“Later, Anna,” Baba whispered.
“Later? I been waiting for later since we left Gillikins. This is later.”
“You can tell her,” I said quietly, putting on a bike helmet in my mind and getting on that bike with the blue streamers.
I tried not to listen, but I found myself leaning forward more than once to catch Baba’s soft words. When he got to the part about the conette who’d been ear hustling on me and Mary Bell and gave up that she didn’t know Mary Bell had a kid, I pressed my head back against the seat. I didn’t have to listen to that mess twice. I even closed my eyes.
That’s why I didn’t see what happened next. Baba says J-Cat stuck her little foot between his and slammed on the brakes. I smacked up against the door as he let loose swearwords from another continent and veered over to the side of the road.
She was screwed around in her seat as far as her seat belt would allow.
“Are you gonna let that flat-talking fool tell you how to feel about Mary Bell?”
I wasn’t about to look at J-Cat. This was none of her business.
Do your own time! You nut-up-bug-ding-wing-crazy-making-Category-raggedy-old-J-cat!
I heard the glove compartment unlatch and the passenger door open. Then she was right beside me, banging on my window and waving a thick paperback book in my face.
“Roll it down! Roll it down!”
I looked at Baba. He was patting his shining face with a handkerchief.
“Let her have her say, Harry Sue, or we’ll be here all afternoon.”
I rolled the window down a crack with no definite plans to listen.
“You better listen!”
J-Cat kept her voice loud enough to override the hands I held against my ears as well as the cars passing on the highway. “This is your Kansas!”
She read:
The sun had baked the plowed land into a gray mass, with little cracks running through it. Even the grass was not green, for the sun had burned the tops of the long blades until they were the same gray color to be seen everywhere. Once the house had been painted, but the sun blistered the paint and the rains washed it away, and now the house was as dull and gray as everything else.
When Aunt Em came there to live she was a young, pretty wife. The sun and wind had changed her, too. They had taken the sparkle from her eyes and left them a sober gray; they had taken the red from her cheeks and lips, and they were gray also. She was thin and gaunt, and never smiled, now.
As she read, I started crying again and didn’t care who saw or heard me. J-Cat yanked open the door and pushed in beside me. She pulled my head onto her lap and patted it.
“We don’t know anything about it, Harry Sue,” she said. “But I imagine your Mary Bell has been through worse than anything that old Kansas prairie had to dish up.”
Being held by J-Cat is like getting a hug from a bundle of sticks. She is one bony lady. Soon as I recovered myself, I pulled away and tried to resume looking out the window on the other side. I needed to find somewhere else to be in my mind.
“There are a few things you don’t know, Harry Sue,” Baba said, making his way onto the highway again. “Things I learned after you left.”
Since J-Cat was out in the lobby, they had let me leave the visiting room without Baba. He had to stay behind anyway to get Mary Bell to sign the papers.
“That woman was a new prisoner, a … how do you say it? A fish. She only just met your mother. And there is also someone who kept eyes on you while your mother’s been in prison.”
“What do you mean ‘kept eyes’?” J-Cat asked. She had the window rolled down and was sticking her head out, feeling the air on her face.
“You know, watched Harry Sue. Kept eyes.”
“Oh, you mean, ‘kept an eye on her.’”
“I don’t need a grammar lesson right now, Anna,” he said.
“Just trying to be clear.” J-Cat pushed her head out the window again.
But I still didn’t get it.
“Stop the car!” J-Cat screamed, and this time she let Baba hit the brakes, believing after her wild call there must be some sort of emergency. Before we knew it, she was out of the car again, taking off down a side road just like the ones I’d been imagining myself on.
“What now?” Baba sighed.
I followed her with my eyes as she ran up the driveway of a small brick house with a sign out front that read: Free Puppies.
Not knowing what to do, Baba and I sat there, recovering, for quite some time, while a cloud of dust settled slowly around us.
“There were letters, too, Harry Sue. Not from Mary Bell, but to her. From Mrs. Mead.”
I had no time to think this through since J-Cat came running back to the car and stuck her crazy orange head in the window.
“I wanna be Anna again.”
“Huh?”
“Don’t play me for a fool, Harry Sue. I know you call me J-Cat.”
What was I supposed to say? It wasn’t the most flattering nick in the world.
“Can I be Anna again?” she persisted. “I’m partial to it. That was my great-grandmother’s name.”
I nodded. Whatever.
She disappeared back up the driveway. Baba waited for me to ask about Mrs. Mead again. He wouldn’t say more if I didn’t ask.
“Mrs. Mead?”
“She wrote to your mother about you. And told her she’d keep you safe.”
I wanted to know how old Mrs. Mead could keep me safe, but by now J-Cat was again back at the car, one of her kangaroo pockets squirming. Digging down, she pulled out the funniest-looking puppy dog I have ever seen, with black spots covering its stiff gray hair. Even though he was no bigger than a wood rat, his long tail poked up like the pieces of asparagus I watched coming up in Mrs. Mead’s garden.
“Can he be Otto?” she asked, reaching through the window and plopping the dog in my lap. “I was going to be Otto, but then I turned up a girl. Otto was my great-grandfather’s name.”
Baba looked back at me and smiled. “Can he be Otto?”
“Okay,” I said.
“That’s a relief.” Anna got into the car and slammed the door. “Wasn’t I saying this very morning, Baba, what we need is a dog?”
“What do you need a dog for?” I couldn’t help it. I bit.
“Why, to lick up Homer’s tears. That’s what for.”
Chapter 36
There’s only one piece of literature worth taking to the hole and that is The Wizard of Oz. If Louise Frank Baum were still alive, I’d write him a letter. That is some kind of story.
I hope someday you read that book and get educated, Fish. Because every time I do, I learn something new. I’ve had brains and lost them, tried to lose my heart but kept it, and hated those monkeys with a passion until I learned the backstory. They were under a spell.
All the while I was lying there in that hospital bed, my mind kept coming back to Dorothy. I know what the Tin Man was missing, and the Scarecrow and the Lion. I’d always figured what Dorothy was missing was Aunt Em, but it isn’t true. In the end, I figured out that Dorothy’s problem was not about getting sprung from Oz.
You have to work harder to figure out Dorothy’s mess. But there is a clue. It comes right after she meets Scarecrow and Tin Man. Dorothy listens to the two of them bumpin’ their gums about whether it’s better to have brains or a heart. After listening for a while, she thinks: “If she could only get back to Kansas and Aunt Em it did not matter so much whether the Woodman had no brains or the Scarecrow no heart, or each got what he wanted.”
I tell you, Fish, that just slayed me. What kind of a road dog did that make Dorothy? No kind, that’s what.
But by the end of the book, you wouldn’t catch Dorothy caring so little about her friends getting their deepest wish. Not after they saved her gingham-checked butt from witches, Quadlings, Kalidahs, wolves, bees, Winkies with spears, and what all.
We don’t know what Dorothy got up to after she landed back in Kansas. But you
can be sure she wasn’t the same Dorothy who left in the eye of that storm. And whatever new road dogs she met up with, well, at least she’d know how to treat ‘em.
Chapter 37
There’s a yellow line all around the edge of the exercise yard in the joint, and cons call it the “yellow brick road.” That’s right. Unlike Dorothy and her crew, cons and conettes don’t so much want to walk the yellow brick road as get beyond it to their new life on the outs. It helps some to know, finally, that my Mary Bell is not as far away as Oz is from Kansas. She’s just beyond that yellow brick road.
It’s late summer as I write this, and I’m still recovering, mostly here in Mrs. Mead’s garden. Me and Moonie Pie got a little catching up to do in the brains department, so I bring the crumb snatchers down every day and we weed, and pick runner beans, and cut flowers to put into mason jars.
Homer’s inventing a birdbath that cleans itself, so Baba props him up in a lawn chair on the edge of the garden to contemplate it. Once we got back from Gillikins, Anna kept Homer and Otto together night and day, so that pup won’t go much farther than the pillow they tuck under Homer’s right arm.
“You ever get the urge to be Christopher again?” I asked Homer, feeding him koftah, the little meatballs Baba had taught me to make that morning.
Otto was sitting up at attention, waiting for his share.
“Why would I want to do that?”
“I just thought since J-Cat wanted to go back to being Anna …”
“But she didn’t change, Harry Sue. She’s Anna because we changed.”
“I don’t follow.”
“She’s always been Anna. We gave her that nick because we were doing time, not her.”
Otto’s little face was turning this way and that, from my hand to Homer’s mouth and back again. I pinched off a bit of meatball with my other hand and let him take it from my fingers.
“I can never be Christopher,” he said sadly. “There is no more Christopher.”
“But you’re the same person on the inside,” I insisted. “You didn’t change on the inside.”
“Yes, I did, dog. I sure did.”
And his eyes started to leak a little, and Otto was on that like a duck on a June bug, as Mrs. Mead says, like he was born to the task of washing Homer’s face and making him giggle like a crumb snatcher.
Homer’s words got me thinking. I always was Harry Sue, wasn’t I? On the inside and on the outs.
“Homer,” I said, “I got a favor to ask you.”
“Okay.”
And so I told him what had happened that very morning while I was cooking breakfast with Baba.
“Your mother gave me something for you during our visit, Harry Sue,” Baba told me. “But she asked me to wait until you had time …”
He broke off talking to pinch the kisra in the pan with his fingers and flip it over.
“Time for what?”
I could see he was searching for the right word.
“To reflect.”
It was a slim little book. A spiral-bound notepad. There was my kindergarten picture on the cover, and around it were designs, doodly hearts, and curlicues. Lots of them. And there was my name in fancy letters. Harry Sue.
“It is a book of poetry she wrote for you,” he said. “But also to remember you. Now she wants you to have it.”
I left Homer on the lawn then and went to get the little book. I got his breakfast tray, too, the one that let him turn the pages with his chin.
“You always did have my back, Homer. Now somebody’s gotta read this book before me. Because I don’t think my heart is strong enough to handle any more surprises.”
Homer nodded. “Better take Otto,” he said. But that was all he said. Because in a very deep way, Homer knew just what I was feeling.
I have changed, Fish, but I will never be Harriet Susan. Because in the eyes of the first person who really mattered, I was Harry Sue.
And I just had to make sure I still am.
But we didn’t have time to talk about those deep things because, just after dinner, Mrs. Mead came to collect all of us: Baba, Anna, Homer, Otto, Mrs. Dinkins, and me.
“It’s the time I was telling you about all the winter long, Harry Sue,” Mrs. Mead said. “Do you remember it? Ipomoea alba?”
She seemed so excited that I nodded yes, but I hadn’t the faintest idea what she was on about. We sat on Mrs. Mead’s back porch, making small talk while it got dark. Baba held Homer gently in his big arms. Anna kept jumping off the steps, trying to catch fireflies, and Otto ran around her feet, snapping at the little flashing lights.
“Anna,” Mrs. Mead said finally. “Settle. Now close your eyes, everyone, and sniff.”
We did.
“At night, the flowers have to rely on scent to attract their pollinators.”
Anna sniffed again. Loudly. “It’s divine,” she said.
I smelled it, too, like someone had sprayed perfume in the air.
“Now look there.” Mrs. Mead pointed to a small clump by the step. With all the tramping I’d done up and down her stairs that summer, I don’t know how I could have missed the beautiful white flowers whose blossoms were reflecting the moonlight.
“These are the moonflowers I was telling you about, Harry Sue.” She plucked a flower and handed it to me.
“All winter long I was telling you that some things require the dark night to bloom.”
I took the flower over to Homer and pressed the silky petals to his cheek before holding it out for him to see.
“Look, there’s a star in it,” he said, and we both saw rays of a different shade of white peeling out from the center of the flower, forming the shape of a star.
Lighting up the night from below, just like a miracle.
Notes and
Acknowledgments
Straighten up, Fish.
It’s time to act like your T-Jones taught you
something and thank the people.
Let’s begin with my first, most brilliant and sensitive critics, my sons, Max and Walter Gilles, who at this writing are fourteen and twelve. I couldn’t ask for better readers. My husband, Roger Gilles, and my dear friends Terri McElwee, Debra Nails, and William Levitan all gave invaluable input. I can’t thank you enough for your close reading and your honesty.
My expert panel includes Pam Lockwood, piano teacher extraordinaire and former home health nurse (whose methods bear no resemblance to J-Cat’s), and Joe Abramajtys, a fellow writer and former prison administrator who helped me see what I could not. I would also like to thank all the children of prisoners I have met along the way. Thank you for sharing your fantasies, your hopes, and your fears with me.
In addition to Joe and my young friends, I learned Conglish from a number of excellent sources. Books like Doing Time: 25 Years of Prison Writing, edited by Bell Gale Chevigny, and Undoing Time: American Prisoners in Their Own Words, edited by Jeff Evans, were great sources. So were the excellent True Notebooks by Mark Salzman and Behind Bars: Surviving Prison by Jeffrey Ian Ross and Stephen C. Richards. The glossary in Behind Bars gave me the idea for Harry Sue’s “Joint Jive” glossary. All of these books are written for adults. If you want to share a great book about prison with kids, check out Life in Prison by Stanley “Tookie” Williams. This is where I learned about “J-Cats” and many other details of daily prison life.
You should know, dear reader, that while Harry Sue is a composite of many girls, all the major events in this novel are based on true stories. My files are filled with news clippings. The summer I began Harry Sue, a young girl was thrown from a seventh-floor window by her father—and lived. A baby drowned in a bathtub where she’d been laid for a nap by her child-care provider. A foster grandmother was arrested and later convicted for severely abusing the children in her charge. And a woman in Florida was convicted of accidentally giving a baby in her care a lethal dose of Benadryl, a cold medicine, to make her sleep longer. Horrible things do happen every day, and I want to acknowledge the gr
ief of those who’ve lost children due to abuse or neglect.
Even though there is cruelty, neglect, and sadness in our world, there is even more compassion and altruism. To young people, I say thank you for being kind to each other. The human heart is very fragile, even when it appears to be covered in riveted steel. Also, my deepest gratitude goes to the adults who care for children, who teach them and who work with juvenile offenders. Your kindness and your sympathy for the hard task of growing up make a world of difference.
I will never forget the magical day almost twenty years ago, when I witnessed the wedding of our old family friend, Rick Stein, to his wife, Leah. Paralyzed in an accident as a teenager, Rick as the leading partner in their wedding dance on wheels was a moment of pure joy for all who witnessed it, proving that the human capacity for love can overcome even the greatest obstacles. And, no, for the record, Leah did not nail her grandmother with the bouquet. I just can’t mention real people in relation to J-Cat without making clear that she is a fictional character without a human counterpart. Unless we count me.
In Dorothy’s story there are two good witches, but here in Grand Rapids we have many! I would like to particularly thank Debbie McFalone, the executive director of Curriculum and Elementary Instruction for the Grand Rapids Public Schools (GRPS), and Julie Powell, fine-arts coordinator of GRPS; Dorothy Johnson and Shelli Otten, principals in GRPS; Sarah McCarville, youth-services coordinator for the Grand Rapids Public Library; Sally Bulthuis and Camille DeBoer, owners of Pooh’s Corner Children’s Bookstore in Grand Rapids; Terri McElwee, of Elite Karate and Fitness; Gretchen Vinnedge, education coordinator for the Community Media Center; Molly Corriveau, a celebrated artist and professor at Kendall College of Art and Design; Mary Jo Kuhlman, Ball Foundation; Jane Royer, corporate volunteer coordinator of the United Way; and Susan Heartwell, executive director of the Student Advancement Foundation. Trish English and Mary Johnson are outstanding volunteers, mothers, and friends.
Okay, okay, we’ll have some honorary good witches, too: Bert Bleke, superintendent of schools for GRPS; Fritz Crabb, community programs manager at the United Way; Steve Robbins of S. L. Robbins and Associates; and Sherman McElwee of the McElwee Martial Art Center. You are my crew, and every day you work hard to make a difference for kids in our city. Thank you!
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