Under the Watsons' Porch

by Susan Shreve

  My father put his hand on my leg and said something like “Of course, darling” and “We'd never bring this up if it weren't for your protection” and “We only have your interest at heart.” He should know better than to say those things to me, his only daughter. He's a junior high school teacher!

  So depending on whether or not you want to believe the Brittles, the story is this:

  Thirteen and a half years ago, Tommy was born in Coral Gables, Florida, to a teenage mother who wasn't married, and she gave birth to him in a motel room and left him there. He became a ward of the state of Florida, which located a foster mother and father who did turn out to be more or less like the weirdos Tommy told me about today, with dead jaguars and tigers hanging on their walls. They wanted Tommy because they had a child already, their own, Jack Junior, and they weren't going to have any more children and Jack Junior needed a playmate. Tommy lived with the weirdos until they moved to Germany forever and couldn't take a foster child without adopting him legally, so at nine years old, Tommy was once again a ward of the state of Florida.

  For a while, he lived in different foster homes in Florida, getting into more and more trouble, stealing or fighting or skipping school—“minor infractions,” my father said, whatever that means.

  Not terrible trouble, nothing like guns or killing, but trouble enough that the state put him in a kind of halfway house.

  “An orphanage,” my mother called it.

  Clarissa Bowers, who lived with Mr. Bowers in another part of Toledo close to the river, was looking for a baby. She had tried to have one of her own and it hadn't worked out. Then one afternoon she was reading a story about foster children in the Toledo Dispatch and the idea came to her that since she was getting quite old, almost forty-five, she could adopt a child. Maybe even a troubled child.

  “And that's Tommy.” My mother was sitting on the end of the bed and even in the darkness I could tell she had that look on her face, her eyes squinty, her mouth puckered as if she were thinking with her lips.

  “The Bowerses got him four years ago and he's been quite a handful,” my father said.

  “So what are you trying to tell me?” I asked. “Not to be friends with him because he's had a miserable, terrible, awful, cruel life and I should only be friends with the lucky people?”

  “We're not saying you can't spend time with Tommy Bowers,” Mom said. “Only that you should be careful.”

  “I like him,” I said quietly, pulling up my covers over the bottom half of my face so only my eyes showed. “I like him better than I've liked anyone I've met for a very long time.”

  From where I'm lying I can see Tommy Bowers's room. There are two long windows on either end of my room and three smaller windows set high from which I can't see out unless it's night and the Bowers house is lit and I'm lying on my bed.

  Now I can see Tommy because he's standing on his bed trying to stick something to the ceiling. I can't tell what it is that he has in his hand but I can tell that he's not having any luck with his project. He keeps jumping on the bed to reach the ceiling, where the overhead light hangs. All I can see in the frame of my window is Tommy's head with his floppy hair, his arms swinging in the air, the four posts of his bed, and the ceiling. I get out of bed and go out on the sunporch to check if I can see more from there. It's a cool night with a full moon, the sky clear and splashed with stars, very beautiful, and I'm thinking how nice it will be to have Tommy living next door. Every night I'll be able to turn out my light and see him in his bedroom or go out on the sunporch and watch him at his desk, which is visible in the window when I'm standing on the sun-porch like I am now.

  I go back into the bedroom to get the blanket at the bottom of my bed and wrap it around my shoulders so I won't be too cold standing on the sunporch, and as I return to my station across from his room, I hear him call me.

  “Ellie!”

  I can't make out his face but he must have opened the window and seen me and now I see him hanging out the window with something in his hand.

  “Hi.” I say it softly.

  “I'm trying to make a walkie-talkie for us to use.”

  “What were you doing jumping on your bed?”

  “You saw me?” This pleases him. “Trying to change the light bulb. You'd know everything about me if I could get the walkie-talkie fixed up. Can you come over?”

  “It's too late.”

  I'm thinking my parents won't ever let me go over to Tommy Bowers's house but of course I don't tell Tommy anything like that.

  Tommy opens the window wider and climbs out onto the ledge, one leg hanging down the side of the house, the other leg in his bedroom. He is leaning precariously toward me.

  “So I've decided what we can do with the Watsons' porch but I don't want to shout it out loud in the neighborhood.”

  “Whisper it,” I say, shivering under my blanket on the cold sunporch.

  “I don't want to whisper it either. We'll meet under the Watsons' porch tomorrow morning at about ten.”

  “I can't,”

  I say. “I have church.”

  “Church?”

  “I mean, I don't have to go to church.” Whether it's true or not, I want Tommy to believe I make my own decisions. So I'm thinking I have Sunday school tomorrow at nine-thirty until eleven and then church, so my parents will drop me off tomorrow at Sunday school, First Congregational, about a mile from our house, and I'll tell them I won't be meeting them at church because I want to see P.J., which won't completely surprise them. I'll go into the front door of the church, duck into the girls' room until my parents drive off, and then I'll be on my way down Miler's Road to meet Tommy at ten o'clock. That will give me three hours before my parents get home from church with Milo and we go to Sunday lunch at my grandmother's house.

  Our life is so regular, sometimes I wish we lived in a place where there were tornadoes, like Kansas, where my mother grew up.

  Tommy waves goodbye, closes the window, and I watch him cross the room, open a desk drawer, and take out something. Then he walks out of view of the sunporch and the windows where I can see him from my bed. I wait, watching, but he has disappeared.

  * * *

  I'm lying in bed again, writing my letter to Tommy—actually thinking about my letter since so far I've written only:

  Dear Tommy,

  I'm SO excited you have moved in next door. Never in my life have I had a friend with such a huge imagination—the same size as my imagination, which my parents tell me is “dangerously out of control.”

  I have in mind to say how much I like him and am hoping we'll be best friends but I don't want to seem too excited and I especially don't want to sound mushy. So I'm lying half under my covers with my flashlight on, rereading what I've written so far when I think I hear my name.

  “Ellie?”

  “El?”

  At first I think it must be my parents calling although by now it's almost eleven-thirty and they turn out their light at exactly eleven. I open the door to my bedroom and listen.

  I hear it again, this time louder. “Ellie.” And I can tell it's coming from outside, so I go to the sunporch again and there's Tommy hanging out the window, calling my name.

  “Are you crazy?” I laugh.

  “I just wanted you to know I put a birthday present for you on your front porch. It's not very well wrapped.”

  I can't believe he got me a birthday present and we've hardly known each other for a full day. But I'm smiling all over, even my hair is smiling.

  “Go downstairs and get it,” he says. “I want you to have it before it's tomorrow.”

  “Okay,” I say.

  “And then tell me if you like it. I'll be lying in the dark in my room with the window wide open waiting for you to call me.”

  It takes me a while before I dare leave my bedroom without getting caught.

  First Milo comes out of his room, goes into the bathroom, pees leaving the door open, and then goes into my parents' room to wake them up
. I'm standing in the doorway to my bedroom with the door almost closed, a tiny slip of space so I can see what is going on in the hall.

  I hear some conversation and then my mother walks Milo back to his room, holding his hand, telling him that pit bulls don't live in the neighborhood and if they did, they have no skill whatsoever at getting into locked houses. She stays for a minute in Milo's room and then pads barefoot down the hall. I see her as she passes my door and hear her open her door and shut it but not tight. There is no click.

  So I wait a few more minutes just to make sure the pit bulls aren't planning another visit to Milo's room.

  We don't have carpet on our stairs, so I walk down very slowly, putting my feet gently, gently down on the wood floor. There are narrow windows on either side of our front door and peering through one, I can see under the porch light that Tommy has left a pink package about the size of a shoebox by the door.

  I wait, listening for noises upstairs in case my parents are still awake, and hearing none, I open the front door very quietly and it squeaks like a long, drawn-out guinea pig squeal and I hold my breath, listening. But upstairs is silent.

  The present is a mess. It's wrapped in stiff, glossy pink paper, too much of it for the size of the shoebox, with lots of tape at either end, a yellow ribbon with a lopsided bow, and a card with “ELLIE” on the front.

  I close the front door.

  The whole time I've been downstairs I've heard nothing but the squeak of the front door. The moon, visible in the living room window, is a full pale yellow circle and light pours in the windows on either side of the front door.

  At the top step of our stairs, I see Milo sitting on the second step, his hand on the railing, his thumb, even though he's six years old this year, stuck in his mouth.

  “What're you doing?” he asks.

  “I got a present,” I say, quickly inventing a story for this occasion.

  “In the middle of the night?”

  “It's not even midnight.”

  “Can I see the present?” Milo asks.

  “In the morning. I'm not going to open it now.”

  Which isn't true, but I certainly don't want Milo to know that I got a present from Tommy Bowers. He'll tell our parents and that will be that.

  “You should open it tonight because tomorrow it won't be your birthday anymore.”

  “That's true,” I say. “But I'm going to wait until tomorrow anyway.”

  I'm hurrying up the stairs past Milo, who moves his little legs so I can pass, and just as I start to go into my bedroom door, my mother comes out into the hall. I pay no attention to her, hoping to be able to get into my room, hide Tommy's present under the bed, and climb under my covers before Milo has a chance to tell her I had a present on the front porch.

  But I hear him tell her as they walk down the hall to his room again.

  “Ellie came down to get a present that was on the front porch,” he says, “and I still can't sleep because of the pit bulls.”

  I lie very still. In the Bowers house, I can see the top of Tommy's head and the head of Clarissa Bowers. They are standing beside Tommy's bed and they must be talking, and then Clarissa Bowers disappears from view and so does Tommy, and the light in his bedroom goes out.

  Then I hear my mother in the hall outside my door, hear my door open, and she says, “Ellie? Are you awake?”

  “A little,” I say.

  “Milo said you got a present on the front porch.”

  “Uh-huh,” I say. “From P.J. I'll open it in the morning.”

  4. The Lollipop Garden

  My mom is staying in Milo's room forever. I can hear her talking and Milo is whimpering—he's an expert at whimpering—and it'll be hours before I can open Tommy's present, which I stuffed under the bed. Outside I hear sirens, probably a fire from the sound of them, close by our house, which means Milo could be awake all night. Fires and pit bulls are his favorite emergencies. I'm lying in the dark watching the pitch blackness out the window where Tommy's house is, waiting for everyone to go to sleep.

  I've almost given up waiting when I hear my mother's bare feet padding on the hardwood floor on the way to her bedroom. I know she'll stop at my door, open it without knocking as if I'm still six and need to be kissed good night, which I don't. She'll call “Ellie?” in her whispery voice. “Are you still awake, El?” Usually she comes in and sits on my bed and we talk, but tonight I pretend to be asleep.

  She tiptoes over and is probably looking at me to be sure I'm not faking it, but I have the covers pulled up and my eyes softly closed and breathe a sigh of relief when I hear her leaving.

  When the door to my parents' room shuts, I turn on my flashlight, hoping the light from it won't show under the door just in case someone decides to get up. Stuck to the present that I pull out from under my bed is a birthday card.

  It's a boy's birthday card. On the front, there's a large basset hound with bloodshot eyes wearing a hunting hat, a pipe hanging out of his long mouth. Inside, it says, “Happy Birthday Champ from your drinking Pal.”

  Tommy has crossed out the greeting and written:

  Dear Ellie or Elly or Eli (which is it),

  You said you wanted a sparkly necklace and would only be getting a blue jean skirt so I found you a sparkly necklace and here it is. I hope you like it.

  Love, Thomas Jefferson Bowers, the First and Last.

  I unwrap the glossy pink paper and sit for a long time with the box—a shoebox from Reilly's Shoes and Bags—in my lap. My heart is beating in my mouth. I suppose I'm excited but it feels as if I'm afraid, the way my skin is sizzling and my mouth is dry.

  The box, which I finally open, is full of pink tissue paper, a nest of crinkly pink, and there in the center of the nest is the largest diamond necklace I have ever seen.

  At least it looks like a diamond necklace.

  Diamonds aren't a big deal in my family. We only just got a dishwasher, and my mom's diamond ring, which my father gave her for their engagement, has lost its tiny diamond but she wears it anyway.

  This necklace has five diamonds about the size of pennies but in the shape of teardrops, which hang from a kind of silvery chain. It's very pretty—I actually think it's beautiful—but not at all like the crazy sparkly necklace I'd seen at Wake Up Little Suzie. That one probably costs about three dollars, maybe even less, and it's made of fake sparkles. These sparkles look real.

  I put the necklace on, tiptoe over to the mirror on the back of my closet door, and shine the flashlight on myself. The necklace hangs around my neck in a circle, not exactly tight but like a collar and just looking at myself, even in my pink ice cream cone pajamas, I feel older. I can hardly catch my breath.

  I get a barrette from my dresser and pin my hair up so it sits on the top of my head like a powder puff. And then without even thinking about it, I take off my pajamas.

  For a while, I stand in the mirror naked except for my diamond necklace, lit by a circle from the tiny flashlight. I look different, mysterious, like a girl in a movie. There are shadows around my spreading hips and light on my face and for a surprising moment, I think that I could be pretty when I get a little older.

  I'm still wearing the necklace when I climb into bed. I plan to sleep in it and pull the covers up to my chin just in case Mom decides to check on me while I'm sleeping.

  In the morning, I wake up to Mom calling from the kitchen that it's late, very late, and I'm going to miss Sunday school and won't get breakfast unless I hurry and already my eggs are cold. I put my hands over my ears.

  But I do get up in a hurry and slip into the new blue jean skirt, which is a little tight and hard to button but it's the only skirt I have with a pocket. I drop the diamond necklace in the pocket and tie a sweater around my waist even though it's going to be hot. Lately I wear sweaters around my waist to hide my butt, but today I want it to hide the pocket bulging with diamonds. By the time I get downstairs, Milo is already crying about Sunday school. This is not unusual. Milo has a habit of
crying a lot and it works. More or less he gets what he wants, which I don't remember happening when I was his age.

  “My tummy's upset,” he says as I rush into the kitchen, slip into my chair, and wolf down my cold eggs. Usually cold eggs drive me crazy, but today all I can think of is meeting Tommy under the Watsons' porch.

  “Your stomach is often upset on Sundays before Sunday school,” my father says.

  “But today I think I'm going to throw up.”

  He scrunches down in his chair, covers his eyes with his hands, and makes little moans and hiccups.

  “Don't throw up at the table,” my mom says without a trace of a smile, although I know she's smiling in her head. “Ellie is trying to eat her eggs.”

  “Cold eggs,” I say.

  “You were late to breakfast,” she says.

  “I'm really sick,” Milo says. “I can't go to Sunday school.”

  “No one believes you, Milo, 'cause you say it so often.” I hop up from my chair, put my dish in the dishwasher, and splash water on my face.

  “Because it's true.” Milo takes my father's hand and heads out the kitchen door to the car.

  In the car, my parents decide that after they leave me at Sunday school, they'll drop Milo off at my grandmother's house so he can throw up there and then come back and meet me in time for church.

  “Actually,” I begin, hoping to sound sincere with that kind of casual, truthful voice that even parents who know you better than anyone might believe. “I was thinking I'd skip church and meet you afterward at home.”

  “Do you have plans?” my mom asks.

  She must know every minute of my day. I mean, it's boring enough to live my day without having to talk about it. Besides, today I do have plans and they belong to me.

  “Plans?” I say, stalling for time, and then out of nowhere, something unpleasant that I haven't even thought about for weeks hurries across my brain. Camp. Three weeks from today, I'll be on a train headed to Camp Farwell, Wells River, Vermont, for six weeks. Day before yesterday, I loved Camp Farwell. But now that I've met Tommy Bowers, I don't ever want to think about camp again.