Lifted to a sitting position, she wrapped her arms around Wiley's shoulders and pulled him to her, kissing the stubbled hair behind his ear, his jaw, the arch of his cheekbones, his lips, hungry for him, waking from a century of slumber, and he returned the embrace, filled with relief, and welcomed the tang of her skin, the pressure of her limbs, the course of her hair spilling into his hands.
Together they saw the child watching from the kitchen. She had just awakened, her hair a bird's nest of knots, and trembled with suppressed indignation. “You called her Erica. I heard you.” Wiley helped Erica to her feet, and she leaned against him for strength. The child quaked like a banshee, her eyes darting from face to face, her hands balled into fists. “You've been lying to me all along—”
Wiley said, “We're leaving. Today.”
“Mee-Maw won't let you go. She'll never let you go. She'd kill you first—”
“Una.” Erica stepped toward her, but the girl inched backward. “You're right. We're not who we say we are, but that doesn't change anything, Una. That doesn't change how I feel about you. We had to lie to protect ourselves, to protect you. We had to pretend to be someone else.”
“Mee-Maw says you are them come back.”
“I'm not Cole Gavin,” Wiley said. “I'm not your father. She's not your mother.”
“We are not who you want us to be.”
The girl looked away, up to the ceiling, folded her arms and brought her hands to her collarbone, hugging herself and fighting tears. She crossed her feet, rested the right upon the left, gripped by the power of her own desperate confusion, gnawing at her lip, anxious for rescue from herself. Groping to become one of them. An uncertain angel. Erica held her close and felt the wild thump of her own heart drum against the child's ear.
NO PROTESTS, NO negotiations, and no threats from Mrs. Gavin when they told her they were leaving, only a hint of resignation when she asked if they were sure, if it wasn't wiser to wait a day or so to see if they were well and fit for travel. The Gavins’ old Rambler station wagon had been hidden beneath a paint-splattered canvas in a locked shed, but once Wiley insisted that she drive them to town to catch the next bus heading west, it was uncovered and prodded till it started. Mrs. Gavin busied herself with the child while the fugitives packed their gear. She gave them a duffel bag in which to stow the broken-down guns, and cooked a last meal before their departure. She refused any payment for her hospitality, and on the road seemed preoccupied by the driving and occasional car passing the other way. Littering the roadside were strands of brown oak and poplar leaves, and when they pulled into the parking lot of a general store, the tires crushed a swath and ground the leaves to dust.
The bus stop outside Parker's Cross Roads was nothing more than a bench beneath a small sign in the shape of a racing hound labeled “Dixie.” Tickets were purchased at the counter inside amid the dusty goods, the sweating soda cooler, the rows of cigarettes and ammunition, and plastic-carded fishing lures and wicked hooks. Arranged neatly in a rack next to the cash register, an army of stacked pamphlets trumpeted in red capitals: HAVE YOU BEEN SAVED? ARE YOU BORN AGAIN? THE COMING ARMAGEDEON. Wiley took the last of these, spread the folds like a roadmap, and chuckled over the contents as the clerk filled out their receipt for the bus to Memphis. He paid with a singed twenty-dollar bill and with the change bought four Cokes, which they took outside to drink. “How much time to your bus?” Mrs. Gavin asked.
“Three thirty,” Wiley said. “Under an hour, give or take. You don't have to wait.”
“We'll set awhile. I just like to be off the road afore dark. Can't see as good as I used to. You remember when I first laid eyes on you, thought you was my Cole.”
“I'm not him.”
“No.” She shook her head slowly. “No, you ain't. If he comes back to me, he will not leave me like this. The prodigal son returns humbled and is given the fatted calf.”
The chrome gas pumps reflected shards of light. The day's temperature had reached its apogee, and a cool breeze foretold the chill night ahead. Erica tied a sweater around her shoulders, fighting off the lingering aftershock of her fever. Pressed to her side, Una took short sips from her bottle to make her soda pop last and thus forestall their farewells. “Will you write me a letter? I will write you back.” She slipped her a label with a PO box address.
“I'll send you a postcard, okay? Next place we go. And when we're all settled, I'll write you again.”
Hidden in her jacket was the small china cup she had rescued from the sandbox, trimmed in Wedgwood blue, painted with two birds in flight, holding up with their beaks a tiny banner between them. Una pressed it into Erica's palm. “I'd like you to have this to remember me by. You won't forget me?”
She hugged the child one last time and nodded.
“Can you tell me your real names? Romeo and Juliet?”