Page 55
"It'll hang them. We're a paragraph at the bottom." I turn my hand over under hers. "Send it from Charlotte's phone."
For the first time since she woke, something close to a smile crosses her mouth. "I already typed the emails."
We wait for dark. She cleans the surgery room with bleach while I sit on the edge of the steel table and try to remember how to stand. Pulling the IV out of my arm is the only thing she lets me do for myself. By nine, the clinic smells of nothing but chemicals, and every packet we opened is in a trash bag in the bed of the welding truck. She’s put the tin frame and her drawing in the dry bag on top of the books, beside the small cardboard box she's carried since the first of October.
"Where?" she asks, when I'm finally in the passenger seat with my eyes shut against the throbbing.
"South. Ten miles below the parish line. There's a slough off Bayou Boeuf."
"And?"
"And a boat."
She doesn't ask how long it's been there. She drives.
It's three in the morning when the road gives out in the cypress. The johnboat is where I pulled it up under the roots six years ago, the tarp over it furred green, the outboard wrapped in plastic and tape. Gas cans are lashed under the seat. An ammo can with cash and two sets of papers I bought from a man in Lake Charles the month after I walked into the marsh. I bought two without ever asking myself why.
She finds them. She reads the names. She puts them back without a word.
The motor catches on the fourth pull. She takes the tiller. I sit in the bow on a folded tarp because it's the only way I can sit, and we slide out of the slough onto the open bayou while the sky is still black.
We don't talk. There's nothing left that needs saying in the dark. The motor hums. The water parts. Once, far to the north, a helicopter's searchlight sweeps the tree line and turns away.
When the east begins to thin, she throttles down and lets us drift.
She opens the dry bag and takes out the box.
I watch her hold it in her lap. It's nothing, a cardboard carton the size of a pair of shoes, soft now at the corners from water and handling. She's carried it through a burning shelter and an hour of marsh with it held over her head. She's never once let it out of reach.
"When I drove in, I told myself I was bringing her home," she says, not looking up. "I didn't buy an urn because I wasn't going to keep her. I figured I'd know what home meant when I got there."
Her thumbs move over the lid.
"It was never Harlowe. Harlowe was just where they kept us."
She lifts the lid, loosens the twist tie on the bag inside, and leans out over the gunwale and pours. Slowly. The ashes lie on the water a moment, pale on dark, then the current draws them into a long thin trail that bends south with the channel, away from the parish, toward the Atchafalaya and whatever lies past it.
She watches until the trail is gone. Then she folds the empty bag into the box, closes it, and sets it in the bottom of the boat.
She comes up the boat on her knees, careful of the balance, and settles on the tarp against my good side. Her head finds my shoulder.
The sun comes up behind the cypress on the east bank and lays long bars of red across the water. Behind us, over the treetops, a smudge of smoke still hangs where the parish was.
Her hand lies on my chest, flat, over the words the old man cut there. I cover it with mine. For years those scars were the only thing about me that was true. Under her palm they feel like something that happened to a boy I used to know.
"We're the monsters now," she murmurs into my shoulder.
I think about nine girls who woke up on a fellowship hall floor to their mothers' voices. I think about a wall of names that will be in three newspapers by noon.
"Good," I answer. "Monsters survive."
She laughs, low. I feel it against my ribs more than I hear it.
I reach back past her for the pull cord and yank it. The motor catches, and she takes the tiller from me without a word, and we go on down the bayou into the light.
EPILOGUE
EVIE
