Carry Me Home

by Janet Fox

  “That’s right,” Mama said. “Just until I get better.” She sighed and said, “Your aunt Ruth isn’t great with little ones.” Then, unexpectedly, she started to laugh.

  Lulu’s head bounced as Mama laughed, and Mama’s laughter was so rare right now that Lulu sat up and started to laugh, too. They both knew Aunt Ruth was, as Mama liked to say pretty often, “a tough old nut.” But she was the only relative they had, and she lived right down the street, so she’d done a lot of babysitting for Lulu and Serena.

  Still.

  “She’s a tough old nut,” Lulu said, and her mama laughed harder, which made Lulu’s heart sing, then Mama placed her hand on her chest and inhaled sharp and settled down. Lulu didn’t want to make her laugh again.

  “That’s enough, now,” Mama said. “I’m going to take a nap.” And she closed her eyes.

  “I’ll take care of Reenie, Mama, until you’re all better,” Lulu whispered. “You don’t have to worry.”

  And Lulu had taken care, hadn’t she, even after. Standing up to her tough old nut Aunt Ruth when standing up was needed.

  43 Now

  HALFWAY THROUGH Friday rehearsal, Lulu lost all track of time.

  She and Jack were rehearsing a short scene where the characters meet for the first time and show one another their instruments. Lulu had to pretend to play the electric guitar, so Mr. Franzen showed her a few tricks to make it look real, and when she got the hang of it she threw herself into the scene.

  Just like before, the whole world slipped away and it was just Lulu and Jack, and they sang and pretended to play their instruments (his was a horn). Lulu loved the music and loved how her voice felt and sounded, and loved the way she and Jack played off one another, and loved the “Okay! That was great, you two!” from Mr. Franzen, and loved loved loved the applause from the kids who were waiting for their turns.

  Yes, acting was the best thing that had happened to Lulu in a long long while.

  By the time they’d run through it a bunch, and Mr. Franzen wanted to move on to some of the other actors, it was almost six.

  “Oh, my gosh,” Lulu said. “I’ve got to go!” She snapped up her puffy coat, grabbed her backpack, and flew to the back of the gym.

  “Okay,” Jack called after her as she ran. “See you Tues—”

  The gym door slammed behind her.

  She ran all the way to the elementary, her coat unzipped, the wind snapping her hair across her face.

  When she got there, there was no Laurie. No Serena. No anybody.

  Lulu ran from door to door all the way around the school, but every door was locked. Even the night watchman didn’t make an appearance. Lulu ran around to the front of the school again, and there, way up the street, her back to Lulu, was Laurie, walking away fast, walking toward her own home.

  Alone. In a serious hurry.

  “Laurie!” Lulu cried. “Laurie!”

  Laurie turned, waiting, and even from this distance Lulu could see that Laurie’s face was dark and her mouth was working.

  When Lulu caught up with her, panting hard, Laurie said, “I told you. I told you there would be consequences. I told you.”

  “Where’s Serena?” Lulu said, her voice trembling. “Where?”

  “I know something’s not right. Your dad hasn’t been around. I don’t know where you live, but something’s not right. Your sister’s sick and needs a doctor.”

  “Where?”

  “I’m responsible,” Laurie said, and tears formed in her eyes, her cheeks two spots of red. “I couldn’t keep playing this game you’ve got going. Which I don’t know what it’s about. I just know you’ve been lying.”

  Lulu was frozen, rigid, sick. She would throw up right there.

  “Look, Lulu. If you need help, I can find you help. But hiding whatever is going on, it’s not the way to handle it, not when your sister needs medical attention. Not when you don’t show up.”

  The words rang in Lulu’s brain like a bell. “Where?” Lulu whispered.

  “I called social services. They came and picked her up.”

  Lulu took a step away. “No,” she said. “No, no, no, no.” She really would throw up.

  “They said they were taking her to the doctor. She has a fever, Lulu. She was upset when you didn’t show up. She was upset about the whole thing. She was…” Laurie sniffed as tears rolled down her red cheeks.

  “Of course she’s upset,” Lulu shouted, anger, fear, and horror all bundled together. “She needs to be with me. She’s supposed to be with me!”

  Laurie took a step toward Lulu. Lulu took a step back. “I want to help,” Laurie said, sounding like her heart would break.

  Lulu shook her head violently. “You don’t understand. You don’t. You didn’t help. You made everything worse!” Then she turned and ran, ran for the Suburban.

  Laurie called out, her voice fading as Lulu ran.

  Social services. Sent to social services. Her Serena. Her sister. How would Lulu find Serena?

  Lulu had not shown up. She had not stood up or stepped in and now Serena was gone.

  “No, no, no,” was the only solid thing in Lulu’s brain all the way back to the RV park.

  44

  WHEN LULU turned the corner right before the RV park, what she saw made her skid to a stop and slide fast behind the nearest big cottonwood tree.

  There was Mrs. Rogers, gesticulating wildly, her hair flying about like it had just exploded out of those curlers. There was a police car, and a policeman and police lady, side by side, taking notes and listening. There was a man Lulu recognized as the man from her daddy’s job site, Hank, the construction boss who had given her Daddy’s tool bag. And there was the Suburban, not where it should be, not parked in the back, in the trees, but hinged up on a hook, like a fish on a line, like the fish Daddy had caught and then released because Serena had begged him to. The Suburban was held up by the tow truck whose lights blinked red, red, and went around and around while the tow truck driver worked to secure the Suburban in place.

  The tow truck driver was not going to release the Suburban. He was going to have it for supper, as if it was a not-released fish.

  The front window of the Suburban was filled with the colorful paper cranes but now they were sliding, one by one and then all at once as the tow truck driver hitched the car up and up; the cranes slid off the dash and into the darkness within. Lulu’s paper cranes.

  Now the number of “noes” that filled Lulu’s brain was countless. It might have been millions of “noes.”

  Then, without warning, Lulu couldn’t breathe. She really couldn’t breathe. She turned her back against the cottonwood tree and tried to suck in air but it was as if all the air in the world had been pulled away into the stratosphere, as if oxygen didn’t exist, as if she was an alien or on another planet that didn’t have oxygen in its atmosphere. Lulu closed her eyes and kept trying to breathe, but it only came faster and faster, shallow breaths, which only made things worse.

  Her heart pounded in her ears, and a darkness filled her brain, pushing out the “noes” and everything else, and the darkness said, “You’re dying.”

  This had happened to Lulu once before, in the hospital, when she hadn’t been able to breathe, when Lulu’s breath got stuck, and then when it stopped altogether not long after her mama had said those words in the beeping darkness, not long after when Lulu knew her mama was gone.

  Look at all those wings.

  If Lulu died now, she’d never find Serena. She’d never find her daddy. She’d never wear a pair of boots or act as a character onstage or ever sing again. She’d never see Jack again or Ms. M and she wouldn’t finish her story with Deana. She’d never live in a real house again.

  Lulu clenched her fists and tried really really hard to stop breathing fast. And that helped. She sank down to sit on the ground and breathed more slowly and that helped even more.

  And the thing that finally helped the most was forcing herself to think of the words to a song.r />
  Comin’ for to carry me home.

  When Lulu was finally able to open her eyes and peek around the tree trunk, it was nearly dark. The Suburban and the tow truck were gone. Hank from the job site was gone. Only Mrs. Rogers and the police were left, and the police looked like they were getting ready to leave, while Mrs. Rogers ranted on, reminding Lulu of angry Aunt Ruth.

  Maybe Lulu should stand up, and walk around the tree toward them all and say, “Hi. I’m Lulu Johnson. Are you looking for me?”

  But if she did, it would be the real end. She would be sent away, maybe to Aunt Ruth or maybe not. She might be with Serena or she might not. She might be here in this small and cold but pretty darn nice Montana town that she’d come to like a lot, with a handful of people she’d come to like a lot—or she might not.

  She might have her wishes come true, or she might not.

  Lulu knew things she’d never really known she knew, but there they were, plain as day.

  Her daddy had run away that first time for the month when he’d left the girls with Aunt Ruth—and later, he had run away from Texas with Lulu and Serena if truth be told—because if he’d been caught with all those unpaid bills for Mama’s care, and caught with all the other stuff that he hadn’t tended to when Mama got sick, caught with the things he neglected and dropped because it was all too much trying to care for himself and Lulu and Serena and all the stuff—he had run away because if he hadn’t run away, he might have been sent to jail.

  Yes, he’d also run away because of his sadness, but it was his sadness that had made it impossible for him to stand up and do the right thing, and when people didn’t do the right legal thing, they could be sent to jail.

  Then they might have been a family, or they might not.

  None of this was Lulu’s fault, that was true, but she’d seen enough of life to know that adults often don’t listen to kids and often do things that makes kids sad, like separating sisters from sisters and parents from children.

  No, if she went to the police right there, she might be okay—or she might not.

  Breathe in, said Lulu’s brain. You can’t find Serena or your daddy if you die.

  Lulu was wearing her warm puffy coat, and she had her backpack. She stepped away from the tree, stepped into the deeper shadows of the cottonwood trees. She had to find a safe place to be.

  First for the night.

  Then—and only when she found Serena and her daddy—for forever.

  45

  LULU WALKED up the darkening street. It was Friday night of a holiday weekend. The Main Street of town was lively with people out, even with the cold, because the restaurants and bars were open and the movie theater was playing the latest release.

  Lulu did not want to be where there were lots of people, some of whom might recognize her from school, from the laundromat, from the food bank, from the Lutheran church.

  Her feet led her on a familiar path down a side street away from the bustle, and before she knew where she was, she was standing in front of the public library.

  It was closed, of course. She stood outside staring at it, as if she willed some angel to come winging in to open the doors.

  And then, to her everlasting amazement, an angel did appear. Two, in fact. But they didn’t wing. Two women pulled into the back parking lot of the library in a rattly old Ford pickup.

  Lulu moved around the side of the library, keeping to the shadows.

  The two women, housekeepers, Lulu thought, were chattering away as they got out of the truck. One of them had a big ring of keys and she unlocked the back door of the library, and they went inside.

  The women did not lock the door behind them and it was an old-fashioned kind of door that didn’t lock by itself.

  Lulu slipped along the wall to the door, and watched as lights went on in the hallway inside, and then down at the end of the hallway. When she thought the housekeepers were busy collecting their equipment and getting down to business, Lulu opened the door and squeezed inside, closing the door softly behind.

  She tiptoed down the hallway in the opposite direction of the lights. The two women continued to chatter as they worked, dusting, vacuuming, cleaning the bathrooms and the staff room, and they made enough noise that Lulu was pretty sure they wouldn’t hear her even if she did step on a squeaky board.

  Lulu had spent enough time in this old library building to know stuff about it. Like she knew there was a tower that was off-limits to the public, but that could be reached by a stair. Ms. M had shown Lulu the tower one summer Saturday, mainly because she needed to find something up there and Lulu had begged to go with her.

  “This is one of the old Carnegie libraries,” Ms. M said. “When they built it, they put in this tower with a bell, in case they needed to rally the town to some disaster, like a fire. I’ve been told that they rang the bell for the last time at the end of World War One, but of course that was in celebration. The bell is gone but you can see a lot of the town from up here.”

  There were windows on all four sides of the bell tower that used to be open because of the bell, but glass had been installed “to keep the birds and bats out. Otherwise we’d have a real mess in here.” Lulu had walked from window to window while Ms. M found what she wanted, the windows looking out over the town, toward the mountains on one side and the river on the other.

  Now, in the darkness, Lulu found the door to the tower, slipped inside, slid underneath the chain and the dangling NO ADMITTANCE sign, and climbed to the top. In the tower room there was enough ambient light that she could see.

  The small tower room was used for storage of all kinds. There were boxes of brochures advertising the library, a stack of two weeks’ worth of newspapers for recycling, posters for special events. There were even a few cartons of books—books that would go in the annual library sale. The floor was wood and creaky-old, so she had to be careful, even if the cleaning women made noise but just in case they got quiet. Though it was a bit musty and almost every surface was hard, it was dry and warm—warm from the heat that rose up the stairwell—and safe, for now.

  Lulu found a spot where she could sit with her back against some old stacked shelving. That was when it hit.

  Fear. Loss. Helplessness. A terrible, aching loneliness. And a sharp hunger pang that came out of nowhere now that she was safe.

  Lulu could do almost nothing about the first four things, but she could deal with the last, so for the moment she buried those four dark things and dealt with her suddenly demanding stomach.

  She dug around inside her backpack and found a squished cereal bar. She always carried a water bottle and she had some water left.

  Lulu took care of the hunger. But the rest of it—the aloneness, the loss of Serena, the loss of Daddy, the not knowing what to do next—taking care of those was much harder.

  46

  IT TURNED out that the library was a really good place to hide, if you were trying to figure out what to do next when you were in some kind of trouble.

  Once the cleaning ladies had gone for the night Lulu could use the bathroom. Safety lights were kept on all night, so she could see where she was going. And she found that there was food in the staff room—cookies and apples. Someone had even left personal stuff in a drawer—toothpaste and a comb, which Lulu planned to use when she woke up.

  Up in the tower she took out the stack of her colored paper and began to fold. Folding paper cranes, she’d discovered, emptied her mind. Let her mind rest, much the way slipping inside a character onstage let the world slide away.

  Plus, she needed to make a lot of cranes, because she’d lost all she’d made so far, and she still believed, still hoped, was still sure, that if she made those paper cranes, as many as she could, her wishes would come true. Maybe the cranes that were left inside the Suburban counted. She decided they would as long as they were left alone.

  By the time her eyes began to close out of sheer weariness, Lulu had made another thirty-two cranes.

  But falling a
sleep was hard, even as her hands kept busy with the cranes, because every so often her quiet mind filled again with feelings. She kept thinking about Serena. She missed her sister’s warm back. She wondered whether Serena was scared, or missed Lulu’s warm back. Or maybe Serena would be so mad at Lulu she’d never speak to her again.

  Lulu was mad at Laurie. She was mad at Daddy. But she was more angry at herself. How could she have been so stupid? So irresponsible? She should have been there. She should have been there for Serena. She should have shown up. She should have done what needed doing.

  Because now, being without Daddy, she might never get Serena back again.

  It was way late in the dark night before Lulu fell asleep.

  And then she woke up while the dawn light was still pale.

  Lulu knew she had to leave the next morning as early as possible, and stay out while the library was open, because she couldn’t be sure that one of the librarians wouldn’t come up to the tower for some reason. She had to hope that she’d be able to get back in and hide again before night.

  Lulu went downstairs early in the morning and hid in the bathroom until she heard noises, then slipped outside as the librarians were scurrying around and people were coming for books and events and everyone was distracted.

  She’d decided she would try and find the social services office. Just to find out where it was. Maybe she’d be able to gather information, like where kids went when they were taken to social services. Maybe they stayed right there? Maybe they went to the hospital? To the police station? For the moment it was the only thing she could think to do other than walk.

  The day was brisk with a biting wind but the sun was out. Lulu felt the cold run right through her even with the puffy coat. The bell tower had been warm, warmer than the Suburban, so overnight she’d gotten used to not feeling the chill.