by Susan Lubner
CHAPTER
21
“STOP!” I SCREAMED.
Mom slammed on the brakes in front of the diner, and Smoky’s cage almost slid off my lap. “Oh my goodness, Lizzy, what is it?”
“What is that?” I asked, pointing at the front window of the Thumbs-Up. But I could see what it was. More importantly, who it was.
“What?” my mother repeated.
“Who put that poster there?” I opened the car door, not taking my eyes off the photo of Charlotte staring out from the diner window. Her pale face looked like a small moon shining through the glass.
“Lizzy! What are you doing?”
“I just want to see.”
“Hold on. Let me park the car,” Mom told me. I closed the door, and she pulled into the alley. We stepped out onto the sidewalk.
“When did this get put up?” I asked. I assumed it must have been today when I was at school, because there was no way I would have missed it waiting for the bus.
“Oh, it’s so sad. This young girl ran away.”
“They think she’s here?” I was trying to keep my voice steady.
“She’s from Lewiston. But she took a bus to East Thumb, so they are looking for her here, yes. Her parents, of course, are just devastated. They came to East Thumb to put up posters and hand out flyers.”
“Her parents? Together?”
“Yes. They were in the diner briefly. They came in to ask if it was okay to post the sign. My heart just breaks for them.”
“Maybe she came here by bus, but then she left for someplace else.”
“Well, maybe. I guess they don’t know for sure,” Mom said. “But East Thumb is a starting point. The bus station has security cameras, and the Lewiston police tracked when the ticket was purchased, which was last Friday, almost a week ago. Thankfully, they could get that information,” my mother said.
Cameras?
“I had seen it reported on the news. I sure hope she’s safe.”
“I’m sure she’s safe,” I said.
Mom looked at me and tipped her head to the side. “You’re a positive thinker like me, Lizzy.”
Well, I’m pretty positive about that.
“She’s so lovely. That red hair would be hard not to notice.” Mom stared at the poster.
There was that glassy look in her eyes again. My heart clenched like a fist. It’s weird for a gaze to feel familiar. But it was. I knew it, because I had seen it on my mom before. There was sadness behind it. That wrecking ball–sadness when something is lost. Like a runaway you can’t find. Or a baby that you had been waiting for.
“Guess who is back?” I announced quietly, as I entered my bedroom.
Charlotte peeked out from the closet. “Smoky!” I put him down, and he scampered over to her. Charlotte picked him up. “He’s still so skinny,” she said.
“Of course he is. He had only been found a couple days before he was a lost cat again. Not much to eat inside a wall,” I said.
“Tell me about it,” Charlotte said.
What was that like, being able to relate to a lost cat? Their worlds were strangely similar.
“This is for you.” I handed her half of a saved sandwich.
“Thank you.”
I had started asking her what she wanted for lunch. “As long as it has yellow mustard and pickles on it, I’m good,” she had told me.
While she ate, I noticed she was wearing my clothes. She noticed me noticing.
“I hope you don’t mind. I took a shower today,” she explained. “I couldn’t stand the smell of myself for one day longer.”
“That’s fine,” I said. I was actually relieved. I had noticed her BO a couple of days ago. Joss said it’s a favor to tell someone when they stink so they can fix it. But I didn’t want to be rude. Still, pregnant people have a strong sense of smell. I didn’t want my mom to get a whiff of her and then start sniffing and poking around my closet.
“It was the fastest shower ever. Both your parents were at work.”
I nodded. “Your parents have been here looking for you.”
Her mouth opened. I saw bits of chewed-up sandwich. “Here? In your house?”
“No. Here in East Thumb. And downstairs, too. There’s a giant poster with your face on it in the window of the diner.” I explained about the cameras at the bus station.
“I guess I’m glad they’re looking for me. Together.”
“Of course they would look for you,” I said.
Charlotte’s eyes lit up like shiny stones. “Did they look like they might still like each other?” she asked.
“I didn’t see them. My mom did, though, when they put up the poster.”
Charlotte sighed. “I hope my dad changed his mind about leaving us. Maybe my plan worked. I guess I’ll find out when I go home,” she said.
A tight feeling pulled at the back of my throat.
“If it wasn’t for that fire…,” she said. “What if they never figure out what started it? I guess if that happens, they won’t ever blame me. Except… if the bus station cameras prove that I came to East Thumb… and when the police find out who owns the apartment house… I’d be a suspect. A runaway, a bus ticket to an empty house, a fire…” Charlotte covered her mouth with her hand.
“That won’t happen,” I said.
“How do you know?” she asked.
“I just do. They don’t know you were in the house, anyway. I mean, it’s possible they have cameras at the Portland Public Library, too.”
“So?”
“That’s where Joss and I sent your parents the e-mail from. They could trace it, which they probably would, and connect the dots. Joss and I first sneaking into the apartment that was connected to your mother’s client, and then being at the library at the same time that e-mail was sent? We’d be suspected of something, too.” I hoped not, actually. But I didn’t want Charlotte to worry that she was the only one who could get in trouble. “We are all in this together,” I told her.
“You can’t get in trouble for helping someone,” Charlotte said. We looked at each other as if we wished like crazy that was true. Sneaking into a house to feed a cat was one thing. Hiding a human everyone was looking for was something else. “Don’t worry,” Charlotte continued. “I won’t let you get in trouble. I won’t tell a soul I was ever here.”
“Where will you say you were all this time?” I asked.
“I don’t know. I don’t even know when I’ll be going back at this point. But even if they ever find out I was here, I’ll say everything was my idea. Or that you didn’t know I was hiding in here.”
“I don’t think anyone would fall for that,” I said.
“My parents are lawyers. They would help you for helping me.”
I was thinking they’d want to do just the opposite. Maybe they’d want to put me in jail more than the police. My “helping” was keeping her away from them.
Still, I chose to keep the truth about the fire tucked into a tiny space inside my heart so I couldn’t touch it. I needed to keep it there to protect my own family. Otherwise, Charlotte would leave, and who knows what would happen if she took her good luck with her.
“What if I can’t ever go home?” Charlotte was asking.
The juice heart that Zoe had spilled popped into my head. What had the shape of it tried to tell me? A sign of a misshapen heart… a heart that wasn’t perfect? A defective heart… Joss had called it… was that a heart that hid the truth? Like mine?
“I can’t stay in this closet forever,” Charlotte continued.
“No, you can’t. It won’t be forever.” Then I had an idea. I smiled. “Do you want to take a field trip tonight?”
My alarm beeped at midnight.
“Are you awake?” I whispered out to Charlotte. No answer.
I opened the closet door. Smoky was snuggled up against her, and they were both sound asleep. Maybe I should just forget about my plan. It seemed risky. But then Charlotte had been excited about it when I told her. An
d she deserved to have a little fun.
“Hey. Wake up,” I shook her gently. Charlotte’s eyes opened.
“I’m awake,” she said. “Are we going?”
We put sweatshirts and sweatpants over our pajamas, and then jackets and hats and scarves. I wore my fuzzy slippers, and Charlotte wore her sneakers.
“Let’s go,” I whispered, leading her down the hallway. I grabbed the keys off the hook, and in less than a minute I was unlocking the back door to the diner.
“What are we doing here?” Charlotte asked me as I led her to the kitchen.
“How about a midnight snack?” I asked. I used my phone’s flashlight to make our way to the freezer. “We have chocolate, cookie dough, vanilla… but we’re not sneaking around for just vanilla. You have to have something more exciting than that,” I said. “There’s Moose Tracks and Oreo, too.”
“Wow! I think if I knew all this ice cream was right underneath me I wouldn’t be able to sleep, like, ever!”
“You’d get used to it,” I said. “But it is pretty awesome.”
Charlotte considered each flavor. We had six, mainly because there just wasn’t enough room to stock more. Chocolate, vanilla, strawberry, and cookie dough were permanent flavors. But the other two we switched out from time to time. “Can I have a bit of each?” she asked. “But I’ll skip the vanilla.” She smiled.
“You can have whatever you want,” I told her. I grabbed two to-go cups and handed her one. “Go for it,” I said, handing her the ice-cream scoop. I held my phone with the light on so she could see. Then she held it for me while I scooped at the cookie dough for myself. By the time we finished we were both shivering. I stuck a plastic spoon into the mound of chocolate that topped Charlotte’s mini mountain of flavors.
“I’ve never hung out in a giant freezer before. It’s cool,” Charlotte said.
“Cool!” I said. “Get it?” And we both cracked up laughing.
I rinsed off the ice-cream scoop and the spoon we used for the hot fudge, and put them back in the drawer. I wiped the sink dry. “Can’t leave any evidence.”
“Can I see the rest of the diner?” she asked.
“Of course.” I led Charlotte out from the kitchen, past the griddle, and around the counter. “Be careful, don’t trip over anything. There are stools on the other side.” Even with the moonlight spilling through the windows, and the flashlight from my phone, it was still pretty dark.
“My little brother Ethan would go nuts,” Charlotte said when she saw the half car hanging from the ceiling. “He and my dad love old cars. They go to car shows together.”
“My dad’s not really into cars,” I told her. “He just liked it for the diner.” I shined the light around the room, and Charlotte took in the old Coke and Pepsi signs, and everything else.
“It’s so cute here. When I’m done being a runaway, I’m going to come back and eat here one day.” For the first time, that sounded like Charlotte definitely planned to go back home eventually.
“You sort of are eating here right now,” I pointed out.
“Kind of. But I’ll come back with Molly and Ethan and my mom.” She paused. “Too bad my dad won’t be with us. He really would have liked the car.”
“You can bring him here,” I said.
“No. I don’t want to.” Her voice was angry.
“Hey,” I said. “Let’s eat our ice cream before it melts.”
“Can we sit in one of those amazing booths?”
“No. We better not. We don’t want to chance being seen through a window. I have a better idea, anyway.”
“What?” she asked.
“It’s a surprise.” We exited the diner the same way we had sneaked in, through the back. I locked up. Then we hurried in through the other door and up the stairs to my apartment. We stood outside the door, but instead of going in, I grabbed Charlotte’s hand and pulled her to the left.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
“You’ll see.” We stopped in front of another door. I turned the bolt, unlocking it, and pulled. The hinges creaked. In front of us was an iron staircase. “Almost there,” I said, licking a glob of fudge off my ice cream. At the top, we reached another door. It was the same width as a regular door but about half as tall.
“Watch your head,” I said to Charlotte, ducking.
“What’s up here?” She asked, as we stepped outside onto the roof. The wind leaned into us and I held the door as it closed so it wouldn’t make a loud bang when it shut.
Charlotte looked around. Her eyes sparkled like they were smiling and happy. It probably felt so good to her to finally spend some time outdoors.
“This is awesome,” she said. “Are you allowed up here?”
“We come up here all the time in the summer. My dad calls this place our porch in the sky.” The roof was flat where we stood and covered in small stones. The flat area was about as long and wide as a very large swimming pool and was enclosed by an iron railing. The rest of the roof rose up higher behind us, creating a short wall and a perfect spot for the built-in bench next to the door we had just come through.
“Let’s eat,” I said. We sat with our backs up against the house. Almost immediately I could feel the sting of the cold through my jacket.
“When the weather’s warmer, we bring chairs up here, and Mom plants pots of flowers and tomatoes that we serve at the diner. It’s like a little garden. Really cute.”
“I love it up here,” Charlotte said. “We just have a regular boring porch at my house.”
“No garden?” I asked.
“No. Just a few flowers by the front steps.”
We both shivered. It was cold, especially for eating ice cream, but neither of us cared. We weren’t so high up that we could see very far, but the sky was clear, the stars were bright, and there was a fat orange moon between the branches of the trees.
“I’d come up here all the time if I were you. You’re lucky.”
I was trying to be lucky, I wanted to say. But I didn’t.
Instead, neither of us said much. We were too busy eating. I thought about how Charlotte must have seen my life. My two happily married parents. Unlimited free ice cream. A view of the moon from the rooftop. Just the good stuff. That’s the way I used to see my life, too, before I knew bad things could happen.
On the night of the car accident, I hadn’t paid any attention to the siren I heard earlier that morning. But it had been so loud when the ambulance sped past our apartment, I had to ask Mom to repeat herself.
I said, Mom had repeated in a loud voice, a special night for just the three of us. You choose the movie. She had smiled and run her hand down the side of my face and under my chin. She was feeling good. No more morning sickness, finally.
So later that night we made our way to the movie that we never got to see. I remember the scary sound of the crash. Metal crushing and glass smashing. I saw a police car. Its lights flashing. A blue sky at night. My father’s blue-lit face. And I heard a siren wailing. The exact same sound I had heard earlier that day. An ambulance. But this one took my mother away. And the baby she was carrying inside her.
CHAPTER
22
“HELLLLLLOOOOO… ANYBODY HOME?” CHARLOTTE was asking me. She tapped at my arm, and I pulled my thoughts out of that horrible memory.
“Sorry,” I said.
“What’s wrong?” she asked me.
“Nothing.” I tried to smile, but it wasn’t easy, and Charlotte noticed.
“I can tell something is. What is it? Does it have something to do with why you cried the other morning when you asked for my mom’s e-mail?”
I didn’t answer.
“Well, I guess you don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to, and it seems like you don’t. Not that you don’t know every secret about me. Just saying.” Charlotte looked away.
She was so right. Not only did I know her secrets, but she trusted me enough to keep them.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll tell y
ou.”
She waited while I thought of how to start.
“I was in a really bad car accident once,” I said.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “You’re okay now, right?”
“Most of the time,” I said. “It still hurts, sometimes.”
“What hurts?” she asked me.
I felt the tear run down my cheek.
“Oh,” Charlotte said, and then I told her everything.
It was the first time in a very long time I heard the words about the car accident come out of my mouth. I didn’t like to talk to anyone about that night. Not even Joss. And I hadn’t had to. The whole of East Thumb was talking about it, and Joss had heard about the car crash from everyone else. But it was everything after the crash that had hurt the most.
The night of the accident was in November, two years ago. But sometimes it felt like it could have been yesterday. That night had been cold, like tonight. But it had smelled different. The air had an earthy smell to it, like a garden, after everything’s been picked.
Mom was almost in her sixth month. After so many tries to have a baby and this time, everything was going so well.
Dad was driving. Mom sat next to him.
I was in the back seat behind my father.
The other car must not have seen us.
It smashed into Mom’s side of the car.
Dad and I were okay.
Mom was not.
At the hospital, the doctor said he was very, very sorry. I didn’t know right away it was because of the baby. Dad had to explain what the doctor meant.
Mom came home from the hospital a few days later. She lay in a ball. She didn’t eat. She hardly spoke. And Dad had to pretend that everything would be okay.
“But it took a really long time,” I said to Charlotte. I had stopped crying.
“I am so sorry, Lizzy. That is really awful.”
“I realized the siren I had heard earlier that day must have been a warning.”
“A warning?”
“A sign. But I didn’t think about signs then. So I didn’t know it was trying to warn us not to go out.”
“You think that, really?” Charlotte’s voice didn’t sound like she thought I was weird. “I don’t know anything about signs,” she continued, “but I remember once thinking I should call my grandmother and the phone rang and it was her. My mom called it a coincidence.”
