They didn’t send us to a regular school. Grandfather said we were too far behind for that. So he got in tutors to teach us at home. There were three or four of them, and they came on different days and taught us arithmetic and spelling and history and so forth. Grandfather said we’d catch up a whole lot faster that way. When we were caught up, he would send us to private schools, and at last I would have a jacket with an emblem on it and play on some team.
But it didn’t take me more than a week to realize that Ooma wasn’t suited to it at all. She liked having Grandmother make a fuss over her and give her bubble baths, and take her shopping for clothes and then for sodas at some fancy place afterward. She liked having horseback lessons, and she liked being able to run around in the garden and lie in the grass and smell the flowers. But she didn’t like the rest of it very much. She didn’t like having to eat in that big dining room and be polite; she was used to eating whenever she felt like it and grabbing whatever she wanted. She didn’t like being tutored at all. She spent the whole time her tutors were there twisting and turning in her seat, staring out the window and chewing on the eraser of her pencil. The tutors were always bawling her out for something. She didn’t like that, either, because she wasn’t used to being bawled out. She didn’t like hanging up her clothes and cutting her fingernails and getting her hair shampooed all the time.
The trouble was that our grandparents had a lot of rules. They didn’t think they had a lot of rules, but they did. They were always saying that they’d been too hard on Gussie, that they shouldn’t have been so strict with her and made her take lessons in everything and learn how to serve tea and be polite. They’d learned their lesson, they said, and they’d never do it that way again. But they still had an awful lot of rules. I guess that if you’re used to a hundred rules, fifty doesn’t seem like very much. But Ooma’d been used to about two rules, and any more than that seemed like too many.
Me, I liked having the rules. I liked the idea of everything being set and organized for a change. I liked knowing that if I listened to what the tutors said and studied what they told me to study, I would catch up and stop being dumb. I liked knowing when I was supposed to get up in the morning and what time lunch was. I liked knowing that if I finally went to a private school and got to be friendly with the other kids, and one of them asked me over to dinner, I’d know all the right table manners and how to serve myself from the maid, if they had one.
But not Ooma—she didn’t like having any rules at all. By the end of the first week we were there, she was being low and quiet. It wasn’t like her to be low and quiet, and I knew there was bound to be an explosion if I didn’t do something. For I knew that if Ooma went back to Gussie and J. P., they’d know where I was and come after me, too. I couldn’t let that happen; I had to keep her from deciding to go back. So one night, when we were supposed to be doing our homework, I went into her room to talk to her.
She was lying on her bed looking at a magazine—she still couldn’t read enough to read a book. I sat down in her chair. “Ooma, you ought to try not to be so grumpy, you don’t realize how lucky you are.”
“I want to get the hell out of here.”
“Give it a little more chance. Once you get used to it, you’ll probably like it.”
“I’ll never get used to this damn place, you made me come here. I wish we didn’t come.”
“If you go back to live with Gussie and J. P., you’re bound to get into big trouble sooner or later.”
“Why would I?”
“What about that time in New York you stole all that money?”
“The system is always ripping us off.” She heaved the magazine across the room. “We have a right to rip them off.”
“Just because J. P. says that doesn’t mean you have to believe it.”
“Why shouldn’t I believe it if I want to?” she said. “It’s right, isn’t it?”
“I don’t think it’s right,” I said.
“Well, I do,” she said. “I just want to get the hell out of this damn place. Why did you make me come here, anyway?”
I could see that there wasn’t any point in arguing with her. She wasn’t in a mood to listen to anything I said. So I dropped it; but I knew there was going to be an explosion, and it came three or four days later.
That afternoon, I was up in my room writing an essay on the planets when I heard Grandmother come upstairs and go into Ooma’s room. In a minute she opened my door and put her head in. “Where’s Ooma, Fergy? The reading teacher is here.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Isn’t she in her room?”
“No, she’s not.”
“Maybe she’s in the bathroom,” I said.
“I looked in there,” she said.
I began to get the feeling that Ooma was up to something. I figured I’d better find her myself before they did. “I’ll go look for her,” I said. I went into Ooma’s room. There was a good chance that she’d hidden when she’d heard Grandmother coming. I looked under her bed and in her closet, but she wasn’t there. I checked the bathroom again, in case she’d hidden in the shower, but she wasn’t there, either. I went back into her room to see if all her clothes were still there. I didn’t think she’d take off on her own—that would have been too scary for her. But I checked, anyway, and her clothes were still there.
I was just about to go downstairs when, through the window, I saw something move out in the garden. I went downstairs and out back through the glass doors in the living room. There was a birdbath in the middle of the lawn and, beyond that, flower beds. I couldn’t see Ooma. I crossed the lawn to the other side, and then I saw her.
She was lying flat on her back in the middle of a flower bed. The flowers all around her were broken and flattened. She had her shirt off, and she was rubbing her chest with a handful of dirt and flowers mixed together.
“Ooma, are you crazy?” I said.
“I’m sick of this crappy place,” she shouted. “I can’t stand it anymore. I want to go back to Gussie and J. P.”
“Ooma, get out of there,” I said. “Grandmother’s going to have a fit when she sees what you’re doing.”
“I don’t give a damn,” she said. “I don’t care what she thinks.”
I started to jump into the flower bed to haul her out of it, when I realized that Grandmother and Grandfather were coming across the lawn toward us. I grabbed her arm, jerked her to her feet, and dragged her out of the bed onto the lawn. There were dirt and bits of flowers all over her chest, and on her face, too. She swung with her fist to slug me, but I ducked back into the garden and picked up her shirt. Then our grandparents were there.
“What is this, Ooma?” Grandmother said. “What have you been doing?”
“I’m sick of this damn place,” she shouted. “I’m sick of all these damn rules. I want to go back to Gussie and J. P.”
Our grandparents looked at each other. Then Grandfather said, “All right, Ooma, let’s go inside and talk about it.”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” she shouted. “I just want to go home.”
“But, Ooma,” Grandmother said, “we don’t know where your parents are.”
“I’ll find them,” she shouted.
Grandfather put his arm around her shoulder. “All right, calm down. We’ll see what we can do about it.” He started walking her toward the house, and Grandmother and I followed along behind them. I was feeling rotten about what might happen to me.
Grandmother gave Ooma some ice cream and got her calmed down, and finally she was willing to have a bubble bath and put on clean clothes. So she and Grandmother went upstairs, and Grandfather and I sat in the living room.
“Do you have any idea where they are, Fergy?” he said.
“Because of having the stolen motor home, they’re trying to stay out in the country away from cities.”
“You don’t have any better idea than that?”
“No,” I said. “They were out in Arkansas when we ran away, and the
y might be around there someplace. But they’re in the habit of traveling around a lot, because you can’t sell that honey and stuff to the same people all the time.”
He nodded. “Fergy, you understand that we can’t keep Ooma here if she’s going to be miserable all the time.”
“Yes,” I said. He was right, but it didn’t make me feel any better.
“I’ve been watching her the past few days, and I could see she’d lost her spark. She was like a wild animal in a trap. Did you notice?”
“Yes,” I said. “I was hoping she’d get over it.”
“We thought that in time she’d get used to things here, but it doesn’t seem so. I’m afraid it’s going to take a long time to civilize her. It’s a shame. She’s intelligent and she’s pretty when she takes care of herself, but she just doesn’t seem to care for any of that.”
“Maybe she will when she’s older.”
“It may be too late then. I don’t know. You never can tell how these things will work out.” He took off his glasses and stared at the ceiling. “How? How are we going to find them?”
“Grandfather, if they take her they’ll take me, too.”
He put his glasses back on and looked at me. “They’ll try to, Fergy. I know that. It’s the risk we have to take. We can’t keep Ooma here if she’s as miserable as she’s been.”
“Maybe if we gave her a little more time.”
He nodded. “It’s worth a try.”
So they had a talk with Ooma and got her to agree to stick it out a little longer and see if she got more used to their ways. A week went by. I worked as hard as I could on my studies, because I knew it might be my last chance to catch up. When I got a chance I tried to talk Ooma into staying. “You’ll be able to go to a fancy school and meet a lot of rich kids and marry a rich guy when you grow up.”
“I hate rich guys,” she said. “They’re bourgeois.”
“Don’t you like new clothes and being pretty instead of looking like a pig all the time?”
“What’s wrong with old clothes?” she said. “I like them.”
“If you go back to the motor home you won’t get all this good stuff to eat—ice cream and roast beef and cake.”
“I don’t care,” she said. “I want to go back to Gussie and J. R.”
Finally, I realized that I couldn’t talk her out of it, and I stopped trying. And then one morning I went up to her room to tell her that her reading tutor was there. She wasn’t there, and I was about to knock on the bathroom door to see if she was there, when I heard a radio playing softly somewhere in the room. That surprised me, because she didn’t have a radio. I cocked my head to listen, and in a couple of seconds I determined that it was coming from the bed. I jumped over there and snatched up the pillow. And sure enough, there lay a little transistor radio.
I picked it up, and just then Ooma came back into the room, tucking her shirt into her skirt. “Where did you get this?” I said.
“Grandmother gave it to me,” she said.
“You’re a big liar,” I said. “You stole it.”
“None of your damn business,” she said. She grabbed at it, but I snatched my hand back in time.
“Who did you steal it from? “
“None of your business,” she said, and grabbed for it again.
I figured I knew. Grandmother and Grandfather weren’t much interested in listening to the radio. If they wanted to hear a concert or something, they usually put records on the big stereo in the den. But the maids listened while they worked. “You stole this from one of the maids, didn’t you? From Sheila.”
All she said was, “Give it back to me,” and made another grab for it, so I knew I was right. I stuck it in my pocket and ducked around her out of the room. I went downstairs to give it back to Sheila, feeling sick, for I knew that if Ooma was starting to steal again, she would have to go back to Gussie and J. R I didn’t want to tell Grandfather, but I had to, and I did.
He nodded. “It isn’t the stealing,” he said. “The money’s not important. But it’s a sign that she’s unhappy, Fergy. That kind of thing always is.”
“Then why did she steal all the time when we lived in the van? She was supposed to be happy living that way.”
Grandfather nodded. “I imagine that she wasn’t quite as happy about all of that as she seemed. Right now, she’s homesick and she misses her mother, which would be normal in a child her age. But when you get down to it, that was a fairly insecure life you were all living. I mean, never knowing if you’d have a good dinner, and always worried about being run out of someplace by the police. Most children like to know that there’ll be food on the table and a roof over their heads the next day.”
I could agree with that, all right. I never liked living that way myself, and I guess maybe that down inside, Ooma didn’t like it as much as she thought she did. But there was no way around it—she was determined to go back to J. P. and Gussie, and we had to let her do it. “I’m not going back with them,” I said. “I’ll run away again.”
“Let’s cross that bridge when we get to it, Fergy,” Grandfather said.
The question now was how to find the motor home. The easiest thing would have been to call the police and put them on the lookout for it. But we didn’t dare do that, for the police were bound to discover that the motor home had been stolen, and then J. P. and Gussie and the rest would be in serious trouble. So Grandfather hired a private detective to look for them, a man who specialized in finding missing persons. He told Grandfather that there was a good chance of finding them.
“It seems like a needle in a haystack looking for somebody in a country as big as the United States, but people leave trails. They’re out in public with that little business of theirs. People are going to remember them. I’ll have one of my associates who operates out of the Memphis area start driving around to shopping malls and asking questions. We know that they tend to work out of suburban malls, and if they’re still in that area, he’s bound to find somebody who remembers them. Once we catch hold of one end of a string, it’s relatively easy to follow it out.”
After that Grandfather said that Ooma didn’t have to study anymore if she didn’t want to or have horseback-riding lessons, either. And she could wear old clothes, too; but she would have to keep herself clean and eat with the rest of us and at least try to use good table manners.
The whole thing kind of surprised Ooma. She wanted to go back to Gussie and J. P.—that was clear enough. But suddenly being allowed to sit around all day and look at magazines or watch TV, she felt sort of out of things. Sometimes when one of my tutors came she would hang around in the den where he was teaching me, curled up in a big chair, sucking her thumb. Or when they took me in to the Boston Symphony one Sunday to expose me to good music, she said she wanted to go.
“You’d just be bored, Ooma,” Grandmother said. “Besides, you’d have to dress properly, and you know you don’t like to do that.”
She looked at me in my shirt and tie and jacket and shoes that I’d shined up so they gleamed. “I wouldn’t mind dressing up this time,” she said, kind of sad.
“No, you’d just be bored,” Grandmother said. I knew Grandmother was trying to get Ooma to see what she would be missing when she went back to Gussie and J. P. I felt sorry for her, but she’d asked for it.
So a week went by, and another one, and I was beginning to get up hopes that the missing persons detective wasn’t as smart as he thought he was and would never find them, when one night as we were eating dinner the phone rang. The maid answered, and in a minute she came into the dining room. “Excuse me, Mr. Hamilton. It’s a woman who says she’s your daughter.”
“Does that mean Gussie?” Ooma said. Her eyes began to shine.
“Yes,” Grandfather said. He looked at me and Grandmother, and then he got up and went down the hall to his den to answer the phone.
Grandmother turned her head to stare out into the garden. “Fifteen years,” she said. “It’s been fifteen yea
rs.”
Ooma jumped out of her seat. “Where is she? Can I go see her?”
“We don’t know where she is yet, Ooma. We have to wait until Grandfather finishes talking to her. Now sit down and finish your dinner.”
But Ooma couldn’t sit still She kept jumping off her chair and running down the hall toward the den to see if Grandfather had finished talking. I would get her and bring her back, and about two minutes later she would jump down and race off again.
I felt pretty bad. In a while—a few days, maybe even a few hours—they would drive up in the motor home and take me back, and I’d be living with them again, playing guitar in shopping malls, living on hot dogs and peanut-butter sandwiches, wearing old clothes, taking showers in YMCAs and public bathhouses, and getting dumb all over again. How I wished that that guy had never found them. Oh, how I wished they’d forgotten about us altogether.
Then Grandfather came back into the dining room. He looked at Grandmother. “It wasn’t that detective who found them,” he said.
She looked surprised. “Not the detective?”
“No,” he said. He sat down at the table and put his napkin in his lap to go on eating. He looked mighty grim. “They’re all in jail. They got caught for stealing the motor home. They’re being held for ten thousand dollars bail. Augusta called to ask us for the bail money.”
Grandmother pulled her lips tight together. Then she said, “Did you tell her that the children are here?”
“I had to,” Grandfather said, picking up his fork. “She said they wouldn’t have been arrested, but she was so worried about the children that she went to the police about it. She was afraid they had been kidnapped, or worse.”
FOURTEEN
THE WHOLE THING made me feel terrible. I’d got my own mom and dad put in jail, I had trouble going to sleep that night for thinking about it. I tossed and turned, wishing that somehow I had bothered to figure out a way of letting Gussie know we were okay. If only I had done that, they wouldn’t have got put in jail. I could have told her we’d found Mr. and Mrs. Clappers and gone to live with them. She’d have believed that and wouldn’t have worried so much. Or I could have told her we’d got put in a home someplace, but wanted to stay there and weren’t going to tell her where it was. I could have thought of something, and I could have figured out a way to get a message to her. But I hadn’t; I’d been too worried all along about saving myself and hadn’t given Gussie any thought, and now she was in jail. For it was clear enough that it was Gussie who’d gone to the police. She’d told Grandfather so. J. P. hadn’t wanted to take the chance; they’d find us themselves, he said. But it was too much of a worry for Gussie, so she took the chance and went to the police.
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