And the kids at school only laughed all the harder when they saw it.

But they ain’t laughin’ now, Semelee thought with grim satisfaction as she threaded the holes in the eye-shells through the slim leather thong she wore around her neck. At least some of them ain’t. Some of them’ll never laugh again.

She watched the ripples and eddies that remained behind on the surface in Dora’s wake. Something about their crisscrossing pattern reminded her of her dream last night, the one about someone coming from someplace far away. As she watched the water she had a flash of insight. Suddenly she knew.

“He’s here.”

10

Miami International had been a mob scene, far more hectic and crowded than LaGuardia. Jack wound his way through the horde of arrivees and departees toward the ground transportation area. There he caught a shuttle bus to Rent-a-Car Land. In order to help them out of second place, Jack decided to rent from Avis. He settled on an “intermediate” car and chose the most anonymous looking vehicle they had: a beige Buick Century.

The hospital had given him directions from the Florida Turnpike but Jack chose US 1 instead. He figured it would take longer. The red-vested guy at the Avis desk gave him a map and highlighted the way to Route 1.

He was on his way.

All around him South Florida lay flat as a tabletop under a merciless sun, bright in a cloud-dappled sky, blazing through a haze of humidity that hugged the land. Someone somewhere had called Florida an oversized sandbar hanging off the continent like a vestigial limb. Jack couldn’t see anything to contradict that.

He’d expected more lushness, but the fronds of the palms along the side of the road hung limp and dull atop their trunks, their tips a dirty gray-brown. The grass and brush around them looked burned out. No doubt the result of the drought Abe had mentioned.

He reached Route 1—also known as Dixie Highway according to the signs—and ran into some traffic at the southbound merge. People rubber-necking an accident on the northbound side slowed him for a while. He saw the strobing police and ambulance lights and felt a flash of resentment, wondering if people had rubbernecked his father’s accident like these yokels.

As soon as they passed the crash, the road speeded up again.

For a while the view along US 1 threatened to devolve into Anytown, USA—at least an Anytown warm enough for palm trees—with a parade of Denny’s and Wendy’s and McDonalds, and Blockbusters and Chevrons and Texacos. Further proof of the depressing homogenization of America, its terror of the untried, its angst of the unique.

But then he started noticing taquerias and tapas joints, and billboards in Spanish. The Cubano and Mexican influence. He passed a place offering “fishes.” Okay, this wasn’t Anytown. This had a flavor all its own.