The Rule of Threes

by Marcy Campbell

  “Oh no,” I said, backing away from him. “No way.” I pulled out my phone and handed it to Tony. “Try calling her. Tell her you’re here, and find out where she is.”

  “She won’t have her phone,” he said, but he took my phone anyway and pressed the numbers. The phone rang and rang, but no one picked up. “I told you,” he said, handing it back. “She must have borrowed a phone to text Rakell. They don’t let her have a phone in the rehab place.”

  Tony sat down in the grass and dead leaves. He cupped his elbow and brought his thumbnail up to his mouth. We were both shivering. The wind had picked up. A plastic bag was twirling around in the street and landed in a spindly tree, where it hung on for dear life by its handles.

  “I bet she’s in there and taking a nap,” he said, “or a bath. She listens to music when she takes a bath, so she wouldn’t hear us. And if she’s sleeping, she wouldn’t hear us then either, because she’s a really sound sleeper. She wasn’t sleeping well at that place. She told me.”

  Tony’s eyes filled up with tears, and he tried to wipe them away with a twist of his knuckles. I took a deep breath. I knew what he wanted me to do, but wasn’t I in enough trouble already? I wished the BFFs were here, though I already knew what they’d say. Olive would screw up her face and say it was too dangerous, and Rakell would say go for it. Or maybe not. They were both surprising me lately.

  There was a small handle on the coal door. I lifted it, finding it was heavier than I thought it would be. I peered into the darkness.

  “Where does this go?” I asked Tony.

  He jumped up and grabbed the handle from me. “To the basement,” he said, “where the furnace and washer and dryer and stuff are.” He looked at me with a hopeful expression. “I’d go in, but I tried once to sneak out of the house when I got in a fight with my mom’s boyfriend, and I almost got stuck. Plus, I’m way bigger now.”

  I took a step back. “Isn’t this breaking and entering?” Did I really need to add that to the vandalism already on my permanent record? Not to mention stealing, I thought, as I looked at my backpack.

  “You’re not breaking anything, just entering,” he said. He had fresh tears on his face. “Please, Maggie.”

  I stuffed my backpack in first and heard it land with a quiet thunk. I could see it there on the basement floor, which didn’t seem too far down. I could jump it. It would be no different than jumping off our front stoop.

  Getting through the door wasn’t very difficult, but I had to go feet first, backward. I scratched my stomach as I slid over the metal, but it didn’t hurt too bad. There was a little wriggling for my shoulders, but then I slid and fell a couple of feet.

  I landed right on my butt, on the cold concrete floor. I stood up and rubbed it, let my eyes adjust to the dark.

  “Are you okay?” Tony called through the rectangular patch of light.

  “Yeah, I’m fine,” I called back. I knew my butt would be sore later, and my stomach stung from the scrape, but there wasn’t any blood. I had dirt all over my clothes—ages-old coal dust, I guessed. I tried to brush some of it off.

  Tony yelled, “Go upstairs and unlock the front door.”

  I picked up my backpack and skirted a pile of laundry on the floor by the washing machine. There were some old baseball bats in the corner and cans and cans of paint lined up and stacked on top of each other. A pegboard hung on the wall with a bunch of paintbrushes and other tools hanging from it, and I wondered if it all belonged to the boyfriend who’d made Tony help with his business. Was that the same guy Tony had tried to get away from through the coal door? At least Tony had a real father now, one who not only shared his DNA but who acted like a dad.

  Just then, the furnace let out a series of bumps and groans that scared me, and I sped right out of the creepy, dusty basement, sprinting up the stairs into a kitchen.

  “Hello?” I called. “Mrs. Miller?” I didn’t know if that was Tony’s mom’s last name. Lots of kids at our school had last names that were different from their parents’.

  The kitchen was tiny but clean, except for a few dishes in the sink. There was a little table in front of a window facing a square patch of backyard grass surrounded by a chain-link fence, and two chairs pulled up to the table. I could picture Tony and his mom there, having breakfast.

  On the table was a white milk-glass vase, the kind that went for fifty cents at the Shoppe, and there were a couple dead wildflowers in it, their fallen petals crisp and fanning out around the base. I remembered Tony saying his mom used to try and make the place pretty even though they didn’t have much money for decorations and things.

  I heard a pounding at the front door. Tony! I’d forgotten to let him in.

  I walked out of the kitchen, through a little dining room filled with nothing except a half-dozen boxes, and into the living room, where . . . where I saw her.

  “Mrs. Miller? Mrs. Miller!” Oh God, please, please don’t be . . . please.

  I slapped her face like I’d seen in the movies. “Mrs. Miller!” I yelled into her ear. Her lips looked completely the wrong color. They were bluish.

  “Wake up!” I yelled. I heard pounding, and I didn’t know where it was coming from, but I thought it was in my ears, my chest. My whole body was beating.

  I took her hand, but it felt cold and clammy. I dropped it, put my ear to her chest, and I heard something, a heartbeat, but it was faint and not going da-dum da-dum da-dum like it was supposed to but more like da-dum . . . and then really fast: da-dumda-dumda-dum.

  I shrugged off my backpack, unzipped the pocket, pulled out the Narcan box, and tore it open. I was always one to read directions first, but there was no time. It was a weird-looking little device, but it had a nozzle that looked just like my mom’s allergy spray.

  I shoved the tip into Tony’s mom’s nose, pressed up on the plunger underneath it and heard a hissssss as the medicine sprayed out. The next sound I heard was glass breaking just a few feet away from me and the thud of a rock landing on the living room floor. Tony punched at the glass, making a hole big enough for him to get through, though his jacket snagged, tearing his sleeve.

  “What are you doing?” he started shouting at me.

  I threw him my phone. “Nine-one-one!” I said. “Now!” But Tony wasn’t listening to me. He knelt next to his mom and held her hand. “Mom! Can you hear me?”

  I couldn’t believe it, but she answered, in this soft, scratchy voice. She answered.

  “Tony?” she said, and my heart nearly exploded with relief. It was just like that girl, Claire, had said at the assembly, how her cousin had seen Narcan used on somebody, and it was like they’d come back from the dead.

  “You’re bleeding,” Tony’s mom said to him, looking at his hands, his arm. “What did you do?” she asked in that tone that all parents get when their kids hurt themselves, apparently, no matter what.

  I was wondering whether I should still call 911 when I heard slamming car doors outside and saw a swirl of red lights through the broken window.

  “Why did you call?” Tony asked me. “She’s fine.”

  “I didn’t!” I said, but then the door was pushed in, and two male cops were right up in Tony’s mom’s face, slipping on latex gloves while they asked her a million questions and shined lights into her eyes. Tony and I stood back against the wall until another cop came in, a woman with a long black braid under her cap, who ushered us into the kitchen. She said the upstairs neighbor had called the police when he’d seen us messing around with the windows.

  There were cookies. There was a thermos full of hot chocolate. There was a blanket. Later, I wouldn’t remember where those items had come from, only that the police officer, Sharon she said to call her, had seemingly pulled them out of thin air. There were also questions, lots of them, about how we’d found Tony’s mom, and about the Narcan, which I had to admit to stealing from the nurse’s office. We were sitting at the little kitchen table and Sharon was standing, writing on a notepad. I did all the tal
king because Tony was crying, his head down on his arms, the blanket covering him.

  At one point, Tony raised his head to ask if his mom was going to be okay, and Sharon said yes, but that she’d “have a long road ahead of her.”

  “Are you taking her to jail?” Tony asked, his lip quivering.

  I played with the dead flower petals. I didn’t know if I wanted to hear the answer. I could see how upset Tony was at the possibility and yet I couldn’t help thinking that if she went to jail at least she wouldn’t hurt herself, and Tony would be safe too, with us. I felt kind of bad thinking that, but then Sharon said she would be going to the hospital, not jail. Whew. That was a better option.

  “I’m afraid she’s going to be in a world of hurt,” Sharon told us crisply, but then looked sorry she’d said it. She rubbed Tony’s back. “You just love and support her,” she said, “but remember, recovery is up to your mom. That’s out of your hands.”

  She looked at me, then back at Tony. “People get better all the time. I’ve seen it,” she said, then added, “Your mom is lucky, you know. If it wasn’t for your sister here . . .” She pointed at me, and I didn’t even correct her. I just put the blanket back over Tony’s shoulder.

  “How’d you get it?” Tony asked. We were buckled into the back seat of Officer Sharon’s police car. She had called our dad. We were going home.

  “I used my last five bucks to pay a kid at school to make a scene in the hallway. He pretended to be sick, the nurse ran out, and I slipped in. That was that. Easy-peasy.” I couldn’t believe how I was talking, like this was just a normal day for me. “Did you really think I went in for my social studies notes?”

  “Yeah,” Tony said, laughing. “I honestly did.” We smiled at each other, and Officer Sharon looked at us in her rearview mirror and smiled, too. Her radio crackled with a woman’s voice calling out mysterious numbers.

  “What’s a ten sixty-two?” I asked.

  “Breaking and entering,” Officer Sharon replied. She turned the radio down a bit.

  I started playing with the straps of my backpack until Tony said, “Are you worried you’re going to get in trouble?”

  I didn’t answer. The truth was, yeah, I was worried. I’d stolen something, broken into a house, and given medical help, which I had no business giving, to someone who was minutes away, I knew, from being . . . dead. Not to mention I’d taken a bus across town without even telling my parents.

  “Maggie,” he said, “you saved somebody’s life. Not just somebody’s. My mom’s. If anybody tries to mess with you over that, I won’t let them.”

  “We’re going to have a talk,” Dad said. “Tomorrow.”

  He was crying, and Mom was crying, and me and Tony were crying, and Mittens was yowling because we’d all forgotten about her and her food bowl was empty. Mom fed her, then put out some leftovers for the humans, and we microwaved plates and after that, Dad said we should all just “decompress and get some rest.”

  “Tomorrow is another day,” he said. He was fond of saying that whenever something went wrong, and usually I’d answer, “Well, duh,” but I didn’t tonight. Tomorrow was another day, hopefully a better one.

  Later, as I sat in my room checking my phone, I saw that Olive and Rakell had left a bunch of messages, and so had my mom, who had come home to get Grandma’s forgotten glasses and found the house empty. Even Mildred at the Shoppe, who knew nothing about any of this, had sent a group text to the BFFs to tell us she’d gotten in a box of lava lamps that were “the grooviest things she’d ever seen.” I sat there reading through all the messages, feeling warm and safe and loved, more than ever before.

  I played with the items on my desk. I liked to swap things every month or so, rotating other objects into the mix from my prop box. It was good practice. Right now, my items included a little glass bowl filled with flower petals from my mom’s yellow chrysanthemums, a wooden clock, and the bronze winged pig. Always three items, the perfect number.

  But now as I looked at it . . . the display was almost too perfect. I decided to keep the clock and remove the bowl, but when I lifted it, I accidentally knocked over the pig. Lying on his side like that, the little guy looked quite comfortable, like he was napping.

  I decided to leave him that way, thinking he could probably use a rest. After all, he’d been doing a lot of flying. So many impossible things had happened.

  Welcome to the Family

  The talk came as promised, after breakfast, after the social worker called and Dad spent a half hour on his phone with her in the living room. He was talking quietly, so I couldn’t really hear what he was saying, but that was okay. I didn’t need a recap of yesterday’s events. I’d lived them.

  Tony passed me the box of Lucky Charms, and I poured a big bowl. Maybe sugary cereal was our new normal. I wasn’t complaining about that part, at least. We were sitting at the island in our usual spots, one empty yellow stool between us. My mom was at the sink, cleaning up the dishes from yesterday.

  “We should order another one of these stools,” I said.

  Mom looked up from her dishes. “Where are we going to put it?” she asked. The three stools fit perfectly, with just enough space between them.

  “We can put it on the end,” I said, “and tuck it under when we’re not using it. We just need to rearrange a bit.”

  I looked at Tony, and he nodded, his mouth full of pastel marshmallows. He had a bandage on both his arm and his hand from where he’d gotten cut coming through his living room window. I had a bandage on my stomach from where I scraped it sliding into his apartment through the coal door. But other than that, there was nothing different about us—not that anyone could see.

  Dad walked in and set his phone on the counter, and Mom turned around and locked eyes with him. Oh boy, I thought, here it comes. They had probably waited because they were too shocked to deal with us last night, too worried and frazzled by what had happened. It was like, when you jumped off a swing and cut your leg, your mom would spring into action and cradle you gently and clean up the cut. But as soon as you stopped crying? As soon as everything seemed back to normal? She’d scream at you for jumping off the swing.

  Mom started in on us first. “You didn’t make the best choices yesterday,” she said, looking at both Tony and me.

  This was my least favorite lecture, the bad choices one.

  “You should not have gone over there, either of you,” Dad added. “You should have called one of us, and we would have helped.”

  “But there wasn’t time,” Tony protested.

  “Not true,” Dad said. “We could have gotten the police to your apartment way faster than it took the two of you to take a bus across town. You should have called as soon as Rachel said she’d gotten your mom’s text, Tony. There’s a good chance your mom wouldn’t have even been there, and then what?”

  “But she was,” I murmured. “And her name is Rakell.”

  “And, Maggie, you stole medicine?” Mom added, slightly changing the subject. “How did you even know how to use it?”

  “I learned it from watching you,” I said.

  “What?” both my parents said.

  “Your allergy medicine, Mom.” I shrugged. “It’s the same type of thing.”

  They looked at each other like they were deciding who was going to speak next. Tony’s spoon was clinking against his bowl. Mittens was meowllll-ing from the floor by our feet, waiting for an invitation to get up on the counter and lap leftover milk, which my parents did not allow.

  “We accept some of the responsibility,” Dad said. “We haven’t done a good job of laying out ground rules, especially for you, Tony. We’re going to make up a list and talk about that next week, and you need to be able to check in with us, so we’re getting you a phone—”

  “Really?” Tony said, super excited, but Dad squashed him right back down.

  “But you’ll not be using it, for the time being, for anything except calling home—that’s this home, to me or Mom—
and when you’re home, I get the phones. Yours too, Maggie. They’ll go right in this basket when they’re not charging.” He pointed to the basket by the door where he kept his wallet and keys. “And no TV or video games for a week. You’re both grounded.”

  My mouth was hanging open as I listened. This was so weird. Was my dad being bad-cop? I glanced sideways at Tony and could see he didn’t believe it either. Yet this was one of those times that I felt anything I said would only get me into even more trouble. One week of being grounded was bad enough. I didn’t need to make it two.

  As Mom and Dad were leaving the kitchen, they piled even more on us.

  “I want you both to straighten your rooms today,” Mom said, almost gleefully.

  “And I could use some help sweeping out the garage,” Dad added.

  Once they were safely out of the room, I raised my eyebrows at Tony, and he did the same back at me, and we both started laughing.

  “Welcome to the family,” I said.

  “What’s your favorite color?” Olive asked Tony.

  “Oh, I got this,” I said. I pointed to the hoodie he was wearing. “It’s blue, right?”

  Tony looked down, like he was noticing his favorite sweatshirt for the first time. “Oh yeah, I like blue just fine. But I wear this because it’s so comfortable. I don’t really notice the color.”

  Rakell laughed, and Olive sucked in her breath while she looked over at me, likely waiting for me to launch into a discussion about how color affects mood, even when we’re not consciously aware of it. But I didn’t think that was necessary, mostly because they already knew all of that. In fact, Rakell or Olive would be perfectly capable of giving that lecture themselves.

  I had our roles all wrong, or at least, my belief that we needed super-strict roles in the first place had been all wrong. There wasn’t just one way to do things. I didn’t always have to be in charge. And a stool with three legs wasn’t the only metaphor for perfect harmony. You could find balance in all sorts of different ways, with any number of people.