by Ruth Lehrer
Molly looked at me, and Duck-Duck looked at her. I folded my arms and looked back.
“Okay,” Molly finally said. “Not tomorrow. But we have to tell them soon, you know.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Just not now.” I didn’t want to say it, but seeing the cops that morning still had me shaky in my stomach.
Duck-Duck got up from the table. “Never mind Pippi Longstocking,” she said. “Harry Potter is a wimp compared to you.”
“I agree,” said Molly.
I woke the next morning to the sound of the shower, and even though I was in Duck-Duck’s house, for a minute I thought it was Grandpa. Grandpa would slam the bathroom door shut and use up all the hot water while he yelled and cursed at no one. The curses were slurred by water and rage, the targets unclear. Sometimes I’d hear him imitate us — my mother and me. Falsetto conversations that he always won. Bitches, he would yell, filthy bitches. All the hot water gone, he would emerge still edgy with fury. Water is supposed to put out fire, but perhaps that kind of flame is waterproof.
On Cherry Road, Duck-Duck and Molly had two bathrooms, so if one person was pooping, the other person didn’t have to go outside behind the shed. On Cherry Road, one bathroom had a shower with a curved glass door, and the other had a lion tub. It stood up on patient, clawed feet, so you knew it would never run away while you were sitting in the water. In Grandpa’s house, the bottom of the shower was shallow and dirty, nothing you would ever want to sit in. The Cherry Road lion tub had high sides, and, after you climbed up the little step, the water was deep and hot and smelled like lavender. Nothing on Birge Hill smelled like flowers, especially not the bathroom.
Keely and I seldom showered, but I knew that other people washed with soap and water every morning and every night. I only learned that because in second grade Patrick Hinkel sat in front of me, and he was even dirtier than I was. The teacher came up to his desk one time and told him that in second grade, everyone showered or took a bath with soap, shampoo, and baby powder before they came to school. She spoke quietly, but everyone within ten feet of Patrick shut up so we could hear her. After that, the boys called him Baby Powder Patrick, and I tried to at least wash my face and hands every morning.
On Cherry Road, they had a special time at night for baths. No one talked about baby powder, though. I always wondered if the teacher made up that part just to embarrass Patrick.
Another surprise about living with Duck-Duck and Molly was their garbage habits. Grandpa burned half the trash and shoved the rest into the shed. He even tried to burn tin cans. Molly and Duck-Duck had complicated rules that said you had to look at each piece of garbage, think about where it came from, what it was made of, and where it might want to go next. It was a bit like the TV news interviews Molly watched at night.
Me: So, tell me, sir, what brought you to this point in your life?
Garbage: Well, Fishkill, it’s been a long road, but before the Albany newspaper and the Dalton paper mill, I was a simple tree, minding my own business.
Me: Wow, quite a story. What’s your next destination?
Garbage: The blue bin to the right of the stove. I want to become one with other newspapers. My ride leaves Saturday morning.
Each apple core, each tin can had its own home. Duck-Duck said it had to do with keeping the earth cool, and even though it was a lot of work, I made sure to memorize the different bin colors. One piece of spoiled lettuce in the wrong bin seemed to be terribly upsetting to both of them, and I wanted them to know I appreciated that they were willing to harbor a fugitive.
Tooth-brushing at Duck-Duck’s was different too. In second grade, they passed out toothbrushes with little tubes of striped-blue-and-white toothpaste. I used the toothbrush for two years straight, until the bristles got completely flattened to the plastic stick and bumped over each tooth like when you ran your finger over the spiral binding of a notebook. I didn’t think it mattered, though, because I thought when I grew up, I would have no teeth. Grandpa had a fake set that he soaked in water at night. Keely had teeth of her own, but only a few; the rest were missing. After a while, I realized teachers, even the old ones, still had real teeth. Then I realized it was usually the kids with bad sneakers and free-lunch cards who had parents with bad teeth. So they only pulled out poor people’s teeth. I figured that was because they couldn’t afford all the toothbrushes, paste, and floss the health teacher said you needed. Or maybe it was so the rich people would know who the poor people were.
Molly didn’t have fake teeth. In the lion-tub bathroom, there was a drawer with thirty different tiny toothpastes and at least ten new toothbrushes, all still wrapped in plastic. Molly said I could pick whichever brush I wanted, and I looked at every single one before I picked.
When I started staying at Duck-Duck’s, I had one pair of jeans, two T-shirts, a few pairs of underwear, and a couple of not-quite-matching socks. My sneakers had holes in the toes and rubber crumbling off the heels. Duck-Duck said this was dangerous because other gangs could track us by a bread-crumb trail of sneaker dust leading them to our hideout.
“See if there’s anything of yours you can give her,” Molly told Duck-Duck.
“You don’t have to give me anything,” I said to Duck-Duck as we went upstairs. “That’s not fair of her. You need clothes too.”
“Mom thinks I have too many,” said Duck-Duck. “And she hates shopping for clothes. It’s like she’s scared of malls or something. Occasionally, I manage to convince her to buy something online.”
She opened her closet, and I blinked. I’d never seen such a full closet. It was stuffed with shirts and dresses and jackets. Down at the bottom were rows and rows of sweet little shoes.
Once a year, my mother would give me ten or twenty dollars and drop me off at Goodwill. Most of the clothes were okay, but the sneakers were never right — either too big or too small. I always wished for the kind runners had. Bright-white with blue tread. Or the ones with shiny lights in the soles. I used to dream about those shiny lights.
“If your mother hates shopping, where’d you get all this?”
“My aunt Patty goes shopping with me,” said Duck-Duck. “She says a girl has to develop her own sense of style.”
I wondered if I had any sense of style.
“We can play beauty pageant. What do you want to try on?”
Duck-Duck was almost exactly my size, but the weird part was, the clothes that looked so perfect on her made me feel like a freak. A monkey in a dress. A monkey-lion with a purse.
“No dresses,” I said. “I don’t think that’s my style.”
Duck-Duck held outfits up to me and tilted her head back and forth. She’d squint and say, “As Aunt Patty would say, we’re not going to the royal wedding in that one.” She pulled open her chest of drawers, and there were more clothes. I wondered if she could even wear it all in a year.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “Personal style is developed over time. When Aunt Patty comes to visit, she can take us both to the mall. She promised to take me to New York City at Christmastime too, to see the department-store windows.” She giggled. “Mom said she would rather be lying in her grave than go to Macy’s in Manhattan at Christmastime. Aunt Patty said Mom would be lying in her grave naked, since she wouldn’t have bought any clothes for the occasion. Then Mom told her that closed-casket funerals were more tasteful anyway.”
Duck-Duck picked out a pair of green jeans and several T-shirts for me. “You can start with these.” I tried on a bunch of her sneakers, but the toes were crampy. “We’ll tell Mom. She’ll just have to suck it up and take us to the mall.”
I couldn’t decide if I was happy about this or not. Grandpa always used to say that charity was rich people’s way of pissing on you, but it felt nice to think of Molly buying me shoes.
“If she hates malls, it wouldn’t be nice to force her,” I said. “I can wait for Aunt Patty. The other gangs don’t seem to have figured out yet that the sneaker crumbs are mine.”
A
lmost every Saturday, Duck-Duck had soccer. She asked if I wanted to go too, but tons of kids running around kicking one another didn’t sound like fun to me. So on Saturdays, Molly and I would drop Duck-Duck off and then go food shopping. Luckily Molly didn’t hate food shopping.
On Birge Hill, we never had a shopping day. Sometimes Grandpa would buy huge pallets of something, like the tomato soup or the sardines. Otherwise, he or Keely would go out in the afternoon and buy a single jar of instant coffee, or a six-pack of beer and a roll of toilet paper. Sometimes Mom would walk all the way to the convenience store and buy Doritos. And Red Bull for the morning after she had drunk her six-pack.
Molly made a list every Saturday morning.
“What do you want for dinner tonight?” she would ask at breakfast. “What do you want tomorrow?” She would take suggestions and make lists for the whole week. One list for the vegetable-and-fruit store, one for the regular supermarket, one for the store with fancy food I’d never seen anywhere else before.
At first I couldn’t figure it out. Why spend an entire day running around town buying food that you would just eat up in a meal or two? Why go to three stores when you could go to one? But then I started to like it. We would go to the vegetable-and-fruit store, and Molly would poke around and pick a forest of broccoli and ask if I thought it looked good. Some looked like miniature trees, fresh from the mountains. Others looked more like after-Christmas trees people put out in the street when they got too yellow and old. There were baskets of ten kinds of apples, and all of them looked just a little different. We picked out pink ones and red ones and made sure to pick the big crunchy ones Duck-Duck liked. It was a lot of responsibility, remembering who liked what and what went in each recipe. Like lasagna wasn’t just one ingredient — it was wavy noodles and three different cheeses and real tomatoes and canned tomatoes and about five other things that went in with tomatoes. It was like pieces of a puzzle made a different picture after you cooked them into place.
Molly wrote lists, but every week she let me pick out one thing that wasn’t on the list. The first time, I picked a mango. I had never seen a mango before, and even though Molly said it wasn’t quite ripe and we would have to put it on the windowsill in the sun before we could cut it open, I took it home. Eating it was like putting a warm beach into my mouth. The next week, I picked clams. They were still alive, the fish man said, just breathing really quietly. I wondered about eating something still alive, but it seemed better to eat something that had recently been breathing than something that had been dead for years and years, like those sardines. We brought the clams home, and Molly steamed them until they were dead and taught us how to crack them open. We melted butter and dipped each one in. I decided no amount of butter could ever make a sardine taste like those clams: strong but sweet, like I imagined the ocean should taste.
One Saturday morning when Duck-Duck had an away game, Molly and I stopped at the bakery and ate lemon cookies at a black metal table. Molly stirred milk into her coffee and started talking.
“Your mother,” she said, “she’s a missing person. We can’t just keep pretending she doesn’t exist.”
Me, I was okay with pretending she didn’t exist. At least I thought I was. When I did think about her, I could hear the roar of the river in my ears, and I had to breathe a lot before I stopped sweating. I had been with Molly and Duck-Duck for a couple of weeks. I’d been hoping Molly would forget about telling the cops.
“Can we wait a little longer?” I said. “If she’s not dead, maybe she went on a vacation and forgot to tell me.”
“Why don’t I think that’s what happened?” said Molly. She almost gave me the blue-eyed squinty look she gave Duck-Duck, but then she stopped.
“You can’t do that squinty-eye thing with me,” I said. “I don’t have blue eyes, so I don’t know the code.”
“Code?” said Molly.
“That wink-wink-squint thing you and Duck-Duck do. Dirt-brown eyes don’t understand that kind of talk.”
“You? Dirt-brown eyes? Where’d you get that idea?” She looked at me, amused. “You’re my green-eyed girl.”
I almost choked on my lemon cookie. For a second, I couldn’t swallow. Then I wanted to cry, which was stupid.
“Green?” was the only thing I could think of to say.
“Sure, like the lake green,” said Molly, and she smiled at me.
I wanted to ask what she meant by “my girl,” but it was way too dumb a question. Maybe she just meant it to be funny or cute. If I had had a real mother, maybe I could have these squint conversations and get the jokes and not be embarrassed to ask a grown-up lady if she liked me or not. But I didn’t ask. Maybe Duck-Duck would know.
“And they never found a body,” said Molly.
“No body, no,” I said. This was stupid. If Keely’s body had shown up, the cops would already know I’d killed her, and we wouldn’t be having this conversation.
When we got home, Molly started going on about cops again.
“It’s time to talk to the police,” said Molly. “Maybe they found a body but they couldn’t identify it because you didn’t report her missing.”
We were back to the missing-person talk again. The thing was, I wasn’t missing her.
“Can you talk to them but keep me out of jail?” I finally said.
“Fishy, it was an accident. You’re not going to jail,” said Molly, and she picked up her phone.
I didn’t believe that for a second. I felt like I was going to puke. I went to the bathroom and shut the door. I ran the water a lot so I couldn’t hear anything. Then I changed my mind and opened the door just a hair.
Molly was on the phone with the police.
“She’s recovering from trauma, sir,” Molly said. “She probably has PTSD. It’s not surprising she didn’t report it.”
Who knew what “PTSD” was? It sounded like bug spray, or the name of one of those crime shows Duck-Duck liked so much. Molly was a good talker, though. Maybe I wouldn’t end up in jail for long.
I heard Molly say good-bye. I flushed twice so she’d know I’d been busy. Then I came out to the kitchen.
“We’re going down to the station,” said Molly. “They want your mother’s name and description so they can run her through their database. Maybe she turned up somewhere.”
She was careful not say “turned up dead somewhere.”
We got in the car and put on our seat belts. Keely never used seat belts. She said they made her feel tied down. That was the point, I said. She would never admit it, but it was just one of Grandpa’s thoughts moved to Keely’s brain. Grandpa said no pampered government pig was going to tell him what he could do in his own truck. Freedom to drive, freedom to die. No seat belts wasn’t how he died, though.
Molly had different rules. Seat belts weren’t a choice; they were the law. Molly wouldn’t even turn on the engine till she heard all the click-clicks. And if a buckle just happened to unclick while you were driving, Molly would pull over to the side and wait. “Click up,” she would say. She was hard to fool.
We didn’t talk on the drive down to the police station. When we got there, Molly and the cop filled out a bunch of papers. They asked me questions, and I tried to answer: Keely’s hair color, eye color, age, weight.
“Brown, dirt-brown, twenty-seven.” Molly’s eyebrows went up at that, but she didn’t say anything. “I dunno, skinny but not really skinny?”
The same young cop who arrested us in the cemetery started going on about the Department of Social Services when another cop came in. Grandpa always called him Bub, but I think his name was Greg. I knew him; he knew me.
“Hey, Sam,” he said to the young cop. “She’s old man Jamison’s kid’s kid. She must be one tough cookie. I would have gone wacko in that house. If this lady says she’ll keep her, let her stay. It’s Saturday. The Department can deal on Monday.” He didn’t talk to me, since adults always talk about kids like they’re not in the room.
Sam got his ba
ck up. “The law says”— and he went on to say what the law said about minors and protective services and calling DSS immediately.
“Sure, sure,” said the old cop. “Do what you got to do. I’m just telling you . . .”
Sam waved his hand to shoo Bub away. He started looking around his desk for the phone number for DSS. Then he got on the phone and left messages for people.
Molly told him we were going to wait for as long as it took. “Don’t worry,” she said to me. “It’s just a lot of bureaucracy. Everything will work out.”
Here I was in the police station again. Here Molly was in the police station again. She probably hadn’t ever been in a police station before she met me. They were going to call the Department for Children with No Mothers and send me away for good.
I couldn’t run away right now. They probably had bars and locks on even the bathroom windows. If the bathroom had windows. There was a desk at the front with a woman who probably had a gun. Even if I ran as fast as I could, I wouldn’t be able to get out quick enough. And they had police cars to chase me. And dogs. I didn’t even have a bike.
Molly gave me quarters to put in the soda machine, and I bought a Coke for me and a ginger ale for her. While I was there, I checked for windows in the bathroom. I was right. There were none.
Both of us had finished our sodas before someone from Social Services called Officer Sam back. I tried to hear what he was saying, but then I started to sweat and decided I wasn’t going to listen. Wherever he sent me, I would run away.
I paced around the station room, clutching the empty Coke can, making it crunch with each step. I tried not to listen to the phone call.
I still overheard the cop say “protective services.”
Protective services sounded like a zoo. A zoo for children with dead mothers and no fathers. We’d be kept in cages, and people would stare at us behind the bars, throwing peanuts at us and laughing. There would be no Yodels. There would be no Duck-Duck. I almost started to cry, but I kept circling around the station, knocking my soda can against any metal I saw. Clink, bang, twack.