Lena

by Jacqueline Woodson

  Dion’s chin trembled but she didn’t say anything.

  “Marie say she was gonna talk to her daddy see if we could come live with them but she ain’t called back. I’m gonna try her again, though.”

  “Her daddy ain’t gonna want us,” Dion said. She wiped at her eyes and tried to sit up straighter. I looked around the waiting room and saw a black lady sitting at the guard desk watching us. When she saw me looking, she looked away.

  “I been thinking since this morning about something. Maybe the social worker people ain’t so bad,” I said. “Maybe we turn ourselves in we could get us a nice place to live, like with somebody like Miz Lily.”

  “Ain’t going to no social worker people,” Dion whispered, her voice fierce. When she looked at me, her eyes were narrow as slits and her cheeks were burning red.

  “Where you going then, girlie?” I asked. I wasn’t mad at her for getting mad. Just tired. Tired of everything.

  “Mama’s people!”

  I put my hand over Dion’s. On the cover of the map book there was a picture of the globe, looking all blue and green and promising.

  “Mama’s people ain’t gonna take us in, Dion. I don’t even know where to start searching when we get to Pine Mountain.”

  “We start with the phone book,” Dion said. “Look under her maiden name—Charles.”

  “And we find out everybody in that phone book’s name is Charles. And then we find the Charles relatives that didn’t even come to her funeral or come get us the first time the social work people took us away.”

  Dion’s chin trembled again. After a moment, a tear slipped out of her eye. She snatched one of her hands from underneath mine and wiped it away, real quick without taking her angry eyes off me.

  I looked over at the lady but she wasn’t watching us no more.

  “I ain’t going to no social worker people, Lena Bright. You go, then you go by your own damn self!”

  I didn’t say anything. It’d been a long time since I heard her curse and it sounded loud in the quiet waiting room. Loud and painful as a punch.

  “I’m gonna go try Marie again.”

  Dion nodded and opened the map book again. I walked up to the guard desk.

  “Excuse me, ma’am. Can you tell me where’s the phone?”

  The woman smiled at me and got up. “I’ll show you,” she said, and walked me two feet down the hall, then went back over to her desk and stood there, looking back and forth between me and Dion.

  I got the operator and made a collect call to Marie’s number. It was busy. I smiled. That was a good sign. Maybe she was talking to her daddy about us. Maybe things were happening. I hung up and walked back over to Dion.

  “I’m gonna try again in a while,” I said. “It was busy.”

  When I tried a few minutes later, the phone rang and rang. My hands was trembling when I walked back over to Dion.

  We sat there just sort of looking at each other and looking away. I kept my hand on top of the hand Dion still had on the book. Announcements came over the loudspeaker, people came in and out. All around us the world seemed to be going on about its business.

  Fifteen

  I wish I could say I was surprised to see Miz Lily walking into that waiting room, walking fast toward us with that beautiful head of white curls. My mama used to always say you can’t stop hoping. Even when everything else in the world seemed to be gone, she said that’s the thing you got to hold on to. Hope.

  Me and Dion watched Miz Lily coming fast toward us without moving save for Dion slipping that book of maps back into her bag.

  “I declare,” Miz Lily said, shaking her head. “I knew something wasn’t right about all this. I thought I raised enough kids like y’all to know the signs. But I must be losing my touch.”

  “Our mama’s resting—” Dion began.

  Miz Lily held up her hand. “Y’all don’t have to lie anymore. Nobody sitting in this immediate area is gonna hurt you. That there’s my friend Betty I told you worked here. She’s been keeping an eye on y’all.” Miz Lily waved and the woman sitting at the guard desk waved back and nodded. Miz Lily sat down beside us and put her hand on Dion’s shoulder.

  Dion looked down at her hands and didn’t say anything.

  “Y’all don’t have a mama, do you?” she asked softly.

  I shook my head, feeling myself getting teary again.

  “I figured that when Dion didn’t mention her in her prayers. And what about your daddy? Is he living?”

  “Yeah,” I said hoarsely. “But we don’t know where he is. Last he was in Ohio but he ain’t no more.”

  “And this Marie child I talked to—”

  I jumped. “Marie called?”

  Dion lifted her head, looking wildly from Miz Lily to me, then back again.

  Miz Lily nodded. “Said her father wants y’all to stay with them.”

  I pressed my hand against my leg and pinched, hard. I didn’t want to be dreaming, didn’t want to find myself awake somewhere without this happening. Dion looked down at her hands again but she was grinning, grinning wide.

  “My precious Lord,” Miz Lily said under her breath. “To think you thought I believed your mama was here. I wasn’t gonna let you out of my sight until I had some sure facts. I couldn’t get them with you two hanging around so I asked Betty to keep an eye on you until I had my answers. I wasn’t going to call the police until I checked everything else out. I knew something wasn’t right. Then just as I was about to pick up the phone to call another social service agency, it rang.”

  “We’re sorry, Miz Lily,” Dion said. “We don’t care much for lying, and you being so nice to us and all.”

  Miz Lily looked down at Dion, her face melting. She took Dion’s chin in her hand and stared at her a moment without saying anything. Then she looked over at me and shook her head. “But y’all are just babies.”

  Me and Dion didn’t say anything.

  “Called the four Brights listed around here and none of them knew of y’all so I figured you didn’t have people around here. Called a few agencies and nobody seems to have a record of you. It’s like y’all are spirits. Just appeared.”

  Dion shook her head. “No, ma’am. We real.”

  Miz Lily smiled and ran her hand over Dion’s head. “You sure are, child. . . . Well, come on. I want to go home and call Marie’s father and get this thing straightened out.”

  She went over to speak to Betty, then came back over to us.

  Me and Dion got up and walked in a line behind her right out of that hospital. When we got to the door, Dion turned and looked at me, a big grin eating up her face.

  Sixteen

  Miz Lily and Marie’s daddy talked for more than an hour while me and Dion sat in the living room, leaning forward so that we could hear as much as possible. Seemed Marie’s dad was explaining about Chauncey, about me and Dion too but mostly about the town and such. Miz Lily kept going, “Oh, Lord” and “Oh my” and “A professor, huh? Well, ain’t you something.”

  There was a lot of talk about social work agencies and how Marie’s dad was gonna handle the paperwork and all. Seemed he’d met a bunch of people working in foster care right there in Chauncey. I could hear Miz Lily explaining to him about red tape and them having to contact next of kin and such. “But looks like there’s really no next of kin to worry about. Seems these girls really on their own, don’t it?” she said, her voice dropping down to a whisper.

  Marie’s dad must have been going on and on because Miz Lily had gotten real quiet.

  “I guess this is it, huh, girlie?”

  Dion looked at me and smiled. “I guess so.”

  Neither of us wanted to say it right out loud. Didn’t want to jinx it.

  “Well,” Miz Lily said. “If you wasn’t taking them in, I sure would. They’re good girls, sweet and polite as they could be. But you’re right—get them back to what’s familiar and back to their old school. No doubt they’ll catch right up.”

  Me and Di
on looked at each other again and grinned.

  I could hear them talking over a plane schedule. I bit my lip, trying to hold back my excitement, but Dion was grinning. We had never been on a plane before. Rich people took planes. I felt rich inside, like everything about the world was falling in place and there wasn’t so much empty inside of me anymore. I grabbed Dion’s hand and squeezed it.

  “We going on a plane, Lena,” she whispered.

  “Yeah, girlie. Me and you way up in the air.”

  Dion bounced herself against the back of the sofa. “A plane,” she whispered again. “Me and you up in the air.”

  “What’s the first thing you gonna do when you get . . . get to Chauncey, Lena?”

  I smiled. “I’m gonna hug Marie and then I’m gonna touch all the walls in her house. And then I’m gonna send Larry back his money and tell him we all right.”

  “I’m gonna buy some bubble bath,” Dion said. “And tomorrow morning I’m gonna eat a ham and cheese sandwich for breakfast!”

  It was a two-hour flight back to Columbus where Marie and her dad would pick us up and drive us the hour and a half back to Chauncey. There wasn’t any airport in Bowling Green. Miz Lily would drive us to Nashville and put us on a plane there, she said, and we’d be back to Chauncey by dinnertime. I felt my heart lift up in my chest. The sun was shining through the living room window, making a bright patch on the hardwood floor. I felt like that patch of sun—all bright and warm.

  Dinnertime, I kept thinking. Home by dinnertime.

  Seventeen

  It was near eleven o’clock when Miz Lily got to fixing us some sandwiches and packing up some store-bought cake for us to take. Me and Dion helped, putting food in bags and washing up the breakfast dishes we’d left in the sink that morning. After a few minutes, I had to go upstairs to the bathroom, sit down on the toilet and let myself cry. It was almost over. There wasn’t nothing to be afraid of anymore. Marie’s daddy wasn’t going to let anything happen to me and Dion, and my own daddy was gone. When I tried to get a picture of his face, it was all blurry and far away. Dion would be the one to remember it, to remember the good things about him—the way I was the one to remember them about Mama.

  When I came back downstairs, Miz Lily was still getting us ready for the trip and talking about Marie’s dad.

  “He’s a good man. I can tell by talking to him. All he’s been through trying to find y’all. But if you girls don’t like it, you know you can always come back to my house,” she said, her eyes getting all soft.

  I tried to remember what I could about Marie’s dad. He had never said much to me but he always let us come over on Saturdays to take baths and drink hot chocolate. When he saw Marie and me was getting to be friends, he left us alone. He loved Marie more than anything.

  “Marie told me he was looking all over for us,” I said.

  Miz Lily nodded. “He said he was worried sick—the idea of you two somewhere on the road. Said he wasn’t going to stop looking until he found you, made sure you were safe. Made sure you had a home.”

  I smiled and looked away from her—my throat getting tight. He had been worrying about us. Worried sick. That meant something. Made sure you had a home. He had said that. Once, Marie told me she caught her daddy sitting in the dark crying. He was staring at a picture of her mother. When she turned on the lights, he wiped his eyes real quick and looked away. Another time she said she had asked him about not liking white people and he said it was ’cause white people didn’t like blacks. He’d said none of it’s right, though. I bit my lip remembering something else—that one time Marie had said me and her daddy were alike ’cause we wanted people to just be able to be people. To just be able to live. And now here he was, making sure me and Dion had a home. A safe place to live.

  “I’m going to keep in touch,” Miz Lily was saying. “And you write and tell me how you are. I stuck a card with my address in each of your knapsacks. If you lose it, I’m listed. Lily Price.”

  Dion went over to where she was standing by the counter and hugged her, her hands still dripping with dishwater.

  “You’re good,” Dion whispered.

  Miz Lily smiled. “We all got our skeletons, honey. Next person walking down the street might not think I’m as good as you do. My daughter could probably tell you a hundred stories about why I wasn’t a good mother. I’ve done my share of right and wrong.”

  “You’re good to us,” I said.

  “Then that’s what matters, isn’t it?”

  Me and Dion nodded.

  “Oh my stars,” she said when they pulled away from each other. “Let me go get my camera.”

  She climbed upstairs slowly, then came back down a little while later with a Polaroid and made me and Dion stand out on the porch. We stood with our arms around each other’s shoulders smiling into the bright sunlight.

  “I’m gonna buy a nice frame when I leave work tomorrow and put it right up there on the mantelpiece with my other pictures.”

  We didn’t talk much on the drive to the airport. Dion could barely sit still and I had to bite my lip to stop imagining that plane going up into the air.

  But I was thinking about Chauncey too. Seemed my mind was racing my body to get there. I’d never spent the night at Marie’s house but I still knew every nook and cranny of that place. Some Saturdays we’d just go from room to room, Marie telling me everything she could remember happening there. I’d touch photos and bedspreads and paintings and try to imagine living in a place where I knew the history of it the way Marie did. Now I would be living there with Marie. I closed my eyes for a moment, trying to imagine it. I was already seeing Marie’s grinning face at the airport, her and her daddy standing there. I smiled. It seemed impossible that come Monday, I’d be sitting in Ms. Cory’s history class again. I was gonna work real hard this time. Maybe Marie was right. Maybe I could go to college if I wanted.

  Dion took my hand. When I looked over at her, she was smiling. I squeezed her hand real hard, then leaned back against the seat and stared out at Kentucky.

  Eighteen

  When we climbed out of the car, Miz Lily looked kind of teary-eyed and so did Dion. We walked to the airport all hugged up, Miz Lily’s arm soft and warm against my shoulder.

  Dion would probably be writing her every other day or so. Dion get attached to a person, she holds on.

  “Y’all know to call me the minute you step off that plane, right?”

  “Planes scary, Miz Lily?” Dion asked. We were getting close to the ticket place and she started walking slower.

  “Shoot, no.” Miz Lily smiled. “About the most exciting ride there is.”

  I wrapped my arm tighter around Miz Lily’s waist. Maybe she’d never been in a car going ninety down a dark highway or sitting high up in a truck trying to take a narrow turn. Me and Dion had. We’d seen the inside of more vehicles than we’d ever want to again. Maybe a plane was exciting but I was ready for all my riding to end.

  Miz Lily had made special arrangements with the stewardess ladies on the plane. We were to sit right up front where they could keep a watch on us and Marie’s dad was going to have to show identification before we could leave with him.

  There weren’t many people waiting for the plane. I tried to give Miz Lily the money she’d given us that morning but she shook her head. “You hold on to that. Buy you and Dion something nice when y’all get back to Chauncey.” She hugged me and Dion again, handed us our tickets and walked with us into the plane. Dion walked carefully, touching the backs of the seats and looking all around her. The stewardess lady was standing right up front. She smiled at us, then talked to Miz Lily while me and Dion put our knapsacks under the seats in front of us and sat down.

  “You-all call me when you get to the airport, you hear?” Miz Lily said. “Make sure you call me the minute you get there.”

  Me and Dion nodded. Miz Lily gave us another kiss.

  “Miz Lily,” I said. “I really appreciate everything—”

 
; “Hush, child.” She waved her hand at me and smiled. “I should be thanking y’all for giving me some time away from that job of mine. Put your seat belts on.”

  We buckled our seat belts while she stood watching us. Dion threw her a kiss. Miz Lily made as if to catch it and put it in her purse, then headed slowly down the aisle. I watched her make her way out of the plane, my eyes filling up.

  “You think we’ll ever see Miz Lily again, Lena?” Dion asked. She reached up over her head and turned the light off and on a couple of times, then put her hands on her lap and looked at me.

  Seemed like someone was always leaving someone, like that’s the way the world worked—people were born and people died, people left and people came. It was like the world was saying you can’t have everything you want at the same time.

  “I reckon we’ll see her again,” I said. “And you know something, girlie? Even if we don’t, we had a chance to make a good friend.”

  “And to eat some grits!” Dion said.

  I laughed.

  Dion frowned, thinking. “It’s okay to miss her, huh? And to talk about her from time to time?”

  When I nodded, Dion smiled, then took out her book of poetry and started reading. She’d be all right, that Dion would. And me? Maybe I’d be all right too.

  Outside, the sun was hanging pretty over some mountains in the distance. I watched the pink and gold light spread itself over the green for a while, making a promise to myself to write about it one day. All of it. The stuff I’d written down in the book Marie gave me and the stuff I’d left out too. I wanted to remember it. And I wanted Dion to remember too. Mama told me once that if you remember all the places you been in your life, you’ll have a better sense of where you’re going. I pressed my shoulder against Dion’s and smiled. I had a real good sense of where we were going.