Left

by Tamar Ossowski

  Evelyn poked me in the arm. “What did she want?”

  “To find out how I am doing.”

  “Be careful around her. Last year she talked to Bobby McCarthy and the next day they took him away.”

  I picked up my sharpened pencil and pressed the pad of my thumb into its tip. It left little dots where it pushed up against my skin. Mrs. Ficsh went to the board and filled it with numbers and I tried to focus but it made no sense.

  None of it made any sense.

  I felt like someone had forced me to swallow a bowling ball, which now sat at the bottom of my chest. Every time I took a breath, I could feel it pinning me down. I couldn’t get Evelyn’s words out of my head. They got louder and louder until they were all I could hear. I thought about Leah’s face when I came out of that bathroom stall. I thought about my mother and the last time I had seen her and about popcorn and pink bicycles.

  Evelyn squeezed my hand on the drive home. “It will be okay. I won’t let anyone take you away.”

  My fingers were starting to pinch under her grip, but I didn’t pull away. She was so determined that for a minute I believed her. Leah loved me. She wasn’t going to get rid of me. She wasn’t going to give me away. I took a deep breath and closed my eyes.

  When I opened them, Evelyn’s mother had almost reached Leah’s house. The street was usually empty but this time there was a car parked in front. She pulled up beside a white Ford that I recognized instantly.

  Because it belonged to my grandmother.

  When I got to the front door, Evelyn and her mother waved and I watched as their car turned the corner, shooting streams of exhaust into the air. I held the doorknob in my hand and rubbed the key hanging around my neck.

  Then I walked away.

  At first I walked fast, thinking someone might be following me, but when no one came I slowed down. The thought of being left again, of Leah sending me off, was just something I could not bear, so I pushed it out of my head and started numbering each cement square on the sidewalk, counting twice every time the root of a tree buckled one in half. Once I finished, I realized I was lost. I started to feel something puffing in my belly, so I squeezed my fists tight and squinted my eyes and after a few minutes it went away. I told myself that I wasn’t lost because you could only be lost if you had somewhere to go.

  I stepped over tricycles and walked past driveways with happy faces drawn in chalk. Women smiled at me as they pushed baby strollers down the street. It was getting close to dinnertime and I watched fathers get out of their cars, trading briefcases for small children. I had never been on my own before and something inside of me tingled. At the corner, I decided to follow a yellow butterfly fluttering along a line of pink flowers. I had to walk quickly to keep up, but then suddenly it disappeared and I felt more alone than I did before.

  My stomach started to rumble, so I unzipped my backpack and searched inside but all I could find was a half-eaten banana, now much darker than the yellow it had been that morning. I ate it anyway. It was soft and ripe and tasted brown and made me think of Leah.

  I walked faster and my legs were getting tired and my stomach was grumbling more. I reached the end of the houses and then I saw a street with a Laundromat and a convenience store. Ignoring the buzz vibrating through my ears, I found a bench and sat down and told myself that the swelling growing in my belly was only happening because I was hungry.

  Four bicycles leaning against the front of the store caught my eye. They each had red ribbons woven into the wheels and I tried to trace the pattern with my eyes, but I couldn’t drown out the throbbing in my head so I took some long deep breaths. Then I pretended I was underwater, in the pool in the art building, with Leah up in the stands watching over me. I was so lost in dreams of blue that I didn’t notice the girls who came out of the store to reclaim their bikes.

  “Library Girl!” one of them shouted.

  “Wanna play, retard?” the second one said as she moved in behind the first. They were the girls who snickered at Evelyn and me when we left the cafeteria after lunch to go to the library.

  The third one lifted the top off her can of Pepsi and it popped open like a gun. She edged in behind the second so that I was surrounded. I did what I usually do when I don’t know what else to do.

  P-E-P-S-I.

  “Did you say something, Library Girl?” Number one got close to my face. She was sucking hard on a candy that made her lips purple. I turned my head and she laughed.

  “I think Library Girl likes my soda.” Number three smiled. She lifted the can high into the air and then tipped it so that it splashed onto the cement, spraying my shoes and legs, but I didn’t move. She put her face close to mine. “What do you think of that?”

  I stared down at the foam, which was now sizzling on the ground. The sound of fizz filled my ears until that was all I could hear, so when the fourth girl came out and spoke, I couldn’t make out what she said, but the other three moved away.

  The girl was taller than the others and she wore a dark gray shirt with its sleeves cut off. The material around the holes looked frayed and I wondered if it was itchy. The other three got on their bikes, but she came closer. She was chewing gum and blew a big bubble that popped near my nose. It made me jump, which made her laugh. When she spoke, her words were heavy with sugary spit and they didn’t make any sense—maybe because the sound of the fizzing soda was still in my ears. Finally, I had to look away because her face was too close.

  When I looked up again, she was getting on her bike and a man was waving his arms and yelling. I rocked back and forth with my hands wrapped around my elbows. I didn’t look up at him and after a while he walked away, too.

  It was getting cold and I was tired and hungry and the bench had a stray nail that I kept forgetting to avoid. It had already poked a hole into my tights, so when I moved I could feel the wood pressing up against my bare skin. It felt rough and dry and I wondered if I would get a splinter and if it would hurt and then I thought about how tired I was of being scared of everything all the time. I rocked harder and faster, ignoring the dark and the cold, so that all I could feel was the rhythm running through my body and then I started thinking about flying.

  Specifically into space.

  We were studying the planets in science. I memorized their order, loving mostly how they each seemed to know exactly where they belonged. When I finally stopped rocking, I went inside the Laundromat and took a seat in front of a row of dryers, watching the clothes whirl and turn. I pretended that I was an astronaut. I imagined what it would feel like to spin around on Saturn’s rings, riding faster and faster through the black air. A voice that took me a few minutes to recognize broke me out of my dream: the man who had chased away the girls in front of the convenience store.

  “Want some?” He opened his hand, exposing a fist full of M&Ms, but I shook my head. He dropped them into his mouth and they crackled as they mashed against his teeth. When he finished, he wiped his hand down the length of his thigh. “Is your mother here?”

  Again, I shook my head. My stomach started to growl and I wondered if I should have taken him up on his candy offer. I looked at the vending machine and tried to remember how much change was floating around the inside of my backpack.

  “You do the laundry to help her out.”

  I wasn’t sure if it was a statement or a question so I just shrugged. He handed me the bag of candy and this time I took some. I ate two at a time, sucking them slowly so that I didn’t have to bite into the crunchy coating covering the chocolate.

  “I used to help my dad out.” The man’s arms were brown and skinny and covered with silver fuzz that looked like dust balls. “One time he was doing some work on the roof. I told him not to. I told him it was dangerous. But he didn’t listen to me.”

  He dropped the last few candies into his hand and then folded the empty bag into a long skinny rectangle. I waited for him to finish the story. To tell me what happened. But he didn’t. He popped the chocolates into hi
s mouth and picked up the newspaper and started to read.

  I unzipped the pocket in my backpack, took out some change, and walked over to the vending machine. Uncertain as to what a real astronaut would choose, I decided on a bag of pretzels and slowly punched in the code, holding my breath as a big metal ring turned and dropped the bag down. Back at my seat, I sucked the pretzels until they turned to mush in my mouth. The man was gone. He left his newspaper on the seat next to me.

  I wasn’t sure what to do next. My stomach started to tighten, squeezing the M&Ms and pretzels inside of me. I pressed the palms of my hands together and stared at the spinning clothes, but now all it did was make me feel dizzy. I dug around inside my backpack and found a book I had taken out from the library about a pig and a spider. The farmer wanted to kill the pig because he was a runt. After a few pages, I put the book away.

  A woman came in, dragging a big bag of laundry behind her, and two little boys followed. They looked the same, one bigger than the other, with short buzz haircuts that made me want to rub the tops of their heads. The older one kept pinching the younger one, but every time the mother looked over he would stop. She didn’t look over very often because she was too busy trying to stuff all of their dirty clothes into one machine. The older one was drinking milk out of a carton. When he saw me looking, he stuck his tongue out and his spit spilled out in white stretchy strings. His mother walked over to the change machine and he got out of his chair and came closer to me. He still had the milk in his hand and I could make out the picture of a missing child on the side. I wondered if Leah would put a picture of me on a milk carton. I wondered if I was missing.

  I took a deep breath, but all I could smell was electric heat and detergent. I put the halfempty bag of pretzels into my backpack and went outside. Walking in the dark made me feel clean and I wondered if that’s how the astronauts felt when they were floating in space. I started thinking about planets again and how easily they understood where they fit in and before I knew it I found my way back to Leah’s house.

  It looked different in the dark. All the lights were on and I could make out the white and blue flash of the television. I started to walk up the path, but then I stopped and instead, I turned and walked to the back of the house. I lay down on the grass and propped my backpack underneath my head and stared up, breathing in so deeply I worried I might loosen one of the stars from its spot in the sky. It was black outside and I felt like I was invisible. I pulled my jacket up close around my ears and turned on my side. Soon the letters in my head quieted and Leah’s garden wrapped itself around me. Fireflies danced near my head and the air smelled sweet, like candy. I looked back up at the sky and wondered if one day I would finally be able to figure it out.

  Exactly where I fit.

  When I woke, she was lying beside me. The sun was starting to rise and I wasn’t sure if I was dreaming. She looked still, like a house after everyone had gone to bed, but then she opened her eyes and reached across to touch my face.

  “Where did you go?” she asked, still cupping my cheek. I put my hand on top of hers because I wasn’t sure if she was real or if I was lost in a dream.

  “Nowhere.”

  The pink in her cheeks started to fade.

  “I won’t do it again.”

  Her eyes got glassy and I felt sadness begin in the roof of my mouth. I squeezed tight and it formed a lump in the back of my throat. I promised myself that this time I would be good and that no matter what, I would not give her another reason to give me away. I promised myself that I would be the person I was supposed to be. The person she wanted me to be.

  “Nowhere isn’t a very nice place to be.” She traced her finger down my cheek and under my chin. “There’s something I want to talk to you about.”

  Her breaths were long and heavy and their heat spent a second at the tip of my nose before disappearing. The thought of losing her was too much and I didn’t want to watch her say the words, so I closed my eyes. But then I was alone and I felt the letters peeking through the darkness, so I opened them.

  “When I was a little girl, I spent a lot of time nowhere.”

  I didn’t speak and she was quiet for a few minutes.

  “Franny, when I was a little girl, terrible things happened to me. The only place I had to go was nowhere.”

  I started to pull at the grass. “What kinds of things?” I wanted her to tell me, but then when she opened her mouth to speak, I was afraid that she would.

  “Ugly, terrible things. And until I figured out that I could draw, I thought I was all alone. I was nowhere most of the time. But you don’t need to be nowhere. You will always have me. Always.”

  More than anything, I wanted to believe, but then I thought about my grandmother’s car parked in front of Leah’s house and I remembered the look on Mrs. Skoll’s face when she led me to her office. I tucked my chin down and she brought my head close to her chest. I heard the pounding of her heart and I wondered if it was the little girl that bad things happened to trying to get out. She kissed the top of my head and wrapped me more closely into her. I felt warm and, as the smell of wet grass seeped into my nose, I wanted to believe what she was saying because I could not imagine losing her.

  We separated for a minute and she stared at my face. “You belong with me.”

  She licked her finger and used it to wipe a line of drool that had drizzled out during sleep and then helped me stand up. The moment we walked through the front door of the house, the telephone rang and Leah ran off to answer. She was in the kitchen speaking in hushed tones so I couldn’t hear what she was saying.

  The television was on with the volume turned down and my grandmother was lying on the couch. I watched the people on the screen move in silence and then I sat on the floor beneath her, leaning back, the vibration of her snores skimming the top of my head. We sat that way for a few minutes and then the pattern of her breathing changed and I knew she was awake. She reached out, touched my shoulders, and then pulled me close to her.

  “The first time I saw you, I knew you were special.”

  I cringed, but my grandmother didn’t seem to notice. “Is that why she left?”

  Her face shifted for a second before she spoke. “Your mother left you here with Leah because she thought that was best.”

  Leah walked back into the room. Her face looked gray, like a storm cloud had rubbed itself across her cheeks.

  “Anything important?” my grandmother asked.

  Leah just shook her head. “No, nothing important. Are you hungry? Why don’t I go make some breakfast.”

  I found a pillow and hugged it close to me, rocking back and forth as Leah quickly left the room.

  “Do you think a lot about being left?” my grandmother asked.

  I shrugged, folding myself more tightly into the pillow.

  She clasped her arms around me, squeezing so hard that it hurt. She was quiet then and sunk her face into my hair. We rocked together. “Would you like to come home with me?”

  I didn’t want to always be the one that everyone worried about. I was tired of causing trouble for all the people around me. I shook my head.

  “I will always love you, Franny.”

  I know she meant to make me feel safe and I wanted to feel that way. I could hear Leah humming small little pieces of songs that I did not recognize. I felt my grandmother’s arms around me and I thought about her words. I wanted to feel protected, like everything was going to be okay. But all I felt was tired of being scared. Tired of being the one that people always thought they had to take care of.

  Therese

  It was Therese’s job to spot the red ones.

  Then Tim would slow the car down so that by the time they reached the traffic light, it would have already changed from red to green, without them ever having had to come to a full stop. There were no cars on the road at that hour of night and they coasted along the black streets like pirates.

  Matilda craved motion. She needed to be rocked, pushed, mov
ed, and driven. The few times they were forced to stop, she would hold her breath and let out a scream that made Therese’s eardrums vibrate so violently that afterward she would need to lie down with a cold compress across her forehead. Tim took Matilda driving at night because that was the only way to get her to sleep. Therese came along because she liked looking into other people’s houses.

  “We need to start thinking about a place of our own,” she said, trying to peek inside a house whose lights were on.

  “No.”

  As they slowed down at a stop sign, Matilda started puffing air through her lips.

  “What’s your problem?” Therese asked, turning away from him and tilting her head to get a better angle of the house they were passing.

  “She’s going to lose it any minute.”

  “I didn’t mean about the baby. I meant about your mother. Why can’t we leave her and find a place of our own?”

  “No.”

  He pumped the gas and the car lurched forward. Therese looked up, realizing she had forgotten to warn him about the red light. He came to a full stop even though they were the only ones on the road. The sputters coming from the backseat sounded like the first few drops of a rainstorm getting bigger and meaner until they all ran into each other and formed one long continuous wail.

  “Just run it,” Therese said, reaching back to jiggle Matilda, which only made her angrier.

  “No,” Tim said as the shrieks got louder and bounced off the windshield, making the air around them shake. Therese pursed her lips and squinted her eyes, but he just gripped the steering wheel tighter and waited for the light to turn green.

  “Are you trying to punish me?” she asked.

  “The light will change in a second.”

  “I don’t mean about the light, I mean about your mother.”

  Tim hit the gas hard and the tires squealed as they spun on the asphalt. Once they were moving, Matilda quieted.