The Donzerly Light (38 page)

But her eyes
, both of them thought. Her eyes were deep forest green, a soothing and distant hue that seemed to bubble up from the lightless look and manner about her.

When they had stared at her for a moment or so, the girl made a rolling motion with her hand, which Mari heeded, cranking the window down.

“Hi,” Jay said across Mari. “Where you going?”

The girl shrugged and studied them for a moment, focusing on Mari mostly. “Is he a rapist or anything?”

Mari shook her head, but that didn’t seem to convince the girl, so she looked to Jay.

“Are you a rapist?”

“No.”

“What are you?”

He shrugged. “Unemployed.”

Back to Mari she looked. And looked. And looked. “So can you like unlock the back door?”

Mari nodded quickly, not frightened anymore. Just taken aback by the old, almost sinister youth of the girl. She reached back and unlocked the door while Jay twisted to get at the box and the clothes and the blankets and his crutches, which he stuffed as far to the left of the car as he could, making a small space for the young girl, who got in and heaped her bag atop the clutter. She closed the door and settled into the seat.

Both Jay and Mari stared back at her.

“I’m not a Satanist,” the girl finally said, perturbed.

“No,” Jay said.

“Of course not,” Mari agreed.

The girl shook her head. “What is it with people in Kansas? You dress original and they think you drink baby’s blood and dance inside pentagrams.”

“I’m not from Kansas,” Jay said.

“Me either,” Mari said. “I’m from New Jersey.”

The girl nodded. “I was there once.”

“Really?” Mari reacted, enthused.

The girl’s look moved from Jay to Mari to Jay, and she asked, “Are we going to like go anywhere?”

“Sure,” Jay said, and turned back to the front. He waited for a semi growing in the sideview mirror to pass, bucking the Honda with a wash of turbulence, then took the Honda back onto Interstate 70 heading west.

Mari put a hand out to their rider. “I’m Mari. This is Jay.”

He smiled at her in the rearview mirror.

“Hi,” the girl said, then looked out the window at the golden fields still in the morning calm.

“What’s your name?” Mari finally asked.

“Astrid,” the girl said to the countryside, then asked Mari, “Could you roll your window back up?”

“Oh. Right.” Mari cranked it back up, the glass squealing the last few inches, then turned back to the girl. “Astrid. That’s a pretty name.”

“Some guy in Topeka asked me if I was a vampire when I told him my name.” She snickered without smiling and watched the wheat whiz by. But not whiz very fast, she realized, and looked at Jay in the rearview. “Is this as fast as this thing goes?”

“Afraid so,” he apologized. “You in a hurry?”

Astrid shook her head.

“Where are you heading?” Jay asked.

“I don’t know,” she said, then looked between Mari and the rearview. “Do you guys know if there are any Buncha Burgers in Kansas?”

“The fast food places?” Mari asked, and shook her head.

“I don’t know,” Jay said, adding his reply.

Astrid looked out the window again. “I’ve been dying for something from a Buncha Burger.”

“They have those where you’re from?” Mari asked.

Astrid nodded at the fields and the bluing northern sky above them.

“Where are you from?” Mari asked, making the next logical inquiry.

“Mars, most people in this pisshole state would say.”

“I take it you’re not planning to settle down here,” Jay said, and a too-brief little girl smile flashed out at the prairie.

“You have a pretty smile,” Mari told her, and Astrid looked away from the scenery to her.

“Really?”

Mari nodded. “You have straight teeth. I had to wear braces.” And she flashed the smile that had cost her parents thousands.

“My mom had really nice teeth,” Astrid said. “She died a few years ago. Breast cancer.”

“I’m sorry,” Mari told her.

“That’s okay. I remember her smile.”

“That’s where you got it from, I’ll bet,” Mari said, feeling the exchange fix between them. Maybe not forming any sort of bond, because why would that be necessary, but take on a more pleasant tone. A more real tone, with less suspicion and none of the teenage aloofness she could remember dishing in her own wild years.

“Your name’s different, too,” Astrid said.

“Jay?” Jay responded from the front seat. “Yeah, I know. My parents stole it from the alphabet.”

Astrid smiled again, putting her hand to her mouth to staunch a giggle. Her left hand, and then Mari could see what Jay had seen—that the girl’s left thumb ended in a nub at the lowest joint, a thin scar tracing over the termination point.

“It’s no big deal,” Astrid said. She had caught Mari staring at her hand. “One opposable thumb is all you need. I just use the left hand for scratching.”

Jay smiled in the rearview. “You’re quick.”

“All us
vampires
are,” she said, and fell into a fit of adolescent giggles.

When the fit had run its course, Mari asked, “How’d you lose your thumb?”

“How’d you get your name?” Astrid parried.

“Misspelled at the hospital,” Mari told her, drawing a shocked look from Jay, to which she said, “You’d better make sure
you
don’t drive us into a ditch.”

“Misspelled on your birth certificate?” Astrid asked, and Mari nodded with a big tight-lipped grin.

“My parents say ‘y’, the nurse put ‘i’, and, well, they kind of liked it.”

Astrid nodded, smiling. “That’s cool.”

“So...”

She held up her hand less its useless opposable thumb. “Bus crash.”

“Bus crash?” Mari parroted.

Astrid nodded and looked back out the window. “Just one of those things, you know.”

“Bad?” Mari asked.

“I was the only one that lived,” Astrid replied, and the car jerked almost to the shoulder as Jay looked back at her. “Yo, the road’s up there, Jay.”

He turned back to the front, but not before exchanging a wondrous glance with Mari.

“You were the only one that lived?” Mari checked, and Astrid nodded.

“We had a competition out of state,” she began. “A cheerleading competition. Yeah, I know, ‘you were a
cheerleader?
’ A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away I was. So we were on our way back home, and the driver lost control people were saying later, and the bus went off the road and into a dry quarry.”

Mari glanced away from Astrid for just a second, spying the box, her mind working, trying to recall. “Where was this, Astrid?”

“Pittsburgh.
Go Steelers
.” She thrust a thumbless fist in the air and said, “I still got it.”

“A long time ago?” Mari asked, mining for information without being obvious. To her left, Jay’s fingers were working hard on the wheel. This was just too weird.

“One year and one month ago last Monday,” Astrid said. “You know, the papers called me the miracle girl. Said it was a miracle because I only lost my thumb.” She snorted disapprovingly. “A miracle would have been if all my friends had lived. I was just lucky.”

Mari glanced sideways at Jay, and saw his face go ashen at Astrid’s comments.

“Anyway, after that my grandma was like a total psycho. I was living with her after my mom died, and after the bus crash she was freaking, thinking that I was going to die every second. She wouldn’t let me do
anything
, and when I got my navel pierced she threatened to send me to a convent, and like I’m not even Catholic...
hello
?”

Mari’s eyes were wide, drinking up the tale, pieces of which sounded familiar. She wondered if Jay could recall this tragedy, and what this was doing to him, and she reached to his arm and put her hand there, squeezing his bicep easily as he drove.

“So I split. I stayed with some friends, and then one of them put some moves on me, and I like told him I don’t put out for low life wannabe jocks, and from there I just kind of moved around. And I’m still moving around, just trying to get out of Kansas now.”

“Sounds rough,” Mari commented.

“Life on the road, Mari. Just life on the road.”

How true, Mari knew. And how sad this girl had to know this so young. But how young was ‘this young’? “How old are you, Astrid?”

“Almost sixteen,” she answered, with an honesty that troubled her an instant later. “You’re not going to narc on me, are you? Send me back?”

Mari shook her head. “Is Astrid your real name?”

“It is now,” she said, offering no more than that. She looked past Mari to a clump of buildings astride the road up ahead. “Is there anyway we could stop soon? I gotta pee.”

“Sure,” Jay said, nodding without looking into the rearview. “Anything you want Astrid.”

While Astrid donned her sullen teenage persona and strolled into the McDonalds to take care of business, Mari went quickly through the box of letters and the notes she’d taken at the library and arranged them on her lap. When she’d found what she was looking for she turned to Jay, but he was just staring out the windshield. “Jay?”

He looked to her. “Saving one life doesn’t sound so noble anymore.”

She took his chin in hand and made him face her. “She’s alive, I’m alive, and neither of those things would be the case if it weren’t for you. Okay?” But it still didn’t seem okay. “So what that your not the kind of miracle worker that little girl would wish for? She is
wishing
, Jay. That is what matters.” She took her notes in hand and held them out. “And so is this.”

He saw two letters atop the sheaf of lined yellow pages. One had to relate to Astrid’s special event. “I remember what happened to her, Mari. That bus groaning as it went over the lip of the quarry hole and flipped over and over before it hit bottom. These jagged rocks were slashing through the metal skin like knives, shredding everything. I was cut, my legs, my face, my chest. I was laid open like a fish and watched the blood pour out of me like the water at Niagara Falls.”

“But she only lost a thumb,” Mari reminded him.

“And all her friends,” Jay reminded
her
.

“All right, all right. Will you feel sorry for yourself later, please? She’ll be back out soon, and I don’t think she needs to hear about all of this.”

“Okay,” Jay agreed. This wasn’t about him. It was about them, and some as-yet unknown thing ‘out there’—wherever that would end up being. “You’re right. Go ahead.”

“Okay, try and follow this,” Mari began, showing Jay her notes. “This is the event that she survived. The date matches, and the description, and her age at the time would be right. The papers only had her name listed as K.S. Libby. Nothing on what that meant. So this girl in the car has to be her—another person you saved, Jay.”

“Should I say spooky again?” he asked, but Mari only stared at him. “Okay. I’m listening.”

“You saw her thumb? She has a scar. And I don’t mean ‘the wound’. I mean a mark of what happened to her. Of what she survived.” Mari touched her left sleeve. “A mark like I have.”

“So?”

Mari showed Jay another letter, a very recent one concerning the tower collapse at the fair in Junction City, Kansas. “I don’t know why this didn’t connect. All I can think is that this letter was one of the first I looked into at the library because it was one of the first ones I read, so there were a lot after it. More than a hundred. And it kind of got buried in my head.”

“What got buried?”

“The name of the man who survived when the tower fell.” She pointed to her notes now. “His name was VanDerPool, Jay. Gary VanDerPool, thirty eight, of Gretna, Kansas.”

“Gus’s brother?”

Mari nodded emphatically, that energy driving her again. “The one he was going to help with his crop. It said in the news reports that...” She read from her notes. “...that ‘Gary VanDerPool is expected to recover fully, though his right eye could not be saved’. His right eye, Jay.
His
mark.”

Jay took the sheet of notes and flipped through them, page after page after page, the record of the lives he had saved, of the lives that had been...
marked?
“Mari, what are you saying this means?”

“Jay, we’ve now crossed paths with two people who are connected to what you’ve done—one directly, Astrid, and one indirectly, Gus VanDerPool. Gus fixed my car, the car that is carrying us to Amarillo, and Astrid...”

“What about her?”

“Well...I don’t know about her yet, but there can’t be any other explanation, Jay. The people you saved are somehow influencing this journey.”

“Gus and Astrid are two people, Mari.”

“Two that we
know
of, Jay. That gas station attendant back in Topeka, he had a limp.”

“He sold us gas, Mari. Just gas.”

“But he was
there
. He sold us gas right
then
. I’m not saying for sure he was a survivor, but if he was it would make sense. Keeping us moving. On time, or whatever sort of schedule we’re destined to be on. Just like with Gus...” Her eyes gleamed. “Like with Gus and that minute.”

“What minute?”

“That minute after midnight,” she told him, the totality of it coming to her just then, from that place in her gut that had steered her to Plainview. Weird. It was so completely weird, all of this. Weird and wonderful because
man!
didn’t it have to mean something purely good now! “Think about it—if we’d left a minute earlier, right at the stroke of midnight, we would have broken down a minute earlier. A minute in my car on the interstate is more than half a mile. We would have broken down
before
where Gus got on the interstate. He never would have seen us, or helped us. We might still be sitting there.”

Jay absorbed that for a moment, the grand smallness of it, so vast in scope yet so personal in execution, and when it sank in he nodded to Mari. Mari—the other half of the equation. Seeing things that he didn’t. Or couldn’t. Maybe even wouldn’t. Maybe because after so many years at the mercy of the coins and what they foretold, this journey required someone who could keep him going, make him look past that mystical script that was reworked every time heads or tails came up. Maybe she had not only gotten his attention, maybe she was going to keep said attention focused as well.