“You could have tried. Did you even try?”
“I was about to. When they picked me up.”
“Don’t you think that’s a little late?”
Allie’s rage rose to the surface, and she knew she would let it out now. It had to get out. Allie had no choice, no way to control it.
“I was pretty pissed at you, too, Mom. How could you do this to me? Do you have any idea what kind of hell my life turned into when they dragged you out of our house? I know it was Dad’s idea. I know that because I know him. And I know you. He’s the one who got greedy. But you went along with him. Why did you go along with it? Why didn’t you just say no? Tell him to get another accountant and leave you out of it? Then he’d be in jail, and I’d be home with you right now. But no, you have to do whatever he says. And I’m just so mad at you for that!”
Allie heard something like a sigh on the other end of the line. Or it could have been a soft sob.
“I know, honey. I’m mad at me, too.”
Allie stood a moment in that dingy hall, feeling her rage drain away. It had to. It had to go now. Because her mother was no longer a brick wall at which to direct that rage. She had gone back to being a wounded human, with feelings. Allie couldn’t bring herself to hurt her anymore.
“Can I ask you a question?” Allie asked her mom.
A silence, during which Allie could picture her mother squeezing her eyes closed. Because that’s what her mom did when she sensed something coming. Something she knew she didn’t want.
“I suppose.”
“Do we still have a house? When this is over, and you get out, and Dad gets out, do we even still have a house to go back to?”
“Yes. It’s not strictly official. Yet. Technically the investigation is still open. Still ongoing. The IRS found a bunch of unreported income, and they seized the boat and most of what we had in the bank to cover it. Technically they’re still looking for hidden income. But I happen to know there’s no more for them to find. So we should still have a house.”
“Oh,” Allie said. “Good. That’s good.” And surprising, she thought. She didn’t say it.
Neither one of them spoke for a strange and uncomfortable length of time.
“Mom?” Allie asked after what seemed like minutes. “Are you still there?”
“Yes, I’m here. But I don’t have much more time. I’m getting signals.”
“I’m sorry I yelled at you,” Allie said, tears suddenly brimming over and running down her face.
“Likewise. Honey, I have to go now. We’ll talk soon.”
“Right. Soon.”
Then the line was silent, dead, and Allie was holding the receiver at arm’s length, staring at it.
She hung up and followed the guard back into the cafeteria, head hanging, doing her best to think nothing at all. More importantly, to feel nothing at all.
She sat at a table, on the very end, one bench seat away from any other girls. The guard came and looked over her shoulder.
“Why aren’t you eating? Not hungry?”
“I’m starving to death, actually. But I’m a vegan. And there’s nothing here I can eat.”
The woman shook her head and wandered off.
So that’s it, Allie thought. I’m starving and no one cares.
What might have been three minutes later, or maybe five, just as the other girls began to clear their trays and shuffle out of the room, a tray appeared in front of Allie’s face. She turned to see the older girl who had tried to serve Allie lunch just before her difficult phone call.
On the tray was a plate with a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on white bread, potato chips, and carrot sticks. Next to the plate Allie saw a glass of what looked like apple juice.
Allie hated white bread, and she avoided jelly because it was mostly refined sugar. And the addition of the potato chips and fruit juice made for a very high-sugar, high-carb meal. But none of that mattered now. Because she could eat this food. She could actually eat it.
“Thank you!” she said. “I can eat this!”
The girl smiled, at one corner of her mouth only, and set the tray on the table in front of Allie.
“Thank you!” Allie called again as she walked away.
Then she scarfed down every bite of the food. Every crumb.
Every last carb.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Actually . . . They’re Alpacas
Polyester Lady showed up with a dress in a paper bag.
“I want you to put this on for court,” she said.
She pulled it out and showed it to Allie, who immediately felt most of the blood drain from her face.
“Oh,” Allie said. “So that’s why you asked me my size.”
“I think it helps to dress up a little for the judge.”
“It’s so pink, though.”
And it has polka dots, she thought, but did not add. Truthfully, it was the most outrageously horrible dress Allie could ever remember seeing. But was she really going to go in front of a judge in jeans and a T-shirt—probably not even clean—or a prison-issued jumpsuit? Just because the dress was not her style?
“It won’t hurt you to look a little girly and innocent just for one day.”
“I guess not.”
Actually, Allie figured it would hurt plenty. But it wouldn’t kill her.
Polyester jiggled Allie’s elbow, which Allie took to mean her turn had arrived. She had been trying to listen to the proceedings—to the judge ruling on other cases involving other minors—but her brain would not hold still.
Then Allie was on her feet and walking toward the judge’s bench, her social worker at her right elbow. They stepped into a spill of sunlight from the one courtroom window. It made Allie wince and narrow her eyes, which she didn’t figure helped the girly, innocent look much. Apparently the dress would have to pull off the job alone.
“State your name for the court,” someone said.
It wasn’t the judge who spoke. She had been looking at the judge and his lips hadn’t moved. A bailiff, maybe? Allie turned her head to search for the owner of the voice, but the sun glared into her eyes, and she had to blink them closed.
“Me?” she whispered to Polyester Lady.
“Yes, you. Now.”
“Alberta Keyes,” Allie said loudly.
The judge had his gaze trained down, reading something on the desk in front of him. They stood in silence for what felt like several minutes, allowing him his time to read.
Allie’s heart pounded almost painfully, and when he looked into her eyes it skipped a beat.
“So. Miss Keyes. I’m getting the impression you feel you had extenuating circumstances that caused you to run away.”
“Yes, sir. My roommate at the group home was sort of . . . vicious. She was going to hurt me. A lot.”
“Didn’t you consider reporting this to the home supervisor, or your social worker?”
“I told the supervisor, and she asked if I wanted to report her to the police, and I did. Why do you think she wanted to hurt me so much?”
“Ms. Manheim?” the judge asked, raising his gaze to Allie’s social worker.
So that’s her name, Allie thought. How did I miss that?
“I really think, Your Honor, that if Alberta is placed in a proper foster home she won’t run away again. She had some pretty frightening experiences out there, and I think she understands now what can happen. She used bad judgment in a stressful situation—I’ll be the first to admit that—but she’s a smart enough girl to learn from her mistakes. That’s my opinion, anyway. And I want to add, Your Honor, that I share some of the blame for this mess. I couldn’t find her an emergency foster. I should have taken her to juvenile detention until I could. Or at least until I could check her into a group home more properly. But she was scared to go to detention, even for one night. She begged me to take her to the group home instead. So I did, thinking I was giving her a break. But I think I was wrong to do it. I think my judgment was off in this c
ase. Because she was in the beginnings of this trouble before I could even come back the next day and check on her. I’d hate to see her suffer for my mistake any more than she already has.”
The judge sat back and scratched his mostly bald head, then smoothed his traces of hair, as if there were enough of it to be messy. He looked around the courtroom.
“Anybody else connected to Miss Keyes here today to speak on her behalf?”
“No, Your Honor,” Ms. Manheim said. “Both her parents are—”
“I’d like to say something.”
Allie’s head whipped around to find the source of the familiar voice. And there she was. She wore a pink top as if in solidarity. Her thin white hair looked freshly washed and combed.
“Bea!” Allie shouted.
The judge banged his gavel once, then pointed it at Allie in a warning.
“Sorry,” Allie mumbled.
“And you are?” the judge asked Bea.
Meanwhile Bea was making her way up the aisle, looking sore and stiff.
“I didn’t say you should approach the bench,” the judge added.
Bea looked up and stopped. She was just a few inches from Allie’s left elbow now. Allie wanted to lean over and ask how she knew about the hearing, how she found Allie in this place, but she didn’t want to be gavel-warned again.
“Who are you, now?” the judge asked Bea.
“Beatrice Ann Kraczinsky. And yes, I have something I want to say. This little girl is so honest, when I met her I couldn’t even stand her she was so honest. I kept trying to put her out of my van for being so straitlaced, and if you lock her up, then the world just doesn’t make a darned bit of sense anymore. If you lock her up, you have to lock up everybody else in the world, too, because she’s more honest than all of them. It’s like a joke that anybody would blame any of this on her. There she was minding her own business and trying to grow up, but her parents broke the law, both at the same time. You’re supposed to put her in a foster home if that happens, but I guess you got busy and didn’t have one. So you put her in this place where somebody was trying to kill her, and now you say it’s illegal to try to get away from being killed. You can’t make that illegal. People have to stay safe, and you can’t tell them they’re breaking the law if they—”
“Wait,” the judge interjected. “Slow down, please, Ms. Kraczinsky. What is your relationship to Miss Keyes?”
“Oh. That. Well. I’m sort of her grandmother.”
“Can you explain to me how you can be ‘sort of’ someone’s grandmother?”
“Sure I will. It’s like when your family has this Uncle Fred, and then later you find out he’s really no blood relation to your family at all. But meanwhile he was just as good an uncle as all your other uncles. Maybe better.”
“So if you’re so close to this girl and her family, why didn’t you take her in?”
“Oh. I actually . . . hadn’t quite met her yet. At the time.”
“I see. At least, I think I see. It’s a confusing load of information. I hope you realize, Ms. Kraczinsky, that the point of this proceeding is not to decide whether to punish Miss Keyes. We’re trying to decide whether she’ll be safe in a foster home, or whether she’s still a flight risk.”
“She’s safe,” Bea said, her voice argumentative and hard. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you. She’s smart. She’s not stupid, that girl. You’re talking about her like she can’t even think for herself, but she has a good brain. Keep her where she’s okay, she’ll stay put.”
“Thank you, Ms.—”
Bea opened her mouth to talk again, but the judge banged his gavel. Twice. Allie jumped.
“Thank you, Ms. Kraczinsky. I think I have all I need.”
Silence. Nothing and no one moved.
“You may take your seat now,” the judge said, pressing the bridge of his nose as though his head hurt.
Bea moved out of Allie’s peripheral vision. Allie didn’t watch her go because she was too focused on the judge. On what he would say and do next.
The judge leveled Allie’s social worker with a serious stare.
“You have a suitable placement for Miss Keyes this time?”
“We have a foster home lined up, yes.”
“All right. Miss Keyes, I’m going to exercise my discretion and sentence you to time served. The few days you’ve spent in detention, waiting for this hearing, is all you’ll be asked to serve. But this ruling comes with a warning.”
Allie found herself staring at his pointed finger. It reminded her of the Greek gods they’d studied in school. Hadn’t one had the power to shoot lightning bolts from the end of a finger?
“If you let me down, and end up here in my courtroom again after another unauthorized foray into the world, my ruling will be very different, and you’ll be sorry you crossed me.”
For one shivery moment Allie thought about the man she’d ditched at the gas station in San Luis Obispo. The way he’d told her she’d be one sorry little girl if she ran. So many people using so many different forms of power to control her.
“Yes, Your Honor.”
Polyester Lady took her elbow and turned her, leading her away from the bench and toward the courtroom door.
Allie looked everywhere for Bea. But Bea was already gone.
“We have to stop and get your things from the detention facility,” Allie’s social worker told her on the drive.
Allie had forgotten the woman’s name again. The courtroom experience had felt dreamlike and foggy to Allie. Her world had seemed unfocused at the edges—probably a result of fear—and no part of that morning had tended to stick.
“I didn’t imagine the part where Bea showed up there,” Allie said. “Right?”
“Oh, no. You didn’t imagine it. She was there all right.”
“You don’t say that like it’s a good thing.”
A sigh. A half mile of silence.
“Look,” Polyester said. “We got through that. We got you no more detention. Let’s just look forward.”
“What I have at that juvie place is nothing. One set of clothes. Not even ones I like. A cheap toothbrush they gave me. Let’s just go to this foster home.”
“No, they have more of your things than that. I got a message on my voice mail. Two bags. Nice-looking soft bags, woven or embroidered with . . . llamas, I think they said. They have clothes in them, and one has an iPad and a phone, and what looks like some gold jewelry. Somebody dropped them off this morning.”
Allie opened her mouth, but was too overcome with emotion to speak for a moment. Manuela had been wrong. Bea had brought Allie’s things back. Hadn’t hocked the iPad or the phone. Hadn’t stolen the gold necklace.
“You okay?” Polyester Lady asked.
“Actually,” Allie said, “they’re alpacas. Yeah, we have to go get that stuff, then. That’s a lot of my stuff.”
“Should I even ask how you got all those things? Because just about everything you brought to New Beginnings you left behind there.”
“No. You definitely shouldn’t ask.”
They drove most of the rest of the way in silence. Allie was thinking that, actually, Manuela had been half-wrong. Bea hadn’t stolen Allie’s stuff. But she also hadn’t stayed around.
“Thank you for taking part of the blame,” Allie said. Right around the time she saw the detention facility looming.
“What I said in court, you mean?”
“Yeah. That. You could have said you did everything right and I messed up. You didn’t have to put it on yourself.”
“Sometimes we have to own our decisions. Good or bad.”
“Right,” Allie said. “I’m getting that. I thought I got that all along, my whole life. But it turns out I just didn’t have many hard decisions at the time.”
They pulled up in front of a house in Reseda in the San Fernando Valley. It was a big house, but plain. Grayish blue. It could have used a new coat of paint. But Allie had been told she somehow would be welcomed insi
de the place, so what did paint really matter?
Polyester Lady got out and opened her trunk while Allie pulled her two South American bags from the backseat.
“What’s all that?” Allie asked.
Her social worker was pulling two full-ish garbage bags out of her trunk and setting them on the curb in front of Allie’s new foster home.
“This is everything you left at New Beginnings.”
“Oh. Good. I kind of figured I’d never see that stuff again.”
Allie looked up to see a woman standing at the now-open door of the home and felt gripped with a whole new variety of fear. This woman in the doorway was Allie’s foster mom, and she was a complete and utter stranger. She could be kind. She could be deranged. She could be anything. But she was already the most important person in this next chapter of Allie’s life.
Allie sat in what was suddenly her new kitchen, drinking a glass of iced tea. When the woman looked away for any reason, Allie studied her. She seemed young. Or youngish, anyway. Late thirties. She had short dark hair. Creases on her forehead, maybe from the gravity of life.
Allie wanted to ask what motivated her to take in kids she’d never met before, but couldn’t think of a proper way to phrase such a question.
“Where are all these other kids you said live here?”
“It’s a school day,” the woman said. She had been introduced as Julie Watley, but Allie had no idea what it was proper to call her. “Tomorrow you’ll go, too.”
“But it’s so close to summer vacation. Just a few days, right?”
“Nine days, actually, for the high school. But you have to go. I’m sorry, but attendance in school is mandatory for the foster care system.”
“Okay,” Allie said. “Not a problem.”
She wanted to say thank you. She felt overwhelmed—almost crushed—by the weight of her gratitude to this woman. For taking her. For the simple act of wanting her. But she couldn’t seem to wrap the feeling into words.
“What do I call you?” Allie asked after a time, to break the silence.
Allie and Bea : A Novel Page 29