Claire Whitman bought the purple unicorn shirt off a clearance rack at the dollar store that morning, and she would spend the rest of her life unable to pass a clearance rack without a small chill of gratitude and superstition. It cost two dollars. It had a white unicorn rearing up over a rainbow in glitter that was already, by ten o'clock, migrating to everything it touched. Junie had seen it from the cart — seen it, her mother would later say, the way sailors see land — and had made the case for it with the total commitment she brought to all negotiations: immediate, absolute, and conducted at a volume that assumed the whole store was a jury.
"That one," Junie said. "That's my shirt. It was waiting for me."
Claire had a rule about clearance racks, born of a budget that ran her life like a strict governess: one thing, and it had to be needed. A shirt was needed — Junie was growing out of everything she owned at a pace that felt personally insulting — and two dollars was two dollars. She held it up. Junie put it on over her clothes right there in the aisle, struck a pose of unbearable triumph, and refused to take it off for the drive. So that was how it happened: a purple unicorn, purchased by chance and worn by decree, on the last ordinary morning of their lives.
Junie Whitman was five. She had her mother's fair hair pulled into two brown braids — the braids were Claire's daily compromise with a head of hair that woke up with plans of its own — and her father's grin, which she deployed like a tool. She wore denim shorts and pink sneakers with lights in the heels that flashed when she stomped, and she stomped diagnostically, often, to confirm they still worked. She was afraid of exactly two things: the vacuum cleaner, and nothing else that had yet been discovered. Dogs twice her size were friends she hadn't been introduced to. Strangers were an audience that had not yet heard her material.
"She came out of me with her eyes open and her fists up," Claire told people, "and she has not changed her position since."
There was also the matter of Junie's education in the supernatural, which she pursued with the unsystematic rigor of her age. She had an imaginary friend at preschool who was, by Junie's account, a retired pirate. She held funerals for bees. She had once spent a full grocery trip informing the produce section that the watermelons were sleeping and everyone needed to whisper. Claire had long since sorted her daughter's pronouncements into the great category of Junie-things — vivid, confident, and governed by an internal logic that did not require adult ratification. It had never once occurred to Claire that any of it might be reportage. Mothers of five-year-olds are not trained to consider that possibility. They are trained to find the sippy cup, and the other shoe, and three more minutes of patience, and Claire was good at all of those things and entirely unprepared for the rest of that day.
They were driving home from Claire's sister's place in Bowling Green, three hours down the interstate with the air conditioning giving up by degrees, and Junie in the back seat conducting a running census of the world: cows, a water tower, a hawk, a truck with at least a hundred wheels, Mommy, the hundred wheels being an estimate she defended with spirit. Claire drove with the tired, threaded attention of a single mother on hour three — present, careful, running on coffee and the radio — and when the fuel light came on she took the next exit with relief. The travel plaza was a good one, big and clean and blazing with glass. She'd get gas, and Junie could have an ice cream, and they'd stretch their legs for exactly ten minutes.
What Claire knew, pulling in under that high canopy, was the child's weight and the price of gas and the stickiness of the afternoon. What she did not know — what she would turn over in her mind for years, in the small hours, with mingled terror and awe — was that her daughter had not, strictly speaking, been only herself that day. That something gentle had been traveling with them since the dollar store. That a hand other than hers had, in some sense that defied every report she would later read, been holding Junie's all the way down the interstate, guiding a five-year-old with pink sneakers toward a fuel island, a question, and a man who had been waiting twelve years to be found.
Claire parked by the store, on the far side from Pump Seven, and unbuckled her daughter. Junie hit the concrete running — but not, at first, anywhere in particular. She stood a moment in the heat, glitter already on her chin, and looked across the whole bright plaza with an expression her mother, watching from the car, had never quite seen on her: not mischief. Recognition.
"Mommy," Junie said, with terrible calm, "I have to go over there now."