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  Cause I paint them that way.
 Oh. When am I going to see my daddy?
 Soon. Real soon. Again she wondered why she didn t ask for her mommy.
Of course. Poppy had always been real close to her dad too. Mom had the
regular job, working a register at Kmart, so she wasn t around most days. Dad
did seasonal work and sometimes he d be home for weeks at a time. Since he
loved basketball and she was his only kid, he d taught her the game early.
They d spent countless afternoons going one-on-one.
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Dad& I didn t even know you were sick.
She looked at Katie and saw that her fine, dark hair was all tangled. A case
of terminal bed head. But what d you expect when the kid was tied to her bed
all the time?
 How about I fix your braids? Poppy said.
Katie brightened.  Could you do a French braid? My Nana never lets me have a
French braid.
 Nothing to it. One French braid, coming right up. Katie s smile, missing
tooth and all, sent a shiver of pleasure through Poppy. If that s all it takes
to make you happy, little girl, you ll get a million French braids.
And then the smile faded.
 You re not going to make my hair like yours, are you? Poppy felt her hair
where it fell from behind the mask.
 What s wrong with it?
 The color s weird.
 Weird? Poppy had to laugh.  That s Deadly Nightshade, honey-bunch. The
coolest color around. You rinse it into dark hair like mine and it comes out
looking like red wine.
 I still don t want it on my hair.
 Don t worry. We won t change your color, just your braids. Now, turn around
and let me brush it out. As she worked with Katie s hair, Poppy couldn t help
thinking about Glory, and wondering if this is what might have been&
 What s your name again? Katie said.
Before she could give it a thought, her real name slipped out.
 Poppy. Damn me! What an Appleton thing to do! Jesus, what am I gonna do
now? The kid knows my name.
 That s a pretty name, Katie said.  Isn t a poppy a flower?
Oh, well. The damage was done. But maybe it wasn t so bad. Anybody asking her
would like figure Katie s kidnappers would use fake names, so they d pay no
mind to  Poppy. She hoped.
 Yep. It s a little flower. That s what my daddy used to call me. His little
flower. Until I got tall. Then he called me his sunflower.
 Where s your daddy now? Poppy s eyes misted for an instant.
 He s far away.
 Is that where you grew up? Far away?
 No. I grew up right around here. Now that was like a total lie but it ought
to throw off anybody coming around later looking for a Poppy who grew up in
northern Virginia. No worry about her real home popping out. Poppy never told
anyone her real home town.
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Really, how could you tell someone you grew up on Sooy s Boot, New Jersey?
Sooy s Boot! How could you let those words past your lips?
 I grew up far away, Katie said.  In Georgia.
 I figured you were from somewhere down South.
 How come?
 Yo axent, hunny, she said, mimicking Katie s drawl.  Lank Joe-jah.
 I don t have an accent.
 Oh, yes, you  Poppy stopped as her hand found a depression in Katie s scalp
on the left side of her head in her skull.  Hey, what s this dent in your
head?
 I& I had an accident.
 What sort of accident?
 I broke my head. Poppy s stomach turned.
 Shit! I mean, shoot! When did that happen?
 When I was little.
 When you were ? Poppy had to laugh.  You re not so big now. At least you
weren t born that way. If you were I might think you were an Appleton.
 What s a Appleton?
 They re some weird folks from back around where I grew up. Lots of them got
weird-shaped heads.
 I thought you said you grew up around here.
 Yeah, Poppy said quickly.  Yeah, well, somewhere not far from here. Not
far in miles, she thought. Probably less than two hundred. But so very far in
every other way it might as well be like Mars or someplace.
Sooy s Boot& a hiccup on one of the roads running through the heart of the
New Jersey Pine Barrens. She was born and raised there, which made her like a
fullfledged Piney. Which meant  poor hick to most people.
But she didn t remember feeling poor when she was growing up. Mom had the
Kmart job in May s Landing, and Dad worked the pineland s annual cycle: He cut
sphagnum moss in the spring, picked blueberries and huckleberries in the
summer, then cranberries toward fall, and cut cordwood through the winter.
They had everything they needed.
Until Mom died. She d been bothered by the veins in her legs forever, and one
day one of her legs got red and sore. She should have seen a doctor, but she
put it off and put it off, and then one day at work she grabbed her chest and
keeled over. She died on the way to the hospital. Coroner said a giant clot
had come loose from one of the veins in her leg and clogged her heart. Or
something like that.
That left Poppy and Dad. She was all he had, and he doted on her. And no
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doubt Poppy would like still be living in the pines, would have grown up to be
another Piney girl married to a Piney guy, raising a bunch of little Pineys&
if it hadn t been for basketball.
Still brushing Katie s hair, Poppy smiled. Jesus, she d been good. Dad had
drilled all the fundamentals into her before she was ten, and by middle school
she was playing with the boys at recess and giving them a run for their money.
The coach at the regional high school took one look at her in tryouts and put
her in the starting five of his varsity squad. She had to put up with some
heavy resentment until they started winning like they d never won before.
All because of me, she thought.
No brag. Truth. She d been totally awesome in the paint could dribble circles
around anyone who got in her way. And when they walled up to block her out,
she hung back and dropped in three pointers. And when they got so frustrated
that they started fouling her, she d sink two for two on her free
throws ninety-five percent from the line.
By junior year she d already been offered a full ride at Rutgers. Dad had
been ecstatic: Not only was his little flower All State, but she was going to
college. That big round ball was going to be her ticket out of poverty and the
pines.
Then she did a real Appleton thing: She fell in love.
With Charlie Pilgrim, of all people. Even now she couldn t help wincing at
the whole thing. How could she have been so totally stupid?
Well, one thing leading to another, as it so often does, Poppy had found
herself pregnant. And since there was no way she d have an abortion after all,
this was Charlie s baby and they were in love she had to quit basketball.
Dad was crushed, of course. And seeing his face every day when she came home
right after school instead of practicing with the team became a total torture
that finally got to be too much to take.
So she and Charlie had run off to New York City where Charlie was going to
find a job and they were going to get married. Except Charlie never did find
steady work and they never got around to like getting married. They wound up
on welfare, sharing a filthy Lower East Side apartment with two other couples.
And then the baby had been born. She was beautiful, she was glorious, and so
that was what they named her: Glory.
But soon Glory had started having fits, and the doctors at NYU Medical Center
said she had a brain defect, something wrong in her head that gave her [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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