Where I'd Like to Be

by Frances O'Roark Dowell

  “You know why trees smell the way they do?” Murphy asked, looking up from her hammering.

  “Sap?” Logan guessed. “Chlorophyll?”

  Murphy shook her head. “Stars. Trees breathe in starlight year after year, and it goes deep into their bones. So when you cut a tree open, you smell a hundred years’ worth of light. Ancient starlight that took millions of years to reach earth. That’s why trees smell so beautiful and old.”

  I thought it sounded like poetry, what Murphy had to say about the trees. I shook my head. I could talk a blue streak, but I could never say things the way Murphy did.

  I saw Donita roll her eyes, but she smiled, too. She held a bunch of nails between her lips, so it was a strange sort of smile, but it seemed real enough. Murphy appeared to be growing on her, though that didn’t mean they were living in harmony night and day.

  Right around lunchtime, Murphy backed away from the building site and peered toward it, her hand shading her eyes. “You know, I think we should have some turrets,” she called out. “Like on a castle. I stayed in a castle once, with my parents, and it was really nice. Well, it got cold at night, but we just piled on the quilts and were warm as toast.”

  “You’re kidding, right?” Donita asked, not even bothering to look up from where she was hammering in a joist hinge. “We’ll be lucky if the walls stand up. We can’t be adding no towers for Sleeping Beauty.”

  I looked around at what we had so far, just the skeleton of the floor and the boards for one wall lying on the grass, waiting to be nailed together. “I have to admit, it’s hard to imagine adding anything fancy to what we’ve got,” I said.

  Murphy came a few steps closer. “Do you want this thing to look like a shoe box? Completely boring?”

  Donita stood and crossed her arms. “I want it to stand up and stay standing,” she said, sounding firm on the matter. “I don’t think we need to be having ridiculous dreams about what might could be.”

  Logan jumped into the middle of the fray. “All right, ladies, all right! Let’s break it up. No catfighting on the premises, if you please.”

  Murphy and Donita glared at him. Then they looked at each other and cracked up. They laughed so hard they were choking on their laughter and pounding each other on the back. Logan stood to the side and looked confused, until Murphy finally caught her breath and looped an arm around his shoulder, grinning at him. “Logan the Peacemaker,” she said.

  Logan shuffled his feet. “I was only joking,” he said, frowning. “Nobody ever gets my jokes.”

  I watched Murphy and Donita laughing together, and it made me feel shy. I wished me and Murphy could cut up that way sometimes. We did a lot of stuff together, not even counting the fort, but I still couldn’t help but wonder if Murphy really wanted to be my friend or if she just needed someone to pass the time with until someone came to collect her from the Home.

  Over the next few days our hammers kept pounding, and the air was a mix of sounds—birdsong fluttering between the ring of metal on metal and wood. Every once in awhile we’d hear the putt-puttering of Mr. Potter’s old truck pulling up in the Parrish’s driveway, and pretty soon he’d be walking around the edges of the fort, giving us building tips.

  “Y’all know where your windows are going to be?” he’d asked us Monday afternoon. Murphy and I were marking the bottom boards of the frame so we would see where to place the studs, the boards we’d nail plywood to for the walls. “That’s going to influence how many studs you need to mark for.”

  Donita was counting out nails. “We don’t need windows, Uncle Wendell. A door ought to do us.”

  “We have to have windows,” I protested. “Otherwise it’ll be like hanging around in a dungeon.”

  “Listen to me on this one, Maddie,” Donita insisted. “You got windows, you got rain coming in the windows. You got snow coming in the windows. You got God’s creatures coming in the windows. Windows are more problems than we need to be dealing with here.”

  Mr. Potter put his hand on Donita’s shoulder. “I got some strong plastic covering you can put over the windows, baby. When the days get short, you’ll be wanting some light in there while you can get it.”

  He turned to the rest of us. “All right, children, let’s talk about how you make yourself a window.”

  Logan was the one who knew the language of houses: king studs and trimmers, rise, run, and span. He was the one who showed Ricky Ray how to drive a nail into a board, bending down low so he could guide Ricky Ray’s hands. “My grandfather taught me that there’s two ways to nail pieces of wood together,” he explained the first day. “There’s face nailing, which is when you pound the nail through one board directly into another board, like this.” He gave an expert tap of the hammer, using just the right amount of force to shoot the nail through one piece of wood and into the next.

  “But sometimes you’ve got to toenail,” he said next, and that cracked Ricky Ray up.

  “I got ten toenails,” he said to Logan. “I know all about toenails.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t recommend doing to your toenails what I’m about to do to this nail, okay?”

  Ricky Ray nodded, all serious, as Logan showed him how to drive a nail down at an angle to make a T out of two boards. “That’s pretty hard to do,” he said when he finished, “so you better let me help you if you need to do any toenailing.”

  I stood there watching with my mouth hanging open. It was like a new Logan Parrish had been born before my eyes. With a hammer in his hand, Logan didn’t just seem like a normal person, he was downright heroic.

  • • •

  We were starting to get somewhere; we had a floor, the side walls and end walls were ready to go, and the corner posts were up. I had it all in my mind’s eye as I sloshed a brush dipped in silver paint across our Journey Through the Mind time machine, wondering what Murphy, Donita, and Ricky Ray were doing at that very minute. We’d accomplished a lot so far, but it would probably be another week before the fort was finished.

  “Do you think we ought to paint the outside?” Logan Parrish had come to stand beside me, his hands jammed in his pockets, his feet dancing in his shoes.

  Any innocent bystander would have thought Logan was out of his head. Obviously we were already painting the outside of the time machine. But I knew exactly what Logan Parrish was talking about.

  “I just don’t want to take forever for it to be finished,” I told him, waving my brush and accidentally flecking his arm with silver paint.

  Logan nodded, rubbing his arm on his jeans and making a big, silvery smear. “Me either. But at the same time, I have a hundred ideas for what we could do to it to make it completely great.”

  “Like put shutters on the windows,” I said.

  “Or build steps up to the front door,” Logan said, excitement threading its way into his voice. “And I was thinking that it couldn’t be that hard to figure out how to put windowpanes in the windows. And what do you think about trying to find a woodstove? It’s going to get cold soon. We could cut a hole in the roof for the stovepipe.”

  “Logan?”

  A woman wearing a bright blue sweater and gray slacks stood at the foot of the stage, looking up at us, her eyebrows raised as though she found what we were doing just the slightest bit amusing. “It’s four forty-five, honey. I promised Daddy dinner would be on the table by six. He’s got a board meeting tonight.”

  “Is that your mom?” I whispered.

  “Yeah,” Logan whispered back, not sounding all that happy about the fact.

  I looked at her a moment longer. “She doesn’t really match you, does she?”

  Logan shook his head.

  Looking down at Logan’s mother, I could see she didn’t have a frog bone in her body. Mrs. Parrish was immaculate. Her frosted blonde hair was cut in a neat bob, not a strand out of place. Also, you could just tell she had a pocket organizer and a cell phone in her purse. Mrs. Parrish was the sort of woman Granny Lane had always admired. “Oh, that one, s
he’s got her act together, now don’t she?” she’d say. Granny Lane wasn’t the least bit organized herself, but that didn’t stop her from liking others who were.

  The way Mrs. Parrish rattled her keys lightly, signaling that it wouldn’t be a good idea to test her patience, let you know right off that her act was more together than most people’s.

  “Can we give Maddie a ride home?” Logan asked his mother. “She’s one of the kids working on the fort.”

  Mrs. Parrish gave a brisk nod of her head. “Of course. But both of you, please. Dinner at six means dinner at six.”

  It felt funny to walk out of the building matching step for step with Logan Parrish. It suddenly occurred to me that we might even be friends. Logan gave me a half-grin and rolled his eyes at me as his mother held out her keys and beeped open the car door locks of a spruce green SUV.

  Logan’s little sister, Marcy, was sitting in the front seat talking on a play cell phone, running her hand through her floppy, blonde curls as she spoke. When Mrs. Parrish introduced us, Marcy put her hand over the receiver and whispered, “Sorry, can’t talk right now. Important call.”

  “Caroline?” she spoke into the phone. “Lunch on Tuesday?”

  Mrs. Parrish smiled. “Marcy’s in the second grade, and already she’s quite the social butterfly.”

  I looked at Logan, who was struggling to get his seat belt on, his face going red from the effort.

  I was pretty sure he had to be adopted.

  “So Maddie, Judge Parrish says that all of the children building the fort come from the Children’s Home,” Mrs. Parrish said as she pulled out of the parking lot behind the auditorium. “How long have you been there?”

  “Since April,” I told her. “Before that, I was living with a foster family over in Blountville.”

  “It’s a good thing you came over here,” Mrs. Parrish said. “The schools are much better. And the Children’s Home is excellent. Our church sponsors a scholarship. We sent one young man from the Home to Cornell University.”

  “I’m sure he was happy about that, Mrs. Parrish,” I said. Outside the car, the trees seemed to rush past us in a blur of green and yellow, the leaves just beginning to change over. I imagined a boy on a college campus that smelled like autumn and wood smoke, and a little shiver ran through me.

  “It was a wonderful opportunity for him,” Mrs. Parrish agreed, glancing at me in the rearview mirror. “So is it your wish to be adopted?”

  Logan looked at his mother. “Mom, that’s pretty personal.”

  “Not at all,” Mrs. Parrish said, brushing Logan’s remark away with a wave of her hand. “Maddie knows she’s in the foster-care system. I’m sure she’s given some thought to the question, and if she hasn’t, then perhaps she should. I’m sure all foster children consider adoption.”

  I nodded. “I’ve thought about it some. Mostly what I want is my own house. Besides, the people who want to adopt eleven-year-old girls are few and far between.”

  “That’s a problem you hear about a great deal,” Mrs. Parrish said. “Even for children as young as two years old.”

  I liked the way Mrs. Parrish spoke to me, like she considered me her equal. You could tell she wasn’t the sort of person who wasted time talking to people not worth the effort.

  “How about your parents, Maddie?” Mrs. Parrish had pulled the car up to the foot of the Home’s driveway and now turned to look straight at me. “Are they completely out of the picture? Or is there a possibility of reconciliation?”

  “I don’t have parents,” I told her. “But I still have my Granny Lane up on Roan Mountain. I’ve got family lots of places, come to think of it,” I said, picturing Mr. Willis and Randy Nidiffer in my mind. “Granny Lane used to always say, ‘Families are made, not born.’ I guess that’s how I feel about it too.”

  I pondered Logan’s family as I walked toward the dormitory. It was hard to see much of his mama in him, the way she was just about perfect and Logan was anything but.

  If he wasn’t adopted, maybe Logan got his frog genes from his daddy, I thought, pushing open the dormitory door and breathing in the warm scent of the dryer coming up from the basement. I pictured Judge Parrish hopping around a courtroom, his long black robe flying up to show those lime green pants underneath.

  I laughed, wondering what old Murphy would think about that.

  Chapter 9

  It was beautiful.

  Maybe if you were a world-famous architect or interior decorator you wouldn’t think so, but if you were one of us, you couldn’t take your eyes off of that fort.

  Saturday morning, two weeks after we had set out to the library to begin our task, Murphy, Donita, Logan, Ricky Ray, and I stood in front of the end result of our many hours of labor, silent at first, and then we couldn’t stop talking.

  “It sure is a lot more like a house than I thought it would be,” Donita said, pacing back-and-forth, nodding her approval. “I think the roof makes it seem like it could be a house. We should put shingles on it, though.”

  “And we have to paint it.” Logan slapped a wall with the flat of his hand. “Maybe green, so it would be camouflaged. I don’t want this place easy to spot.”

  I had so many plans for our fort, they were spilling out of me like water from a faucet. I sat down on the fort’s front step and started going down my shopping list. “The next time Corinne and Dan take us over to Wal-Mart, I’m going to buy us a pitcher and a big jar of instant tea, and that way we can have something to drink whenever we want. I’ll get some gallon jugs of water, too, to make the tea with. And maybe a rug. Do you think we could get wall-to-wall carpeting somewhere?”

  In the middle of all this noise, Murphy gave a dramatic clearing of her throat. We all turned to look at her. “I think this is an important occasion that should be marked somehow,” she said, and the rest of us nodded. “Maybe if we got together in a circle and somebody said a few words.”

  “Something exactly right,” Ricky Ray put in.

  “Something just right,” Murphy agreed. She looked at me. “You read a lot of books, Maddie. Maybe you know the right thing to say.”

  “Give me a few seconds,” I told her, thinking she should be the one to say something; she always had such amazing things to say. But she’d handed me the task, so I walked away from the fort to stand behind a sycamore tree, searching for the words like I might find them on the ground among the leaves and the acorns. I peeked around the tree and took the long view of what we’d built. The fort was nestled in a stand of trees, the dappled shadows of leaves falling across its walls. What was once a clearing of dirt and moss and rocks was now home to this collection of boards and nails. I wished that it had an address people could write letters to.

  I didn’t have many words to say about it, which was unusual for me. When I walked back to the fort, I motioned for everyone to join me in a circle. I looked at the window and imagined a curtain of blue calico blowing through it.

  “Today is a good day,” I said. “And we have made a good place. May it stand for a long time among these trees.”

  I thought that keeping it short was best. I could tell by the look in everyone’s eyes that they agreed with me. We smiled at each other, and then Murphy said, “It’s time for the ceremonial march inside, beginning with the youngest.”

  And so Ricky Ray, beaming so hard with pride I thought he might just burst into rays of light, led us inside.

  Standing in the center of the room, I looked up at the ceiling and turned slowly around. Who would have believed we could’ve done this almost entirely by ourselves?

  None of it was easy work, and it took us two weeks of squeezing in time between school and practices and church activities, two weeks of hiking from the Children’s Home up Allen Avenue, over Dewey Payne Road, and a quarter-mile through the woods that ran along the edge of Hampton’s Dairy Farm, hiking until the woods thinned and we could see the backyards of the houses in Logan’s neighborhood through the black walnut and sycamore trees
, and then counting one, two, three, four houses, until we were in the farthest back part of Logan’s backyard.

  I would have made that hike five times a day. Six times a day. It was that worth it to me.

  The inside of the fort was one room, ten feet wide and fourteen feet long. This was plenty of space for everyone to stretch out and get comfortable, which everyone immediately did. You could look into any person’s eyes and see that they were coming up with dreams for the fort. Me, I wanted a place for cubbyholes, the kind that my kindergarten class had, where we could keep our things and maybe leave each other mail.

  Even without furniture, the fort was the kind of place I liked to be. There were two windows, one east and one west, and a nice breeze blew through, bringing with it the smell of the woods. Wednesday, after we’d gotten the roof raised with the help of Mr. Potter, we’d all pitched in and painted the walls a soft off-white with paint Logan had borrowed from his parents’ basement. Now the walls seemed to glow with light.

  “I believe I’d like to live here forever,” Ricky Ray sighed, leaning back against the wall and breathing in deep a mix of fresh paint and autumn trees.

  The rest of us just nodded yes. We didn’t even need to say it out loud.

  After that first day, we were all at the fort as often as we could be. Murphy and I got into the habit of hiking up there after we worked at Mr. Potter’s store on Monday afternoons. No one else was there on Mondays—Logan was gone off to play in the marching band, Donita was at choir, and Ricky Ray had his weekly social worker visit—so me and Murphy worked on little projects, just adding bits and pieces to the fort’s decor. Me, I was trying to sew some curtains by hand. Sewing of any sort is not in my nature, but I just flat-out liked the idea of curtains.

  “Dagblast it!” I yelled one Monday after I’d poked myself with my needle for the third time in under a minute. “I’m bleeding all over my material!”