“It’s not so bad,” I say.
The smell of the fried bacon clings to the tablecloth, to the walls. It’s the one meal that Ma likes to keep the windows closed for. She says the smell makes the eating twice as good.
Ma puts a poached egg on my plate. She’s cooked it just how I like it, so the white is set, but the yolk pops and soaks around it.
“Thank you,” I say, trying not to see those hoop earrings, or her hair twisted up beautiful when the day is only just beginning.
Instead I stare at the faded flower pattern in the curtain and wind myself tight into the material, so no one can see my thoughts.
Rita piles her egg between her bread, pressing on it until the yellow runs down the side. Gramps is waiting patiently for Ma to drip his soft bread into the frying fat. His unread book sits open on his lap.
“I’ll be glad to see the back of it,” Ma says. “It’s a strange place.”
“You’ve hardly seen any of it,” I snap at her. Rita looks shocked at my spikiness.
“Don’t be rude to your mother,” Dad says.
I want to say more. I want to say so, so much more. But instead, I spill silent words into the bacon I’m chewing and wash it down with a mouthful of orange juice that tastes too bitter.
We clean the dishes together, Rita and I. I have to keep shaking my wrist into the air to stop my bracelets from dunking in the suds.
“Rob’s teaching me bridge today,” Rita says.
I watch the air to see if it ripples around my mom, but it stays completely still.
“Bridge?” I say. “That’s for old people.”
“Rob says it’s not,” Rita says. “It takes brains and a lot of skill.”
“You’ll be useless, then,” I say.
“I can always rely on you for love, Lo.”
“Do you want more tea, Gramps?” Ma asks.
At first he doesn’t look at her, but when he does, I wonder if somehow he knows. Somehow he can sense another man in our home.
I put down my cloth, pick up my jacket and just leave them all. I can’t stand to be breathing Rob’s breath where it shouldn’t be.
“Lo?” I hear Ma ask, but I close her off with the front door of their van and leave her jangled dirt where I can’t see it.
I know where I’m going, but I pretend to myself that I don’t, as I cross the park and the road. The streets are busier today, but no one notices the girl from the circus walking among them in the trickling rain. No one knows that there’s a line of hurt too deep and painful in my heart and Dean seems to be the only person who can take it away.
The fountain has so many people around it I can barely see its water. I slow down, but none of them are Dean.
The merry-go-round has come alive, the horses running in their endless circle, children kicking their legs against the lifeless bodies. I hold its music to me as I walk away.
I’m on Dean’s street. It’s strange to think that a few days ago I never knew it existed, but now my heart thumps too quick at the sight of it. I slow down, glancing through the windows until I get to the red door. Close up, I see that the paint is peeling and there are weeds peeping between a crack in the steps. Just small ones, but Ma wouldn’t approve. Without thinking, I crouch down and pinch the wiry green in my fingers, and it pulls easily from the earth. I’m left standing with it in my hand, so I throw it onto the pavement, where shoes will hopefully kick it into the road.
There are two doorbells by the front door, and I’m unsure which one to press, so instead I knock on the red wood. There’s silence on the other side, and I wonder whether I should just turn and run. Yet I don’t.
I’m about to knock again when the door opens and Dean is here. He looks surprised and embarrassed and I think I shouldn’t have come. But I needed to see him.
“Laura,” he says, keeping the door almost closed.
“We’re going tomorrow,” I say, as though that’s a reason to be here, uninvited on his doorstep.
“Already?”
“Yes.” I feel the gap between us filling with roads and obstacles and impossibilities. “Can we go for a walk?”
Dean looks over his shoulder. “I’ll just get my coat.” And he walks down the corridor behind him, through the open door at the end.
The wet air of the street is pushing past me, so I step inside, into a hallway that smells stale and still. There’s a small blackboard with a half-smudged message, a piece of blue chalk hanging from a string. On a shelf are two wooden boxes, one with letters lying flat inside. I’d imagined flowers at a table, wallpaper on the walls.
“Dean?”
“I’m ready,” he says, coming out, but I want to see his home, I want to know his life.
“Can you show me?” I ask.
“Show you what?”
“Inside.”
“It’s just a small flat. There’s not much to see.”
“I’ve never been in someone’s house.”
“Never?”
“No.”
Dean hesitates, his hand ready to pull the door shut.
“It’s not exactly a great example,” he says.
I smile up at him. “Please?”
He raises his eyebrows at me. “OK.” And I start to take off my shoes before he can change his mind.
“You can keep them on,” he says.
“I can?”
“Our floor isn’t exactly shiny.”
The door opens into another hallway, a box with no windows and doors leading from it. The kitchen next to us is thin but stuffed full with pans and plates and piles of paper. China is stacked crooked in the washing-up bowl.
“I did warn you,” he says. “Mom and I aren’t the tidiest.”
“You need to get our Rita in here. She’d sort you out.” I imagine her in this kitchen with a door to shut off the world, three cupboards tacked onto the wall in a row.
“Is that your garden?” I point through the window.
“If you can call it that.”
“It’s all concrete.” I don’t want to sound disappointed, but it’s just slabs of gray, with two large pots brimmed with empty earth.
“I reckon your garden is better,” Dean says.
“I haven’t got one.”
“You’ve got all the parks and places where you stop.”
“They’re not mine. I’d like a proper one, with a vegetable patch, so I could grow tomatoes.”
“Fair enough.” He smiles at me.
“Where do you eat your meals?”
“On our laps in here.” The room next to the kitchen has a sofa piled with clothes. A line of shelves reaches floor to ceiling, crammed with books and magazines falling over themselves.
“Is it different than what you expected?” he asks.
“A bit,” I admit. “It’s messier.” And he laughs, but I don’t know how his thoughts even find space, with all this tangled in his mind. “I like the way it feels permanent, though.”
“The mess?”
“Your home.”
I want to see his bedroom, but I don’t ask. Instead, I just stop in the doorway and glance in. His bed is unmade, pushed up against the window looking out on the street. The wall is covered with pictures, some ripped from a sketchbook with pencil lines of trees and roots and leaves, others bigger than us, paintings of skateboards twisting in the sky. They’re brilliant and beautiful.
“Did you do these?” I ask.
“Yes.” He looks proud and embarrassed all twined together.
“Is that what you do at college?”
“No. Engineering.”
“What’s that?”
“Designing engines.”
“So kind of like art?”
He doesn’t look sure. “I suppose.”
“Don’t you like it?”
“It’s what I’ve got to do.” He closes his bedroom door, as if to shut off the conversation. “Ready?”
“Yes.” But even with all the mess twisted everywhere, I don’t want to leav
e. I want to take off my shoes and curl up on the sofa, look out on the concrete garden and imagine what I can grow.
I follow Dean from his flat, and he just takes my hand and leads me from this building of bricks, out into the faltering rain.
We walk in silence and I think I should speak, but I don’t know what to say. The right words settle but then drift and disappear. The street feels different, now that I’ve seen inside a part of it. I feel different, as Dean and I walk down the sour-smelling alleyway and out toward the factory.
Dean helps me onto the blue container, and we jump through our shattered window. Inside, he shakes the raindrops from his hair before he looks at me. I feel the world shift.
“It’s a bit wet for the roof,” he says. And when he smiles, I know it’s too late. I know that somehow this boy has got into my blood and I don’t want to travel away from him.
He holds my hand again, as though it’s the most natural thing in the world. Because maybe it is. Maybe this was always meant to happen. Maybe Rita would say that our souls have known all along that they’d find each other.
We go through the furthest door, the opposite way of the stairs to the roof. The corridor in front of us stretches long and is scattered with broken windows all down one side. When we walk, the shattered glass crunches like tiny bones under our feet.
Through the door at the end and we’re in a small room. Dean climbs onto a big metal shelf sticking strangely from the wall and holds down his arm to help me up. I let him, even though I could easily climb it on my own, and we sit together, our legs hanging down, touching slightly.
Opposite us, empty windows face out over fields. The stillness around feels wrong, as though somehow we’re cheating. I move slightly, my feet tapping gently on the shelves, the sound filling the room.
“What’s your mom like?” I ask.
“She’s good. When I see her. She’s out of the house by four in the morning to get to the bakery.”
“That’s the middle of the night.”
“For most people.”
There’s a sadness in him that makes me scared to take his hand, but I do.
“Do you miss your dad?” I ask.
“There’s nothing to miss,” he says. “I never really knew him.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No need to be,” he says. “You can’t miss what you’ve never had.”
“I think you can.”
We sit in silence, and I wonder if I’ve asked too much, if I’ve opened some hurt too big for me to understand.
“So you’re moving on tomorrow?” Dean eventually says.
“Yes.”
Dean nods, looking at me. We’re silent, our thoughts meeting, and I wonder if they’re the same.
“Shall we go to the river?” He points to the twisting line in the distance that breaks up the fields.
“Now?” I ask this boy I barely know. This boy who shares my secret.
“If you’d like.”
I almost laugh, but I don’t know why. “OK,” I say, and he jumps down and reaches out to help me.
We leave the factory at our backs, the air clean of rain as we walk down new streets with houses held close together. We have to cross a road with so many cars, before we run up a steep bank to see fields on the other side. It’s a different world, green after all the gray and the sound has changed.
“This way,” Dean says.
The grass is damp against my ankles. Above us, two birds fly together, dipping close before they disappear their separate ways. We climb a fence and walk to where the river quietly makes its way through the fields. I want to put my thoughts of Ma and Rob on a raft and watch them drift away.
A heron swoops down on the bank opposite. We stay deadly still and see its head bend toward the damp grass, its beak prod sharply into the soil. There’s only the sound of the water passing us by.
“I’ll show you my favorite bit,” Dean says.
We keep the river on our left, following where it’s been. A bit further on, just before it curves, Dean stands still on the bank and starts to take off his shoes and socks.
“Coming?” he asks.
“Where?” I don’t know how it’s possible to have happy and sad so side by side. How my heart hurts more than it ever has, but I look at this boy and want to laugh into the blue.
“There.” He points to a large rock sitting in the middle of the river. “It’s not too deep to wade across.” He rolls up the bottom of his jeans and steps into the clear water. “Just a bit cold.”
I take off my shoes and socks as I watch him. The bottom of my jeans are damp from the long grass and hard to push up.
I step into the river and the water clamps my ankles in ice.
“Just a bit cold?” I laugh. “What’s a lot cold, then?”
“Colder than this.”
My feet burn and numb, before I reach the rock where he already sits, his legs stretched out in front of him. It’s a small step onto it, but it juts high enough out of the water to keep us dry.
“This is your favorite bit, then?” I stretch my legs next to his, feeling my skin sparkle.
“Yup.”
“It’s a bit like the moon,” I say.
“A very small moon.”
“Maybe we’re just very big.” The gray stone is smooth under my palm. “If you’re a giant, when we move on, it’ll only take a few steps if you want to come and see me.”
“I’ll have to be careful not to squash your tent.”
“It’s too late. Everything’s already been crushed.”
Dean shields his eyes from the sun as he looks at me. “Does it feel that bad?”
“It’s like my family is painted on a piece of material and Ma is ripping us right down the middle.”
“Does anyone go on her side?”
“Rita might. But then I think she’ll never forgive her. I don’t know. I’m scared that everyone will hate my mom if I tell them what I saw,” I say. “But then I’m scared that I’ll have to carry this secret forever.”
“I’m helping carry it.”
“But tomorrow I’ll be gone, and I won’t see you.”
Dean looks at me. “Do you really just move on and go? To the next place?”
“Yes.”
“And that’s it?”
“We leave our footprints.” But my mind crashes and whirls because I don’t just want to leave our footprints here. I want our wheels to stop for a while, for a little bit longer.
“How far do you go? After here?”
“Sometimes the next town, sometimes a bit further.”
“So I could come and see you?”
“But a few days after that we’d move again. And again.” The road will stretch too far between us. “It’s impossible.”
“Nothing’s impossible,” he says.
“Some things are.”
Dean puts his hand into the water, just where it curls around the soft gray of the rock. It’s only the tips of his fingers, but it’s enough to make the river change direction, stumble confused a different way, before it carries on.
“That’s a good color,” Dean says, pointing to my painted toenails. “Proper bird-egg blue.”
“Rita did them,” I say, wiggling them to dry them more.
The numbness in my ankles has almost gone. “I did hers luminous pink.”
“Seems a shame to have them covered up by shoes most of the time.”
“At least I know it’s there,” I say, pointing them straight. “You know, I bet there’s loads of color around us that we can’t see.”
“What, underneath the bark of trees we’ll find bright blue?”
“Maybe not bright, but there’ll be blue.” I look at Dean carefully. “Gramps told me that we only use some of our brain, the rest is a bit of a mystery. I reckon the world is like that too. There’s tons we can’t see. Like when you look into a sunbeam and suddenly there’re millions of specks of dust floating right in front of your eyes, but you never normally kno
w they’re there.” I turn to lie on my stomach. The sound of the river is stronger when I look at it. I dip my fingers in, hold them there in the cold.
“I reckon there are angels everywhere too, but we just can’t see them,” I say.
“Can’t?” Dean says, turning onto his stomach too. “Or we don’t know where to look?”
We lie so close together, there are only fragments of air between us. Dean puts his hands next to mine in the water.
“Let’s leave palm prints,” he says.
“Instead of footprints?”
“Yes. In the water.”
I nod. “Rita would approve.”
And so we press our hands into the river, and I tell it to remember us. To remember me and Dean together. The water takes the untold future in our palms and runs quickly away from us.
The sun dips suddenly behind the only cloud. It’s instantly colder, but it won’t be long before it appears the other side.
“I think my mom’s a coward.” The word tastes sour in my mouth. “If she was unhappy, she should’ve just said. If she wants to leave my dad, she should have the courage to tell us.”
“Maybe she doesn’t want to leave him? Maybe this is just a thing for her.”
“A thing?” Rob and my mom. A thing. A thing that stamps on us and will rip us apart. “It’s disgusting.”
“I’m not saying she has a right to do it,” Dean says hurriedly, as the sun strikes out again. “Just maybe it’s not what you think it is. Maybe it was a one-off, a mistake.”
It didn’t look like that. I saw the way her skin was smiling as she put her shirt back on.
I sit up and wipe the river water on my jeans, smearing the material temporarily dark, before I shuffle forward on the rock and push my feet hard into the water. I need the cold to cut the image away.
“You’ll be OK, Laura,” Dean says.
“Will I?”
I look back over my shoulder at him. His eyes are half shut from the light as he watches me.
“Of course.” I can’t tell if he really means it. “Watch,” he says. “Closely.” His palms are flat down in the cold water. “Are you looking?”
“Yes,” I tell him. He closes his fingers, the skin different under the surface. He opens them, turns them over and a stone sits in the middle of his right hand, snug among the lines of his fortune.
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