He shifted in the bed and winced from the effort. “Have you made any specific plans about what to do next?”
“Um, no,” Charity said. “We were waiting to see if you pulled through. I wanted to stay here for a while, but Mr. Whitney won’t let us.”
“Make specific plans,” her father said patiently, “and see if the visions tell you to alter them.” His voice grew softer, got slower. “At times you’ll have visions, other times you’ll have vague impressions. Those are the hardest to get right. Just keep trying. It won’t always make sense.”
He tried to sit up and instead grimaced and sunk back into the pillows.
Her mother went to his side. “He needs to rest now. Go back to the bunkhouse and start making plans. I’ll come in a few minutes to help you.”
“Wait,” her father said. To her mother, he said, “Do you have my notebook?”
She nodded.
“Give it to Charity. It’s hers now.”
The notebook. This somehow made it all feel final. The job of psychic had become Charity’s whether she wanted it or not.
Charity sat with her mother,Enzo, and Blue in the bunkhouse, her father’s notebook in front of her. On a loose piece of paper, she’d written, “Drive to New Salem,” and listed the roads they would take.
No visions had come. Her father had had so many visions he’d needed to calendar them to keep them straight. She was bereft of instruction. She had a bunch of blank pages and a growing sense of dread. “Would it be safer to leave right away or wait until morning? The roads are more dangerous at night.”
“Mr. Whitney might not let you wait,” her mother said.
“If we wait until morning,” Enzo added, “anyone who passes our car might recognize it.”
“So we go now,” Charity wrote the word “now” next to the others. “We take food, our weapons…” She jotted that on the list. “And a container full of gas so we don’t have to stop at a gas station. We’ll pull off to the side of the road any time we have to, you know, relieve ourselves.”
Blue fiddled with her hat. “Do you really need to add those sorts of details?”
“I don’t know,” Charity said. “My father said to be specific. Besides for those rest stops, we drive straight there.”
A vision came then. The three of them sat in the car pulled off the road behind a copse of trees. Bits of garbage lay strewn alongthe ground, including a large, faded plastic orange container. The last vestiges of daylight were slipping away. Enzo sat in the driver's seat and Charity perched beside him, holding his hand.
Blue scooted forward from the middle of the backseat. “We’ve been here for over an hour, and all that’s happened is the two of you have discussed your future and made kissy faces at each other. No sign of the police.”
As the words left her mouth, an armored police truck drove by. If they hadn’t been pulled over, the truck would’ve spotted them.
The vision ended, and the room came into focus again. Everyone stared at her, expectantly waiting.
She wrote what she remembered about the surroundings in the notebook. “At some point, we’ll have to pull over to the side of the road and wait for an hour so that we’re not seen by a police truck.”
“Where?” Enzo asked.
Charity shrugged. “I don’t know. An orange barrel lay on the side of the road. We’ll have to keep our eyes open for it about an hour before sunset.”
“That sounds doable,” Enzo said.
Charity’s mother reached over and hugged her. “See, you can do this. Now what about my plans? A week from now, your father and I will take the same route as you. We’ll leave at daybreak, take food and gas with us, and stop only when we need to.”
Her mother’s words faded. Charity saw her mother pull up to a checkpoint in the road. Her father, bundled in a coat and hat, sat in the passenger side. Her mother leaned out the window and counted out bills for the guard. “That’s three thousand. It’s all we have.”
The guard put the cash into his jacket pocket and waved them through.
The room returned. Her mother had stopped talking and was waiting for Charity to speak.
“You’ll need three thousand in cash to bribe a guard at a checkpoint.”
Her mother’s eyebrows furrowed. “We don’t have that much. Paying for the doctor took most of what we had.”