Harbor Me

by Jacqueline Woodson

  ALSO BY JACQUELINE WOODSON

  After Tupac and D Foster

  Behind You

  Beneath a Meth Moon

  Between Madison and Palmetto

  Brown Girl Dreaming

  The Dear One

  Feathers

  From the Notebooks of Melanin Sun

  The House You Pass on the Way

  Hush

  If You Come Softly

  I Hadn’t Meant to Tell You This

  Last Summer with Maizon

  Lena

  Locomotion

  Maizon at Blue Hill

  Miracle’s Boys

  Peace, Locomotion

  NANCY PAULSEN BOOKS

  an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, NY 10014

  Copyright © 2018 by Jacqueline Woodson.

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  Nancy Paulsen Books is a registered trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  Ebook ISBN 9780525515135

  Cover photograph © 2018 by Elizabeth Ansley

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  For Lena and Alana, who harbor so many

  And for my family, who harbors me

  Contents

  Also by Jacqueline Woodson

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Acknowledgments

  Praise for Jacqueline Woodson

  We’ll leave now, so that this moment will remain a perfect memory. . . . Let it be our song, and think of me every time you hear it.

  —Betty Smith,

  A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

  1

  We think they took my papi.

  It’s over now. Or maybe it isn’t. Maybe, even as I sit on my bed in the dying light of the late afternoon, it’s beginning again. Maybe Ms. Laverne is looking over the new class list, her finger moving down the row of names. Maybe her, she is thinking. And him. And her. But it won’t be the same. It won’t ever be the six of us together again.

  We think they took my papi.

  My uncle is a musician and a storyteller. He says the hardest part of telling a story is finding the beginning. I’ve pulled the voice recorder from my closet and have it sitting on the middle of my bed now. When I press play, Esteban’s voice fills my room. It is scratchy and faraway- sounding, but still, Esteban is here again and all of us are sitting in our small circle in a place we called the ARTT room.

  Nobody knows where he’s at.

  Outside, a blue jay perches on the edge of a branch. Ailanthus tree. Tree of Heaven. Ms. Laverne taught us that. It’s the same tree the girl in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn saw from her fire escape. The thing about that tree was it could grow anywhere. And keep growing. And that was the metaphor: that even when things got really hard for everyone in that story—even when the dad died and the mom had to scrub more and more floors to make money, even when the kids didn’t have anything to eat for days and the apartment was freezing—the tree kept growing. The main character, her name was Francie— she was like that tree. Ms. Laverne said that all of us—Esteban, Tiago, Holly, Amari, Ashton and even me—we’re like that tree too.

  My uncle is moving out tomorrow. He’s really the only parent I’ve ever known. He says, This is a beginning. He says, Now you’ll have two houses to go to. He says, You’re twelve now, Haley. You’re ready.

  But I’m not ready.

  This afternoon, I miss everything.

  I miss my uncle even though he is upstairs packing. I miss the ARTT room, I miss Holly and Amari arguing and Ashton pushing his hair away from his forehead. This afternoon, I miss Tiago’s dreams of the sea and Esteban’s poems and all the stories we finally trusted each other enough to tell. I miss the beginning of our story together. And the deep middle of it.

  Once there were six of us. Once we circled around each other, and listened. Or maybe what matters most is that we were heard.

  Downstairs, my father is playing the piano—soft, sad notes floating up from the living room. The piano is old—found on the street a few blocks away the day my father moved back home. My father, uncle and three other men lifted it up the stairs, then had to remove the door to get it inside. It’s an upright—scratched wood and yellowing keys. My father took a whole day tuning it, and now the notes move through the house, dipping down at the end like tears. Rising up like prayer. Upstairs, I can hear my uncle moving from dresser to bed and back again and I know he is neatly folding shirts and sweaters into his suitcase. Most of his stuff is already downstairs. Boxes line the hall by the front door. His favorite chair is draped with a blanket. His guitars are stacked in their cases beside it. Tomorrow, he will move to Manhattan and start his new life. I’ll be the bachelor I was always meant to be, he said. Then, seeing the look on my face I failed at hiding, he added—And I’ll be back every single Sunday to spend time with my most favorite person in the world.

  I don’t remember a life without my uncle in it.

  In two weeks, I’ll begin seventh grade. My best friend, Holly, will be there. But there will be holes where Ashton, Amari, Tiago and Esteban once were.

  We think they took my papi.

  I play the first words of Esteban’s story over and over as my father’s song lifts up to my room, as my uncle packs above me, as the blue jay perches in the Ailanthus tree. As the world keeps on spinning.

  2

  That first week of September, the rain wouldn’t stop. Rivers ran down along the curbs, and at
the corner near our school, cars had stalled in the middle of the huge pools of rainwater. Even though it was still warm outside, our classroom felt damp and a little bit cold. Some of the kids were playing with those spinner things. One boy, whose name I forget, had his head down on his desk. I remember his dark curls, the way they fell over his arm. For some reason those curls spiraling over his arm and down onto the scratched-up desk made me sadder than anything. There were eight of us then. Our small class had come together because the school wanted to try something new: Could they put eight kids together in a room with one teacher and make something amazing? Eight special kids.

  Even though they didn’t say it, we knew there was something different about us. We had all been in the big classrooms before, and our learning felt like a race we were losing while the other kids sped ahead. We made believe we didn’t care that we learned differently, but we knew we did. And the school knew we did. The school knew we got laughed at and teased in the big yard and that some days we faked stomachaches and sore throats to stay home. It was only September, so no one knew if this experiment would work. But our teacher, Ms. Laverne, was tall and soft-spoken and patient. We loved her immediately. And the school itself had huge windows and brightly colored walls. My uncle said it was one of the best schools in the city. I had been there with Holly since first grade, so I didn’t really have any other schools to compare it to. But if nice teachers and rooms filled with lots of windows made something “the best,” then I guess it was true.

  By the end of that rainy week, the boy with the curls had moved away and another girl’s mom had come in and fussed about her daughter being smarter than those children while Ms. Laverne shushed her and guided her and her daughter gently out of the room. The girl looked like she wanted to sink into the floor and disappear. We never saw her again, but sometimes I wonder what it would have been like if she had gotten a chance to be a part of the ARTT room, if she’d gotten to hear what we heard, see what we saw. After she and the curly-haired boy left, only Ms. Laverne and the six of us remained.

  An hour after class started on that Friday, Esteban came in, his head down, his hair slicked wet against his forehead, his Yankees cap dripping with rain. He walked straight to his seat without looking at the rest of us. I watched him sink into his seat so sadly and heavily, it felt like the whole room shivered. His jacket was way too big for him, the shoulders hanging down his arms, the sleeves falling over his hands. I didn’t know Esteban yet. I didn’t know anyone but Holly, really. But I wanted to go over to him, hug him hard. I didn’t care how dripping wet he was. No one should ever have to look that sad.

  Do you have a late pass for me, Esteban? Ms. Laverne asked. She was standing at the front of the room, her arm stretched out toward the smart board. I don’t remember what was on it, maybe a globe. Our tiny group that year was a fifth/sixth grade class—this too was a school experiment.

  Is everything okay? Ms. Laverne’s dark brown face was crisscrossed with worry.

  Esteban shook his head. I don’t have a pass, he said, his voice breaking. We think they took my papi. Nobody knows where he’s at. He put his head down on his desk, his face turned toward the window.

  Ms. Laverne went over to Esteban’s desk and bent toward him, her hand on his back. They spoke softly to each other. Maybe they spoke for five minutes. Maybe it was an hour, I don’t remember. That was a long time ago. So much can change in a minute, an hour, a year.

  3

  While Ms. Laverne talked to Esteban about his father that morning, I thought about mine. I thought about handcuffs. I thought about fathers being taken away. I thought about uncles coming to the rescue and mothers gone.

  The memory is mostly shadows now—my father’s pale hands hanging from silver handcuffs. The cops pushing his head down into the police car. My uncle coming to me and lifting me up into his arms. I was three years old.

  When my uncle first came to live with me, I was afraid. It was this vague fear around the edges of myself. Whenever I got real quiet in class, Ms. Laverne knew why. As I watched Esteban that morning, I felt it, the fear coming around the corner, finding me. Finding both of us.

  I stared over at him. I wanted to give Esteban the same sign—my pinky pointing toward him while my thumb pointed toward me. I wanted to say, I know that thing, Esteban. I’ve looked out the window that same way.

  Ms. Laverne turned from Esteban and told us to read quietly to ourselves. We took our books from our bags and opened them, but I don’t know if any of us read a single word. The whole world felt wide open suddenly. Like it wanted to swallow us. I heard him tell Ms. Laverne, I’m scared. I’m so, so scared.

  When the lunch bell rang, Esteban stayed behind. I wanted to touch his shoulder as I walked out and say, It won’t always feel like the first day. It won’t always feel this bad. But I didn’t. I let the words hang in my throat until Holly grabbed my hand and pulled me down the hall with her.

  Behind us, I heard Amari say, E, what’s going on? Talk to me, bruh.

  4

  If there’s one thing I do remember as clear as if it happened an hour ago, it’s the afternoon when Ms. Laverne said to us, Put down your pencils and come with me. It was the end of September and we had been taking a spelling test. Esteban had been absent for days, and when he finally returned, Ms. Laverne asked him if he was up to doing some work and he nodded.

  It helps me forget for a little while, he said.

  Forget what? Amari asked.

  That nobody knows where they took him. And now we’re packing up everything, Esteban said. Because if they took him, maybe they’re going to take us too.

  I turned back to my test. I didn’t want to think about fathers. Mine had been in prison for eight years by then. In the last letter we’d gotten, he said he wasn’t sure what would happen with his parole. If he got it, he didn’t know exactly when he’d be coming home. I remember zero about living with him. Every good thing that happened had happened with my uncle. I couldn’t imagine a different life. Didn’t want to imagine it. Not for me. Not for anyone.

  I was stuck on the word holiday. Did it have one l or two? My spelling had always been bad, but in Ms. Laverne’s class it didn’t matter so much because we were all at different levels in one thing or another. The words you miss just tell me what you don’t yet know, Ms. Laverne always said. It says nothing about who you are. For some reason that made me feel better. I was eleven years old. What eleven-year-old didn’t know how to spell holliday?

  Put down your pencils and come with me.

  The six of us stood up. Our school uniforms were white shirts and dark blue pants or skirts. We could wear any jackets, shoes and tights we wanted. I had worn blue-and-white-striped tights that day. Holly’s tights had red stars on them. When we stood next to each other in the school yard that morning, our stars and stripes echoed the flag waving from the pole above us. We had spent the minutes before the bell rang dancing around it while Holly sang that old song about having a hammer, I’d hammer out danger, I’d hammer out a warning . . .

  We stood next to our desks and waited for Ms. Laverne to tell us what to do next. Amari pulled his hoodie over his head, then quickly pulled it off again, the way he sometimes did when he was nervous. Amari was beautiful. His skin was so dark, you could almost see the color blue running beneath it. His eyes were dark too. Dark like there was smoke behind his pupils. Dark and serious and . . . infinite. In that fifth/sixth grade class, I didn’t know how to say any of this. I wanted only to look at him. And look at him.

  Take a picture, it lasts longer, Amari said to me in such a cranky way, it almost brought me to tears. Ashton smirked, then pushed his hair away from his forehead and held his hand there.

  She doesn’t want a picture of you, Holly said. Bad enough we have to look at you five days a week. She had left her desk and was heading over to the classroom library.

  Holly, back to your desk, Ms. Laverne said. I want yo
u all to take your books. You won’t be coming back here today.

  We all gathered our stuff and followed her into the hallway.

  Ms. Laverne took out her phone and said, Smile, people. In the photo, Holly and I have our fingers linked together, our tights looking crazier than anything. Amari has his hood halfway on and halfway off, and Tiago, Esteban and Ashton are all looking away from the camera. The picture is taped to my refrigerator now. We all look so young in it, our cheeks puffing out with baby fat, our uniform shirts untucked, Tiago’s sneakers untied.

  We walked down the hall behind Ms. Laverne, her heels softly clicking. I thought about how maybe one day I’d grow up to wear black shoes with small heels that clicked as I walked down a hall. And have students following behind who were a little bit in love with me.

  Two small kids came running down the hall, but when they saw Ms. Laverne, they stopped and started walking so slowly, I almost laughed.

  Esteban pulled his knapsack onto his shoulder and held it with both hands.

  You okay, bro? Amari put his hand on Esteban’s arm.

  Nah, Esteban said. Not really.

  Amari moved his arm over Esteban’s shoulder. And kept it there.

  5

  When we got to Room 501, Ms. Laverne opened the door and held it for us. Nobody knew what to do, so we just stood there. The room was bright and smelled like it had just been cleaned with the same oil soap my uncle used on our floors. Back when me and Holly were in third grade, it had been the art room, but then someone gave our school enough money to open up a whole art studio in the basement, so now this was just a room we passed by sometimes and said to each other, Remember when that used to be the art room?

  Welcome to Room 501, Ms. Laverne said.

  Holly ran in ahead and the rest of us followed and looked around.