took three sweeping steps over to the bag and unzipped it. Rooster didn’t stop him. Jude rifled through piles of clothes, a freezer bag of cassettes, and then his hand struck something solid. He hauled it out. A clear glass canister, like all of Queen Bea’s kitchen canisters, with the orange rubber lid. Embossed in cursive in the glass was the word Flour, but inside were the pebbled remains of Teddy, his bones and skin and teeth, bits of stone and shell in sand.
“Take it,” Rooster said.
“I’m going to,” Jude said, cradling the ashes awkwardly in his arms. They weighed perhaps as much as a newborn baby, and he looked down at them with the same terror and awe with which a new father might look at his child, holding it for the first time.
“Look, don’t worry,” Rooster said. “I don’t think John’s gonna interfere in your business no more.”
“What does that mean?”
“I got a feelin’ he’s gonna have other priorities soon.” Rooster’s voice was grave. He touched the Band-Aid on his forehead, pressing it into place. “He ain’t gonna have a choice.” Jude didn’t know what Rooster was talking about, but he felt a small spring of sympathy for him. Did he have no mother to tend to his wounds?
He stood up, propping the ashes on his hip. Then he put his skateboard under his other arm and left the apartment. He did not see Johnny on the stairs or in the street. He didn’t see Johnny again, not that day, not ever.
You’re leaving?” Eliza asked.
Jude’s own duffel was packed, slumped at his feet on the kitchen floor. He wound the phone cord around his hand.
“Something just came up,” he said. “I just have to do something back home.” His father was on the futon, pretending not to listen. Jude couldn’t say what he wanted to say. “Don’t worry—I don’t think Teddy’s dad is going to go through with the adoption.”
“Why not?”
“I talked to him.”
“I don’t get it,” she said. She sounded baffled, but resigned to, even fond of, her bafflement. She seemed to have learned that it was the prevailing wilderness in which she would have to exist. “When am I going to see you again?”
Jude unwound the phone cord, then wound it again. Through his bag, he could feel the weight of the glass canister against his ankle.
“You want to come with me?”
“Back to Vermont?”
“Just for a few days. Tell your mom I’ll get you home safe. Way before the baby’s born.”
Eliza sighed. Sixteen, and she had the sigh of a forty-year-old woman.
“I know you’re tired,” Jude said. “Just one more trip.”
When he hung up, his dad came into the kitchen. Jude took McQueen’s case out of his bag and handed it to his father, trading him for a wad of cash.
“If you change your mind, the loft is yours. Davis is going to be out by September one.”
Jude put the cash in his pocket. “I’d have to learn to get used to living off drug money.”
“A straight edge kid like you—that’s a moral conundrum.”
For some reason, Jude’s conscience, ready to fire, sent up an image of Hippie. The next generation of Lintonburg pot seller. The picture was of Hippie hobbling off the high school lawn, his glasses lost, as blind as Teddy, and Jude decided that, if for no other reason than to clear his karma, he would finally return to Hippie the money in his pocket.
Les hauled Jude’s bag up from the floor. “I’ll walk you to the van,” he said.
Twenty-Three
The van was parked in the alley in the morning. When Harriet saw it through the window above the kitchen sink, she dashed in her robe and moccasins up the stairs, past the bathroom, where Prudence was singing in the shower, past Prudence’s open door, where the great mass of a bald Eliza was passed out across the trundle bed like Rousseau’s sleeping gypsy, up to the third floor. Jude didn’t stir when she pushed the door open, or when she sat on the edge of the bottom bunk. It was when she touched the cut on his lip that he bolted awake. He sat up and looked at her, at the bedroom around him, at the lemony light drifting through the curtains, then lay back down.
“Fuck,” he said. “I was dreaming I was driving.”
Had his voice deepened, or was it just hoarse with sleep? “You guys must have gotten in late. You want to tell me where that cut on your lip came from?”