Mr. Darcy’s eyes widened. “That’s one of my favorite books! Have you gotten to the part where . . . ha! Don’t worry, I won’t spoil it.”
“I’m at the part where they’re in India, and there’s going to be a suttee,” George said. “Do you remember that part?”
“Of course! One of my favorites. I wish I had a friend like Passepartout. He seems like a pretty useful guy to have around.”
George nodded. “My friend Lizzy would probably say that he’s a bit too perfect, at least when you’re looking at what he can do. I guess that’s why the author gave him some flaws, too, like making him hot-headed and impulsive.”
“Lizzy, huh. Girlfriend?” Mr. Darcy asked.
“Ha!” George said. “I’m only twelve.”
Mr. Darcy smiled. “I had a girlfriend when I was twelve.”
George shrugged. “Well, I don’t. She’s just a regular friend. She gave me this book.” He paused, not sure if he wanted to put words to his pain. Something made him continue. “She just moved away.”
“Ah, I’m sorry, George. That must have been tough. Especially on top of . . .” He trailed off, but George knew what he meant.
“On top of being here. Yeah, I guess, although this is a pretty good place.”
Mr. Darcy grinned broadly. “Is it? I’m glad to hear that!”
Mr. Darcy, it turned out, knew a lot of books, too. He’d read the Harry Potter books and the entire Narnia series, plus other books by Jules Verne, the author of Around the World in 80 Days. And lots more besides.
Mr. Darcy wasn’t Lizzy. He was a different kind of friend. Knowing him, and missing Lizzy, helped George to realize just what Lizzy had been to him. It hadn’t just been Lizzy’s opening his eyes to books that had made those afternoons at the park so magical. He had been resentful at the start when she wanted to take time away from reading to him to run and play, and he’d thought it silly that she always wanted to act out stories from books.
Now when he remembered his time with her, he thought of her bright sense of humor and fun, her teasing him with her terrible accents and her dramatic voices, and even those ridiculous games she made him play. All of the things he had once thought silly were the very things that had made his days delightful. Their friendship had been far more than just the books they’d read.
So maybe Mr. Darcy wasn’t Lizzy. That was okay. He was a good guy all the same. His opinions about books were grown-up, which meant sometimes he didn’t find the same things funny or that he thought books like I Want to Go Home! were silly. George didn’t really mind. He just liked talking about books.
Mrs. Darcy turned out to be the blond woman who usually served behind the counter at lunchtime, and she was very sweet, too. She wasn’t much into books, at least not as much as the Georges, but she’d stop by and tousle George’s hair on her way to the kitchen sometimes. When she wasn’t behind the counter, she loved to talk to people. She would flit from table to table like a butterfly, chatting and laughing as she went.
Mr. Darcy wasn’t very comfortable with people, George found, rather like himself. He liked to come early and help set up, or make the food in the back room. George was one of the few people Mr. Darcy really talked to. It made him proud to think that he was special in some way.
George winced as his mother threw a spoon at the redhead she’d targeted. He had no idea what had set her off, but his mother had returned home this evening completely drunk and looking for a battle.
“You wanna say that to my face?” she screamed at the woman, standing up so quickly that her chair flipped over backwards.
“Mom,” George said, tugging at her arm. “Sit down. Please, just let it go.” She wouldn’t, he knew, but he had to try. He had to do something.
She turned on him. “Did you hear what she called me? She’s asking for a fight, and she’s gonna get one.” She stood up and stalked towards the other woman, who had taken hold of a table knife.
No good could come of this. “Mom!” he yelled. “Mom!” He grabbed her arm again and this time yanked with all his might. To his surprise, he was able to stop her. “Come on,” he said. “We need to go.” He’d noticed one of the servers dive for the kitchen when Mom first started yelling and knew she was probably calling 911. He had to get Mom out of there first.
“Come on,” he said again, pulling with all of his force. He’d spent a lot of time being physically active, swinging and climbing with Lizzy, and of course he played soccer every recess. It shouldn’t have surprised him that he was stronger than his mother, who was weakened by drugs and years of ill-using her body. It felt strange nonetheless.
He kept moving towards the door. Mom switched to singing loudly. “And I’m here, to REMIND you, / Of the mess you left when you went AWAY.”
One of the volunteers was hurrying towards them. He had to get Mom out of here before the cops got here and there was trouble.
“I got it,” he said to the volunteer. He kept pulling his mother backwards. She came more easily now, seeming to have forgotten her rage at the woman, although she was still yelling the Alanis Morissette song at the top of her lungs.
“. . . that you gave to me, YOU, YOU, YOU OUGHTA KNOW!” Her last words were hurled at the closed door to the shelter, as George had finally gotten her outside.
They stood for a minute on the sidewalk, looking up at the shelter. It was light and looked bright and warm and pleasant. George felt a pang of regret for his beloved book, left on his bunk in the room he’d shared with his mother. If the shelter needed the room, they’d toss his stuff into bags and he could get it later. They were good about protecting the belongings of people who stayed there. After all, when everything people had was in one bag, those last things became pretty important to them.
George looked down at his arms and realized he was shaking. It wasn’t a cold night, so he felt a bit silly shivering, but he was reeling from his mother’s rage. He was also terrified at the thought of sleeping on the streets.
They’d stayed at an all-night diner once when he was seven or eight. He’d slept sitting in a booth with his head on the table. He didn’t know if his mother had slept at all.
Once when he was nine, they’d slept in an alleyway behind a dumpster. Or, rather, he’d been behind the dumpster. There’d been no room for his mother behind it. He didn’t know where his mother had spent the night, as she’d left him there and come back for him in the morning. It had smelled terrible, and he’d heard noises and voices all night long and didn’t sleep a wink. He’d failed an English test the next day and thought life couldn’t possibly get any worse. He hoped he wasn’t about to be proved wrong.
“Hurry up,” his mother chided him. She stood in front of the door to an apartment in an unfamiliar part of town.
George jogged up the stairs and stood next to her, wondering who lived here. He didn’t dare ask. His mother was still fuming.
A woman with sharp dark eyes opened the door, looking from George to his mom. “What do you want?”
“He needs a place to stay for a couple of days,” his mother said. “Mark kicked me out, and the shelter got too hot.”
The woman rolled her eyes but opened the door. “Fine. He can have the couch if he cleans it off.”
George nodded.
His mother pushed him into the apartment. “I’ll be back in a few days,” she said, handing him a $5 bill as she closed the door. He palmed it quickly before the stranger could see it.
George turned uneasily to face the owner of the apartment. She closed her eyes for a moment and sighed.
“I’m Desirée,” she said. “Don’t make a mess. Don’t break anything. Don’t drink my stash.” She paused. “I’m going out. Don’t wait up.”
Lizzy would have joked that that was a lot of “don’ts,” but George barely had the chance to nod before Desirée had gone out the door like his mother.
He went first to the kitchen to see what food there was. He wasn’t entirely surprised to find nothing. The cabinets we
re full of bottles: some alcohol, some medical. The fridge was the same. There were two containers of leftover takeout, though. He opened both, but they were moldy. George tossed them in the trash and noticed another similar container already in it.
He sighed. Apparently Desirée was fond of takeout and didn’t keep food in the house. He was too hungry to try to sleep on an unfamiliar couch. He’d have to go out and find something.
George tested the door a few times to make sure it wouldn’t lock behind him. He was pretty sure it wouldn’t, but just in case, he slid a folded-up receipt he’d found on the table between the lock and the doorframe before heading downstairs.
There was a convenience store a couple of blocks away, and fortunately they had ramen. He could buy an awful lot of ramen for $5, but he decided to just buy two packs for now and save the rest of the money for later. He stuffed it inside his best shoe, the one with most of the toe intact, just in case.
George slipped out the piece of paper and entered Desirée’s apartment. She wasn’t back yet, so he headed to the kitchen to make his ramen. He dug through cabinets for a pot and was just beginning to panic when he finally found a stainless steel bowl that he thought would work. When he put it on the stove and tried to turn on the stove, nothing happened.
Worry building in his stomach, he tried again. There was no smell of gas and no hiss. He closed his eyes in frustration. Desirée had clearly had her gas turned off, probably due to non-payment. That had happened a lot to his mom, so he was used to checking if the stove worked before trying to heat anything up, but he’d forgotten.
George sniffed and wiped his nose with his hand. He was not going to cry. He could just . . . make his ramen in the microwave. Except there wasn’t one. He looked around the kitchen frantically. How could there not be a microwave?
He saw it then. The microwave was on the floor, half-buried in a pile of trash along the back wall. He dug it out, set it up on the counter, and plugged it in. He poured the water for his ramen into a bowl and put it in the microwave.
When he pushed the buttons, nothing happened. This time his eyes filled with tears, but he looked up at the ceiling and blinked them away. There was no point in crying like a baby. Eating ramen raw wasn’t so very bad, really. It was food. It was enough to fill his belly so he could sleep. He’d use the rest of the $5 tomorrow to buy food that he could eat without heating up.
George was truly anxious by the time his mom returned a few days later, collected him without a word, and took him back to the shelter. The shelter people let them back in without calling the police. That was good. He liked the shelter a lot better than the alternative.
After that, George worried, and he couldn’t stop worrying. What if the next time they got kicked out for good? Could the shelter people do that? They’d probably call CPS and have him taken away from her, because they wouldn’t want to make a kid sleep on the streets. What would happen if he was taken away from her again? There weren’t many foster homes for twelve-year-old boys. He’d probably go into another group home, or maybe the same one as before. He couldn’t stand it.
June 2002
Finally, the day came that a part of George had been dreading all along. He came home from school to find one of the shelter’s social workers, Mrs. Colt, waiting near the entrance.
“George,” she said, and he knew something was very wrong.
She took him back into one of the back rooms, and that was where he learned that his mother was dead of an overdose.
He felt numb. He loved her. She was gone. The only thing that came to mind was . . .
“Am I going into foster care?”
She nodded, looking sympathetic.
George turned in his chair to face the wall so she wouldn’t see his face. His mother was gone. Gone gone gone. He would never see her again, no more fetching Gatorades or . . . well, maybe he didn’t see much of her anyway, but she was still his mom and he knew she loved him in her way. Had. Had been his mom, had loved him. Now she was dead.
He closed his eyes.
“George,” she said. “There’s a couple who want to take you in. They’re certified for foster care, and they’re ready to take you home.”
George shook his head in disbelief. “A couple? I’m not going to a group home?”
Mrs. Colt smiled and nodded. “Yes, George and Anne Darcy. They actually own this shelter, you know. It’s Anne’s special project. Apparently they had been applying to do foster care, and they were just approved. Mr. Darcy says he got to know you, and when he heard about your mother this morning . . .”
This morning. His mother had died this morning.
Had it been this morning? He suddenly realized that his mother had still been sleeping when he left for school. She usually was, so he hadn’t given it any thought. Had she already been dead? Had he been sleeping in the room with his dead mother all night?
“What?” he asked, when he realized the social worker was staring at him.
“I asked if you needed help packing your bag.”
“I, uh . . .” He would have to go back in the room to get his bag. Was his mother still there?
Mrs. Cole stood up. “I’ll just come with you, shall I?”
He led the way back to his room. He gathered his things in a black trash bag and his backpack, just as he had the day he and Mom had left Mark’s. Only this time it was just him.
Suddenly what the social worker had said came back to mind. The Darcys. George and Anne Darcy. Mr. Darcy wanted to be his foster dad? He was going to go home with them, to live with them?
It was disloyal to his mother, surely, for him to feel such a sense of wonder and excitement. He would have a foster dad! One who had chosen him, who already knew him! They could . . . play catch, and whatever else boys did with their dads! Did anybody still go fishing? Was that even a thing?
He chuckled to himself, then glanced at Mrs. Cole to see if she had noticed. She hadn’t. It had occurred to him that he knew just what he would be doing with his foster dad: talking about books.
And that made him think unexpectedly of Lizzy. His best friend Lizzy, gone now. Would he ever see her again?
He shook off his melancholy as he put the last of his clothes in the garbage bag and nodded to Mrs. Cole. He was sad, truly sad, for his mother. But he was also eagerly anticipating life with the Darcys.
June 2002
George was astounded when they turned off the quiet road onto a driveway and passed through the gate. There was no house! Just trees and a few fields.
He looked, puzzled, at Mrs. Darcy. She smiled and nodded ahead.
He turned and looked back out the window. The driveway made some slight twists and turns, with woods on one side and then the other, then a long stretch with beautiful trees lining both sides. When they came out from between the trees, he could see a house on the left.
The house was a large, beautiful gray stone house with a dark brown roof. There were windows, so very many windows, and it was so tall it had to have more than two floors. But what shocked George the most, beyond its size, was the setting. It stood on a lawn with grass so green and perfect that he wondered if it was real. The driveway made a circle in front of the house, just like in old movies.
He supposed it still counted as a house. But he had never seen a house so large. A mansion? An estate? What did people even call it?
“This is home, George,” Mrs. Darcy said as they approached the building. “We call it Pemberley.”
“It . . . it has a name?” he asked, shocked. Was that something rich people did? Name their houses?
“Yes,” Mr. Darcy said. “It’s named after our family’s estate back in England. That belongs to the National Trust now, has for several generations, but my grandfather named our estate here after it.”
“Your grandfather,” George repeated. Mr. Darcy was a grown-up, and his grandfather had lived in this same house, then. That was really, really old. George didn’t even have a grandfather, or had never met one if he h
ad one. He’d had Grandma, but she was long gone. That was it.
“Come,” Mr. Darcy said, parking the car on the circular driveway just in front of the house. “I can’t wait to show you everything!”
The house was absolutely amazing. And despite how quickly he’d been handed off to them, the Darcys seemed to have been expecting him. There was a giant playset with swings and a rock wall outside. He couldn’t help thinking that Lizzy would have loved to play on that playset with him and wondered if she’d ever tried a rock wall.
Mr. Darcy showed him his bedroom. There were dozens of books and several bookshelves with room for dozens more. The room itself was done up in blues and reds and looked like a boy’s room, but without stupid cartoon rocket ships or monkeys or anything that would have made it seem babyish. Not that he would have minded, not really. But he appreciated that it looked like a room for a twelve-year-old.
He especially appreciated the books. They were new, with unbroken spines and tight pages. He took a few of them off the bookshelf to stroke. He’d never been the very first person to own or read a book before. Even his present from Lizzy had been hers first. Now to have shelves of them! He sighed happily.
The dressers and closet had clothes! Some of them were his own clothes, clothes he’d brought there in black trash bags. Somebody must have unpacked him while Mr. Darcy was showing him around. Mrs. Darcy, perhaps? But there were others, many others, that were unfamiliar.
George picked up a shirt and looked at the collar tag. It was size 10/12, just the right size. The pants he checked were, as well. So somebody had found out his size and gone clothes shopping for him. It felt weird, but it was pretty cool, too. Here he had new clothes. Decent clothes, too. A little preppy, but hey, he was living with rich people now; they probably liked that style. And he hadn’t even had to try clothes on or anything.
He sat on the bed and sighed. How in the world had his life managed to turn around so completely?
Every time things seemed at their worst, it seemed that something happened to save him. First, he’d been hungry and miserable and lonely, and then he’d met Lizzy and discovered books.
A Good Name: A Modern Pride and Prejudice Variation Page 5
