The Runaway

by Jo Barney

  The Runaway

  A Jo Barney Henlit Novel

  Jo Barney

  Contents

  Copyright

  New Release Newsletter

  Dedication

  1. Sarah

  2. Ellie

  3. Jeffrey

  4. Matt Trommald

  5. Ellie

  6. Sarah

  7. Jeff

  8. Matt

  9. Ellie

  10. Sarah

  11. Ellie

  12. Jeff

  13. Matt

  14. Jeff

  15. Sarah

  16. Matt

  17. Jeff

  18. Ellie

  19. Jeff

  20. Matt

  21. Sarah

  22. Matt

  23. Jeff

  24. Ellie

  25. Jeff

  26. Sarah

  27. Jeff

  28. Matt

  29. Jeff

  30. Ellie

  31. Jeff

  32. Matt

  33. Sarah

  34. Ellie

  35. Sarah

  36. Ellie

  37. Sarah

  38. Ellie

  39. Sarah

  40. Jeff

  41. Ellie

  42. Matt

  43. Ellie

  44. Ellie

  45. Sarah

  Reader’s Guide

  About the Author

  About Penner Publishing

  This edition published by

  Penner Publishing

  Post Office Box 57914

  Los Angeles, California 91413

  www.pennerpublishing.com

  Copyright © 2013, 2015 by Jo Barney

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, corporations, institutions, organizations, events, or locales in this novel are either the product of the author’s imagination or, if real, used fictitiously. The resemblance of any character to actual persons (living or dead) is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the copyright holder.

  Cover Designer: Christa Holland, Paper & Sage Designs

  ISBN: 978-1-940811-37-6

  New Release Newsletter

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  This is for the thousands of kids who’ve lost their families and who go out to look for them, or something to take their place, on the mean streets of every city everywhere.

  Chapter One

  Sarah

  September 2009

  I can remember every second of that last graffiti patrol with Ellie. Maybe it’s the meds they’re feeding me, or maybe I’m a little crazy right now. The nurse says I probably should be with all the stuff I’ve gone through in the past couple of weeks, Ellie at the center of it all.

  It was chilly that morning, and we shivered a little as we headed toward the first mailbox, me, in my punk clothes, Ellie in her old lady sweatshirt and red sneakers. She had her supplies and towels in an old shopping bag, like usual, and I could tell she was still mad at me, at my knowing how the graffiti got on the boxes. I was thinking about that, too, but she didn’t know the whole story, not then.

  “Spray!” Ellie ordered, and I stopped remembering and pointed the bottle at the mailbox in front of me. We scrubbed, Ellie not talking to me yet. After a couple of minutes, the black polish on my nails began to melt like the paint scrawls we were working on. Ellie muttered “Good” when she saw me rubbing at them. As soon as the box was as clean as Graffiti X could get it, we headed toward the next one. By the time we got to the street with the big trees, I was getting hot and glad for what little shade was left, the limbs above me almost bare. Leaves crunched under my boots.

  The people who lived in these buildings were rich. I could tell by the doors, the polished brass knobs, and the pots of flowers beside them. They must sit on their upstairs terraces and feel like they were living in the arms of the trees. I was imagining eating breakfast four stories up and feeding a squirrel a piece of pancake, when I stumbled and heard the heel of my boot snap. Shit, my only shoes was my first thought. I had to walk like a cripple, one leg short, one long.

  “Take ’em off!” Ellie said, shaking her gray head at me. “Stupid to wear boots like that; you look like a baby hooker.” She took the bag of supplies from me, and I leaned against a tree and pulled them off. The cold from the sidewalk seeped through the leaves and into my toes. The look on Ellie’s face told me not to complain, so I shoved the boots into the bag. Maybe I could get the heel fixed somewhere. “We’ll finish up with the next box. When we get back you can borrow a pair of my old sneakers.”

  I watched where I was going, hoping I wouldn’t step on dog poop or something yucky hidden under the leaves. That’s when I saw the white basketball shoe sticking up from a pile of debris at the curb. Someone must have lost it. Except that the shoe also had a sock in it. And in the sock, a leg.

  I grabbed Ellie’s arm and pointed. She looked, made a sound like she was choking. I ran to the gutter and pushed sticks and leaves away from the rest of the leg. I saw familiar, worn denim jeans, recognized a plaid patch on a thigh, a hand I knew because of the small ink tattoo of a smiley face at the wrist. I was bawling by the time I uncovered his head, brushed bits of dirt from his eyes, understood that he was dead. Peter.

  “Leave him!” Ellie yanked on my arm, her words daggers of icy fear. “Not our business.” She had me up on my feet, and I shoved at her and knocked her into the trunk of a tree. “It’s trouble!” She reached for me again. “Nothing good ever comes from a dead body.” I was crying so hard I couldn’t see. She grabbed my arm and pulled me through the trail of leaves. “I’ll call 911,” she said. “When we get home. Anonymous.”

  And she did, and now I’m lying here in this hospital bed hoping she’s still alive.

  Chapter Two

  Ellie

  September 2009

  I’m muttering ancient thoughts when I notice the girl standing on the corner, looking at me. Black boots, net stockings, holes at the knees, a tacky black skirt under a fat jacket, its elbows patched. Her black hair looks plastic, her dark-rimmed eyes shiny blue.

  She cocks her head at me like a curious crow. She frowns. “Hey! That was really pretty.”

  “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” I say. I keep scrubbing.

  “So you’re hired by the government or something?”

  I wave her out of the way with one hand and spray another swoosh of Graffiti X on the silver lines. This time I’ll wait the thirty seconds before I get worked up. “No,” I answer.

  “Oh, so you just do it?”

  The midnight artists have attacked the mailbox in front of me until their fat pens and sprayers and brushes have created a gruesome mass of internal organs, a handful of spindly fingers, an eyeball or two, and some scary, foreign-looking scribbles.

  “Yes.” I pass the steel wool over the metal fingers, and the pad etches its way into the black letters I am uncovering. VAGINA. Just when did that become a dirty word? I press harder. The girl has moved behind me, is watching the body parts, the body word, disintegrate.

  I make a final swipe at the edges of the box, push against a curve of silver that still shows. I’m woozy from the smell of the damp rag, and my fingers on my right hand are up to the knuckles in black and silver goop, too late for gloves.

  “That’s it for this one,” I say in the girl’s direction, meaning good-bye. I turn and head for the next mailbox, a block away. I hear her boots tapping on the sidewa
lk behind me. High heels, for God’s sake. She’s, like, what? Fifteen?

  Most of the time, people don’t even look at me as I scrub. Sometimes someone will ask if I get paid. After a glance at my apron, the grungy red Kmart sneakers swallowing my anklets, the nubs of gray hair escaping from under my Yankees baseball cap, the questioner usually smiles in an embarrassed way and hurries off.

  One time a little kid asked me, after I told him to stand back and don’t breathe in what I’m spraying, if I was a grandma. I said no, because I’m not sure. “I think you’re Graffiti Grandma,” he said, pulling his lip down over his teeth so he couldn’t take in my poison. His mother yelled at him, and I never saw him again, but the title has stuck in my head. Could be worse.

  “Can I help?”

  “Why would you want to?” The girl’s finger, or the finger of a midnight buddy, pressing down on a button, has created the blue organ, the yellow eye, the dangerous word, and now she’s watching an old lady clean up after them. She’ll have a good story to tell her gang the next time they come around with their cans of paint and felt pens and whatever they swallow or sniff to get their artistic juices running.

  She comes closer to me, takes the shopping bag from me with one hand and my elbow with the other. “I’m Sarah,” she says.

  “I don’t care who you are.” I shake her off and grab the bag back. “I can do this myself.” For a second, I could swear I was talking back to my grandmother. I stop walking and consider that thought.

  All my life I have lived by that motto and I’m not going to change now, despite the lines of silver paint pen refusing to melt into my wads of paper. Or maybe because of them. Life has presented me with any number of stubborn uglinesses, and early on I learned that they are best faced alone. Especially when the would-be helper looks, with her black eyes, duct-taped black jacket, and ragged skirt, like the spawn of a failed witch and a raccoon.

  “And where has it got me?” I didn’t mean the question for her, but she shrugs, a little grin moving her lips. I know the answer: a door punched into an olive green hallway like twenty other doors, behind which old people like me fall apart. What the hell. “I’m Ellie,” I say. I hand her the bag and we head to the next corner.

  I choose, for reasons of my own and which I am not too clear about, to go out each week and clean up the U.S. mail receptacles bolted to the sidewalks lining the four blocks around my apartment house. It’s one of the few things I can still choose. Something inside me makes me attack those blue boxes, even though at times I grumble so loud dogs growl as they sniff at my shoes, my stained bag, their owners saying sorry, yanking their animals and themselves away. I don’t know why I get so worked up. And I’ve tried to understand it, the graffiti, the why of it, the need to signal that someone’s been there on walls, signs, and mailboxes, like dogs do on tree trunks.

  On this next box, a red heart wraps around a word: MOM. This isn’t the first time I’ve come across this valentine, and it puzzles me almost as much as VAGINA. “What would that person’s mother think if she knew her kid was vandalizing public property in her name?” I ask my helper.

  The girl squirts the bottle a couple of times, and the soft red crayon melts fast, drips in bloody splatters onto the cement. “Maybe that kid doesn’t have a mom,” she answers as she bends over and tries to mop up the sidewalk.

  I wipe fast while the red’s still melting. The box’s blue enamel comes out almost clean. “So he doesn’t have to worry about what she’ll think?”

  Sarah blinks, looks away. “Where to next?” she asks. We turn the corner.

  This block is lined with classy apartments and new condos. The only old things the developer left after tearing out a couple of decrepit mansions are the eighty-year-old trees, maples and oaks, lining the street. Their used-up leaves play in the cool fall air, pad our steps. Sarah scuffs her boots through the dry drifts, trying to leave a track, maybe, so she can find her way back. That’s what I used to think when my son, Danny, headed off to first grade scuffing the same way, me standing at the door watching.

  “Over there.” I point at the backs of a row of shoulder-high parking signs. “Easy targets for anyone wanting to make his mark in the world.”

  At some point, in the months I’ve been cleaning up my neighborhood, I came to the conclusion that’s why kids tag. Maybe it’s because I myself once wanted to make a mark in the world.

  She’s already got the spray bottle out, and she aims it at the scribbles running across a PARKING 10 MINUTES sign. Black ink sags onto the rag in her hand. “I think this is making a mark on the world, not in it.”

  “Would you please explain that to the jerks who are doing it?”

  The girl steps back, wipes a finger across an eyelid, maybe squinting against the sting of Graffiti X. “You think I do this stuff?”

  I’ve heard this question before. Danny, about her age: “You think I do this stuff?” Even now, I can feel my hand reaching into his pocket, touching the plastic bag, pulling it out, the white crystals rustling inside. I can still hear myself yell, “Get out.”

  “Yes,” I say. She’s slipped out of her fat jacket and has tied it around her waist by the sleeves. She looks like she’s being hugged by an elephant. The arm that brushes mine is tattooed. A flower winds from elbow to shoulder, reds and oranges and greens. I poke a finger at a blossom. “Anybody who could do this to herself is capable of doing the same to a mailbox.”

  She gives up the bag when I pull at it. I toss the bottle in and head toward the last box on my route. I don’t look back, but I imagine she’s standing on the curb, glancing around, wondering who else to bother.

  That first time, I believed Danny when he said, “Trust me.” I let him stay for another year, until the night he left for good, me bloody, hanging on to a doorjamb and screaming, “You’re not my son anymore.” We both were screwed up, me on cheap bourbon, Danny on who-knows-what. He never did come back home. The one time he called, I told him I couldn’t help him. It was up to him, just like it was up to me, to find our separate ways. So far, I told him, I am not good at saving myself, much less other people.

  “Thanks a lot, Mom.” Ugly words, worse than cussing at me, words I kept hearing while I made my way to clean and sober. Last summer one of his high school buddies told me he saw Danny up north in Green River. “Looks good,” he said. “He was hauling around a little kid in a pack on his chest. Gavin, I think his name was.” I should be glad for that news, both of us finding our ways, even if Gavin is one more son to regret not knowing.

  I lift my foot to avoid catching the loose sole of my shoe on a root-raised hunk of sidewalk. The city needs to come fix stuff like that, I think, probably out loud. I can see the last box half a block away, Day-Glo green swirls signaling to me. I shut my mouth, walk a little faster, not wanting to think about unfixable upheavals elsewhere.

  Then I hear Sarah’s voice floating toward me like the leaves dropping from the trees. “The freesia’s for my mom. She liked to grow them.” I stop, turn around, see her leaning against the clean mailbox, wiping her eyes on a jacket sleeve, her face disappearing into her hands.

  I pat my pants pocket, feel a fold of Kleenex, take a step, then another, toward her. I can’t stand watching someone cry.

  “I grew freesias once,” I call to her.

  Chapter Three

  Jeffrey

  1986-1991

  The only thing Jeffrey can remember about his mother is that she has red lips. Whenever the five-year-old sees a red-lipped woman on the street, on the bus, or on his father’s arm, he wants to run up and take her hand in his, but he is too big to hold hands, his father told him, giving him a knock on the head the last time he did it. The woman had smiled at him, but he could see that it wasn’t his mother because this lady’s teeth were shiny with gold.

  He and his father live on the first floor of an apartment house, and they sleep on the sofa that is opened into a bed most of the time. Sometimes his father has a visitor, and then Jeffrey ta
kes a pillow into the closet and sleeps among the shoes and wad of clothes that have been tossed inside to make the room neat for the visitor. Sometimes the visitor has red lips, but she is never his mother. Finally, his father tells him to stop being so fuckin’ stupid the morning he can’t stop crying after he finds a lady sleeping crosswise on the sofa, her hair touching the floor, her red lipstick smeared like jam across her face.

  Jeffrey understands then that his mother is gone, for sure. “Off somewhere, the bitch.” The way his father says it, his hand flinging out and bumping into the bottle that lives on the table, the boy knows two things: his father hates his mother, and his father will hit him if he asks one more time.

  Sometimes he wishes he could live at school with his kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Michaels. She smiles and pats his shoulder and teaches him songs like “Itsy Bitsy Spider,” which Jeffrey sings to himself as he walks home and waits for his father to come in. One night he waits until it is dark, and he gets hungry so he spoons peanut butter into his mouth and pours orange juice into a cup, careful not to spill. The bed is open and when he gets tired, he crawls in between the lump of covers.

  The next morning he wakes up and wonders if he should go to school because it is light outside. He is sure Mrs. Michaels will miss him if he doesn’t come, so he heads down the street and finds the playground empty and the big doors locked. He sings his way home, pulls the key on the string out from under his T-shirt, and puts it in the lock like usual.

  At the lock’s click, the door swings open and a hand reaches out, sweeps across his head. He feels himself flying first up and then down, and he lands on his nose, his face pressed into the rug.

  “Little jerk. Had me worried. Don’t ever disappear like that…” His father’s voice falls apart and his body crumples on top of Jeffrey. It is a long time before Jeffrey can dig himself out from under the weight of arms and legs and chest and the smell of beer and make his way to the sofa.