February Fever (4 page)

There was an unexpected suggestion in her words. She'd gotten on the train for
something
, and it wasn't just to travel cross-country. “What did you get on for?”

She shrugged, all hint of mystery gone. “It's a way to travel.”

“Is this your first train ride?”

Her eyes misted. “And last, if I have any say in it. You'll excuse me?”

I nodded. She walked three more feet away from me, but not to talk with anyone else. Her sudden change in mood was perplexing. I ran through our conversation. Had I done it again? Said something heinous when I thought I was being polite? I couldn't recall anything, but then again, if I recognized social impropriety, I'd avoid it in the first place. I sighed and returned to my people-watching.

The rest of the crowd appeared to be standard Minnesotans, vastly different from the bright and eccentric Ms. Wrenshall. They wore parkas zipped up to their necks, an array of caps, and fur-lined boots. Judging by their chafed cheeks, I guessed they wished they were inside or, better yet, already on the train. The station must be even more crowded than it appeared from the outside.

I noticed a couple on the perimeter of the crowd, he in a lined denim jacket and she in a puffy yellow parka, doing the “let's pretend we're not arguing” dance. Their tight faces, mouths snapping open only long enough to deliver a tense word or two, and the way they stood physically close but turned away from each other gave them away. I couldn't leave our luggage, so I craned my neck to see if I could lip-read what they were fighting about.

A bump from behind pushed me off balance. I caught myself and turned.

“Excuse me.”

The woman speaking had her head down, long brown hair obscuring her face. She was the only person at the station not wearing a cap. As she spoke to me, she was glancing at her daughter, whose hand she held. She wore a purse slung over her shoulder but carried no other luggage.

“I didn't see you,” she continued, still not looking directly at me.

“That's okay.” I stepped aside so she and her daughter could pass. As they moved through the crowd, the little girl turned and waved at me. I noticed her heart-shaped face and the doll in her hand in the same moment.

Recognition hit like an electric jolt.

Noel
.

Six

I hadn't thought of
Noel in a decade. She'd been my best friend the summer I turned five, back when my parents lived within the Paynesville city limits. Noel's family moved into a house on the opposite side of Koronis Park from me, which was the other end of the earth in my five-year-old mind. Back then, kids of all ages played in the streets until dusk, people smoked cigarettes in movie theaters, and no one worried about predators or seatbelts.

Noel and I met on the playground in June, shortly after her family moved to town. I liked her the moment she appeared on the edge of the sand and walked up to those monkey bars like she owned them. She set her ever-present Velveteen Rabbit on the ground, clambered up the worn metal bars, and started penny dropping like a pro.

Watching her, I knew instantly that I wanted to be her friend. I'd been trying to nail a penny drop for
days
, and here she waltzed in, making it seem as easy as breathing. I was a cool cat, though. I hung out on the swings and spied on her from behind my bangs, posing myself so she could clearly see the new and highly fashionable rainbow tank top I was wearing and maybe, just maybe, if she was studying me as hard as I was pretending
not
to study her, she'd see the new hair ties my mom had twisted in, each sporting two pretty red plastic marbles.

Chuckie Greaves, who earlier in the summer had landed a butterfly net over my head and tried to pull down my shorts, begged me to play tetherball with him, but I would have none of it. I swung higher and higher, trying to impress the girl doing the penny drops, but she was either way better at bluffing disinterest than I was, or she couldn't have cared less about me.

Four minutes into this one-sided dance, I was ready to give up. If my bejeweled hair binders and splenderous tank top weren't good enough for her, tough noogies. I'd been swinging alone all my life. What was a few more months?

That's when, for I'm sure the first time in his life, Chuckie Greaves saved the day.

Bored with trying to get my attention, he snuck over and flashed the new penny drop girl his butt. She fell to the ground, her balance shot, grabbed her Velveteen Rabbit, and hid under the slide. I marched over and told Chuckie that the police could measure butt waves and knew he'd just mooned someone.
The Law is on its way you will be arrested forever
, I said. (If you want to be good at anything, let's say lying, I recommend you practice young.)

After he ran home, I hauled myself up on that metal bar just like I'd seen the girl do. I hooked my legs over it, hair and hands hanging. I knew she was watching me. I also sensed, using my five-year-old-girl jungle instincts, that she needed to come to me if this friendship was gonna have legs.

I started swinging my hands, building momentum. Back and forth, back and forth, the upside-down world becoming a blur. When I felt like I had enough force, I unhooked my legs, propelled them under me, and landed on my feet like a gold medal gymnast.

At least, that's what I did in my head.

In reality, one of my legs stuck while the other flew free, which meant I flailed through the air like a starfish before landing on my stomach. The air knocked out of me in a
whoof
. I tasted blood and dirt.

I sprawled there for several seconds, the world a pinhole of light, wondering where I had gone wrong. Somewhere deeper, I may have also wondered whether this was a harbinger of how the rest of my life would go. (It was.) When I finally caught my breath, I was two things: grateful that Chuckie hadn't seen my disgrace, and determined to get that girl to teach me how to do the penny drop.

“You have to swing higher so you can let both your legs go at the same time,” she called out from under the slide. “Otherwise you'll just land on your face every time.”

Bingo.

Her name was Noel, it turned out, and she took her Velveteen Rabbit everywhere. His name was Rabbie. Her parents had moved to Paynesville, Minnesota, from somewhere exotic, like St. Cloud, Minnesota. Her dad was the new high school math teacher and her mom was a nurse. She had two younger sisters, both of them “dumb and stupid,” according to Noel (only she said it “dumb and thtoopid,” because her two front teeth were missing).

I never did master the penny drop that summer (or since), but the two of us were inseparable, me an only child with a mercurial home life, her with two annoying younger siblings stealing most of her parents' attention. We explored every nook and cranny in that playground, learned how to sneak cookies without our parents knowing, and could giggle until our sides felt like they were being unzipped.

It didn't take long to discover that Noel was a risk taker, and she was mischievous, once she had an ally.

For example, she had it in for Chuckie Greaves, working every angle to get revenge for his butt reveal. She finally figured out how in mid-August, when it was almost time to start kindergarten.

We were wild things by then, all dirty faces, uncombed hair, and populating an imaginary world that we ruled from sun up to sun down. We'd been working on Chuckie for two weeks. Noel said he had to think we were his friends for her plan to work. Finally, after many cookie bribes, we convinced him to invite us into his house.

As soon as we were inside, I distracted him while she pretended to use the bathroom but instead robbed the piggy bank he'd been bragging about all summer long. Once she had the money, she found me in the kitchen, gave me the signal (touching her pointer fingers together in front of her nose), and we ran out of the house, laughing so hard we could hardly speak.

We kept running until we reached the slide in Koronis Park, where Noel pulled out our ill-gotten gains. Chuckie had saved almost $17, and we knew exactly what to do with it.

We were walking back from the Ben Franklin when the car pulled up. Our red Radio Flyer was overflowing with Dots, Marathon bars, Pixy Stix, Red Vines, and caramel corn. Back then, $17 literally bought you a wagon load of candy. Rabbie was perched on top of the sugar mound like a king. Our mouths were ringed with a red sugar circle from our Blow Pops. We were laughing about a knock-knock joke that was all the funnier because neither of us could recollect how it ended.

I remembered all of those details as if it were a movie playing in front of my eyes.

What I could never remember, what would wake me up in shuddering tears as recently as ten years ago because I could not recall it, was what the vehicle had looked like.

The police asked me afterward, of course. They were at first kind, then desperate.

I was five. It was a car, and it was silver, and it was as huge as a boat. That's all I remembered. But I could tell them what happened
after
that big silver car pulled up on that sunny Sunday as my best friend Noel and I hauled our stolen booty home:

The passenger door opened.

Inside, a man leaned over, smiling at us. His dark hair was laced with gray. I didn't recognize him. His smile made my stomach hurt.

“What are you girls going to do with all that candy?” His voice was pitched, that babyish “I'm talking to a kid now” tone that some adults think makes children like them more.

Noel stood straighter and jutted out her chin. She was that kind of girl. “It's
our
candy. We bought it with
our
money.”

The man chuckled, but only with his mouth. His eyes stayed on Noel like two black flies. “I'm sure you did, baby girl. Isn't all that candy heavy?”

Noel glanced at the red Radio Flyer, then at me, then back at the man. “Naw. We have a wagon.”

His voice dropped. “You are such pretty girls. Where do you live?”

I wasn't even aware I was pointing toward my house until I saw the flash of pink to my right and realized it was my own arm. I flushed. I didn't understand the shame, but it burned hot. I wished that we could return all this candy and Chuckie's money. I wished that I'd never wanted to do a penny drop. I wished that my mom was here.

“And I live over there.” Noel pointed toward her house. “We're not sisters, if that's what you're wondering.”

The man looked around, nodded. “You want to go for a ride?”

I don't know the model of his car, or the color of his clothes, but I would forever remember the trapped-animal terror those words struck in me. My heartbeat pounded in my ears, and my vision narrowed. I wanted to cry, but I was a frozen doll.

“Sure,” Noel said. Her face grew pale. She was as scared as I was, but an adult was asking us to do something. We needed to do it.

She was closer to the car. If I had been nearer, I would have led the way.

She began to walk toward the open vehicle door. His eyes were hungry, his smile tight and mean. She was wearing her favorite white socks, the ones her mom had sewn plastic beads around the edge of, and they made a tiny swishing sound as she stepped away.

I let the handle of the wagon drop to the sidewalk. It clanked.

I knew we'd lost the candy, everything. No point in looking back. I followed Noel.

To an adult who wasn't there—even to myself all these years later—it's impossible to understand the awful tractor beam that pulled us toward that vehicle. The man was confident, and he was a grown-up, and he spoke in a way that left no room for argument. Even so, if we hadn't just stolen Chuckie's money and bought all that candy, if we weren't so weighted down by guilt and sure we deserved to be in trouble, I don't think we would have walked toward the car. That's something that's stuck with me, even after the nightmares finally began to ease off a decade or so ago: our own bad choices, mine and Noel's, had in some way made this horrible moment possible.

Noel slid into the car. She had to put her hands on the seat, and then one knee followed by the other because she was just a little girl. I was right behind her, close enough to smell cigarettes and something sour, like old chicken noodle soup. The tears were coming, but yet, I followed Noel.

She was perched on the leather seat, and I was just about to crawl in next to her. She turned to look at me, her skin ashen, her eyes as large as plates. She was weeping too now. The man was staring at her, the smile erased from his face. I would be sitting next to Noel in seconds, and the man would be staring at me instead of her, and then he'd close the door, and he'd drive away like the child catcher in
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
, and we'd never see anyone who loved us again.

“Mira!” The voice was far away, but it was my mom's.

I felt God breathing on me. There's no other way to describe a relief that elemental.

The sound of my mom's voice broke the spell. I could think clearly.
My mom loves me. She wouldn't want me to go with this man. She might be mad about the money and the candy, but she loves me and I don't have to do this.

My heartbeat receded and my vision cleared. I turned toward my mom's yelling, then back to Noel. Her face was hopeful. She had heard my mom too. She knew my mom wouldn't let anything happen to us. We had our own adult now and so didn't have to listen to this one. I held out my hand to help her out of the car.

She was sliding over, reaching toward my outstretched palm, when the man with eyes like flies leaned across her, slammed the door shut, and sped away. The last thing I saw was the whites of her eyes, her expression so far past scared that she looked like she was wearing a Halloween mask of herself.

The air moved like fire through my lungs. The car turned.
Which direction? I don't know.
I was burning from the inside.
You didn't see at all?
I couldn't move. The vehicle disappeared.
You sure you can't remember?
I stood there until a woman came out of her house across the road. It felt like hours. It was probably less than a minute. My mom was racing across the park, but I wouldn't register that until later.

“Are you okay, honey?” the woman said. “Did you know that man?”

I shook my head. I was so hot. My tears felt like steam. I was inside an oven. How could I breathe in an oven?

She called the police.

The rest was a blur. I was asked questions, and with each one I couldn't answer, I fell deeper into myself. My mom cried a lot. My dad hugged me.

Weeks later, Chuckie came by with a bag of caramel corn. He told me he didn't mind that I'd stolen his money. Said he'd saved up to buy me more caramel corn because it seemed like I really liked it. He said he'd always make sure I had caramel corn, if I wanted it.

Noel's dad didn't start teaching that fall. A
For Sale
sign appeared in their lawn.

My parents moved us to the country.

Noel
.