One Mixed-Up Night

by Catherine Newman

  “I thought you were sleeping at Walter’s,” my mom said.

  “I know,” I said. “I wasn’t.”

  “You lied to us,” she said from inside my hair, which was where her face was.

  “I did,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  “I am very happy to see you,” she said, “but also I am totally killing you.”

  Walter and I sat on the couch with Zeke, who was asleep again and spread out over our laps, while the grown-ups talked in another room. We learned later that they were figuring out how we would pay for the damage we’d caused. Our parents were also asking Shirley what would happen next—if she’d need to explain the ruined things, tell someone what we’d done. Shirley didn’t want to rat us out because we were such nice kids—but our parents were too mad to tell us that at the time. “I think it’s just the couches that won’t be sorted out by morning,” Shirley told them, apparently. “And I can say that the top one didn’t appear to be secured properly and fell down.”

  The light was just breaking at the edge of the horizon, a kind of gray glow, when Alice pulled the minivan out of the Ikea parking lot. Shirley was waving from behind the big automatic doors, and Walter and I waved back. “In Mixed-Up Files, they go home in a Rolls-Royce,” I said, sighing, and Walter laughed quietly.

  We were in the back with Zeke, who was barely awake and kept patting Walter’s arm, saying what Alice had said when we were walking out: “Sweetie, sweetie, never do that again. Promise me.” “I promise you, Zekey-Deke,” Walter said. And Zeke said, “You’re my good boy,” before falling asleep in his car seat. I craned my head around to see the blue-and-yellow Ikea sign behind us, getting smaller and smaller and then disappearing completely.

  Walter and I were each holding a stuffed heart, the kind with arms and hands. Shirley had given them to us when we were leaving. She shook hands with each of us, then threw her arms around us both and whispered, “All you need is love. I didn’t make that up, I know, but it’s true.” Later, I’d look at that heart on my bed, and I almost wouldn’t believe what we’d done.

  Alice dropped us off, and my parents ruffled my hair, said, “Let’s talk more about all of it after we get a little sleep, okay?” and went into the house. I stood outside for just a second longer. There was still a tiny sliver of moon in the sky, but the sun was rising now, a glowing orange globe more perfect than anything you could ever buy, turning all the clouds pink around it. I heard a sound, felt a vibration on my back. “Frankie, Frankie, come in, Frankie.”

  The walkie-talkie. I dug it out of my backpack and pressed the talk button. “Walter!” I could still see the van, just turning off our street.

  “Shirley was right.” The voice came in crackly now, but I could hear him. Maybe he was crying again, or maybe it was just the bad connection. “She was right, Frankie. You and me. We’ve got everything we need.”

  And in that moment, it was true. We did.

  A lot of things changed after that night—besides our parents keeping a closer watch on us and asking a lot more questions about what we were doing and when we’d be back.

  Most important, Walter and his mom started seeing a family therapist, and things were getting better at their house now: sometimes they were sad, yes, but there were no more secrets, no more late-night tears, no more smothered feelings. The lighter Walter seemed, the more I understood the weight that had been on him, like he’d been carrying a rolled-up carpet across his shoulders for half a year.

  We didn’t tell a lot of people about our night at Ikea. There were parts of it that felt too private and parts that felt too crazy to be believed. We’d been planning to write a story about it and try to sell it, to pay for the damages. But in the end we didn’t. We just did more of the jobs we were already doing: I doubled up on my babysitting hours, and Walter added another cat to his summer cat-feeding rotation in the neighborhood. We’d get it paid for.

  Well, not the damage we’d actually done, because Shirley took care of explaining it to corporate headquarters or whatever. But we’d agreed to earn the cost of fixing the broken wall and donate it to an organization for runaway teens that Shirley was very involved with. This seemed like a pretty perfect compromise to Walter and me. And we knew we’d gotten off easy.

  My mom would bring it up from time to time, the Ikea night. “Sometimes I think of how we didn’t even know that we didn’t know where you were,” she said once. “And it makes me so scared I can hardly breathe.”

  “I know,” I said. “I’m really sorry about that.”

  She was quiet for a minute, nodding and chewing a forkful of salad. “Is it weird that there are raisins in the tuna salad? The raisin people want me to be some kind of Raisin Ambassador, which means I put raisins in everything and they pay me. I can’t decide. Too raisin-y?” So: things were different now, but also the same.

  We went to the beach a lot that summer, and my dad always packed up our stuff in one of the huge blue plastic Ikea bags with the yellow handles. I’d be lying on my towel, drying off in the sun, and I’d see the bag and remember our adventure almost like an electric shock. Of course, Walter was with us a lot, and he’d point at the bag and shake his head, like, Crazy kids, which we were.

  Another good thing that happened is that Walter’s family got a new kitten, a tiny little furball sister for Puddle. She was the cutest thing, sleeping in a salad bowl, attacking our feet, falling into the bathtub. Zeke wanted to name her Puddle, “like our own Puddle, who is the cat who I also love!” But Walter convinced Zeke to give her Puddle as a middle name—and he named her Shirley instead. “Shirley Puddle, the kitten of kittens,” Alice called her.

  Speaking of: we stayed in touch with Shirley, or our parents did, really, and she actually ended up coming to our Fourth of July barbecue. She brought a really nice person with her—someone with pretty blond hair, who loved to laugh and who Walter and I thought was probably her partner, though we weren’t sure. I asked Walter if he thought Shirley had run away as a teenager because of having, or wanting, a girlfriend—it seemed so sad to me to imagine—and he shrugged and said, “You only know the things that people tell you.” True enough. Maybe one day she would.

  Later, I would find that I felt different about Ikea. I still loved it, and Walter and I still sat on our couches to play the picking game. We still got the wanties about everything, even. But we’d put our feet up on the coffee table, and I could also feel, alongside the fun, fizzy feeling of loving all the stuff, that I didn’t actually want anything. Not really. I’d even gotten rid of some of my collections. I mean, just into a bin in the basement, but still.

  I should mention, though, that the coffee table was new. Or, I should say, new as a coffee table. But let me back up. When you have done the world’s craziest thing and been caught and had to explain everything? When your parents are as upset with you as mine were with me? That’s a good time to tell them whatever else you’ve been holding back, because let’s face it: in the context of us having spent the night in Ikea, the fact that I wanted a doorknob was really not that big a deal.

  When I tried to explain, I could hear how big this felt to them, this small confession—as if it made sense of the whole Ikea adventure, fit all the puzzle pieces into a picture, for them, of the inside of my head. And you know, maybe it did. I saw them look at each other over my head—a Meaningful Look, as if they’d talked about it, or as if my saying I wanted a new door was the key that unlocked some big secret. It was very annoying. Very my parents. But I was glad that their feelings didn’t seem to be too hurt. “You need a door,” my mom said. “One that shuts. That’s a perfectly reasonable thing to want. I’m sorry we didn’t think of offering it to you.”

  My parents decided to remove the old door—they couldn’t bear to screw anything into it—so I got to pick a new door and, yes, even the knob. I painted the wood a cool, modern color called Swedish blue, and my parents installed the door for me, cursing over the hinges and the hardware. We stood back to admire it, and
then I said, “If you don’t mind.” And they said, “Please,” and I stepped into my room, pushed the door, and heard the satisfying click of it closing. I loved it. A second later, there was a knock, my mom’s voice saying, “Can I come in?” and then she said, through the closed door, “I’m totally kidding,” and I heard her and my dad laughing.

  My dad added smooth wooden legs to the beautiful old door and now it was a coffee table. Because it was a new spot to sit, it had immediately become Mr. Pockets’s favorite place in the house, and he was sprawled there most evenings, among the cups and mugs, the games and books and catalogs. That coffee table was now the least Ikea thing in the whole house, but I loved it. I loved its dings and scrapes—“war wounds,” my mom called them—and whatever secrets it held from all the families it had known. I even mostly loved our too-small house, my messy room, my imperfect parents and my imperfect life. It wasn’t a lesson with a capital L or anything—but something had changed for me nonetheless.

  I had new pictures in my room too. They were in Ikea frames (of course), and they were all from that night. That Night. One was a selfie we’d taken up in the loft, when we’d first gotten there, our cheeks smashed together, our eyes wide. One was of Walter in the white bathrobe, raising his eyebrows at me, which always made me laugh. Another was of Walter on the forklift. He’s smiling in the picture, as bright as a shooting star, and the warehouse lights are shining behind him like a crazy halo. It was that whole night in one image. Or, you know, practically that whole night.

  The last image was one Walter took—one that I didn’t see until I’d downloaded my pictures onto the computer. It was of a heart drawn on a whiteboard easel in the kids’ area, and inside it, in Walter’s handwriting, were three words:

  Thank you Frankie

  And now, because I could say things out loud with my door closed, I whispered back, “It was my pleasure, Walter.” And it was. Much more, even. Besides, what I really meant was “Thank you.” So I said that too.

  My son, Ben, and his oldest friend, Ava, are Walter and Frankie to me, and I am so grateful to them for the dozen (plus) years they’ve spent lying around our house with the Ikea catalog, playing the picking game. Also for their beautiful example of friendship, which I mined for material. And to Ikea itself, because where else would Walter and Frankie really want to spend the night?

  I wrote this book imagining my daughter, Birdy, as its audience, and she was its first and best reader. Her graceful intelligence and compassionate eye are so valuable to me.

  My own oldest friend, the late, great Ali Pomeroy, died while I was writing this book, but not before giving Walter’s dad all his best lines. Thank you, Al. I miss you all the time.

  Also late and great: E. L. Konigsburg, author of From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, which was such an inspiration to Frankie and Walter (and me).

  K.J. dell’Antonia was my one-woman writing group, and I wrote this book because I knew that every Friday she would email to see if I had written, and I was scared to say I hadn’t. Thank goodness for K.J.! (And cowardice!)

  The purring-est Craney Crow lent elements of his personality to both Puddle and Mr. Pockets, but he slept through most of his own helpfulness.

  Many wonderful people read the book and/or offered up the bounty of their time, energy, or imaginations at crucial moments, including Jeanne Birdsall, Ava Blum-Carr, Jonathan Carr, Kelly Close, Sophia Corwin, Layla Elkalai, Cammie McGovern, Becky Michaels, Peter Michaels, Michael Millner, Jennifer Newman, Chris Perry, Jennifer Rosner, Brittany Shahmehri, and Kathleen Traphagen. Thank you.

  Publishing a book means, of course, getting tons of help from people who are in the business of publishing books—but then they help you way more than their jobs technically require. My beloved agent, Jennifer Gates, is just that kind of above-and-beyond person, and she fought for this book in the most devoted way. Jennifer’s colleague Rick Richter generously offered both encouragement and middle-grade expertise. Michelle Nagler, my brilliant editor at Random House, may actually love Frankie and Walter as much as I do, which I love her for, and she made sure that this book would shine for them. Her colleague Jenna Lettice also stepped in to offer vitally important feedback at a vitally important moment. Alison Kolani and her eagle eyes and eagle-eyed copy editors Barbara Bakowski and Diana Drew helped make the writing as good as it could be. And Ann Macarayan patiently designed the cover of my dreams.

  My friends, my kids, my parents, and my husband are my best cheering squad. Thank you. Love is all you need. It really is.

  CATHERINE NEWMAN is the author of the memoirs Catastrophic Happiness and Waiting for Birdy, which are books written for adults about kids. This is her first book written for kids about kids. (YAY!) She lives in Amherst, Massachusetts—ninety miles from the nearest Ikea—with her husband, kids, cats, friends, and books. Visit her at catherinenewmanwriter.com.

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