Follow Me Home

by Monica Goulet

  For the first time I almost believe he didn’t mean to start the fire. That he feels the loss of this house even more than I did.

  I watch him get out and pick through the rubble like I did days before. But he’s not looking for material things. He’s looking for memories – evidence his life was normal once. He finally sits down on a piece of cement at the edge of the foundation. I watch him for a few more minutes, and then get out and join him. We sit there for a while, staring out at the rubble.

  “Is your family going to build here again?” Jay asks.

  “I don’t know. My parents are looking at other houses too. My dad might decide to sell this lot if he can get enough for it. He’s a real estate agent.”

  “You think someone’s going to build one of those big, modern houses with a three-car garage?”

  “I hope not. The other house was perfect.”

  “I know,” Jay says. “My mom used to call it our house of gold. Remember the yellow shutters and door?”

  I nod.

  “Well, my mom picked the paint color because it was called Gold at the store. She said it would bring us good fortune.”

  I pick up a black, metal object that could be the remains of my laptop and toss it aside again. “Ironic,” I say, and Jay nods. “How did the accident happen?” I ask, and then immediately regret it. Jay picks up the piece of metal I just tossed aside and spins it around in his hands. “I mean, if you don’t want to talk about it, it’s okay.”

  He drops the metal and steps on it, pressing it into the ground. “They were coming home from work – the same route they took every day. My dad went through a yellow light just as it was turning red.” He picks up a brick and closes his hands around it. “Someone was coming full speed from the other direction and clipped them in the back. Their car spun around a bunch of times before it was hit head on by a dump truck.”

  “That’s awful,” I say.

  Jay kicks aside another brick with his foot. “My dad re-bricked the whole house, before me and Laura were born. He was always so proud to tell us.”

  “So your parents must have lived here a long time.”

  Jay nods. “Ever since they were married. I always imagined them living here together until they were old and I could come visit them.”

  I pick up a different brick and watch Jay pile a few damaged ones on top of each other. He kicks around some rubble and pulls some more out. He arranges them all in a square, like a house, and I can picture him as a kid playing with blocks in the spot we’re standing in. Once I see his pattern, I start gathering bricks of my own and piling them on top. Soon we have a mini house.

  We step back and stare at our creation. I don’t know why, but it makes me feel hopeful somehow. Like things could maybe be okay for Jay again. And me.

  “Let’s get out of here,” he says, turning away.

  We’re almost at the car when he turns back toward the house and kicks the bricks down with one swift motion.

  Chapter Eleven

  When we’re back in the car, Jay stares down at his lap for so long I worry he’s fallen asleep. I’m debating whether or not I should say something when he lifts his head.

  “I meant to say thank you,” he says. “For not calling the cops on me when you saw me coming out of your window that day.”

  “You’re welcome, I guess.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  I straighten myself in my seat and brush a piece of ash off my shirt. “I don’t know. You walked out of there like you belonged. You didn’t look worried when you saw me. That made me think twice. But later on, it was more for myself.”

  “What do you mean?” Jay asks.

  “I thought if my parents found out someone was breaking into our house, they’d want to move back to where we came from.”

  “And what’s wrong with that?”

  “It’s a long story,” I say.

  “So was mine.”

  I look over at him. “Just had a bad experience at my old school with a guy,” I say. “It was stupid.” I tug on the bottom of my sleeve and look back at the remains of the house again. The bulldozer will probably be coming in any day now. “So what did you do before to get in trouble?” I ask.

  Jay shrugs. “Just borrowed some money.”

  “You mean stole?”

  “I guess,” Jay says. “But I would have paid them back someday.”

  “Who?”

  “The foster family I was staying with. They were loaded. They wouldn’t have even noticed it was missing if their kid hadn’t seen me.”

  “So you think that makes it okay to steal? Because they had lots of money?”

  Jay shakes his head. “You wouldn’t understand.”

  I look past him out the window. “You don’t know me.”

  “And you don’t know me either.”

  I cross my arms. “I know you used to live in my house until your parents died in an accident,” I say. “Then you got put in foster care until you stole money and started living in a homeless shelter. I know you came back here and burned down my house.”

  Jay plays with my keys in his hands but doesn’t look up. “So just because you know a couple events of my life the past year and a half, you think you know me?”

  I shrug. “I’m just saying.”

  “Then how about you tell me more about you so we’re even?” Jay says.

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know. Why you moved here. Where you’re from.”

  “We moved here for my mom’s job. She’s a speech-language pathologist at the hospital here.”

  “And?”

  “And that’s it,” I say. Jay studies me and starts the ignition. I lean back in my seat and stare out the window. “Where to next?”

  “It’s a surprise,” he says.

  I swallow. My mouth is dry, and I wish I hadn’t finished all my juice. “Maybe we should go back. I have a lot of homework.”

  “If we go back now, I won’t be able to see my sister.”

  I grip the armrest again, thinking of this sister I don’t even know stuck in a foster home somewhere. I wonder for a moment if he brought this up on purpose to make me feel bad. If he did, it worked. “Fine,” I say.

  The houses blur together as Jay speeds by. I wonder if I’d be able to jump out of the car if I start to get worried – if Jay starts driving off into a forest or something. I close my hand over my cell phone instead and lean back again. Only a couple more hours and this will be over.

  “So you’ve lived in Sherbrook your whole life?” I ask after a while, trying to fill the silence.

  “Yeah. It’s not bad for a small town. Someday I’ll get out of here, though.”

  “Where will you go?”

  “I don’t know. California, maybe. I’ve never been.”

  “Me neither,” I say. “My mom’s from there.” I lean my head back and realize I’m not nervous anymore. It kind of scares me. Jay pulls into a grassy field off the road. It’s not quite a wooded area, but it’s close. “Are you sure we can park here?”

  “It’ll be fine,” he says, getting out. “Follow me.”

  He slips the keys in his pocket. My alternative to following him is to walk home, so I get out and slam the door behind me.

  He leads me through a trail I hadn’t even noticed when we parked. It’s so overgrown with brush, we have to duck the whole way through. I’m doing the exact thing I was ready to jump out of the car for earlier, and I don’t know why – other than the fact he has my keys.

  I stumble over a root and almost fall. “How far are we going?”

  “We’re almost there,” he says. He reaches out his hand to guide me through. I stare at it for a minute and then take it. We get to a clearing, and when Jay lets go of my hand, it feels cold and naked. I shove it in my pocket. When I walk up beside him, a small lake seems to rise up out of nowhere.

  There aren’t any houses on the lake – nothing but trees. I walk up to the edge of the water, trying to forget if
something happened here no one would see. “How did you find this place?”

  “I used to explore a lot as a kid. My mom called it running away. I told her it wasn’t running away if I planned on coming back.”

  I laugh nervously and take off my shoes so I can dip my toes in the water. “Did she ever call the police?”

  “Just the first time. After that she always waited a couple hours and I’d usually show up again before then. She tried punishing me the first couple times, but when that didn’t work, she gave up and told me to just be careful.”

  Jay walks up beside me and takes off his shoes too. He sits at the edge of the water and pulls a black, rubber-like object out of his bag.

  I pull my feet out. “What’s that?”

  He sets it aside and pulls out some kind of small pump. I watch him unfold the black thing until it turns into a circle. An inner tube. I breathe out. Not a garbage bag to wrap my body in after he’s knocked me off. “How did you manage to get that?”

  He shrugs. “I’ve had this thing for a while. It’s one of the few things I’ve managed to keep with me through everything. I used to come here and just float for hours.”

  He attaches the pump and blows the tube up within a few seconds. “Coming?” he asks, holding it at the edge of the water.

  “I don’t think that thing fits two people.”

  “Sure it does,” Jay says, sitting down on one side.

  “Won’t we get wet?”

  “Not if we don’t let it tip. Besides, if getting wet’s the worst that can happen, what’s the problem? You can swim, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then live a little.” He smiles again, and I get the feeling he hasn’t smiled this much in a while. There’s something tentative about it, like his muscles aren’t quite used to the reflex.

  I could always find a change of clothes before going home. And what’s he going to do to me out in the middle of the water? Push me off and try to drown me? It would be better than any of the other scenarios I’ve been imagining this morning. I always thought if I had to die, drowning would be the way to go. It seems less violent somehow. Maybe because it’s at the hand of nature instead of another human being, or a disease that eats away at you one day at a time.

  I roll up the legs of my pants and sit down on the edge of the tube. Jay pushes us out before I can change my mind.

  “How do we get back?” I ask.

  “That’s the beauty of it,” Jay says. “We’re at the mercy of the water.”

  I raise my eyebrows and he laughs.

  “That, and we can always hand paddle.”

  I try to relax, resting my head on the one end of the inner tube. The water rocks us gently, but it’s still pretty calm. I stare up at the sky and feel like we’re the only two people in the world right now. It should be a scary thought, but it’s not.

  I’m not sure how long we’re floating there, but we seem to be slowly sliding toward each other in the center of the tube. Soon, our arms are touching, but I’m too scared we’ll tip if I move so we stay there like that, our heads inches away from each other.

  “I came here with Laura after our parents died,” Jay says after a while. “We stayed for hours. When we got back, the social workers were already there. It was the last time I saw her for a few months.”

  I turn my head to face him. He’s so close I can count the freckles on his forehead. “What was it like being in foster care?”

  “It was different for me since I was in a group home most of the time. But I think it sucks either way.” Jay lets his left hand trail in the water but his right one falls closer to mine. “They call it a group home, but it’s more like a jail. There’s always a counselor looking over your shoulder. Someone’s always tracking what time you leave and when you come back. The TV is bolted down so nobody steals it, and the fridge is always locked. Only the counselors can get the food out. It was like because you didn’t have proper parents, you must be untrustworthy.”

  Jay looks out at the water when he talks, and I try to follow his gaze. My eyes land on the spot where the sun is reflecting off the water. It’s so bright my eyes start watering, and I wonder how he can keep staring at it.

  “The worst part though was the other kids. A lot of them came from bad homes with drugs and stuff. They’d pick fights with each other and I’d always wake up to someone screaming at someone else. And my stuff always got stolen. I gave up on keeping anything and gave everything I owned to this kid Mikey one day. He was the youngest kid at the home and everyone picked on him. The day he left to move back with his parents I packed all my stuff in his bag when he was out of his room. My money, comic books, my MP3 player – a whole bunch of stuff. I figured if it was going to get stolen anyway, someone who actually needed it might as well have it.”

  I shift again in the tube and my hand falls next to Jay’s. It’s pale and tiny next to his. I can’t decide if I should move it or not and by the time I decide I should, I think it’s too late so I leave it. For a second, I think I feel something like butterflies – a shiver that runs up my spine, but maybe it’s just the wind. “Were you put there because of the stealing money thing?”

  “Kind of,” Jay says. “Once I got moved out of that family, they couldn’t find anyone to take me.”

  “So was it worth it? Stealing the money?”

  Jay kicks one of his feet out a bit and it hits my own. “No. But only because I didn’t get away with it.”

  “What would you have done if you did? Move to California? Buy a car?”

  “No,” Jay says. “I didn’t take it for me. I took it for my sister.”

  “I thought she was already with a family.”

  “She is,” he says. He shifts away from me and my butt sinks into the middle.

  “When’s the last time you saw her?” I ask.

  “Three weeks ago,” he says. “But she called me the day your house burned down. It was why I’d been so angry when I went in the attic.”

  I try to shift myself out of the middle, but it’s not working. My left side is still pressed up against him. “Wouldn’t you be happy she called?”

  He’s quiet for a bit, and I dip my hand in the water, waiting for him to continue. I feel him watching me.

  “I think her foster father is hurting her,” he says, finally.

  My hand freezes in the water. I stare at it, floating lifeless like it’s not attached to me. “What makes you think that?”

  “She told me how she got in trouble the other day because she forgot her homework at school. She said he hit her with a broomstick and then sent her to her room. That was the first time she told me. But I’ve been suspecting it for a while.”

  The hairs on my arms rise and I look away from Jay, out over the water. “Maybe he was just disciplining her, you know, like how some people still spank their kids. Maybe it wasn’t that hard.”

  “She said she had a big welt on her back.”

  A breeze I can’t feel sends goose bumps up my arms. I picture Wes when he was angry. How small he made me feel. I close my eyes to try to shake the image away, but it just becomes clearer. “What are you going to do?”

  “I should be out of juvie by the time I’m eighteen. I’ll try to get custody.”

  “Do you think they’ll give it to you?”

  “No,” he says.

  “Why don’t you tell someone?” I ask, and immediately hate myself for it. It’s the question Julie asked me after, when I finally told her. Why didn’t I just tell someone? It made me feel weak. Stupid.

  “It’s not that easy.”

  I let my arm dangle further in the water. The water is cool, and I open up my hand to feel it between my fingers. I can still make out the faint outline of the scar on my arm. I flip my arm around so I can’t see it.

  I shift in the tube. My butt’s soaked, but I’m not worried about getting wet anymore. We sit in silence. I feel like I could stay here all day, just floating and feeling like nothing can touch us.
/>   “What would you be doing right now if you could do anything?” Jay asks, breaking the silence.

  I shift again and try to face him. The wind picks up the ends of his hair and it tickles my face, sending shivers down my spine again. “Anything? I don’t know.”

  “Come on. If I were a magical genie and I just asked that question, you’d say you don’t know?”

  I laugh. “But you’re not a magical genie.”

  “I could be. You don’t know me, remember?”

  “True.” And it is. I don’t know him at all, and yet I’m floating on an inner tube in the middle of a lake with him and have never felt safer in my life. “Okay, I’d be dancing then. On a big stage somewhere in front of a big audience.”

  “You dance?”

  “Used to,” I say.

  “Why not anymore?”

  “It’s a long story.”

  “And I have a long –” Jay stops and sits up suddenly. We both almost fall in the water. “Crap,” he says, looking at his watch. “We have to go. My sister gets out of her class in five minutes.” He starts paddling furiously, splashing me so the front of me is soon wet too.

  I grip the side of the tube and try to help paddle, but I’m pretty sure Jay is doing most of the work. “I don’t know if we’re going to make it,” I say. “Where’s the school?”

  “Not far,” Jay says, out of breath. When we get close enough, he hops out in the knee-deep water and runs to shore. I stare for a split second and then hop off myself, dragging the tube with me through the water.

  I race to the car and sit down just as Jay starts the ignition. I’m soaked from the waist down, and have no idea how I’ll explain the wet car to my mother. Jay’s white shirt clings to his body. I try not to stare, but it doesn’t matter – he’s so focused he barely registers I’m here. The car jerks forward, and I’m tossed back in my seat. Please don’t wreck the car.

  The light ahead turns yellow, and I grip the door handle. The car jerks to a stop. This time I’m thrown forward against my seatbelt. We stop just past the white line, and I let out a breath. Jay glances at the clock. I’m sure five minutes have already passed since we got out of the water.