by Sarah Dooley
“We left the Sun House all alone,” I said to Orange Cat.
And he really was there at my feet, guiding me through the house. The minute I saw him, I knew I was dreaming and became aware of the blankets touching my skin, of the fish lamp’s soft whir near my left ear. Orange Cat’s crooked tail twitched once at my thoughts, as though I had broken some rule by realizing it was a dream.
“I’m listening,” I whispered to Orange Cat. “Just because I’m dreaming doesn’t mean I’m not listening.”
Orange Cat squeaked his funny meow, and I followed him into a bedroom where the curtains were once yellow, where the obsession with fish began because of the ocean-themed paper on the walls.
Tonight, there was hardly any paper. What was left was peeling down and down slowly in narrow strips. The windows were curtainless and boarded up, the glass trapped cruelly behind unfriendly lengths of plywood. There were crude moon shapes cut into the plywood, letting me glimpse dark silver moonlight that never truly reached inside.
“What is this?” I asked Orange Cat, reaching down, aching to pick him up and hold him against me. He ducked my hand and trotted to the corner, where a familiar plastic food dish sat empty.
“You’re hungry?” I asked him, and he meowed. “You’re honestly hungry at a time like this?”
Orange Cat nudged the bowl insistently. I reached to pet him again and he hissed, eyes flashing from orange to pale yellow. It was suddenly very cold and damp inside the Sun House.
“Livvie didn’t forget,” I whispered urgently to Orange Cat. “It’s not that I forgot. It’s just—kitties don’t eat when they’re dead.”
Orange Cat growled deep in his throat, and I started backing away just as he lunged at me.
“Natasha!”
“Mhmmmph.”
“Tash, Livvie had a nightmare!”
Natasha was asleep facedown on top of her book, with only a few pages to go. It must have been a scary book, because she jumped awake when I tapped her again, guarding her face from invisible dangers.
“What—”
Her sleepy eyes blinked twice and then focused. Her hands dropped.
“Olivia?” Her shoulders slumped tiredly. “What are you doing?”
“I had a bad dream,” I whispered, crawling insistently under the quilt even though Natasha made no move to invite me.
For a moment, she stayed stiff, holding the quilt tighter so I couldn’t quite get covered. Then a long, loud sigh racked her and she relaxed. I inched a little more of the quilt for myself and scooted back against my sister.
“What did you dream?” she asked tiredly in a voice that sounded like Karen’s.
“I dreamed about the Sun House. Orange Cat was showing me it, and it was empty and all messed up.”
Natasha sighed again, shifted uncomfortably. “We left it pretty messed up, Liv.”
“Nuh-uh, it was perfect. But not in my dream, in my dream, it was messed up. Orange Cat showed me his empty food bowl, and he hissed at me like I forgot to—” My voice breaking was unexpected and so were the tears that suddenly flooded my eyes. I could bear the thought of a broken Sun House and I could at last bear the thought of Orange Cat being gone, if only just. But the idea that he was alone in that place and that he thought I had forgotten him . . .
“Oh, Livvie.”
“What?” I sniffled, and Natasha chuckled, a deep, soft sound.
“Nothing. I was just saying your name for the fun of it,” she said. “Livvie, Livvie.”
“Tasha, Tasha,” I echoed, and in saying her name, I stopped crying. We lay there like that for several moments in the darkness, having declared not quite a truce, but something similar.
“Your fever broke,” Natasha said after a moment, wrapping her arm around so that her hand could reach my forehead.
“I’m good at breaking things,” I pointed out, and Natasha laughed a surprised sort of laugh.
“Who isn’t, in this house?” she asked wearily.
“Hey, Natasha?”
“Yeah, bug?”
“Is Simon mad at me?”
“You scared Dad really bad, honey. He had his hand on the phone to dial the police when I thought of where you must be. He was terrified for you. And do you know, he was already upset about the house and then you vanished and he thought you’d overheard him. . . .”
“Upset about what house?”
Natasha shifted to prop herself on her elbow and look at me.
“This one, bug. Didn’t you know? We got another slip.”
My mind quickly flashed back to the broken mug, to the hole in the living room wall, to my screaming. Complaints from neighbors wore on a landlord and then when they came in, when they saw the dents in the drywall . . .
“When?”
“Yesterday.”
“So . . .” I calculated quickly. “The third Thursday in November, we have to be out?” The slips were always for thirty days.
“That sounds about right.”
“Why didn’t anyone tell Livvie?” I asked in a tiny voice.
“I guess they thought maybe you’d run away, or that you would hurt yourself, or that it would give you nightmares, but since you’ve taken care of all of those already . . .” She sighed a shaky sound.
I began to rock back and forth against her, the hum working its way up from my stomach. My hands were trapped under the blankets and Natasha hugged me tighter, maybe so I couldn’t get them free.
“I shouldn’t have told you,” she said after a minute. “Sometimes I’m not sure what to tell.”
Swallowing the hum and forcing my body to stop rocking, blowing hard through pursed lips, I said, “It’s okay, Livvie’s okay, Livvie’s okay.”
Natasha looked at me. Her eyes got smaller. “Are you really?”
“I’m okay,” I repeated, my mind flashing back to that night in the kitchen, to Janna’s anger, to my father’s vow to begin looking someplace other than my hometown. A deep breath, my voice coming out only a little higher than normal. “I’m okay.”
Natasha walked me back to bed and tucked me in, asking me once more whether I was all right. I hugged her good night and promised I was fine. The minute she was gone, I began to rock so hard the bed shook. What a mess, I thought in exhaustion. What a mess.
I should have known when I woke up that it was going to be a bad day, because my first words were “Get off me, you lump! I can’t breathe!”
Gray Cat complied with a glare that said, This is MY idea.
Simon was at the table when I trailed into the kitchen. He sat hunched up, studying the chaotic pages of newsprint scattered on the table in front of him. Lanie tapped him hello on the head, pulled the milk from the fridge, and left the kitchen, still drinking out of the jug. Simon occasionally circled something in red ink. He glanced up when I stopped next to him.
“Hey, doodlebug,” he said kindly.
I sat down in the chair beside him and folded my arms on the table. “Does that mean you’re finished being mad?”
Simon looked up from his paper briefly, then started circling things again.
“Was never mad,” he said. “You just gave an old man a heart attack when you ran away, that’s all.” I learned long ago that Simon used silly phrases that didn’t mean what they said. Although I hadn’t given anybody a heart attack, I had definitely scared him for him to compare it.
“Didn’t run away,” I protested, using his pattern of speech a little bit by dropping the “I” off the front of my sentence. “Just wanted to find out why the whistle was blowing.”
Simon ran a hand down his face, leaving smudges of newsprint.
“Honey, you can’t just leave the house alone.”
I think my voice might have accidentally raised some. “Livvie knows, Livvie knows that already!”
Simon had less patience than Karen for my raised voice.
“Olivia, don’t start that stuff.”
“Don’t start what?” I demanded. “Olivia, don’t you start! Do
n’t you dare—” I broke into a hum and rocked forward and back a few times, evening the pressure in my head. Simon abruptly closed his newspaper.
“I’m going to wake Natasha,” he said shortly, and although I was no expert, I thought I might still be hearing anger in his voice.
“Fine, just make him mad, Olivia!” I hollered. “You sure are good at messing things up!” Bolting from the table, I ran back into my bedroom and flung myself at the bed. Gray Cat hissed in protest and skittered out from under the blankets.
Moments later, I felt stupider than ever. I couldn’t stay in bed all day, not after I was absent from school yesterday. I would definitely be considered truant for that. But to get out now, I would have to walk right past my father, and it was difficult to walk past someone you had just run away from, slamming the door as you went. I could hear him and Natasha shuffling around in the kitchen. Crouching next to the door, I listened.
When the kitchen fell silent, presumably because everybody in it was busy eating, I drew a deep breath and bolted past them with my book bag banging on my shoulder. I would wait in the car for my mother.
The light faded earlier with every passing day, I thought as I sat in the car. It was cold out and the sun hadn’t managed yet to clear the top of the mountain. A little later every day. There was a day in late autumn, a day just like this with the taste and the smell and the thinness of the air just the same, when Orange Cat walked up to me in our yard on Main Street and meowed to be picked up.
I had lifted him and kissed the fuzzy top of his head. I wasn’t sure what else to do besides that, but he seemed to really want something. His fur was damp with frost and his paw pads wet when he placed them on my face.
“You aren’t supposed to be out here,” I said sternly. “Livvie, you had better keep a closer eye on your cat.” Orange Cat meowed in protest, but I took him inside, anyway, and left him on my bed with Gray Cat.
Today was so similar, the air the same weight and taste and color, that I felt like I should be able to reach through this day to that day last year and spend another minute with my Orange Cat. Karen’s arrival in the car jolted me from this useless hope, and I began to hum frantic G notes.
“Livvie, you’re in your pajamas,” Karen said. “Hurry in and change.”
“I have the right shoes on.”
“You don’t have the right clothes on.”
I surveyed my ratty sweatpants and sweatshirt. “These are, technically, not pajamas.”
“I technically don’t care what they are. You’re not wearing them to school. Please go change.”
“I don’t want to run into Simon.”
“He’s your father. You live in the same house. You’re going to run into him at some point, anyway, so it might as well be while you’re staying out of trouble by doing what I’ve asked you to do. Quick, quick. You’re going to be late for school and you’re going to make your sisters late again.”
As if I’m not under enough pressure, I thought. Humming louder, I leapt from the car and dashed back into the house. I ran through the kitchen with my eyes closed, banging into the table and whacking my elbow on the corner of the door frame as I careened down the hallway to my bedroom.
“Livvie, get dressed and hurry!” I bellowed, basically diving into a clean T-shirt and a more-or-less-unwrinkled pair of jeans. “Let’s go now!”
Back through the kitchen with my eyes closed, banging into chairs and the edge of the table. I heard a loud sigh, but Simon didn’t say anything. I heard him right something plastic that I had knocked over.
Lanie had arrived in the car while I was gone and, wonder of wonders, she had actually left the front seat open for me. Sliding in, I turned to face her.
“That was nice.”
“What?”
“The seat.” I patted it.
“That’s what peace agreements are all about, big sis.”
“I think I like peace agreements, then.”
Lanie snorted. “I’ll bet. Just wait till you have to start doing nice stuff for me. Then you might not feel so eager to have a peace agreement anymore.”
“I always do nice stuff for you,” I argued as the car pulled out of the drive, passing Natasha on her bike, her breath puffing into frosty clouds in the morning air.
“Like what?” Lanie demanded.
“Like I don’t hum in your room anymore. I don’t take your stuff anymore. I don’t borrow your clothes and I especially don’t borrow them and then pick up Gray Cat and get hair all over them ’cause you get real mad.”
“Not doing mean stuff to me is not the same thing as doing nice stuff for me,” Lanie pointed out.
“Girls,” Karen said in warning, “this is starting to sound less and less like a peace agreement.”
“Girls, don’t start,” I said in a perfect Simon voice. Lanie giggled and I think Karen might have, too, except she tried to hide it.
At school, Lanie didn’t say anything mean as I climbed out of the car, and I ventured a tiny wave. She didn’t return it, but at least not saying anything mean was a start. Natasha met me at the corner and hooked her arm through mine like yesterday never happened.
“Natasha, why is Lanie being so nice to me?” I asked as she walked me to my door.
“Because you scared the living daylights out of her and she thought she made you run away.”
I stopped walking for just a moment, bobbing my head and humming while I thought about what to say.
Finally, I said, “How come everybody thinks they made me run away? I made me run away. They weren’t even there when I did it, so how could they have made me?”
“Sometimes being there doesn’t have anything to do with it,” Tash said. “Sometimes even if you’re there, you can’t stop things that—” She broke off and looked around like she wanted to hug me, then realized we were at school in full view of everybody. She hugged me, anyway, and I squirmed.
“Have a good day, bug,” she said, although she rarely called me by that nickname at school. With a pat and a wave, she sent me into my classroom and wove her way into the crowded hall behind me.
In my class, G met me at the door with words already chosen and arranged on her Velcro strip: a photo of me wearing the green-and-yellow shirt I wore on the second day of school last year, followed by a cartoon drawing of a stick-figure person running away from a stick-figure house. G’s face was accusing as she handed me the strip.
“I did not run away,” I protested. “I just went to check something out and I got . . . stuck. How did you know? Natasha?”
G nodded impatiently. The ripping-Velcro noise used to hurt my ears, but I had gotten used to it by now. G was rough and wild with her Velcro strip, always in a hurry to talk. She pressed the strip into my hand again: a picture of a stick figure with a horrified expression on its face, followed by a picture of a stick figure sitting on a bench.
“Yes. Stuck because I was scared.”
She looked at me gloatingly. Sometimes I thought it made G extraordinarily happy when she guessed right about my feelings. I guess because I was so dismally awful at guessing right about them myself.
Her next pictures were softer and so was her expression. A smiling face, then two hands with palms upturned, the sign for “now.”
I smiled back. “Yeah. I’m better now.”
G grinned and began putting together another sentence. I knew this one would be about something totally different, because she understood me better than anyone. I wanted to keep talking to G because she was helping me practice for everyone else. Sometimes when I spoke out loud, it was like I had strung random words together into a mockery of a sentence. They made sense in my head, but when I was finished, everyone was staring at me like I had spoken in tongues like the scary ladies at the church we used to go to, and nobody could understand a word I said. G was never like that. She always got it.
She was about to hand me her strip again when I began to sense someone else in my presence, someone else soaking up some of my per
sonal space. I didn’t recognize the information my senses were giving me—the smell, the height, the attitude. I didn’t recognize the person.
Turning quickly, I stepped back so suddenly I tripped on the trash can and almost fell. As I shouted and grabbed the coat hooks for balance, I sensed motion where the new person had been standing and I flattened myself to the wall, unreasonably afraid. I didn’t like it when new people moved quickly.
The new person was nearly as short as G, and round in a way that was comforting. I found her silver hair startling because of how silver it was, and her eyes were just the same.
“I didn’t mean to scare you,” she said. “I guess I should have properly introduced myself before we met. That way we wouldn’t have been strangers.”
It took me a minute to puzzle out that she was kidding, and by the time I had, my body had pushed itself up off the wall and my feet had carried me a couple of steps back into what Miss Mandy explained was a polite conversational distance.
“I’m Mrs. Rhodes. I’m the new sub.”
I looked behind her as though maybe she were hiding the old sub. “Where’s Mrs. Paxton?”
The sound of Velcro ripping, although I was accustomed to it, made me jump when my attention had been so focused on the new person. It was two of the pictures I’d already seen this morning: the scared face and the stick figure running away. G was grinning from ear to ear.
“Mrs. Paxton won’t be joining us today,” Mrs. Rhodes explained kindly. “I’m going to be here instead. Now, what’s your name, dear?”
“Olivia Lashea Owen.” I said it all in a rush because that was how I’d learned it.
“Olivia, hmm? Come again?” She leaned closer, making me lean back, which she noticed right away and adjusted herself back to her previous position. “I’m sixty-five, dear. You need to slow down.”
