Where I'd Like to Be

by Frances O'Roark Dowell

  Murphy didn’t even bother looking at me. “They’re probably already ruined with all of this rain.”

  “Maybe not,” I said. “Maybe there’s still time to get them.”

  Finally Murphy turned to face me. “Let it go, Maddie. The books are gone. It’s for the best.”

  Electric tingles ran up my arms and legs, and my face felt hot. I thought back to the first day I’d shown Murphy the books. I should have run the minute she and Logan had walked in the room. I should’ve shoved them under my bed and never let anyone, not even Ricky Ray, look at them.

  No one’s stopping me from going back to the fort, I told myself, but I stayed put, feeling frozen again, unable to make anything happen. I picked up my sketchbook and made criss-cross lines over an entire page, humming tunelessly.

  I’d been doodling for almost half an hour when a woman tapped on the half-open door to our room. She was pale and thin, dressed in a navy blue skirt and scuffed blue shoes. She’d covered her dark curls with a scarf. You could tell that once upon a time she’d been pretty, but her lipstick and eye shadow couldn’t hide all the tired lines around her eyes and mouth.

  “Emily?” the woman said, her voice sounding shy and hopeful.

  “I’m sorry,” I told her. “There’s no Emily who lives here.”

  But she didn’t seem to hear me. “Emily?” she said again, looking straight at Murphy. “Baby? Gosh, I’ve missed you so much.”

  And Murphy turned and looked out the window.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said.

  • • •

  And then it was raining and raining and raining, a cold, end-of-October rain that made the leaves slippery on the path through the woods, and I was wearing tennis shoes so I slipped and slid and fell. I thought I would never get there, and I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to find what I was looking for when I did.

  But the turned-over earth was still fresh on top of the hole Murphy dug and even though it was dark, dark, dark, I could see enough to dig through it with my bare hands to get to the books. Please let them be okay, I thought, please let them be okay.

  But they weren’t okay. I couldn’t even turn the pages, they were soaked through with rain and stuck together, and I could have tried forever to dry them out and still they would never be right.

  I didn’t know what to do except make my way through the trees to the fort, where there was a flashlight, so I could take a closer look at how bad the damage was.

  “She’s not really my mother,” Murphy’d said to me as soon as the woman left. “She just says she is. They made me live with her.”

  “Who did?”

  “My real parents. At least, I think that’s what must have happened. I think when I was very young, they left me with her, and they meant to come back to get me.”

  Murphy looked away. “That’s what I think must have happened.”

  I didn’t know what to say. I had the facts right in front of me, but they couldn’t get inside my brain.

  That woman was Murphy’s mother.

  Murphy’s mother was not dead.

  Her parents were not researchers.

  They had never taken her to Africa. Or South America. Or New Mexico.

  “You would hate my house, Maddie,” Murphy’d said after a few minutes. “It’s made out of cinder blocks. The floor is covered with old linoleum that’s peeling up around the edges. I scrubbed and scrubbed, but I could never get that floor clean.”

  I picked up the Book of Houses and pointed the flashlight at it, hoping this time the pages would float free from each other and there would be Ricky Ray’s castle and Logan’s brick ranch house, there would be Donita’s white cottage with the picket fence and garden and Russell’s mural on the walls, and on the last two pages I’d find Murphy’s castle in its enchanted forest. But the book was a soggy mess.

  I walked back to the spot just beyond the woods, and this time I placed the books in the hole as gentle as could be, and I said, Goodbye, goodbye, and I knew I was saying goodbye to more than just the books as I scooped up the wet earth and placed it over them.

  “So did you really fly? That time you jumped off of your porch?” I’d asked Murphy, back in the room.

  Murphy nodded. “That really happened,” she said softly. “I really did fly.”

  I sat down on my bed across from her and stared at my shoes. She tapped my foot lightly with hers and said, “You believe me, don’t you?”

  “No,” I said after a minute. “I guess I don’t.”

  And then Murphy was gone.

  Chapter 21

  November showed up cold and wet. On the bus to school kids sniffled and sneezed and laid their heads against the windows, peering out through the rain to the skeleton trees. Christmas seemed a long way away, and spring was just a lie someone told you once that you didn’t really believe. I carried a book with me everywhere and avoided making eye contact. I wasn’t in the mood to communicate with anyone.

  There was a hole inside of me. At first I thought it was just because the books were gone. But then I figured it had probably been there my entire life, starting from the time my mama left me. Granny Lane and Mr. Willis had filled it, but when I had to leave Roan Mountain, there was that hole again, only now it was bigger because it was the size of three people gone, not just one. It got a little bigger each time I had to say good-bye to someone I cared for.

  After Murphy left the Home, and Donita and Logan discovered what happened to the books and stopped talking to me, well, I was pretty sure that hole was so big that it had eaten me up entirely. Teachers commented that I seemed real quiet lately, and then they stopped noticing me at all.

  Walking around Elizabethton in rainy November is nobody’s idea of a good time, but that’s what I did, just to get out of my room in the afternoons. It had been a long while since I’d spent any time roaming around by myself. Even before the fort and Murphy and Logan and Donita, there’d been Ricky Ray, who was always ready to hike up to the Mini-Mart or spin in crazy circles on the swings. Sometimes on my walks I thought I could hear him running up behind me, keeping count of my footsteps for me, saying, “When my mama comes to get me, you can come live with us. You can have the top bunk.”

  Of course, when I turned around, there was nobody there. But I kept turning around anyway, just out of habit.

  It was my own fault I was all alone, I kept telling myself as I trudged along, my hands jammed hard into my pockets. Why wouldn’t Logan and Donita be mad at me? And I couldn’t bring myself to go knock on Ricky Ray’s door, even though he’d already knocked on mine a half-dozen times. The idea of somebody as sweet as Ricky Ray being nice to me after I’d been so stupid made me cringe farther into my jacket, as if a cold wind had slapped me across the face.

  I’d start my afternoon at the library, trading out old books for new ones, then I’d shuffle over to the Limestone Grocery to buy a bag of chips. If Mr. Trivette was in his tiny office, I’d stop and pass some time with him until a customer came by for some coal, and then I’d make my way up the hill to Potter’s Used Auto Parts and Misc. Supplies and stand under the sloping roof until Mr. Potter saw me and knocked on the window for me to come inside.

  “Now, Maddie, you don’t have to wait for an invitation,” he’d say, ushering me through the front door and putting two quarters in the Coke machine. “You’re always welcome here.” Then he’d hand me a soda and say, “You’re one of the best workers I’ve got.”

  “Mr. Potter, you don’t have any employees,” I’d tell him. “So I don’t know how high a compliment that is.”

  “If I was hiring, I’d hire you, little gal,” he always said.

  Most times, I’d go into the storeroom and putter around a bit, take some inventory for Mr. Potter or start on my homework. Sometimes I’d take my sketchbook out of my backpack and draw for a while and think. I thought a lot about Murphy, trying to sort through my feelings. I spent a long time wondering which of the things she’d told me wer
e true and which were lies. Oh, I knew what the obvious lies were, the lies about her parents and about her aunt in Europe. But what about that boy who whispered poetry to horses?

  I really wanted that story to be true.

  I’d learned a lot about Murphy in the past weeks, things Corinne told me, even though she worried she shouldn’t out of respect for Murphy’s privacy. I learned that Murphy’s daddy died from cancer when she was eight, and after that her mama fell all to pieces, drinking and laying out from her secretarial job. Murphy was the one who took care of things then, who went to the Winn-Dixie to buy the groceries and came home and cooked them up for dinner. She kept the house clean and got the laundry done. She’d been voted “Smartest Girl” in her fifth-grade class. She never missed a day of school. Sometimes her mama hit her, but mostly she just watched TV and drank. Murphy’s mama’d been in jail three times for driving drunk. Murphy had been in other foster-care homes. Her last foster family had been well-off, which accounted for all of Murphy’s nice stuff.

  “So why’s Social Services letting Murphy’s mama take her back?” I asked Corinne one afternoon when I’d cornered her in the dorm kitchen and made her talk about it some more. “It sounds like she’s got too many problems to take care of a child.”

  “It’s important that families be reunited whenever possible,” she said, picking up a plate from the dish drainer and drying it with a soft towel. “And it’s true that Murphy’s mother has serious problems with substance abuse, but she completed a rehabilitation program and is willing to spend the next six months in a halfway house with Murphy. They’ll talk to counselors, and Murphy’s mom will work on her issues.”

  “And then she’ll take Murphy home and sit around getting drunk some more,” I complained. I grabbed a bowl out of the drainer and began rubbing it hard with the hem of my shirt. “Not that I care what happens to her.”

  Corinne gently took the bowl from me and set it down on the counter. “The judge thinks Murphy’s mother will do a better job this time,” she said. “And the social workers think she can learn how to take care of Murphy.”

  “What do you think?” I asked, slumping into a chair.

  “Well, I’ve read Murphy’s files,” Corinne said. She held up a fork to examine it, rubbed it on her sleeve, and turned away from me.

  I came over to the sink and stood close to her. “What? What do you think, Corinne?”

  “I think it’s a long road, Maddie,” she said finally.

  “For Murphy and her mom?”

  “For everyone.”

  • • •

  One afternoon after it had been raining for days and days, Mr. Potter came into the back room where I was doing my math homework and said, “How’s that fort holding up in all this bad weather?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. I haven’t been up there in awhile.”

  “You children lose interest? That comes as a surprise, seeing how much work y’all put in up there.”

  “Well, you know, the weather and everything,” I said lamely. “It’s a long walk in bad weather.”

  “Fort’s the best place in weather like this,” Mr. Potter insisted, “if the structure’s holding firm and the roof’s not leaking. Dress up in some warm clothes, and you can have a fine afternoon in a fort.”

  Some odd expression must have crossed my face, because Mr. Potter came over to where I was working and put his hand on my shoulder. “You don’t go on account of Murphy being gone, is that it?”

  “I guess that’s partly it,” I said.

  I’d told Mr. Potter some of the story, not about the books, but about Murphy’s mother coming to get her, and how they were in a halfway house now, learning how to be a family. I didn’t tell him that Donita wouldn’t speak to me anymore. I was afraid he’d feel like he shouldn’t let me come to the shop.

  Mr. Potter picked up a box of oil filters and lifted the lid, taking a moment to count its contents. “All I know is the weather’s supposed to clear up tomorrow or the next day,” he said. “You ought to go check on that fort. It’s a shame to let such a fine place go to waste. I believe Murphy would agree with me on that account.”

  I grabbed the clipboard with the inventory list on it and pretended to study it. “I’ll give that some thought, Mr. Potter,” I said, trying to sound like I was about to get real busy with work. “I sure will.”

  Mr. Potter made a growly uh-huh sound, but he let me be. I paced around the storeroom, checking things off the list, listening to the rain. Every once in awhile I’d pull out Murphy’s blue stone from my pocket and roll it around between the palms of my hand. She’d given it to me right before she left, saying she guessed I knew it wasn’t really a rare and valuable artifact. She said she’d gotten it at the gift shop of a nature museum and made a lot of wishes on it that hadn’t come true yet, but they might still someday.

  When I held it, that stone didn’t seem nearly as mysterious as it had hanging from the ceiling in our room like some distant planet. Up close it was more gray than blue. If you looked at it hard enough, it was hardly a cut or two above ordinary. I thought about it awhile and decided it was a whole lot like me. Nothing special.

  I guess you could say the same thing about Murphy. She was just a regular old foster-care child, no better or worse than any of us. I rolled that idea around my brain like a polished, blue stone, but it wouldn’t settle into a spot where I could get used to it. Maybe I was as mad as mad can be when it came to Murphy, and maybe I was hurting a little bit about her being gone, too. The fact was, it would be a long time before I’d sort out who in the world Murphy was.

  That didn’t mean I didn’t miss her.

  I slipped Murphy’s stone back into my pocket, wishing she’d stayed long enough for me to think of something good to give to her. But five minutes after she’d set the blue stone on my desk, she was gone. I should have given her my rodeo belt buckle, I thought, leaning my head against the window. Maybe there was some place I could mail it to where Murphy would be sure to get it.

  I turned my head and looked out at the cold, gray sky. Wrong time of the year for the fort, I told myself. A picture of Logan, Donita, and Ricky Ray sitting up there cutting up and telling stories flashed in my brain, but I pushed it out and pushed it out again. It kept coming back in, though, and that hole inside me got a little bit bigger every time it did.

  Chapter 22

  When Mrs. Lyman yelled at me during JM practice that if I didn’t get my nose out of that book she was going to make me props manager instead of an active team participant, I put my book away in my backpack. Even though I wasn’t in the mood to run around on stage solving impromptu problems and pretending to fly in our silver time machine, I didn’t want to jeopardize my JM career for the next two and a half years of middle school.

  I didn’t even bother looking over at Logan for his reaction. I already knew he was wearing a sour look beneath the shadow of his Fraley’s Feeds cap. He’d been wearing that same expression ever since he learned that Murphy and I’d buried the books. “We could have fixed the Book of Houses, Maddie,” he’d said. “We could have put it back together again.”

  “That book was way beyond fixing,” I told him, but he didn’t understand. And a few days later, when he found out Murphy was gone, that she wasn’t even Murphy, he couldn’t understand that, either.

  “How could she do that to me?” he kept repeating. We were sitting on the steps of the Older Girls’ Dorm, the sky going dark above our heads.

  “Do what?” I asked. “It wasn’t her idea to go. They made her go.”

  Logan scooped up a handful of dirt and threw it into the yard. “I wish she’d never come here in the first place.”

  After that’s when he stopped talking to me.

  I was up on stage doing an improvisation exercise with Kenny Ehrlich, when a woman walked into the auditorium and took a seat in one of the rows toward the back. Because she looked young and was fashionably dressed, the first thing that came to my mind when I saw h
er was talent scout. Some sponsors from the First Baptist Church of Elizabethton had taken a group from our dorm to a play the weekend before, and I was still under its spell. I guess that’s why I got it in my head that that woman was in the Lawton Crockett Middle School auditorium looking for talented eleven-year-olds.

  The idea that there might be a talent scout in the audience put a little bit of zing back into my step. I’d spent three weeks being eaten up by the hole inside of me, and all of a sudden I felt like fighting back.

  Before that moment I’d never really thought about being an actor, but suddenly I was filled up with the idea. It took the cold, rainy month of November and wrung it out, dried it up, and lit a fire in the fireplace. I turned to face Kenny Ehrlich, who I was supposed to be doing an improvisation with, and said funny, smart things that made him break character and crack up.

  I was a star! At least that’s how I felt up there making everyone laugh, all the lights on me.

  Mrs. Parrish laughed and smiled as I babbled on about my newfound love of theater on our way to the Home. She still gave me a ride after every JM practice, even though Logan could barely bring himself to speak to me. For the past three weeks, Mrs. Parrish and I had made small talk, careful not to say anything that would highlight the fact that Logan currently couldn’t stand the sight of me.

  “You’ll be a wonderful actress, Maddie,” Mrs. Parrish told me as she pulled into the Home’s driveway. “You have that necessary joie de vivre. That’s something no actress can fake.”

  Logan snorted. It wasn’t a snort that made a whole lot of sense to me, since I couldn’t imagine why he would have an opinion on my joie de vivre, whatever that was. Maybe Logan’s was more of a general issue snort, a snort that meant to express his overall dissatisfaction with the fact that I was alive.