Chapter 6
6
Bliss
Twenty-Four Years Before
At first, Bliss was terrified.
She’d stumbled running away from the cemetery and from Madison, fallen, and hit her head. She remembered that much.
When she woke up, there was blood dripping from a cut on her forehead, and she felt sick to her stomach. Touched her fingertips to the small cut above her right eye, winced at the sting.
Bliss was a tough kid, she’d had to be, but the sight of the blood made her dizzy. That, on top of the nausea, was too much.
She rose to her hands and knees and threw up her fancy lunch.
When she’d finished, she went to the creek, splashed water on her face, rinsed out her mouth, tried to think what to do next.
Duke was probably still sleeping off his last bender, which meant she’d probably be able to sneak past him, scrounge around in the medicine cabinet in hopes of finding some Band-Aids and iodine, and get away before he woke up and started yelling.
Her father didn’t need a reason to yell; when he’d been drinking steadily for a couple of days, and without her mother around to blame for all his troubles, he’d go after Bliss, take his misery out on her.
She walked on tiptoe and kept her eyes down at times like that, and this was most likely one of them.
Her head was still spinning a little as she made her way through the trees, over the fallen log that bridged the creek, and off in the general direction of the camper, which sat, rusting and dented, in a hidden clearing, under the friendly branches of a lonely old-timer of an oak.
When Bliss reached the clearing, having watched her feet for most of the way home, since she couldn’t afford to stumble again, she was mystified, then startled.
The oak tree was there, tall and welcoming, its leaves rustling softly in the cool breeze.
The camper, however, was gone.
Just gone.
So was Duke’s old truck.
Had he finally gotten fed up, like he always warned would happen, and left her behind? Hitched the truck to that falling-apart camper and hauled it away somewhere?
Bliss sank to her knees, the breath knocked out of her.
She’d already barfed up her lunch, but her empty stomach cramped just the same, over and over. It was so painful that her head swam again.
This wasn’t right.
Oh, Bliss had no trouble believing that her dad would desert her, just as her mother had done. That bothered her, naturally, but not as much as the flat-out weird impossibility of that old camper being loaded up onto the bed of Duke’s rust bucket of a truck and taken someplace else.
Neither the camper nor the truck would have been able to pull off a trick like that, since they were both good for scrap iron and not much else.
Slowly, when her stomach had finally stopped trying to hurl up a whole lot of nothing, Bliss moved toward the spot where the camper should have been.
Sure, Duke could have taken off in the truck. Gone drinking again, hustling money at the nearest pool hall. He did stuff like that all the time—at least, when the rig was running, which it often wasn’t.
But what could he possibly have done with the camper?
There were no deep gouges in the dirt under the oak tree. No oil drips or leaked sewage, no empty cigarette packages or beer cans.
Nothing.
The grass was green and springy and thick, as though it had never been browned and bent low by the weight of an old camper. There weren’t even any tracks, left by the comings and goings of Duke’s truck.
Instead, buttercups, wild daisies and other wildflowers bloomed among the deep green blades in bright splashes of color.
Bliss’s head began to ache.
She had to be in the wrong place. That was it.
She’d fallen and hit her head.
And she’d gotten turned around somehow, that was all. Gone the wrong way, thinking she was headed home.
Except that the oak was the same tree she’d sat under so many times. The tree she’d hugged, and felt almost as though it was hugging her right back.
Oh, yes. Bliss knew that tree well. Secretly, she called it the Grandfather; it was a friend. Until Madison, it had been her only friend.
She paused in her confusion to remember that she’d shouted at Madison just a little while ago. After the ruckus she’d raised, Madison probably wouldn’t want anything to do with her ever again.
Sadness nearly overwhelmed Bliss in those moments of mixed-up realization.
What should she do next?
Walk to town? Head for the Bettencourt house and ask for help?
Town was too far away—at least four miles, according to Duke. And what was she supposed to do when she got there? Go from bar to bar, with her bleeding head and her wobbly knees, looking for her father?
Her granny used to say that, if she got herself lost, she ought to find a church or a police station. Folks there would look out for her.
The problem was, Duke didn’t hold with churches, or with cops.
The first, he said, was just a place where pompous-ass people took your money and told you lies, and the police couldn’t be trusted, either. They were out to get people like them—Duke, Mona and, he swore, even little snot-nosed kids like her.
If something went wrong, and there was a poor person handy, the cops would harass, not help, them.
She could backtrack to the cemetery, hoping Madison was still there, lingering over the picnic blanket and reading a book. Or just lying on her back in the grass, smiling at the sky, like she sometimes did.
Madison was a kid, too, but she was smart, and she’d know what to do.
Wouldn’t she?
Bliss squeezed her eyes shut, tight as could be, but the tears came anyway.
She wrapped both arms around the Grandfather, as far as they would reach, and hugged him. Tight.
The rough bark chafed her cheek and the cut on her head, and it throbbed. The blood, which had slowed up a little after she splashed her face with cold water down at the creek, started flowing again.
The creek.
She’d go back to the creek, sit down in the soft, fragrant grass growing along the bank, and think things through.
So she headed for the water.
She perched nearby for a good while, knees drawn up to her chin, arms wrapped around her legs, crying and wondering and telling herself she must be crazy, to think there was any magic in an ordinary place like this one.
Lord knew, Duke had said she was loony often enough, and so had Mona.
Maybe they’d been right, though that was as hard to accept now as it had been when they said it.
The sun began to drift lower, toward the mountains to the west of where she sat, and, calmer now, Bliss wanted to sleep.
Surely, when she woke up, this bad dream, if that was what it was, would be over. She’d find the camper, fix up the cut on her head, maybe crawl onto the bunk above what passed for a kitchen, and tough things out until she felt better.
Except that Bliss knew she probably shouldn’t let herself fall asleep, in case she’d done real damage to her noggin when she tripped and landed on her face.
She knew from TV that when somebody banged their head against something hard and then drifted off, well, sometimes, they croaked.
So she sat, watched a deer and two fawns make their cautious way down the hill on the opposite side of the creek, dip their velvety noses into the water and drink, ever so delicately, like ladies in a storybook sipping their afternoon tea.
The deer, after regarding Bliss with limpid brown eyes, finished drinking and wandered back the way they’d come.
Bliss felt a touch of envy. Baby deer had someone to look out for them.
Why didn’t she?
She turned lightheaded again, wondering about that, and swayed a little, gripping her legs tighter so she wouldn’t tip over.
There was no telling how much time had passed when she was jolted out of her stupor by the sound of someone tromping through the underbrush, whistling a catchy tune.
When the boy emerged, Bliss felt the same confusion, the same loss of balance, as she had when she’d found Duke, his truck and the camper gone from the place they should have been. And weren’t.
He was about Bliss’s age, maybe a year or two older.
He wore blue overalls with no shirt underneath, his feet were bare, and he was carrying a fishing pole in one hand.
It wasn’t the modern kind, like Duke used when he was of a mind to land himself a clutch of rainbow trout, but a long, thin strip of wood with a string fastened to one end.
Bliss thought of Huckleberry Finn.
The boy’s hair was a light golden brown, and it gleamed in the gathering dusk. To Bliss, it looked as though someone had turned a bowl upside down on his head and then trimmed off whatever was still sticking out from under the rim.
Beside him trotted a big reddish-brown dog, tongue lolling.
The dog had no collar, no jingling tags.
Spotting Bliss, the boy stopped in his tracks, and so did the dog.
The kid looked just as surprised to see her as she was to see him .
“Who are you?” he asked, frowning now. “What’s your name?”
Somehow, Bliss found her voice. “I’m Bliss Morgan. Who are you?”
“Jack Bettencourt,” the boy said, still all serious-faced, still hanging back, as if expecting Bliss to come rushing and hollering at him like somebody on the warpath. “This here is private property, and you’re trespassing.”
Bliss stayed silent. She didn’t have the energy to argue.
Jack Bettencourt came a few steps closer, peering at her from under that fringe of shining hair. “What happened to your head?” he asked. “It’s all bloody.”
Bliss touched the skin near the cut, but not the cut itself. It still hurt like crazy, and it was definitely still bleeding.
“I fell down,” she answered. Her voice sounded strangely normal, considering that she didn’t have the faintest idea what was going on.
The boy said his last name was Bettencourt, but Madison had never mentioned him. In fact, she’d talked about being an only child, and wishing she had brothers and sisters. It was confusing.
“Do you know Madison?” she asked, silently hoping for a yes.
He shook his head, and the dog loped over to where Bliss sat, used his long, sandpapery tongue to lick her cut.
“Hobo,” the boy said. “You stop that, right now.”
The dog ignored him.
Bliss slipped her arms around the animal’s neck and buried her face in his dusty fur, cut and all.
For the first time since this nutty dream had begun, if that was what it was, she felt comforted, though just a little.
Jack approached, after leaning the fishing pole carefully against the trunk of a fir tree, and gently pulled the dog away.
“That cut looks pretty bad,” he said, squinting. Up close, Bliss could see that he had freckles, that his eyes were the same color as Madison’s, hazel, and the tops of his skinny shoulders were peeling from sunburn. “Maybe we ought to head back to the house, so Ma can take a look at it.”
“Ma?” Bliss echoed, puzzled. She’d never known a real person to say “Ma” when they talked about their mom, just the girls in the Little House on the Prairie stories.
Jack looked her over, his eyes widening slightly. “Where do you hail from, Bliss Morgan?” he asked, looking equally confused by her appearance as she was about his. “Ain’t never seen any girl dressed like you before.”
“Don’t say ‘ain’t,’” Bliss said. “It makes you sound ignorant, and if you’re really a Bettencourt, then you ought to know better.”
The freckled face scrunched up a little.
She’d annoyed him.
So it surprised her when he put out a hand, pulled her to her feet.
For someone who couldn’t be a day older than ten, he was sure strong.
“Come on,” he said. “Ma will have my hide if I don’t haul you right home, so she can tend that cut. You don’t want to get an infection or anything.”
Bliss ran her hands down the front of her shirt.
She’d wanted someone to help her, and here were Jack Bettencourt and his goofball dog, Hobo.
She might as well do as he said.
For the moment, after all, she didn’t have a better plan.
So she followed the boy in overalls back the way he’d come, with the dog nudging her along from behind, bumping her with his wet, cold nose every time she slowed down.