down at the magnificent Patagonian dinosaurs. “But that’s Birmingham for you. One step forward, two steps back.”
A moment of silence, then, and Chance shuts her eyes and imagines the flutter of leathery pterosaur wings, the deafening bellow of the Argentinosaurus as the Giganotosaurus hisses and lunges at the sauropod’s unprotected flanks.
“Would y’all like to see the hall where your fossils will be displayed? It’s right downstairs.”
“Yes, we would,” Alice says, and Chance opens her eyes, reluctantly letting go of the daydream, and the brilliant noise and violence of a Cretaceous day dissolves instantly back into fiberglass bones and the black iron support rods that hold them up.
“The diorama’s almost finished. The exhibits department at the Field Museum in Chicago helped us design it, you know. We’ll be keeping it on permanently.”
Chance takes a last look at the giants, silently wishes the sauropod luck, and then the collections manager leads them along the balcony to a waiting elevator.
“Some lives are more unlikely than others,” Chance once wrote in her diary, seventeen years old and already it had seemed to her that she’d enjoyed more odd luck and misfortune than most people twice her age, more than some people might experience in their entire lives. Small unlikelihoods and bigger ones, the trivial and profound weaving accidental trails about her. The death of her parents and her unlikely survival, to start with, both of them killed and her left with nothing worse than a broken arm. “A miracle,” one of the doctors said, though Chance had always suspected he’d actually meant something a little more prosaic. Not a miracle, just damned unlikely.
And the fact that Chance ever met Deacon Silvey at all, much less fell in love with him, as unlikely as anything else in her unlikely life. Inhabitants of the same small city, but existing in two entirely different worlds. Deacon lost in his ruin of bars and dead-end jobs, firmly stuck on the fast track to nowhere, and Chance rarely looking up from her textbooks, the Golden Key honor student, Phi Kappa Phi, Sigma Xi, and her first scientific paper published when she was still an undergraduate. The good girl, too-smart girl all set to write her own ticket out into the real world hiding somewhere beyond the rust and slag-heap confines of Birmingham.
But she met him anyway, the summer night that she and Elise Alden got drunk on Jack Daniel’s and walked from Chance’s house to the homely little park at the end of Nineteenth Street, a few months before Elise moved away to Atlanta. Not really much of a park at all, though it had a few dogwood trees, a weathered, graffiti-scarred gazebo with a picnic table, and the gated entrance to the city’s old water works tunnel. A place that Chance had always avoided because it had a reputation as a hangout for junkies, a reputation that had earned it the nickname Needle Park.
Following the “nature trail” down from Sixteenth Avenue into the park, limestone gravel scattered between railroad ties, a crude footpath for curious urban hikers who’d never seen kudzu and poison ivy and blackberry briers up close. Halfway down and Chance and Elise heard voices, angry voices, someone shouting, and “Come on,” Chance said, leaning against a tree so she wouldn’t fall down. “Let’s go back home.”
“Wait a minute. I want to see what’s happening,” and Elise took another step along the trail, then stopped and peered through darkness and a thicket of briers at the dimly lit park below.
“What’s happening is none of our goddamn business,” Chance said, wishing she wasn’t starting to feel nauseous, that the world would stop spinning just long enough for her to drag Elise’s dumb ass back home where it was safe and she could at least be sick in a toilet instead of in the bushes.
“Oh, Christ. It’s a couple of big guys beating up a hippie.”
“Too bad,” Chance said. She took a
A moment of silence, then, and Chance shuts her eyes and imagines the flutter of leathery pterosaur wings, the deafening bellow of the Argentinosaurus as the Giganotosaurus hisses and lunges at the sauropod’s unprotected flanks.
“Would y’all like to see the hall where your fossils will be displayed? It’s right downstairs.”
“Yes, we would,” Alice says, and Chance opens her eyes, reluctantly letting go of the daydream, and the brilliant noise and violence of a Cretaceous day dissolves instantly back into fiberglass bones and the black iron support rods that hold them up.
“The diorama’s almost finished. The exhibits department at the Field Museum in Chicago helped us design it, you know. We’ll be keeping it on permanently.”
Chance takes a last look at the giants, silently wishes the sauropod luck, and then the collections manager leads them along the balcony to a waiting elevator.
“Some lives are more unlikely than others,” Chance once wrote in her diary, seventeen years old and already it had seemed to her that she’d enjoyed more odd luck and misfortune than most people twice her age, more than some people might experience in their entire lives. Small unlikelihoods and bigger ones, the trivial and profound weaving accidental trails about her. The death of her parents and her unlikely survival, to start with, both of them killed and her left with nothing worse than a broken arm. “A miracle,” one of the doctors said, though Chance had always suspected he’d actually meant something a little more prosaic. Not a miracle, just damned unlikely.
And the fact that Chance ever met Deacon Silvey at all, much less fell in love with him, as unlikely as anything else in her unlikely life. Inhabitants of the same small city, but existing in two entirely different worlds. Deacon lost in his ruin of bars and dead-end jobs, firmly stuck on the fast track to nowhere, and Chance rarely looking up from her textbooks, the Golden Key honor student, Phi Kappa Phi, Sigma Xi, and her first scientific paper published when she was still an undergraduate. The good girl, too-smart girl all set to write her own ticket out into the real world hiding somewhere beyond the rust and slag-heap confines of Birmingham.
But she met him anyway, the summer night that she and Elise Alden got drunk on Jack Daniel’s and walked from Chance’s house to the homely little park at the end of Nineteenth Street, a few months before Elise moved away to Atlanta. Not really much of a park at all, though it had a few dogwood trees, a weathered, graffiti-scarred gazebo with a picnic table, and the gated entrance to the city’s old water works tunnel. A place that Chance had always avoided because it had a reputation as a hangout for junkies, a reputation that had earned it the nickname Needle Park.
Following the “nature trail” down from Sixteenth Avenue into the park, limestone gravel scattered between railroad ties, a crude footpath for curious urban hikers who’d never seen kudzu and poison ivy and blackberry briers up close. Halfway down and Chance and Elise heard voices, angry voices, someone shouting, and “Come on,” Chance said, leaning against a tree so she wouldn’t fall down. “Let’s go back home.”
“Wait a minute. I want to see what’s happening,” and Elise took another step along the trail, then stopped and peered through darkness and a thicket of briers at the dimly lit park below.
“What’s happening is none of our goddamn business,” Chance said, wishing she wasn’t starting to feel nauseous, that the world would stop spinning just long enough for her to drag Elise’s dumb ass back home where it was safe and she could at least be sick in a toilet instead of in the bushes.
“Oh, Christ. It’s a couple of big guys beating up a hippie.”
“Too bad,” Chance said. She took a
Similar Books
