“What’s wrong with them?” he asks.
I shrug. “They’ve been in the fridge,” I say.
He smiles and leans closer to me across the center island. “What’s wrong with that?”
I make a face. “Jordan. I grew up picking berries off the vine and eating them warm from the sun.” I point to the mummified things he’s put in front of me. “Those suck.”
He laughs again. “Snob.”
I’m surprised for a second, and then I’m not. “I guess anyone can be a snob about anything,” I say.
He nods. “And you are a snob.”
I don’t think he’s being mean. He’s got to be teasing. “Yeah, right,” I say with a chuckle.
It’s his turn to make a face. “Annie. Nothing’s ever good enough for you.”
I’m too stunned to say anything. I know people think Nora’s a snob because she never joins in, but it’s not for the reasons they think. Nora doesn’t go to sleepover parties because she doesn’t have a sleeping bag, and she doesn’t laugh and joke around with the other kids because their jokes seem silly to her. And they are, considering how she’s always just about to get killed by Fay or Bridget. I know how other people look at Nora. I just never thought anyone looked at me that way, too. But I guess they do. I want to tell Jordan he’s got me all wrong, but I can’t. Not unless I’m ready to tell him everything, which I never ever will.
“Are you finished?” Jordan asks after a while. I nod. “Then let’s go,” he says.
It’s a great spring afternoon. Still a little chilly, but the sun when it hits you through the leaves is polka dots of warmth.
I tell Jordan about the Prue Tree and about finding Nora’s circles in the dirt under it. I tell him about all the places we Bianchis like to go.
“But she’ll have needed food,” he says. “Where could she find something to eat?”
“There’s the Lady Slipper Grove,” I say with a gasp. “Maybe she went there. Lady slippers are a kind of orchid, and I’m pretty sure you can eat their bulbs.”
“Show me,” he says.
I lead Jordan through the woods. The broad-leaved oaks and maple trees give way to slender white birch trees the farther you go. And farther still are the hemlocks. Tucked deep between them and the black-spotted trunks of the birches is an open hollow where the sun comes down now that a big old tree has fallen. That’s where the lady slippers are. They’re snowy white and lovely. Jordan has this dreamy look on his face, and he starts to walk out into them, but I stop him.
“No, don’t,” I say, catching him by the arm. “They’ll die. They’re really fragile.”
We look around, but it’s obvious that no one’s been digging up bulbs.
“Nora hasn’t been here,” he says.
He’s right. The sun shines hot but the wind blows cold, and I know Nora’s been out in this for days now and I can’t find her.
“Where is she?” I ask, but it comes out a sob and then I’m crying. I’ve never cried in front of Jordan before because lab partners don’t cry, not even when their experiments don’t work.
I sit down on the ground and fold my arms over my head because I hate crying in front of Jordan and because I know I’m the only one who’ll cry for Nora.
“Why did she run away?” Jordan asks. I never actually said to him that Nora ran away, but he knew anyways.
“Because no one cares,” I say through my sobs.
“No one cares about Nora?” he asks.
“No one cares about anyone,” I say.
I hear Jordan laugh, and I look up at him because now I’m angry that he laughed.
“How can you say no one cares about anyone?” he says. He looks sort of angry, but it’s like he’s hurt, too. “I care about you, don’t I?”
I’ve dragged him out into the middle of a forest when he should be at baseball practice, so I know that he’s not lying. And not just about this, because there have been about a thousand times Jordan’s done stuff that nobody else would do for me, but even still. He’s only like that with me because he doesn’t know the whole story. If he knew the whole story, he’d run faster than Nora.
“No one cares about Nora except me. And I’m not enough for her to stay,” I say. “I wish I was, but I’m not, and I never was, so she never even let me love her to begin with.”
Jordan sits down on the ground next to me. “Then how can Nora run away because no one loves her?” he asks. “You do.”
He just doesn’t get it. He has no idea how terrible everyone was to Nora—or how terrible people can be to each other period, and I’m glad for that at least. I don’t want Jordan to ever know.
I lean my head to the side and let it rest on his shoulder. “Yeah,” I say. “I love her more than anything.”
He leans his head against my head. “She’ll come back,” he promises.
“Maybe, but…” I think for a while about what it will be like now that she’s actually run away. “I don’t think she’ll ever really come back.”
We walk toward my side of the forest without talking, but after a while I start to worry that Jordan might want to walk all the way back to my house with me, and I tell him to turn around and go home because it’s getting late. He shifts from foot to foot for a while, and I wait for him to spit it out, but he never does.
“If you don’t want me to walk you home, at least be careful, okay? It’s getting dark,” he tells me, but not in a nice way. It’s like he’s growling at me or something.
I walk toward home with a frown, not sure what it was I said that made Jordan so angry with me. Maybe it’s something I didn’t say. Maybe I should have said thank you. I’ll do it tomorrow at school. I’ll tell him thank you for skipping baseball when you love it so much and wandering around in the woods for four hours and not finding anything, and I should have said thank you a million times already and I don’t know why I haven’t yet.
I see the police cars parked in front of our house before I even make it out of the woods. I run the rest of the way and throw the front door open, scared they’re going to tell me something awful.
Chapter Twelve
Nora’s sitting at the kitchen table.
She looks like she’s been crying, but otherwise she doesn’t seem hurt. I let out a big sigh and practically collapse onto the pew. That’s when I notice everyone else in the room.
There are two police officers, but neither of them is from Ashcroft. I have no idea where my parents are, but there’s a woman sitting next to my sister with her mouth all pinched up, like she either disapproves of pretty much everything around her except for Nora, or she’s afraid of it.
And it’s like I see the kitchen as she sees it. I see our house as she sees it.
There’s this thing I do to forget about it, even though I never really forget. I just look at the spot I’m in, and I don’t think too much about all the junk that’s piled up around me. I don’t think about the stacks of useless brochures that come in the mail even though Mom never orders anything from them. I don’t think about the cans and jars and leftover boxes and the broken bicycles and the stacks of laundry or the bags and bags of other bags that my mother never ever throws away.
It’s not like our house is full of garbage. It’s not like dirty dishes are stacked everywhere and there are bugs. It’s just that there’s so much useless stuff everywhere you can hardly turn around without knocking something over.
There are paths through the stuff that my feet know so well I don’t even have to look at all the junk anymore. I ignore it. I pretend it isn’t there. You get used to it because you have to. Because you don’t have any choice but to pretend, pretend, pretend. We’ve all been pretending for so long now it took someone walking in and seeing this place to make us remember that this isn’t normal. This isn’t the way other people live.
It’s not like we’re all crazy—I mean, we know it’s bad. That’s why we never bring anyone home, but we just look past it. And every year we try to clean it up. I ask my mo
ther where to put stuff, and she tells me to put it in another room. The stuff never goes anywhere; it just gets shifted so we can clean under it. And if you do get rid of stuff, like expired cans of beans no one even knew were at the back of the cabinet because all these pots and pans are in front of them, then Mom just goes and brings home more things to pile around herself.
Walls and walls of junk. Mazes of useless stuff, when all of us need things we don’t have. We don’t have enough, so Mom never lets go of anything, because what if she needs it one day and doesn’t have it? That’s the thing, you see. It’s not that my mom’s dirty, or lazy, or any of the things you might think when you walk in the front door of 17 Snow Lane. My mom never stops cleaning, never stops working. Never stops trying. It’s just that she’s scared. And the stuff makes her feel protected.
But how do you explain that to someone who’s sitting at your table and looking at you like this woman is looking at all of us right now? It’s too real. It’s too in-your-face, all this stuff. The beatings happen and then they’re over and you can play them down to an outsider. You can call it a spanking or just a slap. This—the way this house is—you can’t ignore it or play it down or explain it to someone else seeing it for the first time.
The beatings don’t show how messed up we are, but our house does. 17 Snow Lane gives us away. And I see that now, looking at this woman sitting next to Nora looking around at how messed up we are, and I finally see it. I see it all now. The junk. The chaos. The crazy. And in a way, I can’t believe I didn’t see it before. But you do what you have to do, don’t you? You tell yourself what you have to tell yourself to hold on to whatever it is that’s outside of all this insanity that makes you feel normal. So you never tell your friends and you never let them inside and you pretend that you’re as normal as they are, because you just wouldn’t be able to get through the day if you didn’t.
But it’s not normal. And it’s not okay. And I see that now and I can’t stop seeing it.
Now what am I going to do?
The woman sitting next to Nora forces her lips into a smile. “You’re Annie, right?” she asks.
I nod.
“Your parents didn’t know where you were,” she says. “Can you tell us where you’ve been all afternoon?”
I don’t say anything, because what can I say? There’s nothing I can say that will make any of this better.
“Does that happen a lot?” she goes on. “Do you go away and not tell anyone? Does anyone ask where you’ve been?”
I shrug.
“You know that’s not the way other families do things, right?” she asks.
“Who are you?” I ask.
She smiles really big. “I’m Miss Rastin, Annie. I’m a social worker, and I’m here to help you.”
The social worker talks to each of us alone. I go upstairs while she talks to my sisters and my brother and I sit on the roof so nobody stares at me. The thing about being the youngest of nine kids is that you’re never alone, but you’re always lonely. Like this homeless person I saw taking a bath on the street in Dorchester once. No one will help you, but everyone’s watching, and you have to do your most private stuff right out in the open.
When it’s my turn, I go back downstairs. Fay is just leaving the playroom, and she and Miss Rastin are smiling and talking to each other like they’re best friends. I wonder what’s in this for Fay, because she never smiles like that unless she thinks she can get something for it.
“Come in and sit down, Annie,” Miss Rastin says. I do, and she closes this little notebook she has in her hands. “I’m sure this is hard for you,” she says.
“I’m just glad Nora’s home,” I say. “That’s where I was this afternoon, you know. Looking for her in the woods. And my parents usually know where I am, even if they don’t know for sure. I mean, I’m always in one or two places.”
Miss Rastin nods and smiles with her mouth closed. “Mm-hmm,” she says. “Do you feel like you have to defend your parents a lot? Or make excuses for the things they did or didn’t do?”
Oh Jesus (fifteen Hail Marys). She’s right, but she couldn’t be more wrong at the same time.
“So, Annie. I hear you’re really popular at school,” she says.
“I am?” I ask, and Miss Rastin laughs.
“Nora tells me you have lots of friends and everyone likes you.”
I shrug. “I got lucky,” I say, thinking of Kristin, and Sarah, and Karen, and even Samantha, who can be tricky sometimes, but at least she’s honest. And, of course, Jordan.
“Do your friends come over after school a lot?” she asks, but she knows the answer. I stare at her. “Annie, I understand why you don’t want to talk to me.”
I raise one eyebrow. It’s enough. She laughs again and looks me over for a long time.
“I heard you were funny, and I understand that, too. Humor is a great way to deflect feelings. Making people laugh is great, but it doesn’t really make anything better. You know that, don’t you?”
Okay. She’s got me there.
“Yes,” I say, looking down. She’s not an idiot, but that doesn’t mean I trust her. I look back up at her. “Why are you asking us each questions alone? Are we all in trouble because Nora ran away?”
She shakes her head and opens her notes. “I don’t want you to feel pressured by anyone else in the family to say one thing or another.”
“So if I’m not in trouble, I can go, right?”
She smiles, but not in a happy way. “The State of Massachusetts is trying to determine if you’re safe. Do you feel safe, Annie?”
This woman has no idea what she’s talking about. Of course I’m not safe. I’ve never been safe.
“We found your sister Eleanor in Connecticut, riding the buses. She exploited a loophole in the ticketing system and was living on one of the bus lines for days. Do you know why we brought Nora back?” she asks. I shake my head. “She said she had to come back for her little sister. She said she couldn’t leave you here with no one to take care of you.” I nod because that sounds like Nora. Miss Rastin continues, “Is it true? Is there no one to take care of you?”
“They all take care of me,” I say. I think of Fay and feel like I should add to that answer. “In different ways. It’s a group effort.”
The social worker narrows her eyes at me. “You’re smart, Annie. You’re tough. And you don’t have to do this anymore if you don’t want to.”
There are lots of times in my life when I feel like I have no idea what people are talking about. It happens all the time when I’m around the girls at school, because all they have to think about are boys and stickers and sleepover parties, and I never have time to think about those things. The strange thing is, I know exactly what this woman is talking about, and there’s no way in hell I’m going to admit to anything, because I also know she wants to take me away from my family.
“We know about the abuse, and that alone is enough to warrant placing you in a foster home.”
I stand up to run, but stop myself before I actually bolt for the woods because I can see the cop from another town standing on the back steps. I sit down. I look at Miss Rastin and she looks at me. I guess I’d be sad if I didn’t feel so cornered.
“Is Nora leaving?” I ask.
“Not without you,” she tells me.
“Well, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” I say, and I just don’t care how many Hail Marys that is. I’m done saying Hail Marys. I’m done counting. “What the hell am I supposed to do with that?”
“Anything you want.” She leans toward me, and I think this is the first time I’ve seen her real face. “You don’t have to stay here and cover up for them anymore. You can start over.”
I realize Miss Rastin is wicked young. She’s, like, barely older than Miriam. She’s got nice clothes on, too. Maybe she’s from a rich family and she’s smart, so she probably went to a good school. She’s studied a lot. She’s a social worker, so she’s doing this because she wants to be a good person, a
nd maybe she is. But she has no idea what she’s talking about, because I love my family. I love my family as much as she probably loves hers, but I bet she doesn’t know that. I bet anyone who looked at our family from the outside would think it was this huge act of kindness to take me away from it. Maybe for Nora that’s true, but not for me.
“So who will I be if I start over?” I ask her.
“Anyone you want.”
“Just not me.”
She leans back and works really hard not to look emotional anymore. She stands up. “I was hoping for more from you, Annie.”
“More what?” I ask, standing up with her. I’m angry now. “What am I supposed to be?” I laugh and change my voice, because it’s all a joke now. “What’s my destiny, Carl Sagan?”
She folds up her notes and gestures to the door like I’ve been dismissed. “Annie, I just want you to know that this”—she spins her finger around the room to include the whole house—“ends when you want it to end.”
I don’t leave the room. In a few minutes they’re going to tell me to pack and say good-bye. And then I’m going to go to some stranger’s house in another town and my whole life will be social workers and borrowed moms who don’t hit me or love me.
“So you’re telling me to run away, like Nora?” I ask. “You said she was riding around in circles when you found her. Is that what I’m supposed to do from now on?”
Miss Rastin really looks at me, and I feel like she’s not trying to win anything anymore. She sits down.
“Okay, Annie. What do you want to do?” she asks me.
I think about this for a long time, because it’s only the second time someone’s ever asked me that. Well, okay, maybe not exactly, but at the beginning of the school year Mrs. Weiss asked me what my destiny was, and that’s basically the same thing. Both of them are about me deciding for myself what my future is going to be like, and I’m finally ready. I finally have an answer to Mrs. Weiss’s question.
“I want to make it better. And not just for us kids, but for Mom and Dad, too. I want it to be us, but not the worst us. I want the best us. Even if that’s still a little crappy.”
Snow Lane Page 12
