"Try it, then. " The longer I looked at her, lean but solid and wholly unflinching, the more I prayed she wouldn't call my bullshit.
Lulu didn't move. I wondered if she was thinking the same thing—measuring whether or not she'd be able to take me if she felt she had to. I never reached her height, but I was twenty years her junior and I was faster than she had reason to know. Lulu might have been past forty, but she could still knock the head off 'most anyone I knew. Even so, she backed down first.
"You know I've never laid a hard hand on you—not in your entire life—
and I don't mean to start now. But yours is a mind that needs changing. I wish I knew how to do it, but I don't. And I can't keep you hostage here forever, even if I stopped you now and didn't let you leave.
"You're my daughter. I don't mind saying so—you're mydaughter. Not Leslie's. And not your mythical father's, either. You're mine and you're Dave's—the closest we ever had or ever will have, and I love you accordingly. I know you've got things you think you need to get answers to, but I wish you'd take my word that you don't. There are some things you're better off—hell, you're just plain happier—not knowing. There's so much of that crap waiting for you that even I don't know it all, because I didn't want to hear it. I'm only going to say this once, and then I leave it to you: Don't go get involved with old Tatie. "
I tried to be flippant. "You make it sound like a matter of life or death. "
She snorted and slapped her hand at the wall. "Goddamn stupid kid. "
Then she retreated from the doorway and half stumbled out into the hall, then into her bedroom. Her voice trailed behind her, taunting but sad. "There's more she can take from you than just your life. " Her bedroom door closed, but I heard her last, bitter words.
"She knows who you really are, you know. "
IV
I have a savings account that was supposed to be a college fund. Dave started it for me out of my "share" of earnings from his photographs, and it is more than sufficient for me to shun employment for a few years yet, so long as I stay living at home and don't feel the need for a Porsche. I cleaned out half of that account and transferred the rest to my checking. It was a lot of money to have at my immediate disposal, but I didn't know how much dough I was going to need for this road trip and I was determined not to come up short.
Even though it was after midnight, I hit the road. I probably should have waited, but I'm not very patient under the best of circumstances, and it seemed best to leave while I still had all that psychological momentum built up. Besides, Macon's only three or four hours south of here, provided the roadwork stays at a minimum. The state of Georgia is forever widening, repaving, and generally altering I-75 to facilitate the downward flux of northern tourists to their Sunshine State destination.
Welcome to Georgia: billboard space for Florida—not to mention a most miserable part of the world to be driving through in the middle of the night. There's nothing at all to keep you awake on either side of Atlanta, and I was wishing with each passing mile that I'd put off my quest until a more reasonable hour. Tatie wasn't going anywhere, if indeed she hadn't left years before. Lulu had shut up when I said I'd look in a phone book, so I might expect to find Tatie still in the area. If the phone book idea was a wild goose chase, my aunt would have been the first to tell me.
This trip could have waited a few hours more, but it was too late now.
My head nodded with fatigue made more potent by the rhythmic white noise behind the music on the radio, and my eyes ached with each pair of headlights that sailed by. But Macon wasn't far. I could make it. Atlanta was more than halfway, and its towering lights were growing dim out my back window. Less than an hour south from here I'd get within Macon's city limits and find a hotel. Everything would be fine.
Something dusty, something charred sage and rosemary filled my sinuses and made my sleepy eyeballs itch. At first I wondered if there was something wrong with my car's AC, but I figured out the scent's true source before I even heard the voice.
This is madness.
I didn't jump. I was too tired to be startled, or at least too tired to act on it. I raised my gaze to the rearview mirror and met a familiar pair of eyes, though not the ones I might have expected. The voice came not from Mae, who fancied herself my mother, but from one of her sisters—I knew not which.
Once, a long time ago, Lulu had said that I should ask my questions of the ghosts, so there on the southbound side of I-75, I did. "What's madness? Me doing this?"
All of it. Time, over and over changing nothing—repeating the same lives again and again, each time expecting things will come out different. They never do. It's like riding a horse in a big circle, just out front of a boneyard. You keep thinking you've gone past all those angry dead folks, but then you come up on 'em again, right where you left them, and they're still just as mad as hell to see you.
"All I'm doing is taking a trip to go ask an old woman some questions. "
'Sthat all? I guess I'm crazy too, then. See, I look at you, all grown up and a woman now, and I think this time—yes, this time it has to be different. I look at you and I can't imagine how you could be the same person, there on the inside. Malachi sees it—or maybe he doesn't. I think he knows it so sure he doesn't have to see it anymore. That's faith for you, right there. It's faith when you hear the Lord talk so loud that you can't hear regular people and regular reason anymore.
An' I wish you had faith a little more. I wish your auntie's words could hold you, but I know they can't, and I know mine can't either because I know better than anyone who you really are. Your aunt said Tatie knew, and she's right—all us old folks, nearly dead but not quiet yet, we all know. And I know you'll not be stopped by us. But your auntie's right. You're not even asking the right questions. The things you think you want to know don't matter for nothing. The old woman will answer you, and she'll speak true because you're asking her nothing of value. Not yet.
Mae can call you her baby if she likes, but you and I both know you're no sweet innocent. Mae is blinded by who you are, but I'm not, and I want to see things different this time. But damned if you don't make it hard on us, going off into the lion's den like this. Damned if you don't make us wonder. Damned if you don't make us doubt what we know.
Damned if you do.
"But I—I'm not Avery, am I?" I took a second to glance in the mirror then but she was gone, vanished as surely as if she'd never been there. "That's not fair," I grumbled aloud, whapping my hands on the steering wheel. "You oughta at least stick around long enough for me to respond. "
Right at the height of my indignation, I suddenly realized that my car was no longer on the road.
"I've wrecked," I gasped, lifting my forehead. It stung where the steering wheel had carved a deep dent in the flesh. I'd fallen asleep, and the wheel made a crummy pillow, but I thanked God for it anyway. In my dream state I'd wandered off the interstate and found myself puttering at a snail's crawl through heavy grass, my foot off the gas but the little Nugget engine still demanding to move forward.
I'd not wrecked, I'd fallen asleep and wandered off the road.
I'd been terribly lucky.