Mary looked at him for a moment as he waited for her reply. “No,” she said plainly, before slipping her sunglasses back down on her face and looking away. The man returned to the stack of bills, but his question had made him lose count, and she heard him swear under his breath as he started over again. Perhaps he was wondering how else a girl would be able to pay cash for a car—albeit a used one—if she wasn’t a famous fashion model.
Mary stayed silent as the man finished, feeling the remainder of Ron Dackard’s money against her leg, to which it was strapped with an ACE bandage. Once he had totaled the $3,200, he slid the title toward her. “Alright. You’ve got yourself a car.” Mary picked up the paper, her eyes running over its seals and signatures. “Lemme go get the boys to bring it around,” he said, straining slightly with the effort of standing. Then he carried himself to the backroom with his wide chugging gate.
Once he was out of the room, Mary bent down toward Hannah, who was staring into a dismal-looking little fish tank that contained only three common goldfish circling their scum-walled environs. “We’re going to have such a fun trip, Bunny,” she said. Hannah looked up at her. The past few months had been hard on Hannah, Mary knew that.
“Are we going home now?”
Mary squatted down so that their eyes were level, and she shook her head. “We’re going to do something so much better.”
“What?”
Mary turned to see the black Chevy Blazer round the front of the building and idle, like a loyal steed. Then her eyes returned to Hannah. “We’re going to have an adventure,” she said, the words feeling round and perfect on her tongue.
The Chase girls drove north, hugging the coast before drifting toward the center and taking the great artery that cut through the peninsula of Florida to the heart of the south. The elevation seemed to slope downward until Mary felt their destination grow nearer. It was something she was drawn to without knowing why, like her own magnetic north. And when the swamp finally did come into view, its still waters reflected the steadily falling sun like an inverse earth.
Years earlier, Mary had read about Tammahuskee Swamp in a magazine, and the images from the article had settled in her mind, found shelter there. The heavy-footed cypress trees, their branches swathed with veils of gray moss; the carnivorous pitcher plants, hooded and red veined; the black cottonmouths, slipping between land and water—they all seemed to be the inhabitants of the fairy-tale world Mary so often created for Hannah. Mary recalled that the swamp used to be home to panthers, but they had been eradicated. And as she glanced out her window at the orange sky, she wished that they were still there, lurking in the bush, their bodies pressed low.
Up ahead, a sign came into view and Mary read the white letters, then made a smooth turn onto the dry pine-flanked dirt road at the entrance to the park. “This is it, Bunny,” she said, finally letting herself feel the weariness from the past days and weeks and months. It was a relief to be with just Hannah, in a place both water and land, where the past and the future seemed to meet, where Mary could prepare for what came next. “We’re here.”
Mary pulled up to the campground offices and put the car in park. They had stopped only twice, exiting the highway and finding themselves on wide roads lined with unfamiliar fast-food chains. When Mary saw a Kmart, she pulled in, and with the Dackards’ money, Mary bought a tent and two sleeping bags.
“Do you want to stay in the car while I run inside?” Mary asked. The sun had sunk out of sight, and under the pines, the air outside was cool and getting colder.
Hannah opened her car door. “No,” she said. “I wanna come.”
She followed Mary up the wood ramp to the drab gray building. Mary pulled open the clattering screen door, then propped it open with her hip as she pushed in the larger wooden one and scooted Hannah in ahead of her. A small gray-haired woman looked up. She wore a handknit-looking sweater over an ill-fitting uniform.
“Evening,” she said, with a nod. “May I help you?”
“We’re here for a campsite,” she said.
The woman glanced up again at Mary, then back down at her ledger. “Do you have a driver’s license?”
Mary took her wallet from her bag and pulled out her license, handing it to the woman, who slid her glasses up her nose before tilting her head back to examine the small card. Then she set it down beside the ledger and began to transcribe Mary’s name. “You girls have come a long way,” she said.
“We were visiting family,” Mary replied. “Down in Florida.”
The woman then pulled a photocopied map from a stack. “You’ll be in campsite 21. You’ll want to park just in front of it.” Then she looked at Mary as if Mary were a young scout under her command. “You have equipment, I assume. It’s going to get down into the forties tonight and you’ll need proper sleeping bags. Most people don’t come this time of year.”
“We have bags,” answered Mary, as she took the map and stuck it in her back pocket. She rested her hand on Hannah’s back as they turned to leave.
“The closest grocery store is Harvey’s,” the woman called after them. Mary stopped and looked back. “Just a couple of miles down the road. They’ll be closed by now, but they open at eight in the morning.”
Mary nodded. “Okay,” she said, with a single nod. “Thanks.”
Then the girls walked back out, hearing the screen door bang shut behind them. “How hungry are you, Bunny?” Mary asked, as she opened her car door, stepping aside to make room for Hannah.
Hannah looked up, then shrugged. “Only a little,” she said.
“Do you think another PB&J would be enough for tonight?” she asked. “We could get something warm in the morning.”
“I guess,” replied Hannah, before scrambling up into the car and across to the passenger’s seat.
Mary got in beside her and navigated by headlight the short distance to campsite 21, which was a small alcove with a picnic table sitting on patchy balding grass. Mary noticed a shiver run through Hannah as they got back out of the car. She popped the tailgate and pulled out one of the three big suitcases they had brought with them to Miami, then she opened it and took out Hannah’s purple down jacket and tossed it to her sister. “Here, Bunny,” she said. “Put that on.”
Hannah caught its sleeve as the rest of the jacket landed by her feet. She wasn’t old enough to wonder why Mary had brought her winter coat with them to Miami. “Do the alligators stay in the water?” she asked, slowly sliding the jacket on.
“Oh, yeah,” said Mary, as she pulled a hat down over Hannah’s head. “Don’t worry about them. They can hardly move on land.”
Hannah gave her a solemn look, and Mary cupped the back of her head.
“You’ll like it here, Bunny,” she said. “It’ll be a good place to stay for a couple of days.”
Hannah nodded, the way an adult does when processing information that doesn’t seem to make a whole lot of sense. “Why did we leave Gail’s house?”
“It was just time to go,” said Mary.