Children of Exile

by Margaret Peterson Haddix

  I was a little afraid that pressing a paintbrush against those walls would knock them down.

  The woman’s key rattled in the lock. A voice from inside yelled, “What took you so long?”

  I half expected the woman to say, It’s Rosi’s fault. She was a coward and hid Bobo from me.

  But the woman winced. Her hand shook, and she had to stop for a minute from trying to turn the lock. I saw her swallow hard, and then she called back, “They’re here. They’re really here. Our children.”

  And then the lock clicked and the door swung open. The woman pushed Bobo toward a shadowy corner.

  “Your son,” the woman said.

  After the sunshine outside, it took my eyes a moment to adjust to the dim light inside the house. A gray-haired man sat in a dark corner, his face hidden in the shadows. Bobo bumped into the man’s knees, and the man wrapped his left arm around Bobo’s shoulders and pulled him close.

  “Well, don’t expect me to give you any better of a hug than that,” the man said gruffly. “I’ve only got one arm.”

  “I’ve got two,” Bobo said, which was so Bobo. He sounded as casual as if they were just comparing the length or curliness of their hair. Something that didn’t matter.

  The man turned toward the light, hugging Bobo, and I saw that the shirtsleeve at the other side of the man’s body hung empty.

  I waited.

  Back in Fredtown there’d been a girl, Leila, who was born with a misshapen foot. She’d had surgeries to fix it, and now she was one of the fastest runners of all the seven-year-olds. But all along the way, as she progressed through casts and crutches, braces and special boots, there were always meetings where all the children of Fredtown found out exactly what was happening to her, how the bones were being reset, how we could help her while she healed. I remember some of the other little girls being jealous of all the attention Leila got, and then there were meetings about that, too.

  But we always heard the story behind her injuries, her recovery. We always knew the explanation. From the time she could talk, Leila herself could rattle off the exact words she’d been told: When I was born, my foot was like a flower that hadn’t bloomed yet. The bones were curled together. I just had to have the doctors help the bones straighten out. That’s all.

  I thought this man—our father—would tell Bobo and me the story behind his missing arm. He was the adult; we were the kids. I thought he would want to head off any rude questions Bobo might ask.

  But for a long time he did nothing but hold Bobo in that one-armed hug. When Bobo started to squirm, the man let go and started to trace his fingers across Bobo’s face. It was like he was trying to learn Bobo’s face, like he used his fingers to see.

  Could it be that the man’s eyes didn’t work and he really did need to use his fingers to see?

  And he wasn’t going to explain that either?

  Bobo giggled.

  “That tickles,” he said.

  The man let his hand drop.

  “He’s got a good face, good hair,” the man pronounced. “Where’s the other one? The girl?”

  He really couldn’t see. Couldn’t see me standing in the doorway.

  “Here,” I said. The Freds would have wanted me to say, Here, Father, or Here, Daddy; Here, Papa; Here, Dad. But I couldn’t do that, any more than I could call the woman Mother, Mama, or Mom.

  The woman shoved me forward. Then she pushed down on my shoulders.

  “Kneel,” she said. “You’re too tall.”

  I wanted to tell her, It’s wrong for someone who’s bigger and stronger and older to be mean like that to someone who’s smaller and weaker and younger. But I was taller than her, and maybe stronger, too. She was just older.

  It was wrong for her to say, “You’re too tall,” like that was a defect.

  I stumbled forward, bumping against the man’s knees just like Bobo had.

  “She’s old enough to help you sell the apples,” the woman said, and there was something conniving in her voice, almost like a little kid wheedling for a piece of candy. “She’d be able to watch and make sure nobody steals from you.”

  What was she talking about? Was the man totally blind? Could he not see at all?

  What kind of people would steal from a blind man?

  The woman kept pushing me down, forcing me to crouch before the man. He put his hand out and ran his fingers across my face just as he’d done with Bobo. He froze when his fingertips brushed against my nostrils.

  “She’s got that kind of nose?” he asked. “What color are her eyes?”

  I opened my mouth to answer—or maybe to ask what was wrong with my nose—but the woman spoke first.

  “Brown,” she said quickly. “They’re dark brown, almost black, just like yours.”

  My eyes aren’t brown, but green. Like . . . well, like the woman’s own.

  The woman squeezed my shoulder warningly. I turned to look at her. She put a finger over her lips and shook her head fiercely, her scowl deepening.

  I glanced at Bobo. It wouldn’t have been surprising for him to chime in, “Oh, don’t you know your colors yet? I do! See, this is what brown looks like, and that is what green looks like,” pointing first to his eyes, then to mine.

  Bobo was turned away from the rest of us. He was watching a spider make a little web between the wall and the leg of the man’s chair. He didn’t say anything.

  The woman jerked me up and back, away from the man.

  “It’s almost time to eat,” she said. “Rosi can help me make supper.”

  “Okay,” I said, trying to sound cheerful and helpful and kind. Not puzzled and angry and sad, like I really felt. “Bobo’s good at setting the table, so we can both help.”

  Bobo still didn’t say anything. I suddenly realized that if Bobo was really that interested in the spider, he would have pointed it out to the rest of us. He would have turned around exclaiming, Look! Look! How does that spider do that? Why can’t I spin sticky web stuff out of my belly? Instead, he was standing there motionless, except for his shoulders quivering every now and then.

  Bobo was crying, and trying not to let anyone see.

  I recast the way I’d heard him say “That tickles” when the man was feeling his face. I recast the giggle I’d heard. Bobo’s moods could turn like that, a giggle twisting into tears in an instant.

  I remembered that Bobo sometimes hated being tickled.

  I was a terrible sister for not remembering sooner.

  I put my hand on his shoulder.

  “Come on, B,” I said. “We’ll work together.”

  But the man slashed his one arm through the air and slapped his hand against his leg.

  “My son doing women’s work?” he said. “Never!”

  Bobo’s shoulders shook harder.

  “Women’s work?” I asked. “Setting the table isn’t women’s work or men’s work! Preparing meals is everyone’s work!”

  Bobo whirled around.

  “Fred-daddy cooks for us all the time!” he said. “I want my Fred-daddy! I want my Fred-mama! I want to go home! My real home, I mean, in Fredtown!”

  I’d thought the woman was scowling before. Now her face was like the sky before a thunderstorm. Terrifying.

  “Punishment,” the man said. “They must be punished. They have to learn—”

  “You’ll go to bed without supper,” the woman said quickly. She yanked me backward. Because I still had one hand on Bobo’s shoulder, I jerked him backward, too. He tipped against me.

  “But—,” I began.

  “Both of you will go to bed without any supper,” the woman said. “Now. In there.”

  She pointed to a break in the wall where a tiny room seemed to hide. A hanging cloth in the doorway separated it from the rest of the house.

  But it’s still light out, I wanted to say. And we don’t even have our bags delivered from the airport. We don’t have any clothes to sleep in. And . . . we didn’t do anything wrong.

  The Freds ha
d taught us to stand up for ourselves when we were falsely accused. They’d taught us to explain away misunderstandings calmly and peacefully. They’d taught us everything about how to behave in Fredtown, with Freds.

  But we weren’t in Fredtown anymore. These adults weren’t anything like Freds.

  There was something bottled up in the woman’s expression that really scared me. Rage, yes, but also fear. It was like she was a kid too. Like Bobo and me. Little kids were the ones who got scared and angry. Not adults. And who was she scared of and mad at? The man? Bobo and me?

  “We are tired after our long trip,” I said stiffly. Suddenly I just wanted to get away before I said or did anything awful. “Come on, Bobo. I’m sure we’ll feel better after a good night’s sleep.”

  “Not tired!” Bobo wailed. “Not sleepy! Not—”

  I picked him up. He kicked at me like he was throwing a tantrum—something he probably hadn’t done since he was two. I kept holding on, hoping it would calm both of us.

  “Shh,” I said, stroking Bobo’s hair like Fred-mama always used to do. “Shh. It’s okay. Everything’s okay.”

  I carried Bobo into the tiny room, and it was a relief to be away from the woman’s glare, the man’s anger. I let the cloth drop behind me, hiding us. There was nothing in that little room except a lamp on an upturned orange crate and a thin blanket spread on the floor.

  “Look how soft this blanket is,” I said, leaning down to pat it. “Look how nicely it’s spread out, just waiting for you and me.”

  “Don’t like that blanket!” Bobo cried. “Want my blanket! Want my bed! Want to go back to Fredtown! Want—”

  “Shh,” I whispered in his ear, as I eased him down onto the blanket. “Calm down. Would eating help? I’ve still got a bag of raisins and a peanut butter sandwich in my knapsack. . . .”

  Was it wrong to offer him that when we’d been sent to bed without our supper? My Fred-parents had never used that as punishment, so I couldn’t be sure.

  It didn’t matter, because Bobo screamed, “No! Not hungry!”

  I understood. My stomach felt too achy and sad for me to even think about food. I couldn’t believe I’d ever be hungry again.

  But what if the man and the woman heard Bobo yelling and realized that we didn’t care about supper, so they’d think of some worse punishment?

  “Listen,” I whispered again to Bobo. “You can tell me everything that’s making you sad or mad. Sometimes that helps. You can tell me anything you want. But tell only me. Whisper. Don’t let anyone else hear.”

  “Want my Fred-daddy,” Bobo said, and while it wasn’t a whisper yet, at least he wasn’t screaming. “Want my Fred-mama. Want my toy sailboat.”

  “We packed that, remember?” I whispered in his ear. “It will probably be here by the time we wake up tomorrow.”

  “Want my monkey bars,” Bobo said, and now this was more like a murmur.

  “I bet there’s a playground here, too,” I said. “Maybe their monkey bars are even better.”

  “Want . . .” Bobo went on listing everything he missed about Fredtown. Every third or fourth word was “Fred-mama” or “Fred-daddy.” Only when I was sure he was more asleep than not did I dare to let myself whisper back, “Oh, me, too, Bobo. I want our Fred-parents too.”

  Except that I knew the kind of thing they would say to me if they were here, even if they’d witnessed everything the man and woman had said and done. I could just hear Fred-daddy’s voice in my head, telling me, I think you just don’t understand the reasons behind those things you were insulted and hurt by. You just don’t understand your real parents. If you understand other people’s viewpoint, you can think of them more kindly. And you can stop focusing on your own anger and pain.

  I did still want my Fred-mama and Fred-daddy. I wanted to go back to Fredtown as much as Bobo did.

  But I also wanted something I thought might be possible, something I promised myself I would find a way to do tomorrow:

  I wanted to talk to Edwy.

  CHAPTER TEN

  In the morning, when I woke up, the space on the blanket beside me was empty. I was confused for a moment—Blanket? Floor? Where’s my bed?—but then my empty stomach twisted painfully and I remembered everything: Bobo and me being sent to bed without supper, the man who was supposed to be our father yelling that we had to be punished (for what?), the woman who was supposed to be our mother scowling and glaring at me, and telling me I babied Bobo.

  Where was Bobo?

  Back in Fredtown, he’d never wandered off in the night, and this new place—our new/old home—had to have scared him yesterday as much as it scared me. . . .

  Just then I heard laughter on the other side of the wall: pure, clear laughter flowing like a river of joy.

  It was Bobo.

  Thinking about how his giggle the day before had been followed by tears, I scrambled to my feet. I was still wearing the dress I’d worn yesterday—and the entire time on the plane the night and day before that. My hair was probably sticking out in all directions, and I had no comb to tame it. But all I could think of was getting to Bobo.

  I spun around the open edge of the wall, into the next room.

  Bobo was sitting at the small, rickety table—sitting on the woman’s lap, actually. He had a fork raised in the air and his head was tilted back, his curls resting against the woman’s collarbone.

  “Bobo!” I said, and somehow everything I was confused or worried about made his name come out sounding harsh. “Be careful! If you’re eating and laughing at the same time, you might choke!”

  “She said I could put sugar on my pancakes!” Bobo burbled. “Then . . .” He let out another fountain of laughter. “Then she said that for all she cared, today I could have sugar on my sugar, if I wanted it!”

  The woman shot me a glance that just dared me to remind Bobo that eating too much sugar made him bounce off the walls. She hugged him closer.

  I glanced toward the corner where the man had been sitting the night before.

  “He went to the privy,” the woman said.

  “The father,” Bobo said, as if he wasn’t sure I’d understand. I kind of liked how Bobo put it—“the father,” not “my” or “our.” I could do that much.

  Bobo stabbed his fork into a mess of pancake pieces on the plate before him, but stopped before bringing it up to his mouth.

  “Does the father feel people’s faces every time he sees them?” Bobo asked.

  The woman—the mother—glanced toward the back wall of the house and lowered her voice.

  “He can’t see,” she said, her face pinched. “That’s why he touches. He wasn’t always like this. Just since—”

  “Since what?” I asked.

  The mother shook her head. Now the expression on her face was like a door slamming shut.

  “There’s hotcakes on the stove for you, too,” she said, motioning with her head.

  I walked to the stove. I wanted her to offer me sugar as well. I wanted her to say I could have sugar on top of sugar, just like Bobo. But she didn’t.

  The pancakes left in the skillet were shriveled and not even lukewarm. There was a fly crawling on the one plate laid out on the cracked counter beside the stove.

  My Fred-parents would never expect me to eat off a fly-specked plate, I thought. They would never give me the left-behind breakfast.

  But my brain was rebellious too, that morning. It shot back at me, And if they were here now, they’d say, Rosi, Rosi, Rosi, aren’t you capable of washing off your own plate? Aren’t you capable of heating up your own food?

  I wished my Fred-parents were there to call me Rosi, Rosi, Rosi. I wished they were there even if they were gently scolding me. I washed off my plate in the sink and pretended I didn’t notice the slight brown tinge to the water. But I slung a little hotcake onto my plate without bothering to turn the fire on under the skillet first. I had a feeling the food would stick in my throat no matter how cold or hot it was.

  I sat down
with Bobo and the mother. Bobo had his mouth full, and neither the mother nor I said anything for a moment. I worked out dates in my head: It was a Saturday or, at the latest, a Sunday. Not a school day.

  “I could run errands for you today,” I said. I felt devious. Back in Fredtown I could have just asked, Can I go see my friends? Can I go talk to Edwy? But here it felt like I had to hide what I really wanted. “If you need me to go to the store, I know how to barter for a good price. I won’t forget to get the change when I pay.”

  The mother pressed her lips into a thin line.

  “You’ll help with the apples,” she said. “This afternoon. This morning we’ll go to church. You and me and Bobo. It’s Sunday.”

  “Church?” I said, trying out the word, the idea.

  “Didn’t you ever go to church in . . . that place?” the mother asked. She meant Fredtown. I could tell. But she said “that place” like even those words hurt her mouth.

  I looked at Bobo shoveling sugar-covered pancake pieces into his mouth. How much did he understand? How much of the tension in the mother’s voice did he hear?

  “We had religious studies in school,” I said, trying my best to keep my tone even and unconcerned. “We learned the best tenets of all religions: Be kind. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Cultivate right thought and right speech. Forgive those who trespass against you.”

  “All religions,” the mother repeated. She sounded like she didn’t believe me. “Didn’t they tell you there are some false prophets who lead people into evil ways, not toward goodness and light? Or did they not even tell you about the evil ones?”

  A noise came from behind the house—maybe a door slamming. Maybe it was the father leaving the privy.

  The mother stood up, practically dumping Bobo from her lap. He landed on his feet and kept chewing.

  “Hurry!” the mother said. “It’s almost time to go.” She looked me up and down. “Don’t the two of you have any other clothes than that? You’re wrinkled.”

  Did she think we’d carried everything we owned in our knapsacks? Didn’t she know about our luggage? Wasn’t someone going to deliver it? Wasn’t it a mother’s job to keep track of her children’s things?