by Nikki Loftin
“Busy babysitting?” Jake asked. He had a piece of Johnson grass sticking out of the corner of his mouth that he was chewing slowly, carefully. “Nobody else home?”
“Yeah, my dad’s home,” I lied.
Doug smiled. “No, we saw him go past. You’re a good liar, though. Couldn’t tell from looking at your face. I can’t never hide it. We thought you’d gone, too.”
Jake pushed Doug out of his way, shoving something—a screwdriver? A hammer? I couldn’t tell, he hid it so fast—behind his back. “Nah, we didn’t, Doug. Remember? We just came by to visit a bit. Hang out with you. Friend.”
Doug look confused. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “That’s right. We came over to hang out.”
I could see what he meant about his face giving it all away. They hadn’t come over to hang out. For one thing, they hadn’t knocked—they’d tried jimmying the doorknob.
For another, Doug had a big bag in his hand. Had they been coming to steal stuff?
“Can I hold your baby?” Doug asked.
I was shocked. “Um, no. She’s scared of strangers.” Carlie was peering at the two guys with wide, serious eyes, but she didn’t look afraid, of course. She loved meeting new people. She was probably going to start smiling and babbling any second.
I was afraid, though. I didn’t trust these two, especially not with Carlie.
“I won’t hurt her, Pete,” Doug said, each word low and sincere. “I never hurt a baby. I like ’em. They’re soft.”
I didn’t know how to respond—soft? As in, if you squeeze them?—and then I didn’t have to say anything. Carlie had taken that exact moment to let loose a whole diaper full of stench.
Perfect timing.
“Whoo-ee!” Doug yelled, flapping an arm in front of his face. “Toxic-waste baby! You gonna have to change that?”
“Yeah,” I said, acting like it bothered me. It didn’t. I’d rather change a thousand diapers than hang around with Doug and Jake. “Better go soon, or it’ll explode.”
“Explode?” Doug hooted again, but the two of them were moving off the front step and crossing the yard. “Little land-mine baby. I like it.”
“We’ll see you soon, Petey,” Jake said, swiveling his head back. “Maybe don’t mention this little visit to anyone. Got that? We’re sort of . . . grounded. Wouldn’t want to have to redo the other day.”
The other day. He meant when they’d beat me up.
It was a screwdriver in his back pocket, I saw, as he jogged off. And even though I could feel warmth on my arm, and Carlie was fussing, I waited there until they disappeared. Then I checked the front door.
Sure enough, there were scrapes and scratches all around the keyhole—the hole was even enlarged a bit, like he’d been jimmying it for a while. The lock wouldn’t reengage, no matter how I tried. Why hadn’t Dad bought a dead bolt, like we’d had in San Antonio? “We’re safe out here,” I remembered him saying. “Nobody would come this far out in the country to steal. Too much work.”
I guessed it wasn’t too much work for Jake and Doug. I ended up stacking two chairs behind the door to hold it shut if they decided to come back, double-checked all the other doors and windows, and finally changed Carlie’s diaper.
It was toxic, but not as toxic as my mood. How was I supposed to tell Mom and Dad about the doorknob without telling them who had done it?
I couldn’t take another beating. And I was too much of a wimp to tell on them and risk it.
I wanted to run away worse than ever.
I found a way to tell what had happened, sort of, but it meant that I’d probably never be left alone again until I was twenty-five.
“I heard somebody at the door,” I told Dad when he got home. He’d noticed the doorknob and the chairs, of course. “It was weird. Whoever it was ran off when I called out. But the doorknob was already shot.”
“Shot,” Dad said, running his hands through what was left of his hair. “Shot. God, just think what could have happened if he’d had a gun. And you didn’t get a look at him?”
“No,” I said. “I was too scared to go outside.”
“Good,” Dad said. He looked pale, as shaken as I had felt when I’d opened the door. “You did okay.” He even reached over and gave me a hug, both his arms wrapping around me so hard I couldn’t take a breath for a few seconds. “You did fine.”
It was the first time in my life he hadn’t criticized me for saying I was scared. I didn’t know how to take it.
He spent the next hour on the phone with a freaked-out Mom, trying to calm her down. When that didn’t work, he pounded on his drums until Mom got home, hammering away at them like he was going to break all the heads.
“Oh, sweetie,” Mom said when she came in the door. She almost smothered me with her hug. “Where’s Carlie?” She was napping, but Mom woke her up to hug her, too.
And then the fighting began.
Two minutes into the screaming, Laura rolled her eyes, said, “I quit this stupid family,” and locked herself in her room. I knew how she felt. I really wished I could quit it, too.
Run away, a small voice whispered inside. Run away with Annie. Mom’s voice obliterated any thoughts of escaping.
“Someone has to stay home with the kids until we have enough money for daycare or until school starts. It can’t be me, because I’m the only one of us with a JOB!”
Mom fought dirty when she wanted to.
“So that’s it? Time to start in on what a loser I am? Why didn’t you just divorce me when I was fired? Why prolong the anticipation?”
“It’s not too late, Joshua. Don’t give me any ideas. And don’t change the subject. Whatever we decide, the kids can’t stay here alone so much! It’s affecting Peter, can’t you see it? I thought it would help, having a fresh start. But he’s drawing further and further away. And even Laura’s getting so lonely. You’re gone so much.”
“Job interviews,” Dad ground out.
“Jobs are for money,” Mom said. “These are for bands—free gigs, right?”
“It’s temporary. I’m going to get work, so lay off.” His voice had gotten harder, meaner.
“When? Before or after your kids are murdered out here in the middle of nowhere while you’re farting around with your drum set in Austin like an overgrown fifteen-year-old?”
“Farting around? Come on, Maxine, say what you really mean. You know, I was a drummer when you met me—why isn’t it good enough now? Why do you suddenly have this problem with who I am? Not just what I do, but who I am?”
I froze, listening. Dad sounded like he felt the same way I did. Like he wasn’t good enough. How could he feel that way, too? I was saved from having to think about it by Mom’s answer.
“Who I am?” Mom repeated, her voice high and mocking. “Because we’re older, Joshua. We’re adults now—or I am, at least. We have rent, bills,” she shouted. “Not to mention kids, scared kids, who need someone here with them—”
“So now you want me to sit here instead of getting a job? I have to go out to find work. Peter will just have to learn to man up—”
“Man up? To armed robbers? Can you even hear yourself? It’s not safe! This could happen again tomorrow!”
“What, you think there’s a ring of dangerous thieves going house to house in the countryside, stealing ten-year-old televisions and broken appliances?” Dad laughed, a short, ugly bark.
“There could be!”
The fight went on until they both ran out of steam. Dad finally apologized and actually figured out a few things to do to keep Mom from calling the divorce lawyers, but he had to drive into town for supplies and stay up late working with his tools to get her to back down.
The next day, he left me at home, safely locked behind brand-spanking-new dead bolts on the front and back doors and window bars on all the downstairs windows, and went around to as
k the neighbors if they’d had any break-ins.
Laura was in charge of Carlie, and Mom was back at work.
I had to get out. I had to see if Annie was there. I’d spent most of the night—well, from two A.M. onward, once Laura got off the computer—doing research on late effects from leukemia treatments.
Annie had to be wrong. From what I read, the kind of effects she was talking about almost never happened. I had to figure out some way to make her see, change her . . . My own thoughts stuttered to a halt.
Make her. Change her. That was just the sort of thing Mom and Dad whispered about me, when they thought I couldn’t hear. Or yelled, when they didn’t care if I was there or not.
They wanted to change my mind, to make me see their way. Make who I was disappear and replace it with who they wanted me to be.
They never wanted to listen.
Maybe I couldn’t stand up to them, but I didn’t have to be them.
I wasn’t going to do that to Annie. I was going to listen, and more. And if she didn’t want to change her mind, if she was set on running away, I was going to help her do it.
Chapter 25
She wasn’t in the valley. I looked in all the places we’d been. Annie had done something with the grapevines in one of the meadows, but it looked unfinished, like she’d given up in the middle of the project.
I walked back up the hill toward the Colonel’s wife’s house. She was home, and her kitchen door was wide open. I could hear her humming at the sink. Her back was to me and to the table that was covered with . . . “More green grapes?” I said it out loud, and she whirled around, holding an enormous butcher knife.
For a second, I thought she was going to throw it at me. But then she lowered it and let out her breath. “Boy!” She laughed, but hard, like she wasn’t sure if she was going to start yelling. “You almost gave me a heart attack.”
“I’m sorry. The door was open.” The room was filled with flies, and one of them landed on the tip of her nose. She blew it off, along with a few stray pieces of gray hair, and slumped down.
“Not your fault.” She motioned to a stool with the knife. “Sit. You can help me strip them grapes off the stems.”
I sat, and we worked together in silence for a while. The pile of grapes was enormous. And all of the grapes were unripe. I didn’t get it. She was crazy, sure, but not stupid. Why had she picked these before they were ready?
It made me think of Annie, and of her cancer, and how unfair it was for a kid to have to even think about dying. Just like picking unripe grapes—it didn’t make sense.
“Go ahead and ask,” the Colonel’s wife said after a few more minutes. “I can practically hear you thinking from here.”
“What are you making?” The jars gleamed like untried experiments on the counter.
“Jam,” she said. “Green mustang grape jelly. Of course, I’ll have to add a whole lotta sugar to make it sweet.”
“Wouldn’t it be better to pick them when they’re purple?”
“Well, I could wait until they’re ripe,” she said, “but you know, there aren’t any guarantees they’ll last that long.”
“They might,” I argued.
“Sure, but you know, the deer don’t usually wait until they’re perfectly ripe to eat ’em. And the raccoons, and the foxes, and all those other critters. I’d prefer to wait, but I can’t. If I want grape jelly, I got to make it now, before the grapes are gone for good.
“Sometimes,” she said, after a few more seconds of silence, “sometimes you got to act. You can’t wait. You got to do what needs doing, before the world makes the decision for you.”
There was no way she was talking about grapes.
“Has Annie been here?” I asked, wondering if Mrs. Empson knew what we were planning. “Was she here today?”
“Yep.” She nodded and left it at that.
When I’d finished cleaning the grapes, she stopped me with a rough hand on my arm. I flinched; she’d hit one of the worst bruises.
“You know that mountain you fell down?” she asked. “Annie told me what really happened when she came by. Those boys are dangerous.”
“You have no idea.”
“Stay away from ’em, if you can. Stay in the valley, if you’re not going to be at home. It’ll keep you safe.”
I almost laughed. “I think you’re right. I wish I could live there.”
She gave me a measuring look. “You know what? I imagine you could.” She stressed the word you.
“What?” What did she mean?
“When my husband died, I went down in there. I wasn’t . . . myself. The valley kept me fed and warm and dry for as long as I needed. It took me a while to get my head back on straight. More than a few weeks.” She laughed. “I looked like heck, coming back up, my hair full of sticks and leaves. Like a sasquatch, I imagine.”
She’d lived in the valley? “What did you eat?” I asked.
“What the valley provided,” she said slowly, remembering. “Berries, nuts. Wild onions and mushrooms. Fish. Water’s fresh and clean. You know, when I was down there, I kept thinking of the Bible, of the manna and quail in the wilderness. I never got a quail. Too cute to kill, I always thought. But the valley had plenty of food for me. Never did get sick off a bad berry or mushroom. I think the valley hides those from its friends.”
She stopped and gave me a searching look. “But I’m not saying you should live there. Just keep away from them boys.”
“I’d love to,” I said, washing grapes in the giant metal colander in the sink. “But they won’t stay away from me.” I found myself telling her about the day before, how they’d come to the door with a screwdriver, how scared I’d been.
When I looked up, her face was white and pinched. “House robbing? That’s new. Worse. Listen, son, I don’t have much use for those boys’ parents—there’s only one place kids that young learn to be so cruel to helpless things, and that’s from being helpless in the hands of bad grown-ups. But their folks got to know about this.”
“Don’t tell,” I said, feeling a flush of terror. “They’ll come after my sisters or me. Or Annie. You can’t tell.”
“I can’t not tell, boy,” she said slowly, like I might have trouble understanding the words. “Kids like that? If you don’t stop ’em, it gets worse. Sometimes a lot worse.”
“No,” I said, panicked. She didn’t understand. “It will only get worse if you do tell. They’re testing me to see if I can keep my mouth shut.”
“That’s not how it works,” she said. “They’re checking to see if you will keep your mouth shut. Then they’ll do worse and worse stuff. . . . I been watching them all year. They’ve killed most of the cats that used to live around here. People blamed it on the coyotes, but I saw them chasing after one. And now they’re starting to break into places? I live alone out here. I’m afraid—”
“You’re afraid of them?”
She snorted. “No, I’m afraid I’ll have to shoot one of them. I don’t carry my shotgun around for looks, you know.”
She smiled at me, but I didn’t smile back. It was no hope, I could tell. She was going to do what she felt like she had to.
“Don’t say anything today,” I said. “I’ve got to go over to Annie’s camp, and I don’t want them to come looking for me while I’m on my way.”
“Planning to see her off?”
“Off?” What was she talking about?
“Well, her treatment got moved up. Seems the doctors were more worried about her blood work than she let on. That’s why she came here—to say goodbye. Asked me to tell you the same if I saw you. She only had a few minutes to talk. Her momma’s picking her up this afternoon.”
I couldn’t speak. This afternoon?
So there would be no running away, no getting her mom’s attention. No way to change what was going to happen to
her.
The injustice of it all stuck in my throat, choking me. I had finally met a friend, someone who thought my stillness, my quiet, was good, not weird. Someone who understood exactly what it felt like to be ignored when it mattered.
And now she was being taken away from me. Taken away from herself, her life, before she’d had a chance to be the incredible Annie she was obviously meant to be.
“You get on home,” Mrs. Empson said, then opened the door and reached for her flame-painted helmet. “Want a ride? I’ll take you, then get on over to those boys’ folks. There’s gonna be a stop to this, today.”
“No,” I said. “I don’t need a ride.”
She gave me a strange look, but shrugged. “Your call. Just watch out for them boys. I’ll keep an eye and ear out, too. I don’t think for one minute they’re going to take this lying down. But if I know their folks, they won’t be able to sit down for a week, or do much else.”
I had to see her. Whether Doug and Jake caught me or not. I had to at least tell her I understood.
Had to explain that I’d changed my mind. That I would have helped her run away. That I had listened to what she was saying, and understood.
When I got to the camp, all the girls were inside the main barn. I could hear them singing “This Little Light of Mine,” accompanied by some out-of-tune ukuleles or guitars. I had a feeling Annie would be in her bunk.
Two suitcases were stacked on the step of her cabin, teetering there like they were going to lose their balance. I thought about Annie balancing on the rocks near Pretty Pool, leaping from one limestone ledge to another on her way down into the valley next to me. After the treatment, she might not be able to balance. Maybe to walk.
My gut started churning even more. It wasn’t right.
I knocked on the door. After a few seconds, it opened. I almost gasped. Annie had never looked so empty, so lifeless. Like she had already lost that part of her that gave her eyes their spark.