Just Under the Clouds

by Melissa Sarno

  Officer Torres wants us not to move. She thinks Adare’s nearby and she wants to end this before dark.

  “She wouldn’t go far,” Mom insists.

  “What about the cat? She loves it,” I say for my sister. “She’ll follow it anywhere.”

  “They’ll find them both,” she assures me. “It’s their job.”

  I don’t know how you follow the trail of a cat. Or the trace of a shoeless Adare. “It’s my fault,” I tell her. “I should have been there.”

  “No. It’s mine.”

  “I should be with her.”

  “No, Cora. I should be.”

  I scrape my shoes in the dirt. “Are you going to send Adare to Jade’s school?”

  “It’s the best in the country for kids like her. It’s a good opportunity.”

  “Adare is Adare, like you say. What’s the point in figuring her out to be like anyone else?”

  “It’s not about that. It’s about doing what’s best for her, giving her the best chance. Adare is smart. Smarter than most people give her credit for.”

  I think of Adare’s way with cats and people like Miss Li and the security guard at her school. I think of her pointing out the chimes and the sky and her crows. I always thought it was everyone else seeing past Adare, but maybe it’s me.

  I point to the houseboat. “My friend Sabina lives there. Her dad’s a fisherman.”

  “That’s perfect,” she marvels. “A home no matter where you are.”

  “We could get a houseboat,” I say. “You could get a license and we could learn to sail and we could collect rainwater and sun and not have to worry about anything.” I look up at her and it feels like a prayer.

  She shakes her head, like she’s sorry she already let me down.

  “It hasn’t been fair to you, living like we do. I know that. But I’m trying to make sense of where we are. Where we need to be. And you, you try harder than anyone I know. I love a lot of things about you, but that’s one of the things I love best.”

  She takes her hand from mine and looks down at the forms. She clutches her pen and writes in the date. March twenty-first.

  The day Daddy and his notes disappeared. Then my Tree Book. Now Adare.

  “My Tree Book’s gone,” I tell her.

  “Gone?” She looks almost as sad as I do. “Where could it have gone?”

  “It’s lost.”

  “Maybe it was only on loan,” she says. “Maybe it’s back where it belongs.” She looks up to the branches of the tree and I look up with her.

  “That’s the tree of heaven.”

  “No way.” She shakes her head, like she doesn’t believe me. “Your father’s?”

  “This is it. This is the one.” I watch her stare up into its branches. “I climbed it,” I tell her. “I could hear my heartbeat. I could see everyth—”

  I don’t even finish the words.

  Of course. The tree.

  I’ll be able to see anything from there.

  Before I know what I’m doing, I’m off, running toward the foundry to get up it as fast as I can.

  The door is closed, but I bang at it, hoping someone will hear.

  “Cora!” I hear Mom call out.

  I look around in a fever, a whirl, like Adare’s spinning rain dance. There’s a heap of scrap metal, broken stone, brick, and piles of lumber. I take a heavy brick in my hand. I back up and then I take off running forward, hurling the brick at the knob, shaking the knob loose, so it swivels in a loop-the-loop.

  I shake the knob, fiddling with the metal, pushing at the lock until the door swings open and in.

  The last of the daylight fills up the gray room. I run past the giant heart, straight for the far wall, toward the ladder.

  Then I hear a mewing cat.

  I snap my gaze back to the misshapen heart and see the charcoal cat in a curl. He rests against two little bare feet.

  Adare.

  I collapse into her for a hug, but she squirms from me, kicking her feet and giggling.

  “What are you doing here?” I ask through a smile so big I almost can’t manage it.

  Her eyes shine in the dark.

  “Looking,” she tells me.

  “Here?”

  “For you.”

  Like Anju said, el corazón. I look up at the hard metal lines of the brassy pink.

  Mom crosses through the light from the door and crouches down beside us, grabbing Adare and cradling her in her arms. “We were so worried,” she tells her. “We love you so much.”

  Adare nestles her head in Mom’s chest.

  “How did you get in?” I ask.

  “Anju.” She shrugs and pulls the cat into her arms.

  “But the door.”

  “Yeah.” And she doesn’t say much more than that. The charcoal cat slinks around, nudges his chin at Adare’s side.

  “He doesn’t belong here,” I say. “He belongs wherever you are. Don’t you think?”

  Adare nods. “I love him.”

  I say, “I know.”

  I look over to the ladder on the wall and the hatch above. I think of the lost notebook, the tree of heaven, and all the things that sent us here to this moment.

  March twenty-first.

  It takes time to figure out the sounds of a place. Some places have footsteps cracking the floors, a rattle in the stairwell, or the creak of an elevator shaft. There could be highway hum or rustling trees, lights buzzing in the hallway.

  Tonight, here in our placement, it’s quiet. The walls are thick. Sometimes I hear a door slam, but the sound disappears. I lie in the dark next to Adare. I match up our palms. I let our toes touch. I listen to the best sound: her breath next to mine.

  I close my eyes.

  I think of her sitting inside the heart, the word meaning me, el corazón. I think of Officer Torres writing up her report with a smile at her lips. I think of Anju explaining how she let Adare in, told her to close the door behind her, which Adare took to mean to close the door then. I think how Officer Torres drove us home in the police car and dropped us off in front of our brick building and asked, “Is this you?”

  I think how a place could be a home, could be yours, could be you.

  I think how we answered. Yes.

  Then I drift into sleep, feeling Adare shifting next to me, and the rhythm of her breath. I feel a release.

  I sit up fast, panicking in my tank top and underwear, shuffling my legs. Not again. No. Not again.

  But I’m not sitting in a wet puddle—I’m pressing on the air mattress, sinking to the floor, while the air lets out in a slow, whistling ooze. Adare rustles, moans. Mom says from her beanbag cushion, “What’s that?”

  “The mattress,” I say in the dark.

  Mom moves, slow, to the light switch. The bulb bursts on above us and we’re rubbing our eyes, trying to go from dark to light, and Adare’s awake and yawning and whimpering in her butterfly wings because it hurts her eyes and Mom is shushing while we feel around for the poking hole, for the air escaping.

  “Stand up,” Mom insists, and I take Adare’s hand, lift us both above the flopping mat. “Get the Band-Aids.”

  I leave Adare and turn on a blast of yellow light in the bathroom. I take out the Snoopy Band-Aids from the medicine chest and bring them to Mom.

  “It’s punctured,” she says with a sigh. “How could that—” she starts, but stops, shaking her head. I can see it makes her mad, but she’s trying to pretend it’s fine.

  I stand with Adare crouched at my feet. She’s whining without words, like she isn’t really awake.

  Mom sits back on her hands. “Well, I think I got it,” she says. “But we should figure out what made this hole.” She starts searching around the mattress.

  I don’t know what it could be
. We don’t have much here in the first place.

  I scoot down to the floor, running my fingers over the hard wood. Adare curls up like she’s going to fall asleep.

  Her wings are strapped to her back, all old and worn. Then I see what must have done it. There’s a wire poking out from one wing’s sparkled edge. I’m about to point and tell Mom what’s going on when I stop.

  I don’t want Mom taking away Adare’s wings.

  I’ve got to figure out something else.

  I see my backpack slumped on the floor and I feel around it, pretending I’m searching, just like Mom. I slip my hands into the outer pocket and pull out a pen.

  I hold it up. “This must’ve done it,” I say. “I was drawing before bed.”

  Mom swings around, takes the pen from me, and I don’t know what I’m expecting, what she really can say about it, whether it even matters if it’s a pen or a tack or Adare’s old butterfly wings, but if she’s got anything to get mad about, she might as well get mad at me. “Well…” She places a hand at her hip. “We’ll need to be more careful. Until we get a real mattress.”

  And that’s all.

  “Can you put the Band-Aids away?”

  I nod, fast. Then I take Adare’s hand. “Adare, come help me,” I say. “I need your help putting the Snoopys away. Okay?”

  “Okay.” She stands up like the world’s going to end and drags herself to the bathroom with me while Mom places the pen on the kitchen counter and moves across the room to shut off the light.

  I set Adare on the toilet seat. She doesn’t know what she’s done and it doesn’t matter, really, but I bring my finger to my lips anyway, like it’s our secret to share.

  I start unpeeling the backings from Snoopy Band-Aids. They’re like sticky little ribbons and I loop them around and around the wire to fix the broken wings.

  We walk from Adare’s school alone for the first time back to Red Hook. We’ve each got a ribbon on our wrists with a little silver key dangling. When Mom wound the purple ribbon around Adare’s wrist this morning, Adare held it up, and it sparkled across her eyes.

  Mom said she’d talk to her boss about getting her hours switched so they matched ours. Then she looped the satin around the bump of my wrist and told me not to worry, promised she’d be the one to keep us safe.

  She made me make two promises, too. “Don’t keep so many secrets.”

  “I won’t. I swear. What’s the second?” I asked. No climbing, I thought.

  Instead, she smiled. “Climb high.”

  This time when Adare stops, I stop with her. When she points, I lift my gaze. I’m not the one dragging Adare through this world. She’s the one leading me.

  “Hey, Cora!” Sabina calls to us from the corner, with her schoolbooks pancake-flattened beneath her arm.

  I wave and run toward her. “Hey!”

  “So I have this idea. About making a book.”

  “Okay.”

  “A memory book.”

  “With all the notes you find?”

  “No,” she says. “Like my own book, with my own memories.”

  “So a diary?” I ask.

  “Well, it’s not as romantic when you put it that way. A memory book,” she corrects me.

  “Just don’t lose it,” I tell her.

  “That’s the thing. I know it’s not the same as your Tree Book, but I thought we could share it. We can read what the other person says and remember it for each other. That way, if one of us has to leave, we won’t forget what happened. What do you think?”

  I hesitate. I don’t know about starting a new book. But then I wonder what it would be like to share a book with someone who’s here in my life, now. “Okay.” I start nodding. “Yeah.”

  “Awesome. So I’ll see you tomorrow?”

  I nod. “Tomorrow.”

  She smiles and squeaks her heel, taking off toward the canal. Adare waves, even though Sabina is long gone.

  We cross the walking bridge into Red Hook, passing the church steeple and the highway. When we reach the brick building and our bright blue apartment door, I walk up close and run my fingers across the faded number of our place. I trace it. A number 7 and an A are smacked together. The answer to Ms. Alice’s equation.

  7A. Found.

  I stand in front of the door. Our door. Not like at Ennis House, where all we had was a door that could have been anybody’s.

  I take a whiff of all the cooking smells and I imagine frijoles charros mixed up in them.

  I let Adare turn the key and open the door to the empty apartment. Our things still sit hunched in the corner. There’s the air mattress with the Snoopy Band-Aids. Sookie skulks over to Adare and the charcoal cat follows. We decided yesterday to let him be ours.

  I sink to the floor with Adare as she strokes their chins. I look around, watching a crack of falling sun slip through the alley and in through the window. “What do you think?” I ask.

  Adare giggles. “Big,” she says.

  She’s right. It’s bigger than any other place we’ve been. I wonder how we’ll fill it.

  The sun catches a hint of something on the ledge. I stand up, wander to the window, and lift the latch.

  “Adare—look.” I take the silver button and hold it out to her. Is it possible they’ve found us?

  She runs past my outstretched hand to the window and points. I whip my head around to watch a black crow smudging across the alley, taking off into the sky.

  Then I hear footsteps and a key turn as the doorknob twists. Mom looks relieved to see us here. But she also looks like she knew we would be.

  “What do you think?” Mom echoes as she lets a brown grocery bag slide to the floor. She tousles Adare’s hair. We sit together, all three of us on the bare floor, in a perfect linked chain.

  I close my eyes and say what I see. “There’s an African violet on the sill. And the ceiling’s blue, like sky. My greenhouse is an old aquarium, and when the stems and leaves are sturdy enough, we transfer it outside so everyone can see what we grew. We’ve got a round table with four chairs. Three for us. And one for Willa. And when people come over, they can’t believe how much it smells like cinnamon.”

  I open my eyes and watch Mom open hers, like she’s been dreaming it, too. “I like that. What about you, Adare? Do you?”

  “Yeah,” she says.

  “And one more thing,” I say.

  “What?” Mom asks.

  “A set of chimes.”

  Mom takes my hand. I take Adare’s hand with my other, and it’s funny how her weird grip has started to feel right.

  “What do we have today?” Mom whispers.

  I haven’t drawn anything in my palm. Not since we came here. And even though it’s blank, or because it is, I say, “Everything.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thank you to my agent, Rebecca Stead, for believing in this book. I feel so lucky to have you by my side on this journey. Allison Wortche, the excitement, love, and care you have for Cora and her story has meant so much to me. Thank you both for making my dream of publishing a book come true.

  Julia Maguire, Jenny Brown, Melanie Nolan, Karen Greenberg, Marisa DiNovis, and the rest of the Knopf team, I am grateful this novel is in such capable, smart, and caring hands. Thank you also to Michelle Andelman for your enthusiasm for my work.

  I would not have come this far in my writing life without the support of many talented writers who are also amazing friends. Thank you to the earliest readers of Cora’s story: Janet Sumner Johnson and Alison Cherry. Your thoughtful feedback was invaluable. Tracy Weiss, thanks for bottomless glasses of wine and the endless reading you have done for me. Heather Leah Huddleston, I am grateful for your careful reads, chats, and laughter. Beth Kephart, thank you for reading, listening, and for your love and encouragement over the years. You believed i
n me long before I knew how to believe in myself. Sharon Mayhew, Amy Sonnichsen, Jennifer Chen, Dianne Salerni, Lauren Gibaldi, and Phoebe North, I couldn’t ask for better partners and friends in this writing life. It is because of you that sitting alone with words is never lonely.

  Thanks to Carmen Colon for your careful read of an early draft. Thanks also to Jessica Palmer and Patricia Romano for answering my questions about your families and backgrounds. Rebecca Fishman and Shilpa Londhe, I am grateful to you for holding me accountable and for inspiring me with the incredible work you do. Lynn Monaghan, the query whisperer, “thank you for being a friend.”

  Thank you to all the wonderful educators and administrators at Variety Child Learning Center. My experiences there helped inform Cora and Adare’s story. A special thank you to Dr. Fern Sandler for helping me better understand Adare.

  Taryn Cunha, Nastasia Sidarta, and the Gowanus Canal Conservancy, I appreciate you answering my questions about plant life around Brooklyn and the canal.

  I am grateful to all my family for your love and faith. Mom and Dad, thank you for being my biggest cheerleaders. Your love guides me every day. Rosemary, my first stories were born at your kitchen table. Grandma Angie, I’ll never forget your love of books and the stack at your bedside table. Grandma Kitty, stories about you have long stirred my imagination and wonder.

  Finally, thank you to Tyler, who inspired the confidence I needed to find my voice. You keep me rooted in love and optimism, always. Owen, you shared the earliest days of your life with the seeds of this story and helped me see it through. I was only able to write it because my heart was so full.

  Katie Burnett

  Melissa Sarno is a freelance writer and editor with an MFA in screenwriting. She lives in the Lower Hudson Valley of New York with her family. Read more about her at melissasarno.com and follow her on Twitter at @melissasarno.

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