by Lisa Tucker
“She knows I’m not her mother,” Kyra said quickly. “It’s just pretend.” Kyra had reminded the little girl over and over that she was her aunt, but Hannah kept calling her “Mommy.” Another reason that Terri was furious with Kyra, but Kyra thought Terri deserved most of the blame herself. Hannah could sense the woman was not her mother—and someone had to be.
“She wants you,” Amy said, handing her back. “She doesn’t even know who I am.”
Amy sounded so sorry for herself. It was infuriating. “What do you expect? The poor kid hasn’t seen you since—”
“She’s better off.”
“No, she isn’t. God, Amy, were we better off with Dad and Marie? Because that’s what you’re saying about your daughter. Terri’s her stepmother, but you’re her mother. She needs you in her life, and you know it!”
Amy shrugged. “Too bad you didn’t think of that before, huh?”
Though this usually made Kyra back off, it wasn’t going to work this time. Not when she’d brought Hannah with her, even though she knew Terri would be so angry that she probably wouldn’t be allowed to take her niece out of the house again for another two months.
“This isn’t about me,” she said. “It’s about you and Hannah.” She grabbed her sister’s skinny arm. “Don’t you see what’s going to happen if you keep living like this? You’re going to die, Amy, and this little girl is going to grow up without her mommy.”
Kyra could hear the word echoing from when she and Amy were little: Mommy, Mommy, Mommy. She had tears standing in her eyes, but she was surprised to see that Amy did, too.
Bonnie was groaning on the mattress. Hannah said, “Go home now! Bus?” Kyra told Hannah “a few more minutes,” and promised the little girl they would get ice-cream cones when they left. Then she looked into her sister’s eyes. “I want you to come with us.” She shifted Hannah’s weight onto her other arm. “I have it all arranged. There’s a rehab place only a few blocks from my apartment. Once you get clean, we can go back to court, try to get custody or at least a lot more visitation. It will be like you wanted it to be. Just me and you, taking care of your daughter.”
Amy smiled then, a real smile. After a moment, she put her arms around Kyra and Hannah. The hug was real, too, and so much like the old Amy that Kyra was positive she was about to agree to do it, to go with them and enter rehab. They were both crying, and Amy whispered, “Sis, thank you for—”
Before she could finish her sentence, the police were shouting, banging on the front door. The sound was so loud that Hannah screamed and covered her ears. Kyra was terrified; she wondered if Amy would be arrested with all the other addicts and prayed her sister wouldn’t be. The police did take about half the people in the house to jail, including Amy, but they let them all out a few hours later. Only Kyra had to stay.
Kyra would never be sure who called the police, but even if it was Terri, it was still Zach’s fault for not stopping his wife. And it was her own fault for keeping Zach up to date on where Amy was living, because he always acted like he was a friend, like he was worried about Amy, too.
She got off with only a night in jail, a small fine, and community service, but she lost everything that mattered to her. She was not allowed to see Hannah again for a full year, and after one brief visit, she was never allowed to come back. And she never had another chance to save Amy. Her sister ended up leaving Kansas City only a few weeks later—after Terri told her that Kyra had been sleeping with Zach during the custody battle.
“I would never have picked any man over you,” Amy said, laughing bitterly. “To think that I loved you more than anyone in the world.”
Her jacket was ripped at the shoulder and so dirty it looked like Amy had found it in the garbage; her cheeks were hollowed out, and her skin was as gray as the late afternoon November sky. But it was her eyes that Kyra would never forget. They were so hopeless. And yet Amy was still feigning a laugh when she spit out, “You’ll never see me again,” and turned to walk away.
She begged her sister to stop, but when Amy didn’t, Kyra felt like her heart was breaking. She knew her sister meant it when she said she’d never see her again, and she was horribly afraid that it might turn out to be true.
For years after, she tortured herself with daydreams of the life she and her sister could have had if only she’d picked Amy that day instead of Zach. The only thought that comforted her—but then she wouldn’t have moved to Philadelphia, and she wouldn’t have met her husband and had their son—also made her feel guilty. It was as if her family’s very existence relied on the collapse of her sister’s.
“We’re almost there,” David said. “About twenty more minutes.”
She’d been staring out the window, but she hadn’t really seen anything. Now she was surprised to realize they were back in civilization. They were driving by a huge shopping mall. In the dark, it looked strangely frightening rising up in the middle of the immense empty parking lot.
He gently rested his hand on the back of her neck. “Are you ready for this?”
“I’ll have to be.” It wasn’t really an answer, but it was the only one she had. If her son was at Vivian’s house, then she would have to be at Vivian’s house, no matter how she felt about it.
All night, she’d refused to spend one minute thinking about her mother. She didn’t even intend to speak to her if she could help it.
When Vivian had found her email address last year, Kyra had been surprised, yet she knew she shouldn’t have been. She’d joined all the social networking sites looking for Amy, and though she’d quit participating when the disappointment became too much for her, she’d left up a profile with basic information, in hopes that someday Amy would come looking for her. Instead she’d ended up with her mother, whose breezy, self-centered emails were all too similar to the postcards when they were kids. Kyra deleted them without responding and hoped her mother would get the hint. She felt sure that Vivian hadn’t changed, but even if she had, it was too late from Kyra’s perspective. The woman couldn’t just decide to be a mother or a grandmother when it suited her. That wasn’t the way it worked. You had to be a mother when you didn’t want to; that was how you earned the right to be one when you did.
She sat up straighter and forced herself to concentrate on the street signs, but it didn’t help. She was back there again, remembering that hot afternoon when her mother left. When Amy let go of Kyra’s hand and ran down the block to catch up with Vivian’s car, Kyra was standing on the walkway, staying put, as she’d been told to do. But she was pulling on the corners of her eyes, straining in the bright sunlight to see what was going on. All she could see was an empty street. No cars, no grown-ups, no kids. No one but herself.
Their father wasn’t home. She’d never been alone like this, the only person in the yard, no one in the house. After a while, her stomach was doing flip-flops, and her head felt too light, like it might melt all over the walkway pavement, but there was no one to tell. She felt like she’d been discarded, like she was a bag of old clothes waiting for the Salvation Army truck. She felt like she needed to cry, but her eyes didn’t remember how.
It was only a few minutes, maybe even less, but her seven-year-old self couldn’t have suffered more if she’d woken up alone on the moon. Or maybe it was just that she was already learning what it meant to be left by your mother and feeling a pain so new to her that she didn’t know the word for it yet: loneliness.
She never forgot that feeling and she never forgave her mother for what she did. But she also never forgot the relief of that moment when all her squinting and blinking in the July sun finally paid off, and she saw her sister, wailing and clearly miserable, but nevertheless, walking back to her.
TWENTY-EIGHT
After they left the motel, April drove for a long time, but Michael didn’t mind because she was talking and laughing her Christmas bell laugh. She even
offered to tell him three good secrets if he promised not to be mad that she hadn’t told him before. He wanted to know the secrets, but he told April he couldn’t promise. His mother had read him a book about being sad and happy and excited and a bunch of other feelings he couldn’t remember. “Mad is a feeling,” he said. “You can’t make yourself not be mad.”
“All right,” she said, and sighed. “I have to tell you anyway before we get there. One, my name is really Hannah, not April. Two, I’m your cousin. And three, we’re going to see your other grandmother, the one you don’t know. I met her when she friended me on Facebook. Actually, she didn’t friend me, because she thought I was somebody else named Amy Callahan.” Hannah laughed. “I wonder why. Anyway, she was really glad when I told her who I was, and so last week when I got some awful news, I called her. She felt so bad for me that she told me to come to her house, so she could help me handle this. So that’s where we’re going—to meet your grandma. What do you think of that?”
He wasn’t sure what she meant by that: the last secret, or all of them? He didn’t like that she’d told him a different name. It felt like a lie, and that made him sort of nervous. Also, he was a little confused by what cousin meant. He knew it was someone in your family, but he wasn’t sure exactly how. He did like the idea of having two grandmas to play Sorry and Uno with, and two grandmas to make him root beer floats. Best of all, when this grandma called his parents to tell them he was there, they would come right over, since they never let him stay at Grandma’s house without them. Even when he said he really wanted to, they said it wasn’t a good idea.
They were out of New Jersey and through Delaware and into Maryland, and Hannah was still talking. “Sorry I’m so wired, buddy. I’ve been knocking back Red Bulls, the sweetened kind, so I’ll have the energy to make it. Now I can’t seem to shut up.”
“It’s okay,” Michael said. He knew her drink was called Red Bull, because he’d read the label on the shiny can. He figured it was some kind of milk, since a bull was a cow. He had no idea what wired was, but he liked listening to her. She was so happy and she kept making him laugh by saying goofy things about the other cars and trucks and places they went by.
But after a lot more driving and talking, she made a wrong turn and got lost. They had to stop at a Food Mart for directions, but when she didn’t understand the directions, she got lost again. Finally she pulled into a truck stop and she wrote everything down and got back on the right road, but by then she wasn’t talking at all. He didn’t mind. It was really late, way past his bedtime, and his eyes kept closing. Even though he hadn’t counted the things he was sure of yet, he wanted to go to sleep, fast, so he could wake up and not have to ride anymore in this car.
He woke up a few times, but only for a minute or two when Hannah honked the horn or a loud truck went by. Then he woke up for good when the car stopped in front of a house with a giant lightbulb above the door that was so bright, he could feel the light right through his eyelids.
“Hey, buddy,” Hannah said. Her voice was soft. She’d taken off her seat belt and she was looking at him. Michael was rubbing his eyes. “You want to go meet Grandma?”
He nodded. She got out and opened his door. It was warm and sticky outside, but there was a breeze that left goose bumps on his bare legs.
The house was almost as small as a playhouse, without a front porch or any steps—just a big square of concrete to climb up to the door. The driveway was made of dirt and there were tree limbs lying all over the front yard, like someone cut them down and forgot to put them on the curb for the mulch truck. But the house was yellow, which he liked, and the shutters were blue, his favorite color.
When they got to the concrete stair, Hannah held his hand and pulled him up. She leaned down and kissed him on the cheek. “I’m really stressed out,” she said. “I’m so glad you’re with me right now.”
She rang the doorbell and then she rang it again when nothing happened. She started knocking on the door and banging on it with her fist.
“She has to be home. I told her I’d be here tonight.” Hannah flipped out her cell phone with the blue and white clouds. “It’s 2:07. She said she’d be home by midnight at the latest.”
He didn’t know what to say. When Daddy was late, it was because a student needed help. And Grandma, the one he knew, was only late when a sick person got sicker. And Mommy was hardly ever late unless her haircut took too long, or a doctor made her sit in the waiting room forever.
Hannah helped him back down off the concrete block. She sat down on the hood of the car and started typing on her phone. “I’m sending her a text. Once she knows we’re here, she’ll come. Don’t worry.”
Michael was looking at those blue shutters on the big front window. The paint was chipping off, and underneath was a gray color. He wondered why paint did that, when it never chipped off clothes or hands.
“Want to get back in the car?” Hannah said. When he didn’t answer, she said, “You can walk around if you want. Just stay in the front yard, where it’s light.”
The yard was easy to see, but it had all those tree limbs that he could fall over. And it might have mosquitoes that would make him sick. It might even have a snake that could bite him. But the idea of getting back in that car again was so much worse. He took a few hesitant steps into the grass.
It was kind of spooky being out in the middle of night, but it was also exciting. The sky looked purple and blue and he could see the moon. He felt like he was an explorer, like he was the only person in the world who’d ever dared to walk into this place. When he made it all the way to the other side, he wanted to tell Hannah, but she was hunched over, staring at her phone.
After a while, he was getting a little bored. He’d walked back and forth, back and forth, and he’d even stepped carefully on one of those tree limbs. He was afraid the limb would snap back and hit him in the face, but it didn’t. He wondered how much it weighed, and then he decided to see if he could lift it. He put his hands on the narrow part and tugged and tugged, but he only moved it a few inches, closer to the big tree on the far side of the yard—the one that sort of scared him because the branches looked like a giant’s arms, but sort of excited him, too, because it was what the kids at his last school called a climbing tree. There was a place where the branches divided that was so low, he’d barely have to lift his foot and he’d be up off the ground.
His hands were dirty from lifting the limb, but he wiped them on his shorts and forgot about it. Hannah wasn’t watching what he was doing, which kept surprising him. She seemed too upset about the phone to notice anything. In the car, when she was talking nonstop, she’d told him she was not actually a grown-up. “I’m seventeen, but I’m almost eighteen. Then I’ll be able to do whatever I want. Maybe I’ll move in with Grandma. If she wants me. I don’t know. But what I’m trying to say is I remember being your age.” She told him about kindergarten, and her school bus and her lunch pail and a bunch of other things. She also told him about a hill by her house. “It was really steep, but I thought if I got to the top, I would be the king—queen, whatever—of the mountain. And when I made it, it was even cooler than I imagined.” She laughed. “Five was one of my best years.”
He was still standing by the big tree. Every day at school, he’d wondered what it would be like to be one of the climbing kids. He knew he could fall and break his neck, but none of them ever fell. They were always laughing as they climbed higher and higher, so high that all he could see was the bright colors of their clothes flashing in the sunlight as they moved from branch to branch.
When he put his foot in the tree, he glanced at Hannah to make sure she wasn’t going to tell him to stop. Part of him wanted her to, the scared part, but the explorer part was already grabbing the branch above him and pulling himself up. The bark was scratchy against his hands. The leaves tickled his face. He stood there until he decided he wasn’t actually
up in the tree, since he was at the bottom. So he climbed up higher, to the next branch. His hands were burning but he didn’t blow on them until he climbed to an even higher branch, where the tree trunk and two other branches formed a little seat for him to sit on.
He sat there until his hands didn’t hurt and then he found another place to climb. Every time he moved, he listened carefully to make sure none of the branches were the old kind that could snap off. He only moved to branches that were so solid they didn’t budge when they felt his weight. He was trying to be safe, but he couldn’t try too hard or he’d get scared and not have any fun.
He was about halfway up the tree when he saw a car pull into the dirt driveway. He could see Hannah talking to a lady with red hair, though he couldn’t make out their expressions or hear what they were saying. Then the red-haired lady was in the yard, calling his name. She sounded out of breath, like Mommy did when she was worried about him, so he yelled, “I’m up here.”
He watched her shiny hair move closer. When she was standing at the foot of the tree, she said, “Hi,” and smiled really big. She didn’t look like a grandma. He waited for her to say who she was, but the only sound was the fluttering of the leaves.
“I’m getting down,” he said, because he figured that was what she was waiting for. But then he didn’t move. The branch below him suddenly seemed very far away. If his foot slipped a little bit, he would fall to the ground like an acorn, except an acorn couldn’t break its neck and have to go to the hospital.
When she asked if he needed help, he said no. Only cats got stuck in trees, and he was a boy. He took a big breath and held the branch he was sitting on as he eased himself down until his foot was snug on the branch below. It wasn’t that hard. He just had to make sure he didn’t look straight down.
“You’re a good climber,” she said. “You must do this a lot.”
