The Dust of 100 Dogs - A. S. King [50]
All the other speakers at commencement had been awarded college scholarships and grants, and gave speeches about their glorious academic futures. I didn’t want to speak but I had to, so I wrote a piece about how graduates should do what they want to do, and not let themselves be steered by anyone else’s desires.
Parents probably didn’t like what I had to say, but what did it matter? It got me as much applause as it got the others. It made my parents burst from their chairs and pound their pasty palms together, even though they probably hadn’t heard a word I’d said. They were stoned out of their minds anyway, with new tablets my mother had gotten for her migraines. My father wore a wrinkled linen blazer with jeans and sandals, and a POW/MIA baseball cap. My mother didn’t take off her sunglasses once.
I kept looking around for Junior. If he had any brains, he’d show up and try to take the cash out of all the cards I got that day, but he was nowhere to be found. Maybe he was in jail somewhere, maybe asleep in a crack house. Maybe uptown scoring more drugs.
My mother was still wearing her sunglasses when we got home from the ceremony.
“I don’t want you drinking tonight, Saffron. I’m scared you’ll be killed in a horrible accident or something,” she said through my bedroom door. I sighed, sliced off a strip of her ear, and ate it like beef jerky.
“Don’t worry. I’m only going to Susan’s house and I’m sleeping over. I won’t be on the road at all.”
“What time will you be home?”
I walked past her and out the door. After all those years at the kitchen table, and all the years living through Junior’s bullshit together, she hadn’t the courage to tell me she was proud of me that day. So I refrained from answering her at all.
The next day, I arranged my flights from Susan’s house. On Sunday night, I packed my few summer clothes and my father’s collapsible army shovel into a drab duffel bag Pat had given me. Before Susan drove me to the bus station, I said goodbye to my parents.
“I’ll call you once I get there,” I told them.
My father searched for the missing remote control. My mother had a glassy-eyed stare. Neither of them made a sound. It was as if they were finally suffering from the years of imaginary torture I’d inflicted.
From the bus station, I traveled to Philadelphia, to spend one night and catch a plane the next morning. For two hours, as I struggled to fall asleep under the glow of a city night, I walked through my plan of action in my mind—each time throwing a different wrench in the works to see how I could solve unforeseeable problems. What if I get there and no one meets me at the airport? I’ll find a taxi. What if I get to a town and there are no rooms available? I can stay with someone, I’m sure. What if I’m robbed or lose my money? That’s why I bought traveler’s checks. What if I can’t find the bay?
That was the big one. What if I couldn’t find the bay? Things would surely have changed since I’d seen the Jamaican coast in 1664. If an important town like Port Royal had sunken thirty meters under the sea, then what else would have changed in three hundred years?
In my mind’s eye, I was confident I would recognize it somehow. Whenever I’d closed my eyes to sleep for the past three hundred years, I’d walked that sand in long, measuring footsteps. But what if all my information was mixed up? I knew that no one had ever officially claimed Philip’s emerald, but who knew? Maybe someone had already found it all and sold it, not knowing what it was. Then what? Back to Hollow Ford? On to medical school?
I got up four times to pee during the night. Each time, I was increasingly agitated about not sleeping. Finally, at four thirty, after listening to delivery trucks honk outside the supermarket across the street, I turned on the blinding fluorescent bathroom light, stared at my reflection, and decided to trust myself.
The only mirror in Fred Livingstone’s office was behind a small bar in the corner. It often captured Fred’s nose or chin in its beveled edge, causing a distorted reflection