SW01 - The Edge of Nowhere

by Elizabeth George

  She directed her attention away from Debbie and onto the kitchen table. It was a mass of magazines, newspapers, and coloring books. It held a Lego set being built into the Millennium Falcon, as well as a pile of those connect-the-numbers kids’ games that she’d liked so well when she was little.

  When the hot dogs were done, Debbie dumped the water from the pan. She used a yardstick to shove everything on the table as far to the wall as she could, and she handed over a dog in its bun along with a couple of paper towels that Becca saw were intended to be their plates and napkins. Debbie loaded her dog with the works: mayo, mustard, ketchup, onions, pickles, relish, cheese, and cold chili. She even threw on some green olives with pimentos. Becca used only mustard, wondering how Debbie was going to fit her hot dog into her mouth.

  It didn’t turn out to be a problem as Debbie was a master in the eating of hot dogs. She could also chew and talk at the same time, and she was able to do this without showing the chewed-up food in her mouth, which took some skill. She said, “Here’s what we’re going to do, Becca. We’ll barter till your mom gets here. It’s a good thing to learn, anyway, if you and she are going to spend any time on Whidbey.”

  “Okay,” Becca said slowly. She wasn’t sure what Debbie was talking about, but she found out soon enough.

  “You can stay here at the motel in exchange for doing some work for me. I’ll pay you a bit, too, to keep things completely fair. The place needs some attention, and I can use your help. I’d also want you to babysit the kids now and then. Mostly Chloe, because Josh’s just signed on with a Big Brother from the high school. Think it’ll work?”

  Becca nodded. “I’m pretty good at stuff. Like painting and things. And I can clean good. And I babysat all the time where I’m from.”

  “Deal then.” Debbie held out her hand for a shake. She said, “We can renegotiate things when your mom gets here,” but she added this in a way that told Becca Debbie had concluded for some reason that Laurel probably wasn’t going to show up anytime soon.

  When they’d finished their lunch, Debbie pushed away from the table, lit a cigarette, and told Becca she would show her her room. “Let’s grab your stuff from the car,” she said. “It’ll give you a chance to settle in before I get the kids. They’ll want to meet you.”

  They went back through the office, where Debbie took a key from a holder shaped like an enormous fern frond. Nine other keys were hanging there, each of them on a completely different fob. The one Debbie held was numbered 444 as if the motel was a huge Las Vegas resort or something, and its fob was Las Vegas as well: a slot machine the size of a checkbook. As they went back outside, Debbie explained that her father had collected the key fobs during the old days when hotels and motels actually had keys and he had traveled for Boeing. He had a whole box of them as souvenirs, and when he built the motel, he decided to use a few. They had nothing to do with the order of the rooms, but what the heck. Since there were only ten, what difference did it make, huh?

  Becca saw what she meant when they walked along the line of rooms that were numbered haphazardly to match the stolen fobs. Room 444 was third along the way, and its door was warped and tough to open. Debbie had to use a shoulder on it.

  Becca saw that the room was very clean, which encouraged her to think well of the place. It was also very old and very simple, but for a girl who’d spent her first night on Whidbey Island inside a doghouse, it looked celestial. There were twin beds with a table and lamp between them, a dresser with a kneehole in it to tell people it could also be used as a desk, a straight-back chair, a clock, a television without a remote, and some paint-by-numbers art hanging on the walls.

  The bathroom was what Becca wanted, though. She was used to bathing daily and washing her hair as often, and what she desired more than anything was a long soak in the tub. The towels, she saw, weren’t thick like those she was used to, but they were clean and white.

  Behind her, Debbie said, “We need to talk about the rules. There’s only two. No boys for overnighters and no using. Okay?”

  Becca could see that her agreement was going to be crucial to Debbie. She nodded and said, “I don’t know anyone for an overnighter, and I don’t use. You mean, drugs? I don’t use drugs.” Drugs were the last thing she would ever use, Becca thought. She had enough trouble with the whispers when she was perfectly straight. God only knew what would happen if she were ever stoned or lit up with something.

  “Drugs, yeah,” Debbie said. “But I mean drinking too. Especially drinking. Above all, drinking. I know how kids are and I know it’s tough to say no. But you got to promise me or we can’t do business. We can’t do business if you lie to me, either. About anything. And I’ll know if you lie. I always do.”

  “I promise,” Becca said. “No drinking, no drugs, no over-nighters, no lies.”

  Then she brought up an issue that she knew was going to be a delicate one, especially considering what Debbie had just said to her about lying. She said, “I have to go to school, though. Mom’s going to take me when she gets here but I’m sort of worried ’cause it’s my first year, and I’m already a couple weeks late. I’m worried I’ll fall behind if Mom doesn’t show up fast.” This was three-quarters the truth and one-quarter a lie, and Becca supposed it was a good way to see if Debbie really could tell when someone lied to her.

  Debbie looked at her long and hard. Becca heard Reese . . . try to find . . . dear sweet baby . . . in a whisper that got choked off the way whispers did when they hurt. Still, one sharp needle from them flew into the air and landed somewhere near Becca’s heart and although Becca didn’t know it, it was her flinching from the pain of that needle that helped Debbie make her decision.

  She said, “I’ll get you into school. No trouble. Do you have anything with you? Transcripts or something?”

  “I’ve got my records from middle school. But that’s all. I mean, I don’t have any other records, like a birth certificate or shots or anything.”

  “Good enough,” Debbie said. “Nothing about school will be a problem.”

  There was a sudden firmness to her voice that was different from the firmness with which she’d spoken about lying. It felt hard like a boulder. It felt smooth and unmoving like marble. This made Becca ask, “It won’t? Why not?” without thinking about her questions much.

  Debbie smiled but it wasn’t a smile about anything other than vindication. She said, “Why won’t it be a problem, you mean? Because a few years ago, the registrar at the high school killed my daughter.”

  DEBBIE SAID NOTHING more on that subject, and when she left Becca alone in room 444, Becca was too intent upon having a bath to think very much about it. This bath was a real pleasure to her, and washing her hair in the shower afterward was practically ecstasy. When she was finished, she wiped the steam from the mirror and thought long and hard about Laurel’s instructions to her.

  “Makeup. Lots of makeup, sweetheart. Particularly eye makeup. The point isn’t to make yourself gorgeous, and I’m sorry about that. The point is to make sure Jeff Corrie wouldn’t know you if you served him a cup of coffee somewhere.”

  Becca didn’t want to, though. What teenage girl anywhere wants to make herself deliberately hideous? But the point wasn’t to capture some errant Prince Charming, and Becca did know this. She sighed and set about making herself into goth-meets-Dumpster. At least she wouldn’t smell bad, she thought.

  She was just finishing when she heard laughing and a little boy’s shouts of fun and excitement coming from outside her bathroom window. “No fair! You kicked it way too hard!” he cried as another boy—a deeper voice this time—laughed and said, “Bro, if you can’t block that one, you are hurrrr-ting.”

  This had to be the grandson, Josh, Becca concluded, playing soccer with his Big Brother in the vacant lot next door. She flicked the window curtain back to see if she was correct. When she saw who was out there, though, she drew in a sharp breath. It was like they were fated, she thought. For the Big Brother was the boy from t
he ferry, the boy from the sheriff’s car outside of Carol Quinn’s house.

  She dropped the curtain hastily. As she did so, a knock sounded on the door to her room.

  “Becca?” Debbie Grieder shouted. “You in there, chick? Come here and meet my Chloe.”

  Becca had no choice. It was, after all, part of the deal. She only hoped she could avoid seeing the dark-skinned boy another time, although she couldn’t have exactly said why she was so reluctant to be in his presence again.

  Outside her room, Debbie was waiting with a little girl who was clutching her hand. She had enormous eyes the color of cornflowers. She was wearing overalls and bright pink rubber boots that matched the color of her Hello Kitty T-shirt.

  “This’s Chloe,” Debbie said. “An’, Chloe, this is our new friend Becca.”

  Chloe’s mouth was an O. Becca couldn’t blame her. Only facial tattoos would have made her look worse than the makeup did. Becca said to her, “Hey, there, Chloe. D’you like Barbie or Bratz?”

  Chloe grinned and cried, “Barbie!”

  “Me too,” Becca said. “Only I don’t have any Barbies with me. What about you?”

  “Oh, I got lots of Barbies.”

  “Could I visit them?”

  Chloe looked at her grandmother. “Grammer . . . she could look at them, huh? But they got to stay in my room. C’n we take her to my room to see ’em?”

  “Sounds good to me,” Debbie said. “But first she’s got to meet Josh, okay?”

  Becca smiled but gritted her teeth behind her closed lips. No way to avoid it, it seemed. She was going to come face-to-face with the handsome black boy again.

  She followed Debbie to the back of the motel, where in the vacant lot a maple tree showed leaves edged in crimson and wild green grass grew in profusion up to a bluff. This was thick with blackberries and with ocean spray bushes, purple fruit on one, creamy flowers on the other. In this area, the two boys were kicking a soccer ball, the taller boy laughing as he danced the ball gracefully toward a makeshift goal. The smaller boy was clinging to his waist and shouting, “Hey, no fair! You stole it from me!”

  The dark boy tripped. Both boys stumbled. They fell onto the grass and laughed up at the sky.

  “Hey, you guys,” Debbie called out. “Come meet Becca King.”

  The older boy was the first to get up. He did so, still laughing, and he scooped the little boy under his arm like a football. He called out, “Ready to charge for a touchdown!” and his companion squealed till he set him down again.

  He turned then. Becca steeled herself for whatever might happen. His eyes met hers, as dark as the nighttime of his skin. And there it was again. Something passed between them as one random thought struck another.

  . . . if someone could only . . . rejoice . . .

  Then the boy crossed the lawn. He said, “Happenin’, Chloe?” and touched the little girl’s head softly. Then he said to Becca, “I’m Derric. You just move to Whidbey?” as if he’d never seen her before this moment.

  “Did,” Becca said, and felt like a fool. One word was all she could manage in reply?

  He smiled. He had the whitest teeth Becca had ever seen. His skin was so smooth it looked painted on. Standing before him, Becca wanted to wipe the hideous makeup from her face. She wanted to lose twenty pounds. She wanted to say, “I’m actually strawberry blonde.” She also wanted to kick herself for wanting all this. How lame was she? she asked herself.

  Derric said, “I think maybe I saw you coming over on the ferry?”

  “I think I saw you too,” Becca replied.

  “Well,” Debbie said, “that’s as good as married on Whidbey Island. Come on then, troops. Let’s have a snack.”

  The word snack set Josh’s and Chloe’s feet in motion. Chloe yelled, “Popcorn!” Josh yelled, “S’mores!” and both of them tore toward the front of the motel. Their grandmother followed.

  Derric and Becca brought up the rear. Derric walked at Becca’s side. He was very tall. He was like a dancer when he moved.

  He said quietly, “I saw you at Carol Quinn’s last night. That was you, right?”

  She ventured a quick glance his way. “Yeah. Why did you tell me to go?”

  He was quiet for a moment. She glanced at him. He met her gaze and she saw him swallow. “I completely don’t know,” he replied.

  * * *

  SEVEN

  Becca was ready for school more than an hour before she needed to leave. She’d washed her dog-scented clothes in the bathtub on the previous night, but because of the cold and the damp, they were still hanging wetly over the shower curtain rod when Debbie knocked on her door. Debbie saw them and said, “You don’t need to wash your own clothes, darlin’. I c’n throw them in with ours.”

  Becca said, “Gosh. That wouldn’t be right,” because she had a feeling Chloe and Josh generated lots of laundry, especially Josh since during their snack the previous day he’d asked her if she wanted to slide down the bluff with him and Derric and look for dead crabs at the edge of the water. Debbie had mouthed “There aren’t any” in case Becca was worried about having to pick them up. Becca had said sure to Josh and the little boy had looked delighted. Still, it didn’t seem fair to throw her laundry in with theirs, no matter how much she played with the kids.

  Debbie said, “Well, if you feel that way,” and Becca could tell she’d hurt her feelings somehow although she couldn’t quite figure out why. Debbie went on with, “There’s a Laundromat. It’s way the heck up hill, though, at the top of Second Street, almost out of town.”

  “That’s okay. I need the exercise,” Becca said.

  “Whatever you want.” Debbie stepped back out of room 444 and lit a cigarette. Becca knew she was doing so in order not to feel something, and she wondered if it had to do with Debbie’s daughter. She couldn’t have said exactly why this might be the case other than having caught a glimpse of a single picture of a teenage girl among the others hanging on Debbie’s wall. She looked the same age as Becca herself.

  Josh and Chloe were outside in Debbie’s SUV. They would be dropped off first, since their school was on the way to Becca’s. Both of the schools sat on Maxwelton Road, which was not far from the Cliff Motel, and getting there involved a ride down a twisting road that was sided with forest: huge Douglas firs creating deep pockets of shadows that were crammed with ferns and shiny with the glistening leaves of salal.

  As they passed a narrow driveway that disappeared into the undergrowth, Josh informed Becca that a white deer roamed the woods around here. Only the luckiest people ever saw it, he proclaimed. It was there in a flash and gone in a flash and if you saw it, it meant a Big Change was coming to your life.

  Becca looked at Debbie. Debbie said to Josh, “‘You just keep thinking, Butch, that’s what you’re good at,’” and she rolled her eyes, telling Becca he was making things up. Becca liked this about him although what she couldn’t tell was whether he was making up the part about change coming to your life or the part about the white deer.

  When the kids got dropped, Debbie waited till they’d disappeared into the front doors of the school. Then she waited some more as if worried they’d run off the minute she drove away. But her expression said more than worry was involved and Becca knew there’d be whispers coming off Debbie, which she would have heard had she not had the AUD box chugging away in her ear.

  It was time, anyway, to mention the AUD box because from Becca’s experience, she knew that earphones and schools didn’t mix without an explanation. She was ready with one, and she gave it as Debbie drove out of the parking lot.

  She had an auditory processing problem, she told Debbie, using the same lingo she’d heard Laurel use so many times to one school official or another. It had to do with eliminating secondary ambient sounds so that she could focus on one main sound. That was why she wore this device (here she showed it clipped onto her jeans, along with her earphone). She didn’t want anyone to think she was listening to music or something like that.


  Debbie glanced over at her, giving Becca one of those looks that said she was evaluating the truth quotient in Becca’s words. She said, “Auditory processing problem, huh?”

  “I can’t always tell where I should pay attention,” Becca told her. “This thing helps. It’s called an AUD box. A-U-D, not o-d-d. It masks the noise I’m not supposed to listen to.”

  Debbie nodded, her gaze back on the road. “AUD box,” she said. “We’ll make sure they know about it.”

  When they pulled into the parking lot of South Whidbey High School, classes were already in session. Debbie jerked the truck to a stop in a stall marked ADMIN ONLY and led Becca toward the school building. This resembled a bent shoe box with a brick extension tacked onto it. It was into the brick extension that Debbie took Becca.

  To their left stood a birch desk. Behind it a student was doing service as a receptionist, and Debbie strode over to her and announced, “We need to see Ms. Ward, Hayley.”

  Hayley said, “Ms. Ward?” with a glance at Becca. She shot her a smile, said, “Hi,” and then added, “Let me get her, Mrs. Grieder,” and she took off down a hall.

  Becca watched her. She turned the AUD box way low and glanced at Debbie because Debbie seemed like an entirely different person inside this school, like someone getting ready for a battle. But instead of taking a weapon out of her jacket pocket, Debbie said firmly, “Give me those transcripts, darlin’.”

  Becca had the transcripts in her backpack. She rustled for them and brought them out, slightly crumpled and definitely unofficial but the best thing Laurel had managed to come up with considering the time she had, always receiving reassurance from Carol Quinn that she would manage the rest when Becca arrived.

  Debbie gave the transcripts a glance, then tossed a look at Becca. Hayley was coming toward them down the hall, a rabbity-looking woman following close behind her.