The House That Wasn't There

by Elana K. Arnold

  This school was no different—the stucco painted a darker brown than most of the surrounding houses, but that was all. The kids seemed all right, for the most part . . . that weird creepo boy from next door was in her class, so that wasn’t great, but Mr. Rivera was pretty funny, and the girl at the desk next to her, Cynthia Chen, seemed like a good potential friend.

  It was a little weird to be confined to one desk for so much of the day. Back home in the Montessori school, kids had been free to move around as much as they wanted, taking their work to the classroom’s back table if they wanted to spread out, or to slump in a beanbag, or even to head outdoors and read under a tree if the day was nice. There had been a cat that visited the school from time to time, meandering through the schoolyard and occasionally napping on someone’s lap if they were sitting still. Oak had always sat as still as possible, even if her legs fell asleep.

  She had often thought how nice it would be if the cat had followed her home one day after school, but it never did. Sometimes it visited the school every day, and sometimes it disappeared for weeks at a time, but it always came back around eventually. Now, Oak realized with a start, she was the one who had disappeared. Even though she’d never known the cat’s name, and even though the cat hadn’t seemed particularly fond of Oak—no fonder than it was of any other warm lap—she felt terribly guilty that she’d left without saying goodbye.

  Oak’s mom had packed her a lunch, but she walked by the paid lunch line in the cafeteria to check it out and it didn’t look awful; there was pizza, even. Maybe she’d see if her mom would let her bring money tomorrow.

  But today, Oak took her bagged lunch from her backpack and stood awkwardly near the edge of the cafeteria. There were seats inside, but there was also a set of large, heavy doors to a patio outside, and these were pushed open. A bright rectangle of sunlight beckoned.

  It was bright out there, and Oak felt suddenly vulnerable, as if she had been thrust onto a stage without her lines, and she blinked against the blinding light.

  “Hey!” called a girl’s voice. “Oak! Come sit with us.”

  Oak’s eyes adjusted, and she looked around. There, at a nearby picnic bench, was Cynthia, a sandwich in hand, waving.

  There were three other girls at Cynthia’s table, and Cynthia introduced Oak to each of them as she threaded her legs over the bench and sat down.

  “Oak,” Cynthia said, touching the arm of the girl who sat between her and Oak, “this is Miriam. She’s in our class.”

  “Hi,” Oak said, feeling shy.

  “And that’s Cameron and Carmen,” Cynthia said, waving her sandwich at the girls who sat across the table. “They’re twins.”

  Oak almost said, “No way,” in a sarcastic voice, but she stopped herself just in time and instead said only, “It’s nice to meet you.”

  “Hello,” said the twin on the left.

  “Hello,” said the twin on the right.

  “I’m sorry,” Oak said, “but which of you is Cameron and which is Carmen?”

  “I’m Carmen,” said the twin on the left, and Oak noticed that the pizza slice on her plate was pepperoni, while the pizza slice on Cameron’s plate was plain cheese.

  Oak opened her bag and pulled out her sandwich—cheese and tomato—and an apple, and a little bag of chips.

  “So, where’d you move from?” Cameron asked.

  “San Francisco.”

  “Ooh,” said Miriam brightly, “I love Frisco! We went last summer. Are all those seals still on that wharf?”

  Oak closed her eyes for a long moment. No one who actually knew San Francisco would call it “Frisco.” But she decided to let it pass. “Probably,” she said, answering the question Miriam had asked about seals; in fact, they were sea lions, a whole mess of them that lived at Pier 39, a favorite attraction of tourists. “I mean, they usually are.” Actually, they always were.

  “They’re so cute,” Miriam said. “Do you know their names?”

  “Whose names?”

  “The seals’ names.”

  Was this girl serious? “They’re actually sea lions,” Oak said. “Not seals.”

  “O-oh,” said Miriam, nodding. “I always mix those up. Like alligators and crocodiles.”

  “What’s the difference between an alligator and a crocodile?” Carmen asked.

  Cameron answered, “One you’ll see later, the other you’ll see after a while.”

  It took Oak half a second to get the joke, and then it struck her as ridiculously funny. She laughed—a sharp, loud bray of a laugh. The sound made the other girls laugh, too, and they laughed wildly together. By the time they all calmed down, just a minute or so later, they were friends.

  “So,” Mom said, when she arrived at the end of the day to collect Oak from school, “how was it?”

  “It was good,” Oak said, shoving her backpack into the rear seat of the car and then following it inside. Buckling her seat belt, Oak caught her mother’s eye in the rearview mirror. Her mother looked a little too smug. “I mean,” Oak said, “it was all right. It could have been worse.”

  “Well,” Mom said, “that’s almost always true.”

  Oak didn’t know what to say to that. She rolled down her window and let the wind tangle her hair. The sun warmed her face. Whether or not she wanted to admit it, she did like how warm it was here. San Francisco was a damp place, foggy and cool. Here in Los Angeles, the air was not only warmer but also drier.

  “Tomorrow,” Mom said a few minutes later as they pulled onto Rollingwood Drive, “you can ride the bus to school. There’s a stop just here, at the corner.” She slowed down and waved her hand to indicate where the bus would pick Oak up.

  “Okay,” she said. There was no use arguing about it; just like the move, taking the bus seemed to have been decided without asking what she wanted. “Do you even miss home a little?” Oak asked, resentful.

  Mom pulled the car up to the curb in front of their new house. She couldn’t park in the driveway because that’s where the construction workers had set up their tools and scaffolding. Three of them clambered around in the framework they’d erected, tossing scraps of fluffy pink insulation material into the dumpster in the driveway. Only two of them, Oak noticed, were wearing hard hats. The third guy had on a baseball cap.

  Mom didn’t get out of the car right away. “I thought you knew,” she said, “I grew up not far from here. I didn’t move to the Bay Area until I was an adult.”

  This was news to Oak, and she sat very still, waiting to see if Mom would share anything else. Mom wasn’t a big fan of talking about her childhood; usually when Oak asked anything, her mom would say, “The past is in the past.”

  But instead of talking, Mom pulled the key from the ignition and climbed out of the car. “Hey,” she called up to the construction guys, “you! Put your hard hat back on.”

  “Yes, boss,” the guy answered with a grin, saluting Oak’s mom.

  Oak got out of the car too. She slung her backpack over her shoulder and headed into the house.

  Her mom had done a lot of unpacking while Oak had been at school; six or seven boxes, flattened and stacked, leaned against the wall just inside the front door. Most of them were labeled “Kitchen,” which hopefully meant that the next time Oak reached for her favorite mug—the green one with a frog’s face—it would be there.

  Grudgingly, Oak admitted to herself that the place was beginning to feel a little bit like home. The brown leather L-shaped couch made the area in front of the fireplace feel like an actual room, and before he’d left, Dad had installed their flat-screen TV above the fireplace. Right now, one of Mom’s playlists was on, the one she liked to listen to while doing chores. The lamps were unpacked—both of the clear glass table lamps, one tall and thin, the other squat and fat, with matching burlap shades, and the standing lamp too, a knobby mahogany base with a shade made out of woven sticks. The bookshelves were up too, and it looked like Mom had begun to sort the books that would go on them but had given up m
idway through the first box, which sat opened on the floor in front of the shelves.

  Oak didn’t have any homework since it was just the first day of school, so she let her backpack fall to the rug near the front door and headed over to the bookshelf boxes.

  Mom, Oak observed, had opened the box labeled “Fiction,” which, Oak thought, was as good a place as any to begin.

  Most of the books in this box Oak had never read; they were grown-up books about marriage and jobs and mysteries that held no interest for her, that felt, the few times she’d thumbed through one of them, to be so far off as to be more fictional than the most magical of fairy tales. There was one book, shorter than the others, and without a dust jacket. Its cover was black and its title, Feline Teleportation, was gold embossed down the spine.

  Though Oak had never read this book, she had a fondness for it; her father had brought it home from a business trip he’d taken to Seattle several years ago and had given it to her mother.

  “It was the strangest shop,” Oak’s dad had told her mom. “Full of weird things. I mean, this book was one of the most normal things there.”

  Suddenly, Oak had an idea. What if, instead of organizing the books by category—fiction, nonfiction, kids’ books—she were to organize them instead by color? She could arrange them in a rainbow, with red books on the highest shelf, and working her way down, shelf by shelf and left to right, until the purple-spined books ended the rainbow on the bottom right corner of the shelf.

  It was a great plan. “Mom,” she called into the kitchen, where she could hear her banging around, “are these all the book boxes?”

  “There might be a couple more in the corner of the dining room,” Mom called back. “I didn’t realize how many books we had! We might need to donate some.”

  There they were. Three boxes, one labeled “Cookbooks” and the other two labeled “Books, Misc.,” stacked in a corner. Oak dragged the boxes one by one, too heavy to lift, into the front room and set to work.

  Chapter 5

  Sometimes, when Alder was the saddest, he would wait until his mom was distracted, and then he would move a kitchen chair across the room and up against the bookshelf, and he would very carefully lift Mort down. Walking quickly but quietly, Alder would take the stuffed opossum to his room, shut his door for privacy, and hold him.

  This was exactly what Alder did when he got home from the first day of sixth grade, following the second bus ride of the day in which he didn’t sit next to Marcus —not because he was sitting next to someone else but because Marcus wasn’t on the bus at all, but rather off on a run with the cross-country club. His mother had left a note saying that she was at an exercise class and would be home soon, so when Alder found himself alone, he went to the kitchen for a chair and climbed up to retrieve the opossum.

  Holding Mort, Alder sat on his bed, on the quilt that was still rumpled from last night’s sleep. Out the front window, he could see the sad, nearly flat stump, all that was left of the walnut tree. Alder didn’t like to look at the stump. Gently, he placed one hand on the opossum’s back. The fur felt comfortably soft, softer than it looked.

  Mort’s feet were affixed to a smoothly polished, asymmetrical piece of driftwood. He stood as if at alert, his belly raised up from the wood, his four legs spread heroically apart. His mouth tilted upward in a mysterious smile, not unlike the smile of the Mona Lisa, which Alder had seen pictures of in his history textbook at school.

  Unlike the Mona Lisa, Mort’s teeth were exposed by his smile—not all of them, but a few sharp top teeth. A tiny tip of his pink tongue stuck out just a bit, but Alder didn’t think the tongue was real. Maybe it was made of plastic, or rubber.

  Mort’s coat was mottled brown and black and cream. His front legs were covered in short dark fur, and the back legs were hairier, the same mixture of long, multicolored fur as his body. Mort’s face, around his pink nose and black whiskers, was white, except for a darker patch between his eyes that extended up between his black rounded ears and over the back of his head, joining with the mottled fur of the rest of his coat. His toes were pink and hairless. His tail, curved perpetually in a C shape that veered to the left, was dark at the base and then yellowish-white to the tip, not unlike the tail of a rat, only bigger.

  Except for the fact that he was perpetually attached to a piece of wood and the fact that he was perfectly still—not really dead, since he couldn’t rot and didn’t smell, but definitely not alive, either, in spite of the fact that he stood on his feet and his eyes were open—Mort looked exactly as Alder expected any opossum would look.

  And Alder knew it was a little weird that he liked to hold the opossum, which was why he did it so infrequently, and why he closed his bedroom door. Still, he did like it. It made him feel . . . a little more solid, somehow, the way Mort was made more solid by his base of driftwood.

  He sat in his bedroom with Mort on his lap for a good long while. He waited until he heard Mom get home and run a bath, which she did sometimes after an exercise class. Soon after that he stood up and headed to the living room to return Mort to his rightful place well before he figured Mom would be done washing up.

  But maybe he misjudged the time and spent too long in his room, or maybe Mom had just taken an unusually short bath, because when Alder and Mort emerged from his bedroom, it was to find Mom sitting on the pink couch, waiting.

  The kitchen chair was right where Alder had left it, up against the bookshelf. Alder climbed atop it, carefully put Mort back where he belonged, and then climbed down again.

  “Hey, buddy,” Mom said, and she patted the spot beside her.

  It was weird, Alder thought, that he could both want to do something and not want to do something at exactly the same time, the way he both wanted to and didn’t want to sit next to his mom. There must be a word for that, he thought. Maybe he would ask Mr. Rivera.

  He did go over to the couch and sit next to his mom, but not quite as close as where she had patted. Even so, she wrapped one arm around him and pulled him toward her, and after a moment’s resistance, Alder rested his cheek on the fabric of his mom’s white T-shirt, on her shoulder. Her hair, still damp, tickled the back of his neck.

  They sat there together for a few minutes, not talking. The big front window was orange and bright with the setting sun; without the foliage of the walnut tree to filter the sun’s rays, it looked almost like the whole thing was trying to get inside, to be with Alder and his mom. It was so brightly beautiful that Alder had to close his eyes against it, but even then he could see the brightness through the closed lids of his eyes, he could feel its warmth on his face, magnified through the window glass.

  But eventually, the sun slipped away. Alder could tell when the light behind his eyes grew dimmer, when the warmth on his skin faded, and then he opened his eyes.

  Mom squeezed him once more and kissed his head. “I love you, kiddo,” she said.

  “I love you, too,” Alder mumbled, pulling away.

  Mom stood up, ran her hands down the front of her jeans. “Come on,” she said. “I’ve got an idea.”

  Dinner was chili, already simmering in the slow cooker, but Mom said it could wait. She grabbed her purse and her keys from the counter and headed for the car. Alder followed.

  “Where are we going?” he asked, slamming into the back seat.

  “I’ve been thinking about it for a while,” Mom said, “and tonight seems like just the right night to do it.”

  “Do what?” Alder felt his heart thumping with excitement. Every now and then, his mom surprised him with some wild thing, like a weekend trip to the San Diego Zoo last spring, or that time a year ago when she’d driven him and Marcus to an orchard for apple picking one day after school, followed by big mugs of steaming cider.

  “You’ll see,” Mom said, and she caught his eyes in the rearview mirror and grinned. “Don’t worry,” she said. “It’s a good surprise.”

  Alder wasn’t worried. Mom’s surprises were always good. And thinki
ng about what the good surprise could be filled him with bubbles, bubbles that rose and burst and popped, taking up all the room that had been filled with sadness, before, and embarrassment about being caught with Mort.

  It was just dark enough for their headlights to glow in front of them, and their light swept the road in front of the car as Mom drove up Rollingwood Drive to the corner and took a right. Then, at the main intersection, she headed left.

  What was in this direction? Alder tried to remember. There was the grocery store; maybe they were going for ice cream. But that didn’t seem to be nearly a big enough surprise for the way his mom was acting.

  There was the roller rink. That could be it, Alder supposed. Maybe they were going roller skating. If that was the surprise, Alder would be disappointed, though he promised himself that he wouldn’t let Mom know it was a disappointment, since she was such a fan of roller skating.

  But, to his relief, they drove right past the roller rink.

  Then Mom put on the left blinker and waited for traffic to clear so that she could pull into a shopping center. Alder craned his neck to see what shops were in the center: there was a coffee shop, and a dry cleaner’s, and a yoga studio . . .

  And a pet store.

  Mom pulled her car up in front of the store and parked it. She turned around and grinned. “What do you think?” she said. “Want to meet some kittens?”

  The big glass door of the pet shop had a sign affixed to it:

  CAT ADOPTION FAIR ALL WEEK!

  “I saw the sign earlier, when I was picking up the dry cleaning,” Mom said, as the glass doors slid open to reveal a brightly lit store stocked with aisles of pet care products, a section to the left for dog stuff, a section to the right for cat supplies. “And I didn’t think too much of it at the time, but . . .” Mom cleared her throat before continuing, “Well, you’re a sixth grader now. You’re old enough for some responsibility, don’t you think?”