“Nothing.” She sat down beside me with her knees pulled under her chin. “Just my stupid parents. They know you and I started hanging out a few weeks ago and they were worried about that stupid article in the newspaper.”
“It’s no big deal,” I said. “They’re just being parents.” I didn’t let her know I was upset because I’d never heard what other people thought of my family. I mean, I suspected things. It’s just hard to hear it come from someone’s mouth unfiltered because they don’t know you’re around.
Gracie sniffed, so I patted her knee and kissed her. After I pulled away, she looked at me, her eyes shiny with tears, and said, “Adam, I love you.”
I gave her a blank stare, I’m sure, because she finally looked down into her lap and said, “I just want you to know that.”
“Thank you,” I said. I couldn’t say it back, but I took it, the word love, and placed it beside sunflower and ad infinitum. As soon as I did that, a slight pulse began to beat a rhythm against my leg. I looked down and saw the outlines of Gracie’s heart-shaped rose quartz in my pocket, thudding and thudding, growing soft and warm. Each thud was the word love, over and over, and it beat against my leg from then on.
Gracie didn’t spend the night in the closet. She was afraid her parents would come in and want to apologize or expect an apology. That’s how things worked in her family. In mine we didn’t apologize, not even when we knew we were wrong or had been mean to each other, so I really didn’t believe Gracie until about half an hour after she ran upstairs someone came knocking. She scrambled up from the closet floor and grabbed a pair of pajamas hanging from the back of the door so that when her mother came in a second later, it looked like she’d been in there getting ready for bed.
“Grace,” said Mrs. Highsmith. “Are you okay, honey?”
“What do you want?”
“Your father’s very sorry, sweetie. Please come down and watch television with him and let things smooth over.”
“I’m tired,” said Gracie. In the mirror, I could see her standing beside her bed, clutching her pajamas to her chest.
“Well, come down and say goodnight at least,” Mrs. Highsmith pleaded. “You know your father won’t sleep until he knows the two of you are on good terms.”
Gracie sighed. “Fine,” she said. “I’ll be down in a minute.”
When her mother left, she came back in the closet. “I’ll have to stay in my bed tonight,” she said. “But listen. In the morning, my parents and I will leave to eat breakfast with my aunt and uncle in Youngstown. Then we’ll probably go shopping or see a movie. That’s what we do on Saturdays. But you and I have to be in Youngstown right after midnight to catch the one A.M. train. So I need you to do a few things while we’re gone.”
“Sure,” I said. “Whatever you want.”
“Okay,” said Gracie, “so this is what you need to do.”
In the morning the Highsmiths left like Gracie said and, after it felt safe, I came out of the closet and went into her parents’ bedroom to open the middle dresser drawer like she’d told me. Inside were piles of Mr. Highsmith’s folded white underwear, but as soon as I pulled up the top layer, I found the white envelope like Gracie said I would. It was slim so I didn’t expect much money to be inside, but when I sat on their king-sized bed and shook the money out onto the bedspread, it was fifty and hundred dollar bills that drifted out. Fifteen hundred dollars. I’d never seen so much money in my life.
I tried to figure out how much to take. Gracie hadn’t been specific. I needed to leave some so Mr. Highsmith wouldn’t notice, but I had to take enough to make sure we’d be okay. Five hundred, I decided. That left a decent amount in the envelope, so if Mr. Highsmith opened it to look inside he’d see enough bills to think nothing had been tampered with. Five hundred dollars would be enough, I figured.
After stuffing the money next to Gracie’s heart in my front pocket, I returned the rest, then put the envelope back neatly, tucking down the folded underwear as if I were Mrs. Highsmith herself. That had been simple enough.
For the rest of the day, I picked at leftovers in the refrigerator and watched television until it was time to hide again. When the Highsmiths came back that night, I was asleep on the closet floor. Gracie left me like that until it was near midnight, when she shook me awake and said, “Adam, it’s time. Come on.”
She had packed a purple backpack full of clothes and food and some money of her own. She slid it on her back and lifted her finger to her lips as she walked to the door. I followed, stepping lightly down the staircase, through the living room and kitchen, out the back door.
“What now?” I whispered, and Gracie grinned, her teeth glistening in the moonlight. She held up a set of keys and they shone as bright as her teeth.
She got into her mother’s car and put it in neutral. Then we pushed it while holding on to the doors. Gracie steered the wheel with one hand and when we were on the road, she got in and I pushed the car a while longer just to be safe.
“Far enough,” said Gracie finally, and when she turned the ignition, I jumped in too. Then she flicked the headlights on, shifted the car out of neutral, and suddenly the rose quartz in my pocket began to thud fast and hard. “Hold on,” she said, pushing down on the pedal. And like that we drove out of town, into the dark of an unknown country.
A PLACE YOU’VE NEVER BEEN
WE DROVE OUT OF TOWN IN LESS THAN FIVE MINUTES, then dipped through Vienna, the next town over, small like ours, with the same town square and the same cannon from World War Two sitting on the green, the same paint-flaked band shell no band played in anymore and the same Super Duper grocery store on the corner where everyone stopped to get gas on Sunday evenings, the same back roads running like capillaries from rural routes to main streets and the same churches with the same people in them on Sundays, praising or kneeling or crossing themselves, the same fields of corn that, the farther out we drove, slowly began to fade until they completely disappeared.
Past the local airport, this sorry excuse for a terminal in the middle of a hayfield, the landscape began to change and we entered Liberty, a town where nothing but fast food restaurants and shopping plazas sprawled as far as I could see. According to Gracie, this was where the Jewish people in our part of Ohio lived. Well, here and Cleveland, she corrected herself a moment later. I tried to notice if anything looked particularly Jewish, but I wasn’t sure what Jewish things looked like.
Then Gracie took a left on a road called Gypsy Lane and a right on Fifth Avenue, and that’s when I began to realize when roads are called lanes, avenues and boulevards, you know you’re no longer in Kansas. Trees and lampposts lined the streets and just like that, we had entered Youngstown.
As we passed apartment complexes and houses that looked like Spanish villas and gothic mansions, I thought of Mrs. Motes teaching The Fall of the House of Usher and wondered how long it would take for those places to fall apart. A park appeared on our left, a square of trees and playgrounds and tennis courts like an oasis in the middle of all those huge Victorians, taking up an entire block. And just across the way was a huge building with stone pillars holding up the roof and wide steps that led down to the sidewalk. I said, “That building looks Greek, not Jewish,” and Gracie said it was Stambaugh Auditorium, where she and her family sometimes went to see plays.
Then we drove down a hill and were suddenly surrounded by the college campus. It wasn’t much. Not like I’d thought it would be. Four or five story buildings without decoration, not classy like the one that looked Greek. I’d seen advertisements on television for the university since I was a little kid, but it looked bigger on TV than in real life. I blinked and we had passed all the way through campus. On the other side, in the downtown, there wasn’t much to see either. Mostly the buildings looked like they’d been built a hundred years ago and were ready to fall down. Like the Wilkinson farm, they were waiting for a fire to be lit.
We stopped at a red light on the corner of Commerce and Fifth, where a f
ew people roamed the streets, drifting out of bars or walking aimlessly, bumming cigarettes or money. One guy sat against the wall of the city playhouse, under the Stage Door sign, and although I’d never seen a real homeless person before, as soon as I saw him, I knew that’s what he was. He sat there, chin tucked against his chest, like he was asleep or drugged out of his senses, and then—blink—the homeless guy disappeared and there was this kid there instead.
This kid wore dirty clothes, ripped up jeans, and had the yellow hood of his sweatshirt pulled over his head like a boxer. I watched him for a moment until suddenly he pulled off his hood and looked up at me. When our eyes met, my gut twisted. I had no word for this feeling. It was like déjà vu, only in the opposite direction. Because what I saw when that kid pulled down his hood was me.
Then the light shifted, Gracie pushed on the gas and I looked at her for a moment to see if she’d seen that other me. Her eyes were fixed on the road in front of us, though. I wasn’t sure whether I wished she’d have seen me too, or if it was better that I’d been the only one to notice.
We crossed a green iron bridge and entered an area that seemed to be nothing but empty parking lots, tunnels and bars with motorcycles parked out front and leather-vested men and women going in and out of them. Gracie drove through a tunnel, pulled into a parking lot soon after and said, “We’ve got to hurry. The train will be here in ten minutes.”
Not spotting any tracks, I said, “Why don’t you drive us to the station then?”
Gracie was already getting out of the car, though, starting to run. “It’s down the street,” she called over her shoulder. “I don’t want to leave the car near the station. It’ll give them a clue to where we’ve gone. Come on!”
I was amazed by the way her mind worked. I was really lucky, I thought, to have been given the word love by someone like Gracie. If she knew what she was doing when it came to making plans like this—to run away and make it possible—then she must have known what she was doing when she gave me that word.
It was strange in this place: a weird mix of concrete and nature. The sky spread out above us like carbon paper, but the streetlamps drowned out all the starlight. On one side of us the downtown skyline loomed on the horizon, its rooftops jutting up and down like a row of rotten teeth. On the other side an oil-black river flowed, its surface moonlight-rippled. Trees lined the riverside, their leafless branches reaching toward the sky like the arms of beggars.
Gracie had a few strides on me, but I caught up with no problem. She didn’t know how to pace herself. She pushed too fast for too long, so her breath was unsteady. When we ran back into the tunnel we’d driven through, her Doc Martens echoed. Clip-clop, clip-clop. Like a horse and carriage. “Slow down,” I shouted, my voice echoing with her boots. But when she looked back her eyes were narrowed.
“We don’t have time!” she hissed over her shoulder.
Once we left the tunnel, we crossed the street and ran down a little drive with a sign at the entrance: Youngstown’s B&O. And as we ran down the curve of the drive, the building became visible: two stories of whitish-brown brick set into the hillside where the rails rested on their ties.
I stopped at the front doors, which had frosted designs around their borders and log chains wrapped through the brass handles. The place looked pretty ritzy. When I cupped my hands together and pressed my face to the glass, all I could see was the shadow of a circular bar and some stools surrounding it. “The downstairs is a restaurant,” said Gracie, breathing hard. “Upstairs is where we wait to get on.”
I followed her up a set of attached steps that led to the rails on the hillside. “The doors upstairs will be open so we can wait inside,” she said. “There’ll be a security guard there and some bathrooms, but there aren’t enough people using this stop to make it worth opening a station with actual Amtrak people working. My dad used to work here, but they shut it down and moved him to Cleveland.”
We reached the top of the stairs and a moment later a whistle blew, piercing the night. We could see the round light in its grill a ways in the distance. We stood there with our backpacks casually slung over our shoulders, acting normal, and I thought for an instant, We’re going to do it, we’re going to get out, but soon a security guard came out of the building to ask if we were here for the train and I closed my eyes for a moment before turning around to face him, wondering why the hell people always had to be in a kid’s business.
Gracie looked away from him, so the guard turned to me. I nodded and offered him a smile, hoping that might make us less suspicious. He was a little black guy with a security badge on his forearm, like a police badge, which made me anxious. His shadow twitched, shuffling around on the platform, reaching for the gun holster at its hip. He had a walkie-talkie. The walkie-talkie worried me too. Especially when it squawked and a voice asked questions I couldn’t make out. I thought he might radio someone about two kids trying to catch a train without their parents, so I decided I’d better do something to make him my friend for the next five minutes.
“Does the train have a dining car?” I asked.
He nodded and said that it did. That was a mistake on my part, though, because now he felt like he could ask us even more questions. “You kids here alone?” he asked. But before I could answer, Gracie turned back to him again and took over.
“No,” she said. “Our parents are down in the lot, waiting for the train to pick us up. Our mom’s in a wheelchair.” She said this like my mom was her mom, which made me feel like she was trying to steal my mom, but I got over it pretty fast. “It would be too hard for my dad to get her up here,” she explained. “We’re visiting our grandparents for Thanksgiving.”
“That’s nice,” said the guard. He peered around the corner, searching for the wheelchair-bound mother waiting in a car with her dutiful husband that Gracie had brought into our story. But when the guard looked back he said, “You say they’re down there?”
Gracie and I nodded.
“Well, I don’t see a soul down in that lot,” he told us. “I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to have you kids come inside until we can figure all this out.”
That was it, I thought. It was over. In another minute the train would pull in and we wouldn’t be on it when it pulled out. I was already imagining my parents coming to get me, my mother’s hurt-filled face, the angry dip in my dad’s forehead, Lucy trailing behind, shaking her head in disappointment while her shadow gloated. I suddenly felt like I was going to throw up and put a hand on my churning stomach. But while I was getting ready to give up, Gracie opened her mouth and said, “That’s not necessary, sir. They’re down there. Really. We’ll get them for you if that’s what’s needed.”
The guard gave Gracie a suspicious look, one eyebrow arched, torn between distrust and not wanting to get in trouble if he was wrong. I saw the round light of our train as it drew nearer, felt the tremor in the tracks. I hoped he’d side with not wanting to get in trouble like most people. After a moment, though, he spoke into his walkie-talkie. “Yeah, this is Gordon over at the B&O. I got a couple of kids here saying they’re supposed to be going to visit their grandparents for Thanksgiving and their parents are down in the lot, but I don’t see anyone down there. Can you send an officer over?”
The radio fizzed and crackled, then a voice came out. “Sure thing, Gordon. Hold tight and someone will be there in a minute.”
“Thanks,” Gordon radioed back.
“No problem,” said the radio.
“Sorry, kids,” he told us, “but if your story checks out, we’ll still have you with your grandfolks on time.”
“Thanks,” I said lamely, tipping back and forth on my heels. Gracie winced at me like I was stupid. And when Gordon went to put his walkie-talkie on his belt, she nodded toward the steps we’d come up and then in the next moment she was sprinting down them. I looked at Gordon, who’d gone wide-eyed, and said, “Don’t worry, I’ll get her!” and was off and running too, leaving him at the top shouting at us
to come back.
Before I reached the bottom, the staircase was rumbling and by the time I reached the lot, the ground trembled beneath me. When I looked up, our train came thundering out of the east, sliding down the tracks behind Gordon like a silver curtain. When it came to a halt and stopped squealing, I heard Gracie calling ahead of me.
“This way, Adam!” she shouted. She was already at the other end of the lot, running back to where we had ditched her mother’s car. I ran after her, watched her enter the flickering tunnel before me. Clip-clop, clip-clop, her boots echoed again, and when I caught up to her in the empty parking lot she was already in the car turning the ignition. In the distance I heard the whine of police sirens and got in fast. Gracie put the car in gear as soon as I was in, and we took off with my door still swinging. First down a side street, then another and another, left and right and left again, until we were far from the station, lost in the labyrinth of look-alike streets in the suburbs of Youngstown.
When we finally made our way to a street Gracie recognized, she pulled the car over for a moment, leaned her head against the wheel and said, “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck. I can’t believe this. Fuck!”
“Calm down,” I said. “It’s not the end of the world yet.”
“But what are we going to do, Adam?” she said, her voice rising with each syllable. “We’re fucked. That’s it. That’s all. That train was our one chance out of here and we blew it.”
“We didn’t blow it,” I said. “Besides, we got out. That’s something.”
“Who died and made you an optimist?” she said.
“That’s not what people usually call me,” I said. Coming from Gracie, it sort of made me want to smile. “By the way,” I said instead, “where are we?”
Gracie nodded toward an old Victorian house across the street from where we were parked and said, “That’s where my aunt and uncle live.”
She’d been so angry with herself but suddenly at the mention of her aunt and uncle’s house, she dropped into some hazy field of memory and began telling me stories. It was as if she’d been saving them for some other time but wasn’t sure if she’d have that chance now, so they all tumbled out of her mouth at top speed. If it had been my brother, I’d have thought he was high, but Gracie had something high about her naturally. She told me about how her dad sings opera in the shower, but never anytime else. About how her mother threatens to leave when she thinks Mr. Highsmith isn’t paying her enough attention. About how her aunt and uncle are drunk all the time and spend their weekends in alcoholic stupors and you can practically see the fumes exit their mouths when they talk. About how every Saturday she and her mom and dad go to visit them and her parents drink with them and give her money to take the bus into town to see a movie while the adults play cards and drink their heads off. I interrupted her at that point and said, “You mean like, before we left, when you and your parents went to Youngstown, you were at the movies by yourself?”
One For Sorrow Page 12