“Gloria,” he croaked. “Help me.”
A lantern was still on in Auntie’s kitchen, spilling mullioned rectangles of yellow light onto the ground. Peter knocked on the door first, then quietly let himself in.
Peter found the old woman sitting at her kitchen table. She was neither writing nor drinking her tea, and as he entered she lifted her face toward him, simultaneously reaching into the tangle of eyeglasses around her neck. The right pair found her face.
“Peter. Been thinking I’d see you.”
He took a chair across from her. “How did you know about her, Auntie?”
“Who that now?”
“You know who, Auntie. Please.”
She gave a little wave. “The Walker, you mean? Oh someone must have come by and told me. That Molyneau man, I think it was.”
“I meant two nights ago. You said something. Told me she was coming. That I knew who she was.”
“I said that?”
“Yes, Auntie. You did.”
The old woman frowned. “Can’t imagine what was on my mind. Two night ago, you say?”
He heard himself sigh. “Auntie-”
She held up a hand to quiet him. “Okay, don’t work yourself up into a condition. I was just having a bit of fun. Haven’t done that in so long I couldn’t resist it. You looking like you do.” She met his eye with an unblinking gaze. “So tell me. Before I go offering my own opinion. What you think she is? This girl?”
“Amy.”
“Don’t know what she’s called. You want to call her Amy, go right on with it.”
“I don’t know, Auntie.”
Her eyes grew suddenly wide. “Of course you don’t!” She chuckled to herself, then broke into a spasm of coughing. Peter rose to help her, but she waved him back down. “Go on, sit,” she croaked. “My voice just gets rusty is all it is.” She took a moment to settle herself, clearing her throat with a wet harrumph. “That’s what you have to find out. Everybody got something to find out in they lives, and this is your one thing.”
“Michael says she’s a hundred years old.”
The old woman nodded. “Best look out then. A older woman. Careful this Amy don’t boss you around too much.”
He was getting nowhere. Talking to Auntie was always a challenge, but he’d never seen her quite like this, so weirdly cheerful. She hadn’t even offered him tea.
“Auntie, you said something else the other night,” he pressed. “Something about chance. A chance.”
“Reckon I might have. Sounds like something I’d say.”
“Is she?”
Her pale lips curled into a frown. “I’d say that depends.”
“On what?”
“On you.”
Before Peter could speak, the woman continued: “Oh, don’t be looking like that, all woebegone like you are. Feeling lost is just a part of it.” She pushed away from the table and rose stiffly to her feet. “Come on with you then. Got something to show you. Might help you make up your mind.”
He followed her down the hall to her bedroom. Like the rest of the house, the space was cluttered but clean, everything in its place. Pushed against the wall was an old four-poster bed, the mattress sagging in a manner that told him the ticking was just loose straw; beside it was a wooden chair bearing a lantern. He saw that the top of the dresser, the room’s only other piece of furniture, was decorated with a collection of apparently random objects: an old glass bottle with the words Coca-Cola written in faded lettering of elaborate script; a metal tin that, when he picked it up, made a sound suggesting pins; the jawbone of some small animal; a pyramidal pile of flat, smooth stones.
“Those my worry things,” said Auntie.
Now that they were standing together in the cramped room, Peter felt her smallness; the crown of her white head reached barely to his shoulder.
“That’s what my mama called them. Keep your worry things nearby, she always said.” She gestured with a crooked finger toward the bureau. “Don’t remember where most of it comes from, excepting the picture, of course. Brought that with me on the train.”
The picture was positioned in the center of the bureau top. Peter lifted it from its place and tipped it toward the window to catch the light of the spots. The photo was too small for the frame, which was tarnished and pitted; Peter supposed the frame had come later. Two figures were standing on a flight of stairs that ascended to the door of a brick house, the man behind and above the woman, his arms wrapping her waist as she leaned her weight against him. They were dressed for the cold, in bunchy coats; Peter could see a dusting of snow on the pavement in the foreground. The tones had been bleached by the years so that everything was a muted tan color, but he could tell that they were both dark-skinned, like Auntie, with Jaxon hair; the woman’s was cut nearly as short as the man’s. She wore a long scarf around her neck and was smiling straight into the camera; the man was looking away with an expression that seemed to Peter like three-quarters of a laugh-a laugh the camera had stopped. It was a haunting image, full of hope and promise, and Peter sensed, in the man’s misdirected attention and the woman’s smile and the way his arms enfolded her, pulling her into his body, the presence of a secret the two of them shared; and then, as more of its details came into focus-the way the woman’s body curved and the thickness of her, beneath her coat-he realized what this secret was. It was a picture not of two people but three; the woman was pregnant.
“Monroe and Anita,” said Auntie. “Those were their names. That there’s our house, 2121 West Laveer.”
Peter touched the glass over the woman’s belly. “That’s you, isn’t it?”
“Course it’s me. Who you think it was?”
Peter returned the picture to its place on her dresser. He wished he had something like that, to remember his parents by. With Theo it was different; he could still see his brother’s face and hear his voice, and when he thought of Theo now, the image that came to his mind was from their time together at the power station, the day before they’d left. Theo’s tired, troubled eyes as he sat on Peter’s cot to examine his ankle and then, as he lifted his gaze, an expectant smile of challenge. The swelling’s down. Think you can ride? But Peter knew that over time, even just a few months’ worth, this memory would fade, like all the others-like the colors of Auntie’s photograph. First the sound of Theo’s voice would be lost, and then the picture itself, the details dissolving into visual static until all that remained was an empty space where his brother had been.
“Now, I know it’s under here someplace,” Auntie was saying.
She had lowered herself to her knees, pulling the skirt of the bed aside to look beneath it. With a grunt she reached under the bed and withdrew a box, sliding it across the floor. “Help me up, Peter.”
He took her by an elbow and eased her to her feet, then lifted the box from the floor. An ordinary cardboard shoe box, with a hinged lid and a flap that sealed it tight.
“Go on now.” Auntie was sitting on the edge of the bed, her naked feet dangling like a Little’s, skimming the floor. “Open it.”
He did as she’d said. The box was full of folded paper-he had already figured that out. But not just paper, he saw. Maps.
The box was full of maps.
Carefully he lifted the first one free of the box. Its surface was worn smooth, so brittle at its creases he worried that it might dissolve in his hands. At the top were the words AUTOMOBILE CLUB OF AMERICA, LOS ANGELES BASIN AND SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA.
“These were my father’s. The ones he used on the Long Rides.”
He gently withdrew the others, placing each on top of the bureau. SAN BERNARDINO NATIONAL FOREST. LAS VEGAS STREET ATLAS. SOUTHERN NEVADA AND ENVIRONS. LONG BEACH, SAN PEDRO AND THE PORT OF LOS ANGELES. CALIFORNIA DESERT REGION, MOJAVE NATIONAL PRESERVE. And, at the bottom, its folded edges squeezed against the sides of the box: FEDERAL EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT AGENCY, MAP OF THE CENTRAL QUARANTINE ZONE.