Livvie Owen Lived Here

by Sarah Dooley

  “Walking’s better anyways,” I reassured myself, and noticed Karen’s eyes narrow in confusion, then flick from me to the retreating Jeep. Her eye creases got a little deeper.

  “Can we celebrate?” Lanie asked, bouncing on her toes and waving the red ribbon high.

  “If we stop to leave Bentley at home and pick up Natasha.”

  I skipped a little at Karen’s answer, forgetting my injured foot. Celebrating meant ice cream, if we had the money.

  Natasha locked her bike to the stair rail while Lanie took Bentley inside. Then we started toward Probart Street, which was familiar because we had lived on it twice, once in the little white house with black shutters, and once in a trailer at the very far end. Downtown Nabor was three streets over and encompassed four square blocks plus an alley. We walked into it slowly, taking in the unusual warmth of October and the shouts of laughter from a group of teenagers up the street. The empty courthouse was the tallest building in Nabor at two stories high plus a dome, and it sat at the corner of town, facing in. The county seat had long since moved, and the courthouse had stood empty ever since, keeping watch over the smaller buildings, frowning down at all of us.

  Karen stretched her arms out and danced, drawing a giggle from Lanie and soft embarrassment from Natasha. I put out my arms, too, and danced in just the same way. A breeze too warm to belong to this month picked my growing hair up off my neck and made goose bumps pop up along my arms. The digital clock at the hardware store turned over from temperature to time with a soft clatter. It was old-fashioned like the store itself, and I loved how its black squares turned over in unison to reveal green, spelling out the things it wanted to tell us. New signs could tell us in pictures and high-color graphics, but I preferred the old way with its soft, familiar sound.

  “Good evening, Nabor!” Karen laughed, spinning with her arms out like a child.

  “Good evening, Nabor!” Lanie echoed. She was spinning her second-place science fair ribbon around her head like a streamer, and I watched the red satin catch the weak sunlight and sparkle.

  Walking through Nabor didn’t take much thought. Once you’d bid farewell to the empty courthouse and stopped to nod hello to Mr. Biamonte at the hardware store, the only thing left to see for two blocks was empty storefronts. The stores were full in the very back of my memory, one stocked with fresh loaves of bread and boxes of macaroni and cheese, the next with shiny gold watches and silver rings, the next with clocks. Nothing in my memory could tell me what had happened to the items now gone from the shelves. They, like the factory, were gone overnight and it seemed the dust was almost immediate, pale on the windowsills, gathering like twilight. The movie theater closed so quick the popcorn boxes remained on the counter, though the popcorn itself had long since been eaten by little gray Bentleys and other furry guests.

  It was not terribly uncommon to find buildings empty in Nabor-with-an-A. Since the paper mill stopped blowing its whistle—in theory, anyway—a decade ago, more and more people had made the move to Neighbor and beyond. I think the only reason we didn’t move was because of me and my attachment to Nabor, to the familiar streets and the familiar school and the way the town recognized my face. They knew to turn away when I started having a tantrum and they knew who to call if they saw me wandering or lost. It was hard to start fresh with a new group of neighbors when your daughter was a kid like me.

  The end of town was marked by U-Save with its single gas pump and its neon orange window molding. My feet knew every scuff in the U-Save’s tile, and many of the scuffs, especially the ones in front of the newspaper stand, belonged to me. Though most of the real estate catalogs were from Neighbor-with-an-E, many included a small—and constantly shrinking—selection of homes for sale in Nabor-with-an-A.

  “We can’t afford magazines today,” Karen said, not apologetically but a little guarded, like she hoped I would stay calm. I rolled my shoulders but forced out a breath and didn’t answer. The free ones were just as good, anyway, mostly. I took two of these and stuck them in my book bag.

  “Livvie took the free ones, just the free ones,” I called, casting a sideways glance at the young cashier. I didn’t want him to think I was stealing. He eyed me strangely and I ducked my chin to my chest and rolled my shoulders again, willing him to look away. Natasha distracted me with an arm looped through mine and a hand tugging at my ice cream wrapper.

  “Need this opened?”

  “Yes, please.”

  We walked back toward Probart Street with our ice creams, feet picking up quicker as the sun went down. The temperature dropped a degree almost every time the sign above the hardware store switched back, and the goose bumps under my jacket were being replaced with cold patches of red. I licked my ice cream and shivered.

  By the time we made it home, half running through the twilight, Lanie had ice cream dripping down her fingers and my hair was stuck in patches to the chocolate on my cheeks. I never remembered I was sticky until after I did things like pet the cat. It was nights like these when I wished we had a working bathtub. The trailer was old and the bathroom had been partially remodeled by someone who had either given up or run out of money before the job was done. The shower worked, but weakly, and the hot water didn’t last long. The cracks around the drain meant water went down and spiders came up, both of which made it next to impossible to take a bath. The floor was plywood, although a box of sticky tiles sat in the corner as though waiting for someone to stick them down. Somehow it seemed too permanent a job for my parents to undertake.

  Seven minutes into my shower, the water cooled and I emerged unstickied but irritated, wishing I could have soaked my troubles away in a hot bath. I didn’t like how the plywood felt on my wet feet and imagined sawdust sticking to me, although it almost never really did. Once in a while I got a splinter in this floor, but usually that was when I kicked and screamed about something.

  Picking up a striped towel from the back of the toilet, I scampered down the hall carpet that was flattened by years of other people’s feet. In my room, I settled into bed with my two new real estate catalogs. The houses there were all spacious and beautiful. I wasn’t sure exactly why I liked them so much, except that I knew the people living in them didn’t do things like throw tantrums or drop mugs or fall off chairs in the night. I was pretty sure they didn’t hear mysterious whistles, either, but then, I didn’t have any way of asking them.

  I kept asking Simon and Karen, and sometimes Natasha (but never Lanie) how long it would be before we could buy one of the houses I saw listed in my catalogs. We had lived several different places over the last few years, moving from one house to the next in an attempt to outrun the bills that kept piling up. Shouldn’t we just buy a house so we don’t have to pay rent? I would ask.

  Each family member had their own specific, sad way of answering. Simon liked to ruffle my hair as if I wasn’t fourteen years old. He would kiss my cheek and say something like “That’s my girl, using that logic.” Then change the subject to school or my cat or my real estate catalog. Karen would look away and the crinkles by her eyes would get deeper. She would say something like “Someday, Livvie. Someday we’ll stop moving.” She always sounded so serious that I didn’t even like to ask her anymore. It was like I had brought up something that I wasn’t supposed to talk about.

  I liked Natasha’s answer best, because she didn’t let it get her down. “I’m going to tickle you if you ask me that again,” she would say, and then she would pin me down and tickle me until I had the hiccups. Natasha’s answers were the funniest but also the least informative.

  But it was the one person I never asked who had finally answered this question for me. Fixing me with a nasty stare one night at dinner, upset because my classifieds had flopped over into her rice, Lanie informed me coolly, “It’s your fault, you know. You’re the reason we can’t afford to buy that house you’re always shopping for.”

  Natasha slapped her and they both got sent from the table, but not before I understood the
way of things. Just like Natasha and Lanie sharing a bedroom, just like Orange Cat and the crinkles by my mother’s eyes, our living situation was my fault. I kept getting us into trouble with landlords and neighbors—throwing tantrums, putting dents in the drywall—and we could never settle anywhere long enough to raise the money for a house.

  Smoothing down a corner of cool gray newsprint, enjoying the sensation of ink smudging onto my fingers, I was not exactly upset, but urgent with the idea that I needed to fix things.

  Chapter 4

  I was sitting on the floor coloring a white house yellow with my highlighter when the whistle blew at ten till midnight. Before it even had a chance to fade, I flung myself down the hall and into Natasha’s room.

  “You heard it, too, right?” I demanded, tossing myself onto her bed. “Did you hear it, Tash?”

  Natasha blinked at me drowsily and tugged her book out from under me, stuffing a bookmark in it before she tossed it to the floor.

  “Heard what, doodlebug?” she asked with a yawn.

  My stomach felt full of pressure all of a sudden.

  “You mean you didn’t?”

  “Didn’t what?”

  I clenched my shoulders, then my elbows, then my wrists, but it wasn’t helping. “Nobody keeps hearing the whistle except for me!” I shouted. “Why can’t anybody hear it? Livvie, why are you hearing that whistle? It’s not real! You’re so stupid, Livvie!”

  “No kidding, Livvie! Now shut up!” the lump in the blankets that was Lanie hollered at me.

  “Lanie, hush!” Natasha tapped my chin. “Look at me,” she said in a commanding voice.

  “What?” I did look at her and felt a little of the pressure leak away.

  “Stop talking to Livvie like that. She’s my sister and I don’t like to hear it.”

  “But—”

  “No buts.” Stroking back a piece of my hair, she sighed sleepily. “If you’re hearing something, then you’re hearing something. Maybe I only heard it last time ’cause I was asleep.” She leaned closer to my ear. “And don’t tell Mom and Dad, but I haven’t gone to sleep yet tonight. This is a really flippin’ good book.” She held it up, but it just looked thick and boring.

  “But if you have to be asleep to hear it, doesn’t that mean that you’re dreaming it?” I ventured.

  “It doesn’t have to. It could just mean it’s something you have to be in a—in a certain state of mind to hear. You know it was ten years ago yesterday that the mill closed down, don’t you?”

  “Mm-hmm,” I said absently.

  “Of course you do,” she said with a smile. “I should have known you did, you’re so good with calendars.”

  “But I didn’t hear it in my sleep. I’ve been awake both times.”

  “But you’re always in a different state of mind.” She didn’t say it mean, but it made me clench a little, anyway. “I don’t mean that in a bad way,” she added quickly. “I just mean you see things different. Not bad. Just different. Maybe you hear them different, too.”

  I shook my head. “You sound silly,” I said, but I no longer felt like I was going to pull my hair. Natasha patted the pillow next to her and I stretched out, starting to feel sleepy.

  “Read to me,” I murmured hopefully.

  “It’s too late, hon,” Natasha answered. “We both need to get some sleep.”

  “We all three need to get some sleep!” Lanie said loudly from the next bed.

  Natasha placed a finger over her lips at me, then flung her pillow as hard as she could at Lanie, who sputtered in protest.

  “Hey!”

  “Hey!” Natasha mimicked. “I said, stop bad-mouthing Livvie! Now, that goes for both of you!” She tugged my ear and plunked the remaining pillow over my head. Giggling, I pulled my head out and plopped it on top of the pillow instead. Lanie rolled over and hid her own head under her pillow, making a grumpy noise as she did.

  Halfway through the night, Lanie got too noisy with her snoring and I had to slip back to my own bedroom. I was half comforted by what Natasha had said, but I still had chill bumps down the back of my neck when I thought about the mill whistle. Back when I was little, Simon and Karen had both worked there and we had owned our Sun House. After the whistle stopped blowing, all the rest of it fell apart. The house. The sun. And Lanie was born, of course, which proved to be an unhappy fact later on.

  My foot ached a little as I slipped back into bed, so I logically figured investigating could wait until tomorrow night instead. There was no point in getting in trouble yet by sneaking out at night, not when I would be limping so slow that I probably wouldn’t even make it to the mill. But my feet itched toward the door; my eyes kept roaming in that direction. If the mill whistle were something you had to be in a specific frame of mind to hear, well, I wanted to know why I could hear it. Why it was talking to me.

  I tossed sideways the other way and pulled my pillow over my head. No one had put my blankets on, so they were tangled and not lined up properly. From the light outside, it seemed like four a.m., which meant I had almost two hours before I was supposed to be up.

  Two hours. Two hours was a long time. Enough time to watch a movie and the beginning of another. Enough time to sleep and dream at least three dreams about Orange Cat, or the Sun House, or perhaps giraffes walking on tightropes. I thought of G and smiled, picturing her in bed right now, bouncing a little in her sleep, dreaming of a smiling giraffe teetering high above the circus tent floor.

  But I was not G. I was Livvie Owen and as Livvie Owen, I had a job to do besides dreaming about the circus.

  I really needed to know why the mill was calling only me. What it wanted.

  The first blanket was the hardest to peel off, because my arms were trapped underneath. Wriggling one loose, I peeled back the soft quilt, then the fleecy blanket underneath, then the woven white blanket I loved best but kept in the middle so it would stay clean. One by one, I peeled my nine tangled blankets off, until I was shivering and barefoot in the four a.m. darkness.

  Climbing from the bed carefully, wary of putting weight on my still-bandaged foot, I stood uncertainly for a moment, shivering with the loss of my blankets. I was going outside, so I ought to wear shoes and jeans and a jacket. Only it was four a.m., which was when I was supposed to wear slippers and pajamas. The clock finally won, aided by the fact that my cold feet ached for fuzzy slippers. It would be almost like bringing bed with me out into the world.

  It was cold outside, and almost too dark to be four a.m. My mind conjured up dark smoke, like from a factory, but I knew that really it was only clouds casting such shadows on the night.

  I tiptoed the lightest past Lanie and Natasha’s window. You couldn’t wake Natasha, not for anything, once she was asleep, but if she had woken to read again . . . and then there was Lanie, who seemed to spring awake at the slightest little sound. I wondered again why my sisters and their sleep habits could not have been reversed, the one who loved me waking to help me and the one who hated me sleeping through my noises.

  Night dampness seeped into my skin and the pressure inside got bigger. I was tempted to hum, but a hum from the driveway would almost certainly summon a parent or a sister, so instead I hummed in a whisper. It wasn’t the same, but it was something. Anyway, I told myself, I needed to keep my ears clear and sharp, in case the whistle blew.

  It never took more than twenty minutes to walk from anywhere to anywhere in Nabor-with-an-A. We had lived so many different places in Nabor that I knew nearly every street, knew the best side to walk on if you wanted room away from cars, knew which houses had dogs and which houses didn’t like children.

  So it should be easy to walk to the factory, I thought, tugging my sweatshirt tighter around my shoulders. Drafts were working their way in from the back of my slippers and I really wished I had decided to wear shoes instead. It seemed maybe I had been wrong about which outfit was appropriate, but here I was outside and it was too late to go back.

  My first job was to sneak throu
gh the trailer park. The park was slapped on the side of a hill and Simon sometimes joked that the whole thing would slip to the bottom if it rained too hard. This was our second time living in the trailer park. The first time, I was five and too little to walk down the steep hill by myself without falling. Those were different times.

  I crept down the hill past sleeping trailers, long and still, looking smaller when they were sleeping. The pink lace curtains in only one window showed a light on behind them, and a tall silhouette moved inside. Neighbor-with-an-E, I thought. He couldn’t work locally if he was up for work already. Nabor-with-an-A didn’t open till eight.

  My feet didn’t know the first block out of the trailer park as well as they knew other parts of Nabor. The next-closest place I’d lived was almost a block and a half away, and quite a few years ago. I remembered Lanie not hating me yet. I remembered we didn’t have Orange Cat and that Gray Cat was only a kitten.

  The house was small, but it was a house. White with black shutters that didn’t serve a purpose, since they didn’t actually shut. There were bikes out front now, too few and too new to belong to my family. I always drew the letters of my name on the wall I loved the most, so at this house, I’d left Livvie Owen Lived Here on the big back porch that looked tempting in the night. I thought the house winked at me as I passed, and I waved softly.

  The street between this and the next place I’d lived was as familiar as Simon’s hands or the hallway in my school. The next was an apartment, standing forlornly in a corner of an old building that was once a post office. I was much younger when we lived at this house. There was a wall in the kitchen that was warm with sunshine, and this was where I’d drawn my sentence, each curve and loop of Livvie Owen Lived Here sketched from memory of a time someone had shown me the letters and told me what they meant. I couldn’t remember who or why. What I remembered about this building was a water fountain in the kitchen and a mail slot between mine and my sisters’ rooms. I remembered fluorescent lights that dimmed and brightened willy-nilly, and the way it made me hum a lot more. The memories were distant, as though I were dreaming and tomorrow G could tell me about it with the thought bubble picture on her Velcro strip. But the memory was warm, like fuzzy slippers or nine blankets.