“What? The thing you dropped?”
“I didn’t drop anything.”
“I saw you,” he said, and he was smiling, like he couldn’t believe I was arguing with what he knew to be true. “You dropped it on the doorstep of the shop and I picked it up.”
I told him I thought it was a joke at first. “I thought you just gave stuff to people for a laugh. I thought you were trying to embarrass me in front of everyone.”
He said that would be too weird and we both laughed, but only a little.
“What’s weird,” I said, “is that I’ve never seen that photo before. But it does belong to me.”
He asked me what I meant and I said, “It’s of somebody I know.”
“Isn’t that because you dropped it, because it was yours?” He smiled and held his hands out in front of him as if to say, Why are we still talking about this?
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe I did, but I still haven’t worked out how.”
“I don’t get why that’s hard. People drop things all the time.”
I got the feeling he was beginning to wonder about me—about my sanity, I mean. I said, “It’s a picture of my brother, and my brother is dead.” I hoped really hard he wasn’t going to say something cushiony.
“God, I’m sorry,” he said, and then, “Can I get you a drink?”
Part cushion, part nothing, which was fine.
I propped my bike against a wall and sat down in the doorway of the ambulance. While Harper was lifting the lid off the little hidden stove and filling a kettle by pressing his foot down on the floor, I said, “Do you see why it’s weird? That I never saw it before and you found it and it’s of him?”
He said he really hadn’t meant to freak me out. He said, “I guess you owned it without knowing.”
“Yeah, but even that’s doing my head in. I wouldn’t have it and then forget about it. It’s a really amazing photo.”
“It’s a mystery,” he said. “I get it. You want to solve it.”
We sat on the floor of the van with the back doors open and our feet on the ground. The tea was some spicy, gingery thing that came out of a packet covered in proverbs, but it tasted quite good.
He said, “Have you always lived around here?”
“Norf London girl,” I said, and he laughed.
“Upstate New York boy.”
I didn’t know what to say about New York. I’d never been there. I didn’t know what upstate meant. I said, “Wow,” or something just as vacant, and then I asked him how old he was. Eighteen last August, three months older than Jack. I said, “How did you get it together to do all this, leave home and travel around and everything?”
“I always wanted to do it,” he said. “The world’s so big, you got to start early. I wanted to get moving, get away.”
“Get away from what?” I said, and he shrugged.
“Everything and nothing. I just wanted to move.”
I was rolling a bit of gravel around under my shoe. “Everything,” I said. “I’d like to get away from that too.”
There was a football match going on in the sports fields opposite. We could just see the players’ heads bobbing around above the level of the wall.
“Just so you know,” he said, “it turns out not to be possible.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Oh, I don’t know. You’re always gonna be you—doesn’t matter where in the world you are.”
I thought of Jack’s “too deep warning light,” this thing he used to say when anyone got a bit of self-help on him, a bit “road less traveled.” It made me smile. If I’d known Harper better, I’d have told him what was so funny. I asked him where he’d been so far.
“I flew from New York to Paris. I wanted to go by boat, but it costs way too much. I wanted to be in the middle of an ocean. Nothing but water for weeks, see if I went crazy. Maybe another time. I stayed with a friend in Montparnasse for a while. Then I got the train here. I haven’t been doing this too long. I’m pretty new at it.”
“Where are you going next?”
“I just got here, so nowhere for a month or so. I want to go to Scotland, Norway, and Spain, and, well, wherever. Plus I’ve got to work when I can, when the money’s low. We’ll see. What about you?”
“Oh, nothing, nowhere,” I said. “I haven’t done anything yet.” He seemed to find that funny so I didn’t tell him it wasn’t a joke.
He asked me about Mum. I wished he hadn’t seen her that day, in the doctor’s. I told him she wasn’t like that, really, which was a lie. I told him they were adjusting her medication and it was just a question of waiting. I stuck up for her because I knew I should, but I wouldn’t have believed a word of it if I was him.
He said, “Was that your sister with you?” and I said yes, and that with the Jack fallout and my dad going part-time on us, I’d pretty much been left in charge. I told him that my friends were getting bored with me because I couldn’t hang around too much, and if I did, it was with a six-year-old in tow. I heard myself grumbling and complaining to this person I’d just met, and I was telling myself, Stop it! Be funny, be cool. Stop doing this.
But it was true and I couldn’t make it leave my head if it was there. While my friends were thinking about what their jeans looked like in their boots, I was wondering how much milk there was in the fridge. When they talked about makeup and boys, I was thinking laundry and kids’ TV. I said, “I’m not much of a picnic to know anymore.”
Harper stood up and poured the rest of his tea on a straggly plant growing out of the curb. He said he’d be the judge of that, if it was OK by me.
At about six thirty I stood up and started fixing the lights onto my bike. I wasn’t ready to leave at all. Harper said, “Did you want to stay and eat? I’m a not bad cook.”
“I can’t. I have to get my sister. I have stuff to do.”
I thanked him for the photo. I said, “I’ve no idea where it came from, but I suppose it’s mine and I’m glad to have it.”
“You’re welcome,” he said. “I’m glad it was you.”
I wheeled out onto the darkening road, past the sad cases and the curb crawlers and the football players and Harper waving at me until he was out of sight.
I couldn’t stop smiling.
When I got to Bee’s, she said didn’t I get her messages, that she’d sent three while I was gone. “Even I started to wonder if he was an ax wielder when I didn’t hear back.”
I hadn’t checked my phone. I didn’t think she’d be worrying. “He lives in an ambulance,” I said because I knew she’d like that. “He’s from New York.”
“Did you like him?”
“Yes, I liked him.”
“What did you talk about?”
“Not much. I wasn’t there that long.”
“Yes you were,” Bee said. “You’ve been gone nearly three hours.”
“I suppose so. He’s traveling. He’s funny. He’s very cool.”
“Told you,” she said.
“I liked him a lot.”
“How did it go?”
“How did what go?”
“Did you talk about the thing, the picture? I thought that’s why you went.”
I said we had, but not really. “I don’t know. Maybe I did drop it. I must have.”
“And you’re going to see him again.”
I shrugged, like it wasn’t something I was in charge of. Even if I did want to hang out with Harper, there was Stroma to think about. I said that to Bee with my hands over Stroma’s ears while she wriggled to get free. I said it wasn’t so easy making plans with a kid in tow.
Bee raised her eyebrows at me. She said I didn’t have to make life so complicated. She said she’d look after Stroma anytime. She said, “Not everyone minds being around little kids.”
I stood there and I thought about my friends who’d rather be dead than seen out with my sister. I thought about the times they’d said couldn’t I just leave her somewhere, anywhere, an
d come out with them. I thought about the times I’d wished I could. I felt like a bad person.
I said, “Are you always right?”
“Course not,” she told me. “I’m just never wrong.”
When I got Stroma home from Bee’s, it was cold and all the lights were off, like there was nobody in. Mum was on the sofa in the dark. I hung up our coats and Stroma’s book bag. I rinsed out her lunch box. She sat at the kitchen table drawing while I boiled water for pasta and scraped the moldy fur off the pesto sauce without her noticing. We jumped around when something good came on the radio. Stroma climbed up on the table and put her heart and soul into it. Neither of us mentioned the lack of a parent in the room. Neither of us expected a kiss or a smile or a cup of hot chocolate. Neither of us said this is not what other families do every evening. I guess we were used to it by then.
There were two messages from Dad on the answering machine. That was about all he got out of Mum, her recorded “We’re not in right now” voice from months and months ago. It was also the closest he got to parenting during the week because he worked long hours and always forgot to call us when we were actually there. He said things like “Don’t forget to brush your teeth, Stroma” and “I hope you’re studying, Rowan” and “I hope my two best girls are behaving,” and we rolled our eyes and kept on with whatever we were doing. It was pathetic, really.
I remember the day Mum and Dad announced they were going to have another baby. That was when they still liked each other. We were having breakfast. I was trying not to think about them having sex.
Jack said, “Please, I’m eating,” and I sniggered through my cornflakes and we got sent upstairs. Clearly they didn’t see the funny side of getting pregnant at forty.
Jack said, “Do you think they’re replacing us because we’re not cute anymore?” He was sitting on the floor, almost twelve, filling the place up with his legs. He was so big suddenly, I thought, God, maybe they are.
When Jack and I were little, Mum and Dad were always doing stuff with us. Mum would be sitting on the sofa waiting when we got home from school. I thought that’s what she did all day, sat and waited for us. Dad built spaceships and palaces out of cereal packets and egg boxes. She made me spiral jam sandwiches by rolling the bread into tubes and then slicing them up. He made curries so hot our eyes streamed and water tasted like fire.
We felt like the center of the universe, I guess because we were the center of theirs.
With Stroma they were the same. Everything was always covered in icing or sequins or paint. Dad found her a bike at the dump and restored it so it looked brand-new. He took her for a ride every evening when he got in, even when he was dead tired, even if it was just around the block. Mum made her a fairy outfit one Christmas and stayed up until two in the morning hand-stitching pink ribbons onto the wings. They created treasure hunts and dance routines and made gingerbread men. They never stopped. Jack and I called them the kids’ TV presenters, and laughed at their sweatpants and the paint in their hair. We said they should have more self-respect and act their age. We were just jealous because we weren’t the center of things anymore. We were just joking. We were just mean.
The day Stroma was born, when we went in to see her, Mum said it was astonishing how much love there was in the human heart. She said she thought we’d filled it, me and Jack, but here was a whole nother room with Stroma’s name on the door.
They must have lost the key. Because now I was the one who spent hours picking Play-Doh off the sofa and toys off the floor. It was me who discovered the instant healing powers of a Band-Aid and how many peas Stroma would tolerate at any one meal. I did the hugging and the singing and the bedtime stories. It wasn’t Mum or Dad who skipped down the street yelling “We’re going on a Bear Hunt! We’re going to catch a big one!” anymore. It was me.
But I was never as good at it as them. And I didn’t want to be doing it, not all the time, not just because there was no one else, and that must have showed. I wasn’t Mum and Dad, and when Stroma threw a tantrum, you knew it wasn’t just about her bathing suit or the bath mat from her dolls’ house or the brown bit on a banana. It was because everything had caved in on top of her and she’d had enough.
I knew already there was no such thing as a normal family. You might think you’ve got one, but something always happens to prove you wrong. There were kids at school worse off than us, way worse—that’s what I kept telling myself. And I knew my parents were good people. It wasn’t their fault something bad happened to them.
But after Jack died, they protected themselves by refusing to love us, the kids who had dying still to do. And it fell to us to keep ourselves alive until somebody remembered we were there.
Eight
The next day we were sitting in the cafeteria, me and Bee, watching some of the boys from her class have this food fight. She said, “How are they doing that without getting a hair out of place? Is there that much gel in there?”
I laughed and said, “Jack used to have a thing about some of the girls here too.”
“What thing?” she said.
“He used to rant about the taste of lip gloss and the fact they spent all their time looking at themselves in reflective surfaces. He used to make me laugh so hard. I had to promise never to be one of them.”
“Well, you’re not,” Bee said. “And neither am I.” She got up to put her stuff in the bin, and I watched her and so did everyone else. I so wished that Jack was still around to meet Bee. It was like a sudden ache in my side, that never happening. He’d have liked her as much as I did. I wanted to tell her that, but I didn’t know how to say it, so I said nothing.
“What are you up to tonight?” she asked while I was searching in my bag for the homework I couldn’t remember doing.
“Cooking dinner, giving Stroma a bath, putting her to bed, and hiding in my room,” I said, counting things off on my fingers, letting my thumb hang down.
“Why don’t you two stay at mine?” she said. “Carl won’t mind.”
“Yeah, and it would give my mum a break,” I said, trying to make it sound funnier than it was.
Bee said, “What’s the thing with your mum?”
“It’s a ‘she’s never going to get over her son dying’ thing.”
She asked if Mum was sick.
“I don’t know,” I said. “If she was sick, then the medicine would work, I suppose. I think she’s just the saddest person ever.”
“Oh God,” Bee said. “Imagine how she must feel.”
I said she didn’t leave a lot to the imagination. I said she made it pretty clear.
Bee looked at me like she was working something out. “Are you pissed off at her?”
“Not a lot of point in that,” I said. “There’s no one to be pissed off at. She’s not in there.”
After school I phoned Mum on my mobile. She didn’t answer, of course, but I left a message, with Bee’s phone number, just in case she needed anything. I felt funny about leaving her for the night, like she was my kid or something, like she should have a babysitter. I said to call me if she wanted us home, and I almost wished she would, but I knew she’d probably much prefer a quiet night in without us. I knew she’d barely notice we were gone.
I watched Stroma clinging to Bee like glue on the walk home. I hoped Bee wasn’t claustrophobic.
Stroma stopped dead in the street because she didn’t have her teddy or her pajamas. I nearly plowed into the back of her.
Bee said, “You can wear one of my T-shirts.”
“Can I use your toothbrush as well or will that be germs?” Stroma asked. Bee said she thought her toothbrush was safe, but that Sonny’s would be a better fit. Stroma said, “What about my mouth, though?” Bee sniffed her breath and said she thought that was safe too. It was such a relief watching someone else take care of my sister.
Sonny was crying when we got there. We could hear him through the door. As soon as he saw us, he started crying even harder. Carl was looking at Bee like it had
been going on for too long and he didn’t know what to do.
“I’ve got it, Dad,” Bee said. She put her arms out for Sonny and he climbed into them. She took him out through the open front door, down the walkway. His arms were around her neck, fingers laced together through her hair. He was still bawling. Stroma and I were left in the hallway with Carl, who looked like the last thing on earth he needed was two more people in the house. I got this hollow feeling, like staying was going to be a really bad idea and I’d have to start letting Stroma down gently.
“Is it a bad time?” I asked. Stroma groaned, this sort of “Why did you say that?” noise, like it would be all my fault if we couldn’t stay now.
“Oh, he’s in a mood, that’s all,” Carl said, rubbing his ears as if Sonny’s noise had got right in there and wouldn’t come out. “Bee’s good with him when he’s like that. He gets sick of me.”
He asked if we wanted a drink or a snack or something. He said to Stroma, “You’ve been at work all day, you must be pooped,” instantly becoming her funniest person in the world ever.
I watched Bee and Sonny, swaying together. She was talking into his hair, he was playing with hers, still yelling his head off. I wondered where their mum was.
Bee went up and down the walkway for ages and when she came back in, Sonny was asleep on her shoulder. She put him on the sofa without waking him up. Carl said, “Thanks, kid. I was running out of ideas.”
Bee shrugged and said, “Nada, Dad. Glad to be of service.”
Stroma sat with Sonny like she was Florence Nightingale or someone, twitching at his covers, sighing over his cheeks and eyelashes and the rise and fall of his little chest. Acting like he was the cutest thing she ever saw, all the time only four years older than him.
“Has he been all right?” Bee said. “He feels hot.”
“A bit moody; he’s getting a cold.”
I asked if me and Stroma should go. I didn’t want to be any trouble.
“No, don’t,” said Carl. “No, it’s great you’re here. I’ll make some supper before his lordship wakes up. You two do whatever. Come and help me, Stroma. Be my sous-chef.”
Broken Soup Page 4
