“That’s kind of what she does anyway.”
Like a doormat. Lying there. Just taking it and taking it, taking whatever steps on her.
Her own anger surprised Jamie like a scarlet tornado out of nowhere. “Shut up!” she hissed at Kate. The storm inside her blasted her to her feet. She bumped her plate, spilling pot pie across the table. Saw Kate goggling at her. Bolted out the door before the snarl on her face could turn to bite, before she could say anything worse to her friend. Stood in her yard panting, gulping in deep breaths of the cool night air to calm down.
She badly needed a walk in the woods. Getting out in the country, being with nature, sitting with her sketch pad under a tree, maybe seeing a deer, a grouse, a red squirrel—that was what Jamie lived for. But no way could she do it anymore, with Grandma needing her.
The best she could do was to look at the sky. The sun had set, and floating in the magenta afterglow were a thin silver arc of new moon and a single bright star.
Jamie gazed, breathing more steadily now. The moon was her mother, the star her father. Far, far away.
The kitchen door let out a rectangle of yellow light, then closed again. Kate came and stood beside Jamie. “What’d I say?” she asked softly.
Jamie turned and hugged Kate around the neck, resting her head on Kate’s shoulder.
“You okay?” Kate’s hands came up and patted her back.
Jamie lifted her head to look into Kate’s face. “You’re going to think I’m crazy,” she said, “but can you help me anyway? I just realized what I’ve got to do.”
Days before, the first minute she got a chance, Jamie had tried calling the lawyer Lampeterson, the one whose name was on the envelope of Grandpa’s will. No go—he was not there in Silver Valley anymore. It had seemed like a dead end. Forget finding parents a while. There had been a funeral to arrange and attend, and Grandma to think of.
But now, thinking of Grandma, Jamie saw a chance thin and shining as a new moon. Knowing what to do, she also knew she had to do it soon, before things got even worse.
She told Kate. Kate told her she was crazy. Jamie knew she had to do it anyway.
That night, after Grandma was in bed, Jamie found the new checkbook—still the plain yellow “safety” kind, no pictures. Jamie made a mental note that when she grew up she was going to have pretty checks with rainbows and sunrises. Meanwhile, she wrecked only one check before she succeeded in writing one out to “Cash.”
In the morning she got Grandma to sign it. Then she took a quick bike ride into Dexter, visited the bank, and picked up a bus schedule at the Pharm-All. Back home she packed a tote bag: a packet of graham crackers, two apples, two bananas, a change of underwear. That afternoon she watched for Kate to get home from school. The minute Kate appeared, Jamie headed for the Garibay place.
“You’re crazy,” Kate told her for the tenth time, eating cheese curls with a resigned expression. She pushed the bag toward Jamie.
Jamie shook her head and pushed it back. “So did you ask your mother for permission?”
“Yes, it’s okay. Don’t worry about Mamaw. Just take care of yourself, all right? Did you get money?”
“Yup.”
“Well, don’t lose it. Or, I mean, lose it if you have to, but don’t let anybody hurt you. If you get in any kind of trouble, call me at your place, or you can call here and Mom will leave the answering machine on, or—”
“Kate, it’s not like I’m going to New York City!”
“I still wish somebody was going with you. Where are you going to stay?”
“Kate, I’ll handle it!”
Kate had told her parents only that Jamie was going back where she used to live for a visit.
Jamie had not told Grandma a thing so far, and Grandma had not asked a thing, not even what the check was for.
Grandma ate one saltine, nothing more, at supper.
I have to tell her, Jamie was thinking. I can’t put it off any longer. Yet she carried her dishes to the sink without saying anything.
Almost whispering, Grandma said, “Jamie, I wonder if you would fix my hair for me.”
“Sure.”
“It seems like such a bother for me to do it myself anymore,” Grandma apologized. Her voice, which had never been strong, seemed to have gotten weaker since Grandpa died.
Grandma stayed where she was, sitting in the kitchen chair, and Jamie stood behind her. When Jamie carefully pulled the hairpins out and undid Grandma’s braids, Grandma’s hair rippled over the back of the chair clear to the floor, a reverse waterfall, white at the top, brown at the bottom. Grandma’s hair was wonderful, so thick, but her face seemed pulled taut by its weight, and thin, and lily pale.
Brushing her grandmother’s hair with the natural bristle brush, making sure she gave it long careful strokes clear to the ends, Jamie thought how different Grandma seemed. Frail. I’m the one taking care of her now, she thought. When Grandma’s hair was all brushed smooth, Jamie plaited it in two Heidi braids that tapered so fine they ended in points, like knitting needles. She coiled the braids like a crown on her grandmother’s head and pinned them in place. Then quietly, without having to dither about it anymore, she said, “Grandma, I have to go away for a couple of days.”
Grandma just nodded. Did not even ask why, or where. Jamie wondered if she had really heard or understood.
“Katie is going to stay with you.” Jamie bent to look straight into Lily’s bewildered blue eyes, trying to see whether she comprehended. “She’ll be here with you the whole time. Today’s Friday. She’ll be here when you wake up tomorrow morning, Saturday, and I’ll be gone. But I’ll be back Sunday night.” Kate had to go to school on Monday.
“All right, dear.” It was as if Grandma were saying, “All right, Daddy.” Jamie’s heart ached.
I have to find somebody to help. Somebody has to know whether she has relatives, a brother, a sister, a son, a daughter—my father or mother …
Kate came and stayed overnight. Before dawn the next morning Jamie was on a Greyhound headed toward Silver Valley.
It was not very far away, three hours, and it was in the same state, but coming down out of the mountains, leaving the wooded ridges and coal slag heaps behind, Jamie felt as if she were traveling to a different country. In the green rolling farmland to the east it was summer instead of spring. The roads were crowded with more traffic than Jamie had ever seen. There were shopping malls outside of towns. People looked different. Groomed. Stylish. Sophisticated.
Jamie rode with her stomach knotted. Her straight hair and bangs felt as old-fashioned as Grandma’s braids. She had a button-up sweater instead of a jacket. Her jeans were baggy. I can’t believe I’m doing this. They aren’t going to want to talk with me.
I am going to be sick if I don’t get out of this bus soon.
“Silver Valley,” the driver roared in a bored voice.
Jamie’s stomach lurched, and she peered out her window. It was a beautiful town. Larkspur and daylilies grew along fences. Pink and crimson rambling roses climbed on porches. Jamie saw white paint, bright glass, wreaths on doors. It was a town made for sunshine.
Why did they ever leave here?
She got off the bus and stood on the sidewalk, thinking. How could she find Mr. Lampeterson, the lawyer? She already knew his name was not in the phone book. Dead end; try another route. If she could find the house she remembered … something might happen.
“’Scuse me,” she asked a woman planting petunias in a window box, “can you tell me where Sweet Gum Lane is?”
Twenty minutes later she rounded the corner and stopped, a strange feeling beating like wings in her chest. There was no landmark she could consciously recognize, yet she knew she had been there before.
She walked slowly, looking for the address, but knew the house before she saw the number. There it was. Small—had it always been so small? But somebody loved it. The gingerbread on the porch was painted wild-rose pink and periwinkle blue and buttercup yellow as w
ell as white.
Jamie walked up to the house. Yes, there was a half-circle of glass, a fanlight, over the front door. She felt too shaky to ring the doorbell, stood there a minute, then walked around the side to the backyard, staring. The yard was still fenced with chicken wire—she had remembered that right. There was a big Japanese maple—hadn’t she played under it, hadn’t she climbed in the low branches? Where was the swing set? She knew there had been a swing set.
“Hello,” a pleasant voice called.
Jamie jumped. Intent on the yard, she had not noticed the woman sitting on the back steps. “Hi,” she replied, but her voice was not behaving. It came out a whisper.
The woman put down whatever she had been doing, stood up, and walked over to face Jamie across the low wire-mesh fence. “You look kind of lost, honey,” she remarked. “Something wrong?”
“Not exactly …” Then Jamie blurted it out. “I think I used to live here when I was little.”
“Really?” The woman’s homely face lit up in a smile. There were deep lines in her cheeks and laugh crinkles around her eyes. Blinking, Jamie realized this woman might have been as old as Grandma, judging by her skin. It was the way she wore blue jeans instead of a housedress, Jamie decided, that made her seem younger. Or maybe her sandy-colored hair, so tousled Jamie had not noticed it was dusted with gray. Or maybe her smile.
“What’s your name?” the woman wanted to know.
“Jamie Bridger.”
“Bridger! That sounds about right. I believe the Bridgers were the people before the people before me.” With sudden, startling ease the woman vaulted her fence to stand beside Jamie. “Well, then, you’d better have a look around, hadn’t you?” she invited happily. “Come on!” She led Jamie alongside the house to the front porch and in the front door.
The house took in Jamie like an embrace. A dozen memories rushed back at once. “Oh!” Jamie cried. “The light, I remember the light!” The old crystal-and-aluminum ceiling fixture was the same, centered amid decorative plasterwork. “And the swirlies on the ceiling! I used to lie there …” Yes, the window seat was still there. “I used to lie stretched out on that, I was so little, and just look up. And the wallpaper!” Still with the same fat white sheep grazing by the same blue curlicue bushes. “Look what I used to do.” Jamie ran to a corner, and there, up to a height of about three feet, the paper was damaged. “I used to take my thumbnail and do that.” Jamie stood staring at the tiny crescent-shaped perforations following the corner up to where she had not been able to reach any higher. Now that she was taller than her grandmother, it was hard to believe she had ever been so small.
The woman who owned the house stood broadly smiling. “I guess I’m not much of a home decorator,” she drawled. The place was comfortably junked up. “That wallpaper’s been there that long?”
“Yes. Mama put it up.” Jamie blinked. “Grandma, I mean.” Jamie giggled. “She was mad when she noticed the corners.”
“I bet. Sometimes I want to take a bunch of crayons and color the sheep. You think I should?”
Jamie burst out laughing. It was just what she had always wanted to do when she lived there.
“You want to see your bedroom?”
“Oh! Yes, thank you, um—”
“Shirley.”
Jamie hesitated, not used to calling adults by their first names.
“Shirley Dubbs. As in rub-a-dub Dubbs, three men need three tubs. Something like that.” This woman seemed a little bit weird, but nice. She led the way upstairs. “Okay, which one was yours?”
“The—little one up front, with the—dormers.…”
Jamie stood staring at light streaming in on a white-painted bed under a puffy quilt, a fuzzy rug on the floor.
“I don’t use the upstairs much,” Shirley said.
The room seemed not used at all, not even for junk. It looked like it was suspended in time, waiting for her. There were pillows in white pillowcases on the bed. There was a white linen cloth with a tatted border on the dresser top. The peach-colored quilt on the bed matched the flocked wallpaper—Jamie’s wallpaper. She remembered it.
“I took the bunny decals off the door,” Shirley said. “Sorry. If I’d known you were coming, I would have left them.”
“That’s okay,” Jamie whispered.
“You came back to visit friends, Jamie?”
“Sort of.” Jamie made herself stop staring at the bedroom. “I’m sort of trying to track down a few things. Do you remember my family at all?”
“Not a bit. I’m not from around here.”
“Are the neighbors the same ones? I mean, you know, have any of them been here long?”
Shirley was getting a small, worried frown. “Most of them haven’t been here as long as I have.”
“Oh.”
“Something wrong, Jamie?”
“Um, no.” Jamie did not have the heart to ask her if she knew a lawyer named Lampeterson. “I’d better go. Thank you for letting me look around, Mrs., uh, Miss—”
“Shirley.”
“Um, Shirley, thanks, I really appreciate it.” Jamie hurried downstairs and out the door. As she jogged down Sweet Gum Lane, she glanced back once at the house. Shirley was standing on its gingerbreaded porch, looking after her.
Chapter
5
Kate was not much of a morning person. She barely stirred when Jamie headed out to bike to the bus station—just mumbled something like, “Good luck,” and went back to sleep. But around eight that Saturday morning she woke up and forced herself to keep her eyes open, knowing she had to get up pretty soon to take care of Mamaw.
Poor Mamaw. Kate hated seeing her so flattened. Kate remembered when she and Jamie were little kids running in the backyard summer dusk; Mamaw would come out and bring them peanut-butter cookies and admire how many lightning bugs they had caught. She remembered Mamaw would help them both dress up for Halloween, and give them coffee (mostly milk) when they came back with bags of loot, and let them sit at the table talking late, like grown-ups. If Jamie were giving Mamaw away, even as badly as things were going, Kate would have taken her. It would have been nice to have a grandma, and Mrs. Bridger was the best, and Kate had always felt that way. She had called Mrs. Bridger “Mamaw” since she had known her.
At only ten past eight, far earlier than her usual Saturday sleep-in time, Kate groaned and got herself up and moving.
Poor Mamaw. Poor Jamie. Kate went to brush her teeth, feeling heavy with a leaden sense of what she had not yet told Jamie, not at such a bad time. What a time for Dad to decide he needed to look for a new job, and for Mom to go to work for the state. What a time for the Garibays to decide they had to move.
As if any time would be a good time. Kate still could not believe she really had to do this. Leave Jamie behind. Leave her friends, and the home she had lived in all her life.
Kate did not hear Mamaw stirring anywhere around the house. Probably the pills were making her sleepy, and she was still in bed. That was okay, if she would just eat.
Dressed in T-shirt and jeans and sneakers, Kate tiptoed to peek into Lily’s bedroom. Maybe if Mamaw’s awake, I’ll bring her breakfast in bed.
But the bed was empty. It did not look as if it had been slept in. Or maybe it was made already.
“Huh!” Kate headed downstairs. Mamaw must have gotten up early, must be down in the kitchen after all.
No. There was no sign of her.
Kate ran back upstairs. Had Mamaw slipped past her while she was in the bathroom? Was Mamaw in the other bedroom, the one with its shades pulled down, the one Mr. Bridger had slept in? Kate hated going into that room, and pushed the door open gingerly. “Mamaw?” she whispered, feeling like an intruder. What if the old woman was in there crying?
But there was no one. Nothing but the shadows.
“Where the—” Starting to get scared, Kate ran downstairs again and lunged out the back door to check the yard. She knew she was grasping at straws. Even when she was feeling
okay, Mamaw seldom went out of the house.
She was not out there. Kate ran all the way around the house to be sure.
Back inside she stood puffing and panicked. “Mamaw!” she shouted to the house. “Mrs. Bridger! Mamaw!”
Nothing. The place was as still as death.
No. No, she couldn’t have killed herself; she wouldn’t have done that.
But where was she? What was left to check? The basement. Kate darted down there. Nothing. The attic? It was reached by a trapdoor that Mamaw was probably too big to fit through. Even as a younger, less cushy person, Mamaw had been scared to climb up there on the ladder. Besides, Kate would have seen the ladder standing in the hallway.
What would Mamaw have done, the way she was feeling? With Jamie gone? Where would she be?
“Think,” Kate whispered to herself, standing by the kitchen table, pressing her hands to her head. One more minute of this and she would have to call her parents, or the cops, or both. “Think, Kate Marie Garibay. Think.”
The kitchen table. Kate could see under it; there was nothing there, but—Mamaw had hidden under the kitchen table when Jamie went to school.
She was hiding.
Kate ran upstairs to Lily’s bedroom, then stopped. Took a deep breath and told herself to be quiet and calm. Walked across the room and gently opened the closet door.
It was an old-fashioned walk-in closet, deep, built big enough to be a baby’s nursery in a pinch, with a ledge around the sides so shoes and junk wouldn’t collect on the floor. Plenty of room in there for a frightened old woman to hide.
“Oh, Mamaw!” Kate kept her voice steady, but her knees wobbled. She sank down to sit beside the old woman huddled on the floor under a row of flowered cotton housedresses. “Are you all right?” She gathered Lily into a hug. “I was scared. Are you scared?”
“No, sweetie, I’m fine.” Mamaw slumped slack in her arms but spoke with desperate dignity. “I just—I felt as though I might float away, that was all.”
“Didn’t you sleep at all?”
“I slept some. Hard surfaces are good for the back. I think I slept very well. I must have. I heard you calling, dear, but Daddy did not want me to answer you.”
Looking for Jamie Bridger Page 4