by Darlene Ryan
When I came out of the bathroom, Leo was sitting on his air mattress reading a book about airplanes. The blocks had been put back in the bag.
“Where’s Q?” I said.
Leo looked up. “He said he had to go somewhere.”
He said something else. I know that because I saw his lips move, but I couldn’t hear the words over the rushing sound—like waves hitting the beach—in my ears. My left boot was lying on its side by the end of my mattress. I bent and picked it up with shaking hands. Q hadn’t even tried to put the insole back in properly. I felt for the twenty dollars, knowing that I wouldn’t find it. And I didn’t.
The boot fell to the floor, and I pressed a hand over my mouth because I thought I was going to puke up apples and carrots all over the floor.
“Maddie, are you all right?” Leo asked, touching my arm. I hadn’t even heard him get up.
What should I say to him? That I was angry? That I was scared? I closed my eyes for just a second. Suck it up, I told myself.
I swallowed the sour taste at the back of my throat and looked at Leo. “I’m all right, I’m all right,” I said.
He looked scared, his face pale.
“It’s okay, I swear.” I put my hand over his for a second and forced a smile I didn’t feel. “Help me pick things up,” I said.
He looked at me for a long moment and then pulled his hand away and picked up Dylan’s blankets. I took all my fury, all my fear and stuffed it in a big mental box for now. When Q came home, I was going to hurt him. I was going to hurt him bad.
I sat outside in the hallway to wait for Q, leaving the door open a crack, in case Leo or Dylan woke up. I think I fell asleep with my head against the wall, but I woke up when Q started up the stairs.
He’d been drinking—big surprise. He smelled like beer, cigarettes and dirty bodies. I got to my feet as he got to the top step. He swallowed a couple of times, swaying a little, like a small tree in the wind.
I slapped him. Hard. I opened the box in my head where I’d stuffed all my rage at finding the money gone and let it out.
He sucked in a breath, but he didn’t move. He didn’t say anything. He just looked sad. Very, very sad.
“I’m sorry,” he finally whispered.
“You should be!” I hissed. “You had no right to touch my stuff or take that money! What the fuck is wrong with you?”
He didn’t seem to know what to do with his hands. “I thought I’d win,” he said.
I was right in his face. “I don’t care!” I spat. Then the words sank in. My legs went rubbery, and I felt behind me with one hand for the wall to steady myself. “You lost, didn’t you?” I said.
He couldn’t look at me. He stared at the dirty tile floor instead and slowly nodded.
My stomach was churning. “How much?”
He swallowed again. “The twenty dollars.”
“And?”
“The rent…money.”
I lifted my hand to hit him again. I wanted to pound him until he was nothing but a lump on the tile. Then I let my arm fall. What good would that do?
I took a step toward the door and then I turned back to Q. “I don’t care where you sleep tonight,” I said. “But you’re not sleeping here.”
I went inside, pushed the door shut with my body, and locked it. I slid slowly down to the floor, covered my head with my arms and cried.
By morning, I was all cried out. The rage had turned to something cold and hard inside me.
“Where’s Q?” Dylan asked when he woke up.
“He had to go to work really early,” I said. Leo gave me a look I couldn’t read. I met his gaze, hoping I looked like I had it all together even though I didn’t.
We had the last of the cereal and the last carrot for breakfast. “Get your stuff on,” I said after we finished eating. “We’re going out to hunt for bottles.”
I’d seen flyers stuck up around town about an outdoor concert on the riverbank behind the hotel last night. I was hoping if we got over there early we could get a lot of the bottles before the hotel staff started cleaning up. We could go to the Community Kitchen for lunch, but I had no food and no money for supper.
We filled three and a half garbage bags with returnable bottles—mostly wine coolers—before a tall, gray-haired man came out of the hotel and chased us off. He would have taken the bags, but I stared him down. I don’t know, but maybe he could see in my face that it wouldn’t be good for anyone if he made a big deal about them.
We got less than ten dollars—a forgotten pizza and milk, if we were really, really lucky.
I caught Leo watching me more than once, his face troubled. I didn’t know what he’d guessed or might have heard. I didn’t even know if Q was coming back. I didn’t like the idea of leaving Leo alone with Dylan, but I had to get out with Lucy or there would be no breakfast. I’d pretty much decided to take them both with me when Q came in. He looked like crap, albeit sober and fairly clean crap.
“Hi,” he said. There were dark circles under his eyes and stubble all over his face.
“Hi,” I said. I could feel Leo’s eyes on us. I wanted to act normal, but I couldn’t remember what that looked and sounded like.
Q cleared his throat. “How…how was your day?” he asked.
It was hard to look him in the face. “Okay,” I said. “How, uh, was yours?”
“All right.” He looked at the bags I was stuffing into my backpack. “You leaving soon?” he asked.
I nodded, doing up the zipper on the back. “You’re not going anywhere, right?” I said.
“No,” he said quietly. We stood there awkwardly for a minute, not quite looking at each other. “I’ll get Dylan in the tub,” he said finally.
I gestured at the door. “I’d better go wait for Lucy.”
It wasn’t exactly a smile he gave me. He turned and scooped up Dylan, swinging him upside down, teasing that he was going to wash Dylan’s hair in the toilet, while Dylan laughed and squealed.
Leo was still watching me. He was doing better about being touched, at least by Dylan and me. A couple of times he’d even let me hug him. It seemed like it was a good time for that now.
“I gotta go,” I said. I put one arm around his shoulder and gave him a squeeze, messing his hair with my hand.
He hugged me back, awkwardly with one hand, but he hugged me back.
All of a sudden there was a lump in my throat. I smiled at him, a real smile. “I’ll be back soon,” I said.
It was a good night scavenging, thank God, because I probably would have sat on the sidewalk and cried if it hadn’t been. Q was waiting for me, sitting on his air mattress with just the light coming in through the window from the street. He set the ice in the cooler, and we put things away without saying a word.
“Can we talk, Maddie?” he asked as I put the jars of peanut butter in the window.
“Okay,” I said. Leo and Dylan were both curled up sleeping.
We went out into the hall, leaving the door open a crack. He sat on the floor, legs bent, back against the wall. After a second’s hesitation, I sat beside him, leaving a little space between us. He rested both wrists on his knees and stared down into his lap.
“Maddie, I am so, so, so sorry for what I did,” he began. “I’m sorry I took your money. I’m sorry I lost everything. And most of all I’m sorry I wrecked your trust in me.”
He took a deep breath and let it out. “I’m trying to fix it. I asked everybody today about extra work.”
“Will Goddard give us an extra couple of days to get the money for rent?” I asked.
“I’ll find a way to get the money,” Q said in a flat, emotionless voice.
“That means no, doesn’t it,” I said.
“He’s a prick,” Q said. “And so am I.”
I looked at him then. “You’re nothing like John Goddard. You’re an asshole, but you’re nothing like him.”
That actually got me a tiny smile. He put his hand on the floor between us. It took me
a minute, but I put mine on top of his. “I am so goddamn sorry, Maddie,” he whispered. “I thought I could do it. There’s a game, Thursday night, on campus, big stakes. I figured I could, I could win enough to get us out of here, to give us a start.” He pulled his fingers back through his unruly hair. “I’m just not Leo. My brain doesn’t work that way. I can’t do the calculations the way he does in his head. I can’t figure out the odds. I’m lucky, but that’s not enough. I can’t do it.”
“I can.”
Leo was standing in the doorway. He looked from Q to me. “I can do it. I can win.”
I got to my feet. “Go back to bed, Leo,” I said. I wondered how much he’d heard. Too much, that was for sure.
“Let me go to the game. I can get us the money,” he said.
I shook my head. “No.”
Both hands were clenched at his side. “I can do this, Maddie,” Leo said.
I kept shaking my head. “I don’t care if you can do it. You’re not going to a poker game with a bunch of scummy people. That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard of.”
Q stood up and touched my shoulder. “Let him talk, Maddie.”
I whirled around to stare at him. “Let him talk? Why, Q? We’re not doing this. Did you forget you won Leo in a poker game? Won him like he was a bag full of quarters?”
Q exhaled slowly. “This is different.”
I folded my arms around my body, hugging myself, because all of a sudden I was cold. “No, it’s not. Poker’s not our way out. It’s just not.” I bent down and pulled off both my boots and held them out to Q. “And I don’t have any more money for you to steal.”
He didn’t say anything, but even in the dim light I could see his face getting red. I dropped my boots back on to the floor and turned to Leo. “We’ll figure something else out. No more poker games.”
Leo looked away. His mouth moved, but he didn’t say anything. He just turned and went back inside.
Q slid his hands over his head, squeezing it between his forearms. “I’m not fighting you on this, Maddie,” he said.
“Good,” I said. “There has to be some other way.”
“Yeah,” he said. He reached over and slid a finger down my cheek. “You look tired.”
“You too,” I said.
He swung his arm over my shoulder, and we went inside.
Leo was quiet the next day. If he wasn’t watching me, he was watching Dylan, but he said very little.
Q came home with leftover pizza and root beer. The cards and the poker book had disappeared. Still, there was part of me that remembered how he’d taken the money from my shoe and taken off, so I watched him. And he knew it.
He came up behind me while I was checking to see which bananas had the biggest squishy spots and quickly kissed the top of my head. “Want me to wash Dylan’s hair?” he asked. “There’s hot water, at least for now.”
“Please,” I said.
He caught Dylan around the waist with one hand and made slurpy fart noises on his arm to drown out Dylan’s protests about the hair washing. Q kicked off his shoes and somehow managed to get his socks off without letting go of Dylan.
I felt myself start to relax. Q had offered to wash the squirt’s hair. He hadn’t left it for me and then taken off with Leo. When he’d said he was sorry about before, he’d meant it.
Dylan was wired by the time he was clean. “I’ll wipe up the bathroom,” Q said. “There’s no point in two of us being wet.” He’d rolled up his sleeves, but there was a big wet spot on the front of his jeans.
Leo started playing a game with Dylan and Fred. The teddy bear was either in the jungle or the circus. I wasn’t sure which. There was a lot of climbing, and Fred kept squeezing into places and jumping back out again to the sound of clapping. I pushed all the air mattresses against one wall and started sweeping the floor.
“Maddie!” Dylan suddenly wailed.
I spun around. Dylan pointed at the window with a shaking hand, and tears were sliding down his face. “Fred fell out the window,” he managed to choke out.
I put my arms around him and looked at Leo, who looked stricken. “He pushed him through one of the holes,” he said. “It’s my fault.”
Instead of a screen, the old window had three holes in the bottom for fresh air, covered by a piece of wood that swung up and down. I looked through the glass. The bear was lying in the street.
Q came to the bathroom door. “What is it?” he asked. He was still barefoot.
“Fred fell out the window,” I said. “I’ll get him.”
“You sure?” Q asked.
“Yeah, you don’t have any shoes on.” I gave Dylan a squeeze. “Stay right here,” I said. “I’m going to go get Fred. He’s tough. He’ll be fine.”
I ran down the stairs praying some car wouldn’t come and run over the stupid teddy bear before I got there.
No one did. Fred was just sitting there on the pavement, none the worse for wear. I grabbed him, brushed a bit of dirt from his furry backside and went back upstairs.
Dylan was sitting on his mattress. His face was blotchy and his nose was running. I held out Fred, and he wrapped the bear in, well, a bear hug. Then he threw an arm around me. “I love you, Maddie,” he said.
The hairs came up on the back of my neck. Dylan was the only one in the room. “Dylan, where’s Q?” I said. “Where’s Leo?”
He looked up at me with his runny nose and dirty face. “Q had to go and Leo had to go with him and they couldn’t wait, so Q said for me to sit on my bed until you came back up with Fred, and I did because I’m a good boy, aren’t I, Maddie?”
My legs gave way, and I slumped to the floor with a sound like hundreds of bees buzzing in my ears. They lied. They tricked me. They planned it.
Dylan was staring at me, and I forced a smile, or at least I hoped that was what it looked like. “Kiddo, how did Fred fall out the window?” I asked. There was a lump in my throat I couldn’t swallow away.
He hesitated. “Leo said it was okay if Fred put his head through that hole to look outside. Are you mad?”
I felt the sting of tears, but I blinked them away because I couldn’t cry in front of Dylan. That would scare him. “I’m not mad,” I said. “But don’t let Fred do that again, okay?”
He nodded and wiped his nose on his sleeve. How could Q do that? How could he use a little kid? Did he think if they came back with a bunch of money that everything was going to be all right with us?
I took a couple of shaky breaths, and then it hit me. Where did they get the money? I didn’t have anything else hidden anywhere. Had Q somehow managed to borrow some or get some? I pressed the back of my hand against my mouth and looked around the room. All the food was still there, and the cooler was under the table, along with my backpack.
I caught the skin on the back of my hand between my front teeth and bit down hard so I wouldn’t scream. The metallic taste of blood filled my mouth. I crawled across the floor until I could reach the strap of my bag and pull it over. I felt in the front pocket with one hand. The iPod was gone.
I pulled Dylan onto my lap and held him tightly, my cheek against the top of his head. I didn’t realize I was crying until I saw the tears falling onto his hair.
Somehow, I got him to sleep. He had to know something was wrong, but he didn’t ask any questions, so I didn’t have to lie to him.
sixteen
I sat by the door in the dark, leaning against the boxes to wait for Q and Leo. I didn’t know what I was going to say, or what I was going to do. I didn’t think that far ahead. I just waited.
How much time went by, I don’t know, hours for sure. It had to be. Finally I heard a sound outside in the hall. I got up.
The door swung open, and Q was framed in the dim light from the one bulb burning in the hallway. One sleeve of his jacket was torn, his lower lip was split and bleeding, and he smelled like vomit.
And I didn’t care. Whatever I’d felt for Q was gone. In the hours I’d spent sitting in
the dark, everything had changed. I’d changed.
“Where’s Leo?” I said. My voice sounded husky in my ears.
“I don’t know,” Q said flatly, starting to push past me.
I stepped in front of him and put a hand on his chest. “What do you mean, you don’t know? What happened?”
He looked past me, not at me. “What the fuck do you think happened? We lost the money.”
The shaking started in my legs and spread through my body. “Is Leo hurt?” I said.
Q shrugged. “He took off.”
I looked frantically around the room. Where was my sweatshirt? Where were my boots? Panic made me want to race out into the street and start screaming for Leo. “We have to find him,” I said. “Where were you?”
He pushed my hand away and tried to get past me again.
I grabbed the front of his jacket. “What the hell is wrong with you?” I said. “We have to find Leo. He’s out there, and he’s probably hurt.”
Q looked at me finally. “No,” he said with a slight shake of his head.
The panic felt like a wave that was going to roll over my head and push me under. Behind me, Dylan made a noise in his sleep and rolled over. I pulled Q into the bathroom. He stumbled over his feet, banged into the bathtub and swore.
“Look,” I said. “I don’t care what happened. I don’t care about the money. All I care about is finding Leo and making sure he’s okay.” I didn’t know what to do with my hands. I couldn’t seem to keep them still. They were in my hair, touching my face, pushing up my sleeves. “We’ll wake up Dylan and take him with us and then, and then we can split up.”
Q shook his head again. “It’s over, Maddie,” he said in a flat, dead voice. “All of us, we’re nothing. It’s finished.” His hands hung at his sides.
“We are not finished,” I said hoarsely. “We’ll find another way to make money. We can get out of here. We can do anything. We’re a family. You, me, Dylan and Leo. That’s why we have to go and find him.”
“Give it up, Maddie,” Q said. There was something that looked a lot like pity in his red-rimmed eyes. “It was a fantasy. It wasn’t real. We were never a family.”