by Heidi Ayarbe
“Okay.”
Silence. We’ve never been big on long conversations.
“You know, Dad, there’s this South American bird that seems like a real MRSA.”
“Mersah?” he asks.
“Yeah. Flesh-eating bacteria.” Does nobody know what that is?
“Of course.” Dad laughs.
“Anyway, he has like two to twelve wives in his harem. Just kind of messing around on the South American pampas.”
“Ouch,” Dad says. “More loony than anything, I’d say.”
I smile. It’s good to hear his voice. “Anyway, it seems like he sucks at being a dad. I mean with all those wives and breeding and stuff. But he’s actually the one who incubates the eggs after his wives leave him high and dry. And then he raises the birds. All alone.”
Silence.
“I guess,” I finally say, “I guess sometimes you’ve just got to look beyond the surface.”
Silence.
I have to breathe in deep so I won’t lose it.
“We okay?” Dad asks.
“Yeah,” I say.
“What are you going to do?” he asks.
I pause. “Give Aunt Sarah a try.”
“You found her?”
“Yeah.”
“Thank God,” he says. “Thank God.”
We’re quiet and I finally say, “It’s okay.”
He whispers into the phone. “That’s my girl.”
Then the line goes dead.
It takes me a few days to get the nerve up to call and ask her.
“Can I pick you up?” she asks. “I mean I can take a bus to meet you. We both can. Mike just had LASIK eye surgery, so he can’t drive. And they, uh, well I can’t drive for a while until I finish my community service. It’s not as bad as you think.” She sounds nervous. “I honestly didn’t see the mayor’s cat or mailbox or, well, I spilled my Jivin’ Juice cranberry smoothie. But normally I’m a good driver. Really good.”
I laugh.
So does she.
I didn’t expect that. That she’d come all the way to Boise and pick me up. With her husband. And then we’ll be stuck in a bus for who knows how many hours not knowing how to fill the silence.
But I have so many questions. And it doesn’t sound like she’s the quiet type.
“Um. Okay,” I say. “But I don’t think I’ll be alone. My friend, she um—” I don’t finish the sentence because I don’t know how.
After a silence she says, “Your friend is welcome here.”
I can hear that there’s more to that sentence that she’s not saying. I want to say we’re a package deal, but that would probably freak her out. It’s good to ease into these things.
“Where are you staying?” she finally asks. “We can leave this afternoon—evening. We can be there in a day. Or less. I’ve gotta get the bus schedule. I have to call Mike. We can get this organized and done today. Today. If”—she pauses—“if that’s okay?”
There’s a pause.
“I—we,” she corrects, “look forward to having you here. I’ve missed you.” I can hear the urgency in her voice, like she doesn’t expect to see me at all. Maybe she’s worried I’m like Dad. Maybe she’s afraid I’ll slip away.
“Okay,” I say. “If it’s no trouble.”
“Not at all!” I half expect her to jump through the phone. “When can we come?”
“What day is it?” I ask.
“December twenty-first.”
“Maybe the twenty-third. I’ve got some things to arrange. We can meet at the bus terminal.” I think it’s better she doesn’t see the shelter and where I am now. It’s better to start off with a clean slate in neutral territory.
“Anytime. Anywhere,” she says.
I walk down the white corridor, my footsteps echoing in the hallway. Willow Springs Mental Hospital for Adolescents isn’t far from the shelter. There’s a yellow waiting room, but the rest of the place is white. Sanitarium white.
Well, better than mint green, I guess.
When I walk in the door, it takes me a second to get used to the pine smell that’s supposed to cover up the odd mix of urine and cigarette smoke. There’s a sickly looking Christmas tree in the lobby with homemade ornaments and clumps of cheap tinsel.
Nicole sits in her room, staring out the window. She’s become a shell. She hasn’t said anything to me since they transferred her. Or to anyone.
I sit down and start to read aloud from my history book—for one of my homework assignments. I’m working hard to finish the second quarter of tenth grade.
“Nic,” I say. “Christmas is almost here.”
Silence.
“You know, I’m not too big on the whole holiday, but I don’t want to…” I sigh. “I don’t want to be alone. I used to think that I liked alone, but I don’t. And you’ve just kinda checked out.”
Silence.
“I miss you,” I say. “Things are going to be okay now. I know they will.”
Nicole shrugs.
“You don’t deserve what happened to you. You didn’t deserve those cigarette burns and bad families.”
Nicole pulls out a folded-up picture and shows it to me—the one Klon took from the book at the restaurant.
I’ve wondered where that picture went. She looks at it and crumples it up, throwing it in the trash.
I pick it up and iron out the creases. “Stop this. Just stop it.”
Nicole turns her back to me.
“You deserve better, Nic. Klon wasn’t your fault. Neither was your sister.”
Nicole turns to me and shakes her head and rubs her skinny arms with gloved hands. She looks more skeletal every day.
“It wasn’t your fault. And Klon—it was mine. I was supposed to be the strong one that day. I was supposed to stand up to you, and I didn’t because I was scared. I was scared that what happened to you in the system would happen to me. That’s why I didn’t go to the police; that’s why I didn’t fight with you about it.”
Nicole unravels a string from her bedspread, curling the dirty white thread around her finger.
“I’ve told Billie at the shelter about Klondike. They found his body at the morgue and are trying to find his mom. I don’t think it’ll be too hard.”
Nicole raises an eyebrow.
I nod. “They have this thing called CODIS—Combined DNA Index System—and Nevada has lots of data. They take DNA samples from the families of missing persons and put them into a database. Then they just have to take a sample from Klon and get a match. It’s a good thing. We’ll find his mom.”
Nicole turns to me. “He’s not a fucking science experiment.”
I swallow. “I know. But this is the way he can go back home.”
“Where they threw him out like trash,” Nicole hisses.
“But I wrote her a letter, see. I wrote about how good he was. About Tourette’s. About how wrong she was.” I sigh. “I know where he comes from doesn’t matter. His real name. Where he was born. How old he was. We knew him, Nicole. We knew who he was. And he was good. He was real. But it meant something to him—to be where he could find his family, his God.” I sigh. “I’m just trying to make things right for him. Because I don’t know what else to do.”
Nicole sits on her bed and folds her legs up to her chest. Her hospital-issue sweat suit looks more like a tent. Some kid walks by and says, “Hey, Helen Keller. You gonna come to session?”
Nicole doesn’t even flip him off. She just sits, staring out the square of a window.
She gnaws on her lower lip. “Well, you got what you needed. You found your family—your precious aunt Sarah.”
I shake my head. “She’s not the family I found. Okay? We have to do this together.”
Silence.
“Theme of the day,” I say. “Your pick.”
Nicole looks at me with her bloodshot eyes. She shakes her head.
“Your turn,” I urge. After a long silence, I finally say, “Okay. What’s the place you’ve wante
d to go to most? For as long as you can remember?”
Nicole taps her gloved fingers on the windowsill. “Home,” she whispers.
“Home,” I repeat. “Let’s go.”
But she doesn’t say anything. Nothing. She stares out the window and I sit in the crushing silence of her white room. After a while, she takes out a crumpled piece of paper—smudged with words. My words.
“I can’t read it,” she says. “I can’t see worth shit.”
It’s the paper from her prescription bottle at Kids Place. I’ve dreamed of saying those words my whole life—to make a difference. And now I’m afraid they’re just smudges on a page. Meaningless.
I breathe in deep. “It’s this stupid Einstein quote I read a few years ago. And I wrote it to you because I wished I could’ve written it to my mom. I, um. It’s—” I hand the paper back to her and say the words that have danced around my head all these years. “‘There are two ways to live your life—one is as though nothing is a miracle, the other is as though everything is a miracle.’”
Nicole turns away.
“I think,” I say, “I think that’s what Klon meant when he talked about people doing what they should—the everyday stuff.”
“Klon’s miracles,” Nicole whispers.
“They could be ours, too,” I say.
“Group time.” Some guy with wire-rimmed glasses pokes his head in Nicole’s door. “Sorry,” he says to me. “Visiting hours are over.”
I zip my coat up. “I’ll be back tomorrow.”
She has already turned away.
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
Billie motions me into her small office while she finishes talking to some guy on the phone and points to the chair.
The wooden seat digs into my thighs and I clasp my fingers around the edge, holding my breath.
“Do you know anything about her?” Billie asks. “This aunt who’s coming to pick you up?”
I shrug. About as much as I know about my mom and dad. It’s funny how little we know about the people we’re supposed to know the best.
“Why didn’t you tell the people in Nevada? The people at social services?”
“I didn’t think they’d listen,” I say. “Credibility issues with the family.” And if I had listened and they had listened, I wouldn’t have had Nicole or Klon. And they were worth all this, I think.
“I’m glad for you. That you found a place. And Nicole—”
“She’s coming, too,” I interrupt. “I mean that’s what I hope.”
“Let’s get real here, Jeopardy. She’s already gone. I’ve seen her before—in hundreds of other faces. Statistically speaking, she’s gonna be one of the ones who pull it off. Suicide is the third leading cause of death for kids your age. She—”
My ears ring with Billie’s words. They all blend into a monotone beep. Then when she stops talking, the room fills with silence until the walls look like they’re bulging with the words she won’t say.
“What do you expect from me?” she says after a pause.
I swallow. “You could be different. You could see past her scars. I did.”
Billie looks at me with tired eyes. “What do you expect from her?”
“Just one of Klon’s miracles.” I stand up to leave. “It’s not too much to expect,” I say.
I throw a card key on Nicole’s bedside stand—one I stole from the day cleaning staff. “I leave tomorrow. Wednesday, December twenty-third. She’s coming to get us. Ten thirty in the morning.”
Nicole glances at the key.
“I could use the company. I don’t even know her,” I say. “But she’s coming by bus—all the way from Jackson Hole—for both of us. She’ll have tickets for both of us.”
Nicole turns away.
“The tickets are open. You can come anytime.” I looked up the ticket rules on the Internet. “Well, within the next six months. Either way, when you’re better. Or now. Anytime. But decide what you want to do. Live or die. Don’t hang out in this limbo land.” My stomach knots. I know I’m giving her the key to leave—the choice to die. Nobody on the street will make her wear gloves. Nobody will force her to eat. Nobody will care what she does. She’ll just become invisible again.
She looks up at me with dead eyes.
“You made a choice to come with me before. Make the same choice again,” I say. “This time we’ll get there. We’ll go home. I’ll get you there.”
Nicole turns away.
“You’re just as guilty, you know.” I clear my throat. “You’ve let them make you become part of the system. You were five years old. That’s all. And you didn’t call because you were afraid. Not calling probably saved your life, okay? He could’ve killed you, too. And your life is worth saving.”
I take out the brittle flower and place it on her nightstand. “Come home,” I say, and walk away.
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
“Thanks for the ride.” I climb out of Billie’s car.
“You want me to hang around?” she asks. “Let me rephrase that. I’m going to hang around until I see this aunt of yours.”
I nod. It feels kinda good to have somebody watching out for me; somebody to make sure Aunt Sarah isn’t an ogre and Uncle Mike a troll. Uncle Mike. I have an uncle, too.
I look around the terminal and don’t see her anywhere. “Can you hold this a sec?” I pass the backpack to Billie—the one the shelter has given me with a change of clothes and snacks for the trip. “Let me take one last look just to make sure she’s not here.”
“She’s not here.” Billie holds my backpack.
I pause and nod but take a walk around the bus terminal anyway. Just to be sure. When I come back, Billie’s bought us a couple of vending-machine hot chocolates and Danish rolls. They’re not half bad.
Between bites, Billie says, “She’s too weak to get out of bed most of the time. I think they’re going to put in a feeding tube.”
I swallow and look away, wiping the tears.
“I’m sorry,” she says.
“Thanks for seeing,” I say, “past all the scars. She needs glasses, you know. And maybe you could visit her. Be there for her.” I clear my throat. “And my aunt. I think she’ll have a ticket for her—one of those open-ended ones. Can you make sure she gets it?”
“I can do that.”
We fall into a strained silence, both eager to see who’s going to come off the bus and through the doors.
People stream on and off the buses. I look at the time: ten fifty-three. She’s twenty minutes late. Maybe she changed her mind. Billie asks about the bus from Jackson Hole, but there’s no bus from Jackson Hole. And we don’t know her route. She just said ten thirty in Boise. So we wait. Billie reaches out to hold my hand, and this time I don’t pull it away. This is my last plan—last procedure. If this doesn’t work…
I can’t come up with a hypothesis because the pain in my chest is too sharp.
Groups of people huddle together in the cold morning air. I don’t recognize anybody. I guess I hoped there would be some kind of genetic pull that would lead me straight to Aunt Sarah. Like I’d know she was in the room.
So I sit down facing where people get off the buses and wait.
Three, four, five more buses arrive, and people spill into the lobby—a mess of heavy winter coats, Wellington boots, muddy floors, and welcomes.
Eleven forty.
No Aunt Sarah.
I can tell Billie’s getting frazzled. She’s successfully torn and divided her hot chocolate cup into even pieces and created a mini checkers game. She’s probably wracking her mind trying to figure out how she’ll cope with a fifteen-year-old’s meltdown. I don’t figure they cover devastating loss in her psychology classes.
My last chance is gone. It’s over. I’m going to Don and Cherry’s—back to where I began. Klon died for nothing. And Nicole…
Then I see her.
A small woman with short, brown curls approaches me. Her cheeks are red and chapped. She looks flustered, ner
vous. But behind Coke-bottle glasses she has warm eyes. Gray eyes. Like mine. Behind her stands a man who’s at least six feet five or taller. His hands are clasped in front of him, thick eyebrows furrowed.
I put out my hand to shake hers and she pulls me into her thick arms.
And I feel like I could melt. Though I know that’s scientifically impossible.
CHAPTER FIFTY
The door beeps when I open it. I pound my boots on the welcome mat and step inside.
A lady looks over her horn-rimmed glasses at me. “You’re the spitting image of her,” she says.
“Um, who?” I ask.
“You must be Sarah’s niece. Maya, isn’t it? Just passing through, are you?” she asks.
She’s one of those asking people. I can imagine her keeping a tally of people’s lives in her small shop.
“No.” I clear my throat. “This is home.” I wander up and down the aisles of the store. “Do you have any postcards?”
“Right here, darling.”
Figures. Right next to her at the counter.
“Thanks.” I look through some sepia-toned cards and pick one that has a picture of a sign propped against an old saloon that says “Elk head drop off.” I laugh. “This is great.”
She rings it up. “Postcards. Not so popular nowadays.”
“Hmmm,” I mumble while writing the note—a long one with big letters, lots of detail. I wonder if they got her glasses yet. I glance at the clock. I have just enough time to get to the post office and send it off. I double-check the address, pay her for the card, slip my coat on, and head to the door.
“You got a sweetheart? Some clandestine romance?” She raises her eyebrows.
Well, at least she gets straight to the point. I shake my head.
“So? Who’s that special person?” she asks again, winking and smirking.
“Family,” I say. I walk to the door and shrug on my coat, bracing myself for gale winds. One thing’s for sure here in Jackson Hole. It’s cold.
“Hey, Maya!” the lady calls out to me.
I turn around.
