Strays Like Us

by Richard Peck

  “Do it or I will.” Aunt Fay’s finger was in Mrs. Pringle’s face. “Where’s the phone?”

  It wasn’t in this room. Tracy wasn’t allowed to have a phone.

  “Who’s your doctor?”

  “I didn’t want to bother – ”

  “Get an ambulance first. This child is seriously burned. Go now.”

  I stood aside when Mrs. Pringle went out the door. Then Aunt Fay said from across the room, “Molly, go downstairs and wait in the living room.”

  I didn’t go. I didn’t want to be that far from Aunt Fay. It was babyish, but I was scared. I didn’t want to sit down there in that big perfect living room by myself. The whole house was too empty. It dawned on me that Tracy didn’t have a dad. It was one thing we had in common, though she’d never mentioned it.

  Mrs. Pringle came out of another room and went back to Tracy’s. Her face was like a mask. I could hear some of what she and Aunt Fay said. It was like listening at the door in a dream.

  “This child’s arm is burned to the shoulder. And the side of her face.” There was a snap in every word Aunt Fay spoke.

  “Will she be disfigured?”

  “That’s the least of your worries. When did this happen?”

  “…This afternoon. We were – ”

  “I don’t think so. You’ve lost a lot of time here. I don’t know what you were thinking about. Did you call your doctor to meet – ”

  “No. It was my decision not to.” Mrs. Pringle’s voice sounded nearly like herself again.

  Then in the distance, the sound of a siren.

  “I told them no siren,” Mrs. Pringle said, her voice rising. “And you’re no help to me. I didn’t know where to turn. You were the only person I could think of. I thought you’d help me.”

  I went downstairs to let in the paramedics when they got there. It seemed an age. But then the siren got louder and louder. I opened the door and pointed them upstairs. Then I stood in the yard because I didn’t want to be in the house.

  They carried Tracy out past me. But I didn’t look at her. I thought she wouldn’t want me to. Aunt Fay came out of the house and walked straight to the Dart. Mrs. Pringle came last, turning back to lock the door.

  We sat in the car while Aunt Fay watched her rearview mirror, flashing blue. We were waiting for the van to pull out of the drive behind us.

  “Are we going to the hospital with them?” I asked her.

  “No. I got the name of their doctor out of her. I’ll tell him she called me in, but I wash my hands of this. He’ll have to deal with the situation as he sees fit.”

  Did she mean Tracy’s burns?

  The van pulled out behind us, and we were there in the dark. “I’m sick to death of secrets,” Aunt Fay said.

  §

  Rocky Roberts swaggered into school Tuesday morning. He wasn’t even late. The crowds parted for him, but that was nothing new. Same old Rocky. He hadn’t grown an inch all year. Will said maybe his grandma Marlene mopping and waxing the floor with him had stunted his growth. But Rocky still knew how to look dangerous. He had a cigarette parked over one ear, and that reminded people of matches. And matches reminded them of fire.

  §

  The story made the Tuesday newspaper, with a picture on the front page of soot on the gym wall:

  MINOR DAMAGE IN MYSTERY FIRE THAT CONSUMED TWO PORTABLE UNITS

  ARSON SUSPECTED

  By Wednesday Nelson Washburn thought student government ought to go in a body to Mr. Russell to find out why Rocky was still walking around free. Nelson campaigned about this in the lunchroom. He even leaned over me to talk it up with Will.

  Until Will said, “Not too close, Washburn. I might bleed on you.”

  The murmuring and muttering went on all week. Finally one of the girls in Brandi Breathwaite’s bunch seemed to recall seeing Rocky on Sunday night, running from tree to tree with a can of gas in his hand. We watched Rocky like a hawk, but do you know something? I don’t think he noticed.

  I watched him with the rest. I hadn’t paid that much attention to him all year because he never looked me in the eye. But now I watched him, though not for the same reason the others did. Did whipping his tail last September build something between us? I don’t think so, but Rocky was a stray like me. He never told his history because nobody ever asked. There was this space around him too.

  Of course Brandi Breathwaite was another stray. Hadn’t she been in the auditorium with us that first day? But she moved in a pack of other girls, so it looked like she’d come from here. By now she probably thought she had. It was funny how I could relate better to rotten old Rocky than to her.

  But then, I knew Rocky hadn’t tried to burn down the school.

  How much did I know that night when I hung at the edge of Tracy’s room? Seemed like I never could just know something – it had to creep up on me. But the sheriff called Aunt Fay down to the courthouse to give a statement about going to the Pringles’ house. And she got the story from him and came home to tell me. It was Tracy who’d set the fires.

  But I had to see it for myself, in my mind. I had to picture Tracy going up to her room that Sunday night. I supposed she had an early bedtime. I saw her in her bed wearing jeans – no, gray-flannel slacks – and a sweater under her nightgown. I tried to be Tracy – staying awake till the house got even quieter and her mother was asleep. Then I felt her throw back the coven, and I watched her carrying her shoes down the carpeted stairs and out the back door that she’d left open a little.

  I saw Tracy dodge in the dark down to the garage, where she’d left a can full of something that would make a fire burn hot. Paint thinner, because their house looked freshly painted. I felt the lump of the matchbook in her pocket.

  Then, stranger still, she disappeared across the town – Tracy, whose mother never let her walk anywhere. But Tracy knew the way, down the hill and along the side streets, not noticing the scent of the lilacs. She’d learned the way to school before she had to go there, just like I’d done last summer. And maybe she moved from tree to tree.

  She went around behind school where nobody would see her from the street. Maybe she thought the portables would burn faster. They did, too fast, so she hurried, panicked by the light. She slopped what was left in the can against the gym wall and touched another match. But this one touched her. I made myself feel that flame hit the paint thinner on her hand and coil like a snake up her sweater. Then she was running, which was just the wrong thing to do. But she was running from the light, running for home and her mother.

  ♦

  Aunt Fay didn’t say I couldn’t tell anybody. But I didn’t say a word, not even to Will. I guess I wasn’t as sick to death of secrets as Aunt Fay was. Maybe it was like that moment when they’d carried Tracy past me on the stretcher and I hadn’t looked at her because I’d thought she wouldn’t want me to.

  If I told, it would just sound like another rumor. Nobody knew Tracy Pringle. It’d be a lot more interesting if it was somebody everybody knew. Rocky, for instance. Besides, I thought it would all come out in the paper. It didn’t, and I asked Aunt Fay why.

  “They’re keeping it quiet,” she said. “The girl’s underage, and her mama’s brought in a lawyer from out of town. They wanted the girl put on the psychiatric ward for observation. But her mama wouldn’t hear of it. If you ask me, it’s her who’s a psycho. Letting that child lie in bed with those burns, just to keep the world from knowing.”

  Or for fear the world would take Tracy away from her.

  “They’re going to let her go home.”

  Back where she started.

  “Do you have any idea why she’d try to burn down the school?” Aunt Fay said, watching me. “She didn’t even go there.”

  I didn’t know why, but I was the only one who knew Tracy. I had to try to understand.

  I decided she’d wanted to burn down the school because she didn’t go there. All the rest of us were there every day. But she only dressed in the kind of school clot
hes nobody really wore and went to school at the dining-room table with her mother. She was the one with the most space around her of us all, and she wasn’t even a stray.

  I guess the loneliness crept up on her. She thought we all had each other. She thought school was a party, with boys. Maybe she even envied me. Then one day she was fourteen years old, and everybody else had someplace to be. And she wanted to burn it down.

  Or maybe she just wanted to do something so terrible, they’d take her a long way away from her mother, farther from her mother than I was from mine.

  “I don’t know why,” I said to Aunt Fay, because you can’t really see inside somebody else’s heart, even in a town like this where sooner or later every secret comes to light.

  Knowing that Tracy set the fires was a lot to keep from telling. I made a deal with myself to tell Will later, when we were older. Eighth grade, maybe. Or the year after that, high school. That was looking ahead, and I wasn’t used to looking ahead. But I was beginning to.

  ∨ Strays Like Us ∧

  Fourteen

  The letter came during the last week of the semester. It was already too summery for school, but the end was in sight. I came home one afternoon, and Aunt Fay was at the kitchen table. She never just sat, so she was waiting for me, and the letter was in her hand. I couldn’t read her face, but I read the envelope. It was from the Division of Family and Youth Services.

  It slowed me down. I worked my way over to the other chair, and she nodded me into it.

  “You remember that woman who brought you here?”

  The social worker. Yes, I remembered. I felt the floor shift under me like the year was beginning to come full circle, and we’d be back where we began, or somewhere farther back than that.

  “This letter’s from the office that sent her. Do you want to read it?” She turned the letter on the table. It was two pages.

  “Tell me,” I said.

  “It’s about your mother. About Debbie.”

  “Is she dead?”

  The question came from some deep place. I didn’t see it coming.

  “Oh, Molly, no. She’s not dead.” Aunt Fay smacked the table with the flat of her hand. “What’s wrong with me? Why didn’t I know you might think that?”

  “It’s all right,” I said. “Just tell me.”

  “They got her for selling dope. ‘Controlled substance’, they call it. They’ve got her in a lockup.”

  I didn’t ask where. I just saw her in a cell someplace, and I thought she was as safe there as Debbie could be. I saw her in a cell, but I couldn’t remember her face.

  “She’s fighting it,” Aunt Fay said.

  I saw Debbie reach up and grab hold of the bars on the windows, trying to shake them loose.

  “She says she can’t be sentenced and put away because she’s a mother. Because of you.”

  Did she want me back to keep her out of jail? Is that all she wanted me for?

  “Could I keep her out of jail?”

  “Not in a million years. But she’s playing games with the system. She’s got to waive her rights to you when she’s sentenced, and she says she won’t do it. Don’t that sound like her? Making trouble to keep from taking her medicine?”

  Maybe it sounded like her. Had I let myself forget too much about her?

  “They’ll declare her an unfit mother, and she’ll serve her time. And that’ll be that.” Aunt Fay’s voice trailed off.

  “But what?” I said, studying her.

  “But it’s brought your name up on the computer or whatever. They should have been checking on you right along. Your well-being. They ought to have been sending a caseworker down regular.”

  “Why didn’t they?”

  “Because they’re the government,” she said. “But now somebody’s going to come down and look us over.”

  “Soon?”

  “One of these days. They’re going to set up an appointment.” She’d pushed back from the chair and propped her ankle on her knee. She was thinking, but I didn’t know what.

  “Could they take me away and put me in foster care?”

  “Over my dead body!” But she clamped a hand over her mouth at the thought. “It’s given me an idea, though.” She tapped the letter with that finger she pointed at people. “It’s given me the push I need.”

  I could read her mind now, a little. She was up to something. “Tonight me and you are going up the hill and pay a call on Edith Voorhees. I’ll phone ahead so she’ll be sure to be in bed.”

  That didn’t sound like anything new, but then she said, “Wear your worst clothes.”

  Did I hear that right?

  “That sweatshirt that ran in the wash? Wear that. You can wear them jeans you’ve got on. Your knees are coming through.”

  “That’s the way they wear them at school.”

  “But Edith won’t know it.”

  Then Aunt Fay winked at me. I’d never seen her do that. I thought she had something in her eye.

  We sat with the summer afternoon sliding in across the kitchen table, and I had a peculiar thought. Would I look back on this moment as the last of something, or the start? It was one of those thoughts that’s here and gone again.

  I looked down and pointed. “You’ve lost your ankle bracelet.”

  “No, I took it off.” She pursed up her lips like it didn’t matter. “Moberly give it to me before we were married. You know, when men give you presents. I said I’d never take it off, and I never did while he was alive. But it was beginning to cut off the circulation in my foot. Gold shrinks, you know.”

  “Aunt Fay, gold don’t shrink.”

  “Gold doesn’t shrink,” she said. “Watch your grammar.”

  §

  There was still some purple in the sky when we drove up the hill to Park Place and swung into Mrs. Voorhees’s drive. I expected Aunt Fay to heave herself out of the Dart and tramp up to the front door as usual. But I noticed she hadn’t brought her black nurse’s bag. It was such a part of her, I never noticed until it wasn’t there. She sat a minute, thumping the steering wheel with her knuckles.

  Finally she said, “Well, here goes nothing.”

  She elbowed the door open, and we went on in and up the curving stairs and into Mrs. Voorhees’s room.

  She was sitting on top of her bed in one of the long dresses she called ‘hostess gowns’. Shoes too. Little gold sandals with their high heels digging into the bedspread. She was all painted up and glittering.

  “Where’s your bag?” she said sharpish to Aunt Fay. “I need – ”

  “This is a social call,” Aunt Fay said, “and you don’t need a thing.”

  Only a small spark arced between them, so I thought they were back to normal, sassing each other. Mrs. Voorhees’s eyes skated over me.

  Then Aunt Fay did something she’d never done before. She sat down on the bed, right beside Mrs. Voorhees’s knees.

  “Well, make yourself at home,” Mrs. Voorhees said. “Fay, what’s come over you this time?”

  “I’ll get right to the point, Edith. I know how you like to have everything out in the open.”

  “Well, I – ”

  “I’ve had a letter today.” Aunt Fay reached down into the front of her top and pulled out the envelope. “Here.” She held it out. “You better read it for yourself.”

  “Well, I – ”

  “Oh, I forgot,” Aunt Fay said. “You’re blind as a bat without your glasses.”

  Mrs. Voorhees bristled.

  “It’s from the Division of Family and Youth Services.”

  I stood beside the bed, watching something happen.

  “As you can imagine, it’s about Molly. And her mother.”

  Mrs. Voorhees pulled back against the pillows.

  “What does it say?” she said in no more than a whisper.

  “Do you want to hear it all?” Aunt Fay flipped the flap on the envelope.

  “Just sum it up.”

  “They’ve got Debbie on a drug charge.
She’s going up for a long stretch on this one. But then she was dealing drugs when she was in high school, wasn’t she? Way back then.”

  “I don’t know,” Mrs. Voorhees whispered. She looked away from both of us. You could only see the tight curls on the back of her head, flattened by the pillow. She’d been to the beauty parlor today. “Why do I have to hear this?” she said.

  “For one thing,” Aunt Fay said, “I don’t know but what they’re going to take Molly away from me. They’re sending somebody down here from the state.”

  I opened my mouth, but she looked up at me, and I closed it again.

  Mrs. Voorhees’s little red-tipped hands were clamped in her lap. “I don’t know why they’d do a thing like that,” she said, still looking away.

  “I can give you three reasons, Edith. I’m about half lame. My house is coming down around my ears. And I’m not blood kin to her.”

  Mrs. Voorhees unclenched her hands and put one up, like she wanted to push Aunt Fay away.

  “You wouldn’t let them take her. You’d run them off the place with a shotgun,” she said, still talking to the far side of the room. “You and that girl have got too thick to stir. Why are you telling me all this? You know I’m not a well woman. What’s this about, Fay?”

  “It’s about time, Edith.”

  I looked across the room and saw us, dim, in the mirrors on the closet doors. The three of us – me in my sweatshirt that had run in the wash, between these two old ladies.

  Then Aunt Fay spoke in a voice she’d never used. “I’ll be everything to this girl I can be for as long as they let me. But she’s got more coming to her, for all she never had.”

  “If it’s money – ”

  “It’s not money, Edith. Money won’t buy it.”

  Mrs. Voorhees’s hand came up to her shoulder to touch the sunburst pin, which might have been diamonds.

  Aunt Fay put out her hand to me, and maybe Mrs. Voorhees saw in the mirrors across the room. I’d never held Aunt Fay’s hand, and she didn’t touch you for nothing.

  “Do you want Molly and me to go now?”

  “What for?” Mrs. Voorhees said, aside. “You just got here. What are you saving, Fay? That you won’t be back?”