by Sarah Dooley
We were almost back across town when the hug finally ended. Drawing back, she looked me in the eye and I was relieved to find hers dry.
“We’ll talk more later,” she said. “You need to go to bed for a while.”
I blinked twice. “But it’s a school day.”
“Honey, you’ve been out all night and you’re a mess. Let me get you cleaned up and you can catch up on some sleep.”
“But it’s—but it’s a school day.” A weird sort of panic started trailing up from my stomach to settle in my throat. “I’m not supposed to stay home from school unless I’m sick. That’s called skipping.”
“Livvie, honey, you’re too tired for school. Sometimes that’s the same thing as being sick.”
Now tears started forming in my own eyes and I drew my knees up to my chest. “I never meant to do something serious enough to stay home from school. I only wanted the whistle to stop. I only—I—Karen, I didn’t mean to. Just let me go to school.”
“Liv—”
“Please, just let me go to school. I’ll be okay.”
“Livvie, honey—”
“Okay, I’m going. That’s all. I have to go to school and fix this.”
“Olivia.” It was the first time my father had spoken since the paper mill, and his voice had changed from the worried tone he’d used there to a tone I hadn’t heard him use in years. The anger in his voice made my own voice silence quickly. “Go to bed,” he said, quieter, as he put the car in park.
I nodded tensely and opened the passenger door. Karen followed me out, but Simon stayed behind the wheel.
“Isn’t Simon coming?” I asked my mother.
“He’s got to drive your sisters to school.” Her tone was still funny, but her arm slipped around my shoulders as she led me to the door.
Lanie met me on the steps, hair swept up into an elaborate set of braids, purple sweatshirt almost looking new from her embroidery. She flung her arms around me at the door and squeezed me tight, then stepped back and frowned at me fiercely.
“Geez, Liv. Do you know how bad I was going to feel if I called you stupid and then you ran off and died like Orange Cat?”
The excitement of the night, coupled with Lanie’s odd behavior and the mention of Orange Cat, was simply too much. Standing on the wooden step with one hand on the storm door, I started to cry. And that, like everything else, was something I just couldn’t do the way you were supposed to. Great whooping sobs came bursting out of nowhere and I grabbed Lanie around the neck and held her tight.
“God, calm down. Jeez.” She sounded scornful and slightly disgusted, much more like herself than she had a moment ago, but her hand wound around and patted me awkwardly. I sniffled and got ahold of myself, peeling myself off Lanie’s shoulder. She straightened her purple sweatshirt and wrinkled her nose at me.
“Mom, I think she got snot on my shoulder,” she hollered.
Karen was spared answering by Simon’s sudden short blast on the car horn. I looked down at him. From up here on the steps, he looked different. Too big for the small car he drove. Too angry to be my Simon.
“Lanie, we’d better get going.” This from Natasha, who came rocketing out the door and down the stairs, edging sideways between me and Lanie. “Dad doesn’t look too happy to be waiting, and having to drive us to school on top of it—well—I just don’t think we’d better make him wait much longer, that’s all.”
Bewildered, I watched Natasha land at the bottom of the stairs, having taken a flying leap off the second step up. Mom’s hand tightened on my damp elbow for a second. I wasn’t sure what I had expected, but I knew Natasha ignoring me was just as out of character as Lanie hugging me, no matter where I had been that night.
“Hey, Natasha . . .” I said uncertainly, but there was still something wrong with my voice, and it wasn’t loud enough for Natasha to hear me over the car’s running engine and Lanie’s prattle about her ruined sweatshirt.
“Come on, Livvie,” Mom said, firmly guiding me by the shoulders into the house. “Let’s get you warm and in bed.”
“But Tash . . .” My voice trailed off as my hand trailed behind me, pointing backward at the Tercel disappearing down the hill. My arm suddenly felt very tired and I let it fall limply at my side.
Karen looked at me with something I think was called sympathy. “She’ll be all right. You just scared her, Livvie.” Eyes casting away from mine, crinkles getting deeper again by half. “You scared us all. Lord God.”
I started to cry again, gentler this time but no less sudden. “I’m sorry. . . .”
Karen let out this long, shaky sigh and pulled me into a tight hug, the very best kind.
“Oh, hush,” she said quickly. “You’re all right.”
But I didn’t feel all right.
“I feel like an idiot with a capital whatever idiot starts with,” I murmured into her sleeve.
“Iiiiii . . .” She drew out the sound. “What letter do you hear?”
I drew back from her shoulder and put my hands on my hips like I had seen Lanie do a million times. “Do I look like I’m in the mood for phonics?”
My mother threw her head back and laughed an amazed sort of laugh. She placed a firm hand on my back and guided me through the door. “All right, fine,” she said. “Forget I asked.”
With weak water pressure, I wasn’t inspired to stay in the shower for long. Soon, I fell into bed, tucked in under nine warm blankets with my fish lamp swirling and a quilt over the window to keep out the sun. My mother fell asleep almost immediately, lying in bed with me with her arm draped over my shoulder. I think she was afraid to leave me alone, in case I would disappear again. She looked younger when she was asleep, and it seemed funny—funny in a weird way, that is, not the kind that makes you laugh—to see her that way.
I was glad she was able to sleep. At least somebody could. It was all I could do even to lie still and stay in bed. My fingers and toes kept crossing, my shoulders tensing and relaxing, my teeth chewing my lips, a hum just under the surface. There were too many things to figure out, too many memories of my midnight adventure to sort through.
It was difficult to move slowly, as wound up as I was, but if I woke Karen, she would get upset that I was drawing the Sun House. She might think I was planning to run away again. So I moved slowly and carefully as I slid my notebook and pencil off the nightstand. I sketched the house as best I could remember, not as it used to be, not as I had sketched it a million times, but as it looked now. I wasn’t much of an artist and my drawings usually looked more like somebody had closed their eyes and attacked a piece of paper with a dirty shoe—at least that’s what Lanie always said—but if there was one thing I could draw, it was letters, so I finished the drawing by adding the letters I’d seen on the sign tacked to the porch railing.
Sketching them in further and further detail—first their shapes, then their shades, then the dampness of the cardboard underneath, I imagined what the letters must say. In my heart I knew they said For Rent. They simply had to. What else could a sign in front of the Sun House say? It couldn’t say For Sale because we had already done that, years ago. But we hadn’t rented yet, so surely that was still an option.
Satisfied with my notion to rent the Sun House for my family, I was at last able to drop into a shallow sleep.
Chapter 6
I woke up sick and said into the darkness, “Great going, Livvie, now you’ve messed up again.”
Karen shifted in her sleep and mumbled something about potatoes, making me jump. I had forgotten she was over there.
The light had changed. I could tell even with the quilt over the window that a big chunk of the day had passed while I was asleep with my face on my notebook. Sitting up and wiggling out from under Karen’s heavy arm, I rubbed the sleep out of my eyes and blinked around me.
Someone sat so still in my chair, it took me a moment to process.
“Oh,” I said at last, feeling a weird emotion I couldn’t quite name vibrating thro
ugh me. I wasn’t sure if it was even my own emotion, or if I was seeing it on Lanie.
“Don’t wake Mom” was all she said, in a voice soft as a whisper.
I shook my head and pressed my lips together tightly to show her I had no intention of speaking. Groggy as I was for sleeping the whole day away, and crummy as I was feeling with my throat sore and my head hot and funny, I wasn’t sure I would have had the words to speak, anyway.
Lanie stood and motioned for me to follow her to the door. Sliding sideways out from under the covers, I felt automatically for my slippers, and my spirits plummeted when I remembered they were ruined. In the space of two days, I had lost two of my biggest comfort items: my fuzzy slippers and my mud mug. Anxiously, my hands fumbled with the kitten collar on my wrist. I rubbed the worn brass tag like a worry stone.
When I was too slow in following Lanie, she reached out and took my hand. “Come on already,” she whispered, a little awkwardly. “We need to talk.”
I nodded dumbly again and let her lead me out the door and down the hall to her bedroom. Automatically, I checked for Natasha, but she was nowhere in sight.
“She didn’t come home from school yet,” Lanie said. “She said she had a study group.”
Lanie sat me on Natasha’s bed and, when I made no move to do so for myself, pulled the quilt up around my shoulders. Then she crossed the room to settle on her own neatly smoothed quilt, pulling her jeaned leg up to her chin the same way I did. Beside her on the bed was a plate with half a sandwich and some Dorito crumbs. She munched absently while she studied me.
“You have a fever,” she said after a minute, somewhat accusingly.
“I didn’t mean to,” I answered, tucking myself tighter down into Natasha’s blanket.
Lanie rolled her eyes. “I didn’t say you did. I’m just saying . . . You have a fever and if Mom and Dad see me talking to you, they’ll think I’m teasing you, so I wanted to catch you before Mom woke up.”
I rocked a little, confused at her odd behavior, and my hands, all alone, began their odd finger play again. “What do you want to talk about? What do you want to talk about?” My words got jumbled up in nerves and came out twice.
“Liv, you really scared me last night. And then I talked to my teacher today and she really scared me, too. She said if you ran off and something had happened to you, I would have felt really bad for being so mean to you all the time. She said—” Lanie stopped and stared out the window for a second. I followed her gaze and found a setting sun and an orange October sky. Almost a whole day had passed without my knowledge. I felt uneasy. Lanie cleared her throat and drew my gaze again.
“My teacher talks a lot and I don’t always understand,” I prompted, thinking maybe Lanie’s problem was that she was confused by what her teacher had said and didn’t know how to retell it. This was a problem I understood well.
But Lanie shook her head. “I understood,” she said flatly. “Too well. I just—I wanted to call a truce. That’s all. Do you know what a truce is?”
“Like a peace agreement. Like at the end of the war.”
She looked at me a little surprised. “Yeah. Like that.”
“You want to call a peace agreement?”
“I want to stop fighting unless you really do something to deserve it.”
I smiled a little at her and she smiled uncertainly back. She was funny. This time in a laughing way.
“Okay, Lanie,” I said. “We can have a peace agreement. Can I go do my catalogs now?”
“Who’s stopping you?” Lanie turned away as if she had never been staring at me in the first place. “Don’t wake Mom, though.”
“I won’t.” I made it halfway to the door, still dragging Natasha’s quilt. “Where’s Simon?”
“He stayed out. He had to pick up Natasha.”
I was almost out the door when Lanie started talking again.
“If you do anything like that again, I won’t call a truce. I’ll declare war. Okay?” She looked away and her face crinkled up like it pained her to admit it. “You really scared me, jerk.”
“Me, too.”
In the bedroom, I found that Mom had rolled over and hid her face in my pillow. I sat on the edge of the bed and watched her sleep for a few moments. Her breathing was so slow and soft. In and out. In and out. I wondered if this was what I looked like when I was sleeping. Mom would know, because she watched me sometimes. I thought about waking her to ask her, but I was pretty sure Lanie would get mad at me if I did it.
And maybe for another reason, too, I let Mom sleep. When she was sleeping, the crinkles by her eyes were softer and not nearly so deep. An absurd thought struck me and I wondered if Mom looked so stressed out and tired when she was talking to people other than me.
Gray Cat stole out from beneath the covers, looking guilty at being caught sleeping next to a warm body other than mine. I sat back and let her pick her way up onto my lap, where she placed a pink paw pad on my shoulder. Looking me in the eye, she bumped her cold nose against my chin and made a squeaky sound.
“I love you, Gray Cat,” I said, suddenly worried I hadn’t told her this enough of late. Saying “I love you” to any cat was hard when there wasn’t any orange in the picture, but it wasn’t Gray Cat’s fault. She was a good cat and I did love her, just differently than I had loved my overweight orange kitty.
The way Gray Cat looked at me without blinking for a minute, I knew she understood what I had said and also why I hadn’t said it for such a long time. Bumping her face against mine a little harder this time, she rubbed her whiskers along my cheekbone. Claiming me, Natasha had explained once, back when she wasn’t mad at me.
Mom woke at seven and immediately began trying to get me to take cough syrup even though I didn’t have a cough.
“If they intended it for people who didn’t have a cough, they would have called it ‘non-cough syrup,’” I explained in what I was certain was a patient voice for the four hundred and forty-seventh time.
“They called it ‘cough syrup’ because it’s supposed to prevent you from developing a cough,” she insisted. “You already have a fever and a sore throat. The last thing you need is a cough.”
“No, the last thing I need is cough syrup,” I protested. I could not tolerate the texture of cough syrup. The way it slimed down my throat made me think I was swallowing toads or snake skin. I would rather have the cough.
Karen sighed and relented, slumping into the nearest chair. Her ankles crossed and uncrossed and her fingers tapped on the tabletop. You could blame what you wanted on autism, but if you watched my mother for a minute, you would realize that a lot of my nervous fidgets, I came by honest. Like mother, like daughter.
I was studying my mother, trying to figure out whether she was where my hands had learned the finger play, when my ears picked up the sound of tires on the gravel. Running to the door and flinging it open, letting in a blast of October night, I bounced on my toes. At last I could put this uneasiness to rest. My sister and my father had come home and now they would hug me like everything was okay and it would be like I had never made my ill-advised midnight journey.
The car door creaked open into a frosty night too cold to be October. My sister climbed out first, swinging a heavy book bag over her shoulder and climbing the stairs two at a time, which was more a Lanie trait than a Natasha one. She slipped past me at the door with a quick “Hello.” Grabbing the Cheerios box off the top of the fridge, she headed for her room.
As I watched her go, Gray Cat following her like a traitor, I felt a frown crinkling up on my forehead. “ ‘Hello’?” I mimicked. “Is that all I get?” Humming a G note, I turned to the door again, hoping for a decent greeting from my father.
But he came through even more quickly than my sister, and although he dropped a hand on my shoulder as he passed, he didn’t even speak. Since the Cheerios were gone, he took the cornflakes. He was the only person I had ever met who could eat cornflakes with no milk.
Karen sighed s
hortly and turned off the stove, where water had just begun simmering for macaroni and cheese. She handed me a yogurt, even though she knew I couldn’t drink it without my mug.
I wasn’t hungry, anyway. The kitchen was so much emptier now than it had been moments ago, when it was warm with anticipation. Natasha’s door opened and my breath caught in hope, but it was Lanie tossing out Gray Cat before she got a chance to eat Bentley. I caught my ears still listening for the car in the drive, because its coming had been so drastically unsatisfying.
“They’ll be home any minute,” I whispered. “They’ll say ‘Hey there, Olivia,’ and I’ll say ‘Hey there, Simon, hey there, Tash,’ and they’ll talk to me for a minute and then Natasha will read me something.” Rocking on my toes and humming softly, I stayed in the doorway too long.
“Livvie, come away from the door before Gray Cat notices it’s open,” Karen said without lifting her eyes from the table. I quickly slammed the door, not wanting a repeat performance of Orange Cat’s disappearance. “You don’t need to be out in the night air, anyway. You’re sick,” my mother added, dragging herself out of her chair to cross the room to me. “Come on, Liv. Bedtime.”
“But I don’t want to go to bed yet. I don’t want to go to bed yet.”
“I know.” She guided me with an arm around my shoulders. “But the rest of the house does, Liv.”
“Houses don’t go to bed.” I giggled.
“You’re funny.” Mom reached around me to turn off the light over the stove.
“Houses don’t go to bed, just people do.”
“You know, you’re right. And people also stay in bed. All night. Without standing on chairs. Without sneaking out to paper mills.”
My smile stopped and I looked at Karen tensely. “I know that, I know.”
She ruffled my hair, but didn’t answer. Somehow, I wasn’t convinced that she believed me.
Chapter 7
The minute I stepped inside the house, I knew something was wrong. The gas furnace was missing; all that was left was a broken pipe sticking out of the darkened wall. The carpet under my feet smelled like the last person who had stepped on it lived and died a hundred years ago. The smell was wet and hot, like the time we went camping in the backyard at the trailer and it rained on our campfire and put it out. The walls, once off-white, were gray and beginning to crumble. My ears took in quiet, broken only by dripping water. No hum of electricity coursing through the walls, no creak of a footfall or whisper of a memory.
