Lena (2 page)

Dion sighed in her sleep. She's real pretty when she's sleeping—with her dark brown hair making her face look all soft. I had cut our hair real short before we left but even with it cut short, Dion still looked pretty—like a pretty boy. I watched the lights from oncoming cars move over her. She got Mama's pretty—Dion did. Me—I guess I look more like our daddy. My hair is just hair—brown and all full of cowlicks. Dion got Mama's bright blue eyes. My own eyes are kind of light brown—but just plain. I stared at Dion, wondering what's she gonna be like when she's grown, being so pretty and all. Wondering if people gonna always treat her like they do now—a little better than they treat regular-looking people.

“What your mama have herself?” Larry asked.

I blinked. I was staring so hard at Dion, I had forgotten he was there.

 

“Excuse me?” I stared straight ahead. From the first day, we knew not to look anybody right in the eyes. Seemed it was easier for people to tell you was lying when you looked at them.

“Your mama have a boy or a girl?”

“Girl.” I looked at him out of the corner of my eye. He was grinning, like he was the proud daddy.

“My wife's working on a boy,” he said. “I keep telling her next one'll be a girl just like the ones that came before her. Seems that's the way it works. You start having girls, you just keep on. Your mama want a boy?”

“She got two already. Me and my brother Dion here is probably a handful for her. Figure she was ready for a girl.”

Larry looked at me but didn't say anything. The first night we got in a truck, this guy started trying to feel on me. He kept saying, “You such a pretty boy,” and I had to keep slapping his hands away. I hoped I wouldn't have to be slapping at Larry's hands. I had figured us looking like boys would make hitching easier but some people didn't seem to care what you were. When we got into cars with ladies, we let ourselves be girls again 'cause seemed ladies wanted to be riding with girls. But with men truck drivers, me and Dion toughened up.

“Figure she just wanted a healthy baby, that's all. Me and Dion was born healthy and I hear this one was too.”

Lying made my stomach hurt. We had told the same lie ever since Chauncey—that we were on our way to see our mama. That she'd just had a baby and had sent for us but somebody stole our money on the way. Dion had come up with the lie. We changed it a bit so we didn't get too bored with it, but mostly it stayed the same and I swear, every time somebody asked for details, my stomach got to aching.

I stared out at the dark highway and tried to switch my mind to something else. You on the road long enough, you get to thinking too deep about things. Some mornings, I'll be half-asleep and I'll start remembering all this stuff I don't want to be remembering, like the times I'd be sitting in the park with Marie worrying about Dion home alone with our daddy. How some days, I'd just take off in the middle of a conversation and run all the way home. And then I'd get home and Dion'd be there on her own sitting in front of the television with a bowl of cereal. I was always scared in Chauncey. Scared of my daddy. Scared of the mornings and the nights in our house. Scared for Dion. It was scary on the road but in a different way. It was easier to be afraid of strangers than to be afraid of your daddy. I put my arm around Dion's shoulder and pulled her closer to me. We were getting further and further away from Chauncey. Everything in my life was starting to feel like it happened a long time ago.

Larry had his brights on and every now and then a deer scooted along the bank. I felt like that deer, trying to get out of the way.

Every truck we climbed into was different. Larry's truck was filled with pictures of his family and smelled like the Jolly Rancher candies he kept scattered on the dash. The first truck we hitched smelled like fresh-killed chickens. The minute Dion stepped off, she started puking and made me swear I wouldn't make her ride in any more dead-animal trucks. Even though my stomach had been a little queasy that first day, I felt good. Good and free.

 

“Your daddy living?” Larry asked softly.

“No. He died of cancer.”

 

Every single lie you tell just makes you remember the truth harder. Why couldn't that be the one thing that
wasn't
a lie? Why couldn't he have been the one to die instead of Mama? I turned back toward the window, hoping that was the end of it.

 

“Cancer took my daddy too. But that was a long time ago,” he said quietly. “Shoot, I wasn't much older than you.” He tapped a finger against the pictures on the dash. “That's why I'm going to be a good daddy to my girls,” he said. “I ain't gonna leave them standing.”

I looked over at him. Larry turned to me then looked away real quick. “I don't mean to say your daddy was a bad man.”

 

“I figure you don't.”

He cleared his throat. “We get to Owensboro I'ma give you and your little brother some money to get yourselves—”

“We'll be fine once—”

 

Larry held up his hand. “I know you're proud. I could look at you and tell that. But you just gonna have to swallow it for a bit. No telling what could go wrong between now and the next minute and when I let you and your brother off in front of that hospital tomorrow morning—I want to feel all right about it. Now if you feeling real bad about it, you can take one of my cards off that dashboard and mail the money right back to me when you-all in a safe place.”

I reached onto the dashboard and took a card from a stack held together with a rubber band. It was too dark to read it so I stuck it in Dion's knapsack.

“Thank you, sir. I'm sure our mama will get it right back in the mail to you.”

“That's fine. Just so long as it goes from my hand to yours.”

Larry looked over at me again. After a moment, he smiled. It was a sad smile.

 

“You tell your mama she's doing a fine job, you hear. You tell her she's raising two good boys.”

I nodded, feeling my own smile coming on. I was doing a fine job raising us. A fine job.

Two

It was near daylight when Larry pulled into one of those all-night diners just outside of Owensboro, Kentucky. “You-all wait here,” he said. “I'll get directions to the hospital.” He disappeared inside and I rolled down my window and took a look around. Owensboro looked bigger than a lot of other towns we'd been through. We'd passed lots of tobacco fields and what looked to be factories. I stared out at the silos and barns, near-black in the half-light of daytime, and at the remains of cornfields picked clean as skeletons. Then I sighed and leaned back against the seat.

 

Larry came out carrying a brown paper bag. “Brought y'all some sandwiches,” he whispered, climbing up into the truck and handing me the bag. “Ham and cheese. Y'all do eat ham, don't you?”

I nodded. “Thank you.”

“Thank you,” Dion mumbled.

Larry smiled and started the truck up again. “Seems everybody's not eating something these days—no meat, no dairy, no wheat. Seems like somebody's just trying to keep farmers out of work, that's all. Hospital's only four miles down the road. Lady in there said you can't miss it.”

Dion fell asleep again as we drove, her breath soft against my shoulder.

When Larry tried to pull his rig up to the hospital, a guard told him he'd have to park at the Trailways station across the street. Larry frowned as he backed up.

“See what I mean about anything could happen?”

I nodded. Dion woke up and looked around, all sleepy-eyed.

“We here already?”

Larry pulled to a stop. I climbed down from the truck and kicked my legs out a bit. Dion climbed down and did the same thing.

“You take this,” he said, getting out of the truck and pressing some bills in my hand. He took a look around the station. “I gotta get moving but you kids take care of yourselves.”

He gave us a look. “Don't talk to no strangers.”

“We won't,” me and Dion said at the same time.

Then Larry was climbing back into his truck and backing it out of the Trailways station. One day I'd get me a truck. Eat up a whole lot of road.

“He was nice.”

 

“Yeah,” Dion said. “I wish I was his kid. Wish I was going home to his house.”

“No you don't. You wouldn't be with me then. You want to be with me, don't you?”

Dion looked away from me and nodded. “I have to pee,” she said, and went on inside the station.

I took my knapsack off my shoulder and hunkered down on it. There wasn't a soul around and from the way the sky looked, all pink and new, I figured it wasn't even six o'clock in the morning.

“It's gonna be a pretty day,” I said softly when Dion came out a few minutes later. I rubbed my eyes, hard, making believe there was something in them. I missed Chauncey, missed going to Marie's house on Saturday mornings. Her house was always clean and warm and there was always lots of good stuff to eat like somebody had just gone food shopping the day before. I wanted to pick up a pay phone and call, say,
Hey, Marie, I'm sorry I left in such a hurry. Wasn't nothing you did, you know.
But I couldn't. What if my daddy had police tapping the phones in Chauncey? What if Marie's own daddy answered and took to asking me a million questions to find out where we were? Or even worse, what if Marie told him about my daddy and the foster care people were searching for us the way they did a long time ago—waiting to catch us and send Dion one place and me another? Foster care people don't care about separating us. I rubbed my eyes harder, feeling the tears pushing through. No matter what, me and Dion had to stay together.

“You crying, Lena?” I felt Dion's little hand on my shoulder.

“What would I be crying for?” I gave my eyes one more wipe and glared at her.

Dion shrugged. She took a step back from me, hunkered down on her own knapsack. We must of been a sight—two kids in flannel shirts and jeans and hiking boots at a Trailways station—Dion chewing on her collar, me with my head in my hands.

“Lena?”

 

She swallowed, like she was a little bit scared of what she was gonna say.

“Where we going, Lena? You tell me that and I won't ask you anything else—ever again if you don't want me to.”

People on the outside who didn't understand would probably look at me and Dion and say, “Those kids are running away from home.” But I knew we was running
to
something. And to someplace far away from Daddy. Someplace safe. That's where we were going.

“Mama's house,” I whispered, my voice coming out hoarse and shaky. “We going to Mama's house.”

Dion shook her head. “Not the lies we tell people—the true thing. Where we going for real?”

“Mama's house,” I said again, looking away from her.

“Lena?” Dion said. “Mama's
. . . dead.
”

I swallowed. Dion hadn't used that word for Mama before. It sounded strange coming out of her mouth. Wrong somehow. I squinted at some cars, then up at the sky where the pink was starting to fade into blue. Beautiful days broke me up inside. They made me think of all the kids in the world who could just wake up in the morning and pull the curtain back from their windows and stare out at the day and smile. I wanted that kind of life for Dion. I was too old to be wishing that for myself.

“I know she's dead. I didn't say we was going to her. I said we was going to her house.”

“And what's gonna happen when we get there?”

“You said you wasn't gonna ask no more questions, Dion.”

Dion nodded and pulled her book out of her knapsack. I took a box of colored pencils out of mine and the brown paper bag our sandwiches had come in and started sketching. I sketched the field across the way from us and a blue car moving in front of it. I sketched the sky with the pink still in it and Dion sitting on her knapsack reading. Maybe we sat there an hour. Maybe two or three. We'd learned how to make ourselves invisible. Most people didn't take a second look if they saw us—two boys sitting doing nothing. Sometimes we hung out at libraries. Dion loved those days 'cause she got to just read and read. And some days we went to a park if it was nice. But mostly we sat in hospital waiting rooms. Before I left Chauncey, I'd gone to the library and looked up all the hospitals I could find in Kentucky, West Virginia and Ohio. People were always rushing around hospitals, thinking about their sick and their dying. They didn't have time to stop and notice us sitting there—or if they did, I guess they figured we were waiting for some grown-up who was visiting. I'd usually let Dion sleep while I kept a lookout. If we found a car unlocked, it was good for sleeping in at night, but most times we slept in the woods. I'd learned to sleep real light and listen out.

 

I put a nurse in my drawing, then an old lady in a wheelchair. Soon a bus pulled in. Then another one. Some people got off. Some people got on. Me and Dion watched them. There was a skinny girl around Dion's age carrying a suitcase. Dion narrowed her eyes at the girl, then went back to reading her book.

“How much money we got?”

Dion didn't even look up from her book. “About ninety-eight dollars.”

When we left Chauncey, turned out Dion had seventy-two dollars stashed in this old yellow sock she had stuck way back in her drawer. That's how smart she is—only eight and was already saving for some rainy day. All along, I'd been trying to save everything I could too. Some days, I'd go down to the Winn-Dixie and pack up groceries for people. After buying us knapsacks and some supplies, I had about thirty dollars left.