“So do I,” said Mom. “All of us would like to do that.”
Dad was gazing down at the orange carpet, and he looked pretty miserable. Then Mom touched his arm and smiled at him. “I think it’s time for George to go to sleep now.”
That night, my parents argued. Their voices came through the skinny wall of the motel room, loud enough to wake me up. The first words I heard sounded a little crazy. It was Dad talking.
“So you’re siding with the monkey?”
“Oh, don’t be silly,” said Mom.
“Well, really.”
“I’m just saying I can’t go on like this.”
Dad was angry. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I don’t know,” said Mom. “But I’m wearing out. I’ve—”
“Shhhh!” said Dad. “You’ll wake them up.”
Mom started whispering. Dad whispered back, and I couldn’t make out another word of what they were saying, even when I pressed my ear right against the wall. I had heard Mom complaining before about how hard it was to keep moving from place to place, about never having a real home. But this time felt different.
When I tried to go back to sleep, I couldn’t. I lay on the hard bed, watching city lights shimmer on the curtains, and knew I’d still be watching them when the sun came up. I was used to that, all right. But it was a whole new fear that kept me awake in the orange room, something I’d never even thought about.
What if my parents broke up?
I worried about it so much that I talked to my mom the first chance I got, as we sat in the car at a gas station. Dad was working the pump. Bumble was “helping” him, gripping the hose in her tiny hands.
“Mom, are you going to leave us?”
She turned around, puzzled. “Leave you where?”
“You know. Are you going away on your own?”
She looked shocked. “No. Of course not,” she said. “Why would you ask me that?”
“I heard you talking to Dad. You were fighting.”
“We weren’t fighting,” she said. “Sometimes I get tired of living this way, and I guess I take it out on your father. But wherever we go, we go together. I promise.”
She reached into the backseat and touched my arm. “It’s going to get better,” she said. “I believe that.”
“Well, it can’t get any worse,” I told her.
DEAD END
It usually took the Protectors only a couple of weeks to find us a place to live. But January came and went, and we were still traveling east. We had gone nearly all the way across the country when we suddenly turned around and headed west again. On the first day of February, we holed up in a dark motel called the Buena Vista. That means “good view,” but all we could see was a snow-covered parking lot.
I didn’t know why Mom seemed unusually nervous that night. She checked twice to make sure the door was properly locked. Every noise from outside made her look up and ask, “What was that?” Once it was a dog going by, panting on its leash. Another time, it was an ambulance wailing in the distance.
“Honey, calm down,” Dad told her, which was pretty funny in a way. He’d always been the one listening for noises, always wondering who was outside.
The very next evening, he gave Bumble the talk.
She sat beside Mom on a sofa made of fake leather, her little legs sticking straight out in front of her. Dad paced back and forth. “In a few months you’ll turn five,” he said. “We think it’s time you learned a few things.”
He had used those same words in the house that smelled of cats, on the day when I had got the talk. But years had passed since then, and Dad looked a hundred years older. He had gray in his hair, deep lines on his forehead, and wrinkles around his mouth.
“A long time ago, before you were born,” he told Bumble, “I went to the police about something I’d seen.”
I felt sorry for poor little Bumble. Half smiling, she looked up at Dad with no idea what was coming next.
“I don’t regret it,” said Dad. “That was the right thing to do. But there was a very bad man who got angry. He said he would find me and get even. So that’s why we keep moving, so the bad man won’t catch us.”
Bumble’s face suddenly crinkled with worry. She clutched her grumpy and leaned against Mom.
“You’ll know who he is if you see him,” said Dad. “He has a lizard on his skin.”
When I got the talk, that had been the moment when my life had changed forever. Not once ever since had I gone to sleep at night without first getting down on my knees to look under my bed. Dad had frightened me so badly that I wanted to yell at him now to shut up before he did the same thing to Bumble. But I only sat there and listened, just as I’d done as a little boy.
“We want you to watch for that man,” said Dad. “But we don’t want you to be afraid of him.”
“What?” I couldn’t believe I’d heard him right. But Dad ignored me.
“That man’s not going to hurt you,” he told Bumble. “Don’t worry about that. But if you see him, you have to tell me right away. You can tell your mom, or tell your brother, whoever’s closest. But don’t tell anyone else. Understand?”
Bumble nodded.
“We’ll make it a game,” said Dad. “Like I Spy. I spy with my little eye a man with a lizard on his skin.”
That made Bumble giggle. It made me angry, everything I’d feared suddenly turned into a joke.
Bumble didn’t seem at all upset when the talk was over. She hopped down from the sofa and turned on the TV. Dad looked pleased with himself. He said, “I think that went well.”
Mom nodded but didn’t say anything.
There was a sitcom on TV, fake laughter coming quietly from the speakers. I said, “So we don’t have to be afraid of the Lizard Man anymore?”
“Of course we do,” said Dad. “Weren’t you even listening? Nothing’s changed.”
“But you told Bumble he’s not going to hurt her. You said—”
“We don’t want to scare her,” said Mom. “We want her to be careful, not terrified.”
I wished they had thought of that when I got the talk. It made me jealous of Bumble.
“The danger’s real,” said Dad, keeping his voice very low. “Don’t think that monster’s not still after us.”
I had a bad dream that night. I was running from a man who would not stop chasing me. He leapt over hedges, over fences, bounding along through the dark.
Mom heard me screaming. She came to see what was wrong and found me tangled in my blankets, covered in sweat. She sat down beside me and held me until I woke.
“It’s okay. It’s okay,” she kept saying. “We’re safe.”
But she didn’t act as though we were safe. There was something about that place that made Mom a nervous wreck. When Dad went out alone each morning to take care of the business of starting over, she wedged a chair under the doorknob. Every night, she asked Dad: “When are we getting out of here?”
I wasn’t allowed to leave the room alone. But I could understand that. I had such a lousy sense of direction I might not have found my way back. So I stayed in the room with Mom and Bumble and did hours of schoolwork. I watched TV with Bumble, or just enjoyed the buena vista through the slits of the venetian blinds, watching cars come and go in the parking lot.
We had been trapped in that room for nearly two weeks when Dad came back to the motel at noon one day. He used our secret knock to let us know it was him: three quick taps, a pause, and then three more. Mom got up to let him in. When she opened the door he was standing there with a silver chain dangling from his fingers. On the end of it hung a key.
“Anyone want to go see our new house?” he asked.
Bumble bounced on the bed, shrieking happily. “What color is it, Dad?”
He shrugged. “I guess we’ll have to wait and see.” It was a tradition that we always went together to a new place.
“I hope it’s yellow!” shouted Bumble. She had always hoped for a yellow house and had always bee
n disappointed.
“I hope it has a swimming pool,” I said.
“I hope it’s safe,” said Mom.
I put on my new snow boots, Mom put on a coat, and all of us stuffed Bumble into her pink snowsuit as she giggled and squirmed. Then off we went to see our house.
It was a cold day with fresh snow that sparkled in the sunlight. Strapped in her car seat, Bumble wore enormous green sunglasses that made her look like a giant bug. In five minutes she was fast asleep. In another five so was I, and both of us missed the ride across the city. I woke as the car went over a bump on a concrete bridge and my head smacked against the window.
There was a river below me, though not very wide. Even my mom could have skipped a stone across it, and she was even worse than me at skipping stones. Nearly frozen right over, it had one channel of dark water flowing down the middle like a blood vein.
“Where are we?” I asked.
Nobody answered. I felt like Rip Van Winkle, suddenly awake in a world where everything had changed. Mom was so upset that I could feel it, and Dad held the steering wheel in a death grip as he stared grimly through the windshield. I wondered what had happened to make them angry at each other.
The car rumbled over the concrete bridge. We passed a riverside park where trees glistened like silver ornaments. Then Dad slowed the car and turned right. “I guess this is our street,” he said.
On the corner was a yellow sign: DEAD END ROAD. I said, “Wouldn’t it be funny if that was the name of the street?”
To our left were town houses, one after the other, as square and plain as the buildings on a Monopoly board. To our right was the park, a strip of bushes and trees along the riverbank. With everything frosty and bright, it looked beautiful, but Mom stared straight ahead as Dad drove slowly along.
This was the only part about bugging out that I actually enjoyed. I loved driving down a strange street to see a new house. It was always a bit exciting, a bit scary, a bit sad somehow. Usually, we would babble away, everybody talking at the same time, making guesses about what we would find. This time, the car stayed chillingly silent.
“What’s the address?” I asked.
“Thirty-eight,” said Dad.
The end of the street was already in sight. Three tall apartment buildings lined a cul-de-sac, and it looked like we were going to be living in one of them. That was a big disappointment. I didn’t want to be sealed in a place with a balcony for a backyard. Apartments were prisons.
Mom felt the same way. In an icy voice she said, “I was hoping to live in a nice little house.”
“Just wait,” snapped Dad.
I couldn’t imagine why he thought he might find a house on that street. But as we passed a tangle of bushes and trees at the end of the park, one suddenly appeared. It was a big old yellow house squashed between the park and the first towering apartment building. There were no footprints on its snowy lawn, no tire tracks in the driveway. It was like a little fairy-tale castle created by magic just for us.
“And here we are,” said Dad as he pulled into the driveway. “What do you think?”
I loved it. Right away it was my favorite of all the houses I could remember. There was no swimming pool, but I wasn’t surprised. Instead, we had the park beside us, and a river in our backyard, and on the far side of the river, a forest so thick and dark that I could imagine it full of wild animals.
Dad called over his shoulder. “Do you like it, Bumblebee?”
I nudged her. Like always, she went in an instant from sound asleep to wide awake. She turned to the window, grinned, and shouted, “It is yellow! It’s like a giant dollhouse.”
Only Mom wasn’t happy. She sat with her arms crossed, as stiff as a corpse.
“Don’t you like it, Mom?” I asked.
“It’s asking for trouble,” she said.
“Why?”
“Ask your father.”
I didn’t waste my breath. “Well, I’m going to go see it,” I said. “Come on, Bumble.”
“No!” shouted Mom, swiveling around in her seat.
I had the door open, my foot stuck out in the cold. “What’s wrong?” I asked.
“I don’t want you going down to that river,” she said. “Not by yourselves. Not ever.”
So that was the problem. Mom was afraid of the river.
“Mom, it’s not dangerous,” I told her. “It’s just a little river.”
“That doesn’t matter.” She glared at me, and then at Bumble. “You promise me right now—both of you—that you’ll never walk out on the ice.”
“All right,” I said. “No problem.”
Bumble smiled. “No problem.”
“Well, okay then,” said Dad, like everything was suddenly just fine. “Let’s all have a look inside.”
The house was so old that it had a mail slot in the front door. Bumble pried it open and peered inside as Dad worked the lock. Then he turned the key and we burst into that house like home invaders. I raced upstairs and claimed the corner bedroom at the back, with a window looking over the river and another looking over the park. If we were still in the house when the snow melted, I would be able to climb out onto the roof of a small back porch. It was slanted, covered with a tangled mat of ivy vines, but I didn’t mind. I could see myself sitting there in summer sunshine, watching the river go by.
Bumble got the room next to mine, and Mom and Dad were way down the hall at the front of the house.
That same day, we checked out of the motel and settled in at our new place. After spending weeks in little motel rooms we felt like we’d come to a mansion. I thought it was great until I went up to bed on the first night. The stairs creaked under my feet; the hallway yawned darkly in front of me; cold air blasted from my room when I opened the door.
Just then, I didn’t feel at home at all. My room was furnished like a jail cell, with a narrow bed under the window, a small dresser, and one empty shelf. I sat cross-legged on my bed, opened a crack in the curtains, and looked out toward the river. On my left, the huge wall of the apartment building next door towered over the house. Some of the windows were lit up, and others were dark, and they made an enormous, glowing checkerboard on the snowy lawn in front of me. Everything else was utterly black. There was not a single light on the other side of the river.
My fear of the Lizard Man rushed over me as strong as ever. Was he out there, hidden by shadows, watching the house?
I got up and turned out the lights. And then, in complete darkness, I went back and looked again. Moonlight glimmered on the river, reflecting off the ice and that vein of black water.
I told myself it was impossible that the Lizard Man was there. He had never found us on the first day. Twice my father had heard him prowling around a new house in the first week. And in the first month…Well, that had happened more times than I wanted to think about.
All night I stared out through the window. I didn’t sleep until dawn.
BECOMING THE WATSONS
We settled in to start over again. Like always, we got new names to begin our new lives. Dad became Michael Watson; Mom became Sophie. My sister got the name Willow, though it made no difference. She would always be Bumble to us. I was tired of being given new names, like a dog being passed from owner to owner, so I asked to choose my own for once. Dad automatically said no, but after thinking about it for a while he said, “Oh, why not.”
I had spent years waiting for that moment. I had gone through a million choices and picked out the one name I thought was perfect.
“No,” said Dad when I told him.
“Why not? It’s cool.”
“No, it is not ‘cool,’” he said. “It’s stupid. People will laugh at you.”
“But you said—”
“Oh, all right!” He did a flapping thing with his hands, like he was trying to fling them off the ends of his arms. “Call yourself whatever you want; I don’t care.”
So I became Igor.
But Dad wasn’t finished with me. �
��At least pick a middle name,” he said.
“I already did. It’s—”
“A normal middle name. So you have something to fall back on when you come to your senses.”
On that day my past was erased yet again. Everything I’d known and everything I’d done was left behind like an old scrapbook tossed in the garbage. I began life all over as Igor Andrew Watson.
But that was just the beginning. Every time we changed lives we changed cars. For as long as I could remember we had driven around in brown hatchbacks and gray sedans that nobody would ever notice. This time, Dad came home in a bright green minivan. Out in the driveway, it looked like a giant jelly bean. I wondered if the Protectors had let Dad choose his own car like I had chosen my name. Maybe he figured six seats would make bugging out more comfortable. But one of Mom’s weird superstitions said green cars were unlucky, and she told Dad to “take that thing back right now.”
“I can’t,” said Dad. “It’s all settled.”
Mom said the same thing about the car that she’d said about the house. “This is asking for trouble.”
The only one who liked that minivan was Bumble. “Can we go for a drive?” she asked.
“That’s a great idea,” said Dad.
“Now?” cried Mom. “It’s almost dark.”
“What are you talking about?” said Dad. “It’s a beautiful afternoon.”
Sometimes they couldn’t agree on anything, but this time both of them were right. Outside, everything seemed cold and gloomy—until the moment we pulled out of the driveway and passed from the shadows of the apartment buildings into dazzling sunlight. It didn’t seem too bright in the back because the windows were heavily tinted. But Dad, in the front, turned his head like he’d been struck by a death ray. He lowered his visor to shield himself, and I saw all his slips of paper carefully clipped in place, his emergency phone numbers, his checklists. He moved them from car to car, always ready for the Lizard Man to put us on the run again.
We drove up Dead End Road, past the town houses, to the busy street with the concrete bridge. But instead of turning left and crossing the river, Dad turned right.
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