Where We Belong

by Hyde, Catherine Ryan

  “Good.”

  “Thank God. Tell me, then.”

  “Paul’s going to be away much longer than he thought—”

  “How long?”

  “Like, months.”

  “Ah. Great,” she said. Like it wasn’t great at all. “So he must be paying you a lot. Because nothing else makes this good news. You come over here and tell me I’m on my own to work and pay bills and take care of Sophie for months, and you tell me it’s good news. So it must be a lot of money. It’d better be.”

  “It’s not money. I’m not letting him pay me.”

  “Get to the good part, Angie, and get to it fast, because my head is about to explode here. If you think I’m going to—”

  “He’s letting us live in the apartment over his garage.”

  Her eyes narrowed a little.

  “How big is it?”

  “Bigger than this.”

  “Is it nice?”

  “It’s incredible. Nicer than any place we’ve ever lived.”

  “Then we can’t afford it.”

  “Oh, yes, we can.”

  “What does he want for it?”

  “Nothing.”

  We just stood there in the warm sun for a minute, while she let that sink in. Rigby was snuffling Sophie’s hair.

  “He’s letting us move in for free?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I wouldn’t let him pay me for taking care of his dog. Which you thought was such a terrible idea.”

  She just stood there blinking for a while longer. I could tell the idea of the thing just couldn’t quite break through.

  “Just while he’s gone?”

  “Not necessarily. He says when he gets back, he’ll make some ground rules, so he can still have his privacy. And if you can stick with them, we can stay. If it doesn’t work out, we can stay till we find someplace else.”

  I waited. But she still just blinked.

  “I’m waiting for the moment you get it and start being happy,” I said.

  That seemed to be the ticket. Her face changed, like somebody had stopped electrocuting her with cattle prods all of a sudden. She rushed in and picked me right up off my feet in a hug.

  “Oh, my God,” she said. “No rent?”

  “No rent.”

  “So the money I make…”

  “We can buy food with it. And put gas in the car. And stuff like that.”

  “Oh, my God, we’ll have so much money!” Her voice came up to a shriek on the word money, and it hurt my ear. But I really didn’t mind. She put me down and let me go. Held me out at arm’s length by my shoulders. “Can we go see it?”

  “Sure. Do we have any gas at all?”

  “None. I’m not even sure it would start. We’ll have to walk.”

  “Fine. We’ll walk.”

  As we massed down the driveway together, all four of us, she stroked my hair and said, “Honey, I’m sorry I’ve been such a mess lately. I know I haven’t been very nice to be around. I was under so much pressure, and I was just so scared.”

  “I know,” I said. “I knew that.”

  But she’d denied it, right up until that moment. So it was nice to hear it from her own mouth. Not like I always needed to be right, exactly. More that it felt good to be told I wasn’t imagining things and I wasn’t crazy.

  “Oh. My. God,” my mom said.

  She was looking straight up when she said it. Right up into the middle of the ceiling. Up at the rafters, with the baskets and the dried flowers. And, between us and them, all that room. All that space. Almost like freedom. Like not having to live with your elbows in, even though I knew that wasn’t really right, because that’s horizontal space, and this was vertical. But that was how it felt.

  “This is so much bigger than it looks from the outside. So you’re telling me we can stay here forever and not pay rent? I can’t quite wrap my head around that.”

  “Forever is kind of a long time,” I said. “But if it works out, we won’t have to move when he comes home.”

  “I’ll follow the rules. I promise.”

  “Told you it was good news.”

  “You did.”

  Rigby was lying stretched out on the rug like a sphinx, the way she used to do on the other side of the fence at Aunt Vi’s. Sophie was lying right beside her in the same position.

  “How’s his brother?”

  “Dying. That’s why he’s not coming back right away.”

  “Oh. I’m sorry. That must be hard. What’s his brother’s name?”

  “What difference does that make?”

  “I just asked. What’s wrong with wanting to know the guy’s name?”

  “Dan,” I said.

  First no answer. Then she said, “Ouch.” And a minute later, “Does this couch fold out?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t look.”

  “Well, let’s find out.”

  She pulled all the couch cushions off and threw them on the rug. I wanted to tell her to be more gentle with everything, even though I didn’t really suppose it hurt a cushion to get thrown on a rug.

  “It does,” she said. “It even looks like it has sheets on it. Oooh. Flannel. How about if Sophie and I take this, and you sleep in that corner behind the screen? Since you like your privacy and all.”

  “Well, later. After Paul comes back. Till then, I’ll be in the big house, and you and Sophie can have this all to yourself.”

  She didn’t answer right away. Instead, she walked to the big glass door and looked out over the mountains. I walked over and looked with her.

  “If you’d told me a year or two ago we’d be here,” she said, “I’d have told you you were nuts. We could barely afford a city apartment in an iffy neighborhood. And now here we are, in this gorgeous little place in this tiny town where the schools are great and the air is clean…”

  “And Sophie is quiet.”

  “And I’ll get some alone time for a change, because Sophie will want to be in the big house with the dog.”

  “No,” I said, and she looked at me strangely. “Only me in the house. Not Sophie and not you. I made him a promise.”

  “He’ll never know the difference.”

  “Oh, my God! I don’t believe you! You just stood here not two minutes ago and said you’d follow the rules. Do you want us to get to stay here or don’t you?”

  She cut her eyes away, like she always did when she didn’t respect herself compared to me. After a few seconds, she walked back to the couch and flopped down with a sigh. Like all the air had leaked out of her.

  I pretended I wouldn’t have to do it for a minute. Then I went over and sat with her. Neither one of us said anything at all. The silence got heavy and weird.

  So I said, “Penny for your thoughts.”

  It’s something she used to say to me all the time when I was a kid. Especially after Dad died. This was the first time I’d said it to her. Usually I was all too happy not to know.

  “I was thinking about how you got us this place to live. And how I kept telling you to charge money for taking care of the dog. And how I’m supposed to be teaching you stuff like ‘Do good for others, and it’ll come back to you.’ Instead of you teaching me.”

  “Yeah, well, don’t put too much faith in me as a teacher,” I said, trying to find my way back into the daughter role. “Half the time, I feel like I have no idea what I’m doing.”

  “I feel that way all the time,” she said.

  Reminding me in one sentence that I could squeeze into the daughter role all I wanted, but getting her to stay in the mother role was another matter altogether.

  Paul called at eleven o’clock the next night. The phone blasted me out of sleep. I’d been dreaming, and I had a weird sensation that Nellie had been in there somewhere. But she was gone as of that first ring.

  Fortunately, there was a phone by the bed.

  I picked it up and said hello. I turned on the light, but I don’t know why. Because t
he moon was full, and I’d seen the phone just fine. And it hurt my eyes and made me squint.

  “I know I woke you,” he said. “I knew I would. I’m sorry. But you said I could call.”

  I turned the light off again. Then it seemed really dark until my eyes adjusted.

  “It doesn’t make any difference. I’m on vacation. I can sleep till noon if I want.”

  “I keep thinking how you said we were friends. And I said we were friends. And you’re supposed to call and talk to a friend at a time like this. And… well… I hate to admit this. It’s pathetic. But I really couldn’t think of anybody else I could talk to.”

  I wanted to tell him I was honored—no, actually, moved in a way I could feel in my gut—that he called me to talk. I didn’t think he ever would. It made me feel like I mattered. Like somebody thought I was good for something besides watching my sister.

  He still hadn’t said anything more, and I didn’t know what to say. Rigby was up on the bed with me, lying flat out on her side with her back up against my hip, her legs hanging off into nothingness. I scratched behind her ear, and she stretched.

  “Nobody talks to anybody down here,” he said. “It’s very strange.”

  “You can’t talk to Rachel?”

  “Yes and no. We say things. But it’s like nothing is real. I think we’re both in shock. So we’re walking around like we’re wrapped in cotton batting or something. We say words to each other, but they’re nothing like the things we’d say at any other time. They don’t seem like they mean anything. They don’t feel real.”

  I waited a minute, to be sure he was done.

  “I was kind of hoping you’d get to talk to Dan more. You know how they say… sometimes… well, I don’t know. I don’t really know, so maybe I shouldn’t say. But they say people are different when they know they’re near the end, and sometimes old grudges and stuff just sort of… actually, I don’t know what they do. I was just hoping you two could talk.”

  “He’s out of his mind,” Paul said. A weird pause. Then he said, “I didn’t mean that the way it sounded. I didn’t mean it like an insult. I mean literally. He’s literally out of his mind. He’s on so many drugs and painkillers, he’s someone else entirely. He doesn’t know who he is half the time. Or where he is, or what’s happening. He keeps asking me for a pad of paper, so he can write down all these notes.”

  Nothing more seemed to come out of him, so I said, “What kind of notes?”

  “Just all this stuff he thinks he’s forgetting. He still thinks he has stuff to do. I spend five or ten minutes settling him down. Convincing him he doesn’t have to be responsible for anything anymore. Then he’ll put the pad down and drift off, but when he wakes up, it starts all over again. A few minutes ago, I brought him a fresh legal pad that I’d just bought, because he’d filled up the only one he had. I’d just taken it out of the plastic. He calls me over a minute later and tells me there’s something written on every single sheet. It’s a brand-new pad. I go and look, and it’s blank. ‘Dan,’ I say, ‘it’s blank.’ We look at this pad together, page after page, and at every page, I say, ‘Nothing. There’s nothing there.’ And at every page, he says, ‘You’re kidding.’”

  My eyes were completely adjusted to the light by then, and it felt good to be in that room, and to be in the half-dark. And to be there on my own with Rig but not feel alone. I watched the way the wind bent the tree outside the bedroom window. Through the window, I could see the branches sway, and out of the corner of my eye, I could see the shadows sway on the wall.

  “That must be awful,” I said.

  “That’s not really the hard part.”

  “Right. I guess not.”

  “I can’t wrap words around the hard part. But maybe you know.”

  “I think so. I think maybe it’s Rachel, and how she’s about to be by herself and not married. But not for any reason you would have wanted. You must be wondering what that means. You know. For you. But then you probably feel bad for even wondering. And I know you could never ask her or talk to her about a thing like that, while her husband is…”

  I stopped, because I heard a little noise on his end of the line. Just a sniff. Maybe he was allergic to something down there. Or had a cold. But probably not. Because I would have heard that right from the start.

  “You okay?” I asked.

  “Yeah.”

  And even just in that one word, I heard it. I’d made him cry. Or, anyway, something had. Life, I guess. I didn’t think people like Paul cried. I thought people like me cried. I thought people like Paul handled things.

  “Well. Not okay. But okay. I mean, this sucks. But I’m okay in that I’m not falling apart at the seams. I’m okay because I will be.”

  “I’m sorry if I shouldn’t have said all that.”

  “No, it was good that you did. That way I didn’t have to.”

  Silence on both ends of the line for a long time. But it didn’t feel too uncomfortable.

  Then Paul said, “Did your family move in?”

  “Not yet.”

  “What am I thinking? That was just yesterday. My God. Feels like a week ago. The days feel so long.”

  “They came and looked at the place. My mom gets paid in three days. Right now, she doesn’t have money to put gas in the car to move all our stuff over. So that’s when we’ll move. Because she doesn’t have to take most of that paycheck and put it away for next month’s rent. For a change. We actually have money for stuff now. Or, I mean… we will. In three days.”

  “I thought she worked for tips.”

  “Oh, no. She hasn’t had that job for a long time. She works at the pharmacy while Sophie’s in school.”

  “Take that twenty I put under the dog food can. You can put it back when she gets paid.”

  “Oh. Okay. If you’re sure.”

  “Of course I’m sure. I’m surprised you didn’t think of it.”

  “Well. I knew it was there. But it’s yours. It’s for dog food.”

  “Even though I never would have known. Listen. I called the grocery store and set up a line of credit. So when you need more dog food, just go in and charge it. And if you need to get more food in the house, go ahead; but do me a favor, and don’t feed the whole family on it.”

  “I won’t buy anything but dog food with it. We can afford food now. Thanks to you.”

  “I should let you get back to sleep.”

  “You know you can call anytime if things are weird down there.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I do know that.”

  After we got off the phone, I wondered where he was staying. Probably in his old house, right across the fence from Aunt Vi.

  I should have asked him to tell her where we were, and that we were okay. She must have felt guilty. Putting us out like that. She must’ve wondered how we were. Where we landed. I wondered if my mother ever bothered to tell her.

  Then I laughed a little snort out loud, and Rigby woke up and looked over her shoulder at me.

  “Nothing,” I said. “It’s fine, girl. Go back to sleep.”

  She did.

  I made a mental note to ask Paul to do that the next time we talked. It just wasn’t one of those things you want to leave to my mom.

  3. Break

  The place hardly looked different with our stuff in it. After all those moves, the beds and coffee tables and couches and all those other big, hard-to-move items had peeled away. I tried to think back on where they’d gone and when, but I swear, I couldn’t remember. The time between when we first got thrown out of our house—the one we used to live in with my dad—and this place was all muddy and thick with fog. Like maybe I’d only dreamed the whole thing.

  Now we just had stuff like sheets to put on the beds and eating utensils to put in the drawers and towels to hang in the bathroom and clothes to hang in the closets. And not too much more.

  So once we’d put it all away, the place looked a lot like it did before we started.

  In other word
s, it still looked wonderful.

  My mom was in the bathroom, and I heard her shriek. I thought she’d seen a mouse or a cockroach or something. But I was so happy in the new place. Nothing could ruin it. I just thought, Whatever. We’ll buy a mousetrap or some bug spray and still be happy.

  But when she stuck her head out, she was beaming.

  “It has a bathtub!”

  “Most bathrooms do.”

  “But the one at the Magnussons’ didn’t. And the one at the motel before that didn’t. I’m so tired of stall showers. I haven’t taken a hot bath in a year. And it’s huge. And deep. Looks like I can get every part of me under hot water that I don’t need for breathing.”

  “Well, this is your big night, then.”

  “I think we should order a pizza,” she said.

  “We can afford a pizza?”

  “Of course we can. We have…”

  I braced myself for loudness. Literally winced.

  “…no rent!”

  She never said those two words in a normal voice, only screamed them. I was nearly used to it by then.

  “Tell me what you want on it,” I said, “and I’ll call from the big house.”

  “I think we should get pepperoni and mushrooms and double cheese. After all, this is a major celebration.”

  “Sounds good to me. Come on, Rig.”

  I walked to the door, opened it, stepped out onto the landing, and waited for Rigby to come through the door with me. She didn’t. I looked back and found her lying on the rug next to Sophie, giving me a look I could only call apologetic. Like she needed to stay with Sophie, because Sophie needed her to, and maybe I would understand.

  “Never mind,” I said. “I’ll go by myself.”

  When I got back up to the apartment, my mom threw her arms around me. And not just for a quick second, either. She got me wrapped up and didn’t let go.

  It was kind of disturbing.

  “You really saved our collective ass,” she said.

  Then I felt even more weirded out.

  I wiggled loose. “Don’t say that.”

  “Why not? I’m giving credit where credit is due.”

  “I don’t know. It just makes me uncomfortable. I don’t know why.”