Liar & Spy (17 page)

I hear footsteps. “Hello?” It’s Safer’s voice, through the door.

“Where’s Candy?” I ask. “Did your doorman go on vacation?”

“Did I hear a ‘knock, knock’?”

“Safer, I know it’s you.”

But he just says it again: “Did I hear a ‘knock, knock’?”

Fine. I’ll play. “Knock, knock,” I say.

“Who’s there?” Safer says.

“Interrupting cow.” And I start sucking in air, because I’m going to blow Safer away. When he starts to say “Interrupting cow, who?” I’m going to give him the longest, loudest MOO in the history of the planet.

But Safer doesn’t say “Interrupting cow, who?” Instead, the door opens, and there he is. “Come in, interrupting cow,” he says. “Come on in.”

How to Land a Plane

In our house, up on my fire escape, my mom used to tell me bedtime stories when I was little.

A lot of the time it was this one:

My mother went to England when she was sixteen years old—her one and only trip to Europe. It was part of a youth group trip, and she was super-excited. She sat by the window on the airplane—it was her first time on a plane—and she watched the earth pull away, watched the cars, the houses, and the buildings shrink until they were dots of color, part of a giant mosaic that she would not have recognized as her own city.

“I’d seen my world close up, but never from a distance. It’s like the paintings.” She would nudge me with an elbow. “By the painter who painted the little dots that made beautiful pictures.”

“I know,” I would say.

“What’s his name?”

“Sir Ott,” I would say, because I wanted her to go on with the story.

“What’s his
first
name?”

“Georges.” She always kissed my forehead when I said that.

The mosaic of my mother’s city gave way to blue water that darkened as they flew toward night, until everything outside turned black and all she could see in the window was her own reflection. They brought food but she couldn’t eat. She was too excited. She stared at her face in the window and thought,
Here is me, going to England; here is me, crossing the ocean; here is me, a dot in the sky
.

“How was it?” I asked her once.

“How was what?”

“How was it to be a dot in the sky? Like a nothing.”

“I didn’t feel like a nothing. I felt—full.”

“But you just said you couldn’t eat.”

She said she felt full of whatever it was that was about to happen to her.

After a long time, she saw something else through the window. She saw lights. Not big bright lights like in Times Square, but a million tiny lights that glowed.

She would close her eyes when she told this part.

“It was as if heavy clothes, embroidered with glowing threads of gold and red, had been tossed down by a giant or a god, and were just floating there, on top of the water.”

And it was beautiful, flying over that.

But as the plane flew lower and the pressure built in her ears, she found that she did not want to land. She wanted to stay above all of it, partly because it was beautiful, and partly
because she understood that all the time she had been in the air, her connection to home had been stretching like a rubber band. It had stretched very far, so far that she was afraid that when the plane touched down, the rubber band would break, and a part of her life would be over.

“Isn’t that silly?” she’d say. “Where did I get that idea?”

My mother’s bedtime stories were not like other people’s.

And that’s how it was for me that night two weeks ago, when the nurse finally came to the waiting room and said I could see Mom. Walking down the hospital hallway, matching my steps to Dad’s, I suddenly did not want to see her, to actually arrive at the door to her room, because as long as I did not get there, I was still in the part of my life when she was not sick. And that’s why I refused to go into her room, why I started crying and ran to the elevators, and why I said I would never go back. I decided to do exactly what Dad said, to pretend that she was just at work, that none of it was happening.

But obviously Mom
had
left on that plane, a long time before it landed in London, the same way I had left the place where Mom was not sick the very second that she fainted in our kitchen.

The last part of Mom’s plane trip was a long moment when the plane was gliding over the runway in London, just barely off the ground. The sun was up, and the world was normal-size again, but the wheels had not yet touched the earth. She suddenly knew everything would be all right. And that, she said, was a beautiful feeling.

Little of Both

I hate the hospital as soon as we walk into it. First, I hate the round coffee kiosk on the first floor where Dad stops to buy a cappuccino, because it’s fake cheerful, and then I hate the elevators that stop on every floor and take forever to get to nine. They ding and buzz and we have to wait while things are wheeled in and out. I hate that.

“Here he is!” a nurse says when we check in at the desk on Mom’s ward. “And looking every bit as serious as his mother warned.”

Her accent is nice—I don’t hate it—but I can’t smile back at her. Now that I’m here, I just want to see Mom.

Dad’s hand is on the back of my neck. “Hi, Sophia. Anything we need to know?”

“Nothing at all,” she says. “It’s been a good morning, even better than good. And I’ve told them all to leave you alone, or else.” She raises one fist and shakes it, but she isn’t doing it for my benefit, and this is another thing I don’t hate.

Dad smiles. “Great. We’ll head back, then.”

“Don’t think I don’t know the coffee is for her!” Sophia calls after us.

I glance up at Dad’s face. “She’s not supposed to drink caffeine yet,” Dad says. “But you know what they say—doctors and nurses make the worst patients.”

I match my stride to Dad’s as we walk down the hall, one-two, one-two—and I tell myself that if we can get all the way to Mom’s room without having to stop for a passing lunch-tray cart or a sliding door, it will be a good sign.

“Right here,” Dad says. His hand is still on my neck. We turn.

Mom is on the bed, on top of the covers. She’s got on jeans and a T-shirt. She looks normal, like her regular self. But when she reaches for me, there’s a tube connected to her arm.

She follows my eyes. “Don’t worry about this thing,” she says, swatting at the tube. “Just more antibiotics.

“I can’t stand not hugging you for one more second,” Mom says. Her arms are out again, and Dad pushes the back of my neck, just a little bit.

I walk to the bed slowly, thinking about where to put my arms. I wonder if there are other tubes, hidden ones that I might accidentally touch or break. But when I get close enough Mom’s hands just take me and pull me in, and she’s a lot stronger than I thought she would be.

We don’t try to catch up. We don’t pour our hearts out. Instead, we watch a show on Mom’s television. She makes room for me in the bed on the side without any tubes, and Dad pulls a chair up close. We laugh at every joke, and once
in a while Mom kisses me, and once in a while she reaches for Dad’s coffee and takes a sip.

No one comes in to remind us that we are in a hospital, and the machines on the walls and the metal bed rails kind of disappear for a while. During commercials, I take things in and Mom watches me.

“This is where I keep your notes,” she says. And she shows me a notebook with my Scrabble messages. She’s written them out, my words and hers, which Dad spelled out for me after I fell asleep.

She takes my hand and turns it so that the blue dot on my palm is facing up.

“What’s this?”

“Long story,” I tell her.

“Good story or bad story?”

I don’t know how to answer that.

She squeezes my hand. “Little of both?”

“Yeah,” I tell her. “A little of both.”

“Tell me next time?”

“Sure.”

When Dad and I get home from the hospital, I call Safer. He answers on the first ring.

I tell him to come downstairs and to bring his notebook. “We’re going to make a list,” I say.

It’s a list of everything Safer is not afraid of.

The Scout

It’s obviously pretty strange to have your first day of school on a Thursday in June when there are only three weeks left in the whole year, but it seems like there’s never been anything extremely normal about Safer’s family. Candy has decided to join the fourth grade, and she does not plan to wait until September.

“Everyone makes such a big deal about the last day of school,” she tells me, stuffing her lunch into her new backpack. “I don’t want to miss it.”

Which makes Safer nod like he totally gets it. He holds his flask out to me. “Coffee?”

“Safer, what’s really
in
there?”

“Coffee!” he says, looking insulted. He takes a swig from the flask.

“Safer,” his mom says, “I wish you’d get bored with that thing already. It’s heck to wash.”

She’s taking pictures of Candy in her first-day-of-school outfit, which is jeans and a T-shirt. Candy was going to wear her overalls, but when she asked me if other kids wear overalls
to school, I had to tell her not so much. She said she didn’t mind being different, but maybe not on her very first day. She’s going to wear them tomorrow.

Safer’s mom clicks away with her camera while Candy zips up her bag and says she’s ready. Safer says he’s ready too. Because it’s his job to walk her.

We’ve been working on Safer’s list for the past couple of weeks, adding things one by one.

First, we walked to the corner and back with Ty and Lucky, Safer gripping a leash in each hand.

Then we walked to Bennie’s with Candy, who was running low on Starbursts. She bought three packs and opened them all in the store, picking out the orange ones and splitting them between me and Safer while talking to Bennie about when the Mallomars will be delivered in the fall. It turns out that the Mallomar is a seasonal cookie.

Last weekend, Safer and I made it all the way to DeMarco’s with Pigeon. “You know, the pizza really is better straight out of the oven,” Safer said after finishing his second slice. And Pigeon hugged him.

The day before yesterday, Safer and I took our longest walk yet, just the two of us, to my old house. I showed him the porch and the big crack in the sidewalk where I chipped my tooth, and I pointed to my old bedroom window and told him about my fire escape. I wanted him to see it, because that house was like a friend to me. But Safer is a better one.

When Safer’s mom goes into her office to put her camera away, Candy quickly pops a giant SweeTart into her mouth. Dad took me and Safer on the D train yesterday to buy them
for her at the newsstand on the Fifty-Ninth Street platform. It was her first-day-of-school present, from us.

“It’s about time,” Safer said on the subway. “I’m pretty sure Candy’s wanted to go to school forever. She used to stand at the window and count the yellow buses.”

I didn’t say what I was thinking, that maybe she had stayed at home for his sake, but now she doesn’t need to anymore.

I tell Candy and Safer I’ll meet them in the lobby, and then I run down to our apartment for my backpack and almost slam into Mom, who’s getting her sneakers on by the door.

“Oops,” she says. “Are you leaving? It’s later than I thought. I’m supposed to meet Dad at some kind of vintage-appliance warehouse.”

I’m guessing that pretty soon we’ll have a weird old stove, like Safer’s.

“Drive safely,” I tell her.

“Oh, I’m walking,” she says, pointing at her sneakers. “Gotta stay in shape—tomorrow I’ll be on my feet all day.”

Mom’s been busy too, getting back to normal. She goes back to work tomorrow. No doubles for a while, though. She promised.

When I get downstairs, Safer and Candy are waiting in the lobby chairs, and the three of us head out. I’ve told Bob to wait for us by the front doors at school, and he’s right there when we turn the corner, flipping his blue Sharpie into the air and catching it.

“Ready?” he asks.

“Hold out your hand,” I tell Candy.

Bob draws Candy’s blue dot, making a perfect circle and then coloring it in.

When he’s done, she looks at it up close. “So what does this mean again?”

Bob tells her. “It means you’re not alone. No matter what.”

She nods. She looks smaller out here in front of the school than she does at home. Kids are starting to swarm all around us, heading into the building. Candy tightens her ponytail.

“I’ll walk you to your class,” I say. “She has Ms. Diamatis,” I tell Bob.

“That’s who I had,” he says to Candy. “I hope you know your times tables. Ms. Diamatis is really into multiplication.”

“Of course she knows her times tables!” Safer says. “I bet she knows them better than anyone in the whole school.” Candy gives Safer a big grateful smile, and I notice that her teeth are a little purple around the edges.

Safer turns to me, mock-offended. “Does he think I would send my scout in unprepared?”

“Don’t start,” I tell him.

Safer is considering school himself. He says that Candy is his scout, that if she reports that school is okay and confirms where all the exits are, he might start eighth grade with me and Bob in September.

Or maybe ninth grade, he says,
next
September.

He’s kidding about the exits. I think.

Last period. Gym. The whiteboard is blank. Ms. Warner says we can pick what game to play. The Blue Team carries the vote with capture the flag. Our jailbreaks are getting better and better.

After the bell, Ms. Warner waves me over.

“I met your friend today,” she says, because I’ve already told Ms. Warner to look out for Candy. “Great kid.”

“Don’t try to give her any nicknames,” I say.

She grins. “You got it, G. No nicknames.”

I take a deep breath. “Tell me the truth. Do you really hate your job?”

She looks at me. “This is pretty much my dream job, G.”

I knew it.

She holds up one hand. “High five?”

It isn’t Friday. But rules are made to be broken.