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Transcript

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The passage by Justin Cronin before she became the girl from nowhere. The one who walked in the first and last and only who lived 1000 years. She was just a little girl in Iowa and named Amy Amy harper Belafonte, the day Amy was born. Her mother, Jeanette was 19 years old, Jeanette named her baby. Amy for her own mother, who died when Jeanette was little and gave her the middle name harper for harper lee. The lady had written to kill a mockingbird. Genet's favorite book. She would be told the only book she made it all the way through in high school. She might have named her scout after the little girl in the story because she wanted her little girl to grow up like that, tough and funny and wise in a way that she Jeanette had never managed to be. The scout was a name for a boy and she didn't want her daughter to have to go around her whole life explaining something like that. Amy's father was a man who came in one day to the restaurant where Jeanette had waited table since she turned 16 diner. Everyone called the box because it looked like one like a big chrome shoebox setting off the country road backed by fields of corn and beans. Nothing else around for miles and slipped a self serve carwash. The kind where you had to put coins into the machine and do all the work yourself. The man whose name was Bill Reynolds, sold combines and harvesters, big things like that and he was a sweet talker who told you that as she poured his coffee and then later again and again how pretty she was, how she liked her coal black hair and hazel eyes and slender wrists. Said it all in a way that sounded like he meant it. Not like the boys in the school had as if the words were just something that needed to get set along the way to let her do as they liked. He had a big car, a new Pontiac with a dashboard that glowed like a spaceship and leather seats, creamy as butter. She could have loved that man. She thought really and truly loved him. But he stayed in town only a few days and then went on his way when she told her father what had happened, he said he wanted to go looking for him, make him live up to his responsibilities. But what Jeanette knew and didn't say was that Bill Bennett's was a married man. He had a family in Lincoln all the way clean over in Nebraska. He even showed her the pictures in his wallet of his kids, two little boys in baseball uniforms, bobby and Billy. So no matter how many times her father asked who the man was that had done this to her, she didn't say, she didn't even tell him the man's name. And the truth was, she didn't mind any of it. Not really not that being pregnant, which was easy, right until the end, nor the delivery itself, which was bad but fast, nor especially having a baby. Her little amy to tell Jeanette, he decided to forgive her. Her father had done up her brother's old bedroom as a nursery, carried down an old baby crib from the attic. The one Jeanette herself had slept in years ago. He got with Jeanette in the last months before Amy came to the walmart to pick out some things she needs like pajamas in a little plastic tub and then wind up mobile to hang over the crib. He read a book that said that babies needed things like that. Thanks to look at the little brands would turn on and begin to work properly from the start Jeanette always thought of the baby as a her because in her heart she wanted a girl but she knew that wasn't the sort of thing you should say to anyone not even yourself. She had a scan over at the hospital and cedar falls and asked the woman Latina flowered smock was running the little plastic paddle over. Genet stomach if she could tell which it was. But the woman laughed, looking at the pictures of the tv and Jeanette's baby sleeping away inside her and said, hon this baby's shy sometimes you can tell sometimes you can't. And this is one of those times. So Jeanette didn't know what she decided was fine with her. And after she and her father had emptied out her brother's room and taking out his old pennants and posters, Jose Canseco, a music group called Killer picnic. The bud Girls and see how faded and banged up the walls were painted in the color at the label on the can called Dream Time, which somehow was both pink and blue at once. Good, Whatever the baby turned out to be, her father hung a wall paper border along the edge of the ceiling, a repeating pattern of ducks splashing in a puddle, cleaned up an old maple rock and cherry found at the auction hall. So that when Jeanette brought the baby home she took a place to sit and hold her. The baby came in the summer. The girl she'd wanted and named Amy harper Belafonte. There seemed no point in using the name Reynolds, the last name of Amanda nut, guessed she'd never see again. Now that Amy was here no longer wanted to, and Belafonte, you can do better than a name like that. It meant beautiful fountain. And that's what Amy was. Jeanette fed and rocked and changed her and when Amy cried in the middle of the night because she was wet or hungry or didn't like the dark Jeanette stumbled down the hall to her room, no matter what the hour was or how tired she was from working at the box to pick her up and tell her she was there, she would always be there. You cry and come running. That's the deal between us, you and me, forever and ever. My little amy harper, Bellafante, and she would hold and mock her until dawn began to peel the window shades, and she could hear birds singing in the branches of the trees outside.