Lizzie Flying Solo

by Nanci Turner Steveson

  Dedication

  To those who seek shelter

  And those who offer it.

  And for my beloved Sarah.

  This book is for you.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Summer

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Autumn

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Winter

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Summer

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  Back Ad

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Summer

  One

  On the second to last day of June, Mom came into my room with a frown on her face and a navy-blue suitcase in her hand.

  “Lizzie,” she said, “we have to give our house back to the bank.”

  I looked up from my book. “Why does the bank want our house?”

  She shifted her focus to the window.

  “Is it because of Dad?”

  She clenched her jaw a tiny bit, the way she always did when that subject came up. “Yes, because of Dad. I can’t pay for it anymore.”

  “Won’t they let us stay until after his trial, just to see what happens?”

  “I tried. I’m really sorry. It’s just until we’re back on our feet.”

  She placed the suitcase on the floor.

  “Pack up the things you care about the most. Everything else will go into storage.”

  “Wait, storage? Where are we going to live?”

  Mom walked to the window and tied the yellow plaid curtains to the side, then stared at the red maple tree in the backyard. My grandparents’ ashes were buried under the roots of that tree. Her own parents. Mom would never leave them behind forever. She crossed her arms and turned back to me.

  “We’re moving to a new town for a while. No one there will know anything about what happened. We’ll be living in a place with other people, so you can make friends again, real friends who won’t judge you the way MaryBeth and Amy did. Everyone needs a fresh start from time to time. This is our turn.”

  “Mom, no. I don’t want to go. People here will forget. You said MaryBeth and Amy were reacting to rumors and that when Dad gets back everything will return to normal.”

  That made her wince. “It’s not that simple, Lizzie. Sometimes we have to answer to things we have no control over. I’m really sorry.”

  She hurried out the door and left the suitcase sitting square in the middle of the floor, mocking me.

  For the next few hours I moved around the house, touching all the things I loved and not understanding how I could possibly pick which of them meant the most. One at a time, I flipped through the pages of my books and ran my finger across the pencil marks where I’d written my name inside. Somewhere between Charlotte’s Web and Black Beauty, I’d learned to sign my name in script. The plastic horses lined up across the top of my bookcase each had names and invented life stories. From their basket in the corner, my four favorite stuffed animals watched me wander around the room. Their eyes asked the question I couldn’t answer. Who did I love the best?

  It was hard enough to decide what to put inside the suitcase, but how would I pack the things I couldn’t touch? Like the way sunlight streamed through my windows and made tic-tac-toe patterns on the hardwood floors, or the smell of burning bacon from Saturday mornings when it was Dad’s turn to cook? No navy-blue suitcase could hold those things.

  Downstairs, I tested the doorknob to Dad’s study to see if it was locked, wondering if there was anything inside that was important. Until a couple of years ago, Dad had always had an open-door policy: I came and went without knocking. Back then he’d been a normal dad. We’d been a normal family, doing all the same kinds of things my friends’ families did: summer cookouts, family movie night, sledding on Powder Hill. Then he got weird and started locking himself inside the study, and he’d get mad at me for trying to come in uninvited. Everything changed again when he was arrested for something that had to do with white collars, and I don’t mean changed for the better. I let go of the knob. Whatever was inside that room, I didn’t want it anyway.

  We kept our winter clothes and ice skates packed up in the mudroom closet. I opened a bin to be sure I wasn’t missing anything important. A black riding helmet toppled from the shelf above and bounced onto the floor. It was the helmet Dad had given me for Christmas, only a few days before he was arrested. In the same box was a letter from the owner of a riding stable not far away telling me I was going to start my long-dreamed-of lessons the following Thursday. I never even got to the first one, because that was the day they came and took Dad away.

  I didn’t see them arrest him. I barely got a glimpse of the three men standing in the foyer asking for him, because as soon as they came in, Mom grabbed me from the kitchen and practically pushed me up the stairs with firm instructions to stay in my room. But our neighbor, Mrs. Alfieri, saw the whole thing. She told me—and everyone else in town—that when they slapped those handcuffs on Dad’s wrists, it was the loudest click she’d ever heard. I kicked the helmet against the wall, slammed the mudroom door shut, and ran back upstairs.

  Hidden in the back of my closet was a shoe box where I kept a small pocket version of Webster’s Dictionary & Thesaurus, a couple of sharpened pencils, and a hot-pink suede diary. That diary was nearly half filled with words I hoped to turn into real poems someday. I crawled inside the closet and sat in the corner hidden behind clothes hanging from a rod and left the door cracked just enough for a wedge of light to spread across my lap. Holding the pencil firmly against a fresh page of the diary, I waited for words to appear—words that might carry away some of the angst choking me.

  After I’d scribbled and scrawled and let silent tears fall, I wrapped the diary inside a blue-and-white Middlebury College sweatshirt and dropped it into the suitcase along with my box of pencils and a sketch pad. I chose eight books, two of my plastic horses, a photo of my grandparents, all four stuffed animals, and the braided leather friendship bracelet MaryBeth had given me before she found out Dad got her father in trouble, too. I had to rearrange everything twice to squeeze in the brand-new bird feeder Mom and I had bought on the first day of spring. That was before she decided things like bird feeders were “unessential” and could no longer be purchased. The suitcase was so full, I had to sit on it to get it zippered shut.

  The next morning the doorbell rang at eight o’clock. I heard Mom open the door and I went to the top of the stairs to listen. It was a bunch of people from a moving company who were packing up and taking our stuff to storage. I ran to my room to be sure I hadn’t forgotten anything, something I might have overlooked the afternoon before. My suitcase was downstairs by the front door, so it would need to be something small that I could carry. Mom had already packed most of my clothes, and a quick search inside the closet showed there wasn’t anything left that I’d miss over the next few months. I scanned my entire
bedroom, wishing I could take the curtains with me, or the lamp, or more of my plastic horses.

  Or everything.

  Nothing in particular jumped out, so I snatched a miniature clay cactus plant I’d made in elementary school and pushed it down inside my jeans pocket. Then I stood in the middle of the room and watched as the sun outside made the tic-tac-toe pattern spread shadows until each pane was half as wide as one of my feet. Placing my left foot on a line, I carefully positioned my right foot in front of it, and stood awkwardly with my arms out to each side, as if I was on the balance beam in the school gym. With my eyes closed, I inhaled deeply and made a wish that we’d be home sooner rather than later.

  An hour later, the movers were still working when Mom and I waited by the front door for a man from the bank who was coming to get the keys to the house and drive us to the new town. The old Toyota Mom had been rattling around in since she’d sold our regular cars had disappeared a few days before, too. She watched out the window, her eyes glazed over, staring at her prized flower garden along the front walkway. Her favorite peach-colored roses were in full bloom, and a few hung heavy with dew.

  I touched her elbow gently. “Mom?”

  The corner of her mouth twitched in response.

  “Can I ask you something?”

  “Hmmm?”

  “Do you really think we’ll be coming back?”

  She sighed the tiniest bit but didn’t shift her eyes from the flowers outside. “The law says every person is innocent until proven guilty.”

  Her voice sounded robotic, like she’d said those words out loud to herself a million times over.

  “That’s not what I asked. Do you really think we’ll come back here after the trial?”

  She felt around for my hand and took it in hers, then pressed both of them tight against her chest.

  “I hope so, Lizzie,” she said. “I really do.”

  Two

  When Mom said we were going to be living in a place with other people, I thought she meant we’d be moving into an apartment building, like the one where our gardener, Mr. French, lived. Every summer Mr. French had come to take care of Mom’s flower beds—every summer until this one. A few years back his car wouldn’t start at the end of the day, so Mom and I had driven him home.

  Mr. French’s town was different from ours. It had narrow, crowded streets and buildings so tall they almost blocked the sky. But when we pulled up to a redbrick apartment complex, he’d smiled and pointed to a tiny patio sticking out the side of the second story. Masses of hot-pink and purple flowers wound their way up wrought iron railings. A lady wearing an apron was clipping herbs from a tub next to a large pot of bright yellow sunflowers. She smiled and waved at us, her hand full of rosemary and mint.

  “My garden, my wife,” Mr. French had said, beaming.

  That was the kind of place I expected for our temporary home. That, I thought, I could do until after Dad’s trial. So when the man from the bank dropped us off at Good Hope: A Home for Families in Transition, I froze. It wasn’t an apartment complex where each family had their own place to live. It was a single, rambling house sitting alone at the end of an otherwise lifeless street, plunked in the middle of scrub bushes and wild grasses, with two old oak trees groaning in the front yard. Cracked concrete steps led to a front door with long strips of paint peeling over the top. Three pairs of eyes watched us through a bay window as we approached. I stopped short and set my suitcase on a patch of dirt.

  “Mom, no.”

  She didn’t even look at me. “Lizzie, yes.”

  She lugged two suitcases up the steps, came back for a box of clothing and another labeled “Important Papers,” then motioned for me to follow.

  “No, I can’t. We can’t.”

  Her eyes pleaded with me not to argue. “We’ll be safe here. Be grateful.”

  The reality of this new change in our lives stunned me to silence. Mom knocked on the door, and a few seconds later it opened a crack. A lady with short dark hair and glasses peered out, then stood aside and waved us in.

  “You can leave your things here for now,” she said brusquely, indicating the small entryway. “We’ll go over the rules, then I’ll take you to your room.”

  Mom and I pushed all our belongings across the threshold and followed the lady down some steps to a large family-type room. Old, overstuffed couches that didn’t match lined the walls, and a big TV sat on a three-sided table in one corner. There was a short bookcase stocked with Reader’s Digest magazines, a table with a tower of board games, and the bay window looking out to the front yard. Mom sank down in one of the couches, and I sat next to her on a flaming-orange cushion covering the window seat. No sign of the people belonging to the six eyes that had watched us a few moments before.

  The lady pulled up a metal folding chair and perched on the edge, sitting with her back tall and rigid. She held a clipboard close to her chest.

  “I am Miss May,” she said. “I am in charge of Good Hope. It is my responsibility to see to it all our residents are safe and working toward the goal of independence.”

  Mom nodded politely.

  “You must obey the rules to be allowed to stay at Good Hope,” Miss May went on.

  She looked at me like she was waiting for a confession of some rule I must have already broken in the few minutes since we’d arrived. When nothing came, she handed each of us a sheet of paper with Rules for Considerate Living written across the top and proceeded to read each out loud.

  No drugs, alcohol, or smoking of any kind

  No visitors without prior approval

  No lollygagging on the front steps

  No children outside after dark

  No children touching the stove, oven, or refrigerator

  No alterations in your room (paint, picture hangers/nails/coat hooks bolted into walls, etc.)

  No children using the internet without volunteer/parent supervision

  No parents out after nine o’clock unless for work

  No pets, not even goldfish

  No bird feeders

  No backpacks left out front

  No skipping or trading chores

  No leaving a mess

  No being late on financial or housekeeping obligations

  No TV in Common Room after nine o’clock during the week

  No loud music, anywhere, ever

  No

  No

  No

  No

  No

  No

  No

  NO!

  Her eyes narrowed into little slits and she pinned them on me again. “These regulations are in place to assure your safety, Elizabeth, and so we, as a community, get along with one another within these walls.”

  I shrank away from her words. Mom reached over and squeezed my hand three times.

  “Lizzie understands,” she said.

  Miss May settled her attention back on Mom and kept talking. A small air-conditioning unit at the other end of the room made a whirring sound as it spit cool air between the vents. I studied the trees outside the bay window. The trunks of the giant oaks were so big around, you could slice a dining room table right out of the middle. Thick limbs, heavy with green acorns, stretched from corner to corner over a dirt yard. There wasn’t anything on the Rules for Considerate Living list about not climbing trees, but I would bet one of my plastic horses if I was caught sitting in one, a new line would be added to the bottom of that list.

  Mom and Miss May were hunched over the clipboard, looking at some papers, when a dog ran from behind the trunk of one of the trees. It stopped in the yard and stared at me through the window, her reddish-brown floppy ears raised slightly, like she was asking for something. Other than the ears, her body was solid white. She was so skinny, I could practically count her ribs. Her hips stuck out to a point on each side, stretching the skin tight, and a sagging, hairless belly looked like she must have a litter of puppies hidden somewhere. Just as quickly as she appeared, she darted off across the drive
way and vanished into the woods.

  Finally, Mom stood up and touched me lightly on the shoulder.

  “We’re done,” she said.

  Miss May led us down a long, low-ceilinged hall, rattling something about how the house was built when the human race was an average of two inches shorter than we are now, which accounted for the low ceilings and narrow hallways. The space Mom and I were going to share was a skinny room with a set of bunk beds on the right, a closet on the left, a small white dresser in a corner, and one metal folding chair. It was so cramped, we couldn’t walk past the bunk beds at the same time without sliding sideways.

  After we made two trips to bring in our suitcases and boxes, I pulled curtains away from a single window that was smaller than the flat-screen TV in my old bedroom. Outside, a skinny strip of yard was bordered by so many trees, it was mostly dirt for lack of sunshine. My life was shrinking inch by inch by inch.

  Mom unzipped one of the suitcases and tried to stuff an armful of clothes into one drawer of the dresser, then tried another, her forehead bunched up tight like she was trying to solve a puzzle. The dresser would have been the right size for the playhouse I had when I was six.

  “Did you see that dog in the yard when we were talking to Miss May?” I asked.

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “I think she has puppies somewhere.”

  She crammed a stack of my T-shirts into a drawer and shoved it closed with her hip, then unzipped the next suitcase. “Oh, that’s nice.”

  “Why can’t we hang the bird feeder? There are so many trees; there’s even a red maple.”

  “I’m not sure,” she said. “Miss May is very exacting, so I am sure she has a calculated reason for it.”

  I didn’t even have to look up the word exacting to understand what Mom meant. She meant that Miss May was strict, and we weren’t going to question her rules, even if we didn’t understand them.

  Looking at the world through the panes of the tiny window made me remember how Mom described what it was like visiting Dad in jail, where they had to talk to each other on a phone in a booth separated by glass. Neither of them wanted me to see him that way.