by Ruth Lehrer
She looked me right in the eye and said, “Okay, kiddo, time to be straight with me.” I started searching for places to run, but she stood in the way of all of them. “I went back and checked that phone number you called the other night,” she said. “It wasn’t your mother’s number. It was the convenience store.”
I thought of saying my mother worked at the convenience store, but that could be disproved. I sucked my front teeth.
Molly kept a grip on my arm and walked us past the fence and the dead trucks. I thought of my backpack, still in the backseat of Molly’s car, and I started to panic.
“Should we pretend to knock?” she asked, looking at me with mean, squinty eyes. I didn’t say a word, so Molly went ahead and knocked, and knocked again, and then pushed open the door.
When Molly pulled me inside, it was like I was seeing the house for the first time. I saw it like Duck-Duck, with her beautiful circus-pink bedroom, would see it. I saw it like Molly, with her clean kitchen and oven-full-of-chicken, would see it.
The house I’d lived in my whole life was barely more than a trailer, and very cold. The oil had run out in April, and the propane had petered out before school started. The kitchen smelled of shuttered winter mold, even though it was only October. I had newspapers and magazines tucked in leaky windows for insulation, but condensation had smeared the black ink along the glass. There was a brown, flaky scar on the ceiling above the stove where Keely had burned hot dogs and made a black, smoky cloud. I had tried to clean a little, but grease had built up on the table and along the windowsills, as if the dead driveway trucks had moved in when I wasn’t looking.
Grandpa’s prized collection was still up on the wall: forty-four license plates from forty-four states, nailed to the wallpapered kitchen walls and up and down the narrow hall. One of the neighbors collected teapots. Grandpa had called her a dimwit.
I had managed to keep the electricity on, paying at the drugstore with change I found under the couch, in a jar behind the cups, in a pocket of an old, forgotten sweater. Despite the lamp, which went on when Molly flipped the switch, the kitchen looked shadowy, almost as if we were underground.
Still gripping my arm, Molly picked up the phone, which was dead. She opened the refrigerator, which was almost empty. There was a bottle of mustard, some ketchup, and a Yodel, which I kept there to protect it from mice.
In a normal house, there would be bread and milk and orange juice. In a smart-math-class house, there would be chocolate cake and chicken sandwiches just sitting there, waiting for dinnertime.
Suddenly I was jealous of Duck-Duck, who had a pink bedroom and a refrigerator full of food and a bookshelf filled with books. It wasn’t her fault she had everything and I had nothing, but it sure felt like it was. What had I done to be stuck in this crap house instead of her?
“How long has your mother been gone?” asked Molly. She didn’t look so good in the kitchen light right then. She looked a little like Duck-Duck after Worm had kicked her.
“None of your business,” I said. I lifted my arm up, like I was going to wipe tears from my eyes, and felt Molly’s grip loosen just a little bit. Then I dropped to the floor, ripping her hand off me. Without standing, I scrabbled backward, out the still-open door. The minute I hit the front step, I jumped up and took off. I could hear Molly running and then calling after me, but she didn’t know the dead-truck yard like I did. Soon I was far away.
And then I realized I had just admitted that my mother was gone. Next, Molly would find out my mother was gone because of me.
I don’t believe in ghosts. Dead people are not scary like live ones. Dead people just watch and listen. They do not drink or tell their children to lie in the dark with noses pressed in rough wood floors. Dead people do not pour whole pots of soup across the kitchen table, leaving steam and waves of slosh and nothing else to eat. Dead people can be trusted to stay in place and let you pass by. It is the live ones who are scary, not the un-live. When Grandpa hit the floor with a heart-attack gasp, he did not wake or turn or beg for help. He did not command or curse. He was just dead. Were you scared? the Social Service ladies had asked. No, I said. Why should I be? Dead, he was, well, dead. On the floor, losing heat, tensing up, an invisible wire fence around his eyes and muscles. If I had known, I would have wished for it daily. I would have plotted poison or guns. The ladies thought I should mourn or worry, but after a day of jumping when the door slammed, I slept so sound that I realized I’d never really slept before. Imagine sirens and lights and earthquakes shaking. Then think of blue-water calm. That was the difference. The difference was mine for good. Why would I mourn or worry now? I had my sleep. I had my hard name to keep others away from my night sleeps. Fish like water. They sleep with fishy eyes open. Some sleep with both eyes on one side of their head. Down against the water bottom, gravel on my fins, I sleep. I blend, my colors the same as the cemetery rock around me. No one notices me. No one except Duck-Duck.
“What’s up, Fishy? Did you sleep here all night?”
It was hard to remember how to speak. It was hard to remember where I was. My knees felt cold, and, for an instant, I thought I was dead too. But why then would Duck-Duck talk to a dead person? And of course I was cold — I’d just spent a night sleeping in a cemetery.
“What are you doing in the cemetery?”
I didn’t say anything.
“Did you eat breakfast?” she asked.
I had eaten nothing since the day before. I was dead, or almost dead, so why did I need to eat?
“I have a couple sausage links,” she said, pulling out a round Tupperware container from her backpack and peeling off the red top.
I fished one out with my fingers, and Duck-Duck did too.
“Are you going to tell anyone where I am?” I felt like I was talking through water, but it was just fog, and we were just under the cemetery quince tree. I tried to chew.
“Don’t be silly. We’re oathed, remember? Why are you living in your house alone?”
I didn’t say anything. I chewed sausage.
“Where’s your mother?”
I looked at her blue eyes and thought of her pretty lunch box and knew she would never think a mom could disappear one morning and never come back.
“If I tell you, are you going to tell your mother?” I said.
“But she sent me to find you. Wouldn’t it be good to tell her?” Duck-Duck handed me another sausage. “Okay, I won’t tell if you don’t want me to. I’d have to stab myself with a pen, remember?” She reached into her pack again and pulled out a grape juice box. She detached the dinky straw and punctured the straw hole in the top and offered me a sip.
“So, you’re like Pippi Longstocking?”
It took me a second to figure out what she meant. Miss Carew had lent me those books in second grade. At first all I could remember about them was pancakes and a horse. Then I remembered: Pippi’s father was gone. Pippi’s mother was dead.
“No, I’m not like Pippi,” I said. “I don’t have a horse.”
“That’s really bad logic,” said Duck-Duck. “Where’s your mother?”
And then, my feet still cold from being dead all night, I told her.
Sometimes I think I am a zoo animal born into the wrong cage: a small monkey living with lions, a turtle contemplating the ways of snakes.
If I lived with the monkeys, the other monkeys would save me bananas and peanut butter and pick nits off my curly tail. I would learn the secret monkey ways — how to swing on vines, how to hang upside down while carrying a monkey baby under my monkey arm, how to sleep in the trees, how to drink milk from coconuts.
Instead, I’m a monkey watching lions bite to kill, knowing that my teeth are way too small to do the same. I don’t like eating dead things; I’d rather have a flower or a nut. I hide in the bushes so I’m not mistaken for lunch. But after living with the lions, they have rubbed off on me too much, and now the other monkeys think I’m weird — not a lion, but not a normal monkey either.
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br /> When the Social Service ladies showed up after Grandpa died, they didn’t get it. They thought a little paint and a cooked vegetable or two would make us a normal family. They lectured a lot, trying to make me nice like them. They treated me as if I were six years old and a bit dumb, even though I was the one who had lived in that house, not them. They said Grandpa had hurt Keely really bad and that was why she didn’t make cookies like other mothers. She was so young when she had me, they said, that she didn’t know how to be a grown-up mother. And she never learned, I added in my head. They’d only heard a few stories. There were a lot more.
But really, what would I know about other mothers? Even if she made chocolate-chip cookies, she would still be a lion and I would be a monkey born into the lion’s cage. The Social Service ladies said that when I turned sixteen, I could be an emancipated minor. I didn’t care what name they used — it meant I would be free. I wrote a list of what I needed: a new name, a lunch box, a wallet, and a key. The key was for the apartment I would have in the city.
But in the meantime, I was still stuck on Birge Hill with Keely.
After Grandpa died, Keely and I didn’t fight. We didn’t talk, even, unless the Social ladies forced us to. She would go out. I would come home. She would come home. I would go out. Even when she was still here, she wasn’t really here. A lion and a monkey.
She had a Walmart job for a little while. She would go to work and come back late. Unless she knew the Social Service ladies were coming. Then she’d come home early and leave a little food in the refrigerator. After six months of Walmart, and milk and bread in the fridge, the ladies closed our case and stopped coming. After that, Keely left less and less in the fridge. I didn’t really understand. What did she do with the food-stamp money? You couldn’t buy anything but food with it. You couldn’t buy beer or cigarettes. You couldn’t even buy soap or toilet paper. Once I wanted a toothbrush, but it wouldn’t buy that either.
I started storing up Yodels again, like I did during the soup-and-sardine year. When Keely was asleep, I would go through her pockets. She must have hid the SNAP food-stamp card somewhere, because I never found it. I would take what little change she had and imagine her cashing her paycheck and buying dinner at the diner: hamburgers, french fries, milk shakes, apple pie.
Once she left me a small can of tomato juice. I would’ve thought it was a sick joke, if Keely ever made jokes.
School ended in the middle of June. That meant no more school lunches. I survived a week of summer vacation on saltines and a tiny jar of peanut butter.
Then the next week, Keely came home in the middle of the day. She was fired from Walmart. Who gets fired from Walmart?
“What’d you get fired for?” I asked, but Keely just walked down the little hill to the rocks near the river. She stood on a big rock right at the edge. The water churned below her.
“The Social Service ladies said you had to buy milk and bread and Yodels every day,” I said, following her. I made up the Yodels part, but I figured she wouldn’t remember anyways. The ladies always said to her, “Don’t you remember what we talked about last week?” and Keely almost never did. Me, I memorized everything, because in the beginning I thought the ladies were teaching us how to be normal.
“We’ll have to economize,” Keely said, and she stared at the rushing water like it was a TV show or something.
Standing there, hearing her say “economize” like we had anything to give up, it was like the first time I realized I was always hungry. I’d stolen food, but I’d never once said out loud, “I am hungry.” And being Carmel meant I had never fought back.
“You barely buy a box of cereal a week,” I said to Keely. “What the hell do you do with it all? Your paycheck? The SNAP card?”
She looked away from the river long enough to open her wallet to show me there was no cash in it. “You don’t understand how much it costs just to keep the electricity on.” I could see the SNAP card, though. It was funny how the government thought calling food stamps SNAP would make poor people feel better about taking free food. I could imagine some lady in an office thinking, “SNAP, what a good name. It sounds so up and peppy.” Me, every time I heard SNAP, I would think, “Food — gone in a SNAP.”
“Give me the food card,” I said, trying to pull the card out of the wallet. But she just tucked the card in her pocket and spit in the river.
Grandpa used to spit in the soup and tell us we were only worth spit.
“You’re as bad as Grandpa,” I said. “I wish you were dead too. Then at least I would get the food card.”
Keely looked panicked, like she remembered the thunk Grandpa made when he hit the floor. I jammed my hand into her pocket and tried to pull out the card. Her hip was bone against my palm. I closed my fingers over the card and started to pull it out, over her hip.
She clawed the card out of my hand, but I was still there, fighting her for it.
“Give me the card, dead lady,” I said. I knew it was mean, but I couldn’t stop myself. “Dead,” I said again. “Like dead meat. Like the dead cat in the shed. Like Grandpa dead.”
When I said “Grandpa,” she jerked like I’d stabbed her. She might have had tears in her eyes, but I didn’t care. And then everything sped up, as if I had hit the fast-forward button on a slow movie.
Keely jerked back and stumbled, and then, like a wheel or a rock, she fell into the river. The riverbank dropped off sharply into deep, dark water.
I could have reached out. I could have looked for a branch or stick.
I could have run for help. I could have yelled.
But I just watched. Keely sank into the dark, and then she was gone. I never saw her come up.
I told Duck-Duck all this.
“So you see,” I said, “I’m a fugitive. I killed her.”
“Boy,” said Duck-Duck. “Pippi Longstocking has nothing on you.”
Somehow she didn’t seem horrified. I didn’t know why. I was pretty sure she didn’t know any murderers. I was pretty sure she had never killed anyone herself. Anyone with any sense would have run the other way.
“As your legal counsel,” continued Duck-Duck, “I would advise you to never admit to something you haven’t been accused of yet. You didn’t kill her. We’ll tell the court she disappeared.”
“Well, she did disappear. She disappeared over the bank of the river because of me, and now she’s dead.”
“Was the body recovered? Is there proof?” said Duck-Duck.
“No, but wouldn’t it be all bashed up?” I could see pieces of Keely floating down the dark river, getting stuck in boat engines, showing up in fish guts. My stomach clenched.
“People used to go over Niagara Falls in wooden barrels,” said Duck-Duck. “This isn’t even half a Niagara.”
“She didn’t have a barrel. She never came up again. She’s dead.” I was getting pissed. Duck-Duck wasn’t there. Why couldn’t she just believe me? She always wanted to talk about things that didn’t need talking about. “Never mind. I shouldn’t have told you.”
“No, no,” said Duck-Duck. “It’s important for counsel to get a full picture of circumstances before taking on a client.”
“I don’t need counsel,” I said. “I need a bus ticket. If your mother figures out I’ve got no grown-up, she’ll tell the school, and they’ll find out what happened, and they’ll put me in jail.” I started to sweat. I had to get moving. Fast.
“Jail? What exactly do you think you did?” said Duck-Duck.
“I wished she was dead, and then it happened.” How much clearer could I put it?
Duck-Duck sucked on the juice-box straw thoughtfully. “Thought doesn’t equal action,” she said.
“I told her she was a dead lady,” I said, “and then she was. She could barely swim, and no one can hold their breath that long.”
“Talk is cheap,” said Duck-Duck. “My mother says that sometimes. Besides, I think we can beat the rap when we go to trial. I watch a lot of crime shows. It’s hard to p
rove things.”
“Forget trials — I need a damn bus ticket to get out of town.”
“If we tell my mother what happened,” she said again, “she could probably help.”
“Screw that, Duck-Duck. She’s a grown-up. Grown-ups don’t help. They only make things worse.”
We sat there a minute, Duck-Duck making empty sucking sounds with the straw. I wished we had another juice box. Maybe I shouldn’t have said that about her mother.
I should have seen the cop coming. He appeared so quick, he must have sneaked up on us. I couldn’t run. He was standing on my foot. How did he find me so quickly?
My mother had a regular relationship with the town cops. She got picked up for drinking without a paper bag. She got picked up for hitting the Slow Children sign after she left the beer-and-spicy-peanut bar. When Grandpa was around, the neighbors would complain about the front yard or about all the yelling, and one of the town cops would show up and talk Grandpa down, or warn him he couldn’t burn trash, or give him a ticket for having too many dead trucks in the yard.
I thought I knew all the cops in Salt Run, but I didn’t know this one. He looked young and too eager. Any cop who was stalking kids in a cemetery probably didn’t have much else to do. It was good he was new, though. He didn’t know who I was.
“Ha!” he said, still standing on my foot. He couldn’t stand on me and Duck-Duck at the same time, but he looked like he wanted to. It didn’t matter, though. Duck-Duck didn’t know enough to run.
“I’m guessing you’re the kids who desecrated the gravestone,” he said. He looked really pleased with himself. “You’re coming with me. The Historical Society has been on us to figure this out.”
I kept sending Duck-Duck mental messages to run, but she looked almost happy, like she’d been waiting hours for this guy to appear.
“Good morning, Officer,” she said. “What evidence do you have? You’re using bad logic if you have no evidence and you think you can get a conviction.”