Gem & Dixie

by Sara Zarr

  “Just keep remembering it’s his fault, keep asking him where it came from, and if he gets mad about the seven thousand dollars, just ask him if he wants to report it to the police. He won’t.” I took her arm. “Don’t let him push you around. You have to make yourself see through his bullshit.”

  She nodded. “Okay.”

  “And if anything gets worse or doesn’t get a little better, tell someone, like Mr. Bergstrom. Or me.”

  She nodded again and hooked her thumbs through the backpack straps. I’d given her the phone, too. I didn’t want any calls from Mom or Dad. I’d get a new one once we were back in the city.

  We got our ferry tickets and waited, while the fog dissipated little by little. I loved being by the water, the way all the boats lined up in the docks, the different colors and the names of them—Aurora’s Borealis, Fishin Expe’dishin, Lucille. I loved how the gulls soared in and out, and bobbed on the water not caring it was freezing cold. I loved the way the fog clung to just the very tops of the trees across the Sound, woven through the branches like cotton.

  “I’m going to live on an island,” I told Dixie. “Someday. In the future.”

  “Sounds boring,” she teased.

  “I’ll have a little house. A little yard. A little dog.”

  “I’ll visit,” she said, “but you know I have to live in the city.”

  “Okay. You can visit.”

  It was too cold to stand on the deck. We got coffees and sat by a window, and scalded our tongues. She reached in her pocket and pulled something out. It was the picture, of me pushing her in the stroller.

  “I found this with your stuff last night, when I was looking for the phone. I took it, in case I didn’t see you again. But you probably want it.”

  I did want it. Even if there was someone else just outside the frame, even if the pose was a setup. It was still something true about us. She held it by its edge, looking at it closer. “You have to call me, too, if you need help. You can’t, like, live on the street.”

  “I know. I won’t.”

  She handed the picture back to me. I put it in my coat pocket. My arm throbbed and sweated under the plastic wrap. I rolled up my sleeve and prodded it.

  “In a couple days your tattoo will itch like a motherfucker,” Dixie said. “Don’t scratch it. Keep it clean and moisturized. If it flakes a little, don’t freak out; it’s not coming off, it’s just the top layer of skin.”

  “It looks good,” I said.

  “Yeah,” she said. “It looks really good.”

  27.

  DIXIE TOOK a cab home. There wasn’t time for more of a good-bye than we’d had on the ferry, not with the driver watching and the meter going.

  I got in a different cab and went straight to school, to Mr. Bergstrom’s office. The door was closed. I knocked, and he opened it. I could see he had another student in there. I was so happy to see his face.

  “Hi,” I said, struggling against tears. “It wasn’t fine.”

  When the other student had gone, I told him, “I found some money. I found this money and it seemed like . . . it seemed like something that could help me with what I wanted.”

  “You found money? Where?”

  “I—”

  “Wait.” He held up his hand and lowered his voice. “Legally, you’re supposed to report found money. I mean, they don’t really care if it’s not that much, but it’s basically theft. It wasn’t that much, was it?”

  What if you find it in your own house? Under your own bed?

  “No,” I said. “Not that much.”

  After that I worried what else I shouldn’t say. I didn’t want legal trouble. Maybe for my dad I wouldn’t care. But for Dixie, for Mom, I didn’t know the right thing to do. So I didn’t tell him about the drugs, either. Everything else, though, I told. A lot of which he already knew. Feeling like home wasn’t home, feeling like no one cared about me, feeling like I was the only responsible one in the family and worrying all the time that I should be doing something to make sure it didn’t fall apart.

  He wrote in his notebook while I talked. Then he asked, “Where’d you go? You missed some days of school. I was worried.”

  “I ran away,” I said. “That’s all. And I’m not going back.” I’d been wrong when I thought I’d never feel scared again, because, in the middle of talking to Mr. Bergstrom, I felt more scared than I’d been through the whole thing. Like a cage was going to drop down around his office and I’d be dragged home. “If anyone tries to make me go back, I’ll leave again.” I stood up and went closer to the door.

  He put his pen down. His face had the goodness that I’d missed. “If neither of your parents reports you as missing, and you keep going to school, no one is going to come after you.”

  “They’re not?”

  “No.”

  “How come you never told me that before?”

  He opened his mouth, then closed it and tilted his head. Then he said, “I realize this sounds incredibly inadequate, but you never asked. And you can understand I can’t go around suggesting to students that they should leave home. Unless I know they’re really in danger.”

  “Oh.” I stared at my hands, ashamed to have thought my problems were so bad.

  “Come sit back down.”

  I shook my head.

  “I wish you’d trust me.”

  Not if he was going to keep using words like “legally.” I felt for the handle and leaned against the door, my hand behind my back. “I know. It’s not like I get hit. I don’t get . . . touched. I don’t get threatened.”

  “That’s . . . good. That’s good, Gem. I’m glad for that.”

  “Me and Dixie have our own room. My mom works sometimes. Enough to pay the rent. We don’t always have food but I manage to eat.”

  He looked confused.

  “What I’m asking is . . . You said you weren’t supposed to tell me some things unless I was really in danger. What does it take to be really in danger?”

  Mr. Bergstrom didn’t say anything for a long time. He sort of rubbed his mouth with his hand and took some deep breaths.

  “Gem? Please come sit down.”

  I didn’t move. He brought me his box of tissues. “Here.” I looked up. Was I crying? I touched my face. It was wet. I moved my hand off the door handle so that I could take a tissue.

  “I don’t flunk classes,” I continued, my tears getting bigger, making it harder to talk. “I know I have problems in school and I know I’m antisocial, but I pull through every class.”

  “You do.”

  “I’m clean, I . . . I wash my clothes. I go to bed at bedtime and I wake up and come to school. And . . .” I pressed a tissue to my eyes and rocked forward. “I take care of my sister. For a long time I took care of her. I try.”

  “You do,” he said, so kindly. “You try very hard.”

  “But . . . what does it take to be in danger?” I asked again, through even more tears. “What does that even mean? Are things not bad enough? Should things be worse for me before . . . before I can make them better?”

  I felt his hand on my arm, leading me back toward the chair. “No. No, they shouldn’t.” I sat down and he stood beside me, keeping his hand gently on my arm. “I’m sorry, Gem. I think I failed you.”

  I cried more when he said that, big crying that came with relief, like all I’d wanted or needed this whole time was for someone to say they were sorry and mean it. To notice what had gone unnoticed my whole life, what had fallen through the cracks.

  When I’d gotten my breath back, he said, “I have some ideas. Why don’t you give me some time alone here. Go to your classes and collect your homework assignments, get whatever you might need out of your locker. In case you need to take a few days off while we get you figured out.”

  “How am I . . .”

  “I’m going to help you. You being older makes it easier than it would be if, well, if you were Dixie. Does she—”

  “She doesn’t want to leave.”
>
  “Right.” He tapped his pen on the desk. “I think we can find some options. You know how I love to pull strings.”

  I nodded, and blew my nose a few times.

  “I will have to actually confirm some stuff with your mom. Just to avoid too much involvement from the system. Because the system sucks.”

  “But I don’t want her to get in trouble. I don’t want—”

  “Let me talk to her.” He smiled. “I’m a professional, okay? I’m good at these conversations and you don’t even have to think about it. Not right now.”

  “Okay.”

  “Come back here when you’re all set with your assignments and everything. And close the door behind you?”

  So I went to my teachers, the ones I could find, and got the assignments I’d missed. Some of them looked at me funny and remarked that I’d really only missed a couple of days, like I was making a big deal out of nothing. I made them tell me anyway, and I also asked for ones that were coming up in case I missed some more days. Mrs. Cantrell was out; I got what I could from the sub. I asked if the reading journals had been handed back, but he didn’t know what I was talking about.

  My locker didn’t have much in it. Two textbooks, a sweatshirt. I carried the things in my arms as the bell for passing period rang. Helena from my English class walked by, then stopped and turned around. “Hey. Gem.”

  “Hi.”

  “Where were you?”

  “Sick,” I said.

  “Sick and . . . shopping?” she asked, pointing at my new outfit. “I love that coat.”

  “Oh, thanks.”

  She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “Well, we have a Grapes test tomorrow, so.”

  “Grapes?” I asked.

  “Of Wrath.”

  “Oh. Thanks.”

  “Later, Gem,” she said, and walked off down the hall as if it was just a normal day.

  28.

  MRS. MURPHY was a lady that Mr. Bergstrom knew from his church who used to take in older kids from the foster system but didn’t anymore, not officially, not since she got divorced. Mr. Bergstrom got permission from Mrs. Harjo, the assistant principal, to drive me to her house. And also from my mom.

  “How did she sound?” I asked him. “What did she say?”

  We were pulling out of the teacher lot in his car, which was kind of old. You couldn’t even see the backseat because of all the papers and boxes piled onto it.

  “Well, she was upset.”

  I ran my finger through the dust on the dashboard. “She gets angry. If she feels like people are judging her.”

  “No, no, Gem, not angry. Upset. Like crying.” He drove carefully, below the speed limit, it seemed like. “She’s glad you’re all right. She understood. I proposed it like . . . what we call ‘respite.’ That we have this person, vetted by the system, inviting you to stay so that your mom can have a break. I proposed it as a break for her.”

  I looked at him. “From me?”

  “I know it’s not entirely accurate, but it was the best way to get you the space you want.”

  “And I don’t have to go back?”

  He paused. “I can’t promise that. We have to approach this as temporary—a break—unless you want to go through a whole different process with courts and all of that.”

  I didn’t want that. Not if I could help it.

  Mr. Bergstrom took his phone from the cup holder and held it out. “Why don’t you call her? I think she’d like to hear your voice.”

  “I don’t . . . I don’t think I know her number.”

  He reached into the chest pocket of his shirt and pulled out a sticky note with a number on it and “Adri True” in neat printing.

  “What should I say?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. What do you want to say?”

  I held his phone, and the number. I looked out the window and saw how we were driving in green now, trees everywhere, like on the island.

  “Can I just say that I’m all right and I’ll talk to her more later?”

  “Sure,” he said. “That’s fine.”

  I put in her number. “It’s going to voice mail,” I told Mr. Bergstrom. Her message didn’t have her voice on it, only the opening of Stone Temple Pilots’ “Interstate Love Song.” I hung up.

  “Do you want to try again?” he asked. “Leave her a message? I think you’ll feel better if you do.”

  I tried again. She picked up. “Who’s this?”

  “It’s me.” There was a pause and I almost said Me, Gem, your daughter, like I’d done with Dad. But I should have known she’d know my voice a lot better than he did.

  “Gem,” she said.

  I started crying again, when she said my name, not big like I had in Mr. Bergstrom’s office but the second time in a day after going so long without, and weighed down by what I couldn’t express. “I’m calling because . . .” My voice faltered; I couldn’t finish the sentence. “Is Dixie okay?”

  “Yeah, she is,” Mom said. She sounded tired, she sounded small. “She’s right here with me. I mean, she’s asleep at the moment but we’re together here at home.”

  I pictured Dixie in our room, just her, and my empty bed.

  “I’m going to stay with this . . . with this lady for a while.”

  “I think that’s good. Just until I kinda get my shit together, you know,” she said, and then it sounded like she was crying, too.

  I didn’t know what to say, where to begin. “Me and Dixie were talking about that time we went camping. With Roxanne?”

  Mom sniffled. “Yeah?”

  “Remember that?”

  “Sure I do.”

  Mr. Bergstrom reached into the backseat and handed me a box of tissues. I guess I was crying more.

  “I’m going to try to work days,” Mom continued. “So I can be here for Dixie at night. I should have . . . I don’t . . .” She stopped, and when she started again, her voice was stronger, bigger. “I don’t want you to worry about us. And if it’s no good with that lady, if you don’t like it, you come home.” Another pause. “Okay?”

  “Okay, Mom.” I waited a second, then I said, “Bye,” before there was too much space full of what she wasn’t saying.

  I put the phone back in the cup holder.

  “That was good, Gem,” Mr. Bergstrom said. He looked over at me and nodded. “That was really good.”

  Mrs. Murphy lived in a small two-bedroom house in Bellevue. She had two blue parakeets, Edgar and Edith, that she kept in the living room. They chirped whenever she talked and were quiet whenever I talked, tilting their heads to listen. “They like new voices,” Mrs. Murphy said. She had gray hair in a bun, pleated jeans, and an oversized beige T-shirt with a picture of a wolf on the front. Hiking sandals over socks. She was tall and heavy and capable looking.

  She didn’t talk for very long after Mr. Bergstrom left, and I hardly talked at all.

  The tour of the house took only a few minutes. The furniture wasn’t anything special. Everything was ruffled—the pillows, the curtains, the bedspreads.

  “You’ll sleep in here,” Mrs. Murphy said, showing me the second room off the hallway. “I know it’s small. Go ahead and throw those extra pillows on the floor if you don’t want them.”

  “Is there a bus I can take to school tomorrow?” I asked. I’d decided I didn’t want to miss any more days. There was the quiz in English, and Helena said she loved my new coat.

  She tugged down on the hem of her T-shirt. “I told Mike—Mr. Bergstrom—I’d drive you to school in the mornings on my way to work, if you don’t mind getting up with the birds. You’ll have to take a bus home, though. Or, if you want, you could come to the library where I work to do your homework and I can bring you home.” When I first heard “home,” I thought of the apartment; then I realized she meant here, her house.

  Tears rushed up. I turned from her and moved pillows around, sniffing, wiping my face with my sleeve.

  “I’ll leave you alone unless you need anything.�
��

  I nodded, and kept my back to the door until I heard it close.

  I didn’t sleep. My tattoo itched all night.

  The only breakfast options she had were oatmeal and eggs.

  “I like to keep my choices simple,” she said. She wore the same high-waisted jeans and sandals with socks she’d had on the night before. This time her T-shirt was blue and had a bald eagle on it.

  We decided on oatmeal. The parakeets had been moved into the kitchen with us. “They like to eat when I eat,” she said.

  I watched Edith and Edgar hop from the perch to their seeds, back to the perch, back to the seeds. “How can you tell them apart?” I asked.

  “I can’t always. Edgar is a liiiiitle bit bigger, aren’t you, Edgar?”

  Both birds chirped.

  Dixie wasn’t at school again until the next week. I saw her in the cafeteria, walking in with Lia and wearing her new leggings, a long-sleeved Bleach T-shirt, and her blue Docs. It seemed like forever since that day on the ferry. I crossed the cafeteria to her. Aside from maybe Lia—who was apparently good at keeping Dixie’s secrets—I don’t think anyone at school had any idea what was going on. No one looked at me or her any differently than they always had. I already felt more calm, though, less like something bad was about to happen.

  “Hey,” I said to Dixie and Lia.

  “Hi,” Lia said, a little nicer than usual.

  Dixie said to Lia, “Save me a place in line.” Lia left, and Dixie slipped her backpack off and knelt to the floor. She pulled out a plastic grocery bag, stuffed full. “I thought you might want some clothes.” She held the bag out to me.

  “Thanks,” I said, and opened it to see what she’d brought. I didn’t recognize anything. It was all new, with tags on. Some jeans, some T-shirts and hoodies.

  “Me and Mom went shopping and I thought . . .” She shrugged.

  “You went shopping? After everything we already spent?”

  “Mom decided to let him pay back some of the child support. Well, more like she made him and said if he didn’t, she’d tell someone about the money.”