The Higher Power of Lucky

Lucky and Miles watched Brigitte talk. She used one hand to hold the phone and the other to show the tapering ends of the pliers, even though Dot couldn’t see her doing it. “You are not too busy?” Brigitte said to Dot. “Okay, yes, right now.” She hung up.

“Lucky, I am going to wrap some clafouti to take to Dot. Can you look for the keys of the Jeep—I think on my desk. Miles, we drop you home on the way.” As Lucky went to Brigitte’s bedroom trailer, Miles began making screeching tire noises again.

The keys were not on the table. Lucky looked all around the room. “I can’t find them,” she called to Brigitte.

“Look in the drawer,” Brigitte called back.

Lucky opened the drawer. Scissors, a tape measure, stamps, pencils, rubber bands. No keys. She closed the drawer and noticed Brigitte’s little suitcase on a chair beside the table. It was closed, but the lid wasn’t zipped.

“Never mind, Lucky!” Brigitte shouted. “I find them in here!”

Lucky had a bad feeling about that suitcase, which had always been stored at the back of Brigitte’s closet.

“Lucky, are you coming to Dot’s?”

Lucky stared at the suitcase. “No,” she called, backing away from it. She went to the kitchen doorway. “I’ll stay here and…work more on my ant report.”

“You should anyway get ready for bed,” Brigitte said. “School tomorrow. I come back soon.”

Miles tire-screeched all the way to the Jeep.

Lucky went straight back to the suitcase. It was a bit bigger and deeper than a laptop carrier. Brigitte had come all the way from France with that one small case, thinking she was staying only a short time—until Lucky could be placed in a foster home. Probably she brought just a change of clothes. Now she had plenty of cotton surgical outfits from the thrift shop, which Lucky knew she liked because they were loose-fitting and cool, and because Brigitte said they made her feel Californian. Plus she had the Jeep and the three trailers and the computer that Lucky’s father had given her. Plus she had Lucky.

This was the first time Lucky had seen the suitcase in two years.

Lucky lifted the lid. There were no clothes in it. Only a stack of papers, and, on top, something very precious that was usually kept in a safe-deposit box at the bank in Sierra City.

Brigitte’s passport.

Lucky didn’t touch it or look at the other papers. Usually she would have examined them all very thoroughly. But the passport was enough. The only reason people need a passport is when they travel from one country to another country. Now she realized what was going on.

Lucky trudged back to the kitchen trailer. She suddenly understood that she’d been doing everything backward. She’d thought you looked for your Higher Power and when you found it you got special knowledge—special insight—about how the world works, and why people die, and how to keep bad things from happening.

But now she knew that wasn’t the right order of things. Over and over at the anonymous meetings she’d heard people tell how their situation had gotten worse and worse and worse until they’d hit rock bottom. Only after they’d hit rock bottom did they get control of their lives. And then they found their Higher Power.

Another part of finding your Higher Power was to do a fearless and searching moral inventory of yourself. But Lucky was too mad for a fearless and searching moral inventory. She was too hopeless. She’d do it later. Right now she had proof that Brigitte was going back to France.

That put Lucky at rock bottom.

The anonymous people struggled with the next step after rock bottom, the getting-control-of-your-

life step. Lucky pounded the Formica table with both fists, which made HMS Beagle leap to her feet and look at Lucky worriedly. It’s almost impossible to get control of your life when you’re only ten. It’s other people, adults, who have control of your life, because they can abandon you.

They can die, like Lucky’s mother.

They can decide they don’t even want you, like Lucky’s father.

And they can return to France as suddenly and easily as they left it, like Brigitte. And even if you carry a survival kit around with you at all times, it won’t guarantee you’ll survive. No kit in the world can protect you from all the possible bad things.

“But don’t give up hope,” Lucky said to HMS Beagle in a calming voice, because she didn’t want her dog to worry. HMS Beagle looked a little reassured and she sat, but she still watched Lucky to see what was going to happen.

“I have an idea,” Lucky told her slowly, thinking her thoughts from the bottom of her deep, rock-bottom pit. “I have an idea of something we can do to take control of our lives. It’s kind of scary. We can run away.” Lucky peered intently at HMS Beagle to see if she was willing.

HMS Beagle was.

13. Bisous

Because Brigitte and her mother were always sending each other bisous, which means kisses, when they talked on the phone, Lucky figured that French people kiss more than regular people.