I looked back and forth between them again. Billy looked at his feet. Chunk stammered.
“What is it?” I said.
“Gram,” Chunk said, suddenly looking much smaller than his six-four, two hundred and sixty pounds. “I want to see her again.”
“Oh,” I said. “Hmmm. Okay. Okay. We've got time for that.”
“Thanks,” Chunk said, unnecessarily, and then went out the backdoor and out across the lower end of the property where his grandmother was buried. It was a clear night with a thick sliver of yellow moon high in the sky, and I could see his large form in silhouette clearly until he entered the shadows of the trees.
When he disappeared into the shadows, Billy took my hand and squeezed it gently. His hand felt so warm, so comfortable.
“What are you thinking?” he said.
“I'm scared,” I said. “Really terrified.”
He nodded.
“You know, it's not even the getting out of the city part that scares me. Not the helicopters or the troops on the ground. It's the starting over part that scares me. We're going to have to make a whole new life.”
He was quiet for a while, quiet enough I could hear him breathing.
“No,” he said finally. “It's not a whole new life.”
I turned to look him in the eye, a question hanging there between us.
He reached up with one hand and pulled my mask down. I started to protest, to hold it in place, but then stopped and let him do it.
He pulled the mask down under my chin and stared at my face.
I reached up and pulled down his mask. The two of us stood there, lost in each other's faces, seen whole for the first time in a long time. A very long time.
“It's not a whole new life,” he said. “It's new circumstances, a new place. But you and I are still here together, and we still have Connie. We're whole. Only the place names change.”
He touched his fingertips to my cheek and brushed away a tear.
“I love you,” he said. “I'm with you every step of the way, and that won't ever change.”
Billy and I stood on the back porch, watching Chunk trudge back to us, head bent down, heart heavy. I knew something was wrong even before he stopped on the bottom step and looked up at us.
“What is it?” I said.
He had been crying, his face still wet. It was something I hadn't seen since his grandmother died.
“I'm not going,” he said.
I felt Billy's body stiffen against my arm.
“No,” I said.
But he wouldn't let me finish. He held up his hands and stared at us with eyes so full of sorrow that everything I would have said just evaporated away.
“Please don't,” he said. “You need to go. You have a reason. I don't. Everything I've ever had is here. Everything I'm ever going to have is here. Let's not talk it to death. You guys need to go. Just you guys.”
I swallowed hard, then nodded.
Billy squeezed me close. He said, “Go wake up Connie. It's time.”
Chapter 28
I held Connie in my arms. Billy carried our bags. Together we ran down to the creek and cleared the brush away from the raft Billy had made of coffin pine. It looked like a surfboard to me. I sucked in a breath, realizing how slim our chances really were. Billy pushed it into the water and waded in so that he was waist deep in the inky, muddy water of the creek. He stood next to the raft, steadying it, so that Connie and I could climb on board. Once we were in place, Billy pushed himself onto the raft and we all settled into our places. I spooned Connie and Billy spooned me. Chunk, on the shore, spread the SWAT sniper blankets over us and covered the blankets with brush. The idea was that we were a piece of scrub brush that had broken off a nearby tree during the last storm and was now floating harmlessly down the water. That was what we hoped the helicopter patrols would see, anyway.
I lifted a flap of the blanket so that a little sliver of the shore showed. Chunk was there, our house behind him in the distance. He raised his right hand and showed his palm. Not a wave, just an open hand, a forever goodbye. We floated down the creek, the world around us graveyard quiet, and I watched Chunk. His hand was raised the whole time, and he was going, going, and finally gone. We were alone, the three of us, lulled into the quiet by the gentle lapping of the water against the raft. I felt Connie breathing in my arms, and I reached over the back of her head and kissed her cheek. In the dark, I imagined her smiling bravely.
“Mommy?” she said.
“Yes, honey.”
“What's going to happen?”
“We're going to leave here, honey. We're going someplace safe.”
“Why?”
Not where, why. The hard question.
“Something bad is coming, Connie. We can't be here when it gets here.”
“What about Uncle Reggie?”
I cupped her hands in mine. She was holding the blue jay Billy had made her tightly in her fist. I thought about how a single blue jay will attack a pack of wild dogs to protect its nest before I answered her.
“Uncle Reggie will be okay,” I said, and prayed that wasn't a lie. “Quiet now. Shhh.”
We'd planned it out without really getting too specifics. There hadn't been time, and we hadn't really known how. Neither of us had ever escaped from hell before. Billy had gone down to the creek the morning before with Connie's binoculars and a can of orange paint. He'd poured some of the paint into the water and watched the cloud as it drifted down stream with the intention of timing it-to see how long it would take us to drift the third of a mile from our house to the wall.
The only trouble was, the cloud of paint either sank, or became so diluted it became invisible. He tried the same thing with a Coke can, but it kept getting caught up in the brush along the banks of the creek. In the end, he had to give up the experiment and settle for a big unknown. And so we drifted for the better part of an hour, coming closer all the while to the horror of freedom.
It was a warm, clear night, not unusual for late August in San Antonio, and we had been in short sleeves before we got in the water. But afterward, after we'd spent all that time curled up together, feeling scared and claustrophobic and blind and wet from the water that constantly lapped over the sides of the raft, we began to shiver. Connie especially was feeling the cold, and she shook in my arms like an epileptic.
I spoke to her in hushed, easy tones, telling her it was going to be okay, that it was almost over, but still she shivered.
She said she wanted to go home.
When we heard the first helicopter pass overhead, she began to mew like a kitten and my quiet reassurances changed to harsher “Shhhs” and “Stop that.”
I was scared too, and I tend to bark when I'm scared.
It didn't help.
The helicopter passed overhead then backtracked. Their routine patrols were never the same, or, if they followed a pattern, it wasn't one that I could ever figure out. The pilot's whim seemed to be the only deciding factor, and the pilot of the helicopter above us seemed happy to spend his night flying over the same patch of ground time and time again. Just our luck.
The blankets over us made us invisible to the helicopter's night vision equipment, just as it kept us from seeing the world beyond the banks of the creek. But I could see enough to know what the crew of the gunship was doing. They were in random patrol mode, not actively searching for anything, their spotlights groping the ground like a blind man's fingers. Several times they flew low over us, so low that the wash from the rotors beat on the
