When the water turned cold, I asked Dad to work the taps for more hot water, even though I was turning into a wrinkly prune from so long in the tub.
“I think it’s enough,” Dad said.
“Oh.” I didn’t make a fuss because it’s best not to PUSH IT or grown-ups get cranky and use up all their patience and they don’t even have a lot to start with, more like a pinch.
Dad handed me the biggest white towel and I stepped out of the tub onto the carpet. My feet left behind two wet puddles. On the bedside clock, the red numbers said 8:46.
“It’s very late,” I said. “We didn’t get any dinner.”
Dad rubbed his head. “Yeah.”
“I guess we still have some snacks left over from earlier,” I said.
I sat on the bed in the bath towel. Dad finished the bag of BBQ beef jerky and I ate the pretzels which cut up the top of my mouth with their salt. I licked my fingers and felt the soft prune wrinkles with my tongue.
“Actually this is better than a regular dinner,” I said. “Because this is an adventure BANQUET.”
Dad smiled. We passed our last bottle of water back and forth until it was empty. I only backwashed a tiny little bit, but that was an accident.
Dad lay back against the pillows and put a hand on my back. He turned up the volume on the TV to watch the national news and then the local news and then some other news and then a commercial for something that helps you go to the toilet. The man in the commercial laughed a lot and was very happy when he was no longer BACKED UP. He worked as a builder and his friends were happy too, maybe because he didn’t hog the restroom anymore. Dad read something on his phone and then set it on the table.
Clemesta yawned and I yawned so wide that my whole mouth dislocated out of my skull.
“Let’s get you to bed,” Dad said. “It’s been a long day.”
“Do you have my pajamas?”
Dad looked inside the bag and then pulled out one of my T-shirts.
“You can wear this for tonight.”
“Oh.” The T-shirt wasn’t even one of my favorites and actually it was getting a little tight at the arm parts. “You said you packed everything I needed.”
Dad sighed. “I must have forgotten the pajamas.” He looked sad, probably because he felt silly for being bad at packing.
I slipped the T-shirt over my head. “It’s fine,” I said. “I’m not mad.”
I looked at the bag.
“But are there toys for me? And my books?”
Dad knocked on his head with his fist and made a kind of groaning sound. “Yeah,” he said. “I forgot a bunch of stuff.” He stared at the bag on the bed like it was the bag’s fault for forgetting.
“Oh,” I said. I pulled at the T-shirt so it would cover more of my stomach.
“We’ll pick up anything you need tomorrow,” Dad said.
“Like toys too?”
“Whatever you need.”
“Promise?” I said.
Dad nodded.
“Pinkie promise.” I held up my little finger.
Dad looked at me with his BLANK FACE so I had to show him.
“Shake with your little finger,” I explained. “That’s called a pinkie promise and it’s a very strong and UNBREAKABLE FOREVER promise.”
“Got it,” Dad said. His finger was very big against mine.
I was very, very sleepy and my eyes were already trying to close themselves. I climbed under the covers. The bed was gigantic, like an island made out of a mattress but only for me. Above the bed there was a painting of a man in a field holding a gun. The sky behind him was black and full of clouds. The sheets were pulled tight and felt clean and lovely against me.
Dad lifted the covers of his bed.
“Wait,” I said. “You have to tuck me in first or I won’t fall asleep.”
He came over and held a hand to my cheek. “Haven’t done this in a while, have I?” he said.
“Why haven’t you?”
Dad tucked the covers up around my arms. “I guess…” he said. “Mom always does it.”
“You can do it whenever you want,” I said. “It doesn’t always have to be Mom. I like it better when you do it, actually.”
That wasn’t a white lie, it was true. Sometimes Mom is my favorite and sometimes it’s Dad, but it was definitely Dad now, because he was being the nicest and most fun and Mom had been SILLY and BAD so she didn’t deserve an adventure trip with a sleepover in a Junior Suite with a bathtub in the middle of the floor.
Dad brushed a piece of hair off my forehead. His hand was warm and smelled like the bubbles from the tub. I breathed in the soapy smell and wished he could keep it there all night long so I could fall asleep with him watching over me.
“Dad,” I said. “What if I have the bad dream from last night?” He looked at me and pinched his lips.
“I don’t think you will,” he said.
“How do you know?”
“Because we’re in a different place,” Dad said. “The bad dream won’t follow you. It’s over.”
“Well, it was A STUPID one,” I said. “And my dream catcher is meant to send all the bad ones away.” My dream catcher was a gift from Savannah last year for my birthday when I turned six. She has the same one in her bedroom window but hers is silver and mine is white and blue and probably nicer.
“I bet tonight will be fine,” Dad said. “I bet you’ll have a good sleep.”
“Are you going to bed too?”
“Mm,” he said. “I’m exhausted.”
I watched as he climbed into the bed next to mine and kicked off some of the covers so his feet could hang off the edge.
“Is your bed the same as mine?”
“Exactly the same.”
He sighed and I watched him squeeze his head.
“It’s been a long day,” he said.
“Ditto,” I replied, even though it wasn’t exactly right.
I closed my eyes and stroked Clemesta’s mane. She smelled of bubbles from the tub, too, sweet and flowery, like spun sugar. I remembered that we hadn’t brushed our one hundred strokes of chestnut hair, and I wondered if Dad had packed my hairbrush.
I pulled the covers under my nose.
“Today was the best day,” I whispered to Dad. “Wasn’t it?” The air-conditioning made a pat-pat-pat sound and the refrigerator sighed.
I heard Dad swallow. “Yeah,” he said. “It was a good day.”
Sunday
Clemesta and I snapped our eyes open very early. We were all ready to RISE AND SHINE but Dad was still fast asleep in his next-door bed, spread out like a star with one hand covering his eyes.
Probably he needed extra sleep because in the middle of the night he shot up like a bolt of lightning and cried out. Clemesta and I got woken up and I looked at him in the bed and said “DAD!” very loudly to get him out of his bad dream. He was sticky and shivery at the same time and he looked at me with wild eyes like an animal trapped in the forest who has to chew off its own paw to get away. I saw that once on a nature show I wasn’t meant to be watching. I think it was a coyote.
Anyway, I said “DAD!” again and he looked at me and wiped his face and took some deep breaths. “Sorry,” he said. “Go back to sleep.”
I guess dads need dream catchers too, or maybe my bad dream from the other night followed us to Pennsylvania after all.
I stretched my arms and wiped the crusty crumbles from my eyes. Clemesta did the same. Even with the bad dreams, I liked being in next-door beds with Dad because that’s another thing that never happened before in my life, except maybe when I was a baby and then I wouldn’t remember it anyway. Hello adventure partner, I said to him in my head and to Clemesta I said, “I wonder where Dad is taking us today?”
“I don’t know.” Clemesta frowned. “I wonder where Mom went with Rita.”
“I don’t care,” I said.
There were voices coming from outside and I hopped out of bed to take a look. I tried to open the window but
guess what? It was glued shut. Probably some DUM-DUM did it by mistake, like if he spilled that very strong glue that can stick your fingers together FOREVER if you don’t use it carefully and responsibly. Dad has the glue in the garage but only he’s allowed to touch it and probably I won’t be able to until I am at least eighteen years old.
I made a head-note to show Dad the silly glued-shut windows when he woke up, and also to ask him if we ever slept in next-door beds before, and also if he knows that French people eat frogs’ legs and think they taste delicious.
I went into the bathroom to use the toilet and decided not to flush in case it woke Dad from his fast-asleep sleep. I opened one of the gift-wrapped soaps and washed my hands. Then I opened a little box that had a sewing kit inside, and two white cotton balls, and a very small nail file. I thought Mom would like the nail file, because she is always painting and unpainting and shaping her nails. Her favorite shade is a dark red polish called SCANDALOUS, which is a word that means very naughty and usually secret things.
“Should we be scandalous today?” Mom likes to say, and the answer is always yes.
I pinched the nail file between my fingers and broke it in two. Then I threw it into the trash.
On the bedside table the little black clock said it was 7:11 and that was not yet human time for grown-ups, so the rule is you have to let them keep on sleeping and AMUSE YOURSELF until they are good and ready to wake up. I was feeling thirsty and hungry and probably almost dehydrated, which means you can die soon if you don’t drink water URGENTLY. Miss Ellis told us that our bodies want to drink eight glasses of water every day or they won’t work properly and our brains will shrivel up and stop being smart. I love my brain very much because it is advanced and full up of useful stuff and it is getting smarter all the time. Miss Ellis says there is NO LIMIT to how much you can fit in there and that’s why I try very hard to remember about the water drinking.
I spotted the glasses by the bathtub and filled one with water from the tap.
I gulped everything down and felt the water sinking into my stomach.
Dad was still sleeping. I ran my tongue over my teeth. They felt furry. Doctor Harold would not be pleased that I forgot to brush them last night. He is my dentist and he always tells me about GERRY GERM who likes sweets just as much as kids. He burrows into your teeth making cavities when you don’t brush the sugar away TWICE DAILY PLEASE.
Doctor Harold is always happy to see Mom. Probably because she is so pretty and she always wears short skirts or super skinny jeans so you can see what her figure looks like even without taking off all her clothes. She is very beautiful, with her long yellowy hair that she pulls straight every morning and her skinny-lovely figure with bones sticking out in the proper places and her very green eyes the color of shining emeralds and her lips which sit like a perfect red heart on her face. Sometimes she lets me wear her lipstick and then I look a teeny tiny bit like her, but in my secret heart I know that I will never ever be as pretty as she is.
“At least you have good hair,” Mom says. I think she is disappointed that I came out looking too much like Dad and not enough like her. She always tries to make me more beautiful, like when she plucks my eyebrows with the metal pincher thing so they aren’t one caterpillar line across my face, or when she makes my hair straight with the special hot iron. One day she will take me for a nose repair job to take out the wonky bit but not until I’m sixteen or maybe fifteen. She says that’s when girls should start to change their faces.
I walked over to the bed to look at Dad up close. I wondered how long he would stay asleep. His breath had the MORNING MOUTH smell, which is when your breath is stale from being cooped up in your mouth all night long and needs freshening. I stood looking at Dad’s eyes for a few minutes more, because sometimes if you stare at someone who is sleeping, they will feel your eyes burning them and wake up.
He stayed asleep.
The carpet under my toes was soft and squishy, not like the one at home which is old and scratchy like Pop’s scraggly beard used to feel on my cheek. That carpet is full of stains and in places it is actually coming apart in patches but we can’t buy a new one because of the bills.
I wondered if my Vet Rescue game was still set up on the porch at home or if the wind had blown it over. I bet the lion cub was happy it got born. It was probably spending the morning cuddling its lion mom. Lion moms are very nice. They always look after their cubs and they never do selfish and SPITE-FILLED things.
I clicked the remote.
Dad opened his eyes and I turned the volume down to whisper-loud so he wouldn’t get disturbed.
“You okay?” he said in his sleepy voice.
“I’m watching TV.”
He turned over and pulled the covers up around his ears. I clicked through the channels to get away from all the talking people, and stopped when I found a show about elephants, which are my third-best animals after wolves and then tigers.
Once, when I was playing outside in the yard, a wolf crept up to me and I thought for sure he would want to eat me but instead he whispered in my ear that he was my friend and I should not be afraid of him. He showed me the secret wolf greeting that all wolves and friends of wolves know by heart, which is a sniffing of noses and a tapping of paws and then a nuzzling of ears against each other. He said any time I met another wolf, I should do the greeting and communicate that I am ONE OF THEM and then they will not want to eat me or feel they have to defend themselves. Obviously, I taught it to Clemesta too, and it saved her life one day last year when she went trotting in the woods and came upon a pack of hungry wolves who hadn’t eaten anything all winter. Lifesaving is part of twin best-friend duties so it wasn’t even a big deal.
Clemesta nodded. “Exactly.”
“Of course, my horse.”
She kissed my nose and we watched the show, which was explaining how elephants are MAJESTIC AND MARVELOUS creatures. They have excellent memories and never forget anything, like which other elephants are their friends and where to find food and the place where their loved ones are buried.
“That’s like you,” I said to Clemesta.
She never forgets one single thing. That’s another of her special powers. I have lots of my own, but I do not have an elephant memory because things like to slip out of my head and disappear forever.
Actually sometimes I also push them out or store them in the NOT NOW box in my brain which is where things go if I don’t want to think about them just yet.
Sometimes things also go into my SECRET-SECRET BOX which is a real shoebox that I keep inside a drawer and hidden underneath a pile of my old clothes that Mom keeps meaning to drop off at the thrift store. My secret-secret box is full of actual secrets, which I write down on tiny scraps of paper and then fold ONE MILLION times and then stick back inside the box so that no one will ever find them except for me. It’s a very smart invention but right now I’m not thinking about it and no one can make me.
The show on the elephants finished and I picked up Dad’s phone. He has only one game on there for me and I only get to play it on special occasions when he doesn’t need to make calls or wait for someone to call him. I saw one message on the screen from someone called Bart who wrote that he wanted to make an offer on the Honda and another one from someone called Diego which said TELL ME WHAT YOU NEED. I clicked it by accident. Then the other messages came up and I saw Mom’s name but no new messages from her.
“We could send her a message and say hi,” Clemesta said.
“No, I don’t want to.”
Dad opened his eyes and sat up in the bed. His hair was squashed flat against his scalp in some parts and sticking out like he had an electric shock in others.
“Morning,” he said.
“Morning, Dad,” I replied. I was very glad that he was awake FINALLY.
“You sleep okay?”
“Yes,” I said. “It was a very comfortable bed. Like a cloud or maybe a marshmallow.”
He smiled.
“You had a bad dream,” I told him.
“Did I?”
“Yeah, but then you went asleep again.” I set his phone down. “Are we still going on the adventure today?”
He rubbed his eyes. “Yeah.”
I hopped up on the bed and bounce bounce bounced and Dad laughed at me because I was making crazy faces and when I was all bounced out I flopped down.
Dad patted the bed. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s get dressed.”
“Wait,” I said. “I have to show you my dancing. Watch.”
I did my best ballet hip-hop dance concert and I waited for Dad to clap so I could do a curtsy and an ENCORE BOW.
“Dad!” I said. “Did you like it?” I was out of breath from all the dancing.
“It was great,” Dad said.
“Then clap,” I said. “And yell ENCORE but loudly so I can do more dancing.”
Dad clapped and then he stood up and picked his clothes up off the floor.
“We should probably get some breakfast,” he said. He looked at me standing on the carpet waiting to curtsy.
“You didn’t do it right,” I said. “You never did the encore part.”
“Do you like pancakes?” he said.
I flopped onto the bed.
“Yes,” I said. “Everyone knows they’re my second-best breakfast after French toast.”
Dad clicked on the news channel and watched the TV for a few minutes, then he went into the bathroom to take a shower.
While I waited, I did more of my excellent dancing in front of the big mirror which showed my whole body from my head to my toes. I did a pirouette and the hip-hop CHEST POP that Jordan taught me, and also the CAT DADDY one with the arm, arm, circle arms, circle arms, scoot your hips. I’m very good at all the kinds of dancing and I wish with all my heart that I could do real classes, especially since Mom gets to spend LOTS OF MONEY THAT DOESN’T GROW ON TREES for stuff like hair salon visits and new clothes and Pilates classes and new headshot photo shoots and that thing where she comes home with puffy shiny lips or a very stiff face. She says it’s different because all that stuff is part of her job and it’s not wasting money because it’s an important investment in her career of being a FAMOUS STAR. I wish she had a different job, actually, like Sasha’s mom the lawyer or Trinity’s mom who works at the magazine. Mom calls them both SNOBS and doesn’t talk to them when we run into them at the store or the park. She says she doesn’t like any of the moms at school, probably because they never invite her to their lunch parties. I think they are jealous of her for being the prettiest mom of all the moms and because all the dads look at her with ridiculous KOWABUNGA eyes popping out of their heads any time she walks by and especially at Halloween. She always dresses up as a nurse or a very sexy cat and then she takes me trick-or-treating in the neighborhood and the dads give me candy and they give her all their attention and that makes her very happy like she’s the one with a bag full of treats.
All the Lost Things Page 4