by Darlene Ryan
“Okay,” I said.
“It’ll be okay,” he said.
I nodded and stepped away from the car. The mall was quiet. The stores were still closed, although the mall walkers were already out. “Let’s go find the giraffe,” I said to Dylan. He was holding on to me with one hand and the grocery bag with Fred in it with the other.
He looked up at me, frowning. “Maddie, where are we going to sleep tonight?” he asked in a small voice.
“Probably in the car like last night,” I said.
His eyes went from me to the big doors we’d just come through and back again. “But Q took the car,” he said.
I crouched down to his level. “He’s coming back,” I said.
“No, he’s not.” He stared down at his feet instead of at me. “My mom didn’t come back.”
I didn’t know how to do this. “Dylan. It’s not the same thing. Your mom would come if she could.” Was it wrong to say that? I took a deep breath. “She would never leave you. I bet she has a good reason, and when she does come back, she’ll tell us what it is.”
His lower lip quivered. “I was bad,” he whispered.
I threw my arms around him. “You were not bad,” I said. My mother had told me I was bad more than once, and maybe she was right, because, after all, here I was in a mall at eight o’clock in the morning with someone else’s kid, living in a car with a guy I only met last week. But Dylan was not bad. His father was a total prick, but I couldn’t exactly say that, could I?
“You are the best, best, best kid,” I said. “And Q will be back, I promise.”
I broke out of the hug, fished out one of the napkins I’d stuffed in my pocket, and wiped his face. “Let’s find the giraffe,” I said.
We started down the mall. I couldn’t help glancing back at the mall entrance. Q would come back. Wouldn’t he? He had the car. He had money. My stomach started to tie itself into a knot. Don’t be stupid, I told myself. Q’s coming back. He’s not like Dylan’s jerk-off of a father.
I wanted to go back to the doors and look outside. I don’t know what I thought I’d see…maybe Q in the parking lot, getting ready to hit the road? I felt, I don’t know, trapped in the mall, like if I could just get outside, I could somehow make Q come back. Right—and if I went racing for the parking lot, I’d scare the crap out of Dylan.
Just then Dylan pulled on my hand. He’d spotted the giraffe. We headed for it, and there was nothing I could do except go climb on a big pink-and-purple giraffe and hope things were going to work out.
Dylan was playing in the helicopter next to the food courts when Q found us. He touched my shoulder, and I wanted to fling my arms around him, but I’d already done that and it just made things weird between us. I held up a finger and leaned inside the helicopter to nudge Dylan.
“See?” I said. “I told you Q would come back.”
He leaned around me to see for himself. Q smiled and did his spazzy eyebrow thing, which made us all laugh.
“Q and I are going to sit right here on this bench,” I said. “Okay?”
“Don’t go anywhere,” Dylan said, but he didn’t reach for my hand. That had to be good.
“I won’t,” I promised. I dropped onto the padded seat next to Q. “He’s got this thing that I’ll leave him.”
“Can you blame him?” Q said.
I watched Dylan showing Fred how to move the levers and push the buttons. “No, not really.” I shifted sideways and pulled one leg up underneath me. “So,” I said. “Did you find the guy?”
Q nodded, and I could see the start of a smile on his face.
“So tell me,” I said, giving him a punch on the shoulder.
“He has a room in a building downtown. It doesn’t sound very big, but it has its own bathroom.”
“Its own bathroom. You’re sure? Not some grotty thing we have to share with strangers?”
“I’m sure,” Q said. He reached in his jacket pocket and pulled out a key ring with two silver keys on it. “We can go see it if you want. Before I give him any money.”
Dylan was making vroom, vroom noises in the helicopter. I suddenly realized that with a real address, I could get a library card. The first thing I was going to get was a book about trains and another about helicopters for Dylan.
I turned back to Q. “How much money?”
He sighed. “Hundred a week. Cash every Saturday.”
I shook my head. “It’s too much.”
He unzipped his jacket and leaned forward, hand hanging between his legs. “We aren’t going to find anything better, Maddie,” he said. “Shit! We aren’t going to find anything as good. As long as he gets his money, Goddard won’t ask any questions about you, about me, about the kid.”
I raked my fingers back through my hair. “We don’t have a hundred dollars a week. Between the two of us, we wouldn’t even make it two months.”
“Goddard offered me a job,” Q said. “Off the books. Cash.”
I looked at him, not quite sure what to say. On the one hand, it was the answer to a prayer—if I had actually prayed for help, which I hadn’t. On the other hand, it was pretty clear John Goddard was a sleazebag who took advantage of people who didn’t have a lot of other choices. Like us. “Are you taking it?” I asked finally.
“I already said I would,” he said. He held up a hand, but I wasn’t going to object. “It’s the best choice for now, Maddie. We’ll have some place to live. The three of us can’t stay in the car. Once we get ahead a little, I’ll find a real job. It’s just for now, I promise.”
“I can keep collecting bottles,” I said.
He nodded. “And we should be able to keep getting food from the hotel at least a couple of times a week.” He looked down at his feet. “There’s one other thing,” he said.
“What?” My stomach started retying the knot that had loosened when Q had touched my shoulder.
“I’m getting rid of the car.”
I straightened up. “No.”
“It’s a done deal,” he said.
“So, make it an undone deal,” I said. “That’s your car. It’s your, your…” I gestured with both hands. “It’s your place.”
Q put one hand on the top of his head. He looked beat. “The room—the building is right downtown. There’s no parking. We need the room way more than we need the car. I can get a lift or take the bus or even hitch to get to work, and downtown, you can get everywhere you need to go.”
I leaned all the way back against the bench. “You sold it to Goddard, didn’t you?” I said.
Q didn’t say a thing, which was as good as saying yes.
“He’s going to give you nothing for it and then turn around and sell it to someone for probably three times as much.”
“We need the money.”
“He’s ripping you off!”
“The world is like that sometimes, Maddie,” Q said. “You’d better get used to it.”
Dylan climbed out of the helicopter then, holding Fred in one hand. He came and stood in front of Q. “I need to pee, and so does Fred,” he said. “Will you take us? Fred doesn’t like to pee around girls.”
Q looked down at the bear with a totally straight face. “Fred, my man, I know exactly how you feel.” He held out a hand to Dylan, who took it.
Dylan looked at me. “We’ll be back, Maddie, promise.”
Something in his face made my chest ache, but I smiled and said, “Okay.”
By the time Q and Dylan—and Fred—came back, the mall stores were open. I’d got the bag Dylan had left in the helicopter ride and was waiting for them, leaning against the back of the bench.
“Wanna go look at the place?” Q asked.
“Okay,” I said.
Dylan let go of Q’s hand and reached for mine. “Where are we going?” he asked.
“To look at a place where maybe all three of us can live,” I said.
“Is it a van?”
I looked at Q over the top of Dylan’s head. A van. His only though
t of somewhere to live was a van. I couldn’t speak because I was suddenly overwhelmed with the idea of hunting down Michael and beating on him with my backpack.
“No, not a van,” Q said. “A room, a little apartment with our own bathroom.”
We started for the mall doors.
“Just for us, or other people too?” Dylan asked.
“Just us.”
He hugged the bear to his chest. “Fred doesn’t like those places where everybody sleeps together.”
“You mean the shelter?” Q asked.
Dylan shrugged. “I don’t know. There were a lot of people, and some of them weren’t very nice. So my dad said we should just all sleep in the van, but it was kind of cold.”
“This place will be warm,” Q promised. He turned away, and I could see he was gritting his teeth.
When I was at church, I thought about praying to God to take care of Dylan. Had it only been yesterday morning? Maybe this was his answer. Maybe it was his plan for Q and me to take care of the kid. I was starting to sound like the Holy Rollers. But just in case God was listening, I sent out a silent prayer:
Dear God,
Please take care of Dylan’s mom and the other kids, and if you could give his father a really itchy rash on his privates, that would be good too.
Amen
nine
The room was filthy. Not dirty like the people who had lived in it were pigs: dirty like actual pigs had lived there.
“Maddie, it smells bad,” Dylan said. “I don’t like it here.” He leaned against me, and I put my hand on the top of his head. I looked at Q.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I had no idea it would be like this. I’ll take the key back and tell Goddard to forget it.” He started for the stairs.
I grabbed his sleeve. “Don’t.”
He looked at me like I was nuts. “We can’t live in that,” he said. “It’s too dirty for bugs. You wouldn’t even get a rat in a place like this.”
It smelled like puke and people who hadn’t washed. But there was a big window that let the sun in and an old tub with feet in the small bathroom. “I can clean it,” I said.
Q shook his head. “No. There’s gotta be a better choice.”
Except I knew there wasn’t. Who was going to rent anything to a couple of teenagers and a kid? Nobody. Now it was me shaking my head. “It has to be here, Q,” I said. “It’s better than no place.”
He slid both hands up over his face and down the back of his head. “Okay. What do you need?”
I’d cleaned the house a lot when I lived at home because it wasn’t really my mom’s thing. She’d walk over something on the floor rather than pick it up. I didn’t know if she just didn’t see the dirt, or she didn’t care. I saw it and I did care, so I learned to clean it up. “Can we go to the grocery store?” I asked. “I need a bucket and some kind of cleaner—oh yeah, and a big jug of bleach.”
I loved the smell of bleach the way some people got off on nail polish or paint. I don’t mean I went around sniffing the bottle and being all weird, just that it made me feel better, like everything had been sanitized for my protection.
See, I had this thing about germs. They scared the crap out of me. My dad had gotten pneumonia, and while he was in the hospital he caught some other germ. They called it a superbug. He died because the germ was stronger than the doctors, stronger than their drugs, stronger than my dad.
I spent my emergency fund on cleaning supplies. Dylan wouldn’t go to the park without me, so Q brought in a blanket and we put him out in the hall by the open door.
Q got the window open, which helped with the smell, and then he swept the floor, which helped even more. I started washing the walls, and the smell of bleach pushed out the smell of rotting food and vomit pretty quickly.
I washed everything in the main room—the walls, the door, the doorknob. Then I washed my way across the floor to the hall. My hands were red and cracked in a couple of places from the bleach. Q looked at them and winced.
“I’m hungry,” Dylan announced.
“Me too,” I said. I put my arm around him and messed up his hair. “Let’s go get some lunch.”
I pulled on my jacket. “Soup line?” I said to Q.
“Are you sure?” he asked.
I bent to zip up Dylan’s jacket. “The food’s decent, and it’s not junk. And the price is right.”
“Okay,” he said. “I should be able to get supper from the hotel tonight.”
“That would be good,” I said. I mimicked his eyebrow thing. He laughed. I took Dylan’s hand and headed for the stairs.
Q was walking on the outside, closest to the street, and a lot slower than he usually walked, so Dylan didn’t have to run to keep up. I smiled down at him, and he smiled back. Then he leaned around me to look at Q. “You should hold Maddie’s hand,” he said.
“Okay,” Q said.
I felt weird taking Q’s hand, especially when mine were all dried out from cleaning. Like Dylan’s, Q’s hand was warm holding mine. His fingers were long and strong, calloused from the rough work he’d been doing. All this hand-holding felt strange—not bad, just not me. But then I wasn’t exactly sure who me was anymore.
I wasn’t the person Evan claimed was going to hell, although I might be a whole lot closer to ending up there. I wasn’t the person who’d run away. I wasn’t even the person Q had met a week ago. I didn’t know who I was, and for now that was going to have to be okay, because I didn’t have time to figure it out.
Lunch was a chicken stir-fry with rice. There were brownies for dessert, and I wrapped mine carefully in a paper napkin so Dylan could have it later.
The room looked a lot better now that it was clean, and God knows it smelled way better. Dylan walked around showing everything to Fred while Q and I stood in the bathroom doorway. Whoever had been in the room before had had a dog and hadn’t been too picky about taking it out for a walk.
“It smells like a toilet,” I said to Q.
“I think whoever—or whatever—lived here used the floor as a toilet,” he said. He grimaced. “What do you want me to do?”
I looked around. “I don’t know,” I said. “Shovel it out, I guess.”
He used the broom and a couple of pieces of cardboard to scrape the crap off the floor. Again, I washed everything. Dylan fell asleep on the blanket in a square of sunshine in front of the window. Three of my knuckles were bleeding by the time I was done.
“Shit, Maddie,” Q said. “Enough. This place is cleaner than a hospital.”
I sat back on my heels. “We need something to sleep on,” I said.
“I’ve got a sleeping bag in the car,” he said. “I didn’t use it because it’s kind of small, but it should work for the kid.” He made a fist with his hand and beat the end of it slowly against his mouth. “How about a couple of those floaty blow-up things, you know, to lay on?”
I nodded. “Yeah. You mean air mattresses.”
I was going to have to go to the thrift store for clothes for Dylan and maybe a couple more blankets, but I didn’t like to buy anything that I couldn’t wash. I’d gotten him some Spiderman underwear, a pair of socks and a slightly too large pair of sweatpants out of a seventy-percent-off bin at the grocery store. I’d also gotten two hideous orange towels. I thought about lying down in that tub until the water was up to my nose.
“There’s that discount store up the hill,” Q said. “I’ll try there. And I need to go give Goddard the money.” He pulled a bottle of juice out of his pocket. “It’s warm, sorry.”
“Did you swipe that at lunchtime?” I asked. My hair was coming loose, so I pulled out the elastic and finger-combed it back from my face.
“I don’t think they’ll go broke over one bottle of juice.” He held out his hand and I got to my feet, following him into the other room, where Dylan was still asleep.
“Should I wake him up?” I asked.
“Let him sleep,” he said. “I think he’s worn-out. I’ll be back soon.�
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I nodded.
Q paused in the doorway. “I like your hair like that,” he said. Then he was gone.
Okay, so what did that mean? Did he mean like, as in my hair looked better loose than it did in a ponytail? Or did he mean like, as in he liked me? And why did I even care? Q and I weren’t like that. Not that it would be a bad thing. But we were friends. Nothing more.
I stretched out on the edge of the blanket next to Dylan and leaned my head against the wall. Did Q think we were something else? I’d held his hand when we’d gone for lunch, but that was because of Dylan. And I had hugged him, but that was only the once.
The next thing I knew, Dylan was sitting on my chest, poking my cheek with his finger. I opened my right eye and focused it on him. He giggled.
“Maddie, open your other eye,” he demanded.
I made a show of trying and failing to get my left eye open. “It’s stuck,” I said.
He frowned and poked my left temple with a finger. I made that side of my face twitch.
“Do that again,” I said.
Dylan jabbed my face once more.
I did the twitchy thing again. “I think it’s working.” I grunted and fluttered my eyelid. Then I opened the eye. “You did it, Dylan,” I told him. I swallowed him up in a hug and he laughed, throwing his arms around my neck. I put my mouth against the outside of his arm and made a loud, slurpy mouth fart. That sent him into a squirm of laughter again.
I did it again, just to hear him laugh. It was a great sound. Then I lifted him up and settled him sideways on my lap. “You want a drink?” I asked.
He nodded. I unscrewed the cap and handed him the bottle. He took a long drink. “I’m hungry,” he said.
Keeping one arm around him, I leaned right and snagged the strap of my backpack with one finger. I fished inside and found the napkin-wrapped brownie.
“Here,” I said.
He broke the brownie into three pieces. “One for me, one for Fred, one for Maddie.”
He fed Fred his bite, and helped with the eating. I made Fred rub his furry stomach and bow his thanks to Dylan.
Then Dylan and I ate our pieces. “Can I have a drink of your juice?” I asked.
