by Kim Fu
They stopped at a food stand and their mother bought three hard rolls with ham and butter. She passed two back to the girls. The ham smelled like dirty shoes, so Kayla gave hers to Andee. Andee stuffed the whole thing quickly into her mouth like she feared Kayla would change her mind.
In Knoxville, Kayla, Andee, and their mother shared the guest room of a relative of a friend—or a friend of a relative, some string of connections—a sour-faced, retired teacher named Marianne. Again, Kayla took lessons, this time in the kitchen while Andee ran off somewhere, outside the apartment building, free on the streets.
“Your mother is a sinner,” Marianne said, during one of their first mornings together. “If you don’t accept Jesus into your heart, you’ll go to Hell along with her.”
“How do I do that?”
“Well, first, you have to say it. Say you accept Jesus.”
“I accept Jesus.”
Marianne pulled Kayla’s thumb out of her mouth. “Stop that. It’s a filthy habit.”
Kayla sat on her hands, the only way she could stop herself. “What makes my mom a sinner?”
“It is the fate of women to tempt men. It’s our curse, from the beginning of time, and why the Lord punishes us with blood and the pain of bearing children. You understand what I mean, don’t you?”
Kayla didn’t, but she nodded along anyway.
“You can atone for this sin, the uncleanliness of your body, the obscenity of it. Or you can embrace the devil and flaunt it, use it for worldly gain. That’s what your mother does.”
Their mother didn’t come home that night. Marianne cooked them fried potatoes and onions, with a piece of cornbread and a glass of milk each. The onions were undercooked, still sharp, and the milk had taken on the flavor of fridge mold. Kayla gave most of her meal to Andee. Andee finished every speck of potato and drop of milk, and put the cornbread in her pockets. “You have to stop being such a princess,” she said. “What if Mom doesn’t come back? What if Marianne stops feeding us?”
“Why would Marianne stop feeding us?”
Three months in Knoxville before their mother hurried them out of the apartment, down the outside stairs, screaming, “Judgmental bitch!” over her shoulder.
They got back in the car and crossed northwest. Andee pointed out animals as they passed through South Dakota and Wyoming: Sheep! Antelope! Pheasants! Rabbits! Geese! Eagles! The pert, surrendering flags of white-tailed deer as they leapt across the highway. Plump wild turkeys, lazy and oblivious in the middle of the road. Hundreds upon hundreds of cows.
“You did not see an eagle,” their mother said.
“Did so!”
“Well, how about that!”
A motel room in Billings, Montana. Their mother vanished for two days and a night. The girls kept the curtains drawn and the TV on the whole time, blaring through cartoons, daytime talk shows, sitcoms, crime dramas, infomercials, cartoons again. They paced and dozed. Andee gathered up the change their mother had left on the radiator and bought them some chips from the vending machine around the corner.
Their door faced the parking lot. In the late afternoon on the second day, the handle started to rattle. Andee opened it, thinking their mother was having trouble with her key. A man stood there, hunched over where the doorknob had been. He straightened up, looking surprised to see them. “Oh, hello,” he said. “I didn’t think anyone was in there. Thought the TV had been left on.” He leaned in, looking over Andee’s shoulder. Kayla sat on one of the twin beds in her unicorn pajamas, her face stained with cheese-puff dust. “You girls alone?”
“No,” Andee said. “Our daddy’s in the bathroom.”
“That so.” The man was wearing a jacket that was too big for him, a nice one, tan leather and sheepskin, his spindly, scarecrow body sticking straight through it like a toothpick through a grape. “Mind if I come in and wait for him, then?”
“Daddy said not to let anybody in,” Andee said.
He looked directly at Andee, as if for the first time. “Well, you tell your daddy that he’s going to be charged for an extra day.” Knowingly, he added, “Tell your mama too.”
Andee locked the door behind him, then dragged a chair across the room to wedge it under the doorknob. Kayla marveled at her ability to lie, quickly and confidently, right into a grown-up’s face.
When they were back in the car, driving south, Kayla could see something had turned in Andee, gone dark. Kayla tried to revive her by pointing out the critters along the roadside, drinking in the creeks. But she didn’t know their names the way Andee did. “Bird,” she said.
Nine months in Denver: the first time since Texas that the girls enrolled in a school. Andee caught up to the rest of her third grade class like she’d never left. Downstairs in first grade, Kayla found herself staring at the clock all day, black numbers on white under a dome of glass. A red triangle for the second hand, ticking with rigid, reassuring regularity. Assuring Kayla that the minute would end. The hour. The day. Their time in this place.
A basement apartment in Ontario, Oregon. In each new place, Kayla followed Andee blankly around the neighborhood, into corner stores, to parks, to fountains busted open in the summertime, to libraries with air-conditioning, baseball games in makeshift dust bowls, soccer on proper fields made municipal green in the spring. Kayla felt like she was waiting out these outings the way she waited out the school day, eager for them to be over even though nothing better waited on the other side. She watched from windows and behind bushes as Andee took the abuse shouted at her by neighborhood kids, usually older, until they were impressed by her refusal to leave, by the way this eight- and then nine-year-old girl stood there squeezing her fists on the sidewalk, on the edges of games. They always let her hang out with them in the end.
A house full of people—including a large number of children—in south Seattle. This seemed, in a more concrete way, to be their mother’s destination. The adults here seemed happy to see her, surrounded her with hugs. The food was good, served out of tureens and stew pots, the kitchen and dining room chaotic during meals, people everywhere. Andee and Kayla rolled their sleeping bags out onto the floor of a bedroom shared with five or six other girls, while their mother bunked with several other adults. There was a treasure trove of hand-me-down clothes. Kayla picked through to find things she liked: a white peasant blouse, a pair of jeans that was only a little bit too big, a gingham shirtdress, a soft pink cardigan. Andee took a fleece-lined hoodie, several pairs of men’s work socks. She took lots of clothes, indiscriminately, anything that fit, for any season, and jammed them into the bottom of her sleeping bag, the same place she kept a stash of food.
Families came and went, older children ran away. Charlotte, a woman their mother had introduced as “my oldest friend in the world,” was one of the only dependable fixtures in the house, the one who answered the beige wall-mounted phone in the kitchen and cajoled everyone into stirring and chopping, in turn. Charlotte had greeted them effusively when they’d first arrived, hugging Andee and Kayla, kissing their cheeks with her brightly lipsticked mouth. But Kayla had gradually become aware of Charlotte staring at her whenever they were together, that she was visibly startled when Kayla walked into a room. More than once, Charlotte told her, “You look just like your mother when we were kids.” And though she smiled as she spoke, something in her voice make Kayla feel inexplicably guilty, as though her very presence stirred up some old enmity, threatened a tenuous peace.
Near the end of third grade, Kayla was startled out of her schoolroom stupor when she heard Andee’s name over the PA during the morning announcements. Andee had won a national essay contest. When Kayla tried to congratulate her sister that afternoon, Andee muttered, “It’s no big deal. Probably won’t even happen.” Kayla wasn’t sure what Andee was referring to—what probably wouldn’t even happen—but she could tell Andee was straining against hope, trying desperately not to be disappointed again. She saw Andee carefully forging their mother’s signature on a raft of doc
uments, more at one time than they’d ever needed to before.
That summer, Andee vanished for more than a week. In the overstuffed, ever-shifting house, only Kayla and her mother seemed to notice, and only Kayla seemed to care.
“Andee will come back on her own in time,” their mother said. “Do you know who she went with?”
Kayla was confused: Why would Andee run away? Andee had adapted so well to the current iteration of their lives. She liked their new school, had shown up in the middle of the year and still gotten decent grades, she’d won that contest. When someone had picked a fight with her on the playground, she’d soundly knocked him on his ass. Kayla roamed the house looking for clues. Andee’s sleeping bag and her cache of clothing were gone.
Kayla finally found an early draft of Andee’s prize-winning essay in a notebook. It was a fictionalized version of their endless road trip with their mother, somehow sadder and more vivid than it had been as Kayla had been living it. She cried for the two little girls in the story. The first-person narrator was so unlike Andee, needy and desperate and ragged, an orphan from a fairy tale, while Kayla thought of her sister like a weed, in the best way—thriving and taking over anywhere, a flowering shoot that could bust through concrete. And the sister was just a baby, a drooling prop, a burden, younger than Kayla had been. Kayla wanted to believe this was a calculation on Andee’s part—she’d made them more pitiable to improve her odds of winning—and not how Andee really felt, how Andee really saw them. The Andee in the essay was alone in the world. The draft ended with a half-sentence that seemed copied from somewhere, a prompt on a form: “What going to Camp Forevermore would mean to me,” and then blank lines.
When Andee returned, their mother was away again. Charlotte had to fetch Andee from somewhere less than a day’s drive away, posing as an aunt, as she did in many situations, for many of the kids. Andee no longer had her sleeping bag. She slept wrapped in a knitted blanket covered in dog fur that she’d found elsewhere in the house.
On her first night back, Andee gave Kayla a friendship bracelet made of yarn, saying she didn’t want it anymore. Kayla tied it tightly around her wrist and admired it for a long moment. She curled up beside her sister and whispered, “I was afraid you were gone forever.”
Andee said, “What if I was? What would you do?”
“I’d miss you.”
“But what would you do? You know you can’t count on Mom,” Andee said. “You can’t count on anybody. What would you do?”
Kayla blinked at this, confused.
“Forget it,” Andee said.
One night, around Kayla’s eleventh birthday, she and Andee went to bed before everyone else. A rare moment when it was just the two of them, listening to each other breathe, the adult voices and laughter through the walls.
Then someone else was in the room. Someone was in Kayla’s sleeping bag. A boy, or a man. With her sister two feet away, the house full of people, another body suddenly there in the dark. A large hand clamped over her mouth, another hand pulling up her nightshirt.
She broadcast her thoughts in Andee’s direction: Help me. Andee didn’t move. Andee, right there in her dog blanket, not doing anything, as the hand went on and on. He made a noise like he was in pain, like Kayla had hurt him in some way, and she knew that he was going to hurt her back until he drew the same sound from her. The hand on her mouth loosened as she started to cry.
Close to her face, she heard a thud, like a heavy book dropped to the ground, and the weight pinning her rolled away. The light went on, the door to the hall was thrown open. Andee stood at the far end of the room, the boot she’d used to strike the back of the man’s head still in her hand. Kayla didn’t want to look at the person on his hands and knees beside her, didn’t want to see the details she’d already felt. She recognized him; he was a visitor, a resident’s late-teenage son. Andee quickly crossed the room again and pulled Kayla up by the wrist, dragging her into the hallway.
“Thank you,” Kayla managed.
“Don’t thank me!” Andee was shaking. “Don’t thank me,” she repeated. She handed Kayla the boot.
2
Finally, their mother was expelled from the group house. Kayla hadn’t been in their car in a long time—it had served as one of the communal vehicles for the house—and it seemed to have gotten smaller, the once-sprawling world of the backseat now a ripped, shallow bench that forced her knees up. The dashboard was lit up like a Christmas tree, all the service lights blinking. The air-conditioning had never worked, as far as Kayla could remember, but now they couldn’t turn off the heat, or something else was happening beneath the hood that was roasting them alive in the steel chassis. They almost made it to their mother’s friend Sally’s house on the east side of Portland before the car sputtered and died. The girls pushed while their mother steered for the last two blocks.
Sally’s boyfriend, Eric, was the musical director at a grassroots evangelical church. The first time he came over after they moved in, Kayla was sitting framed by Sally’s bay window, strumming at her ukulele. In nine years, she’d never restrung it, and the sound was so warped it no longer sounded like a musical instrument and was barely audible, like the soft growl of an injured animal. She was fourteen and had sprung up tall, adolescent breasts smashed painfully flat by a training bra that no longer fit, jean shorts that no longer fit, T-shirts that no longer fit. A grown hen walking around in an eggshell.
“Why, hello, who’s this?” he said.
Kayla smiled and waited for someone else to introduce her.
“Oh, don’t mind her,” Sally said. “They’re just staying here awhile. I owed their mom a favor.”
Eric walked over and took the ukulele right out of Kayla’s hands. She didn’t resist, but as the wood slipped out of her fingers she let out a small squeak of distress. “Poor little thing,” he said, examining the ukulele. “Nobody’s been taking care of you.” He winked at Kayla. “You know how to play?”
“A little bit,” she admitted shyly. “Not really.”
“I can teach you.” He handed her back the instrument and she clutched it to her chest in relief. “If you help out at the church a little bit. Does that sound fair?”
Kayla nodded.
Sally, watching their conversation, said, “Come on, now. Let’s go. I’m starving.”
“See you Sunday,” Eric said.
Sally and Eric broke up soon afterward, but Kayla continued to go to the church every Sunday. She met Eric around the corner and he drove her in his messy station wagon. Heaped in the back were a couple of guitars, a large gas canister, blankets, a lot of garbage. “Sorry about the old jalopy,” he said, with another wink. He called her “cupcake” and “sweetheart” and hugged her as greeting and farewell, sometimes kissing the top of her head.
The church was a converted warehouse with modern stained-glass windows, a 1970s-style Jesus made of tangram shapes in primary colors. It was Kayla’s job to set up the folding-chair pews while the musical devotion group rehearsed in the early morning. Eric wrote a lot of the songs himself, or at least, set simplified Bible verses to a verse-chorus-verse-bridge-chorus structure over a I-IV-V chord progression. He had a country-music voice, a soulful twang Kayla knew was affected—his speaking voice had the clipped dullness of a northerner—but nevertheless made her feel at home, recalled her faded memory of the cornflower house.
After the service, Kayla followed Eric to the office he shared with the youth pastor, one of the former administrative offices at the back of the warehouse. A banner of Matthew 19:14 hung across the back wall: JESUS SAID, “LET THE LITTLE CHILDREN COME TO ME, AND DO NOT HINDER THEM, FOR THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN BELONGS TO SUCH AS THESE.” Beside a small desk, there were large beanbag chairs in a corner, a shelf full of children’s Bibles and Christian storybooks, always-stocked jars of jellybeans and cheese straws.
They cleaned, polished, and restrung Kayla’s ukulele. He let her play one of his guitars as well, and over several months, seasons—the co
ld rain, warm rain, and mild sun of the Pacific Northwest—he taught her the names of the chords, how to strum and how to pick, how to play his songs and other Christian rock classics, how to transpose his lessons to her ukulele. If she finished setting up early, Eric let her practice alone in his office. The luxury of privacy was new to her.
One afternoon, he asked her, “Did you go to Bible school as a kid?”
“Nope.” Marianne’s mix of reading, arithmetic, and hellfire didn’t seem like it would count.
“How are you finding Pastor Mike’s sermons?”
Kayla toyed idly with one of the tuning pegs. “Good.”
Eric put his hand over Kayla’s, stilling it. “You can tell me the truth.”
“They’re boring, I guess. Or confusing. I don’t really know what he’s talking about.”
“Have you tried reading the Bible I gave you?”
“Yes. I liked the—the beginning. The first couple pages. I’ve read them a bunch of times. But then it gets too hard.”
“Mmm, I could see that. Would you be offended if I suggested something a little easier?” He grabbed the first volume of the children’s illustrated Bible from the shelf. “I know you’re too big for this, but it might clear things up for you.”
Kayla looked at the cover, an illustration of a white dove with an olive leaf in its beak flying across a stormy sea. She touched the picture, feeling a strange kinship with the bird. She liked that Eric treated her like a child. It seemed to her that no one had. “Would you read it to me?” she asked.
Eric looked surprised and then pleased. More than pleased: lit with joy. “I’d be honored to,” he said.
They curled up together in one of the beanbag chairs. Kayla made herself as small as she could as she picked from a fistful of jellybeans and leaned into Eric’s chest, feeling his voice rumble through his rib cage. The Jesus in the pictures reminded her a lot of Eric: his scrabbly brown beard, his warm brown eyes, how he didn’t care if she got crumbs or tears on his shirt. They worked through all twelve volumes this way, as a dependable coda to her guitar lessons. She knew she couldn’t tell anyone else about the beanbag chair. They wouldn’t understand. They’d ruin it somehow, make it dirty.
