Children of Exile (16 page)

It wasn't there.

I heard a creak at the back of the house. I heard heavy footsteps.

Just be quiet,
I told myself.
Maybe he didn't hear the door. Maybe he's just getting up to go to the privy.

The footsteps were coming toward me.

Don't worry. It's not like he's going to see me. Just—get out of the way.

I inched off to the side, trying to feel my way back to my own room.

“Girl!” the father hissed. “I can hear that that's you! What are you doing? Why did you just open the front door?”

I had to
think fast.

I had to think like Edwy.

“I—I thought I heard something outside,” I said. “I just wanted to see—”

The father was by my side in a flash. For a second I wondered how he had navigated past the kitchen table and chairs so quickly in the dark. Then I remembered that the house was always dark for him.

“What did you hear?” he asked, his voice a stressed-out rumble.

“Maybe someone running?” I said, trying to sound doubtful in an ordinary way, not an “I'm totally lying to you” way.

But maybe there would be someone running near our house, right outside. Maybe I did have to worry about that.

The father jerked me out of the way and pressed his ear against the door.

“Shh. Let me listen. . . .” He kept his ear there for a long
time before he finally pulled away. “Are you
sure
you heard someone running outside?”

“No,” I said. “Maybe I just dreamed it, and then when I woke up I got all confused and thought the sound was real. . . .”

Either of my Fred-parents would have patted my shoulder and nodded sagely at that explanation and said something like
Oh, yes, sometimes it is difficult to distinguish between dreams and reality when you first wake up. It's good you realize now that that was only a dream. See? Nothing to worry about.

But the father clutched my arm and kept . . . well, I would have said that he kept staring at me, but it was more like even without being able to see me, he was making sure I kept my gaze fastened on him.

It was like he could tell somehow that I was still straining to listen to whatever was going on outside. I was still listening for running feet, for the men who'd been chasing Edwy and me.

“If that ever happens again—if you ever hear anything suspicious outside,” he began, speaking in a low, urgent voice, as if we were in the middle of a crisis, “whatever you do, do
not
open the front door. Don't even look out the front window. And if you hear people outside running or . . . screaming or . . . sounding afraid, get your mother and Bobo and me—or whoever's here in the house. Don't look for us
outside. Let's hope we're all here when it happens. Because then you come over here, as quick as you can, . . .”

He walked me over to the chair he usually sat in. In the darkness, I bumped against it.

“And you bend down, and you pull away the rug, and
this
is where we hide,” he said. “All together.”

He pulled me down toward the floor in front of the chair and shoved the rug away, just as he'd described. And then he was holding my hand against a board, which he lifted and slid to the side. I couldn't see, of course, but he made me reach down into the cold, dark gaping hole beneath the floor.

It felt like a tomb.

“You pull the board back over the top of you,” he said. “There's a little nail you loop the rug over so it will lie flat when everything's back in place. . . . Can you feel it?”

He took my hand and rubbed my fingers against the board. I did feel the nail.

“Okay,” I gasped. “Okay. But why . . . what . . . ? When do you think we'd ever need this?”

“We didn't have it the last time,” he said. He was still right beside me; his hand still hovered over mine. But somehow he sounded far, far away. “If only we had . . .”

I waited. He didn't go on.

“What happened?” I whispered. “The ‘last time'? What are you talking about?”

I thought of his one empty shirtsleeve, his sightless eyes, the way the mother's face seemed frozen in pain. I thought about the men meeting out in the shack in the wasteland, the way they said they would have succeeded “the last time” if it hadn't been for the Freds.

I thought about how there weren't any kids older than me and Edwy, and how the Freds had kept us and all the younger kids away from here for the past twelve years.

Were all those things connected?

Were they the reason the father thought we needed a hidden tomb beneath our house?

The father ran his one hand over his face. Maybe he was wiping away tears. It was too hard to tell in the dark.

“Never mind,” the father said. “You don't need to hear about the last time. Just—be ready. Remember.”

He shoved the board back in place, straightened the rug over top of it.

“Go back to bed,” he ordered. “Before you wake up everyone.”

“All right,” I said.

I crept past him and back into the room I shared with Bobo. I slid under the blanket and shoved my piled-up clothes—my decoy Rosi—out of the way.

And then I lay there, thinking about the wasteland of burned-down houses Edwy had shown me, about the
likelihood that Edwy could have given himself away trying to cover my escape, about the fact that the father thought something so awful was going to happen to us as a family that the best thing we could do was bury ourselves under the floor like so many corpses.

What if we hid down there and there was a fire?
I wondered.
What if the father doesn't even know about all of the burned-down houses, so he hasn't thought of that danger?

I told myself to think about happy things instead.

I had escaped. The men chasing us hadn't caught me, and the father never guessed that I'd been outside.

And Edwy had been kind to me.

Dangerously kind.

I was so slow
and sluggish in the morning.

I think the father could tell that as soon as I stumbled out of my room. He was sitting at the kitchen table, and he immediately turned his head in my direction and scowled. He took a long drink from a mug, then thumped it down on the table.

“The girl should stay here today and help you clean house,” he growled to the mother, who was standing at the stove, frying something in a pan. “I don't need her downtown.”

I felt as though he had slapped me now too.

But then he inclined his head ever so slightly toward the rug on the floor in front of his usual chair, and I wondered if I'd misunderstood.

Was he trying to tell me that the bad things he feared might happen today? Was he saying he wanted me to stay home so I could hide under the floor with Bobo and the mother if we had to?

What would happen to him off in the marketplace, by himself?

“Oh, uh . . . ,” I began.

Bobo, who'd been standing on a chair by the stove, came running over and wrapped his arms around my legs.

“Rosi can play with me all day!” he exclaimed happily.

“I think we'll need to work some too,” I said weakly. My brain kept jumping around, lighting on topics I couldn't bring up in front of Bobo. Like the hole under the floor. And Edwy. How could I make sure Edwy had gotten home safely last night if I was stuck in the house with the mother and Bobo all day?

I realized what I could say.

“Wait—isn't it Monday?” I asked. “Don't we have school?”

The mother stayed bent over the frying pan, but her back stiffened. The father clenched his teeth.

“There's no school this week,” the mother said, finally turning around. “It's still . . . holiday.”

“Hurray!” Bobo said, jumping up and down. “I hope holiday lasts forever!”

“But school is . . . ,” I began. I could have gone on with one of the Freds' principles about the importance of education. But those probably would have made the mother and the father angry all over again. And I couldn't say what I was really thinking:
School is the best way to check on the other
kids, to make sure they're all okay. Especially Edwy.

“School is
not
my favorite thing!” Bobo finished for me. “Except for recess. And lunch. And the games . . .”

I forced out a laugh that sounded too high and fake, even to my own ears.

“Bobo, you love everything about school except when you have to sit still,” I told him.

“Yeah, but that's
awful
!” Bobo said. “The worst thing ever!”

The mother stood frozen by the stove, the frying pan still clutched in her hand. The father's jawline was clenched like rock. I didn't know why mentioning school had set them off. But it was like they were in a totally different world from Bobo, who was still bouncing up and down in his own little happy bubble, where he could play all day and the worst thing he could possibly imagine was having to sit still for five minutes.

I was caught between the two, the parents' world and Bobo's. I had to keep Bobo protected and safe and innocent and in his little happy bubble. I was the only one who could do that.

The mother slid fried eggs onto a plate.

“Come on, Bobo,” she called. “Your breakfast is ready.”

“Oh, goody!” he cried, letting go of me and racing back toward the table.

The father let out a sigh and scraped back his chair. He left an empty plate behind.

“And I'm off to work,” he said heavily.

He picked up the bag of apples he'd carried home the day before and headed for the door. As he brushed past me, I wanted to say,
Don't worry. I'll make sure Bobo and the mother get into the hole if anything bad happens.
I wanted to say,
If anything bad happens at the marketplace, make sure you stay safe too.

But I didn't say anything. I just watched him go.

After he pulled the door shut behind him, the mother said sharply to me, “Make yourself some breakfast, Rosi. There's eggs you can have, too. Surely you know how to fix them yourself.”

I did know how to fry eggs using the stove at my Fred-parents' house back in Fredtown. But I had seen actual flames under the mother's cast-iron pan, and I wasn't used to that. Flames made me think of the ash and burned houses from the night before, which made me think of Edwy, which made me worry all over again.

“That's okay,” I told the mother. “I think I'll just eat the sandwich you made for me yesterday.”

She pursed her lips in a sour way, as if I'd been trying to annoy her by refusing to cook my own eggs. Or by having failed to eat the sandwich yesterday.

I unwrapped it from the cloth that was still sitting on the counter. I sat down beside Bobo and took a bite. The bread was dry and hard, and the layer of butter in the middle seemed slimy and rancid. I had to force myself to chew and swallow.

Who cares about food when all of us may be in danger?
I thought.
When I don't even know what I need to protect Bobo from? When Edwy might have been caught last night? When we know those men who chased us were plotting something. . . .

I put the sandwich down on the table.

“Who's in charge here?” I asked.

“In this
house
?” the mother asked, her voice sharp. “Your father, when he's here. Me, when he's not.”

I refrained from telling her how much Fred-mama and Fred-daddy had always said they were equal partners. I didn't think it would help right now.

“No, I mean, in this town,” I said. “Is there a mayor? A town council? A city manager? A police force?”

Those were all things we'd talked about in school back in Fredtown.

The mother let out a disgusted snort.

“As if any of those things would help,” she muttered. “I'll tell you who
isn't
in charge in this town.
Us
. We have to just put up with how things are run. Try to survive somehow. That's all any of us can do.”

I wondered if the father had told her about showing me the hole under the floor. I thought maybe he had.

The mother cast a glance at Bobo, who was obliviously gobbling down his eggs.

“That's a good appetite,” she said admiringly. Then she turned back to me. “If you aren't going to eat, you may as well start work. You can do the dishes.”

I rose and went to the sink. Maybe if I got the work done early, I could find an excuse to go out and look for Edwy.

But as the day wore on, I despaired of there being any end to the work the mother assigned me. I washed and dried and put away the dishes. I fed the chickens in the backyard. I weeded the garden. I scrubbed the floor. I washed sheets and towels and shirts and hung them on a line to dry.

While I worked at the clothesline, the mother stood at the fence, talking in a low voice with someone I couldn't even see in the neighbor's yard. When the mother turned to walk back toward me, I thought maybe she'd say, “Rosi, let me introduce you to our next-door neighbor.” I thought maybe we'd all sit down together for tea and cakes. That was how things would have gone in Fredtown. But the mother scowled at me worse than ever. She snatched one of the father's shirts I'd just stretched smooth and pinned in place.

“Oh, no! It's missing a button!” she cried, crumpling
the shirt's collar. Her hands shook, as if that missing button made her furious. Or—as if I did.

“I'm sorry,” I said. “I didn't notice. Where—?”

She yanked the shirt from the line, popping the clothespins off. It was almost like she didn't want me to see.

“Never mind,” she snapped. “I'll go down to the market to buy a new one.”

I saw my chance.