Hitchers

CHAPTER 18

I jolted upright in bed, my heart pounding.

Lorena.

If Grandpa was back, and thousands of others as well, couldn’t Lorena be back?

If I could have just five minutes to talk to her. How many times had I thought that? One of those pointless, impossible wishes that fill the dark hours after you lose your life partner. That it might actually be possible made me want to run through the city knocking on every door. I wanted to search for her, now, this instant. Whatever it took, I’d do it to have those five minutes. There must be some way to find her if she was out there.

I got out of bed, went into the living room and paced, thinking. If she was back, she could be anywhere in the city, and she was nothing but a disembodied voice repeating random pieces of her past. Of course assuming everyone with the voice would follow the same path as me, Lorena would eventually be able to contact me. I didn’t want to wait, though. If she was out there I wanted to find her now and be there when she came out.

I wandered into my studio, sat at my drafting table. My heart was racing, keeping me from thinking clearly. Drawing calmed me.

I drew Wolfie clutching a magnifying glass, searching for Lorena. Then I drew Lorena’s face in the upper margin, then Little Joe, peering upward, a bladed hand shading his eyes. Where was she? She was outside the boxes of their little world, just as she had been outside my world until the anthrax attack. But if she was here, she was a needle in a haystack. A speck of dust in a smokestack. I’d have to talk to everyone in the city.

I stopped sketching.

I stared at the page, not seeing it, letting an idea take shape.

If Lorena was out there, she could be inside anyone in Atlanta. How many Atlantans read Toy Shop, or had friends or family who read Toy Shop? What if this person read in my strip some of the words that were bursting unbidden from her or his mouth? If Lorena was out there, there were certain words she must be repeating.

Finn, I jotted in the margin beside my sketch of Lorena, underlining it twice. Snakes. Lightning. Annie. Chile. Toy Shop.

I could have gone on, but I wasn’t sure how I could work even those words into a strip without making it awful. Toy Shop was the only easy one—that would be on the masthead. I pulled out a clean sheet of Bristol board.

I winced as I read over the finished strip, reminding myself that I was doing this for Lorena, that if she was out there this was my best chance of finding her. But I hated making a joke out of her death. Before the strip was published I’d have to contact Lorena’s family in Chile and explain why I’d done it, just in case they saw the strip. They’d be mortified, but I thought they’d understand, assuming I could convince them the dead were returning, and she might be one of them…

I put my pencil down. They’d think I was insane. Everyone who read it would be horrified, and if I tried to explain why I’d done it they’d have me committed.

As long as Lorena understood why I’d done it, let the rest of the world think I was crazy.