You got to do it the way Zero done, Carter had told her. Ain’t no other way to go back to the way you were.
The girls were watching a movie in the house. It was one Amy remembered, from being just a girl herself: The Wizard of Oz. The movie had terrified her—the tornado, the field of poppies, the wicked witch with her sickly green skin and battalion of airborne monkeys in bellman’s hats—but she had also loved it. Amy had watched it in the motel where she and her mother had lived. Her mother would put on her little skirt and stretchy top to go out to the highway, and before she left she’d sit Amy down in front of the television with something to eat, something greasy in a bag, and tell her: You sit tight now. Mama will be back soon. Don’t you open that door for nobody. Amy could see the guilt in her mother’s eyes—she understood that leaving a child by herself wasn’t something her mother was supposed to do—and Amy’s heart always went out to her, because she loved her, and the woman was so remorseful and sad all the time, as if life was a series of disappointments she could do nothing to stop. Sometimes her mother could barely get out of bed all day, and then night would fall, and the skirt and the top and the television would go on, and she’d leave Amy alone again.
The night of The Wizard of Oz had been their last in the motel, or so Amy recalled. She’d watched cartoons for a while and, when these were over, a game show, and then she flipped around the dial until the movie caught her eye. The colors were odd, too vivid. That was the first thing she noticed. Lying on the bed, which smelled like her mother—a mélange of sweat, and perfume, and something distinctly her own—Amy settled in to watch. She entered the story when Dorothy, having rescued her dog from the clutches of the evil Miss Gulch, was racing from the storm. The tornado whisked her away; she found herself in the land of the Munchkins, who sang about their happy lives. But, of course, there was the problem of the feet—the feet of the Wicked Witch of the East, sticking out from beneath Dorothy’s tornado-driven house.
It went on from there. Her attention was complete. She understood Dorothy’s desire to go home. That was the heart of the story, and it made sense to Amy. She hadn’t been home in a long time; she barely remembered it, just a shadowy sense of certain rooms. As the movie drew to a close, and Dorothy clicked her heels together and awoke in the bosom of her family, Amy decided to try this. She had no ruby slippers, but her mother had a pair of boots, very tall, with pointed heels. Amy slid them on. They rose up her skinny, little-girl legs nearly to her crotch; the heels were very high, making it difficult to walk. She took tender steps around the room to get the hang of it, and when she felt comfortable she closed her eyes and tapped the heels together, three times. There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home, there’s no place like home …
So convinced was she of the magical power of this gesture that when she opened her eyes she was shocked to discover that nothing had happened. She was still in the motel, with its dirty carpet and dull immovable furniture. She yanked off the boots, hurled them across the room, threw herself down on the bed, and began to cry. She must have fallen asleep, because the next thing she saw was her mother’s frightened face, looming over her. She was shaking Amy roughly by the shoulder; her top was stained and torn. Come on now, honey, her mother said. Wake up now, baby. We got to go, right now.
Carter was skimming the pool. The first leaves were falling, crisp and brown.
“I thought we were taking the day off,” Amy said.
“We are. Just got to get these here. Bothers me seeing them.”
She was sitting on the patio. Inside, the girls had reached the part of the movie where Dorothy and her companions entered the Emerald City.
“They should turn it down a bit,” Carter remarked. He was dragging the skimmer along the edges, trying to work some small bit of debris into the net. “Girls are going to wreck their ears.”
Yes, she would miss it here. The softness of the place, its cool feeling of green. The small tasks that filled their days of waiting. Carter lay the skimmer on the pool deck and took a chair across from her. They listened to the movie for a while. When the Wicked Witch melted, the girls erupted in happy shrieks.
“How many times they watch that?” Carter asked.
“Oh, quite a few.”
“When I was a boy, seemed like it was on TV about half the time. Scared the wits out of me.” Carter paused. “I always did like that movie, though.”
They loaded the Humvee with cans of fuel. Sitting in the cargo compartment were plastic bins of supplies Greer had brought with him—rope and tackle, a spinner net, a pair of wrenches, blankets, a simple cotton frock.
“I’d be happier if we could bring Sara along,” Peter said. “She’d know better than any of us what to do.”