Where We Belong (18 page)

“Oh. Well, okay. She’s not magic. But she’s a hero. We should get her on the local news or something.”

“No!” he said, too loud, and I wasn’t sure if he was half joking or genuinely yelling at me. “I don’t want news crews at my door.”

“You just want to be left alone.”

“Right.”

I turned to go. “What time tomorrow?” I asked over my shoulder.

“Any time. Doesn’t matter.” Then he said, “Maybe not completely alone. It’s different here. No working with people whether I like it or not. I haven’t even seen the new neighbors. I like it, don’t get me wrong, but it’s not so bad to think about one person coming by every day. I mean, if it’s someone I can deal with.” He didn’t say, “Like you.” But I knew that’s what he meant. “So maybe that’s why I didn’t take it too hard when I saw you.”

I almost said, “So we
are
friends.” I was thinking it.

But then my eyes drifted to his new bookcase. It was completely empty except for that picture of Rachel. It must have been the first thing he unpacked.

He saw me see it.

“Then again,” he said, “when you let people in, they start to know things about you. That’s not my favorite part of the whole people business.”

“Tell you what,” I said. “Next time I see you, I’ll tell you something about me, too. Something I’d just as soon nobody else knew. Then we’ll be even.”

I didn’t know what it would be yet. But that gave me time to think. I knew Paul wouldn’t tell anybody, whatever it was, because he never talked to anybody, anyway. Except Rigby.

And now me.

I trotted down all three flights of stairs feeling weirdly happy. My sister was back. And at least I had one sort-of friend.

You have to have gotten down pretty low before something as small as that starts to look like happy to you.

When I woke up in the tent, the three of us were all huddled together. My mom was in the middle, on her back, with her arms around both of us. She was stroking my hair.

I think we were all mostly trying to stay warm.

I lifted my head and looked over my mom at Sophie.

Sophie was awake, but not making a sound. Just playing in the air with her own hands. She looked perfectly relaxed. Which could only mean one thing. She already trusted she’d see Hem again. I’d told her so the night before, and she must have believed me.

Which put us back in a bubble of peace.

She had a scrape on her cheek, and her hair was still packed with dried mud. But I was so happy to see her, it just filled me up. I was so happy she wasn’t gone forever that I almost felt good. Like it didn’t matter that the ground was hard, and we had no way to pad it. It didn’t matter that I had no idea how we were supposed to get clean. Or that we’d gone to bed without dinner in all the confusion.

We were all still here. That was the only thing that felt like it mattered.

“So, you’re awake,” my mom said.

I didn’t answer. Because the minute I heard her voice, something started scratching at the back of my mind. I couldn’t quite pin down what it was yet, but it was not a good or happy something. I could feel the nuisance of it, like a tag that irritates the back of your neck, or a little burr in your sock.

“Well?” she said. Like I was supposed to talk.

Then I remembered.

I let it sit inside me for a minute, feeling the size and weight of it. Feeling it like a bruise you purposely poke to see how sore it is. God knows I’d had enough experience with bruises.

Then it came up, all on its own. I couldn’t have held it down if I’d tried. Also, I didn’t try.

“Did they ever catch the guy who killed Dad?”

She sat up so fast that I fell off her shoulder and hit my head on the hard ground. The bottom of the tent was hardly a cushion.

Sophie let out a little noise of surprise.

“What the hell kind of question is that?”

“It’s just a question. Don’t get all freaked out.”

“How can I not get freaked out? I wake up in the morning, and you start asking about a thing like that. How am I supposed to feel? What made you even think about that?”

I sat up, rubbing my head. Then I wrapped myself in my own arms to try to stay warm. It didn’t work.

“I think about it all the time. Every day.”

“
Every day?
I had no idea you thought about it every day. It was eight years ago.”

“It was a pretty big deal, you know.”

“Of course I know. How dare you talk to me like I need to be taught that?” Every now and then, when I hit a special sore nerve in her, she suddenly got very mother-like. “He was my husband, and I adored him. It was a big deal for me, too, kiddo. More than you know.”

“But you don’t think about it every day?”

“I hate this line of questioning. Hate it. I have no idea why we have to discuss this.”

“You’re still ducking my question. Did they catch the guy?”

“Or guys. Might have been two or three guys.”

“Still ducking.”

“No! No, all right? No. They didn’t catch him. Or them. Now can we talk about something else?”

“Sure,” I said.

And I meant it. Because if someone’s going to lie to your face, there’s really no point in talking to them anymore. It gets you exactly nowhere.

Apparently, I’d spent the last eight years of my life getting exactly nowhere. I just hadn’t known it until that moment.

“We’re all going to take a nice shower, and then I have to go take the trailer back. It sucks that we couldn’t take it back yesterday. I’m really upset about that. That’s a big bite out of our food money.”

I didn’t answer. Because I was officially not speaking to my mom.

I got the feeling she hadn’t noticed.

I wanted to ask where we were supposed to find a place to take a nice shower. I definitely would have, if I’d been speaking to her. I didn’t know yet that the campground had public showers for the campers.

I found out soon enough, though, because I tagged after my mom and Sophie, and that’s where we ended up.

The showers ran on quarters.

My mom took Sophie in with the quarters we had and gave me a dollar. If I wanted a shower, I had to go to the campground hosts and get change.

It was early, and I was afraid I’d wake them up. But then I saw his wife go by the window inside their trailer.

I ducked under their awning and knocked.

The door opened with a light creak, and she peeked out. She had deep wrinkles at the corners of her eyes and mouth, but I could tell she used to be pretty. Or… actually, she sort of still was. Just old pretty instead of young pretty. I saw that scar on her chin right away. It was small, but it was hard for me to look away.

“Good morning,” I said. “You must be Mrs. Campground Host.”

She laughed. “Geralynne,” she said.

“I was wondering if you could give me change for the showers.”

“Of course.”

She took my dollar and disappeared. When she came back with the quarters, I knew they weren’t even half of what I wanted. I stared at my palm as she dropped them into my hand without touching me.

“I also wondered if your husband was around.”

She gave me a curious look.

“No, he’s out checking tags.”

I didn’t know what tags were, and I didn’t ask. It didn’t really matter.

“Oh. I wanted to thank him for yesterday.”

“Are you the girl who lost her sister?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“We didn’t do much. Just kept an eye on your campsite in case she wandered back.”

“Well, I appreciate it.”

“We’re just so glad she’s safe.”

I was beginning to realize that this conversation had something in common with the quarters. Turns out
it
wasn’t really what I was after, either.

“I wanted to tell him I was sorry for something, too.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. He was telling me about your son, and I—”

The look on her face stopped me cold. She turned to stone. Right before my eyes. Fast, too.

Then she looked over my head and said, “Here he comes back, so you can tell him yourself.”

She disappeared into the trailer, leaving the door hanging partway open.

“Good morning,” the man whose name I didn’t know said.

“Hi. I came by to get change for the showers. But your wife helped me with that. And to thank you for yesterday. And also to say I was sorry for something, but I think I upset your wife just now, so I guess I have to be sorry twice.”

I waited, in case he wanted to say something. But he just looked a little confused. So I kept going.

“When you told me about your son, I think I was kind of rude. I didn’t mean to be. But I shouldn’t have said, ‘We’re not doing that.’ Because I don’t know what we’re doing. I can’t really know. I just know what I want. If she starts hurting herself, or even if she gets big, and we can’t handle her, and we’re just getting too hurt… or if she starts running off all the time… maybe we won’t have any choice. I shouldn’t have said it like you were wrong. You probably did what you needed to do. I
hope
we don’t have to do that. That’s all I should have said.”

I watched him take in a big, deep breath. I thought, He’s like my mom. Doesn’t like to get hit with heavy stuff first thing in the morning. Then I felt like it was my fault, and I was doing life all wrong, always in everybody’s face about stuff that’s better left alone. Me, of all people. The one who hates to talk about everything. Or at least, who always did before.

“Don’t think of it like it’s the worst thing in the world,” he said. “There are some nice places. They’re like group homes. They could teach your sister to do as much on her own as she’s able to do.”

“She’s six,” I said. “She’s barely old enough for school.”

“But later…”

“Oh. Later. Yeah. Actually… I hadn’t thought of that. Maybe when she’s eighteen or something. Maybe I’ll grow up and go off on my own and get a job, and she’ll grow up and go to one of those homes and learn stuff. That might be okay. Thing is, if we had to do it now, it would be like we didn’t even raise her. Like we had her and then just sort of changed our minds. Anyway, you don’t need to know all that. I just wanted to say I was sorry.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

He went back into his trailer, and just as I stepped through the gate in their picket fence, I heard Geralynne say, “Why on earth did you tell her about Gary?”

Then I felt bad again, like I was always upsetting people. Always remembering things they wanted to forget. I think I had a broken forgetter.

While I was walking back, I also thought about how I’d said, “
We
had her.” We. Like I had Sophie just as much as my mom did. Then I remembered when Nellie said just the opposite. That my mom had her, but I didn’t. That Sophie wasn’t really my problem. But I didn’t like thinking about Nellie, so I put the whole thing out of my head as best I could. Which—between that and the situation with my dad—didn’t turn out to be a very good job.

My mom stood by the car with her hands on her hips, glaring at me. She was still mad at me for asking what I asked about Dad. But she wasn’t admitting it.

“You’re going? After all you said about not wanting to go?”

“I’m not going. You’re going to drop me at Paul’s.”