by Lisa Wingate
When we exited the interstate, the pit of my stomach was swirling like a ten-jet Jacuzzi. The neighborhood didn’t look so bad, at first. On the corner by the highway, a new Walmart and some fairly upscale shopping centers seemed acceptably similar to home. Within a few blocks, we passed some recently built condo complexes. Looking down the streets, I could see old mansions that perhaps needed face-lifts, but weren’t bad. We could live in a place like that—at least for now.
The streets passed by, but Barbara didn’t turn. She picked up the map Boone had drawn for her and gave it a worried glance, then looked for landmarks as we drove along. The new construction stopped abruptly, and the neighborhood went downhill. Fast. We crossed under another highway overpass, and I glanced into the rafters. There were sleeping bags, and cardboard, and pieces of clothing tucked under the girders. A man in a ragged overcoat sat on the grass by the guardrail, blankly watching the traffic pass. I looked away and hit the door locks. Barbie jumped at the sound, her eyes wide, blue circles surrounded by bloodshot white.
Neither of us said anything. In the back, the sibs were quiet, as if even they were scared of the neighborhood. Barbara set down the map. I twisted sideways and looked at it. Unfortunately, we were on the right road. A few more blocks and we’d get to Red Bird Lane, where Boone and his construction crew were unloading our belongings.
Turning to the window, I picked up my cell and started to text Emity—something like, SOS, come get me. You won’t believe this. . . .
Emity wouldn’t answer. She’d been grounded from her cell—grounded from everything—and all of a sudden her mom had decided Em needed to visit her grandparents in Galveston, instead of going to Europe this summer. Our trip was off. Like everyone else we knew, Emity’s father was in the Rosburten loop. Those investors my father had solicited were now figuring out that Ross Burten had been living the high life on their money, using the income from new investors to pay dividends to old investors. Now that the feds had broken open the scheme, it was also clear that many of Ross’s perks and lavish vacations had been extended to our family, and that my father had received large bonuses, over and above his quite healthy salary. Whether my father had actually been aware of Ross’s misdealings or not, he was now a pariah—a symbol of the sort of executive greed that had infected corporate America. Like everyone else we knew, Em’s parents didn’t want anything to do with us.
We passed a dumpy-looking convenience store and a crumbling strip mall with bars on the windows and men hanging around the parking lot. Across the street, a dirty white apartment complex looked like government housing. A pair of empty plastic bags floated from the Dumpster and rolled down the sidewalk like tumbleweeds, chasing our car, then racing ahead before blowing into a drainage ditch, where kids were playing in puddles of slimy green water.
Ahead, a used bookstore with colored glass bottles hanging in a tree and little wooden totem poles for porch posts seemed like something out of Fortune-tellers-R-Us. Opposite the bookstore stood a white wooden church where a line of people stretched out the side door, around the corner, and all the way to the street. A homeless man with a shopping cart was moving into position at the end.
“What’re they doin’?” Mark asked from the backseat, pressing a hand against the window and stretching in his booster seat.
Barbie didn’t answer.
“I think they’re getting something to eat.” The realization was dawning on me as I said it.
“How come?” Mark’s question was innocent, his bewilderment obvious.
“They’re hungry, I guess,” I told him, and he leaned closer to the window, like a zoo patron looking through the aquarium glass.
“How come?” When the sibs weren’t fighting, they were inquisitive enough to make your head spin.
“I wanna see.” Daniel grabbed Mark’s shoulders and tried to push him out of the way.
“Stop-pit!” Mark squealed, twisting to shake Daniel off. “Momeeee!”
Barbie hung a right so fast that Daniel’s head collided with Mark’s elbow, Mark’s head bumped the window, and in the cargo area, the cat carrier rolled over. Both boys screamed, and the cat growled and hissed. The noise woke Landon, and jostled Jewel in the third seat, and the car was filled with wailing, pulling of hair, and gnashing of teeth.
“Be quiet!” Barbie’s voice was lost in the din. “Quiet! Now! Stop it! I can’t stand this!” Hands shaking, she grabbed a folded Dallas map and threw it blindly into the backseat. It skimmed Daniel’s head and hit Aunt Lute in the third seat.
Aunt Lute jerked upright, blinked drowsily, and said, “Good heavens! Did you see the horses go by?”
With the exception of the baby, everyone in the car fell silent and looked at Aunt Lute. She went on talking. “All colors. Black and bay, dapple gray. All the pretty little horsies.” She sucked in a breath, her eyes wide. “Did you see them go by? Look.” She pointed toward the window, and Mark, Landon, and Daniel sniffled back tears, pushing closer to the glass to look for horses. Aunt Lute slipped the pacifier into Jewel’s mouth, and the car was quiet again, except for the cat growling unhappily. We drifted along, idling because Barbie had taken her foot off the gas pedal after turning onto a residential street. Her mouth hung open, her face going pale beneath the fading spa tan.
I had a bad feeling we were on Red Bird Lane. The nameplate on a crooked mailbox confirmed it: VASQUEZ, 202 RED BIRD. Three houses farther down, past a small creek and a thick line of trees, Uncle Boone’s truck was parked in a driveway. Barbie let the car roll across the bridge and come to a stop at the curb. Her hands were shaking so badly, she couldn’t shift the vehicle into park.
“Here.” Grabbing the gearshift, I slipped it out of gear.
“This can’t be . . .” she murmured, and for once, we were on the same wavelength. The house was as bad as the rest of the neighborhood. Old, small, sealed with window bars and a cage across the front door that, in spite of the decorative iron at the corners, looked like the entrance to a prison cell.
Barbie yanked open the door and stepped out as Uncle Boone appeared from inside the house with a stack of moving pads tucked under his arm. Setting them in the back of the truck, he met Barbie at the curb. I didn’t have to hear them to know what she was saying. The body language and Barbie flailing a hand toward the house made it crystal clear. She was telling him he was nuts. Half of me wanted to get out of the car, grab Barbie by the ponytail, smack her like you would one of those hysterical women in a movie, and say, Wake up! If you alienate Uncle Boone, we won’t have anybody.
The other half wanted to stand right beside her, screaming at him. How could we stay in a place that had bars on the windows—where there were soup lines and homeless people just down the road, where we were only a few blocks from what looked like the projects?
I wanted to call Emity’s house, let the phone ring and ring and ring—keep calling until someone answered, and I could say, You have to let me come stay with you. I don’t have anywhere to go. This isn’t my fault. I didn’t do anything wrong. . . .
Opening the cell phone, I flipped through the directory, thought about it; then I closed the phone again, dropped it into my lap, tried to mold my thoughts into something that made sense. I couldn’t call now. Not with everyone in the car, and the cat squalling in the back. As soon as I could get a minute alone, I’d do it. Em’s mom was my mother’s friend—at least, they had been friends. If she knew how desperate I was, she’d have to help me. Just until I can get in touch with my mom, I’d tell her. But so far, I hadn’t even tried to contact Mom. Deep inside I couldn’t give up hoping that Dad would come through, and everything would work out, and my mother would never have to know what shape we were in. I didn’t want to end up living in a mission in Ecuador with my mother and our ex-pastor’s group of volunteers. It wasn’t like Mom was going to give up her new life just for me.
“Oh, I see one!” Landon whispered, oblivious to the moaning cat. I adjusted the rearview mirror, so I could watch him. “A b
w-ack one!”
“I see him, too! A lovely black stallion.” Aunt Lute cheered, and they watched an imaginary horse trot by. “My, he’s fine. Can you tell if he has white feet or brown?”
Landon squinted. “White foots.”
“All four?”
“I fink so.”
Aunt Lute tapped Daniel on the shoulder and pointed. “Isn’t he glorious with his four white feet? What do you think he’s doing?”
“Eatin’ a flower.”
“Oh, yes, eating a flower. What color flower? What sort? I can’t quite tell from here.”
Mark pointed to the irises by the mailbox across the street. “Blue, like them.”
“Blue, truly!” Aunt Lute agreed, touching Jewel’s cheek with a fingertip and letting the baby’s fist curl around hers. “Do you see the horse? Do you think we could ride him?”
Underneath her pacifier, Jewel made a noise that sounded like a horsie snort.
“Very good,” Aunt Lute cheered. “Wonderful! Princess Anya could make the most wonderful horse sounds. Of course, she spent far too much time in the stable. The king didn’t like it one bit. . . .” Aunt Lute went on with a story that was a weird cross between Sleeping Beauty and Jack and the Beanstalk. In her version, Jack traded a horse for the magic beans, and the king gave the horse to his daughter as a birthday gift. Eventually, when Jack climbed the beanstalk, the castle was surrounded by thorns and the princess fell into a deep sleep.
Watching the sibs in the mirror, all three of them wide-eyed, I felt a tug in some inconvenient place between my lungs and my heart. I knew why I hadn’t gotten in touch with my mother, or called to beg Emity’s mom to let me into their house. The sibs needed me here. They couldn’t understand what was happening, but they knew something . . . everything was wrong, and they were powerless to set it right. Someone had to look out for them.
I watched in the side mirror as Barbie rammed her hands onto her hips, her chin jutting forward while she ranted about the house. By the front door, Uncle Boone’s moving men had stopped working to take in the show.
Barbie’s voice pressed through the glass, drowning out the sounds of the sibs and Aunt Lute talking about invisible horses, and the cat mewing. Outside, Barbie was alternately cussing out both my father and Uncle Boone, then breaking down and sobbing. “I can’t stay here! I can’t handle this!” She waved toward the vehicle, the house. Us. “I can’t!”
Uncle Boone attempted to calm her, then yelled at his crew to get back to work, as if he knew he needed to finish this project and be out of here before Barbie imploded and left a black hole on the sidewalk. He reached into his pocket, fished out some money, and slapped it into Barbie’s hand. This was becoming a familiar gesture, since we had almost no operating cash. My father’s bank accounts were dry, and with a twenty-four-hour eviction notice hanging over our heads as we had evacuated our house, we’d had no choice but to leave behind things that could have been sold for cash. There was no easy way to transport heavy, ornate imported wardrobes and dressers, custom playhouses and yard toys, and the gigantic gilded billiard table Barbie had ordered for my father on his fiftieth birthday. There wasn’t any time to sell them in place, and undoubtedly no one from Highland Park would have bought our leftovers, anyway. Small items that could have been converted into funds—Barbie’s stash of custom jewelry, the collection of foreign gold coins that hung in Dad’s office, a set of valuable antique pistols, some autographed memorabilia from guys he’d played football with—had disappeared from the house in the past months. My father had told Barbie he was taking those things to a safe-deposit box, but he must have sold them. She’d never suspected a thing.
Heat flooded my cheeks as I watched Uncle Boone hand over the money, then force a key ring into Barbie’s palm and fold her fingers around it. He probably couldn’t afford to be doing all this for us. Considering what he’d lost in Rosburten and the fact that construction had slowed everywhere, he was strapped. I’d heard him on the phone yesterday talking to someone about unloading his boat. Quick. The Touchback was his favorite pastime, man toy, and chick magnet. He and Dad had often disappeared for days at a time, headed out to fishing tournaments that were mostly an excuse for Boone to escape his ex-wife, and my father to enjoy some peace and quiet away from our home-based romper-zoo.
There was no way Uncle Boone would be letting go of the boat unless things were bad. He was probably sorry he’d ever answered the phone when I called the day the Rosburten news broke.
My body felt limp, and I let my head fall back against the seat. I wanted to crawl off to some dark place and hide from everybody. This couldn’t be my life. This couldn’t be happening.
Tears pressed my eyes, blurring the line of tiny homes on Red Bird Lane. I blinked hard, trying to push them away. Uncle Boone was headed toward the house again, and Barbie was following him, shouting, her heels clicking against the sidewalk, rapid-fire.
I looked in the driver’s-side mirror, still hanging cockeyed from Barbie’s Baby Bundles wreck. A woman was standing in the bushes by the yellow house across the street, her body hunched over, her shoulders humped with a coat or a backpack. She was little more than a shadow, standing and watching, her camo green pants and a tattered gray button-up shirt making her nearly invisible among the leaves. Her skin was dark like the shadows. Long, gray dreadlocks swirled over her shoulders and seemed to twine around her like vines encircling a branch. A muted patch of sunlight fell across her face as she lifted her chin and turned her gaze slowly from Barbie’s tirade to me. She met my eyes, and I felt the pull of her gaze, or her presence, as if she were about to say something, and I was sitting on edge, waiting for the words.
One of the sibs kicked the back door, and the mirror vibrated with the impact, creating a blur of sunlight, and leaves, and shadow, out of focus, like a photograph taken while the camera was moving.
When the mirror stilled again, the woman was gone. I swiveled in my seat, checking the line of foliage beside the yellow house. No one was there—just the trees rustling slightly in the wind, and the underbrush fluttering, and a thick stand of cattails swaying along the creek.
Barbie was pacing the sidewalk, her arms stiff at her sides and her fists clenched. Uncle Boone followed behind her, still trying to convince her to accept reality.
This place. This tiny blue house with the prison bars was our reality now, whether we wanted to face it or not. When you fall from the top to the bottom, there’s no soft place to land.
Chapter 11
Sesay
The boys in the yellow house are watching the man and the woman argue across the street. I hope it does not frighten them. The yellow-house boys are kind, and I like to visit them. Their skin is the color of cedar underneath the bark, where the red streaks hide. Cedar is good wood, strong and sweet-smelling, and it dries hard, so the things you carve from it are good. I have given the boys cedar names—Root and Berry. They have other names, of course, but I do not know them. They look for me now, when they come outside. Their mother looks for me, too, but I will not let her see me. When the mother sees you, she pulls her children away and hurries them down the street, and says, “Don’t talk to people like her!” In these years of wandering—ten years, I think, but perhaps it is more—I have learned that people do not want me near their houses or their children. They want me to go somewhere else.
I love the little children. I birthed four babies of my own, and my arms yearn for them at night when my dreaming mind drifts into the past. They were his children, but he took each away when they were small. This is America. Here, children belong to their fathers, he said. You wouldn’t want them working in the cane fields anyway, would you, Sesay? I can give them a good life. Then he drove away through the sugarcane, and I knew I must not follow. If you go past the end of the fields, his men will call the police, and the police will take you away and put you on a boat. Here in this country, they tell the laborers, you can’t just go wherever you want. You have to do your work, because you
owe for your food and the bed you sleep in. What? Do you think all of this is free?
Sometimes, when he came, I saw little faces in his car. They had gray eyes. Mulatto eyes. His eyes. I watched them, an ache blooming in my arms and my breast. I gave names to them, but they never knew those names. This is why I want to be near the children now. I yearn for my own, even though years have gone by and they are grown by now.
The little boy in the yellow house gave a toy animal to me when I handed my book to him. We traded. Now my book is his, and I have a white rabbit in my pack. I will carve a similar one and bring it to him when I come to his window again, but just now, I should go. The angry woman screams at the man across the street, and the sound beats a hammer in my chest. I worry that someone will call the police.
I walk on to the Summer Kitchen. On the way, I try to think of a story to go along with the toy rabbit. A rabbit story. I’m certain I must have one. I have traded stories with many people as I’ve wandered. I trade stories at the Broadberry Mission, as well. Now there are so many people at the mission—not only men and old women, like me, but also families. Some of them have come from yellow houses, such as the one in which Root and Berry live. Now the families live at the mission.
I watch the mothers at the mission reading books to their children. They will let you listen to their stories, if you do not touch the children. One of them told the story of a boy rabbit, a little one. He is a bad little fellow, this rabbit, and he turns against his mother’s wishes, and sneaks into the field of the patrón. The man, McGregor, chases him with a pitchfork, and as he runs away, he loses his new mitten. Peter. The rabbit’s name is Peter Rabbit. I have decided that he is sneaking into the field after sugarcane. I am not certain whether he is a cottontail or one of the short-eared muck rabbits that live in the cane fields, because I could not see the pictures when the mother was reading the story. You must keep a distance from the families at the mission.