Songs for a Teenage Nomad

by Kim Culbertson

  “It’s Rob.”

  I swallow, my arms full of wet clothes. “Oh.” I stuff the clothes in the dryer, freeing a hand to grasp the phone. “Hi.” This is a first. The other ones never called.

  “Umm…” he pauses. I hear a horn honk, the whine of a distant siren. He must be in his car. “How’re things?”

  I roll my eyes. “Well, you know what, Rob? They’ve been better.” I push the start button on the dryer.

  “Is your mom there?”

  I don’t know where my mom is. When I got home from school today, she wasn’t curled in her usual chair or in bed. “No,” I tell him.

  “Oh.” His car radio plays soft classical music. What road is he driving on? What town is he in now?

  He sighs. “Listen, Calle. You’re a good kid. It’s not fair to you.”

  It’s the most I’ve ever heard Rob say in one breath. “Don’t feel sorry for me, Rob. I’ve done this before.”

  “Not that,” he says. “You know, she’ll never be able to hide completely from him. Not completely. He’ll find her. He always does.”

  What is he talking about? “Who?” I ask, turning and leaning against the rhythmic rocking of the dryer.

  On the other end, I can almost hear Rob go pale.

  “What are you talking about?” I ask.

  “Calle, damn,” he says. “Nothing. I’m sorry. I just…tell your mom I’m sorry.”

  He hangs up.

  ***

  “Calle!” calls a voice behind me.

  In the midst of my week-long fog, I turn, barely registering him.

  Sam stops, catching his breath. He has had to run to catch up to me. “Hey, are you okay?”

  I look around at our exposure, the middle of the quad bulging with students eating lunch. “Sure,” I say guardedly.

  He pauses and looks past me. “It’s just you seem upset. You haven’t said anything in class all week. I…is…is everything okay?”

  “Is everything okay with you?”

  His face darkens. “Better now.” He pauses. “You going to answer my question?”

  Without warning, a tear betrays me.

  “Hey.” He takes my arm. “What’s going on?”

  He steers me toward the alleyway between the math and English buildings, away from some stares I’ve started to attract. The sun doesn’t hit here; it is only damp and dirt and shadows. Perfect for us.

  I tell him about Rob leaving and watch his features slip into understanding, into worry. I’ve never told anyone this much before. I stop just short of telling him about Rob’s phone call, how strange he sounded. I haven’t even told Mom that Rob called—it was too weird, and she’s not ready. Besides, in the warm, Tide-scented air of the laundry room, the call didn’t even feel real.

  “What will you do?” Sam asks, when I seem to have finished.

  I shake my head. “I don’t know. She lost her job. We can’t afford the house.” I don’t say it out loud, the inevitable. I just say, “We’ll do what we always do.”

  Sam thinks for a minute and seems ready to say something. Then Amber rounds the corner. Always the princess of crappy timing.

  “Here you are, Samuel,” she says. Her eyes narrow at me, death slits, but she smiles at Sam, an almost computer-generated shift in her features. “Ashley said she saw you come back here. What on earth could you be doing?”

  Even though he isn’t overly close to me, he takes a shaky step backward. “Calle’s upset. We’re talking.”

  She sulks, bottom lip expertly out. “But you were going to help me with math. If I fail Treveli’s test, my parents will kill me. And we won’t be able to go to Trevor’s party.”

  She coils her arm through his and blinks up at him. I notice that she has a mascara blotch under her eye and a badly covered-up pimple on her chin. Girls like Amber almost never get pimples.

  “Oh, right.” Sam’s gaze slips from Amber to me. “I’ve got to help her with this test.”

  “Sure.” I wave him away, thankful that the tears have dried by now. “No problem.”

  Amber whisks him away before he can say anything, leaving me in the alleyway shadows.

  Telling him has only emptied me more.

  CHAPTER 19

  NEW BEGINNING

  …my mother and I sit on a red blanket on our new living-room floor; she has stopped crying, finally, and her face shines with this next step of our lives, the new walls around us far away from the house we shared with Ted Number 2. A San Diego sun low and warm through the curtainless windows, surrounded by a fortress of boxes, we eat Winchell’s donuts, listen to Tracy Chapman, and drink coffee from small white cups…

  The following morning, I wake to the sound of Ingrid Michaelson on the stereo and the smell of bacon. Bacon! The real stuff—no soy. I throw the covers off and climb out of bed. In the kitchen, my mother has made eggs and bacon and sourdough toast. She sets everything out on the table.

  “Morning, sleepyhead,” she says cheerily, kissing me on the forehead. She smells of clean jasmine soap and morning air. I notice the Bay View Foods bag. It’s only 7:45 a.m. She’s been up awhile. Shopping, apparently.

  “What’s going on?” I rub my eyes and settle into a chair. The bacon is crisp and salty and melts in my mouth. I eat another piece.

  “We’re moving,” she announces, pouring orange juice for us.

  The bacon suddenly tastes heavy on my tongue. “What?”

  Seeing the look on my face, she rushes on. “Not to another town. To an apartment.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  She takes a bite of toast that she has smeared with grape jelly. “Well, it all happened sort of fast.” She dabs at her mouth with her napkin. “You know your friend Sam?”

  “Yes.” What does he have to do with anything?

  “His dad called here. Yesterday. While you were at Drew’s.”

  Drew and I had spent most of the day assembling his photosynthesis project for biology. Finals are next week, and without the project, he won’t pass the class. “He called here?”

  My mother nods and sips her orange juice. “You’ll never believe it. His father offered me a job at Bay View. I start training today.”

  “He offered you a job?” I’m beginning to sound like Kandace Jones, the parrot cheerleader.

  “Yeah. Isn’t that great?”

  I nod to be encouraging. “It’s great.” Weird is what I really think it is.

  My mom finishes her scrambled eggs. “But we have to move to an apartment. Honey, eat your eggs.” She motions to my plate with her fork. “This place is just too expensive on one salary, even a decent one.”

  I nod again, spooning lukewarm eggs into my mouth. “And you already found one?” Usually we live in the moving van for a few days or a motel. It’s never an easy transition. This seems too easy.

  “Well, that’s the other great thing. Sam’s dad owns an apartment complex near the store, and he has a vacancy—an upstairs one. A corner one-bedroom with a study. So you’d still have your own room. It’s small, but…”

  I interrupt, “You saw it already?”

  “Tom—Sam’s dad—showed me after the interview yesterday. It’s perfect for us. We can move in this weekend.” She leans forward, her eyes gleaming. “And get this: Tom knows the landlord here, and he got him to actually pro-rate the rest of our month’s rent so we get back our deposit—can you believe it? You certainly know the right people.” She drains her orange juice and starts to clear away her plate.

  “Mom,” I say, handing her my plate as well. “I have finals next week. I have to study.”

  “I’m sorry, sweetie, but we just can’t afford to stay here.” She pauses, looking at me from the kitchen. For the first time this morning, her smile falters and her face darkens. “You want to stay here, right? You like Andreas Bay?”

  I force my face to brighten. “Yes, of course. It’s just so amazing, all at once.” I push my chair back and go to her. “Congratulations!” I say, hugging he
r, breathing in her jasmine smell. I do want to stay here, but something shuts me off and won’t let my mother’s excitement come in. What’s wrong with me?

  She pulls away and smiles. “See, Calle. We don’t need stupid men in our lives. We can do this on our own.”

  I agree with her out loud, knowing that without Sam, his dad, and the landlord, we’d be pulling out the battered California map, already bloodied with the red dots of our last residences, and tossing the penny again.

  ***

  I close the door to my room, holding the phone with shaky hands. My mother is singing in the kitchen while she washes the dishes that have piled up over the last week. Her first day at her new job was, in her words, “fantastic.”

  I didn’t have the nerve to approach Sam at school today, not with Amber constantly in orbit around him. Now I dial his number. The phone rings twice. He answers.

  “Sam?”

  “Yeah?”

  “It’s Calle.”

  A pause. “Hi.”

  “I just wanted to thank you. You know, for what you did for my mom.” He doesn’t say anything right away, so I add, “You didn’t have to do that.”

  “It’s no problem. My dad’s been looking for someone good for a few weeks anyway. It worked out for him too.”

  “Yeah, well, it was really nice of you and your dad. He seems like a good guy.”

  “He’s all right.” His voice is flat.

  After a pause, I say, “Well, I really appreciate it.”

  “It’s no big deal.” He sounds like he’s covering the speaker on the phone. I hear muffled voices.

  “It’s a big deal to me.”

  “Okay,” he says awkwardly, his voice suddenly lowering. “You’re welcome.”

  I hear a voice behind him, a low female whisper, a giggle. I realize Amber’s at his house. She must have just come into the room.

  “I’ve gotta go,” he says quickly, and hangs up.

  Stung, I click off the phone and stare at the receiver as if it’s the one who’s betrayed me.

  ***

  The next day, I push open the door to my mom’s room and watch her packing. Her back to me, she folds clothes into a cavernous tan suitcase. She hums along to Kelly Clarkson on her stereo.

  “Mom?” I step into the room.

  “Are you done packing?” She brushes a lock of hair from her eyes and smiles at me.

  “Yeah.” I don’t tell her I keep things ready to go. My folded clothes go into two blue suitcases; the books, CDs, and few stuffed animals have boxes that fit them, boxes I never break down. I’ve got packing down to a science, so it takes less than an hour.

  There are only three posters on my walls: an Ani DiFranco poster of her Educated Guess album, a black-and-white Ansel Adams poster of a tree, and an Alice in Wonderland print of Alice and the Cheshire Cat.

  Alice says, “Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”

  And the Cat responds, “That depends a good deal on where you want to get to.”

  Alice says, “I don’t much care where…”

  The Cat interrupts, “Then it doesn’t matter which way you go.”

  “…so long as long as I get somewhere,” Alice says.

  “Oh, you’re sure to do that,” says the Cat. “If only you walk enough.”

  I love that poser. For obvious reasons.

  My mom smiles at me, “If you’re done, then you can help me.” She hands me a mound of clothes. “Can you fold these?”

  I start folding a pair of jeans. “Mom?”

  “Hmm?”

  “Rob called.”

  She stops folding and turns to me. “Rob called here?”

  I nod. “A while ago.”

  She raises her eyebrows. “And you didn’t tell me?”

  I place the jeans in her suitcase and pick up a sweater. “You were…” I pause. “You were kind of out of commission.” She flushes and returns to the underwear and panty hose she’s untangling from one another. “Mom, he said something kind of weird when he called.”

  Her head jerks up, her eyes widening. “What? What’d he say?”

  “Something like…‘He’ll find you. He always does.’ Something like that. And when I tried to ask him about it, he hung up on me.” I avoid her eyes, folding T-shirts. “He’s talking about my father, right?”

  “Damn.” She sits down on the bed, a pair of leggings balled in her hands. “Idiot.”

  “Rob?”

  “Yes, Rob,” she sighs.

  “What did he mean—he always finds us?” My swollen heart thumps against my chest.

  My mom kneads the leggings like bread. “Okay. Don’t freak out.”

  “Don’t freak out?”

  “Listen, I guess you should know this now.”

  “Know what?” I wait while she takes a deep breath and lets it out for an impossibly long time. “Know what?” I repeat, annoyance creeping into my voice.

  “Your father has been trying to find us for some time, Calle. He’s been…well, he’s been pretty persistent.” She un-balls the leggings and begins folding them in half and then in half again.

  “What?” The air in the room seems thick, unbreathable.

  The leggings are now a tiny, fat cube of material. She jams them into a nook of the suitcase. “All these times we move…Listen, I want you to know that this has been for your own good. I want you to trust me.”

  I just stare at her.

  “When we’ve moved…it has been because of the breakups. In a way. Mostly, though, I move us so that he can’t find us. I…and I can’t say this with enough emphasis…I don’t want him in our lives. He gave up that right years ago.” She stands and takes a step toward me.

  “Are you serious?” Anger surges through me, but I try to put a cap on it. She won’t talk if she thinks I’m mad at her. I force my face into surprise, not anger. “I mean, is this for real?”

  “Yes.”

  “He’s been trying to find me.”

  “Yes, but…”

  “Mom,” I say, stepping back. I need to handle this the right way and not make her defensive, or she won’t tell me where he is. “I understand that he hurt you. I really do.” I pause, trying to figure out where to go from here. “I know you don’t want to see him,” I say diplomatically. “But did you ever think that I have a right to know who my father is?”

  She nods. “Of course, I did. It’s just that, as your mother, I know that he would not be good for you, that he wouldn’t treat you the way you’re supposed to be treated.”

  I flare again. What gives her the right to make that decision? “How do you know that?”

  “I just know.” She returns to the folding, stuffing an oversized sweatshirt into the suitcase.

  “But it’s not fair.”

  “Honey, if you knew him…”

  “But I don’t know him. I’d rather know a bad father than no father at all.”

  She shakes her head, her eyes sad. “I don’t think that’s true.”

  “But…”

  “Look, as long as you live with me, you need to respect my choices. I’m sorry, Calle. I’m not budging on this one.”

  She disappears behind the closet door.

  CHAPTER 20

  BLIND

  …my mother’s new boyfriend, Dale, convinces the Napa motel manager to give us an upstairs room so that my mom has a view of the vineyards. I listen to my Train CD through my headphones, bored; my mother smiles at Dale, who gives her a thumbs-up sign. Dale sells cars and gives that same thumbs-up on his local commercials. My mother brushes a short lock of newly blond hair from her eyes and claps her hands together. Dale thinks her new haircut and color make her look like Cameron Diaz. I think they make her look ridiculous…

  “That test was brutally hard,” Drew says, slumping down next to us on the theater stage. “I hate biology! What’s the point? When are we ever going to need to know that?” He pops open a bag of salt-and-vinegar potato chips.

  “Yeah
,” Alexa says dryly, rolling her eyes at Eli. “Knowing how our bodies function is such a complete waste of time.”

  “Total waste,” Drew says through a mouthful of chips, missing or ignoring her sarcasm.

  “Well, I aced my English final,” Eli announces, stretching his arms up over his head. “A+.”

  “Eli, you’ve never gotten an A+ on anything,” Tala teases, slurping noodle soup.

  “True,” he smiles. “But that’s about to change. Oh, oh…” He sits up straighter. “Okay, so…A rabbi, a priest and a monkey walk into a bar.” Everybody groans. Eli’s smile widens. “So the bartender looks at them and goes, ‘What is this? Some kind of joke?’” He beams. “I came up with that during my English final.”

  Alexa laughs and pats Eli’s head. “While you were acing it?” He sticks his tongue out at her. Still laughing, she offers me some carrot sticks. “Brain food.”

  “Thanks,” I say, taking a stick.

  “You guys settle in okay?” she asks.

  “We did.” I say, munching the carrot. The move went smoothly. Alexa, Drew, and Eli helped us move into the new apartment last Saturday. No one seemed to notice that I wasn’t speaking to my mother. In fact, I don’t think she even noticed. She had tons of food for us: pizza, chips, soda, and a giant silver bowl of M&Ms.

  We played music and hauled most of the furniture up the stairs, stuffing it into the tiny rooms. A few chairs went to Goodwill. We donated the couch that wouldn’t fit anywhere to the drama department. Alexa brought a new painting she’d done on a piece of tagboard—a stunning, blurry portrait of a reclining woman in blue and yellow and fuchsia—and my mom tacked it up in the living room.

  “Just something to jazz up the room,” Alexa explained.

  Eli told jokes on the sofa. Drew brought flowers for our small table. Instant home. Despite being mad at my mom, I actually had fun. And for a few hours, I stopped thinking about my father.

  On Sunday, though, when I studied while avoiding my mother’s sugary attempts to kiss up to me, I wondered how long it would be before he found us in Andreas Bay and Mom moved us again.

  In ten minutes, I take my last final of the semester—health. The teacher is disgustingly easy. He’s just happy that about five of us in the class actually have brain cells. He gave us the final ahead of time, so those of us who “care enough,” as he always says, will have no trouble. I’m not worried.