Chapter 25 Clara
CHAPTER 25? CLARA
Leaving London
I had no idea if a minute or ten or thirty went by. We passed a stranded ambulance and a crushed bike, abandoned cars. The red-circled speed limit signs were turning clearer. The black roadside directions with the large white arrows pointed us around the curves. Twice we drove on the grassy edges of the road to avoid a clogged roadway, and we’d barely made any progress. My legs were nearly numb with cold, and my breath rattled. I tasted the damp threads of the scarf covering my nose and mouth.
The disembodied lantern was a floating, glowing balloon. The light issuing from Charlie’s car was so weak that the headlights might as well have been turned off, just two glazed and useless eyes.
Charlie and I worked out a system. If I floated the lantern in toward the windshield, Charlie must stop for something in the road—a pedestrian, another car, an abandoned bike.
Now a blob filled the middle of the road, and I swayed the lantern for him to stop. Charlie braked, parked, and joined me. “A cow,” he said. “There’s a dead cow in the middle of the road.” He shook his head.
“A dead cow,” I said, disbelieving it even as I saw it. “Death is in the air.”
“Clara, I’d like you to get in the car with your daughter and let Moira do this.”
“No,” I said as firmly as I knew how behind the scarf covering my mouth. Then from behind, a crushing mechanical sound as another car hit the rear of Charlie’s Vanguard.
Charlie walked to the back of the car and other figures joined him. Sound was as warped as sight, and words overlapped in low voices: cow; dead; field; together .
Figures huddled over the road, pulling and heaving the cow out of the way toward the frost-crusted hedgerows.
I turned away and peeked into the car, where I saw Wynnie rousing from sleep, sitting up in confusion, rearranging her glasses to assess the situation. Charlie came to me and gently placed his hand over mine on the lantern. “I can see better now. You can get in the car with your daughter.”
“I will walk from here to the country if need be.”
He uncurled my fingers from the top ring, releasing my hand from the tight knot, and took the lantern from me. “You’ve brought us this far.”
I returned to the car and slid into the back seat, where Wynnie looked at me. “Mama?”
“It’s okay, love.”
Charlie again placed his hands firmly on the wheel, gripping it as if it might run away, and then the car began to move again. Moira sat in the front, looking straight ahead. “I would have carried the lantern.”
“I know,” I told her, and set my hand in Wynnie’s, knitting my hands to hers.
Moira turned to look at me. “You are such a good mum.”
I would have thanked her, but tears clogged my throat. Charlie drove along the back roads and the dirt roads, avoiding the traffic on the main thoroughfare.
The fog continued to thin until the trees weren’t shrouded in a Cézanne painting, and leafless arms scraped the low and cloudy sky. The dark ribbon of the road emerged, and the fields on either side revealed themselves, with dark wooden fences and rock walls as a boundary between us and the fields. We were, as near I could tell, the only ones on a bumpy and rutted lane.
Wynnie dozed again, and we were all quiet until Charlie slowed down and then pulled onto a gravel road that led into a low-cut field. Safely off the road, he parked among the russet-colored mounds of cut hay.
We’d been traveling for hours, and I needed to find a bathroom and food. I’d eaten nothing since breakfast but the bitter coffee in the thermos. I gently laid Wynnie on the leather back seat, and she stirred, opened her eyes, and sat up. “Mama?”
“I’m here.” I pushed open the passenger door and put my feet on the soft earth. Bronze and dried leaves were scattered beneath our feet. The air, although clearer by bits, was still bitter cold, frigid at its center and inescapable.
“The fog… it’s gone?” Wynnie asked as she slid across the seat to join me outside.
“Not entirely, sweetie, but at least Mr. Jameson can now see to drive.”
“What time is it?” She removed her glasses and rubbed at her eyes.
I checked my watch. “Five in the evening,” I told her. “Now if you’re coming out, wrap your scarf around your neck and mouth and bundle into that jacket.”
She nodded and did as I asked.
“Let’s take a break,” Charlie said, and climbed out of the driver’s side, squinting into the fields and then up and down the empty road. “Let’s eat what Moira packed, and then I need to figure out exactly where I am, how far we are from Cumbria and on what road exactly.”
“Cumbria.” I repeated the word as Wynnie climbed out of the car and lifted her face to a gray-veiled setting sun. She took a breath, and although the whistle remained, she stood firm.
“That’s where the play is,” Wynnie said.
“The play?” Charlie leaned back on the fencing and stretched his neck left and right.
“One we heard about on the ship,” I said, and squeezed Wynnie’s hand. She looked at me quizzically, but I shook my head. “You don’t know what road you’re on?”
“I don’t,” he said with stark honesty, not pretending to have any control over the situation. “All that mattered was getting us out of the city. I turned when there was a block in the road, and I kept pointing north.” He pointed to a compass on the dashboard in the car, its needle the only thing that wasn’t confused about its place in the world.
Moira dragged out the picnic basket and set it onto the hood of the car. I’d buried the feeling of hunger, but at the sight of food, I was famished. “I need to…”
Charlie smiled. “So do I.” He nodded to a bale of hay to the left of us. “Looks like the best we can do.”
I nodded. “I think so. Come with me, Wynnie, let’s make our way to the very fancy loo.”
Moira handed us some napkins from the picnic basket, and we laughed. The sound released the tension that coiled between us. Now we shared a camaraderie that we didn’t turn into words but knew was genuine. We’d escaped the fog. How long it would take us to get where we were going was to be seen, but we were safe, and we were together in that escape.
When we’d finished behind the hay, Charlie did the same, and then Moira.
We ate slowly, savoring every bite of biscuit and ham, of cheese and sliced oranges. The landscape undulated away from us, and far off I heard the rush of a river. A cluster of alders stood to our left side, the gnarled trunks twisting, the ground beneath carpeted with dead branches and dried russet leaves. The sweet treats that Wynnie pulled up from the bottom of the basket were beautiful—tiny meringue cookies with little raspberry centers. It was all hilarious, eating this dainty, civilized lunch while we looked like we’d just climbed out of a sewer pipe.
“What’s it like where you live in America?” Moira asked us as she took another cookie and gobbled it quickly as if someone might snatch it from her.
“It’s home,” Wynnie said, and paused while she found more cookies. “A home of rivers and big oak trees, with docks and the best shrimp you’ll ever eat in all your life. Cute homes and dirt roads and a town that cuddles up to the water.”
“Sounds so beautiful,” Moira said.
“It is,” I told her. “It’s a coastal village on what is often called a river but is a bay. It’s a tight-knit community built around fishing, oysters, and the tides. The American South is at best complicated; at its worst, it is coming out of a terrible period of slavery and war. But its surface, its natural world, is breathtaking and haunted.”
“Just now out of it?” she asked.
“No, it’s been a hundred years, but the echoes last. My dad is a doctor. Our town, Bluffton, is all I’ve ever known. Born there, raised there, married there, and Wynnie, too. It is simply beautiful, and the people are for the most part kind. I guess like most small towns.”
“Married?” Moira tilted her head, and I saw her gaze slip to my empty ring finger.
“Once, yes. Not anymore.”
“But he’s my father,” Wynnie piped up.
“Yes, he’s an amazing father.” I wiped crumbs from Wynnie’s face and then kissed her cheek.
“He had a money problem,” Wynnie said to Moira, and shook her head in an imitation of my own dad that was so precise I suppressed a laugh. “So Mama and Daddy just could not stay married under those circumstances.” She parroted words I’d spoken so many times.
“Wynnie!” I told her. “They don’t need to know all of that.”
“They are our friends now,” she said. “They’re saving us!”
Charlie looked at me with a smile full of warmth. “If I’d known children were this wonderful, I would have had some.”
I smiled in return. Between us rested something kind, something made of our parents’ secrets and a child’s honesty.
“Let’s get where we’re going,” Charlie said, and he began to clean up.
Moira wiped her face with a dirty handkerchief, making the streaks worse. She coughed and turned away from us, spitting onto the ground. “I’m so sorry,” she said in a choked voice. “That was vulgar. But I don’t want to swallow that amalea.”
An electric shock arrowed through my temple. My right arm tingled, and I came near to her, smelled the dank aroma of sweat, dead fire, and dirt. “How do you know that word?”
Amalea.
Darkness in the unseen world.