Gem & Dixie

by Sara Zarr

  “Dixie?” I whispered. She didn’t move.

  Quietly, I slipped into the bathroom again, taking the backpack with me.

  Only seven thousand, I told myself, counting out a combination of hundreds and fifties and twenties. It wasn’t a lot. A small safety net. I wrapped that amount in a hotel washcloth, then splashed water on my face. I got a glass off the sink and filled it to take back to bed with me. I put the washcloth under my pillow and then returned the backpack to where it had been.

  Lying down only made my aching stomach feel heavier, so I sat in the armchair by the window and looked out over the lights and the water, sipping from my glass.

  I sat there long enough to watch the slow brightening of dawn, a reverse fade from black to dark blue to purple and deep gray. It was pretty, but I wanted it to stop. With it came reality, an end to room service and movies and bubble baths and not having to think about what would come next.

  Dixie made a waking-up noise, something between a sigh and a groan. I turned to see her rolling over toward the window, her eyes open. “Why are you awake?” she whimpered.

  “My stomach. I needed to sit up.”

  She gathered a pillow against her body and spooned it. “S’pretty,” she said, half into the pillow.

  “I wish we lived near the water.”

  “We do.”

  “I mean, I wish we lived where we could see the water.” Life would feel more open, I imagined. You’d never have to feel trapped, with all of that water and sky.

  We watched the sky fade into lighter and lighter gray. A ferry made its way out onto the Sound.

  “Maybe we could move,” Dixie said. “I mean, like maybe me and you and Mom could find a new place, a better place. . . .” She shifted her blankets and pillows around and closed her eyes, dreamy. “She needs to get a job she can do during the day. Like in an office. Something that pays more, where she could come home at normal times.”

  I watched her face, how young and I guess innocent it looked. She might be carrying around some piece of plastic saying she was nineteen. She might know how to check into a hotel and keep us from getting ripped off. She might have boyfriends and go to clubs and never have to eat lunch alone. But there was so much she still hadn’t learned—or at least stuff she hadn’t let herself know. That’s what I mean by innocent, thinking Mom could—would—get a good-paying, normal-hours job.

  I could have asked: Why are we here, Dixie? Remember what Mom was doing when we last saw her? That was part of my purpose, wasn’t it, to give her the eyes to see the truth? But maybe it was okay to be innocent like that, maybe it was good. Just because I couldn’t be like that didn’t make it a bad way to be.

  “Do you want to call down for coffee or something?” I asked her.

  She scooted over on the bed so she could reach the room phone, dragging her blankets with her. After she ordered coffee and hot chocolate and some food, I said we should check her phone.

  “I don’t want to hear them,” she said. “I don’t want to know.”

  “We have to know. Then we can decide what to do.”

  She propped herself up with a pillow. “What we do is hang around until checkout, go home, put the money back and pretend we don’t know anything about it. Like we said.”

  “Dixie . . .” I started.

  “What?”

  It wasn’t the right time. If she got mad at me now, she could still call Dad, ruin things for me. “Don’t you want to know how much trouble we’re going to be in? To prepare?”

  “Fine.” She got her phone off the bedside table and turned it on.

  We waited what seemed like forever for it to come on and find a signal. Then it buzzed. Dixie showed me the screen. There was a text from Dad.

  mom says you’re at some sleepover. call when you get this

  “He went back to the apartment?” I said. Or maybe called her. Either way, Mom was clear enough to talk to him and tell him where we supposedly were. But maybe he hadn’t been there, physically, to check under the bed. . . .

  “There’s a voice mail from him, too,” Dixie said.

  “Put it on speaker.”

  She pushed the blanket off her shoulders. “Why? I don’t even want to hear it.”

  I ran my fingers over the fabric of the armchair. I could have been so far away by now. Instead I was maybe three miles from home, because I didn’t leave her.

  “I mean, what difference does it make?” she asked. “It’s over, Gem. We have to go home.”

  I looked at the phone in her hands as if Dad could reach through it and take everything away from me. “Can he track us with that?”

  She looked at me; I couldn’t read her expression. Afraid of Dad, or frustrated with me, or only tired. “I don’t know.”

  A loud knock in the door made us both jump. Then a woman’s voice on the other side of it said, “Room service.”

  Dixie held down the power button to turn the phone off, and I got up. I checked through the peephole that it really was room service, then stood back while the woman, not much older than us, wheeled in a little cart. She turned the cart into a table and uncovered a basket of croissants and rolls and pastries next to our pot of coffee and mugs of hot chocolate.

  “Can I get you anything else?” she asked, standing with her hands folded in front of her.

  I shook my head and signed Amy King to the bill, and then she left.

  We were subdued, not giddy over the food like we’d been the night before. Me, because of worrying I’d messed up my best chance to leave. Dixie, probably because she knew it was unlikely now that she could avoid trouble with Dad. We decided to move the table over to the window. We sat down with our view of the water, the islands, the ferries coming and going, me in the armchair and Dixie in the desk chair.

  “I can’t eat,” she said, staring down at the white tablecloth.

  But after a second she took a Danish out of the basket and nibbled at it. I poured her some coffee, then she poured that into her hot chocolate. She added sugar and kept her eyes on the window while she chewed and sipped. Maybe it was that she needed to think, but it felt like the silent treatment.

  “Are you mad at me?” I asked.

  “What am I going to say?” she asked. “When I call him? I have to tell him we spent some of it.”

  I tore into a croissant; it collapsed and shed flakes all over my plate, the table, the front of my robe. I, she said. To Dad, I guess, it was all about her—after all, he hadn’t mentioned me in his text. I could be I, too. I’d found the money. I didn’t have to show it to her.

  “You don’t have to call,” I said.

  “Yes I do.” Then she said, “You should have left it there like you said you would that night. This is so dumb.”

  This is so dumb, Gem. You are so dumb, Gem.

  I did show it to her, though. And since then I’d been thinking of us more and more as a “we,” whether or not I wanted to, whether or not I should.

  “We” was a trap. I could almost feel it on me like a straitjacket.

  What’s the box? Mr. Bergstrom had asked when I drew it around the whiteboard version of me.

  What I should have drawn was a cage.

  The cage was Mom. The cage was Dad. The cage was our apartment, the empty fridge, the trips to the dark laundry room. The cage was Dixie—pushing her in her stroller and walking her to school and feeding her and dressing her and keeping her busy when she was scared, entertained when she was bored. The cage was me being responsible for all of it, all of them, being the responsible one in the family as far back as I could remember. It was guilt, it was being misunderstood and feeling accused.

  Dixie stared at me, waiting for a reply.

  I hadn’t lost it in months and I wouldn’t do it in front of her. I breathed. My fingers itched for a Hacienda. The pebble-tears built up inside my throat. This time I wasn’t going to let myself be responsible.

  “He’s the one who put it there,” I managed.

  “I know, but—�
��

  “He’s the one who put it there.” I let my fist pound on my leg. Just once, enough to hurt. A tiny release. “He’s the one. He’s the one.”

  She set her Danish down. “Okay. Don’t get like—”

  “He’s the one. And Mom.” I crossed my arms over my body and held on to bunches of my robe, pulling at them as hard as I could. “Him and Mom, and our whole lives they didn’t take care of us.”

  “Gem,” she said slowly, “do not go apeshit right now. Please.”

  “I’m not going back home.”

  “You—”

  “I mean it, Dixie. I’m not going back.” The more I said it, the more the straitjacket loosened.

  “What are you going to do? You can’t just . . . not go back.”

  “Yes I can.” It would actually be easy. Simple, anyway. As simple as never setting foot in that building again. My breathing got deeper.

  I could be responsible for me, no one else.

  “You’re not taking the money, Gem,” she said, almost with a laugh. “If that’s what you’re thinking.”

  “I already took it.”

  “I can’t go home without it, Gem. He’ll never believe I don’t know where it is.” She shook her head. “You didn’t even know how to get into a hotel. You’re gonna, like, strike out on your own now?”

  I stood up. I imagined throwing myself onto the bed and smashing my face into a pillow and screaming until all of the pebbles were out of my throat. What would she think of me then? Would it make her understand me, or understand anything? Would it only prove she was right, that it was stupid to think I could go out into the world on my own?

  Maybe she was right.

  Don’t think that, Gem. Don’t betray yourself now.

  “Okay,” I said. “If you really want to give it back to him, if that’s what you want to do, go ahead.” I pointed to where I’d stashed the backpack, knowing I still had my seven thousand dollars under my pillow. “If you feel guilty about taking something from him after a whole life of him taking from us, if you think giving this money back is going to . . . I don’t know, make him love you or something, if you think it’s going to solve all the problems and he’s going to come around and be a great father and have an explanation that makes total sense for why he’s stashing drug money or whatever it is in our room the day after coming back out of the blue with hardly any warning or reason, then good. Good for you. Maybe you’re right. Maybe he has an honest reason. Maybe he’s a great father. Turn the phone back on. Listen to the voice mail. He probably called to come clean about the money and say how much he loves you and that he understands why you might be upset about him leaving it there. That’s probably what he said.”

  Her face had slowly closed while I talked. Her eyes had filled; then the tears dried up. Her mouth didn’t tremble like it did when she was going to cry. She was steady as a rock.

  I let my robe drop to the floor and stood there naked. “I’m going to take a shower. Call him if you want. I don’t care. As long as you know that he’s using you.”

  Then her mouth did give way, a little bit.

  “He uses you,” I said. “Not me. Because, of the two of us, you’re the one who falls for it. You’re the one who mistakes it for love.”

  Under the shower, I began to shake. I covered my face with a washcloth and let the scream tear through me until it was gone.

  When I came out of the bathroom—wrapped in towels, my throat raw—Dixie was on her bed, holding her phone. “Fine.”

  “Fine what?” I asked.

  “Fine whatever. I won’t call him.”

  I just stared at her, and she put her phone on speaker and played me his voice mail:

  “Hey where the hell are you? I, um— Look, I put something in your room just for safekeeping, okay, and I think you have it and it’s really . . . Dixie, you need to answer your fucking phone and tell me where you are, and do not TELL anyone what you found, that would be very bad. I’m going to try to find you at school today. If I don’t see you there, you’d better meet me back at the apartment later. And . . . listen, don’t be a little shit about this. Show me I can trust you. Call me.”

  I sat on my bed and took off the towel I had around my hair. “You can take it if you want. Go to school. See him. I mean, if you want it to be over.” And when he discovered there was seven thousand missing, she could blame it on me, and be right.

  “I’m not . . . I’m not ready to do anything yet. I’m not saying I’m not going back. But what’s the rush?”

  I felt both relief and worry.

  “And it’s not my fault, Gem,” she continued. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe he doesn’t really love me.” She turned her phone back off. “But it’s not my fault that he doesn’t love you, either.”

  It didn’t hurt. It didn’t hurt to hear. I mean, I felt the pain of it but it was okay. It wasn’t anything I hadn’t already told myself a hundred times, that he hadn’t demonstrated clearly enough. It was a fact like any other fact and it didn’t kill me. I didn’t turn into a pile of ash or disappear. I was still there. And so was Dixie.

  17.

  WE WOULD get on a ferry, we decided, like she’d told the front desk lady we were going to do. We would ride out to one of the islands. It didn’t solve anything, and I had no plan beyond that. I couldn’t and didn’t want to force her to go back before she was ready. So we were stuck in not leaving, not going back, and not parting ways. Only filling time.

  “I have to get a charger before we leave downtown,” she said. “For my phone.”

  “Maybe we should just let it die.”

  “I have to have a phone, Gem. What if there’s an emergency? What if we get lost? What if we get into trouble?”

  Like this whole thing wasn’t trouble and an emergency? “I get along without a phone.”

  “Aren’t you a special snowflake.” It was a typical Dixie comment, but without the typical venom.

  Getting a charger meant staying put until after nine, when stores would be open. We figured if Dad did what he said he was going to do—show up at school, check at the apartment again—we had the morning before he’d even begin to realize we weren’t at friends’ houses, or even think about where else we might be. Or, not we. I had to remind myself that, from his messages, it seemed he had no idea I was involved, let alone that I was the one behind it. I wonder if he even thought of me at all.

  Dixie showered. While she was in there, I took the washcloth with the money inside it out from under my pillow, put it deep into the pocket of my jacket.

  When she came out in her robe and picked her shirt and jeans up off her bed, she said, “As long as we’re going shopping, we might as well buy some clothes.”

  “I thought you were worried about Dad being angry about us spending money.”

  She shrugged. “Nothing expensive. Some extra underwear, T-shirts. I don’t want to walk around in dirty clothes.”

  We got packed and agreed that we’d only spend as much as we got when we checked out of the hotel, whatever was left of the cash deposit. The rest of it, we’d leave untouched.

  Dixie stood by the door with her jacket on and her schoolbag over her shoulder. She’d put on the scarf again and pinned her hair close to her head, and somehow done her makeup. I guess she always carried makeup to school with her.

  “What?” she asked after I’d stared too long.

  “Nothing,” I said. “You look good. How do you always look good?”

  “I don’t.”

  “You do. I see you every day. I know.”

  She got that defiant expression I was so used to; then it went away and she said, “Thanks.”

  I went to the hotel window one last time, looking out at the puzzle of land and water, wondering where exactly I was headed.

  Dixie presented our receipt at the front desk. We waited for them to make sure we hadn’t trashed the room and to total up our room service expenses. Then we got our cash back.

  “Thanks for doing all t
hat,” I told Dixie “Making sure we didn’t get ripped off.”

  We were on the street, the sidewalks damp but some sun breaking through the low-lying clouds. After a night in a room with windows that didn’t open, the air felt good. Dixie pointed us uphill, where the desk clerk had told her there was a place that would probably have the phone charger she needed.

  “The time I was in a hotel before,” she said as we walked, “it was me and Lia. We wanted to try out our fake IDs after we got them and we had some money from Lia’s birthday. We’d seen it on TV a lot, people in hotels.”

  I kept quiet so she’d keep talking.

  “This guy at the place we went—first he kind of accused us of being whores, then when we tried to get the deposit back in the morning, there was no record of it. Like, he’d just taken it. But it was our word against his, and me and Lia looked like . . . well, like me and Lia look. That’s how I knew how hard it is if you don’t have a credit card. And how shady some of these hotel people are.”

  “You spent the night at the hotel?” I asked, trying to keep up.

  “Yeah. I told Mom I was sleeping over at Lia’s house. Lia told her mom she was sleeping at mine.” She shrugged. “We do that all the time.”

  We got to a corner; Dixie turned us left. There were plenty of those nights I’d been alone in our room when Dixie was at Lia’s, or so I thought. “Why?” I asked. “What do you do?”

  We kept walking, and from her silence I thought she must be annoyed with my questions, me being the older one with no idea why someone our age might want to stay out all night, or lie about where she was. She was probably thinking how naive and embarrassing I was.

  Then she stopped at the next corner to wait for the light to change, and she said, “We do stupid stuff, Gem. Just dumb stuff we shouldn’t do. I wish . . .” The light changed and she turned to me with this look on her face that I read as a kind of being lost, or maybe an apology. “I guess this is just another dumb thing I’m doing.”

  “It’s not dumb,” I said.

  “We’ll see.”

  She never said what she wished.

  We found the phone store, and when Dixie paid for the charger, she also asked the girl at the counter some other stuff about her phone.