The Higher Power of Lucky (15 page)
“‘A mother bird sat on her egg,’” Miles read, and sighed deeply, his voice full of wonder.
By the time Miles finished reading
Are You My Mother?
Lucky decided she could safely turn onto her other side and drain her ear.
“Will blood come out?” Miles asked.
“I doubt it,” said Lucky, but she wondered too.
The storm seemed to have blown itself out, and the sun was moving toward the rim of the far-off mountains. Lucky closed her eyes.
“Why is my mother in jail?” Miles asked suddenly.
“She made a mistake, Miles.”
“So she’s really not taking care of her friend in Florida?”
“No.” Lucky felt a whoosh as a glug of oil spilled out. She shook her head in case there was more.
“It’s better that she’s in jail,” said Miles, “because that means she’s not staying away from me on
purpose
.”
Lucky did not know what to say.
“She’ll come back when she’s finished being in jail,” Miles continued, “but if I tell her about running away, will she be mad?”
“I’ll tell her how brave you were about the cholla burr and how you read to me and everything,” said Lucky.
She lifted her head and examined the towel. A tiny white moth, smaller than a housefly, lay there. Lucky had expected a gigantic beetle. She smiled, the pain completely gone, and sat up. “She’ll be proud of you,” she said.
“Guess what, Lucky! Here comes Chesterfield!”
They both heard steps approaching in the calm silence. But it wasn’t a burro who came around the side of the hill. It was Lincoln.
The sky was smeared with red as the sun dipped down behind the Coso Mountains.
“Hey,” said Lincoln, “what’s up?”
“Nothing much,” said Lucky, arranging the skirt of Brigitte’s dress attractively, as if this were a usual, boring day. She felt her hair. It was full of sand, mineral oil, and twigs.
Lincoln got out a string and began tying it into a knot.
“We are living like the old miners! We ran away!” yelled Miles.
“I know,” said Lincoln. “So does everyone else. They searched everywhere in town and figured out you must be here. I’m sure they’ll be here sooner or later.”
“Are they very mad?”
“Pretty worried, I guess. Short Sammy kept telling Brigitte about all the times
he
ran away and how he turned out okay anyway. He was trying to calm her down, but I think he made it worse.”
Miles asked, “How do they know we’re out here?”
Lincoln shrugged. “Mrs. Prender said you were always talking about some burro named Chesterfield that lived in the dugouts,” he said.
Lucky sighed. “Want an egg?” she said.
“Only if it’s hard-boiled.”
Lucky thought how strange it was that some small things turned out just right, which was rare for big important things to do. As the sunset faded and faded and the sky darkened, she and Lincoln ate eggs, Miles got a Fig Newton, and HMS Beagle polished off a carrot. The feel of the air, soft and nearly still, was something you usually wouldn’t even notice. But now, after the dust storm, it felt like a kindness, a special thoughtful anonymous gift.
After a while, the full moon roared up into the sky behind their hill. Lucky thought that the people on Earth were very, very lucky to have their exact moon. They could have gotten a little puny moon like some of the other planets, and that would have totally messed up the oceans and the tides. Or their moon could have been too close or too far away. Or they could have had
two
moons or even more, and everything about their life would have been different. Lucky was sure, both as a scientist and as a girl-speck looking for her Higher Power, that it wouldn’t have been as good.
She was thinking how most people didn’t appreciate the moon enough at all, how they really didn’t give it much
serious thought
, when Lincoln said, “Well, here they come.”
There were many vehicles bumping along the dirt road: Short Sammy’s old Cadillac and Brigitte’s Jeep and Dot’s pickup and Mrs. Prender’s VW and the Captain’s van, and more following in their dust. They drove slowly, shouting “Lucky! Miles! Lucky! Miles!” out of the windows.
“We could hide,” said Lincoln.
But Lucky didn’t want to hide, and anyway Miles was already lurching down to the road, as excited as if they had won a game of hide-and-seek. She sat on a rock and gazed out at the desert. Maybe they would think she’d kidnapped Miles, and send her to a special school in L.A. for bad kids, and if they did she would
become
a bad kid. She saw herself in a room full of beds like in a jail, each bed with a bad kid in it. They would take away her specimen boxes and her survival kit. Instead of being a ward with her own private personal Guardian, she would become a Ward of the State. And you can’t sit on the State’s lap and the State doesn’t hug you before bed. Probably she would die of sadness, Lucky thought, seeing herself under a gray sheet, her face turned to the wall.
Car doors were slamming and dozens of people were getting out and shouting and laboring up to their camp. The air was so warm and the moon was so bright it was almost like daylight, except more mysterious. Lucky got something out of her plastic bag and ducked into the shadows of the dugout where she could watch.
She had something important to do before she surrendered.
HMS Beagle ran joyfully around greeting each arrival, including several other dogs. Everyone was talking at once, asking questions and hugging Miles. From inside the dugout it sounded like the whole town was there. When Brigitte called her name from nearby, Lucky stepped out into the moonlight and, looking down, saw that the silky dress and the urn both reflected its light.
“Thank you for coming to this memorial service for my mother,” Lucky said in a clear, strong voice, and everyone stopped talking and turned to her with surprised faces. She saw that Brigitte suddenly had tears in her eyes.
Lucky was not sure what should happen next, and then she remembered the one thing her father—the man she’d thought was a crematory man—had said to her. He’d said that the decision she made would be the right one.
“These are her remains,” Lucky went on, clutching the urn to her chest. The sense of her mother’s smooth shoulder flooded her with sadness, and then Brigitte smiled up at her and clasped her hands under her chin, almost like praying.
As Lucky opened the lid of the urn, Short Sammy cleared his throat and began to sing “Amazing Grace.” Dot’s high, clean voice joined in, and then everyone was singing, their voices clear and ringing in the still night.
Suddenly a breeze came, a little afterthought of the storm, as if, Lucky thought, some Higher Power was paying attention and knew what was needed. She walked to the edge of the ring of people and flung the remains of her mother up into the air, and everyone watched, singing, as the breeze lifted and carried them out into the great waiting desert.
Bonne Nuit
Lucky put on her summer nightgown, which was old and had become tight at the armholes. It was fresh and California soft from the dryer.
Brigitte came to the door. “Ready?” she asked, and sat on Lucky’s bed.
Lucky was. Her hair was damp from a long shower that had rinsed off every speck of sand, grit, oil, and dust. She climbed onto Brigitte’s lap, even though she was really much too big. But she still fit, and she leaned back while Brigitte wrapped her with her arms, like a present. Lucky felt sleepy and languid. Her knees were almost knobby enough to look like Brigitte’s knees, though Lucky’s were brown and scabby and scarred, and Brigitte’s were beautiful and…Lucky searched for the word…womanly. From the floor where she lay, HMS Beagle touched her nose to Lucky’s bare foot.
“So the papers in the suitcase are to take to the judge in Independence?” Lucky asked.
“Of course,
ma puce
. We need to show him your birth certificate and my green card for living in California and all of that so I can legally adopt you.”
“And,” Lucky stretched back into Brigitte, feeling as if she’d come to the end of a long and difficult journey. “And the restaurant management course—that’s to open a café in Hard Pan?”
“With a loan from your father, yes. What did you think, that I was going back to France?”
“Mmmm.”
“Oh, Lucky,” said Brigitte, and sighed.
After a moment Lucky said, “Brigitte, what is a scrotum?”
“It is a little sack of the man or the animal which has in it the sperm to make a baby,” said Brigitte in her deep, quiet voice. “Why do you ask about that?”
“It was just something I heard someone say,” said Lucky.
For some reason, Brigitte said, “You know if anyone ever hurt you I would rip their heart out.”
“I know,” said Lucky, and she did. Tears came welling up behind her eyes for a second, then they went back inside for some other time, a sad time. A certain crevice of Lucky’s mind wondered if there is some kind of reservoir for tears where they are stored, because sometimes there are so many of them, pouring and pouring out. Lucky leaned her head back and breathed in the sunscreen smell of Brigitte.
She got the back of her throat ready to say good night, and in drowsy, perfect French she said, “
Bonne nuit
, Brigitte.”
Through her curly wedge of hair, Lucky felt the smile on Brigitte’s cheek.
