“I still don’t want you to go,” I say. “I still think it’s a bad idea.”
“I know, but I still gotta go,” he says.
He is standing with the rope tied around his waist and his raft beside him, smiling and ready for his adventure. There is nothing more to be said. He salutes me, and I salute him back and turn before any tears can fall out of my eyes. I climb up the ladder, hop over the fence, and head on my way.
chapter 16
WHAT ABOUT ME?
The street is dark and empty. It gives me the creeps, so I try to walk fast. There are tall fences and warehouses and telephone poles but mostly nothing. I start breathing faster and faster, and my fingers begin to twitch.
“No, Alex,” I tell myself. “No panic attack out here when you’re all alone.” I hear myself and breathe even faster. “Oh jeez, I’m scared.” I begin to jog.
All of a sudden, a finger taps my shoulder and I scream, “Argggh! Don’t touch me!”
“Alex, don’t freak out. It’s just me,” Wolf says.
“You scared the heck out of me!” I say, panting.
“Sorry about that,” he says. “It’s just that I waited to watch what direction you would walk, and as I suspected, you went the wrong way.”
“Oh.” I feel kind of dumb now.
“Look,” he says. “I tied my raft to the ladder. It should be safe for a while. I’ve got the map. I’ll walk with you to your dad’s house. It shouldn’t take too long.”
“I’m not sure,” I say.
I’m not sure if I want him with me when I find my dad. I’ve been dreaming too long about finding him and hugging him and telling him how much I love him, and I don’t think I can really do that in front of Wolf.
I think Wolf understands because he says, “I could just go with you as far as his house, and then leave when he opens the door?”
“Yeah, I guess that would be okay,” I say. “I would like to actually find him.”
And I am glad to have more time with Wolf.
Tuesday morning. 05:15.
It’s a small peach-colored house with white trim. The yard is full of cacti, and there’s a beautiful line of roses beside the house. For sure it belongs to my dad.
I breathe in and out slowly. I fill up my lungs and release all the air until they feel completely empty. Wolf is on the other side of the street, watching. I look over at him and he motions for me to knock on the door. I look down. I try breathing again. I can just stand here and practice breathing, I decide. I’m not the best at it. A little more practice wouldn’t hurt.
Wolf runs up next to me. “What are you doing?”
“Practicing breathing,” I say.
“You’re not going to stop breathing,” he says. “It’s actually impossible to physically stop breathing without something blocking your air.”
“So?” I say, touching the stucco with my fingers. “Doesn’t hurt to practice.”
A little dog inside the house bursts into barking, and Wolf and I freeze, staring at each other. The door opens, and Wolf and I see a tall, hunched man looking down at us through the screen. At this point it would be too weird for Wolf to run away, so he stays put next to me.
“Hey, what are you two boys doing on my porch this early in the morning!” says the irritated man.
He looks beyond us out to the street, probably wondering how we got here. The man has silver hair, but I can see in his gray-blue eyes and small, soft chin that he is my dad. The little dog is still yapping away at us.
“You’re Charles Richardson,” I say, more stating a fact than asking a question.
“That’s correct, son,” my dad says.
“It’s me,” I say. “Alex.”
“Oh, wow,” he says. “Alex, you’ve grown so big. I’m sorry I didn’t recognize you, honey.” He looks me up and down. He glances over at Wolf in his army uniform and squeezes his eyebrows together, confused.
“This is my friend Wolf,” I say.
“I better get going anyhow,” Wolf says.
“Nonsense,” my dad says. “There’s nowhere to go at this hour.” He opens the door wide. “Come. Come in.”
Wolf and I walk into the living room. The place smells like the little white dog that is jumping on my legs. I pet him, and he licks my fingers and follows me in. There’s a couch and a coffee table on one side and a recliner chair across from a big wooden console TV on the other. There’s a bookshelf and a big framed photograph of a train.
“Have a seat,” my dad says. “You must be chilly in those T-shirts. I’ll make us some coffee.”
I want to tell him that I don’t drink coffee because I’m just a kid, but he’s my dad and he’s making something for me. I sit, quiet and amazed.
A plump woman with long dark hair and wearing a robe peeks out from the hallway. “It’s so early, Charlie. What’s going on?” she says.
“It’s nothing, sweetheart,” he says. “Go back to bed.”
Nothing? I’m visiting him for the first time in three years and he says it’s nothing? Who is she?
“Who is that?” I ask when he returns with three coffees.
“Oh, that’s Lydia,” he says. “She’s kind of my girlfriend right now.”
“Oh.”
“So, what brings you here?” he asks.
“Ummm,” I say. “I mean, you. I came to see you.”
“Oh, that’s real nice of you to visit your old dad.” He smiles and takes a sip of his coffee.
“Well, yeah,” I say. “I missed you.”
“That’s very thoughtful of you to come, Alex.”
“Yeah,” I say. “Um, did you miss me?”
“Yeah,” he answers. “Sure I missed you.” He looks around the room. “Hey, Alex, do you want an Amtrak baseball cap?” He brings it over to me. “That’s where I work. Reservations and tickets. All day long I help people get from one place to another.”
I want to tell him that I already know he works for Amtrak, that he worked there the whole time I was growing up with him. But I just say, “Oh,” and accept the hat into my lap.
“We’ve had loads of new station renovations, and the Cardinal and the Carolinian are very popular out east, but the bulk of my business is with the Metroliner between San Diego and Los Angeles. People have been very happy about that one. Fewer stops,” he notes.
“That’s pretty neat, Mr Richardson,” Wolf says.
“Dad,” I say, “are you ever going to come home?”
He looks around the room, and then points to the photograph of the train. “That’s a picture I took of the Coast Starlight, just north of Santa Barbara,” he says proudly. “It was stopped near the highway because one of the engines had shut off.”
“Oh,” I say. It is actually a beautiful picture, the silver train gleaming in front of the ocean. “I know it wasn’t your fault, Dad. I know you thought the deed was real, and you were trying to buy a nice place for us to live.”
“Don’t worry yourself about that, honey. I shouldn’t have been out gambling so late. I had a bit to drink, you know. That wasn’t the best time for making big decisions.” He sips his coffee.
“I forgive you, Dad,” I say. “It’s okay. I’m not mad at you over it.”
He shakes his head. “I didn’t really belong with your mother anymore. She was getting all that education. That’s not so much my thing.”
“But what about me? What about Johnny?” I ask.
“Oh, how is Johnny?”
“He’s good,” I say. “I think.” I continue. “He plays music.”
“That’s nice,” he says. “And your grandmother? She was always very sweet to me.” He grins.
“She’s good. She forgets a lot, though.”
“Oh, that’s too bad,” he says.
“She’s okay, mostly,” I add. “But what about me, Dad? I’ve grown up a lot and I’m not so messy. And I eat everything on my plate.”
“You’ve got a wonderful mother, Alex. So smart,” he says. “I knew she
’d be able to take good care of you and you’d grow up into a fine young lady.”
“You’re still my dad, though.”
“You’re right, honey,” he says. “And you know what? Let me give you two a ride home.”
“But—” I try to stop him.
“There’s no easy way back on the RTD buses, especially not at this hour. And if we wait any longer, the traffic will be bad.”
He gets up and grabs his keys from a little hook by the door. I put my full coffee down on the tray and Wolf copies me. We stand up and follow my dad.
“Wanna come for the ride, Spotty?” he asks the dog, who prances happily in a circle beside him.
“Uh, Dad,” I say. “Wolf’s not coming back to my house—”
“Before I pick up my stuff by the wash,” Wolf finishes the sentence. “Would it be okay if we stopped for a moment at the corner of Florence and the LA River, Mr Richardson?”
I look at Wolf, confused. He only gives me a shrug.
“Certainly, son,” my dad says. “That’s next to the 710, right on our way.”
A few minutes later, my dad and I are waiting in his car while Wolf hops back into the wash and out again with his big bag. My dad doesn’t ask why Wolf is grabbing stuff from the wash, and I don’t volunteer anything.
After twenty minutes of driving in complete silence, he pulls slowly into the wobbly dirt road that used to be Muscatel Avenue.
“What’s all this construction?” he asks.
“The city’s putting in sidewalks,” I say.
“That’ll be real nice for the community.” He seems genuinely appreciative.
We all get out of the car, and my dad asks Wolf to take a photograph of us.
My dad and I stand in front of the car. He puts his arm around me stiffly. Spotty sticks his head out the window. Wolf snaps the shot.
“It was real great to see you, honey,” Charles Richardson announces, before he climbs back into his Plymouth Reliant and drives away.
chapter 17
DOWN THERE IN THE DIRT TOGETHER
Tuesday morning. 06:49.
Wolf and I stand in my front yard. The grass is cool and wet, but the rising sun will soon burn off the dew.
“What the heck was that?” I say, crumpling the Amtrak hat in my hands.
Wolf shakes his head. “I don’t know.”
“My mom said he didn’t want to see me,” I admit. “But I didn’t believe it.”
My nose quickly fills with mucus that I try to sniff up. I push a tear off my cheek, bend down, and grab a big chunk of dirt from one of the piles. I crush it in my hand until all that’s left is a smooth stone that was hiding in the middle. I throw it hard and fast over the fence and into the wash, listening to it click-clack against the concrete.
“Your mom is usually right,” Wolf observes.
“She is usually right,” I agree. “And she loves me a whole lot.”
I stare at him. “What are you doing here, Wolf? Why didn’t you keep going down to Long Beach?”
“Hold on a second and I’ll explain.” He walks over to our trench and throws his bag inside. He grabs hold of the ladder and motions for me to follow. I climb down and lie next to him on the bottom.
“Are you gonna tell me?” I ask again.
“Well.” He clears his throat. “All this time, I’ve been thinking that my dad was a real jerk and didn’t like me anymore.”
“I know.”
“No offense, Alex, but meeting your dad made me see the whole situation differently,” he says.
“Yeah,” I say. “Your dad does seem to care about you a lot, even if he gets mad at you sometimes.”
“That’s what I’m thinking,” he says.
“So you’re not going to leave me?”
“No, Alex,” Wolf assures me. “I’m back for good now.”
He puts his hand around mine, not to wrestle, or punch, or high-five each other, but just to hold it.
We don’t talk anymore after that. My head is spinning with images of my dad, and his train photo, and his sort-of girlfriend, and Spotty the dog. I’m completely exhausted and Wolf’s hand on mine calms me down. When I feel his body begin to twitch with sleep, my own begins to follow. We sleep soundly, down there in the dirt, together.
epilogue
THE MORNING SUN
Tuesday morning. 07:19.
The phone starts ringing before anyone wakes up. Alex’s mother answers and hears the hysterical voice of Wolf’s father. Wolf is missing. Did he spend the night at Alex’s house? One trip across the living room and into Alex’s bedroom reveals a second missing child.
The grown-ups are very upset and on full alert. Johnny is annoyed when his mother wakes him up to ask if he knows where Alex has gone. He rolls his eyes and goes back to bed. He covers his head with a pillow as the police siren comes closer and closer to his house. Alex’s nana cannot remember where Alex was last and is not quite sure who Wolf is until they show her a picture. She smiles and says, “El lobito.” She falls back asleep and misses the rest of the early-morning drama.
Alex’s mother serves coffee to Wolf’s father, Wolf’s father’s fiancée, and the police. It is 7:30 a.m., then 8:30 a.m. The police ask the parents to come down to the station to fill out official reports.
It is ten a.m. when Nana makes her coffee, soft-boils an egg, and chews her toast. She sits down in front of the TV to watch another history special. But she can’t hear the show very well because of the helicopter circling above the neighborhood. She raises her fist, shakes it, and shouts, “Fuera helicóptero!” But the pilot can’t hear her. The children cannot hear her either, because when you lie at the bottom of a deep trench, the earth swallows up sound.
Nana can’t see the picture on the TV very well because there is too much light coming in through the living room window. She begins to curse the morning sun, but then she remembers the sun rises on the other side of the house. Why, then, is the room filled with golden streams of light? She curses her memory for playing tricks on her and looks out the window to check.
Spilling out of Alex and Wolf’s trench in the front yard are yellow, orange, pink, and red rays of luminescence, sparkling and twisting together up into the air.
Nana shakes her head and whispers to herself, “So that’s where they are.”
The only materials on earth valuable enough to cause a bright light to shine out of the ground are jewels, and children. She knows this because when she was a child in México she would follow the glow to help her abuelo find their family’s buried jewelry. Nana knows that Alex would never wear any jewelry, which means that only a child could be hiding in the trench. And if she remembers correctly, there are two children missing.
Nana dips her toast into her egg yolk, certain that having a good breakfast first is the only way she can face the crowd that will show up when she shares the news.
Tuesday morning. 11:00.
“Oh, thank heavens! There they are!”
My mom’s voice startles us awake, and I look up to see three concerned faces gazing down at us. Wolf and I climb out of the trench, very groggy.
My nana doesn’t look surprised.
“You scared me half to death, Wolf!” Mr McCann shouts.
“Sorry, Dad,” Wolf mutters.
Even though our parents are furious at us, they give us big hugs.
“There aren’t many more days left before the street will be finished,” I explain.
“And we really wanted to camp out down here,” Wolf adds.
“But we didn’t think you’d let us,” I finish.
“I’m so sorry, Dad,” Wolf says. “I love you.”
Wolf’s dad’s eyes widen, and he takes a step back. “I love you too, son.”
I squeeze my mom. “I love you so much, Mom.”
“I love you too, mija,” she says, holding me tight.
The police officer standing in the driveway glares at Wolf and warns us both to “Stay out of trouble, kids. Make sure to
always let your parents know where you are.”
“Yes, sir,” Wolf answers.
He asks my mom to sign off on the report and pulls away in his cruiser.
We all head inside and my nana makes us some chorizo-and-egg burritos. For the next hour my mom and Wolf’s dad go back and forth between telling us not to ever do something like this again, and telling us that they love us. Back and forth. Back and forth. Mad at us, and then happy we’ve returned. Crossing their arms and giving lectures. Petting our hair like we’re puppies.
I’m so happy that I’m home. I’m so happy that I have my mom.
After lunch, my nana returns to the living room to watch PBS, Mom searches all over the kitchen for the Ziploc bags to pack up the leftovers, and Wolf’s dad holds his son tightly to him.
“I couldn’t have a family without you,” he tells Wolf.
Wolf mumbles, “I know” into his dad’s chest.
Before they leave, Wolf reminds me to restock the trench for our next battle.
“Just a pretend battle, right?” his dad warns him.
“Just pretend,” Wolf agrees. “I promise.”
Tuesday night. 22:20.
I lie in bed, giving a dirty look to Hops the Kangaroo, who is lying on the opposite side of the mattress.
“Why did he give you to me,” I ask, “if he doesn’t even care about me?”
Hops obviously doesn’t answer. Maybe he doesn’t know the answer. Maybe he wouldn’t tell me even if he did. He just looks back at me with big dark eyes.
“What?” I say.
His eyes are shiny and tender.
“I’m giving you that whole side of the bed!”
Still no answer.
Darn, it’s hard to stay mad at him. “Okay, come here then.” I wrap my arm around him and tuck him under the blanket with me. “It’s not your fault,” I reassure him.
I think about my dad in his peach house with his rosebushes. I don’t understand why he doesn’t want to see me. Maybe I’ll figure it out someday, but not right now.
The Street Belongs to Us Page 11