This Dark Road to Mercy: A Novel (11 page)

“Are we moving here?” Ruby asked.

For a minute I thought Wade didn’t hear her, but when he sighed I realized that he was just tired and hot and didn’t feel like answering a question like that. “No,” he said, “we ain’t moving here. We’re just staying here for a little while.”

“Where are we going to live?” Ruby asked. Wade sighed again.

I leaned forward and looked past Wade at her. “Don’t ask so many questions,” I said. Ruby sat back against the bench where I couldn’t see her. I waited, but she didn’t say nothing else.

C H A P T E R   11

T
he taxi dropped us off at a hotel right on the beach. After checking in, we had to walk by the pool to take the stairs up to our room. In the water were a boy and a girl about my age. The girl was floating on a raft that looked like a killer whale, and the boy had on a pair of goggles. They looked up at us. Ruby waved at them, but neither one of them waved back. A man and a woman who must’ve been their parents were lying on deck chairs. The woman was reading a book; the man looked like he was sleeping.

“I like your raft,” Ruby said, but the girl didn’t say nothing back.

Our room was nice, with two double beds and a little table with two chairs. A big television sat on the dresser across the room from the beds. Wade went around to the far side of the second bed and let the gym bag slide off his shoulder and drop to the floor. He got down on his knees and pushed it under the bed.

“What’s in that bag?” I asked.

He looked up at me, and then he pushed it farther under the bed. “Nothing,” he said. “Just some clothes.” He stood up and clapped his hands. “All right,” he said. “Let’s hit the beach.” The clock on the bedside table said 1
P.M.
by the time we finished putting on sunscreen and left the room to go to the beach. We walked over to a little restaurant on the pier next to the hotel and ordered cheeseburgers, french fries, and Cokes, and then we took the steps from the pier down onto the sand.

While me and Ruby rolled out our towels, Wade took a package out of a bag and started opening it.

“What’s that?” Ruby asked.

“You’ll see,” he said, putting his mouth on a little, clear tube.

I knew what it was before he even started blowing it up. “It’s a raft,” I said. Wade blew a big breath into the tube and nodded his head at me. After Wade had given it a few more breaths, I could see the picture on the raft, and I didn’t want anything to do with it.

“I’m not playing with that,” I said. “It’s got a Confederate flag on it.”

“What do you have against the Confederate flag?” he asked.

“It means you hate black people,” I said.

Wade made a face. “That ain’t what it means,” he said. He gave it a few more puffs before closing the tube.

“What’s it mean, then?” I asked.

Wade put the cap on the tube and held the raft out in front of him like he was studying it. “I don’t know,” he finally said. “But I know it doesn’t mean that.”

Me and Ruby sat on top of the raft, and Wade rolled out his towel. We stared out at the ocean, eating our cheeseburgers and french fries. For the first time that day I noticed how tired Wade looked, and I thought about how he’d driven all through the night from Gastonia while me and Ruby had been asleep in the backseat. He must’ve felt my eyes on him, because he turned his head and looked at us.

“Y’all excited about being at the beach?”

“Yes!” Ruby said. She took a bite of her cheeseburger, and then she picked up her can of Coke and took a swallow. “This is the best day ever!”

“Good,” Wade said. “I’m glad y’all are having fun. I want this to be fun.” He took the last bite of his cheeseburger and folded up the wrapper while he chewed it. “All we’re going to do from now on is have fun.” He unlaced his shoes and kicked them off. “That’s the only rule from now on: have fun.”

C H A P T E R   12

A
ll day long, Wade had been saying he had a surprise for us, and after dinner that night a taxi dropped us off in the middle of a busy street full of shops and stores and restaurants. Across the street was a boardwalk full of people: families with little kids, women wearing bikini tops with shorts even though it was getting dark, and groups of teenage girls wearing makeup and walking around holding hands with their boyfriends.

“What’s the surprise?” Ruby asked.

“You’ll see,” Wade said. We followed the boardwalk along the beach until Wade stopped and pointed toward some bright lights over the buildings in the distance. “That’s it,” he said. “The Pavilion.”

I looked up and saw the lights of a Ferris wheel peeking just above the roof of a building called the Magic Attic. A bunch of kids not much older than me waited outside in line to get in. None of them had their parents with them. Ruby yanked Wade’s hand to make him walk faster. “Come on,” she said. They walked through an arcade toward the street on the other side of the boardwalk.

That night we rode just about every ride in the park, and Wade and Ruby rode just about every one of them together. I told myself that I enjoyed the tilt-a-whirl all alone just as much as I would’ve with Wade sitting beside me, and up at the top of the Ferris wheel I could see the boardwalk and all the hotels just as good as I would’ve been able to see them if I’d been sitting up there with Ruby instead of all by myself listening to nothing but the wind and the music from the park way down below.

The haunted house was about the only ride in the amusement park just for kids my age, and when we walked past Wade asked me if I wanted to go in.

“Maybe,” I said. He snapped off a couple tickets and handed them to me.

“Go ahead,” he said. He pointed to a bench. “Me and Ruby will be sitting right over there when you get out.”

“Are you not coming with me?” I asked.

“Ruby can’t go in there,” he said. “There’s no way I’m going to leave her out here by herself. But you go ahead. We don’t mind. We might even ride something else.”

I turned away from him and walked right up to the haunted house and got in line. To go through the haunted house, you had to climb into a little car that was hooked to other cars, just like they were on the roller coaster.

Somebody laughed in line behind me, and I turned and saw two boys and two girls who were all fifteen or sixteen years old. The boys both had on polo shirts and shorts with their baseball hats turned backward. The taller boy had a huge cup of frozen lemonade with a straw sticking out of it. One of the girls was holding a big teddy bear that a  boy must’ve won for her. It was brown and had on blue jean overalls. The boy with frozen lemonade started laughing when I looked at him. I turned back around.

“I don’t know what it says,” one of the boys whispered.

“Ask her,” one of the girls said. She was laughing so hard that she couldn’t even whisper.

“Hey,” one of the boys said. He tapped me on the shoulder. “What does your shirt say?” I turned around and showed him my shirt so he’d leave me alone.

“ ‘Can’t touch this’?” one of the girls said. All four of them started laughing. I turned back around so they couldn’t see me. “Oh my God,” she said. “Who’d want to touch that?”

My face turned red because I felt stupid for wearing that T-shirt, even stupider for thinking it was cool. But it was the only shirt I had to wear, and I hated Wade for buying it for me.

The little train pulled out of the haunted house and the people got out, and I climbed into the first car and pulled the bar across my lap. The tall boy with the frozen lemonade and one of the girls got in the car behind me.

The brakes hissed and the cars started rolling into the haunted house, and as soon as we rolled forward some scratchy Halloween music started playing from little speakers in the walls. A white sheet that was supposed to be a ghost dropped from the ceiling. We rode right under the ghost, and it was hanging so low that I could’ve reached up and touched it. When I looked back at it I saw the boy in the car behind me stand up and smack it. It rocked back and forth like a piñata. The other boy in the car behind him laughed. The whole haunted house was full of cheap stuff that wasn’t scary at all. The only time I jumped during the ride was when I felt something cold hit my neck.

At first I thought it must be water dripping from the ceiling, but when I touched my hair and felt around on the back of my head I knew exactly what it was, but I smelled my fingers anyway: lemonade. The boy behind me laughed and whispered, “Can’t touch this,” to the girl in the car with him. She laughed too. He sucked up more lemonade into his straw and spit it into my hair. I didn’t turn around to look at him. I just ran my fingers through my hair and hoped it wouldn’t look wet when I saw Wade and Ruby after the ride was over.

When the train stopped I wormed myself free from under the lap belt before the operator could release it. I was the first one off the ride, and I ran down the steps past all the people who were waiting in line. Wade and Ruby were sitting on the bench. Wade saw me and waved. He said something, but I was too far away to hear it. The kids who’d been on the ride must’ve seen Wade wave at me, and they must’ve seen that me and Ruby had on the same shirt. They busted out laughing again.

Seeing Ruby and Wade sitting on that bench, both of them in their Myrtle Beach T-shirts with those kids laughing at all three of us, gave me the worst, most lonely feeling I’d had since the morning me and Ruby walked down to Fayles’ to call 911. I started running, and I didn’t stop until I’d crossed the street, run through the arcade, and hit the boardwalk and couldn’t go any farther.

I stood there on the boardwalk and leaned against the railing, the wind coming off the ocean and blowing both my hair and my tears off my face.

Somebody tugged on my shirt. I turned around and found Ruby standing behind me. “You okay?” she asked.

“No,” I said. “I’m not.” I turned back around and looked out at the beach again, half of me hoping that she’d leave me alone, the other half hoping that she’d tell me that she hated Wade too, that she knew why those kids were laughing at us, that she wanted to go home. She stepped up to the railing and stood beside me.

“Was it scary?” she asked.

“Was what scary?”

“The haunted house,” she said. “Is that why you’re crying?”

“No.”

“Then why?”

“You wouldn’t understand,” I said.

“I bet I would,” she said. “I bet I understand a lot more than you think I do.”

“Maybe you do,” I said.

“Daddy thinks you got scared because you went in there by yourself. He’s getting us some quarters to play video games. He thinks you’re mad at him.”

“He’s not our daddy,” I said. “I don’t know why you want to call him that.”

“That’s what he wants us to call him.”

“Yeah?” I asked. “What about what I want, Ruby?”

Ruby folded her arms across the railing and lifted her chin and rested it on her hands. We both looked out at the ocean. “But doesn’t it feel good?” she finally said. “Having a dad like everybody else? I like it; I can’t help it.”

“Just don’t get used to it,” I said. Ruby pushed herself away from the railing and raised her voice, and she might’ve screamed if the wind hadn’t been blowing so hard to push her words away from me.

“Why are you acting like this?” she said. “This morning you said I shouldn’t think about home, that I should get used to being with him. And now you’re telling me I shouldn’t.” She was crying now, and I reached for her hand, but she pulled it away from me and backed toward the Pavilion. We stood there looking at each other, and then she turned and ran toward the arcade. I followed her.

Wade was standing just inside, and I could tell the pockets of his shorts were weighed down with quarters. He saw that Ruby was crying, and he sighed and bent down to her. “What happened?”

“Nothing,” I said before Ruby could answer. “She got scared because I did.” I reached out my hand and put it on her head. “Right?” Ruby lifted her head off Wade’s shoulder and turned and looked at me. She sniffed and wiped at one of her eyes.

“Well, all right,” Wade said, standing up. He patted the quarters in his pockets. “Who feels like playing some video games?”

Ruby looked up at him. “I do!” she said.

Wade put both hands in his pockets, and when he brought them out he had fistfuls of quarters. He bent down and divided one handful of quarters between the pockets of Ruby’s shorts, and then he held out his other hand to me. I cupped my hands and he let the quarters spill into my palms. I tried to dump them into my pockets without dropping any, but a few slipped through my fingers and rolled out toward the boardwalk. Ruby ran after them and brought them back to me.

“What do y’all want to play first?” Wade asked. He kneeled again and cinched the drawstring on Ruby’s shorts to keep the quarters in her pockets from tugging them down.

“Pac-Man!” Ruby screamed, jumping up and down.

I looked around the arcade and saw what I’d been looking for. “Can I go to the bathroom?” I asked. Wade looked around until he saw the sign for the bathrooms on the far wall beside the gift shop.

“Okay,” he said. “But come back here when you’re done.”

As soon as I turned down the hallway to the restrooms I saw what I’d been hoping to find: a pay phone sat on the wall right in between the men’s and women’s restrooms. I used my shoulder to hold the phone against my cheek, and I took out a fistful of quarters and put them all in the coin slot. As soon as I heard the dial tone I called his number and closed my eyes and waited for it to ring.

“Hello?” Marcus said.

“Marcus?”

“Yeah?”

“It’s me,” I said. “Easter.” The line was quiet.

“Hey,” he finally said. “I was hoping you’d call me.”

“I hope it’s okay that I did,” I said, putting my hand over my other ear because the arcade was so loud, even though I was all the way at the end of the hall.

“Where are you?” he asked.

“I’m in an arcade,” I said, “in Myrtle Beach, with my dad and Ruby. We came here last night.”

“I saw y’all leave,” he said. “I was trying to come over.”

Something made a noise on the other end, and then I heard a voice in the room with Marcus. “Who’s that?” I asked. “Don’t tell them it’s me.” But it was too late. His mom got on the phone.