Where We Belong
Catherine Ryan Hyde
“Hyde is a remarkable, insightful storyteller, creating full-bodied characters whose dialogue rings true, with not a word to spare.”
-Library Journal
Fourteen-year-old Angie and her mom are poised at the edge of homelessness… again. The problem is her little sister, Sophie. Sophie has an autism-like disorder, and a tendency to shriek. No matter where they live, home never seems to last long.
Until they move in with Aunt Vi, across the fence from a huge black Great Dane who changes everything. Sophie falls in love immediately, and begins to imitate the “inside of the dog,” which, fortunately, is a calm place. The shrieking stops. Everybody begins to breathe again. Until Paul Inverness, the dog’s grumpy, socially isolated owner, moves to the mountains, and it all begins again.
Much to Angie’s humiliation, when they’re thrown out of Aunt Vi’s house, Angie’s mom moves the family to the mountains after Paul and his dog. There, despite a fifty-year difference in their ages, Angie and Paul form a deep friendship, the only close friendship either has known. Angie is able to talk to him about growing up gay, and Paul trusts Angie with his greatest secret, his one dream. When the opportunity arrives, Angie decides to risk everything to help Paul’s dream come true, even their friendship and her one chance at a real home—the only thing she’s dreamed of since her father was killed. A place she can never be thrown out. A place she can feel she belongs.
By the bestselling author of DON’T LET ME GO, WHEN I FOUND YOU, and WALK ME HOME, WHERE WE BELONG is a poignant, heartfelt, and uplifting story about finding your place in the world, no matter how impossible it seems.
“Hyde has a sure touch with affairs of the heart.”
-Publishers Weekly
Table of Contents
PART ONE
1. Hem
2. Tibet
3. Inventory
4. Crushed
5. Gone
6. Truth
PART TWO
1. Fishwinner
2. Because
3. Break
4. Calm
PART THREE
1. Smile
2. Risk
3. Unlocked
4. Trust
5. Where We Belong
When You Were Older
About Catherine Ryan Hyde
Also by Catherine Ryan Hyde
PART ONE
The Part When I Was Only Fourteen
1. Hem
By the time I was seven, I had twenty-two packs of playing cards. Twenty-two. And I never played card games with them. Not once. Card games are boring.
They were for building, not playing.
It started with the card house my dad showed me how to build when I was six, right before he stuck his hand in his shirt pocket and figured out he was out of cigarettes and then walked out of the house to get more at the corner store and got murdered. For his watch and his wallet and his wedding ring. The watch was just a cheap Timex, and the ring was only silver and thin. And he never carried a lot of cash, because he never had a lot to carry.
I graduated card houses and went on to card condos, card apartment complexes, card ranches, card palaces. It’s a lot of work for something that’s always going to fall down at the end. But then, all of life is like that. Right?
Take my dad. He was just showing me that perfect moment when the house is getting big, when you’re on the third or so level, and every card drop makes you hold your breath. You have to wait to see. You think it falls right away if it’s going to, but it doesn’t. There’s this weird little pause, like time skipping. That pause was everything that kept me dropping those damn cards. Everything.
“I’ll be honest, Angie,” my dad said. “It brings out the gambler in me.”
But nothing needed to bring out the gambler in him. He was a gambler. It was always out.
Right after he said that, he stuck his hand in his pocket.
Now I have no packs of cards. I got rid of them all after my sister, Sophie, came along. Not right after. Because… you know. She was in a crib and all. And even when she started crawling around, it seemed like everything was okay with her. And then it wasn’t. And it was hard to put our fingers on the moment when we knew it wasn’t. Probably a lot sooner than we said so out loud.
After that, I knew better than to keep anything delicate and easy to ruin around the house ever again.
Anyway, what difference does it make? Now that I’m fourteen, our whole life is a house of cards. Drop. Wait. Breathe. Or don’t.
I liked it better with real cards. I liked how you could just sweep them all up with your hand and start over again. Everything in the world is easier to clean up after than your own actual damn life.
It was our first full day at Aunt Violet’s, and I woke up wondering if it would also be our last. It can happen on any day. You think you know which ones are the most dicey, but it turns out you never do.
Besides, this one wasn’t looking good.
It was a Friday, and I should have been in school, except I had to go to a new school now, and my mom said signing me up on Monday would be good enough, which really meant she needed me to babysit Sophie while she went job hunting.
We were sitting at the breakfast table eating toaster waffles, Sophie and me and Aunt Vi—this old Formica table with these glittery spots on it, like manmade stars. Those spots were holding Sophie’s attention. She was eating her waffle with her left hand, and dropping the tip of her right index finger down on those little glittery spots, over and over and over. With a little grunt on each drop.
Her hair needed brushing. Probably my job, but I was ducking it. Pretend reason: because my mom didn’t make that clear. Real reason: because it’s kind of a rotten job.
Aunt Vi was watching Sophie in a way that made it hard for me to breathe.
Aunt Violet wasn’t really our aunt. First of all, she was our mom’s aunt, which made her our great aunt, and also, only by marriage. Did that make her our mom’s for-real aunt? I guess it did, since there’s no such thing as an aunt-in-law. I didn’t know, and it didn’t matter. Here’s what I knew, and here’s what mattered: We weren’t blood family. Which would make it a whole lot easier to throw us away.
“What kind of job is your mom looking for?” Aunt Vi asked. She never took her eyes off Sophie, which made it look like she was asking Sophie. But, of course, that was impossible.
“She’s really wanting to find a job waitressing at a dinner restaurant,” I said. Sophie’s grunts were turning to little squeals that hurt my ears. I could see Aunt Vi wince on each one. The sparkle pointing was half morphing into arm flaps. I talked through it as best I could. “Because the tips are really good. And then I can watch Sophie while she’s—”
“Can she be gotten to stop that?” Aunt Vi squeaked. Suddenly, and with her voice too high-pitched. And kind of desperate. Like she’d been just about to break that whole time.
Which I’d known. Which I’d felt. But I’d been telling myself it wasn’t as bad as I thought, half believing myself and half not. Uncle Charlie had died just a couple of months before, and Aunt Violet was fragile.
A weird silence followed, which wasn’t a silence at all, because Sophie didn’t stop her noise. It was just Aunt Vi and me holding still and saying nothing. Don’t ask me how all that noise can feel like an awkward silence. But it can. And it did.
Drop.
“No, ma’am. I don’t think it’s possible for her to stop.”
Wait.
Aunt Vi sighed.
I breathed.
“It’s just that I’m not myself since Charlie died. It’s like being sick. You think you can get up and do things, but then you’re still weaker t
han you thought. You know how when you’re sick, you just can’t abide anything? All you can do is be sick.”
I knew what she meant, even though I was either wrong about what the word abide meant or she was using it wrong in the sentence.
“I’m really sorry about Uncle Charlie. He was a nice man. I liked him a lot.”
Aunt Vi’s face held frozen for a split second or two. Then it twisted up into crying. And then I felt like eighteen different kinds of crap for saying exactly the wrong thing to her.
She levered up from the table. I had no idea that old woman could move so fast.
“I have to go lie down,” she said.
Of course, we’d all just gotten up for the day. I didn’t say so.
“Want some earplugs?”
I dug two out of my shirt pocket and held them out in my hand. These bright, dark blue bullets. Not foam. Foam earplugs don’t do much. Well. They don’t do enough. These were made out of beeswax and some kind of fiber. I held them out to her back as it hurried away.
She stopped at the kitchen doorway and turned around. She was wearing a housecoat covered with little pink flowers. It had seen better days. The pink flowers were fading. Practically out of existence. She held onto the doorway like the house had just hit an iceberg.
She always wore makeup. Even with that horrible old housecoat. I wondered who she thought would notice or care. Well. I noticed. I mostly wondered who cared.
I just stood there with my hand out. Like an idiot. I made a gesture toward the earplugs. So comforting. So safe. Such a good solution. Couldn’t she see that?
She shook her head hard. “I’ll just go lie down.”
“No, wait—don’t go, Aunt Vi. We’ll go outside.”
She only stood there, holding on for dear life. Probably waiting to see how I’d get Sophie to go anywhere.
I stuffed the last two bites of waffle into my mouth at the same time. Took my plate to the sink. Then I snuck up behind Sophie and grabbed the half-chewed dry waffle out of her left hand.
She shrieked.
I held it up like a carrot on a stick, just out of her reach. I knew she’d follow it right out the back door.
“I’ll give it back to you when we get outside.”
I didn’t know if Sophie understood when I said stuff to her. I didn’t even know if she listened. I said it mostly for Aunt Vi’s sake. So she wouldn’t think I was being mean to Sophie for no reason. Or maybe she wouldn’t care. Maybe it was only me who cared.
I looked over at Aunt Vi as we hit the back door—almost literally. Locked eyes with her. Without really meaning to.
Wait.
“You don’t know what it’s like,” she said. “How hard everything is when you’ve just lost someone.”
My face got hot, which it always does when I get mad. I always get mad really fast, but then I don’t do anything with it. I don’t let it loose. If I say I’m mad, I’ll cry, which is just so incredibly unfair. It ruins everything. So I don’t say.
Sophie was ramming into my side and bouncing off, over and over. Probably trying to get me to drop the waffle. It hurt, but I was only giving it half my attention.
I just thought it was a mean thing to say to me. Thoughtless. You know?
I drew Sophie out the kitchen door and onto the back porch and slammed the door hard behind us.
And gave her the waffle back.
And didn’t breathe.
Much.
I was lying on this white plastic lounge chair, with the sun beating down on me, on grass that was all marked up with yellow spots from everywhere the dog had peed. The dog was gone, too. She’d died two weeks before Uncle Charlie, which was part of Aunt Violet’s extra-fragile state. I used to like that dog. Her name was Beulah, and she was a fat basset hound with arthritis. She was drooly but nice.
Sophie never liked Beulah. Sophie never liked any dogs. Or cats, either. In fact, you had to watch her every minute with them, because she would try to kick or punch them, even if they hadn’t done anything to her. One dog she saw outside a supermarket she tried to bite, and the dog was too nice to defend himself, and I had to step in and save the day, and then it was me who got bitten.
I looked up to see why Sophie was being so quiet. She was crouched on her belly up against the chain-link fence at one end of Aunt Violet’s yard. She actually looked like a dog, the way she was lying in the grass. Like the way a dog will fold up into a sphinx position. She had her chin on the backs of her hands like they were her paws. Her nose was tucked right up to the chain-link fence. On the other side of the links was just about the biggest dog ever. This all-black Great Dane with cropped ears standing up, pointy. I think they shouldn’t do that to dogs, but that’s beside the point for this part of things. If I had to guess, I’d say he was maybe close to two hundred pounds. He was lying in exactly the same position as Sophie. His nose was about four inches from hers. It was the only part of him that wasn’t black. His muzzle was gray.
I sat up. “Hmmm,” I said out loud, even though there was nobody but me around to hear me. Then I called out, “Sophie, you come away from him,” because I thought maybe she was lulling that poor dog into a false sense of security.
But… like I mentioned before, I don’t even know if she heard or not. Or heard but plain didn’t care. Or couldn’t care, I guess I should say.
I ran things around in my head for a minute or two. She couldn’t reach through the fence—anyway, not very far. That dog wasn’t tied up or anything. Surely he knew how to duck. And he outweighed her three or four times over. Did I really want to take my life in my hands by going to get her? I could always have used the extreme emergency method, which was sneaking up behind and throwing a blanket over her like a net, but I tried to keep that plan in my back pocket as much as I could. Besides, I usually got kicked up just as bad.
I decided that big old dog could take care of himself. Only because of the fence, though. Without that fence, I wouldn’t have bet much on his chances.
Every now and then, I looked up to see how it was going.
“Don’t you dare hurt him,” I said. Maybe four times.
But nothing ever moved.
I thought again about brushing her hair, but I couldn’t bring myself to mess up a good thing. It would’ve been easier if my mom had cut it short, like mine, but she loved Sophie’s hair, and I didn’t blame her. It was a color like mahogany, this rich brown with red highlights that came out in the sun. And in natural ringlet curls. She was a beautiful girl, more than I ever would be. My mom was always talking about her hair, and those gorgeous green eyes, like she didn’t get it that I was here, too. She talked about those green eyes less, though, now that Sophie hadn’t made eye contact with us for years.
I sighed and tried to make all that go away.
After a while, I heard Sophie shrieking that special horrible siren wail of hers. Our mom calls it keening, but I’ve heard other people keening, and I’ve got to tell you, this is worse. I sat up to see that the dog had wandered away from the fence to get a drink out of his water bowl. He raised his head up and looked at me, and I looked back. He had water streaming down from the corners of his mouth.
I reached to get my earplugs out of my pocket.
I don’t want to sound cold, just putting in earplugs and letting her wail. It sounds like I don’t care that she’s wailing. But it’s not that. I care plenty. There’s just nothing I can do. Nothing. Nothing anybody can do. Except preserve their own sanity by whatever means possible.
Aunt Violet burst out the back door.
“You have to make her stop,” she said. She sounded even more desperate, like she was on her last nerve. Like she could explode at any time, and flutter down to the spotty grass in a bunch of dry bits and pieces. “I can’t take it,” she said. “I’m not strong. I told your mom I’m not strong. I’m not myself without Charlie. I don’t have a lot of…”
While she searched for a word for what she didn’t have a lot of, I looked at her eyebr
ows. I was always sneaking peeks at them when I thought I could get away with it. She didn’t seem to have any eyebrow hairs of her own, so she drew them on in this weird color of light brown, and too high in the middle. It made her look like everything in the world was a shock to her system. Not that her eyebrows mattered at a time like that. Just that, when things get bad, my brain goes away. Sometimes.
Just as I opened my mouth to break the bad news, which she damn well should have known already—that I can’t stop Sophie once she gets going, that nothing can stop Sophie once she gets going—the dog came wandering back to the fence. I saw him out of the corner of my eye.
Sophie’s cry wound down the way a siren does, getting lower and slower and then gone.
“Oh, thank goodness,” Aunt Violet said. “Thank goodness she stopped.” Aunt Vi turned her eyes to me, her drawn-on eyebrows scrunched down as far as they could scrunch but still looking a little too high. “Did you take offense at something when we were talking before?”
She asked it like she’d had all this time to think and still couldn’t imagine what it might have been.
My face got hot again.
“I just felt like it was a little bit thoughtless of you,” I said, and then my face burned like crazy, because it was a brave thing to say. I had to work hard not to cry.
Aunt Vi’s head rocked back. “Now what on earth did I say?” Like she already knew I was wrong, and it couldn’t have been anything, really.
“That I don’t know how it feels when somebody dies.”
She just stared at me blank-faced for a minute. Not a real whole minute, but maybe for the count of three. Then her eyes went wide, and her hand came up to her mouth. And she charged at me. It scared the crap out of me. I thought she was about to attack me, and I wanted to run, or yell. Or something. Or anything. But it all happened too fast.
Next thing I knew, she was smothering me in this bear hug, and I was all pressed up to her big belly, which was softer than I thought a person should be. She actually had hold of the back of my head and was pulling it in close, against her big bosom, and I could hardly breathe.
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