"We can either stay here and let the others find us," Harry explains to his granddaughter, "or we can go back and look for them. Maybe we're too tired and hot to do anything but stay here. We could play a game seeing how many different states' license plates we can find."
This breaks her sniffling into a wet little laugh. "Then we'd get lost again." Her eyelids are reddened by the friction of tears and tiny flakes of light shine in her green irises like the microscopic facets that give metallic paint its tinselly quality.
"Look," he tells her. "Here's Minnesota, with its little clump of pine trees. Ten Thousand Lakes, it says. Score one for Grandpa."
Judy merely smiles this time, not granting him a laugh, she knows he's trying to get her to forgive his mistake in losing the others.
"It's not us who are lost, we know where we are," he says. "It's them." He stops crouching beside her, the hoity-toity little snip, and stands up, to uncreak his knees, and also to ease the crowded feeling in his chest.
He sees them. Just this side of the zebra crossing, coming this way, struggling with suitcases. He first sees Nelson, carrying Roy on his shoulders like a two-headed monster, and then Pru's head of red hair puffed out like the Sphinx, and Janice's white tennis dress. Harry, up to his chest in car roofs, waves his arm back and forth like a man on a desert island. Janice waves back, a quick toss of her hand as if he's far from what they're talking about.
But when they're all reunited Nelson is furious. His face is pale and his upper lip stiff and bristling. "Jesus Christ, Dad, where did you disappear to? We went all the way back upstairs to that stupid candy store when you didn't show up in the baggage area."
"We were there, weren't we, Judy?" Harry says, marvelling at his son's growing baldness, exposed mercilessly by the Florida sunlight beating down through the thinned strands, and at his mustache, a mouse-colored stray blur like those fuzzballs that collect under furniture. He has noticed these developments before in recent years but they still have the power to astonish him, along with the crow's feet and bitter cheek lines time has etched in his child's face, sharp in the sunlight. "We didn't take more than a minute in the candy store and came right down the escalator to the baggage place," Rabbit says, pleased to be remembering so exactly, exactly visualizing the two candy bars, the extra nickel he had to fish up for the black counter woman's upturned silver-polish-colored palm, the skin magazines with the girls' open mouths, the interleaved teeth of the escalator steps he was afraid Judy might catch her foot on. "We must have slipped by each other in the crowd," he adds, trying to be helpful and innocuous. His son frightens him.
Janice unlocks the Canny. The baking heat of its interior, released like a ghost, brushes past their faces. They put the suitcases in the way-back. Pru lifts the groggy boy off Nelson's shoulders and arranges him in the shadows of the back seat; Roy's thumb is stuck in his mouth and his dark eyes open for an unseeing second. Nelson, his hands at last freed, slaps the top of the Camry and cries in his agony of irritation, "God damn it, Dad, we've been frantic, because of you! We thought you might have lost her!" There is a look Nelson gets when he's angry or frightened that Harry has always thought of as "white around the gills" – a tension draining color from the child's face and pulling his eyes back into his head. He gets the look from his mother, and Janice got it from hers, dark plump old Bessie, who was a hot-tempered Koerner, she liked to tell them.
"We stuck right together," Rabbit says calmly. "And don't dent my fucking car. You've damaged enough cars in your life."
"Yeah, and you've damaged enough lives in yours. Now you're kidnapping my goddamn daughter!"
"I can't believe this," Harry begins. A cold arrow of pain suddenly heads down his left arm, through the armpit. He blinks. "My own granddaughter" is all he can organize himself to say.
Janice, looking at his face, asks, "What's the matter, Harry?"
"Nothing," he tells her sharply. "Just this crazy kid. Something's bugging him and I can't believe it's me." A curious gaseous weight, enveloping his head and chest, has descended in the wake of the sudden arrow. He slumps down behind the wheel, feeling faintly disoriented but determined to drive. When you're retired, you get into your routines and other people, even socalled loved ones, become a strain. This entire other family loads itself into place behind him. Pru swings her nice wide ass in her three-dimensional checked suit into the back seat next to sleeping Roy, and Nelson climbs in on the other side, right behind Harry, so he can feel the kid's breath on the back of his neck. He turns his head as far as he can and says to Nelson, in the corner of his eye, "I resent the word `kidnap."'
"Resent it, then. That's what it felt like. Suddenly we looked around and you weren't there."
Like Pan Am 103 on the radar screen. "We knew where we were, didn't we, Judy?" Harry calls backward. The girl has slithered over her parents and brother into the way-back with the luggage. Harry can see the silhouette of her head with its pigtail and angular ribbon in the rearview mirror.
"I didn't know where I was but I knew you did," she answers loyally, casting forward the thin thread of her voice.
Nelson tries to apologize. "I didn't mean to get so pissed," he says, "but if you knew what a hassle it is to have two children, the hassle of travelling all day, and then to have your own father steal one of them -"
"I didn't steal her, for Chnssake," Harry says. "I bought her a Sky Bar." He can feel his heart racing, a kind of gallop with an extra kick in one of the legs. He starts up the Camry and puts it in drive and then brakes when the car jerks forward and puts it into reverse, trying not to make contact, as he eases out, with the side of the Minnesota Bivouac, its protruding side mirror and its racing stripe in three tones of brown.
"Harry, would you like me to drive?" Janice asks.
"No," he says. "Why would I?"
She hesitates; without looking, he can see, in the hesitation, her little pointed tongue poke out of her mouth and touch her upper lip in that way she has when she tries to think, he knows her so well. He knows her so well that making conversation with her is like having a struggle with himself. "You just had a look on your face a minute ago," she says. "You looked -"
"White around the gills," he supplies.
"Something like that."
The old guy who thinks he's directing the show directs them down the arrows painted on the asphalt toward the tollbooth. The car ahead of theirs in line, a tan Honda Accord with New Jersey plates, GARDEN STATE, has backs of the head in it that look familiar: it's that jumpy little guy who hopped through the chairs back in the waiting room, good old Grace up beside him, and in the back seat the frizzy-headed daughter and another passenger, a head even taller and the frizz even tighter – the black guy in the Waspy business suit Harry had assumed had nothing to do with them. The old guy is gabbing and gesturing and the black guy is nodding just like Harry used to do with Fred Springer. It's bad enough even when your father-in-law is the same color. Harry is so interested he nearly coasts into the back of the Honda. "Honey, brake," Janice says, and out of the blur of her white tennis dress in the corner of his eye she holds out to him fifty cents for the parking-lot charge. An Oriental kid stone-deaf inside his Walkman earmuffs takes the two quarters with a hand jumping along with some beat only he can hear, and the striped bar goes up, and they are free, free to go home.