Harry Sue

by Sue Stauffacher

It is a well-known fact, Fish, that they are my weak spot.

  Mr. Hernandez cleared his throat as she rolled into the front hall.

  “The purpose of my visit, Mrs. Clotkin, is to inform you that the Marshfield EMS wants to honor your granddaughter, whose quick thinking may have saved the life of one of our students.”

  Granny looked suspiciously at Mr. Hernandez. She was holding the rubber ball she used to keep her hand grip strong and she squeezed it slowly.

  Turning to Sink, she said, “What’s he on about?”

  I stood back, watching Mr. Hernandez take it all in. He was fingering his tie again, like he wanted to press it over his mouth. Granny’s house was always too warm and the smell of poopy diapers mixing with the canned pea soup the crumb snatchers must have turned down for lunch would rival a humid day on the yard.

  “He says that Harry Sue—” Sink began.

  “I know what he said.” Granny regarded Mr. Hernandez with a look that could corrode metal. “What does he want?”

  I crossed my arms and waited. I hadn’t had this much fun since the last health inspector found mouse poop in the peanut butter.

  “Well.” Mr. Hernandez cleared his throat. “Harry Sue’s a bit of a hero around Trench Vista—”

  He broke off and glanced at me, figuring in an instant I probably didn’t share the highlights of my day over brownies and milk with Granny after school. So he gave her the long and short of it.

  He finished with, “I’m told the papers will be covering it, which means—” Mr. Hernandez held out a piece of paper. “As her guardian, we’ll need your permission.”

  “There any reward in this? Any money?”

  “Well, I—I’m not sure. I don’t think so. It’s just a nice gesture. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a certificate….”

  Granny snatched the paper and pen and scribbled her name on the line.

  “Better say where she lives,” she growled. “Granny’s Lap. Better mention we have openings.”

  She pushed the paper back at Mr. Hernandez, who, in return, gave her a look of pure astonishment.

  Thinking back on it, it was the last time I had a good long look at Granny. That is, before my brains got scrambled and before the trial, where she did her best to appear old and feeble so the judge wouldn’t send her up for long.

  She glared at all of us, the skin under one eye twitching. She was giving us her lizard look: Sink, Dip, Mr. Hernandez, me. Like we were flies and her tongue was itching to connect.

  It’s not exactly a picture you want for your family photo album, but that’s how I’ll remember her.

  “Well,” Mr. Hernandez continued, “we swung by early to see if maybe Harry Sue had something a little more appropriate to wear to an awards ceremony.”

  Granny didn’t even blink. She was a pro.

  “Go find her something,” she said to Sink and Dip.

  “But …,” they responded in unison.

  “I’m sure you got something she could borrow,” Granny said calmly.

  Now that I was going to have my picture in the paper and all, Granny realized it might not look so good for me to be dressed like I shopped at the Mercy Street Mission. So off went Sink and Dip, glancing over their shoulders at me, easily a good foot shorter and a bag of sand lighter than either one of them.

  Chapter 29

  We’ll only stay a minute at the fire station. They had a little buffet, and ever since Baba, I was game to try new food. There was this nifty little appetizer: a slice of roast beef was spread with cream cheese and wrapped around an asparagus spear. I thought it would be slimy, but it was crunchy like a pickle and the meat was salty and fresh. There was a lady firefighter who noticed I was partial to them and wrapped some in foil for me to take home.

  Violet was there with her parents, who hung around me like I was their long-lost daughter.

  “Vi says you like chicken-fried steak,” her mother whispered as the fire chief started talking about the history of the Good Citizen Award. I wanted to tell her I was partial to anything that wasn’t burnt, spoiled, or otherwise too rank to eat, and also, could we please listen to what the man was saying about me?

  I wanted to ask, did conettes get the newspaper?

  Well, anyway, I could nab the copy out of the teachers’ break room just in case.

  I remember clear as a bell how I told myself it was okay to feel good about what I’d done. I did save a life. Just because I was the one who almost offed Violet in the first place was a matter to handle another time. You can’t help it when people die. They just do. If you didn’t mean to do it, then it’s okay. Accidents happen.

  At the moment, I thought it couldn’t hurt to tell myself, Good job, Harry Sue.

  And even though I wasn’t around to see the picture they had in the paper the next day, I do carry it in the palm of my heart.

  There I was, one arm around old Violet the Snitch, Dip’s sweater hanging four inches down past the tips of my fingers. The Chumps were pressing in, big and soft, behind us. My other hand is shaking the hand of the fire chief. I’m looking directly at the camera and smiling, thinking how cheesed off old Granny’s going to be when she sees what a fuss they made of me.

  Chapter 30

  I must admit I was feeling pretty high as Mr. Hernandez crunched up Granny’s Loving and Licensed driveway. I had just begun to touch the idea of what it meant to Live, the way J-Cat said, with a capital L.

  Maybe I wasn’t doomed by all the bad that came before. Maybe it was possible to have a happy life even though both my parents had been sent up and my granny had an olive pit where her heart was supposed to be.

  Life had delivered a KO punch to J-Cat, hadn’t it? First, she got that bad sickness that kept her from having a baby. Then she fell for a guy who broke his neck in a ski accident and died three years later. But instead of giving up, she clawed her way out of the hole and spent most of her time pulling as hard as she could on Homer and Baba to bring them out with her.

  In the end, she was a better road dog to Homer than I had ever been.

  But hey, I was still a kid. I could improve.

  Mr. Hernandez pulled away and I swaggered into the house. I had a sack of food in my hand and the crumb snatchers were going to get all of it. I’d let everybody have a bite of the roast beef asparagus thing and Wolf Man would share out the crackers and cheese while I told a story.

  It was going to be a whopper this time, all about this lion who’s supposed to be the king of the forest, only he isn’t because he’s forever trying to PC up.

  Everybody was at the kitchen table coloring on some pages Granny had ripped out of the newspaper. Last year—even with Sink and Dip’s entries— she’d failed to nab the winner in the Marshfield Journal’s pumpkin-coloring contest, eight-and-under category. Granny wanted one of the crumb snatchers to win so she could lure in more unfortunate kids and their clueless parents.

  I glanced around as Granny patrolled the kitchen table, whacking her ruler on the papers of kids whose coloring got a little sloppy. Even Hammer Head was bent to the task, his ears bright red, which suggested there’d been some fallout earlier. Probably Granny was still furious that something good had happened to me.

  I put my sack down. “Why isn’t Moonie Pie down here?” I asked.

  Sink was very busy coloring the stem of a jack-o’-lantern. I could have told her they weren’t green off the vine, but I didn’t bother.

  “He was crying a minute ago,” she said, without lifting her eyes. “But I think he fell back asleep.”

  I glanced around at the little kids, who didn’t dare lift their heads even in greeting. They were coloring in slow motion, no pleasure in it at all. Carly Mae’s little fist was in her mouth. Wolf Man could color a lot better than that.

  A big lump grew in my throat. I tried to tell myself it was the cold medicine she gave before nap time, but I was pretty sure I’d scared Granny off that. No, the reason they were coloring so slow and so badly was because Granny had done som
ething much worse. The crumb snatchers suffered from joint mentality. She’d taken the heart right out of them and they no longer believed things would be any different tomorrow than they were today.

  It was what J-Cat said to Homer about sicknesses of the heart. They were worse than the pain Granny caused with her hands.

  “I’ll get him,” I said, and walked out of the kitchen.

  I stopped at the bottom of the stairs.

  And that’s when my whole life changed.

  If somebody had cared enough to clip the picture of me from down at the fire station out of the newspaper, they could have written Before on it, because that day was the end of my life as I knew it.

  Of course, not every kid’s life ends two times before they hit their teens. But mine did. The first time was when Garnett Clotkin threw me out the seventh-floor window of Destiny Towers.

  The second time was worse.

  It took me a second—ten seconds—a minute— how do you know when time stops?—to figure out what was wrong with the picture in the hallway.

  The stairs were shining.

  And then I knew in a rush, following my eyes to the safety gate, listening to the noise of water dripping from one piece of wood to another.

  He’d turned on the water. And something had plugged up the drain.

  I took the steps two at a time, slipping in a puddle on the stairs, cracking my shin but feeling nothing.

  Nothing but white-hot urgency.

  The safety gate wouldn’t open.

  I kicked at it, but it held fast.

  I jumped.

  Never in my whole entire life will I forget the picture of Moonie Pie floating facedown in that bathtub. That picture grew me up quick. Up to that point, I didn’t have much of a childhood and now I knew I never would. It was like the sun had sunk into the ocean and drowned, plunging the whole world into darkness.

  From that point on, J-Cat had nothing on me. I went nut up.

  I kept hearing the line in my head.

  Don’t hurt my baby.

  And I knew I had to get Moonie Pie somewhere safe. I fished his fat little body—wet sleeper, swollen diaper, and all—out of the tub and took off, pressing him to me like a sponge.

  I must have been screaming because I have this impression of them all at the bottom of the stairs, looking up at me with their mouths hanging open.

  “Don’t hurt my baby,” I said, underlining every word.

  Granny was taking the stairs two at a time. “Don’t be a fool. He needs help.”

  I squished Moonie Pie to me harder and kicked at the safety gate. It caught Granny right in the shoulder.

  Her howls joined mine as I bum-rushed her back down the stairs.

  Somehow, she got a fist full of my hair. “Where do you think you’re—”

  “Hammer Head!”

  I started screaming again. It was such a scream of pain and sadness, of the horrible agony I’d been feeling my whole life but had tried to hold in. It was coming out now and I couldn’t stop it. Hammer Head launched himself at Granny and hit her right in the breadbasket. All the other little crumb snatchers swarmed her like killer bees.

  “Get them off me,” Granny was yelling, and Sink and Dip joined the fray while I shot out of the house like a cannon, leaving my road dogs to take care of Granny.

  Don’t hurt my baby.

  I tossed Moonie Pie to my shoulder. One wet half dangled down my back as I held on to his slippered feet. Running. Running like my life depended on it. There was just one clear thought. I had to get Moonie Pie to safety. Hadn’t Baba beaten back the lions? Hadn’t he carried babies over swollen rivers and outrun soldiers with guns? If anybody could save us now, it would be Baba.

  I felt something burst underneath my ribs and more warm wet liquid gush out, and I remember not so much thinking as knowing that my rotten old heart had finally burst with sadness.

  I streaked across lawns and driveways and flower gardens and was to the edge of Baba’s yard in less than ninety seconds from the time my toes left Granny’s house of horrors.

  There he was, standing just beyond the drive, hunched up against the cold in a brown leather jacket. I ran toward him, hurling myself forward, knowing me and Moonie Pie were just seconds away from safety.

  As I crossed the driveway, I saw out of the corner of my eye a flash of shiny orange metal and I knew, with her recklessness and speed, J-Cat would not see us. Same as I knew that wanting couldn’t make me move fast enough to get out of her way.

  And so I passed him. I crushed Moonie Pie into a ball and passed him to Baba—using the now famous Clotkin chest pass—my love like rocket fuel, propelling him through the air.

  And then the north winds and the south winds met where I stood. And I rose in the air. Me. Harry Sue Clotkin. At the eye of the storm.

  Chapter 31

  Beau says, when an old con just up and dies, they handcuff his wrists together and put him in leg irons. They wheel him on a stretcher down the cell block, put him in an ambulance, and don’t declare him dead until they get to the hospital.

  They do it that way so they won’t have to count him as dying in prison, see? It makes their records look better.

  Most cons don’t have funerals. The hacks just take a picture of the body with the handcuffs and leg irons still on. Then they bury him in the prison graveyard, unless somebody cares enough to collect him.

  It could not have been that way with Garnett. I just know it. There would have been too much blood. Young blood. He was only twenty-seven when he got shanked by a tat-sleeved shower hawk.

  And it was my fault, too, because I should have told the judge that my dad had no impulse control. He was probably bumpin’ his gums all over the place soon as they locked him in his cell. He didn’t know how to collect road dogs. Probably what he did was nut up and eyeball a hack or drop a dime on the first con who got in his face. Poor Garnett.

  And Mary Bell. She wouldn’t have been so tired all the time if she didn’t have a child to account for. Swing shift wouldn’t have made her crank up if she ever got some decent sleep without a little crumb snatcher pestering her all the time to read and play games and all.

  Those were the thoughts that haunted me when I couldn’t sleep. They rattled after me in Granny’s old house until I thought I was the one who would nut up.

  After J-Cat hit me, dreams of Garnett and Mary Bell chased me all over, like two squirrels scampering up and down the walnut trees back of the house, only this time I couldn’t escape them. I couldn’t wake up. Morning wouldn’t come.

  And even after I began to hear, I still couldn’t move. I still couldn’t see. I didn’t know they were keeping me that way for a reason, so my poor bones could pull back together one more time, so my swollen head would stay still.

  I thought, So this is my punishment.

  And it seemed right that I was struck down.

  I couldn’t keep track of anything: not time, not the people who were always coming or going, not even the pain that flared up like a match being held to different parts of my body.

  I was in the special-handling unit. Shoe. The hole. No light. No words. Nothing but pain. Crazy maker. Nut up. Bug. Ding wing. Category J.

  For once, I didn’t fight it. I just gave up.

  Chapter 32

  First voice I could recognize was Mrs. Mead’s.

  “I’ll be fine right here, Anna,” she said. “The natural light is what makes it so nice to knit. I’ve done the death watch before, dear. My husband had four heart attacks before he finally succumbed. I can tell you from experience that a constant stream of communication is what pulls them back from the void. Harry Sue and I are going to have a little chat. About flowers.”

  … I’m partial to natives myself, dear, but there are some non-invasive exotics that I feel are truly worth sharing, particularly when you’re gravely ill.

  My, how she went on. Sometimes, J-Cat was in the room. I could feel her touching me. I couldn’t stop it. She used some kind of
cream, hot and thick, and rubbed it on my hands, pressing until she found the space between my bones and my muscles, pressing until I wanted to scream.

  But afterward I paid attention to how good it felt, clean and free, like I was floating on a cloud.

  … and I’ve discovered a whole new way of enjoying peonies. Paeonia suffruticosa. Tree peonies! They have stiff woody stems. No more lying on the ground to bloom. They’ll stand up straight and tall. I’ve ordered three fuchsia sunsets for the garden….

  There was a new buzzing noise in the room, above my head, different from the machines that whirred around me.

  And Baba’s voice: “It will be too bright, Anna, you can’t leave it on all night.”

  “I want her to see it in her dreams. I want her to know I’m communicating with her.”

  … Fortunately I was able to dig them up and overwinter them last year. But I’ll never put them in the basement again. Good heavens, the earwigs! I thought it was an invasion…. No, all potted geraniums will remain in the garage from now on….

  And then I had the strangest dream. Aunt Em came to visit. Only she looked just like my grandmother on my mom’s side, who died before Mom was sent up.

  I wanted to ask her, “Aunt Em, would you still take Dorothy back if you knew the real story? About what she did to the witches and all? Would it matter that Dorothy didn’t mean for it to happen?”

  But it didn’t seem right to upset her. And anyway, I couldn’t make the words.

  … It’s always potatoes and peas on Good Friday. Any sooner than that and they’ll rot in the ground. And if you didn’t set your garlic in November, don’t bother, dear. All you’ll get is a lot of pretty top growth and a bulb the size of a lima bean….

  And then Homer was at my ear. “Lower, Baba,” he said. “This is just between me and Harry Sue.”

  I felt his curls brush my cheek. Who would push his hair back now?

  “You know I hate hospitals, Harry Sue, but I’m your dog, aren’t I? Not just on the outs, but on the inside, too. Open your eyes, Harry Sue. That J-Cat’s left a message for you.”