The Hole in the Wall - Lisa Rowe Fraustino [60]
“Pa!” Barb squealed. I just moved my lips because I didn’t have the energy to speak.
Then a mannequin-smooth right hand joined the hairy left one to yank on the plywood, and the face that appeared sideways in the open space all nose and grin didn’t belong to Pa. It was Boots Odum, saying, “Thank God we found you in time. Back away, kids, so we can get some good swipes through this mess with the dozer.”
Barbie helped me crawl back to the narrow end of the cave and we huddled together with the chickens, hugging and laughing and crying. The plywood groaned as the bulldozer pushed away the dirt behind it. Finally the darkness ripped away, and the world opened up in a sudden burst of headlights. Soon the familiar shape of Ma filled the doorway, outlined by the brightness like an angel. There should have been trumpets.
“Barbie! Seb!”
“Ma!” I pulled in a deep breath of the cool earthy air that she seemed to carry in her open arms.
She fell to her knees and pulled me and Barbie together into a hug and laughed and cried until she shoved us away. “How dare you two scare me like that? You didn’t come home for supper, so I went looking for you, and found all sorts of strange things out in Jed’s castle and the henhouse. Scared me half to death! I followed your bike tracks into the gore, and—are those my chickens?”
From outside the cave came an urgent voice: “Ma, rescue now, talk later!”
Jed! I could hardly believe my ears. And then he appeared in the blinding glow of the headlights, using a shovel like a walking stick. Only it didn’t look like our old Jed. This Jed made a taller and thinner silhouette than the brother who had left home. And he lumbered along in a slow, jerky movement as if the legs he walked on weren’t his own. As he got closer, I saw that his legs were wrapped up in some sort of braces.
“Jed!” Barbie cried, and ran out of the cave to throw her arms around him. Then she pulled back and looked him up and down. “What happened to you?”
Stanley Odum stuck his head in. “Hurry on out of there, now—we still have a long night ahead before we can be sure you kids are safe.”
Those words scared me and got me wheezing again.
“Oh, I’m so glad we got here in time!” Ma pulled us back into another hug that practically broke my back. My normal, not itching and not stiff anymore back. Then she picked me up on my feet and started walking with me, but my legs were limp and I fell back down. Like the world’s strongest weight-lifter she curled me right up in her arms and carried me to Odum’s pickup truck. Barbie came along behind with Jed. We all loaded into the back and then Boots Odum jumped into the driver’s seat and took off. The bulldozer whined along behind with a goon in the cab. We soon outdistanced it.
It felt so good to be alive, with Jed among us, looking up at the almost full moon and all the stars winking. I didn’t even wonder where we were going as Ma explained that she’d followed the tracks to the gore and called Stanley Odum for help. To her surprise, Jed was with him when he showed up at the house.
And now Ma asked the questions we all wanted to know. “So, Jed, do tell us—where have you been all this time? Why wouldn’t you talk to us when you called? Why did you even leave us?”
“I was at . . .” Jed hesitated.
Now that my eyes had adjusted to the moonlight, I realized just how different he looked now, not just his body but his face. He looked a lot older than eighteen. His eyes were sunken and sad. He had a new scar on his right cheek, all the way from his eye back to his ear and down to the chin. He had a scraggly beard with thin spots that I thought might be covering scars, too.
“I was at ORC.”
And of course we were all bursting with questions about that until Jed gave us a warning look and gestured toward our driver.
“Folks, I really can’t tell you a lot of it. Well, I could tell you—” He grinned his old grin and he didn’t look so aged and beaten down. “—but I’d have to kill you.”
That was one of Jed’s favorite jokes, but at the moment it seemed more scary than funny.