The Middle of Somewhere

by J. B. Cheaney

  To Doug:

  who hates sudden moves,

  loud noises,

  and surprises.

  Surprise!

  Don't let life's little surprises get you down.

  Expect the unexpected! Remember, there's always.

  a Plan B.

  —Kent Clark,

  Seize the Way:

  Ten Weeks to SuperSize Your Life!

  None of this that I'm about to tell you would have happened if my mother hadn't found that squirrel in the toilet.

  Kent Clark says that life is full of surprises. This particular surprise started with my brother leaving the front door open again, which he's not supposed to do because there's a big tear in the storm-door screen that my mother never got around to having fixed.

  When the squirrel got in, my brother was the first to go nuts. My mother went nuts right after, because when she's having one of her Bad Days it doesn't take much. Then the squirrel went nuts because—but let me back up.

  It was the first Saturday morning in June. My brother— whose name is Gerald but we've always called him “Gee”— was sprawled on the floor in the living room watching cartoons. All of a sudden, a fuzzy tail flickered across the screen. Next minute, the furry little animal attached to the tail had whipped around on top of the TV and was staring my brother right in the face. Both were equally shocked, I'm sure, but Gee was the one who screamed. Then he threw what was closest to hand, which happened to be a bowl of Cheerios, and we were off to the races.

  With Gee leaping and lunging after him, the squirrel zoomed all the way around the living room twice before discovering the kitchen door. His squirrelly brain probably leapt with joy—Ah, escape hatch!—as he shot through the opening.

  Only to be confronted with another screaming person: my mother. She hadn't been much alarmed when Gee let loose, because Gee screaming is no big deal. But a small, four-legged mammal on the counter, knocking spoons to the floor and making tracks right through the pancakes on the griddle—that's a big deal. “Ronniiie!” she yelled.

  Ronnie is me, Veronica Sparks. At that exact moment, I was on the bed in my room reading a copy of Architectural Digest from the library. Or maybe “reading” isn't the best word for poring over diagrams of how to organize a closet, which was my current project. That jangly tone in my mother's “Ronniiie!” made the magazine jump out of my hands and dive to the floor. Something big was going down.

  And when I reached the kitchen door, it hurled itself at me: a reddish-gray ball of fur with a twirly tail and beady eyes and toothy mouth stretched wide like a little bear trap, landing right on my chest!

  Then I screamed, which those who know me will agree is a very rare occurrence.

  The squirrel leapt off my chest as quick as he'd leapt on. Next, a wild chase with dialogue to match.

  ME: Open the back door and shoo him out!

  MAMA: I tried that, but whenever I make a move he goes berserk!

  ME: So?! He's not going any berserker! I'll chase him your way!

  GEE: Aiieee!

  MAMA: Don't let him get near the fan!

  ME: I'll head him off!

  GEE: Ow! Ow! Ow! (Which he yells sometimes, not because he's hurt but because it's an easy yell to do over and over.)

  MAMA: Okay, now—oh no!

  The “oh no” was because even though our peppy little visitor got safely through the door, it was the wrong door—back into the living room, with a little squad of Sparkses (that's us) in hot pursuit.

  If I'd thought, while still on my bed looking over Architectural Digest, Hmmm, that particular tone in my mothers voice probably means that some wild animal is loose in the house. Therefore, on my way to the kitchen I'll open the storm door in the living room, just in case the critter heads that way—if such thoughts had run through my head at that point, tragedy could have been avoided. But I'm not so good at handling life's little surprises yet.

  The squirrel saw daylight through the storm door and slammed his panicky body against it, but he missed the hole in the screen that got him into this mess in the first place. Bouncing off the screen, he spun around, getting even more confused, then headed for the hallway.

  The straightest route from the hall led into my room, which at the moment was nothing but walls and corners. I was reorganizing, so all my stuff was piled in the middle of the floor: no posters, shelves, or anything to break up the monotony. That squirrel got up such a speed he was running sideways on the wall, like some hotshot skateboarder. But after twice around, he careened back into the hall and headed for my mother's bedroom.

  Mama never reorganizes. And she never throws anything away. Her room always looked like an explosion in Granny's Drawers Antique Mall (where some of the stuff came from): two dressers, two sewing machines, stacks of plastic storage boxes, a wardrobe with its door hanging open, an empty birdcage, and (somewhere) a bed. And that's only the big stuff. To a squirrel, it must have looked like hideaway heaven, after bare-wall hell. He dived in and disappeared.

  We heard some crackles and rustles, but soon not even that. In the sudden quiet, the three of us stared at each other. “All right,” Mama said grimly. “He's in here somewhere. Gee, don't move. Ronnie and I'll flush him out.”

  So the two of us went on patrol while Gee stayed by the door. He couldn't just stay, though—he kept squatting down to peer under furniture, chanting, “Squirrel-ly Squirr-rel-ly” We had to keep telling him to quit so we could listen for movement. For five minutes at least, we crept around like jungle commandos searching for the enemy spy—tiptoe to the hat rack; stop and listen. Peek under the bed; stop and listen. And try not to think of a screaming kamikaze rodent leaping from behind the rolls of gift wrap to latch on to your nose.

  Finally, Mom straightened up and wiped the sweat off her forehead with a mighty sigh. “This is the last thing I need today. Rent's due, A/C's broken, and I've got to clean up this room. But if I don't get to the bathroom right now, I'm gonna pop.” She eased around the sewing-machine table. “Keep a watch, Ronnie. If that nasty rodent makes a move, chase him out”

  Gee leapt at her, knocking over a pile of plastic storage bins. “Don't go, Mama!”

  She got ahold of her temper and held him off. “It's just to the bathroom, sugar. Help your sister, okay?” As her steps creaked into the hall, my brother slipped over and grabbed my hand. We tiptoed toward the closet.

  Then from the bathroom came a hair-raising screech, followed by a squeak, and finally a WHAM!

  When we got to the bathroom door, still holding hands, the sight struck us both at the same time: Mama flat on the floor with one leg twisted to the side. Hanging over the edge of the toilet seat was something that looked exactly like a squirrel tail.

  Of course Gee started screaming again. Meanwhile, my mother was moaning in pain, so it took a while to sort out what happened.

  There's a hole in the wall between my mother's room and the bathroom. How it got there is anybody's guess, but my guess is that somebody who used to live here had a temper and wore steel-toed boots. The hole made a crooked tepee shape in the bedroom wall and a little boottoe shape in the bathroom, which you wouldn't think a grown-up squirrel could get through. But as I learned that day, there's not much to them but fur.

  Our squirrel must've thought his luck had changed when he found an escape hatch. And while he sat on the tile floor catching his breath, his little heart pattering like a snare drum, he must have picked up the scent of water. A life-or-death chase over hill and dale and hot skillet can make a critter thirsty.

  So he nosed down into the toilet—which was easy, since Gee left the seat up again—only to find that there was no nosing out. The harder he scurried, the farther he sank, until his little head was wed
ged into the inlet hole and he was all the way drowned. My mother came in right after.

  The screech we heard was her shock at Rocky the Flying Squirrel's tragic end. The squeak was her slipping on the wet tile floor, and the thump was her fall. It was a loud thump, because my mother—though cute as a bug with her curly dark hair and bright blue eyes—is a bit on the heavy side.

  So our squirrel problem was solved, but now we had a Mama problem. Which turned out to be a whole lot worse. I didn't know how much worse until I tried to help her up and she screamed in pain: “Call 911!” Gee yelled the same, as though I hadn't heard it the first time. (A lot of yelling goes on in our house.)

  The operator dispatched an ambulance and transferred me to the hospital, where the nurse on duty told me to put a pillow under Mama's head but not to move her or apply any pressure to the leg or knee. “What's that noise in the background?” she asked.

  “That's my brother. He's ADHD. Once he gets wound up he's hard to unwind.”

  “Well, see what you can do,” she said. “That can't be helpful.”

  No kidding, thought I as I thanked her and hung up.

  Our little town is fifteen miles from the nearest hospital—which never seemed very far before, but try waiting for the ambulance to arrive while keeping your injured mother comfortable and your hyper little brother quiet. Mama got herself under control, but she couldn't help crying because her leg hurt so bad. I couldn't help crying a little, too, and since I hardly ever cry, that got Gee going again. The only thing that cheered him up, finally, was getting an ambulance ride to the hospital. And even then, he kept popping up to rattle equipment and ask ADHD questions—the kind that never wait for answers— until the medic suggested, “Kid, do you want a shot of what we gave your mom?”

  After that, our day got long and boring. I won't go into all the details, except that Mama had to have emergency knee surgery and somebody had to figure out who would pay for it and who would take care of us while she was recuperating. That meant a long meeting with a lady with a stack of file folders who met us in one of those tiny offices that hospital architects seem to stick anywhere there's extra space. After some opening chitchat, she asked, “Okay, Ronnie, where's your dad?”

  “In heaven,” I said.

  The lady put down her pen, heaved a big sigh, and gave me a sympathetic look, along with a moment of silence. “I'm sorry to hear that.”

  “Sorry he's in heaven?”

  “No, I mean—” She raised her voice to carry outside to the lobby, where Gee was amusing himself. “Gerald, honey, please stop playing with the automatic doors.” Back to me: “How long ago was your father—I mean, did he—?”

  “Five years. I was seven. I'm twelve now.” That was more about me than him, but I don't like to talk about him much. He was a long-haul truck driver, big and strong and funny. Hugging him was like throwing your arms round a stout oak tree. One icy night in January he stopped on the highway near Chicago to help a lady change a flat tire. While he was wrenching lug nuts off the tire, he got hit by a chicken truck. That may sound funny, getting hit by a chicken truck. Most people think that anything with chickens in it has to be funny. But I don't.

  The lady, whose name tag read L. DANIELS, picked up her pen. “So who's the next of kin that lives closest to you?”

  “My grandfather, probably. My mother's dad. John Q. Hazeltine.”

  “Gerald—don't even think about climbing those drapes. And where does he live?”

  “On the road.” She looked at me. “No, really, he doesn't settle anyplace. He's got this old camper and lots of business on the road. He stops by every now and then to see us.”

  “But isn't there some way you can reach him in emergencies?”

  “Emergencies, no. But we send Christmas cards and changes of address to the Happy Trails Travel Court in Muleshoe, Texas. That's his winter headquarters.”

  “But summer just started, so he won't be there?”

  “No, ma'am.”

  “What about your other grandparents? Gerald! Stop that!”

  I gave her the whole family history: how my dad's father had passed away and his mother was a missionary in Warsaw, Poland, and how my grandmother on Mama's side, the one who was no longer married to John Q. Hazeltine, lived in a gated retirement community in Florida that she only left to go on cruises with her second husband. L. Daniels wrote in the folder for a long time, probably about what a hopeless family we were. She froze up when Gee bounced into the office, but all he did was flop down in the chair next to mine, keel over with his head in my lap, and fall asleep. I mean, fall asleep, like from the top of a cliff or something.

  “He sleeps hard,” I said.

  Gee was still zonked out an hour later when the surgeon stopped by to tell me the operation was successful but Mama would have to stay off her feet for at least a month. “You look like you'd be a big help around the house, right?” I just nodded—that's the story of my life so far, though I'm working on Plan B.

  “We'll release her tomorrow if there's a responsible adult at home to help you.”

  I nodded again, mentally flipping through my short list of responsible adults. We've only lived in Partly, Missouri—seriously, that's the name of the town—since February and don't have that many friends yet. Lyddie McIntyre was probably the best option. She's an old buddy of Mama's who convinced her to move to Partly because it was cheaper than living in the Kansas City area and the school here needed another cafeteria worker.

  When Mama got out of surgery and felt clearheaded enough to make the call, Lyddie agreed to be our responsible adult.

  That's how my summer vacation started. If it hadn't been for Kent Clark, I would have been really bummed about it.

  He's the author of this paperback book I picked up in the dentist's office last fall: Seize the Way: Ten Weeks to SuperSize Your Life! The chapters had titles like “Finding the Silver Lining” and “Row the Flow.” The pages were full of bullet points and checklists and short- and long-term goals. A little voice inside my head whispered, Seize the book! Since it didn't seem to belong to anybody, I slipped it in my jacket pocket and read almost all of it that night while the numbness was wearing off my back molars. By bedtime, I'd made my very first list of long-term goals:

  Buy a car.

  start a business in high school (or sooner), save money.

  After graduation, travel for one year.

  College? (Decide in high school.)

  start using my full name.

  I like “Veronica” but never liked “Ronnie.” However, as long as you're underage, who's going to call you with four syllables when they can do it with two?

  Speaking of names, in the prologue of his book, Kent Clark makes a big deal of his real actual name being Kent Clark—which didn't seem worth making a big deal about until I remembered Clark Kent. Aha: SuperMan, SuperSize. Which is pretty lame, but it's a super book— I've learned not only how to Row the Flow, but also how to Game My Goals and Affirmatize My Attitude.

  Still, anybody's attitude would take a hit if they had to leave their mother in the hospital and come home to a torn-up house with pancake-batter tracks in the kitchen and a drowned squirrel in the toilet.

  Lyddie stuck around for a couple hours to help clean up and stop Gee from denting our car with a shovel while playing Knight's Tale. (This was after she stopped him from digging up Mama's petunia bed to make a grave for Rocky.) “Whew” was her comment after plopping him in front of the TV with a bowl of popcorn. “Is he always like this?” All our friends get around to that question sooner or later.

  “In a little bit,” she went on, “I have to run down to Springfield for my grandson's birthday party, but I'll check on you when I get back. And of course I'll be here tomorrow morning to take you to the hospital to get your mom. Will you guys be okay?”

  “Sure,” I said. Lyddie was playing responsible adult, but the real responsibility around here was mine.

  Row the Flow: that is, find the direction yo
ur life is going anyway and figure out how to make it suit your goals. But my life was flowing in a seriously weird direction. How'd I flow into this dinky little town with institutions called Partly School and Partly Baptist Church, etc.? Would that make me partly-Veronica for the rest of my life?

  What would it take, I wondered while scrubbing the last of the pancake batter off the kitchen wall, to change direction altogether? That's one reason my first long-term goal was buying a car: to whoosh me somewhere else if I didn't like where I was. But “long-term” meant at least three years in the future. For now I was stuck in the family boat.

  Figuring out how to row it was beyond me after an evening of cleanup that took twice as long with Gee “helping.” When my head hit the pillow that night, I sank like a rock.

  Unbeknownst to me, though, the poky current of my life was about to hit the rapids!

  Destiny is not something that happens to you—

  it's something you make happen!

  —Kent Clark,

  Seize the Way

  Kent Clark says that one way to hear destiny knocking is to notice when two unusual events happen at the same time. One unusual event, all by itself, can flare up and then just fade away. But when two of them happen together, they can stir up a crazy kind of energy that just keeps popping and fizzing. So the first unusual event of my summer destiny was Mama falling in the bathroom and busting up her knee. The second happened the very next morning.

  I was in the middle of a dream where Gee and I were in the freshwater aquarium at Bass Pro Outdoor World. It was feeding time and the usual crowd had gathered to watch the catfish and largemouth bass dart for those lumps of processed food thrown out by the fish feeder. Gee was darting, too, because being with the fish inspired him to act “fishy.” The feeder thought it was funny. He kept throwing nuggets my brother's way and Gee kept diving for them and I was afraid he'd drown. The crowd was laughing—like the kids at school, when Gee does something off the wall and they don't know how to react. “Stop it!” I yelled in my dream. “Don't encourage him!” At the shooting gallery near the aquarium, somebody kept scoring targets with a loud buzz that got on my nerves.