by Darlene Ryan
He nodded, and I took a long drink. It was way too warm for me, but it didn’t seem like a good idea to say that in front of a kid.
I put the cap back on the bottle and stashed it in the side pocket of my pack.
Dylan put an arm around Fred and settled back against my chest. “It smells better in here,” he said.
“That’s because it’s clean now.”
“Are we going to live here?” he asked.
“Uh-huh,” I said.
“Where are we going to sleep?”
I pointed to the wall opposite. “There. Q’s gone to get us something to sleep on.”
“And nobody else gets to sleep here?”
“Nobody.” I made an X on my chest. “Cross my heart.”
He sighed softly.
“How about tomorrow we go to the thrift store and see if we can find some toys for Fred to play with?” I said.
“Can we look for a train?”
“Sure.”
“And crayons?”
“Why not?”
We were talking about our favorite colors when Q got back. He was carrying a large plastic bag from the discount store, so I was pretty sure he’d found the air mattresses. “You find them?” I asked.
He nodded and handed me the bag. “Lime green and two orange ones.”
I grinned. “Hey, they’ll go with our towels.” I pulled the plastic packages out of the bag. “What color, kiddo?” I said to Dylan.
“Green,” he said.
“Okay,” I said. I took out the green air mattress, unfolded it and started to blow it up. Q had already started on one of the others. It takes a lot of air to blow up one of those things, I discovered. I had to stop twice—once because I got dizzy and almost fell over sideways, making Dylan giggle again.
But we finally got them all blown up. Dylan—and Fred—stretched out on the green mattress that Q had tucked in one corner of the room. He rolled around, and I hoped the damn thing wouldn’t pop.
“Fred likes it,” he said.
“Good,” I said. “Just tell him not to bounce too hard or there’s going to be a giant pop in here.”
“We need to empty the car,” Q said. “Goddard wants it in the morning.”
“Of course,” I said. He let the sarcasm go.
I’d only spent a few nights sleeping in the Honda, and it wasn’t even my car in the first place, so why did I feel all squirmy about Q selling it to John Goddard? I’d never cared about stuff before, probably because after my dad died, my mom and I had moved a lot. Sometimes it was because of money, and other times it was just because she got bored.
We lugged all the boxes up the stairs, stacking them under the window. I couldn’t help yawning as I set the last box on the pile.
“I’m gonna go get our supper,” Q said. “Just, I don’t know, just do nothing until I get back.”
Kinda hard to do nothing with Dylan there. Fred wanted to try all three of the air mattresses, so I told Dylan the story of “Goldilocks and the Three Bears.” Except it had been a long time since I’d heard the story, so some of the “Three Little Pigs” sort of got mixed in too, but nobody seemed to mind.
Q came back with steak, baked potato and something that looked like lime-green cauliflower.
“That looks yucky,” Dylan said.
“What is it?” I said to Q.
“I don’t know,” he said, spearing a piece with his plastic fork. “Mmm, it’s good, though.” He looked at Dylan sitting next to me with Fred beside him on the floor, a takeout spoon in the teddy bear’s lap. “Tell Fred it’s got lots of cheese sauce. He can close his eyes if he doesn’t want to look at it.”
I was ready for Dylan to pitch a fit, but he took a small bit of the green stuff and lots of the sauce and tried a bite.
“So,” Q said. “What does Fred think?”
“He likes it,” Dylan said.
“Yeah, the bear’s a gourmet,” Q said with a grin.
“What’s a gor…gor…”
“A gourmet,” I said.
“What is it?” Dylan asked, spearing another piece of the green cauliflower.
“Someone who knows about food,” Q said.
Dylan thought about it for a moment, then nodded and went back to eating.
And it was as easy and comfortable as that. I washed Dylan’s hair and then he took a bath while Fred watched from the safety of the top of the toilet tank. I tucked Dylan and the bear into the sleeping bag, and he fell asleep almost at once.
Q touched my arm. “Go have a bath, Maddie.”
“I feel like I should be doing something,” I said, wiping a hand over my neck.
He reached up and pulled the elastic from my hair. “You should be having a bath,” he said. He tipped his head toward the bathroom. “Go before I pick you up and throw you in.”
I lay in the water trying to remember the last time I’d had a bath. Before Evan, that was for sure. When he was around, I took showers. It just seemed safer for some reason I couldn’t put into words.
I lay awake for a long time on my air mattress. Not that it was uncomfortable. After sleeping in the car, and before that, covered in cardboard in one old building or another, this was like being at a fancy hotel. I just couldn’t get my mind to shut off or even slow down. I finally did fall asleep, then woke up with a jolt. I stared into the darkness, remembering where I was and why. Q’s mattress was a few feet away. He was on his side, head propped on one hand, watching me.
“Did I wake you up?” I asked, pushing the hair back from my face.
He shook his head. “I was just thinking.”
I rolled onto my side and folded an arm under my head. I could hear Dylan, or maybe it was Fred, softly snoring in the corner. “What about?”
“How much my life has changed since you cut out of the Holy Rollers’ service.”
“I bet you never thought this would happen.”
He laughed softly. “When you came flying around the side of the building, I didn’t even know if I should talk to you.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re a girl and I’m a guy, and I’m kinda tall and I was all in black like some vampire and I was sitting there in the dark.”
I pulled the blanket up a little higher. “I wasn’t scared,” I said.
“Really?”
“Okay, maybe when you first spoke to me, but not after that.”
Q rolled onto his back. “You mean once you felt the power of my charm.”
I gave a snort of laughter. “Yeah, something like that.”
We lay there in the dark for a while, and the silence wasn’t weird. It was just…there. I thought Q had fallen asleep, but then he spoke. “This is my family now, Maddie. I’m not sorry about anything.”
I glanced over at Dylan, just the top of his head sticking out of the sleeping bag. “Do you think they’ll come back for him?”
“I don’t know.” He exhaled slowly. “There’s something I should tell you. I asked one of the guys up there who brings in the carts to watch for them. I’ll check with him, I don’t know, once a week.”
“What if they show up?”
“It’s up to you.”
It was easier to say things in the dark, when Q couldn’t see my face and I couldn’t see his. “I don’t want to give him back,” I said in a small, low voice. “Not to Michael anyway.”
“Then we won’t,” Q said.
He stretched a hand out into the space between us. “This is our family, Maddie. The three of us. What happened before now doesn’t matter.”
I felt in the darkness until I touched his hand. He linked his fingers with mine. The warmth in his hand spread up my arm and into my chest.
“I love you, Maddie,” he whispered.
Was that what I was feeling? I’d felt something when I’d hugged Q. And when he’d pulled the elastic out of my hair. Was that love? Did it happen this fast?
He pulled gently on my hand. Not only was it easier to say things in the darkness,
it was easier to do things. It was really easy not to think at all. And that’s what I did. I stopped thinking. I slid off my air mattress and onto Q’s, and he wrapped me against him. I kissed him first, boldly pushing my tongue into his mouth. The heat in my chest spread everywhere.
Then Q was touching me and I was touching him, and my head felt like I’d been spinning around and around and around.
I turned to make sure Dylan was still asleep. Little-kid snores were still coming from the corner.
“You sure?” Q whispered, his breath warm against the side of my mouth.
Was I? I loved Q, or it was something close to love. He loved me. I nodded. He reached over and fumbled in the pocket of his pants for something. Then he pulled me to my feet, reaching down to grab the mattress and a blanket. He dragged them into the bathroom, closed the door and then leaned against it, kissing me, his tongue in my mouth now.
I wrapped my arms around his neck, and he eased me down to the air mattress, stopping to pull his shirt over his head.
I couldn’t really see him, and I was glad of that, because it meant he couldn’t see me either. I slid my fingers over his arms. I could feel the muscles like they’d been carved out of a piece of stone. He started undoing the buttons on my shirt. I moved my hands down over his chest, and he gasped. I figured that was good, and I lifted my head to kiss him again.
We did it there on the bathroom floor. Everything fit together the way it was supposed to. It wasn’t exactly how I thought it would be, but it wasn’t awful. After, back in the room, Q moved our mattresses closer together. He fell asleep with his hand on my hip.
I lay there beside him for a while. Then I got up and got the long piece of glass I kept in my jacket pocket. I wrapped it up in the leftover paper napkins from the hotel and stuffed it in the bottom of my backpack.
ten
The early morning sun woke me up, hitting me in the face because I was turned toward the window. I got up to go to the bathroom. What I’d done last night felt kind of like a dream. This wasn’t exactly how I’d thought things were going to be.
I washed my face, got dressed and braided my hair. I put on my last clean clothes, or, in the case of my jeans, mostly clean.
I had to do laundry today. And get a library card, now that I had an address. And go forage for more returnable bottles.
It hit me that I was going to have to do all those things with Dylan. And I’d promised we’d go to the thrift store. Okay, so no library card today.
Q was awake, and Dylan was just waking up. Q touched my leg as I went past him. He smiled, and I shot him a quick smile back. I sat on the edge of Dylan’s mattress. He gave me a sleepy smile, and I brushed the hair out of his face.
“You hungry?” I asked.
He nodded. “An’ I need to pee.”
“Go to it then,” I said, pointing toward the bathroom. He stood up and made his way across the room, kind of rubber-legged, with the back of his hair standing up .
“Wash your hands,” I called after him.
Q stood in the middle of the room, stretching. He was wearing nothing but a pair of gray sweatpants. I could see the muscles I’d run my fingers over the night before. And there was dark curly hair on his chest. I felt a fluttery feeling somewhere below my stomach.
Q reached for my hand and pulled me over to him. “Is everything okay with us?” he asked.
I nodded, then glanced at the closed bathroom door. “I just don’t want to—”
“—give the kid the wrong idea,” he finished.
I looked at him, surprised, although I should have been used to the way he seemed to read my mind by now. “Yeah.”
“Okay, so no mushy stuff when he’s around.”
“Just until…just for now,” I said.
He nodded. Then he shot a quick look at the bathroom door and kissed me on the mouth.
When Dylan came out of the bathroom, I got him a roll, part of my last banana and a bottle of juice Q had stuck on the windowsill all night. It was still pretty cool.
“You want a peanut-butter-and-banana sandwich?” I asked Q. I had a couple of peanut butter packets I’d swiped from our last time at Tim’s.
“Yeah,” he said. He pulled on his boots while I made it, then took a long drink from the water bottle that was still stashed in the window. He grabbed the sandwich and his jacket. “I gotta go,” he said.
Dylan looked up.
Q pointed a finger at him. “I’ll be back. Promise.”
“Okay,” Dylan said.
Q smiled at me. “See you later, Maddie,” he said, and he was out the door and gone.
After Dylan and I had both eaten, I shook out the blankets and made our “beds.”
“Are we going to ride the giraffe?” Dylan asked.
“Nope,” I said. “We’re going to go hunting for bottles.”
We put on our jackets and shoes, and then I grabbed the garbage bags I’d used for laundry and headed out with Dylan. It was a lot harder collecting bottles with a kid. I’d never noticed before how many questions kids ask. All the time. For every two bottles I picked up, I answered about six questions, and I had to watch him all the time. He was like a crow. Anything shiny caught his attention.
Then, when I had two of the bags full, I realized that was as much as I could take, because I needed a free hand to hold on to Dylan. We dragged our way to the recycling center. I wanted to scream at the little bit of money we’d gotten.
“Can we go home now?” Dylan asked.
“We have to go get you some clothes, remember?” I said.
He made a face.
“And we’re going to look for a truck.”
“You said a train,” he said.
I had to turn my back and take a couple of deep breaths so I wouldn’t scream. “Yeah, we’ll look for a train,” I said. “After clothes.”
I managed to find three pairs of kids’ pants. Dylan tried on the first pair, but I couldn’t get him to try the others. I didn’t want him to pitch a fit in the store, so I just eyeballed them. I figured it didn’t really matter so much about shirts, so I just looked at him and guessed.
He’d found a plastic train, the kind of thing you’d get for much younger kids, but it was a train and that was what mattered. And I got a big bag of wooden blocks for fifty cents. We carried it all back to the room, and I washed the train in the sink before I let Dylan play with it. Then I cleaned the bathroom a bit while he drove the train around the room and up over the air mattresses.
It wasn’t until he said, “I’m hungry,” that I remembered I hadn’t figured out lunch. A lot of the time, I only had two meals a day, but he was a kid. I didn’t want to do the soup line without Q. I thought about the other choices, not that there were that many. Then I remembered that the church next to the old hospital handed out bag lunches a couple of days a week.
Dylan didn’t want to walk. I knew we needed to get there before all the lunches were gone.
“Fine,” I said. “I’ll carry you partway, but you have to walk partway.”
For a little guy, he was heavy. And my arms were tired from carrying the two bags of bottles. I lugged him two blocks and then set him down. “You have to walk for a bit,” I told him.
He sat down on the sidewalk. “My feet hurt.”
“Well, my arms hurt,” I snapped. I sat down beside him, propping my arms on my bent knees. We sat there for a couple of minutes. Out of the corner of my eyes I could see Dylan watching me.
“I’m hungry,” he finally said in a small voice.
I felt like a shit. But I couldn’t carry him all the way. I nudged him with my shoulder. “I know you are,” I said. “But you have to walk. I can’t carry you. My arms will fall off.”
He frowned, his forehead wrinkled. “Arms can’t fall off.”
“Well, then mine will be the first.” I got to my feet and held out a hand to him. C’mon, let’s go. I’m hungry too and I don’t want to sit on the sidewalk. It’s cold.”
For a
minute he just sat there, and I thought he was going to have a tantrum. Then he took my hand and stood up.
That didn’t mean I’d won. He walked—no, he dragged his feet—all the way to the church. I ground my teeth together to keep from yanking on his arm and pulling him behind me all the way. It had been easier to get two bags of bottles to the recycling center than it was to get Dylan to the church.
We got the last two bag lunches. Now the question was, where the heck were we going to eat?
There was a low stone wall surrounding the parking lot. ylan was busy looking inside his bag so I was able to walk him over instead of drag him over to the wall.
I brushed off the top and lifted him up, then scrambled up beside him. The top was flat enough to use as a picnic table. We each had a juice box, crackers and cheese, an apple, a banana, a granola bar and a box of raisins. I split one banana for the two of us, saving the rest of the fruit. Dylan ate his own crackers and cheese along with some of mine. I had the rest of the crackers, a bit of banana and one of the granola bars. I packed up everything else into one of the bags to have later and stuffed it into my backpack.
“Where are we going now?” he asked, and I had to do the teeth-clenching thing so I wouldn’t get mad at him.
“Home,” I said.
He took my hand without saying a word, but he was dragging his feet again. I could have crawled on my stomach along the sidewalk and gone faster. I stopped about a block from the church, folding my arms across my chest.
“Dylan, c’mon,” I said. “It’s going to take us all afternoon to get there.”
“My legs can’t go any faster,” he said stubbornly.
I pulled my hand back through my hair. This wasn’t working. I took off my backpack and put it back on backward so it was against my chest. Then I bent down in front of Dylan. “Climb on,” I said.
“Piggyback?” he asked suspiciously.
“Yes, piggyback,” I said, hating the tone of my voice. “Just this one time.”
He put his arms around my neck and I looped my arms under his legs, boosting him up onto my back.
When I stood up, I almost fell over. I hiked Dylan up a little higher, and while he didn’t get any lighter, at least I didn’t feel like I was going to drop him on the sidewalk. I started walking, trying not to think about the pain in both my shoulders.
