The Higher Power of Lucky (2 page)
Wrestling with the straps of her survival kit backpack, which she had with her at all times, then jogging down the dry streambed toward home, Lucky thought of a question that Short Sammy’s story had lodged into one of her brain crevices. She figured she had so
many
crevices and wrinkles, almost all of them filled with questions and anxious thoughts, that if you were to take her brain and flatten it out, it would cover a huge space, like maybe a king-size bed.
The question of Short Sammy’s dog’s scrotum settled one certain brain crevice as she picked her way among the weedy bushes of the dry wash. Even though Lucky could ask Short Sammy almost anything and he wouldn’t mind, she could never ask about the story of Roy, since she had
overheard
it. If she asked about Roy, then he would know that she’d been eavesdropping at the anonymous twelve-step meetings.
Scrotum sounded to Lucky like something green that comes up when you have the flu and cough too much. It sounded medical and secret, but also important, and Lucky was glad she was a girl and would never have such an aspect as a scrotum to her own body. Deep inside she thought she
would
be interested in
seeing
an actual scrotum. But at the same time—and this is where Lucky’s brain was very complicated—she definitely did
not
want to see one.
A little breeze had come up by the time she got home to the half circle of trailers. First was her little shiny aluminum canned-ham trailer, where she and HMS Beagle slept. Next, the long kitchen–dining room–bathroom trailer, and last, Brigitte’s Westcraft bedroom trailer. Instead of having wheels and being hooked up to cars to tow them around, the three trailers were mounted on concrete blocks; plus they were anchored to the ground with metal cables to keep from being blown over in windstorms. The best part was that you could walk from Lucky’s canned ham to Brigitte’s Westcraft without ever going outside, because passageways had been cut where the trailers’ ends touched, and sheets of metal had been shaped and soldered together to join all three trailers, so not even a mouse would be able to find a crack or an opening anywhere.
HMS Beagle bounded out from under the kitchen trailer to smell her and find out where she had been. “HMS” stands for “His Majesty’s Ship,” and the actual original HMS
Beagle
was a beautiful ship that took the scientist Charles Darwin all around the world on exciting discoveries. Lucky’s dog—who was neither a ship nor a beagle—got her name because of always being with Lucky on
her
scientific adventures. Also, HMS Beagle was beautiful, with very short brown fur, little dog-eyebrows that moved when she was thinking, and big ear flaps that you could see the veins inside of if you held them up to the light.
A breeze rattled the found object wind chimes at the Found Object Wind Chime Museum and Visitor Center, and the high desert air carried that sound in front of it, all the way across town, down to the three trailers at the very end of Hard Pan. Just the sound of those chimes made Lucky feel cooler. But she still had doubts and anxious questions in all the crevices of her brain, especially about how to find her Higher Power.
If she could only find it, Lucky was pretty sure she’d be able to figure out the difference between the things she could change and the things she couldn’t, like in the little prayer of the anonymous people. Because sometimes Lucky wanted to change everything, all the bad things that had happened, and sometimes she wanted everything to stay the same forever.
Brigitte’s old leather sandals were on the step outside the kitchen trailer, which was why HMS Beagle had been waiting in her dug-out hollow underneath. Lucky and HMS Beagle both knew the shoes on the step meant that Brigitte had just mopped the floor and she didn’t want sand tracked in by the dog. Inside, Brigitte stood barefoot at the far end, feeding dirty towels into the washer and talking French on the phone.
Lucky dropped her survival kit backpack on the floor by the built-in table; the trailer smelled of Mrs. Murphy’s floor wax and hard-boiled eggs and the sprig of wild sage in a little vase over the sink. Brigitte always cleaned floors barefoot. Lucky noticed that Brigitte’s feet seemed to be filled with many more bones than other people’s feet; she had sharp, jutting-out ankle bones and toes that were almost like fingers.
If Brigitte were ever to have a child, that child’s feet would not look at all like Lucky’s sturdy, wide feet with their short, stubby toes. That child would also have very good posture, Lucky thought, squaring her hunched-in shoulders. Brigitte turned, pointed to the fridge with her chin, and said, “There is cold tea,
mon choux
; I am talking to my mother.” She smiled and shook her head in a tiny, quick way and raised one shoulder, which meant that she promised she’d be off the phone soon.
Yep, Lucky thought as she tossed her hat onto the backpack, already forgetting to work on her posture, probably the thing Brigitte would like most would be to go home to France and have a French baby with bony French feet like her own. She would call her French baby something lovely and tender instead of
mon choux
, which means “my cabbage,” or
ma puce
, which means “my flea.”
Lucky poured sun tea from a jar into a plastic glass and stood gulping it under the ceiling fan. The great thing about sun tea is that you don’t have to boil water and heat up the whole kitchen to make it—all you do is leave a jar of water with two tea bags in a sunny place. She raked her hair with one hand—hair that felt crusty from sweat and weirdly overcurly from a perm that would take
at least
two weeks to start looking normal. Dot
never
got it to look like the magazine picture. Instead of making it go out at the sides in a wedge, in a very original, cute way like the hair of the girl in the picture, Dot permed and cut it so that it looked like some kind of mushroom-colored garden hedge.
Brigitte laughed into the phone. She poured Tide into the washer and closed the lid. Lucky knew for a fact that Brigitte’s mother was working on a secret, sinister plan to lure Brigitte back to France. Even though Lucky had never met Brigitte’s mother, she did not like her one bit; she imagined her as looking like Brigitte but more stringy and tough, with bangs and hair in a barrette at her neck, but the hair gray instead of blond. The mother would never walk on the backs of her shoes or make noises when she sucked ice cubes. She would be strict and formal, like a school principal or the wife of the President of the United States. Lucky stayed directly under the ceiling fan, sucking an ice cube, making slurping noises, and wishing she understood French.
Probably the old mother was right now working on her plot to make Brigitte so sad and lonely that she would go back to France and stop being Lucky’s Guardian. She wanted all her grown-up children—Brigitte and her sisters—to live near her in Paris, which Lucky considered very selfish. Lucky was sure the old lady’s plan was working, because she sent little packages that made Brigitte cry.
The sad thing in the package last week had been a plastic tube like a toothpaste tube, except with a yellow cap, and instead of Colgate or Crest wording on it there was a beautiful little painting of a picnic basket and a loaf of French bread on a green, grassy place. It turned out to be a tube of mustard. When she opened the package, Brigitte had been sitting at the Formica table. She held the tube in her hand and smiled, but looked sad at the same time. She unscrewed the cap and squeezed a little dab onto her finger and smelled it and tasted it. Then she cried, which Lucky
hated
, and told Lucky it was because it reminded her so much of home.
Lucky sighed, put down the glass, and slid into the dinette seat. Once she finally got off the phone, Brigitte said, “First,
maman
send you a
bisou
, a big kiss, okay? Second, please put your backpack over there beside you on the seat so I do not trip on it.” Brigitte unloaded several little Tupperware containers from the fridge. The kitchen trailer was so narrow that she didn’t have to take any steps to do this—the counter, sink, stove, and fridge were all reachable from the same spot. “It is too hot to cook, so we have a cold salad for dinner—tuna, eggs, green beans, tomatoes, olives.”
Lucky hoisted her backpack off the floor and plopped it beside her on the banquette. “Do we have those olives I like?” she asked. She hated the strong salty wrinkled black ones.
Brigitte surveyed the many glass jars in the door of the fridge. “
Non,
” she said. “And it is too bad, because the little olives from Nice would be better, you are right. Sometimes we just have to make it do.”
“Make do,” Lucky corrected.
Brigitte sighed and nodded. “Make do,” she agreed.
Out of the millions of people in America who might become Lucky’s mother if Brigitte went home to France, Lucky wondered about some way to trap and catch the exact right one. She was pretty sure she’d be able to, if only she had a Higher Power.
But when she envisioned her perfect mother, she kept thinking of traits and habits like Brigitte’s.
That
always made her think somehow not of the perfect mother but of the perfect
child
, which in most ways Lucky already was, but not in
every
way. Brigitte did not fully realize the ways Lucky was almost perfect, but she did notice thoroughly the ways Lucky was not.
Lucky did not want to speak French, for instance, which is a jumpy language full of sounds that you have to gargle in the back of your throat. The back of Lucky’s throat could not learn to make these sounds, no matter how hard it tried. Of course, she had learned to say Brigitte’s name the French way—Bree-JEET—instead of the American way, BRIDGE-it.
Lucky got Brigitte as her Guardian when she was eight years old. The reason was that Lucille, Lucky’s mother, went outside one morning after a big rainstorm, and she touched some power lines that had blown down in the storm. She touched them with her foot.
In her mind, Lucky worked on a list of good traits and bad traits in mothers.
Some aspects of life are strange or even terrible, but later something okay or even good happens that would never have happened without the bad/strange thing. An example was how long, long ago, a man who later became Lucky’s father went to France and got married to a French woman. Then they got divorced because he did not want to have children. Later, that same man came back to America (he was still not Lucky’s father yet) and met an artist named Lucille, who had silky-feeling shoulders. This was a thing he probably liked a lot—where you could put your cheek against the top of her arm and your cheek loved that comfortable feeling. Her fingers smelled like paint thinner, a very good smell and Lucky’s favorite smell, along with air-conditioned air. Lucille used to hum little tunes for different situations that made you think of certain ads on TV and laugh. So they fell in love and got married.
But he
still
didn’t want children, and Lucille divorced him too. It was too late, though. Ha-ha! Lucky was already born.
So when Lucky needed a Guardian to guard her during the time after the storm, Lucky’s father called up that first wife, the French one. She was still in France, but she said she would come to California. She came the next day. She turned out to be Brigitte.
Only a very big and terrible thing could make her jump on a plane and fly thousands and thousands of miles—because Brigitte did not love Lucky’s father any longer, and she didn’t even know Lucille, and she’d never even heard of Lucky before. Plus she had her own French life going along, full of plans, and her old French mother. That terrible thing was the thing that happened to Lucille when Lucky was eight, the morning after the storm in the desert.
Lucky loved rainstorms because of how wild and scary they are, when you are safe inside your trailer with the wind whooshing and blowing like crazy and rain pouring down so hard it turns the dry streambed into a river. Her favorite part was afterward, when it smells like the first day of the history of the world, like creosote and wild sage. The sun comes out and you look around at all the changes the storm has caused: the outside chairs blown away, the Joshua trees plumped up with water, the ground still a little wet.
That is what Lucky imagined her mother was doing—sniffing up the morning and feeling the cool ground with her toes—when she stepped on a downed power line, was electrocuted, and died.
And this is how Lucky became a ward, which is the person a Guardian guards. A ward must stay alert, carry a well-equipped survival kit at all times, and watch out for danger signs—because of the strange and terrible and good and bad things that happen when you least expect them to.