Bree said, “I’m going to take a shower.”
She opened the door and I watched her climb the stairs as if she had an anvil strapped to her shoulders. I felt similarly when I turned toward the front room, where the television was on.
My ninety-something grandmother, former English teacher and vice principal, was sitting on the couch in her pajamas and bathrobe, watching a bunch of zombies attack a family. I couldn’t help smiling.
“You’re watching The Walking Dead?” I asked incredulously.
Nana Mama acted as if she’d just noticed me, said, “Hush now, this is bad stuff going down.”
Two zombies had cornered the mother when the episode ended.
I looked at Nana Mama, still amused.
Nana Mama raised her chin defiantly, said, “Ali made me sit down and watch the first episode with him on DVD. He’s right. It’s not really about zombies. They’re sort of interchangeable. It’s the people who are running from the zombies who are interesting.”
“Right,” I said, and handed her the bag from Henry’s. “Your favorite.”
She didn’t take the bag. “What’s this secret?”
I sighed. “Remember that Italian tile you loved that I said we couldn’t afford?”
“Yes?”
“I figured out a way to afford it.”
That surprised her, and she softened. “Really?”
“I thought they weren’t going to rip up the old wood flooring until just before the appliances went in,” I said.
My grandmother got up. She’s a tiny woman. She reached up and stroked my cheek and said, “You are a good man, Alex.”
“Still friends, Nana?”
“Of course. Now let me get a plate so I can have some of Henry’s pie.”
We ate and talked until her eyelids started to droop. Then I went around and shut off the lights and helped her up the stairs. After she’d gone into her bedroom, I said good night to Jannie, who was still up studying, and looked in on Ali, fast asleep.
So was Bree when I climbed into our bed. My mind still swirled with all that had happened that day. I recalled my brief phone conversation with Damon, and how I’d had to cut him off in the middle of a question.
That kind of thing had happened too often in his life, and I felt a pang of guilt. Watch over him, God, I prayed as I drowsed into sleep. Keep my boy safe.
Chapter
43
The moon was high overhead around one that Tuesday morning. The wind was picking up, and the air smelled like coming rain when Acadia Le Duc prowled like a jaguar through branches and vines in the leafless woods between the county highway and the Kraft School campus.
Acadia often thought of herself as one kind of animal or another. She’d grown up in rural Louisiana surrounded by bayous and dense forests, with deer, ducks, goats, sheep, dogs, a monkey, and a cockatoo. Her father even kept several alligators in a penned backwater down the far bank from their home.
But Acadia was not a gator. She was a jaguar, a panther. She was always a big cat at moments like this, hunting for that darkest part of herself. She checked the compass app on her phone every few minutes to stay on a steady northward course over blown-down trees and through boggy bottoms until she hit an old two-track path she’d seen on Google Earth.
Following the path in the direction of the school, she could not help flashing on deep, dark secrets. In Acadia’s memories, cicadas thrummed in a terrible heated night. There were lightning, far-off thunder, and the patter of rain. Her mother screamed for mercy. Her drunken father’s fists gave none.
Acadia remembered it all as if it had been yesterday, but she roused from the memory when she passed several stacks of freshly cut wood before the way bent hard to the right beneath a giant spruce tree. She couldn’t be more than a quarter-mile from the North Dorm now.
She almost laughed. It all felt so delicious. How did Marcus describe this feeling? Free from restraint? Free enough to be authentic?
Whatever you called it, Acadia truly loved feeling like this, an outlaw of the body and the mind. The half-pint of vodka and the joint smoked in the car hadn’t hurt, either, and she flashed once again on that steaming night long ago when the lightning cracked over the bayou and the thunder almost drowned out the slamming of the porch door.