West of Nowhere

by KG MacGregor

  “Okay, so I get to ask a question and you have to tell me the truth. No fibbing.”

  “As long as I don’t have to eat a snail or something.”

  “So…where did you really go the last time I came to meet you at the corner? I was waiting for you right where I was supposed to be and saw you coming down the street, but then you turned around and went the other way.” Amber wasn’t absolutely sure about all that, but figured she could force Madison into coming clean if she was forceful enough about her version of events.

  “I was there too but you didn’t see me.”

  “No, you weren’t. And I just ate a nasty old cigarette”—she coughed for effect and made a sour face—“so you have to tell me the truth.”

  Madison walked ahead a few steps and then stopped and turned around. “I walked with Melanie. She lives on that other street and she said I could get home that way. But then I got lost and went the wrong way around the circle.”

  “How did you find your way home?”

  “A crossing guard…she told me how to get to Garfield.”

  That explained why it had taken her an extra fifteen minutes to get home, but not why she’d gone that way in the first place. “How come you didn’t want to walk with me and Skippy?”

  The girl shrugged, likely realizing that an honest answer in this case would show her as not being very nice.

  “Are you going to tell Joy? She’ll be mad at me.”

  “No, but I bet she’d be disappointed because you told her a fib about me not being there to meet you.” To say nothing of the fact that she’d gotten Amber in trouble, which had probably been her sole intent.

  “That’s even worse. I’d rather she be mad at me than disappointed. But you promised not to tell her.”

  Amber had hoped to clear her name, but couldn’t do that without telling Joy. She could, however, leverage it to make Madison behave in the future. “I won’t, but you have to make a promise too—that you won’t ever do anything like that again. Friends don’t get each other in trouble, and we’re pretty good friends now. Right?”

  Madison’s head bobbed up and down in an eager nod. Whether it was a pact of genuine friendship or merely an effort to avoid being ratted out to Joy, Amber didn’t care. All she really wanted was an end to the shenanigans.

  Jason Perini appeared again at the corner on his bike and Amber tugged Madison off the sidewalk, though she’d been tempted to stand her ground, knowing he would have dodged them at the last second rather than risk crashing.

  “You’re a smelly brat!” Madison yelled. “I can’t stand him. I want to make him stop.”

  “Does he bother you at school too?”

  “He bothers everybody. He’s a bully.”

  “Bullies only act tough to make everyone afraid. Sometimes you just have to stand up to kids like Jason and let them know it’s not working. If he realizes you aren’t scared, maybe he’ll leave you alone.”

  “What if he doesn’t?”

  “If it gets to be a big problem, you should tell Joy. She could talk to your teacher about it, and maybe your teacher would talk to Jason’s parents.”

  “But that’s tattling.”

  “Tattling isn’t always a bad thing.” Amber didn’t dare share the fact that she’d kicked the crap out of a bully in sixth grade as her classmates cheered, but she hoped for Madison’s sake that one of Jason’s other victims was brave enough to take him on. “Just try to stand up to him and see if that works. If it doesn’t, we’ll talk it over again and try to think up something else.”

  As they neared the house, Madison asked, “I’m supposed to call Syd today. Can I use Joy’s laptop in the camper?”

  Joy was generous with her computer, so Amber readily agreed. “You can bring it into the dining room if you want.”

  “Grandpa’s TV makes too much noise.”

  She couldn’t argue with that. “Okay. Joy should be home in an hour or so, and your grandpa wants to make spaghetti for supper.”

  “Yum!” Madison tore through the front door and greeted her grandpa and Skippy before disappearing into the camper with her backpack.

  “She’s in a good mood,” Shep said. “Wonder what kind of mood you’re going to be in when you open this?”

  Excitement and dread filled her as she saw the envelope from the testing service. Either she was now a high school graduate or a flunky doomed to suffer through another round of classes before she could retake the test. If it was the latter, she could cross off most of the jobs she’d seen advertised.

  Nervously, she tore open the envelope. Language arts, mathematics, science…only one score mattered. Overall Status: Pass.

  “Woo!” Amber tossed the papers into the air as Skippy ran for cover. “I’m officially a high school graduate.”

  “Atta girl! Let me see.”

  They looked over the results again. As expected, most of her scores were quite high, but she’d barely squeaked by on math. Close didn’t matter.

  “I need to text Joy.” Her hands still shaking, she pounded out the news on her phone. Within seconds, it rang.

  “That’s fantastic! We should go out to dinner to celebrate, just you and me. I’m on my way home now.”

  “Wow, a date with my girlfriend.” Amber would have been just as happy to celebrate her feat with Shep’s spaghetti, but a real date with Joy made it extra special. “Hey, Shep. I’m going to hop into the shower for a few minutes. Will you keep an eye on Madison? She’s out in the camper talking to Syd.”

  “Hope she’s telling her to jump in the lake.”

  Amber headed out to the camper for her toiletries and clothes, eager to share her news but expecting Madison to pout about not being allowed to come along on their date. “I passed my test, and Joy’s taking me out to dinner to celebrate. That means you and your Grandpa Shep get all the spaghetti to yourselves.”

  Clearly startled by her sudden presence, Madison hurriedly covered something in her backpack. There was no laptop on the dinette table to suggest she had been video chatting with Syd.

  Amber’s eyes were drawn immediately to the bed, which was wrinkled from someone having crawled on it. She certainly hadn’t left it that way, and when she moved to straighten it, she saw that Joy’s gun safe had been moved from its usual place on the shelf by her pillow. “Madison, how come you were crawling on the bed?”

  “I wasn’t.”

  A lie. Obviously she’d been fooling around with the gun safe, and Amber wasn’t going to let that go. Kids had no business handling guns, even if they were locked up. “Were you playing with Joy’s lockbox?”

  Madison didn’t answer, which was just as good as a confession as far as Amber was concerned.

  “You shouldn’t go messing in other people’s things.” When Amber slid the case back to where it belonged, she was startled to realize it was unmistakably lighter than usual. She picked it up and shook it—nothing rattling inside. “Oh, my God…did you open this box?”

  Again, no answer.

  “Please tell me you didn’t…” She tugged the backpack from Madison’s grip and looked inside. Sure enough there was Joy’s pistol. The ghastly image of one child being shot by another while others screamed raced through her head. “Oh, my God…oh, my God, Madison!”

  “I was only going to borrow it. I wanted to show it to Jason so he would be scared and leave me alone. That’s what you told me to do. You said I should stand up to him.”

  Overwhelmed with horror, Amber shrieked, “You don’t ever threaten anyone with a gun! You’re a child, for gosh sakes. Joy is going to freak out.”

  “You can’t tell her! She’ll get mad at me and I’ll get grounded.”

  “You deserve to be grounded. I can’t believe you did this! You went into her private things and opened a box that had a lock on it. How did you even…?” With shaking hands, she reached into the backpack, wrapped her palm around the grip and removed the gun.

  Bang!

  “Fuck!” Amber dropped the gu
n on the floor and clutched her thumb, sure it was broken from the recoil.

  In the same instant, Madison screamed and covered her ears, instinctively drawing her feet up onto the bench.

  “Are you okay?”

  Madison nodded rapidly, her eyes wide.

  Suddenly the door flung open and Joy appeared. “What the hell just happened?”

  “I was just—”

  “Amber was showing me your gun and it went off!”

  “Madison!” Amber barked.

  Joy sharply ordered the girl to her room and turned her glare on Amber. “What the hell were you thinking? You could have killed somebody. You had no right to—”

  “No right to what? Take your gun out of her backpack?”

  “How did she get it in the first place? You’re the only one who knew the combination.”

  “Yeah, right,” Amber said, laying on the sarcasm. “No way would such a brilliant child be able to figure out that your secret code is her birthday. She was going to take it to school and scare a bully. You’re lucky I noticed she’d been crawling on the bed.”

  Joy was breathing so fast, Amber thought she might hyperventilate. “What was she even doing out here by herself? You were supposed to be watching her.”

  “You expect me to follow her everywhere she goes? She’s nine years old, for fuck’s sake, not two. Who’s watching her in her room right now?” She didn’t blame Joy for being upset but she wasn’t going to take the fall for Madison, not this time. “I hate to break this to you, but Madison lies, and she sneaks around and goes through people’s stuff. You can’t trust her.”

  “I can’t trust anybody,” Joy yelled. “Why didn’t you just send her inside and wait for me to get home? You don’t know how to handle a gun any better than she does.”

  Amber counted to ten—getting only as far as three—and as evenly as she possibly could, replied, “All I could think about was taking it away from her.”

  “Unbelievable.” She squatted and fingered the hole in the floor. “Of all the irresponsible things you’ve ever done, this one takes the cake.”

  Amber whirled around and grabbed her rain jacket and purse. She’d had enough of this. “Nice to know you’re keeping a list.”

  “I’m not keeping a list. Don’t be such a—”

  “You know what? Just stop telling me what to be. My job was to take care of your father, not your kid. If I’d wanted one of those, I wouldn’t have given mine away.” She pushed past Joy and stormed out the door, unsure of where she was headed. All she wanted was to get away.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  “I want the truth, Madison,” Joy said sternly. She was still shaken from hearing the gunshot as she walked toward the camper.

  “Amber was showing it to me and it went off.”

  “Which one of you took it out of the box?”

  “She did. She was telling me about how I needed to stand up to Jason Perini. He calls me a jungle bunny because I’m half African-American.” Madison jutted out her lip in a blatant play for sympathy. “Amber said I should take it to school and scare him with it.”

  Not a word of that could possibly be true. Even at her most immature, Amber would never have been so reckless as to play with a gun in front of a nine-year-old.

  Joy sighed and moved toward the bedroom door. “This is so disappointing…especially since we had a long talk about lying just a few days ago. I think you need to stay in here and think about it some more. I’ll come back later and maybe you’ll be ready to tell me the truth.”

  She closed the door behind her and walked into the living room where her father muted the TV so they could talk.

  “Did you get anything else out of her?” he asked. He’d heard the commotion earlier and rolled out to the deck just in time to see Amber stomp off.

  “Just one lie after another. Makes me want to call Syd and apologize for all the nasty things I said about her. Madison’s a handful, all right. No wonder Syd wanted a break.”

  “What I don’t get is how the gun went off in the first place. Those damn things don’t just shoot themselves.”

  “I don’t know, Pop. That’s what I got so mad about with Amber. If she didn’t know what she was doing, she had no business picking it up to begin with.” She huffed facetiously to realize they had literally dodged a bullet. “Too bad she didn’t stick around to explain her side. She just left us to clean up the mess.”

  “Can’t say as I blame her for running off,” her pop said. “If you’re sure Madison’s the one who’s lying, then you were pretty hard on her. She’s been knocking herself out to help ever since Madison got here.”

  Maybe so, but she’d made it loud and clear that she wasn’t interested in doing that anymore. That was a deal breaker as far as Joy was concerned.

  * * *

  “Ow!” Amber muttered to herself, gently massaging her swollen thumb after flicking the remains of her cigarette into the damp street. Regardless of what she’d let herself believe about building a life with Joy, their relationship apparently wasn’t deep enough to upset the fairytale version of Madison as a perfect child. The kid had gotten exactly what she wanted—she’d driven a wedge between them and forced Joy to choose sides. From the first day she’d shown up in California, Amber never stood a chance.

  It was probably for the best. Joy had shown her true colors today, a controlling streak that shifted blame wherever she wanted it to fall. At her core, she was still a chief petty officer or a ground crew chief used to giving orders, not all that different from someone like Corey who dictated the terms because he held all the power.

  Whether Joy admitted it or not, she’d done exactly that too.

  As a light sprinkle became a steady drizzle, Amber flagged down the first city bus she saw. It didn’t matter where it was going since she wasn’t headed anywhere in particular. This one happened to be an express to San Francisco, which would take at least an hour at sunset. All the commuters from San Francisco and Oakland seemed to swap sides at the end of the day. At least she was dry and warm for the time being and her bus pass was good for eight more rides, enough to kill a whole evening until she figured out what to do with herself.

  That question wasn’t just rhetorical. Her current situation wasn’t all that different from being dumped at a truck stop in Kentucky with a suitcase, except this time she had more or less dumped herself, the way she usually did when she was fed up with a rude and unreasonable boss. Now she needed not only a job but also somewhere to stay, and it had to be a place that would let her keep Skippy. Or maybe she ought to just leave Skippy with Shep. If she could give up a baby so it would have a better life, surely she could do the same for a dog, especially one that preferred someone else’s lap anyway.

  The practical difficulties of finding a job and a place to live were all that kept her from wallowing in despair. Only hours ago she was soaring on cloud nine, her future taking shape and her heart finally fulfilled with someone as wonderful as Joy. This relationship was supposed to be the one that lasted. If it could fall apart in only minutes over what was clearly an accident, then it had never been real in the first place.

  She got off at the Embarcadero, picked up a couple of newspapers and boarded a bus back across the Bay Bridge, this one heading to Berkeley. There weren’t many job ads for people with virtually no skills or education, but there were lots of apartments for rent, and several people looking for roommates. A couple of those offers were reasonable and included utilities, but she needed that elusive job first.

  There was one live-in caretaker job but when she called the number, it had already been filled. At this point it was doubtful she could depend on Joy for a reference anyway. Though she’d done a good job with Shep, a potential employer would ask if she was responsible, and Joy had made her opinion on that pretty clear.

  In hindsight, it was stupid to reach into a dark backpack and pull out a gun without even knowing whether or not it was loaded and cocked. If only she’d left it in the backpack
and sent Madison inside like Joy said, none of this would have happened. Sadly, good judgment wasn’t her strong suit.

  When she stepped off the bus in Berkeley, one of the first things she noticed was a Help Wanted sign in the window of a Chinese restaurant. Three doors down was a copy shop also asking for help. That’s how she’d found work before, either word-of-mouth or by walking up to the counter and asking for an application. She could do that now…but not here. Berkeley was overrun with students and apartments were expensive. The only places she could afford to live and work were in Oakland or Alameda.

  Boarding her last bus back to Alameda, she congratulated herself on having a plan. Starting tomorrow she would ride through some of the decent neighborhoods in the area and search for Help Wanted signs. With over three thousand dollars in the bank from her work with Shep, she could rent an apartment or room nearby and be totally on her feet within a few days.

  She’d have to pick up a new phone right away, a prepaid one. The battery in this one was all but dead, and besides, it was on Joy’s account. She’d return it when she went back to gather her clothes.

  The idea of seeing Joy’s angry face again brought a rush of tears, and she fought to keep her sweet memories of their weeks together from ripping her heart out. How would she ever be able to trust her feelings again?

  The bus dropped her in front of the library just as Lee Bowman was walking out.

  “Amber! I was wondering if I’d ever see you again. You should be getting your test scores any day.”

  “They came today, in fact. I’m officially a high school graduate.”

  “Congratulations.” Like her, he was wearing a raincoat, but not carrying an umbrella. “How about I buy you a beer to celebrate?”

  Mindful of his flirtatious ways, Amber hesitated before deciding a beer in a nice, warm bar was better than walking around in the rain. Besides, she hadn’t yet figured out where she was going to sleep tonight. If she got up the nerve to go home to Garfield, it would have to be after ten when everyone had gone to bed.