Where We Belong (30 page)

Silence. I focused on the little lights out the window.

“How’s Rachel doing with all this?”

For probably a full ten seconds, all I heard was his breathing. It seemed weird that I could hear it so clearly. Like he was breathing purposefully and carefully instead of naturally.

“She’s beside herself,” he said. Then a long pause. Then, “And it’s really hard. You know. To…”

I waited. For a long time. Wondering if I’d ever hear the end of that sentence. It wasn’t one I could just guess.

“…watch her loving him so much.”

His voice kind of broke up on the last words. But not really into crying, exactly. He just sort of crumbled.

He didn’t say anything for a long time, and neither did I. I had no idea what to say to him, and it seemed like maybe he was never going to talk again.

“It was so much easier when I only saw them for a few hours once or twice a month. I think I was in this insane denial. Like, yeah, they’d been married for decades, but it wasn’t all that serious. Like they just sort of existed in the same house, but… I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m saying. What was I thinking, coming down here? Watching her with him, day in and day out? Watching how hard it is for her to lose him? What was I thinking?”

“I think you wanted to be there for both of them. I think you knew it would be hard, but you knew you’d regret it if you didn’t.”

“I didn’t know it would be
this
hard.”

In some small way, it broke some part of my heart. I guess I let my heart be close to his for a split second. And I felt the break. It was weird. Like nothing that had ever happened to me before. Then again, I usually kept plenty of distance between me and everybody else.

I had no idea what to say.

“I should go,” he said.

“You don’t have to.”

“That was a lot more than I meant to tell you.”

“It’s okay, though. I mean, it’s okay with me.”

“I just need to go sit by myself and process this.”

“You can call again.”

“I think I have to now. It’s like when you don’t let yourself cry, but then you do. It’s one thing to open that floodgate. It’s another thing to get it shut again.”

“Call anytime.”

“Goodnight, Angie.”

“Goodnight.”

I went to bed. But I didn’t get to sleep until the wee small hours of the morning. And even then, I didn’t manage to sleep much.

I woke up when I heard the doggie door flap open, then fall closed again. I thought it was Rigby going out to pee. So I just rolled over to see if I could go back to sleep. But I rolled right into Rigby. She was up on the bed with me. Her head was up, and she was looking toward the back room. She’d heard the flap, too.

I told myself to get up and go see what it was. But I was frozen. I wondered if wild animals would come in through that thing. It was a big doggie door. It had to be. Or it would be of no use to Rigby. I’d worried about that once, when I first came here to stay. But I’d figured Rigby would defend the place.

Now I wondered if it was fair to make her try.

Before I could think it out any better than that, Sophie stuck her head into the bedroom.

“Hem!” she squealed.

I was on my feet before I even knew I was about to get up.

“Sophie! No! You can’t be in here!”

I grabbed her up, almost without thinking, and she gave my thigh a vicious kick. I half dropped her, half set her down. I grabbed her hand and tried to pull her toward the back door. She started that ear-splitting keen, sliding along the wood floor on her bare, braced feet.

“Rigby,” I shouted. “Come on. Let’s go out.”

Rigby jumped down off the bed, and the three of us walked down the hall to the back door together. Sophie quieted right down and walked right along. Of course. Of course she’d stop shrieking if I gave her what she wanted. Access to the dog. Which I’d just done a second time.

I still felt half asleep, and I couldn’t get my brain to function. I knew I had a problem, and I was only making it worse. But I couldn’t think it out any more clearly than that. I had no idea how to solve it. That is, without letting her scream till she lost her voice. Which I couldn’t do while we were here at Paul’s house.

She’d been so good about trusting she’d see Rigby again soon. I had no idea where that had gone. Or why. Or what to do about it.

We stepped out the back door and onto the landing, and I looked up to the apartment and saw the door hanging wide open.

“Come on,” I said. To both of them. “Let’s go have a talk with Mom.”

My mom was fast asleep on the foldout couch.

“What was that all about?” I asked. Nice and loud. It didn’t seem right for her to go back to sleep after causing a problem like that.

She sat up. Looked around. Looked at me. Rubbed her eyes.

“Close that door,” she said. “It’s cold.”

I felt my jaw drop open.

“Close the door?
Close the door
?”

“What part of ‘close the door’ don’t you understand?”

“I didn’t
open
the door. You did. And I just woke up with Sophie in the big house. Where’s she’s not allowed to be. Did she wake up fussing, and you just decided to sic her on me?”

“Kiddo, you woke me up just now. I’ve been asleep all night.”

“Well, then, who let Sophie out?”

“I have no idea.”

I didn’t entirely believe her. I couldn’t. Maybe she’d been half asleep.

“I wonder if Sophie learned to open the door,” she said.

“Impossible.”

But it wasn’t impossible at all. That was just the problem. Sophie wasn’t stupid. She was different. But the differences didn’t involve lack of brain power. I wanted it to be impossible. That’s why I said it was. But that didn’t make it so.

“Even if she did,” my mom said, “how did she get into the big house? Don’t you lock the doors when you go to sleep?”

“She came in through the doggie door.”

“Oh.”

“Now I don’t know what to do. I want to go back in the house, but now she’s awake. So now she’ll scream.”

“Leave the dog here.”

“I can’t keep doing that. It’s just training her to scream.”

“Fine. Don’t keep doing it. But do it now. Then the van’ll come, and she’ll go off to school. And next time she sees the dog, it’ll be something different. Like you come get her and take her for a walk. Like in the old days. And you can tell her she’ll see Rigby tomorrow. Like in the old days. And then maybe we can get back into some kind of a normal pattern here.”

I wasn’t the least bit sure that would work. But it felt good to hear a plan come from my mom. Whether it was a good plan or not, at least she was practicing.

So I said, “Rigby, stay here with Sophie, okay?”

And I walked out and left them there. And went back up the back stairs, and went back to bed.

But I was too worried to get any sleep.

Sophie got home at about a quarter after four. I was braced for just about anything. What I didn’t expect was to hear my mom yelling. All the way up the driveway.

“Sophie, wait! Sophie, come back!”

I winced, thinking of Paul’s neighbors. I wondered how long it would be before they complained to him. And how he would take it when they did.

Then my mom’s yelling morphed into yelling to me.

“Angie, look out! Block the doggie door or something!”

I was sitting at the kitchen table, and I looked down at Rigby, who was already looking up into my face. Like she was wondering whether I had any explanations or instructions.

“You want to go for a walk?” I asked her.

She stood up and started wagging. Of course. What else would she do? That’s not a yes-or-no question for a dog. It’s a yes question.

I stayed clear of that lethal tail on the way down the hall to the back bedroom. I grabbed her leash off the peg by the door. We stepped out onto the landing together just as Sophie hit the bottom of the stairs.

“Wait there,” I told Sophie. “We’re coming down. We’re going for our walk.”

She didn’t wait. She started up the stairs.

I didn’t like my odds if I tried to reason with her, so instead I just led Rigby down the stairs, and when Sophie bumped into us, she had no choice but to turn and walk back down again.

We all three walked down the driveway past my mom, who looked like a limp dish towel somebody needed to wring out.

“We’re fine,” I said. “We’re going for a walk.”

She let out a deep breath but didn’t say anything. And also, she didn’t look much happier or more settled.

That was the problem with being the one who solved everything. I tried to take the stress off my mom, but then, it was more like we both had it.

Sometimes I wasn’t sure if I was solving anything at all.

We walked all the way into town. I was hoping it would tire Sophie out. I was hoping it wouldn’t make Rigby stiff or sore. It was always a balancing act. My whole life was one big act of skating on a frozen pond not long before the spring thaw.

Everybody seemed to know us.

It wasn’t a total surprise. But there was something…
more
about it that day, and that surprised me. It was a very small town. Just a village, really, and we’d been walking those streets for a year. And it’s hard to miss a teenage girl with a dog the size of a small pony and an autistic kid.

Mostly, I didn’t know them except for their faces. Sometimes I knew how I knew them, like the woman who worked at the post office or the guy who was a checker at the supermarket. I saw three girls I knew from school. Two pretended not to see me back. Or maybe they really didn’t. It’s always hard to tell about a thing like that.

I passed this one woman, and she smiled at us. And she said, “Hi, Sophie.”

I stopped. “How do you know Sophie’s name?” I asked.

“My daughter is in the Special Ed program,” she said. “Sophie’s already in the van when Mr. Maribal stops for her every morning.”

“Oh. Nice to meet you.”

Then we just kept walking. But it was a strange feeling. And it took me awhile to put my finger on why. Something about people noticing us. Knowing they knew us. Knowing we lived around here. Which meant if we were about to not live around here anymore, somebody would actually notice we were gone. It was like existing in a way I’d never been totally convinced I existed before.