Chapter 28

28

ADA HUDDLED IN THE CORNER OF THE BOXCAR WITH HER ARMS WRAPPED ROUND her knees. It was light outside, and she could hear rain. She would have liked to go outside and let the rain stream over her, to scoop up some mud and scrub it on her elbows and knees and the back of her neck, working the grit of it over her skin, and then let it all wash away, to get everything off her. Doing that might make her feel better, she thought, but she was too scared at the moment to step outside lest anyone see her. She wanted only the trees to know where she was.

Last night after the funeral Antoinette had knocked on Ada’s door. When Ada had opened it, Antoinette had said she was about to depart for the evening, but before she went, she thought Ada should know that Mr. Oswald had come recently to question her. He had asked her whether Ada really had left the house that fateful day, and of course, Antoinette said, she did have to tell him the truth. She had paused, as though waiting to see what Ada would say, but when Ada said nothing, she went on. “Me wonder what he might see fit to do now. Send you back to Barbados? Call in the police?” Even accounting for the fact that Antoinette disliked her enough to say anything, the very words had made Ada’s heart pound. She had made herself be still, though, had kept her face as impassive as a stone, determined not to reveal the panic rising high in her chest, until with a pitying look Antoinette shrugged and bid her good night.

Her heart had not stopped pounding since. She drew her knees up tighter to her chest. Coming back to the boxcar had been the only thing she could think to do, but how long could she stay hidden here? She cursed herself for having mentioned the boxcar to Antoinette once. How long before Antoinette told Mr. Oswald about it and he sent someone looking for her?

Water dripped through the ceiling, but only a little and not near where Ada sat. She watched it and listened to the clatter of raindrops outside upon the trees. At home during hurricane season when the wind howled and the trees lashed, Ada used to scramble into Millicent’s bed, and Millicent would snap her quilt up in the air and let it drape over them both. “This is our storm house,” Millicent said. “So as long as we’re in it, nothing bad can come to us.” Ada used to believe her. It was nothing but a blanket and a story, but those two things together felt as sturdy as steel. She could have gotten her quilt out of her sack and draped it over herself now, Ada thought, but she didn’t. It would not be the same, not only because Millicent was not there to tell her that nothing could happen to them but also because that didn’t seem true anymore.

***

WITH THE MAILBAG at his hip, Michael ducked under low-hanging branches and pushed back the feather of ferns as he walked. The leaves blotted out the light, but he had never been one to be scared of the dark, and there was a sense of calm in the dimness at least. He had heard people describe the jungle as wild, as though wild was something bad, but now that he was here he thought the jungle seemed more peaceful and more welcoming than the rest of the so-called tamed world out there.

He crept through tendrils and reeds, thick trees and thin. He saw a few darting lizards and, once, an orange frog about the size of a quarter dollar sitting still upon a doily of olive-green moss. He knew about doilies because the boardinghouse where he had stayed for eight weeks before coming to Panama had a pretty white cotton doily on the bureau by the front door. That bureau also had two brass candlesticks and a small ticking clock, and once, on his way out, he had stopped to touch the bulbous curves of one of the candlesticks, imagining what it would be like to own a thing like that, imagin ing a day when maybe he would have enough money to buy it for himself, when from across the room the stern white woman who ran the boardinghouse, the woman who had given him a room only because he paid double and who kept an eagle eye on him nonetheless, snapped at him and said, “That ain’t for you.” He had snatched his hand away as quick as if he had touched something hot and then turned to see the woman standing in the far doorway with her arms crossed over her chest. “I wasn’t—” Michael had started to say. “That ain’t for you,” she repeated. Had she merely told him to keep his hands to himself, he would not have been so bothered. But it was the assault on all he had been imagining, the assault on his future, that stung. He was fifteen years old, without any known kin in the world. Orphaned when he was young, treated poorly at times, cheated and scammed growing up on the streets. He had been alive long enough to know that what the boardinghouse lady said applied to a great many things—at least for a boy like him. He already knew it deep down, but in that moment, like a shadowy vision suddenly snapped into focus, the boardinghouse lady put words to the feeling and solidified it. For him, there would always be limits in the land of the free. That was the day he made up his mind to leave, to see what else the world had in store. His job at that time was as a newspaperboy, and he had seen many a headline in the newspapers about a place called Panama where the Americans were building a mighty canal. Selling newspapers had put enough money in his pocket that he could purchase a one-way pass on a ship, and he figured he would earn enough while he was there that he could purchase a return pass if things did not work out. He had nothing to lose. He had set out thinking he was venturing off to a whole new place, but what he found in the Canal Zone was not much different from what was in the small town in Virginia he had left. Of course the climate was different and the landscape, too, but apart from those things what he found was a sort of miniature reproduction of the United States, like they had come there to put on a play. There were post offices and barbershops and ice-cream socials and Friday-night dances. And limits. The same sort of limits. Here they called it different—gold and silver instead of white and black—but it worked just the same. Along with everything else, the attitude of his country had been imported down here, and he wondered sometimes if he would ever escape it, and he feared he would not.

In his four or so months on this land, Michael had not ventured into the jungle before, but he was on a mission that day to find the girl who used to reside at the Oswalds’ house and who, the cook had informed him, had left. “Off in a rush,” the cook had said, and when he had asked where, she had shrugged and muttered something about a boxcar out in the bush for all that she knew. She had closed the door before he could even say thank you.

Around him everything was ablossom, every sprig and leaf unfurled, flowers bright and bursting. There were buzzing nests in the trees and twittering birds and so many long, hanging vines that he had to push them aside to walk through. But nowhere in that rich world did he see a boxcar. And he had not passed one yet as far as he knew. He had thought he was heading north, but now he was not so sure. He took another few steps forward and then turned what he believed was due west with the idea that he would walk awhile in that direction. He started counting his steps to keep track of where he was and so that later he would have some idea how to get back out. After a while, when west yielded nothing but more trees and ferns and mud puddles, he turned north again and walked that way for a time. He wondered if he should leave, but nothing good ever came from giving up, and when he stepped into a patch where columns of sunlight streamed between the thick leaves overhead, lighting everything copper and gold, that was enough for him to go on.

He had gone every direction he could think of when at last he saw it—an old boxcar. It was rickety and rusted, veiled by ferns, strangled by vines, and its back end was sunk in the mud, as though the jungle were slowly devouring it.

Michael stayed where he was and clutched the handle of his bag. He was suddenly afraid to call out. There was every chance that this boxcar was occupied by someone else, someone who might not take kindly to seeing him there. He knew how the world worked. But he had come to find her. Michael took a deep breath.

“Ada Bunting?” he said.