Page 109 of Possibly Texas

Rain dropped in buckets from above, stinging my eyes and obscuring my vision as Starbuck kept me from running to the creek. I jerked my arm in his grasp, but he grabbed ahold of my other arm with his free hand and turned me gently to face him.

“Go home, matey!” he declared loudly, fighting against the sound of the storm. “I’ll help ‘im out!”

Then he let go of me and raced towards the creek. I watched him disappear into the sheets of rain. At first, I thought I should chase after him. Ignore his command. However, how many men would it take to fish Amos out of the creek? I would only be a hindrance to their efforts. Levi Lee alone could probably get the job done without anyone else’s help. Other than art, he had proved perfectly capable at any task set out before him.

I don’t know how long I stood there, the rain soaking me to my bones, looking off towards the creek, which I could barely see through the rain. Finally, however, I spun around and raced away, running as fast as my feet would take me towards home. Water splashed up, over, and into my shoes as I dashed along the streets, my hair like a drape over my forehead that I had to push out of my eyes with the back of my hand.

The street was flooding by Bend of the Road Graveyard when I approached, and I wondered if that would create a problem for the bodies buried there. Shaking away the thought, I continued on my way, racing through the deluge, the water sucking and pulling at my sneakers as I came out the other side. The last fifty yards to home were miserable, my legs wanting to give out from underneath me as I tried to spot the house through the torrent of rain. Luckily, the rust-red roof stood out like a beacon, so I knew I was nearly free.

The front yard at home was already becoming a swamp as I sloshed and stomped through it, racing for the steps, but I didn’t let it deter me. I raced through the yard and up the front steps, reaching for the door handle. I whipped the front screen, then the door open, and ducked inside, quickly turning to close the screen and door tightly behind me. For some reason, I flipped the lock, as though trapping the storm—and everything else—outside.

Jack was sitting at the kitchen table, working on a crossword. When I entered the house like a whirlwind, his head snapped up to look at me. I stood just inside, dripping on the floor, looking like a rat that had lost a fight with a washing machine. For a few silent moments, he looked me over, obviously wondering why I had been caught in the rain. Finally, he signed:

Dry clothes. I’ll make soup.

“All right,” I said.

Trudging across the kitchen, defeated, tired, cold, feeling hopeless, and bothered by the interaction between Amos and Lilly for reasons I couldn’t understand, I made my way to the stairs. When I passed by Jack, he stood from his chair and nudged my arm. I turned to look at him and he gave me a small smile, then reached up and tapped his hand against my cheek softly.

I didn’t know what that meant to him. Or if it meant anything in sign language, but I got the gist.

Before I knew it was how I’d react, I felt myself slump against Jack and my arms went around his middle. I was so…empty.

He didn’t react right away, frozen by the suddenness of my strange reaction, but finally, I felt Jack’s arms go around me. As he held me to him, patting my back to soothe me, it was possible that tears fell from my eyes onto his shoulder. It could have been rain. Jack was getting wet either way. But I knew that rain wasn’t what made my vision blurry.

“Jack!” I gasped as I raced down the stairs into the kitchen. “Something’s going on downtown!”

Downtown Possibly had been a black void outside of my window that night. Sitting cross-legged on my bed in my boxers at bedtime, I was staring out at town. No one moved on the streets—though people rarely did at night—and not a single light shone from the windows of the buildings in town. I had opened the window so I could at least feel the Possibilian breeze, but even it had tucked itself away for the evening.

After I had gotten home—and collapsed against Jack in a pitiful display of indecipherable emotion, the rain pelted the house for hours. Buckets dumped from the sky and the wind howled, the lights flickered and the power threatened to go out numerous times. I’d gotten a shower, regardless of the storm, and joined Jack back at the kitchen table.

A pot of steaming hot chicken noodle soup—heavy on the noodles and chicken, light on the veggies, just as I liked it—was waiting on the table. It couldn’t have been from scratch since Jack hadn’t had enough time to whip something up while I was in the shower, but I didn’t care. It tasted better than canned, so it didn’t matter either way. The two of us ate our lunch in amiable silence with hunks of crusty bread that were slathered in butter, which melted into the bread and the soup as soon as the heat touched it. Both of us devoured our soup in great spoonfuls, butter running down our fingers and making our lips glisten, as we savored the meal.

After dinner, Jack had asked—via his notepad—if I wanted to learn to play Cribbage. I’d never even heard of the game, so the next three hours were spent learning and playing. I’m a teenager. Playing an old people card game with my stepfather wasn’t supposed to be an exciting evening activity, but I actually had fun. I never won a single game against Jack, but it was nice to spend time with him that was comfortable, even in its silence. After cards, we watched some stupid sitcom on T.V. before I decided bedtime had come. Jack indicated that he was going to stay up to watch a little more T.V., so I’d left him to it.

I found myself sitting in my boxers on my bed, staring out at downtown Possibly and Auggie’s barn like I did almost every night. Unlike every other night, there was nothing to be seen or heard. No lasers or lights show from Auggie’s barn. No music drifting on the breeze. No sounds of Susurrus Creek whispering across town. For a while, I stared at that black void and thought about Amos’ predicament with Lilly.

A person had to be entirely heartless not to feel for the guy. The public humiliation. Finding out the person you loved would never love you back in the same way had to be the worst. To have the whole town find out you had no idea that you were chasing after the wrong person—and in kind of an obsessive way—had to be devastating.

Then again, I felt for Lilly, too.

To have someone obsess over you—though, I had no idea of the history between Amos and Lilly, or how she even knew about his obsession—had to be annoying. Day after day of dealing with unwanted advances—whether the person knew it or not—had to drive a person mad. I desperately wanted to know how Lilly knew that Amos was playing his daily song for her. Had he flirted with her or mentioned that he was interested? Had someone else tipped her off?

There was so much about Possibly and its citizens that I wanted to know.

But people in Possibly didn’t talk about each other or gossip. Auggie probably would have told me about Lilly and Amos if I was in a position to ask him. He’d told me the history of a lot of the Possibilians in town. Then again, everyone, including Auggie, had seemed shocked by the interaction between Lilly and Amos on Liberty Lane.

Maybe nobody had known?

Which made Amos’ humiliation even more painful.

I couldn’t blame the guy for leaping off of Lovelorn Pass Bridge to get over Lilly so quickly. A wound like that couldn’t be fixed with a bandage.

Regardless, the town had shut down after Amos’ display. The rain could have been blamed for sure. A tempest such as the one the black clouds had brewed would shut down any town, no matter how big or small. However, Amos’ heartbreak seemed to be more impactful on the town. Wyatt’s gunshots couldn’t be heard for the rest of the day. No one raced from building to building in the deluge, and the lights went out everywhere—except Jack’s place—before night even fell. It was if Amos’ predicament had taken all of the air out of Possibly.

Just when I thought I’d fall asleep, and dream up theories about Possibilians and all of their secrets, I saw the lights. It was faint at first, the glow that was coming from Liberty Lane, but in all of the darkness, it was if someone had lit a beacon. Tiny, firefly-like lights were popping up and down the street, glowing in brilliance until I could almost make out Earl Dean’s rainbow bricks from my third-floor window. Frozen in wonder for a moment, I simply stared at the lights and how they shone against the still damp pavement.

Once I was able to shake off my stupor, I’d leapt from bed and pulled on fresh jeans and a t-shirt, then slid my feet into my sneakers without bothering to put socks on first. My shoes were still a bit damp from getting caught in the storm earlier, but I paid the clammy feeling no mind. Instead, I’d raced down the stairs and announced excitedly to Jack that something was going on downtown.