Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands (32 page)

The apartment was in a pretty run-down house a couple of blocks from the Kinko’s. It was on the second floor and didn’t have a whole lot of furniture, but it was nice and warm and there was this really long table a bit like the one my family had had in our kitchen in Reddington. It was made of the same wood, which I remembered was pumpkin pine. Immediately Cameron unrolled his mummy bag underneath it, and I joined him there in a T-shirt and a pair of ass-billboard sweatpants I’d lifted from Victoria’s Secret. We read our books for, like, ten minutes before we both fell sound asleep.

Camille’s roommate got home about seven-thirty that night. Camille had already texted her that we’d be there. Her name was Dawn, and she was kind of a rarity: she was a girl who, I could tell, had no idea just how pretty she was. Normally, in my experience,
a hot girl knows she’s hot. Even if they have the brains of a gerbil, beautiful girls usually know this one salient fact: they turn heads. But, I swear, Dawn was totally oblivious.

Now, she wasn’t the brightest bulb in the tanning bed. That was clear, too. But pretty or dumb, none of that mattered to me, because here was what she had going for her: she was very nice and she treated Cameron like a puppy. She didn’t treat him like a dog, which is an expression that means in reality you treat a person like crap. She treated him like he was the cutest thing she had ever seen—a puppy—and was constantly telling him how sweet he was and how adorable he was and what a buff little dude he’d soon be. Cameron endured it.

And she didn’t seem to give a rat’s ass that he was a homeless kid who wasn’t in school at the moment. A lot of people just might have frowned on that. Not Dawn. Camille wouldn’t get home until around eleven that night because she was working until closing, and here was our entire exchange about Cameron’s and my sitch while we waited:

D
AWN:
So he’s, like, your nephew?

M
E:
Uh-huh. Our families lost our homes when the nuclear plant exploded and things kind of fell apart. But next week we’re taking the bus to Briarcliff, New York. We have family there who are going to take care of us.

D
AWN:
God, the plant. That just sucks. The people who ran it? They were the worst, weren’t they?

M
E:
Yup. They were the worst.

D
AWN:
But Cameron, you are just too cute! This will all be fine, you know. You know that, right? You are just the most adorable little person I’ve ever seen!

Then she hugged him. Again.

Now, obviously the story I gave Dawn didn’t match the story I’d given Camille back in June at the shelter. But since—also
obviously—Camille had figured out who I was, it didn’t matter. It just didn’t.

Still, I had this feeling that I had seen Dawn somewhere before. It wasn’t at the shelter and it wasn’t at the library and it wasn’t at Muddy Waters. It sure as hell wasn’t down by the waterfront. But for most of the evening I just couldn’t figure out where. She had a beautiful heart-shaped face and very prominent brown eyes, and the only makeup she was wearing was a kind of dull lipstick. She pulled her hair straight back, which gave her a wide, high forehead. That look is hard to rock, but Dawn pulled it off. And then, when she fixed this massive collar on her turtleneck sweater, I got it. I knew instantly where I had seen her before. And I knew why she was so into Cameron.

I’d seen her one day that winter on the street outside of a day care on King Street, when Cameron and I had been walking from the waterfront to the library.

When she’d adjusted the collar on her sweater it was a lot like when she had pulled the collar of her jacket up and over the bottom of her face against the cold. She’d been behind this picket fence they had along the sidewalk to prevent the little kids from running from the playground into the street and getting themselves killed by a car, and she had been absolutely surrounded by rug rats. They were all in snowsuits that made them look like little Michelin men (and women), and I had no idea how they could move as fast as they did. All of the kids had been four and five and maybe six years old, so it’s not like Cameron belonged with them. But for some reason it had still made me sad for him. All those kids had each other, and all Cameron had was yours truly.

“You don’t just work at Macy’s,” I said. “You also work at a day care, don’t you?”

“Used to work at a day care. No more. How did you know?”

“I once saw you in the yard with a bunch of the kids.”

“I loved that job,” she told me, and her voice got a little sad.

“How come you’re not there anymore?”

“I made kind of a bad choice one day, you know?”

I didn’t know, so I waited.

“One of the little boys was crazy energetic. Maybe a little mental. And he’d never nap, which was bad for everyone. He’d just keep all the kids in the day care awake. So one afternoon I gave him some cough syrup to knock him out. And maybe I gave him a little too much or maybe it just worked too well. I don’t know. But it was really hard to wake him up—the woman who runs the day care almost called 911—and when we finally got him on his feet, he was still super groggy. He was still super groggy when his mom came to pick him up. So, I was kind of fired.”

“Cameron is a great sleeper,” I told her. It was a reflex. And, fortunately, it was true. Still, I wanted to be sure she understood that he didn’t need any help in the shut-eye department. I didn’t want to take any chances.

You have no idea how amazing it is to sleep on a couch when you have been sleeping burrowed inside a quilt in a trash bag igloo for nearly two months.

Even though I had napped that afternoon with Cameron under the pumpkin pine table, I was out like a light about fifteen minutes after Camille got back from the restaurant and didn’t wake up until noon the next day. Dawn had already left for Macy’s, but Camille was playing checkers with Cameron. It seems Dawn had made a mad dash to the Salvation Army store as soon as she’d woken up and bought five board games for five bucks. It made me feel a little guilty that I hadn’t thought of that—and it made me think a little more highly of Dawn. Maybe she was the Queen of the Antihistamines, but the board games were a good call.

Since Camille and Cameron seemed to be getting along just fine, I went to Henry’s and dropped off my résumé. The lunch rush was ending and I met Andy’s brother. He was a burly guy, like Andy, and he was pretty curt. All business. But Andy came
out from the kitchen and said hello. His brother actually hired me on the spot because I had diner experience and because one of his waitresses had walked out on him that morning, leaving “smack dab” in the middle of the breakfast rush. He wanted me to start the next day. I was supposed to come in at two, when business slowed after lunch, to get trained for a few hours before dinner.

I was pretty jazzed. I spent about an hour on Church Street and panhandled about thirteen bucks before a police officer moved me on, and then I started back to Camille’s. I wanted to be sure I was there before she had to leave for work at the restaurant.

Anyway, I was kind of feeling that things were looking up. I really was. You’re probably thinking that, too. We couldn’t stay at Camille’s forever, of course, but just coming in out of the cold and seeing how Camille had turned it around was seriously inspiring. And it had cleared my head. I had to find a place where Cameron and I could live on diner wages and tips—which was not going to be easy—and at some point I was going to have to figure out what to do about my little buddy. He needed to be in school. He needed grown-ups. He needed a real home. That’s what I mean about how a night on a couch in a heated apartment had started me focusing again almost like a normal person.

And who knows? Maybe things really would have turned themselves around if I hadn’t felt a cold coming on. I felt a tingle in the back of my throat and I started to feel achy. My nose was starting to run. I considered detouring back to the Rite Aid to lift some Airborne or something, but I was only a block from Camille’s. I told myself that she or Dawn—God, especially Dawn—might have something I could take. The key was not to get Cameron sick.

But, of course, Cameron already was sick. When I got back to Camille’s, she was grateful because she was about to leave for work and wasn’t wild about the idea of leaving Cameron alone.

“He’s been sneezing,” she said to me, and pointed under the
pumpkin pine table. The night before he’d taken a bedsheet and draped it over half the table, turning it into a cave. The other half had some notebooks and textbooks from Camille’s classes at CCV. But there was still enough light from the undraped side for Cameron to read one of his classic comic book novels. This one, I saw, was
The War of the Worlds
.

I crouched on the floor and peered in. “How are you feeling?” I asked.

“I feel okay,” he said, and then wiped at his nose with the back of his hand.

“Getting a cold?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“Let me get you something for your nose,” I said. Camille and Dawn didn’t have Kleenex, so I took the roll of paper towels off the kitchen counter and tore off a couple of sheets. Then I asked Camille if they had any orange juice. They didn’t.

“I’ll pick some up,” I said. “I want to go to the Laundromat.”

“Do you have any money?”

“Not a lot. But I have enough for orange juice and a load of laundry.”

“How’d it go at the diner?”

“I got a job. I start tomorrow.”

“No shit? That’s awesome.” She went to hug me, but even though the gesture caught me off guard I was able to stop her before she got too close.

“Whoa,” I said, and put out my arm, my hand a wall, like a traffic cop. “I think I’m coming down with a cold.”

“You, too?”

“Yup, me too.”

Then she went to work, and I emptied out Cameron’s and my backpacks and piled all of our laundry onto the floor. Normally Cameron would have come with me to the Laundromat—he liked to sit on the hot dryers—but it was plenty warm at Camille’s. Besides, I wanted him to stay inside and rest.

“I wish they had a TV,” he said. “Or a computer. It would be cool to watch something. Anything.”

Somewhere, I figured, Camille had a laptop. After all, she was taking classes at CCV. But I didn’t want to search her and Dawn’s bedroom or “borrow” it for Cameron even if I found it. That would have been a pretty crappy betrayal after she had let us chill at her place. “I agree,” I said. “Sorry about that.”

He sneezed and shrugged, and so I packed up our clothes and left for the Laundromat.