by Tom Twitchel
Nervous laughter bubbled up inside me and I collapsed on the couch, a snorting, cackling mess.
Maddy slit her eyes and glared at me even though she was grinning. “You owe me bigtime mister. If it wasn’t your birthday I’d make you take me to get some frozen yogurt.”
“It’s too cold for frozen yogurt.” I laughed.
“Coffee then.”
“You’re too little to drink coffee. It’ll stunt your growth.” I laughed.
Narrowing her eyes, she said, “Today?”
“Nope!” I chuckled and shook my head.
She stuck out her tongue and then laughed along with me. She waltzed over to the couch and sank into it, her head thrown back, staring at the ceiling. “You’re so lucky you gave me a key.”
“You think? You were awesome Maddy! Really, you totally saved my ass!” I said, meaning every word of it.
“Yes, I did! And no thanks to you with all the talking in my head. What is the deal-e-o? Did you do something? Why the heck would she be here? What’s she following up on?”
Shrugging, I said, “I have no idea. Two years ago, when I was at the hostel, she interviewed me. All she has is some partial information. Most of it I made up. I don’t know how she would have tracked down my fake mother’s new name or why she would have come here. Besides, like I said, it’s been two years since I ran away from the hostel.”
“Maybe it’s nothing. When you ran away, she hadn’t been able to close your case or whatever. She found a single mother living with a boy named Benny and she was just following up,” Maddy said, shrugging as well.
I let out a long sigh. “I hope so. What was her attitude like? Did she seem suspicious?”
“All adults act suspicious when they’re asking kids for information. She seemed snoopy and super pompous but that’s probably her job. Right?”
“Yeah.” There was something about her showing up so long after I had skipped out of the hostel that didn’t seem right. I felt like there was something we were missing.
Maddy drew her legs up underneath her. “Weeell, she has really pretty eyes anyway. I’ve never seen that color before. They’re so strange looking.”
“Yeah. Whatever.” Nerves shot and feeling shaky, I tried to calm myself and control my anxiety. What could she do anyway? I’d fill out the forms with as much misinformation as I thought would work and that would be the end of it. I got up, walked over to the counter, and picked up the stack of paper she had left behind. They looked like every legal document I had had to deal with since I had begun my apartment adventure. I flipped one over and groaned. They were double-sided.
“Hey, you don’t need to fill those out tonight. It’s Saturday. Let’s do something fun! I brought cake and DVDs!” Maddy pointed over at the counter next to the fridge. A plastic clamshell with a large piece of lemon cake in it sat next to a couple of DVD cases.
I eyed the DVDs warily. “What did you bring? A Walk To Remember and The Notebook?
Eyes sparkling, she said, “You guessed!… Just kidding! It’s your birthday, not mine. I got a couple of superhero movies. Your favorite!”
I could feel the birthday bus making a U-turn and beginning to head in a much better direction.
CHAPTER EIGHT
You would think that waking up on a Sunday without anything to do would be nice. And it kind of is, unless you factor in waking up in an apartment alone. My birthday Saturday had been great, but the cold and empty apartment made me feel even more alone the next morning. You know, the birthday hangover. It was the inevitable letdown after a celebration, at least for me when I was waking up to my life.
The evening before, I had decided to confide in her and let her in on my growing relationship with Mr. Goodturn and his offer to mentor me. She had been skeptical at first, but she knew about my ability to sense the deeper reality in people when I focused on them. My read on him was positive and she trusted that. We shared almost all of my secrets and I wanted to simplify my need to hide stuff. The more she knew, the less likely I was to trip up and damage our friendship later. It wasn’t even necessary to impress upon her that she needed to keep Mr. Goodturn’s secrets; she just assumed it was the right thing to do. Baffle was a different issue. I wasn’t motivated to bring him further into the loop.
She had needed to leave before dark and that had come way too early as far as I was concerned. We discussed Mr. Goodturn and the failed robbery briefly but her fears had been allayed and that issue stopped being an issue; it was now just another curious detail in my unusual life. We had just watched the movies and hung out, no video games. Although Maddy could play pretty well, I hadn’t been willing to burn time on a game. We’d talked about everything and nothing. For some reason, I didn’t mention my new knack. I wanted to keep it to myself for a while I guess.
While we had been watching the movies, I had noticed some differences in Maddy. She was wearing makeup. Not a lot, but I couldn’t remember her ever wearing makeup before. It wasn’t garish or over the top and she hadn’t put on lipstick. That would have looked weird—a little anyway.
There had been something else. Aside from the makeup, Maddy looked different. She had curves where I had never noticed any before. Her hoodie fit a little different and so did her t-shirt. Not that I looked all that much. Okay, a little but nothing creepy.
And she had touched me like a dozen times. A hand on my arm while she told me about her parents going away again for a trip to South America in a few months; punching me in the shoulder in between jokes; hugging me when I blew out the candle stuck in the piece of cake that she brought me, and leaning against me while we were watching Batman kick ass. I had enjoyed all of it. And I had become aware, as though it was a new revelation, that Maddy was really pretty, in a tomboy kind of way. Where had I been when that had happened? Was it new or had I been blind?
While I thought that over, my hand crept up to my face and felt for the odd-shaped dent over my left eye that Dennis had given me. I didn’t need to look in a mirror to confirm that my eyelid was still drooping at half-mast. My impaired vision did that.
Looking down at the sheets covering my legs, I couldn’t see the ugly twist in my left leg, but I knew it was there. Maddy rarely commented on my disability, and never teased me about it. But she had to know it was there. How could she not? And how could anyone look at me and think I was normal? From my perspective, the only anti-female cologne better than being a brain in school was to be a brain with a disfiguring disability.
None of that changed the fact that she was my best friend. Taking the risk of messing that up by expecting, or trying for, something more wasn’t anything I was willing to do. If I tried to make our friendship into something it wasn’t, something she didn’t feel, I would lose the most important person in my life. That was a bet I didn’t even want to consider. The fact was that while I really cared for Maddy I was confused as to what that actually meant.
Groaning, for dramatic personal effect (who else was going to hear me?), I stretched and got out of bed. Yesterday had been so successful that I had the rare option of not working on a Sunday. The single exception of Miss Hoch’s unwelcome visit aside, my birthday had been pretty cool.
My trip to the bathroom for a shower was a demonstration of automatic pilot at work, and breakfast was an exercise in muscle memory. When I was done, I looked out at the dark, cloudy sky and just drank it in and let it fill me up. Billy’s face floated out of the depths of memories I spent a lot of time trying to block. I remembered the last time I looked at him, brushing hair out of his tear-stained face. My chest hurt and I longed for my little brother.
Literally shaking myself, I decided to take control of my day. No more blues; no more feeling sorry for myself; I’d just had a pretty decent birthday, why be blue?
First, I cleaned the entire apartment, every room, every floor: the kitchen, the bathroom and the living room. Then I tackled the bedrooms. When I walked into my mom’s room, I saw the pocket watch Maddy had given me resting on th
e nightstand next to the bed where I had put it. Maddy knew I had been obsessing about the watch but she didn’t know why. Before the disastrous sequence of events that had destroyed our family, my mom used to keep a watch much like it on her nightstand. The original had belonged to her dad, my grandfather. When I was little and got sick, she would bundle me up in blankets and let me hold the watch. The almost inaudible ticking made me feel like she was close by, which, of course, she was.
Looking at the watch reminded me that I had left Mr. Goodturn’s gift on my desk. Walking into my bedroom, I tidied up first and made the bed before I picked up the small wrapped box. Sitting at the desk, I unwrapped it and opened the box. The chipped top we had both used our knacks on was inside. My name had been neatly carved into its surface. There was a note in the box. It read:
Benny, There are mile markers in all our lives. This top represents the first time we collaborated on something together. It also commemorates a kinship between the two of us. My hope is for you to enjoy the happiest of birthdays and my wish is that our friendship will endure.
G
I placed the top on my desk next to the lamp. I hadn’t been expecting something fancy and it certainly wasn’t. But the sentiment in the note made the gift special and important to me. Unwilling to fall back into the melancholy funk I had been in earlier, I resisted thinking about relationships and turned my thoughts instead to my knacks and how best to use them. Getting some training and insight from Mr. Goodturn was very tempting, but going to the pawnshop made me uncomfortable because of Miss Hoch’s visit. Even though it was likely that she was long gone and even more likely that she hadn’t been in the pawnshop at all, I kept imagining that she might be lurking close by waiting for me.
Mentally kicking myself, I got up out of the chair. Moving quickly and with a purpose, I went into the living room and grabbed my jacket from the barstool where I always draped it. I paused. There was something about my jacket being there that nagged at me, but I couldn’t place my reason for worrying about it.
Shrugging into it, I headed for the door.
To hell with worrying about Miss Hoch.
CHAPTER NINE
Pushing open the door to the pawnshop held different expectations today. Once I got past the ridiculous fear of Miss Hoch stalking me, I could feel myself getting excited. The shop looked empty, as it often was on Sunday afternoons. Mr. Goodturn was behind the counter as usual, but instead of working on some gizmo or polishing a piece of equipment, he was bent over some paperwork. His glasses were perched at the very end of his nose and he was squinting above them while writing in a ledger. Who does that anymore? Give me a laptop and a spreadsheet any day. An old-school calculator complete with paper roll sat close by on the counter, another antique. Hadn’t he ever heard of flash drives or a printer?
“Good afternoon, Benny.” He glanced at me as his fingers punched at the keys on the calculator. The paper roll chattered and several inches of paper with lines of numbers emerged from the feeder at the top of the machine.
“Am I interrupting?” I asked, curious about what he was doing but figuring that he’d tell me if he wanted me to know.
He punched more keys and the calculator spit out more paper.
“Give me a few minutes. I’m just about finished with this.”
“Cool.” I did a slow spin and confirmed that there wasn’t anyone else in the shop. Why Mr. Goodturn opened on Sundays at all was a mystery. Maybe he didn’t have anything else to do and reasoned that he might as well open for the possible cash customer. That didn’t seem likely, since I couldn’t remember ever seeing a customer on the Sundays that I had been in the shop.
Grunting with what sounded like satisfaction, Mr. Goodturn tore the strip of paper from the calculator and tucked it into the ledger.
“There! That’s another month put to bed!” He shoved his glasses back in place with his short fingers and grinned at me.
“You do your accounting on a calculator? And write it in a book?”
“Old habits die hard for old people, Benny. I was doing books like this before…well…for a long time. I’m too old to change, even if I wanted to.” He pulled the machine and book off the counter and carried them to his office motioning for me to follow him.
“What brings you by? I thought we had an appointment for Wednesday,” he said as he picked up a mug and took a careful sip. The paper and string hanging off the side of the cup meant tea. I thought I smelled mint.
“I finished all of my chores and was kind of hoping we could…you know…talk.”
“Would you care for some tea?” he offered.
“No thanks. I’m good.” I parked myself in the metal chair that had become my spot when we had our chats.
Sitting down in his desk chair, he carefully set the mug on his desk and rubbed his hands together. “What should we discuss? The weather? History? Or the lady who stopped by here yesterday, asking about tenants in my building next door?”
“Whaaatt?” My heart sank and I instantly wanted to be anywhere but where I was. She had been in here. What had she been asking?
“Ah, we have a winning topic.” He smiled, but it was thin.
“She was in here?” Pretending that I didn’t know what he was talking about didn’t enter my mind for a second.
“Oh, yes, quite insistent, and persistent beyond her assignation. She had many questions and a passion for getting answers to them that didn’t make sense to me. Where did you meet her?”
That was the million-dollar question now wasn’t it? To answer that, I would have to tell Mr. Goodturn my big secret, and that scared the heck out of me.
“When I came to Seattle I was living in a hostel. She tried to open a file on me with the CPS. I left the hostel before she could create problems for me. But that was two years ago!” I tried to make myself feel less guilty because technically there was truth to what I had just said.
“That doesn’t make sense, Benny. What was she so concerned about that she wanted to have you remanded to the custody of CPS? Was there a problem with your parents? Social Services doesn’t pay their employees to follow up on two-year-old unfiled cases. She did tell me she visited your apartment and met a girl who claimed to be Claire Brown’s daughter. And that her name was Brenda—Bennie for short.”
Crap. You can never tell one lie and have that be the end of it. You always had to tack on more lies to support the first one.
“What did you say to her?” I skipped over the unasked question as to who the girl was in my apartment. The other questions I just ignored.
Pausing to straighten his glasses, he cocked his head to one side. “Benny, I’ve found that when people are asking questions that I don’t have a ready answer for, or if I’m in the dark, I don’t typically say anything. She knows that I own that building, but I didn’t see that as authorization for her asking me questions about my tenants. She didn’t get much information. What little I had to tell her will probably discourage her from coming back.”
“I’m sorry. I hope she wasn’t rude to you.” I wouldn’t have minded if he had been rude to her.
“No, no. But you’re avoiding the deeper issues here. Why would she think there was a girl living in your apartment? And why would she be pursuing you and your mother?”
I held my tongue. I was standing on a cliff and I couldn’t bring myself to make the leap of faith.
Tapping the arms of his chair with his too small hands, he leaned back and sighed.
“Benny, without trying to damage our friendship, and with no intention of spooking you, would it help you to feel better telling me what this is all about if I let you in on something?”
“What?” I asked, not sure that I wanted an answer to that question.
Picking up the mug and taking a longer sip, he held it in his hands thoughtfully staring at the contents as though what he was preparing to say was written in there. In his small hands, the mug looked bigger than it was.
“I know that your living circum
stances are not what you would have the world believe them to be.”
If I hadn’t already been sitting down, I would have fallen down. Did that mean he already knew what I had been devoting so much time and energy—not to mention money—to keep secret?
There was no more at risk here. Somehow, I had been discovered. The last domesticated animal was out of the sack.
“And you think…” My voice trailed off. Having kept my secret for so long, it was hard to say it aloud.
Nodding his head slightly, and grimacing, he said, “That there is a reason no one has seen your mother—ever.”
Well, there it was. His reluctance to rip the bandage and say it himself, and leave it to me to say seemed gracious. As though he didn’t want to be impolite and say aloud what we both knew to be true.
“I don’t know where my mother is.”
“Ah.”
“Are you going to turn me in? To CPS? Are you going to call Miss Hoch?” To say I felt sick at that moment would have been a gross understatement.
He shook his head and put the mug down.
“What we are talking about is best not mentioned aloud. I suspected early on that there was something amiss about your mother. The application through the mail, excuses for missing face-to-face meetings and neither Breno nor myself ever seeing her. I must say, your discretion and extremely low-maintenance tenancy has made it easy to look the other way and not investigate. My concern, my question, is not what, but why?”
He hadn’t said he wasn’t going to contact Miss Hoch although it sounded like that wasn’t his intention.
Choosing my words carefully, I tried to tiptoe around the elephant in the room. “Why? Why…might… Why would someone possibly be living alone when they’re…young?”
“Yes. That would do for a start.”