From the cloud of ferny leaves far above her, a flock of birds exploded into the sky. They were green, and at first Lila thought they were parrots, only they were too small. They flocked west, forming a V—like ducks, for Christ’s sake—and were gone.
She pulled her shoulder mic, thumbed the button, and tried to raise Linny in dispatch. She got nothing but a steady wash of static and somehow wasn’t surprised. Nor was she when a red snake—thicker than one of Van Lampley’s pumped-up biceps and at least three yards long—slithered from a vertical split in the amazing tree’s gray trunk. The split was as big as a doorway.
The snake lifted its spade-shaped head in her direction. Black eyes surveyed her with cold interest. Its tongue tested the air, then withdrew. The snake slid rapidly up a crevasse in the trunk and coiled over a branch in a series of neat loops. Its head pendulumed. The impenetrable eyes still regarded Lila, now viewing her upside down.
There was a low, rippling growl from behind the tree, and a white tiger emerged from the shadows, its eyes bright and green. A peacock strutted into view, head bobbing, fanning its glorious tail, making a noise that sounded like a single hilarious question, repeated over and over: Heehh? Heehh? Heehh? Heehh? Moths swirled around it. Lila’s family had owned an illustrated New Testament, and those swirling insects made her think of the diadem Jesus always seemed to have, even as a baby lying in a manger.
The red snake slithered down from its branch, dropped the last ten feet, and landed between the peacock and the tiger. The three of them came toward Lila at the edge of the clearing, the tiger padding, the snake slithering, the peacock prancing and cackling.
Lila felt a deep and profound sense of relief: Yes. Yes. It was a dream—it definitely was. It had to be. Not just this moment, and not just Aurora, but the rest of it, everything since the spring meeting of the Tri-Counties Curriculum Committee, in the Coughlin High School auditorium.
She closed her eyes.
3
Joining the Curriculum Committee had been Clint’s doing (which was ironic; he had, in the end, been hoisted by his own petard). This was back in 2007. There had been an article in the Tri-Counties Herald about the parent of a junior high student in Coughlin who was determined to see Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret banned from the school library. The parent was quoted saying that it was “a dammed atheist tract.” Lila couldn’t believe it. She had adored the Judy Blume novel as a thirteen-year-old and related intensely to its portrait of what it was like to be an adolescent girl, how adulthood suddenly loomed up in front of you like some strange and terrifying new city and demanded you go through the gates whether you wanted to or not.
“I loved that book!” Lila said, extending the paper to Clint.
She had roused him from his usual daydream, sitting at the counter and staring through the glass doors at the yard, lightly rubbing the fingers of his left hand over the knuckles on his right. Clint looked at the article. “Sorry, hon, it’s too bad, but the book’s gotta burn. Orders direct from General Jesus.” He handed the paper back to her.
“It’s not a joke, Clint. The reason that guy wants to censor that book is exactly the reason girls need to read it.”
“I agree. And I know it’s not a joke. So why don’t you do something about it?”
Lila had loved him for that, for challenging her. “All right. I will.”
The paper mentioned a hastily formed group of parents and concerned citizens called the Curriculum Committee. Lila enlisted. And to bolster her cause, she did what a good police officer knows to do: she went to her community for assistance. Lila rallied every like-minded local she could think of to come out and support the book. She was unusually well-positioned to raise such a group. Years of settling noise complaints, cooling down property disputes, letting speeders go with warnings, and generally showing herself to be a conscientious and reasonable representative of the law, had created a lot of good will.
“Who are all these damn women?” the father who had started it all exclaimed at the outset of the Curriculum Committee’s next gathering, because, one-and-all, they were women, and there were far more of them than of him. Margaret was saved. Judy Blume sent a thank-you note.
Lila stayed on the Curriculum Committee, but there had never been another Margaret-sized controversy. The members read new books that were being added to the syllabi and the libraries at high schools and middle schools around the Tri-Counties, and listened to lectures by local English teachers and librarians. It was more like a book club than a political assembly. Lila enjoyed it. And, like most book clubs, though a man or two occasionally showed up, it remained primarily an XX affair.
There had been a meeting on the previous Monday night. Afterward, on the way to her car in the high school parking lot, Lila fell into step with an elderly woman named Dorothy Harper, a member of something called the First Thursday Book Club, and one of the townsfolk Lila had originally drafted to help defend Margaret.
“You must be so proud of your niece Sheila!” Dorothy remarked, leaning on a cane, a flowered purse large enough to contain a baby looped over her shoulder. “People are saying she might go to a Division I school on a basketball scholarship. Isn’t that wonderful for her?” Then Dorothy added, “Of course, I suppose you don’t want to get too excited yet—I know she’s only a sophomore. But very few girls make headlines at fifteen.”
It was on the tip of Lila’s tongue to say that Dotty had made a mistake: Clint didn’t have a brother and Lila didn’t have a niece. But Dorothy Harper was at the age where names often got mixed up. She wished the old lady a nice day and drove home.
Lila was a police officer, though, and paid to be curious. During an idle moment at her desk at the sheriff’s station the next morning, she thought of Dorothy’s comment, and typed Sheila Norcross into Firefox. A sports article with the headline, COUGHLIN PHENOM LEADS TIGERS TO TOURNEY FINALS, was the top result, fifteen-year-old Sheila Norcross being said phenom. So Dorothy Harper had been right about the name, after all. There were other Norcrosses in the Tri-Counties—who knew? She certainly hadn’t. Down toward the bottom of the article there was a mention of Sheila’s proud mother, who bore a different surname, Parks. Shannon Parks.