The Day I Killed James Page 11

  She looked around. A bit defensive. Or detached. Like I had asked her to do some bothersome homework. And she was more or less just phoning it in. “A nice place. It’s cool.”

  “One room. With one tiny bathroom. No kitchen. No refrigerator. One twin bed.”

  “I’ll sleep on the floor.”

  “No kitchen,” I repeated.

  “We’ll eat out.”

  “And I assume you’ll be picking up the check?”

  I regretted that. As soon as I said it. It was a valid truth. But the delivery felt harsh.

  More valid truth. I was getting low on money myself. I needed to get a job. I’d been eating fast food and allowing Frieda to sneak me leftovers. I honestly couldn’t afford anyone else on the tab.

  But oh my God. That was so only the beginning.

  “Look,” I said. “This place is barely a home for one. I’m sorry.”

  “That’s not why,” she said. “That’s not really the reason. You just don’t want me.”

  “Kid,” I said. The name thing still had me slightly off balance. “I don’t even want me.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense.” She had stopped biting her nails. Switched to hugging and kissing Leevon. Not realizing that her vulnerability was showing.

  “What I mean is, just taking care of myself…just turning my own mess back into a life…I’m not even sure I’m up to doing my own stuff right now.”

  “I won’t be any trouble. I promise. I’ll help. I’ll clean up. I’ll find some ways to make money or something.”

  “You can’t stay here,” I said. With a finality that sounded really sad. Even to me. “I’m sorry.”

  Silence hung for quite a long time. Then I reached out to put a hand on her shoulder. Not hard to do. That little room was so small that two people couldn’t really get far outside touching distance. She jerked away. Jumped to her feet. I had let the cork out of the bottle. She was pissed.

  “I’m not going into foster care! I’m not! My friend Tara was in foster care. I’ll live on the street before I let them get me. I’ll run away.”

  “Down, girl,” I said. “You already ran away.” She sat on the bed again, looking more than a little defeated. “Now let’s just calmly consider our options here. What do you have in the way of blood family?”

  She was looking down as I asked the question. Down and partly away. She sniffled quietly. Wiped her nose on her sleeve. That’s when I got that she was crying. But not for effect. She was trying hard to hide it. “Not much. Just a grandmother in Bellingham. But she won’t take me.”

  “Where’s Bellingham?”

  “Washington State. Way up near Canada. It’s pretty there. We were up there once. But she won’t take me.”

  “How do you know?”

  “She’s Harold’s mother. My dad. He died. I called him Harold. She hates my mother.”

  “You’re not your mother.”

  “Close enough, though.”

  “We could call her.”

  “She doesn’t have a phone.”

  “You’re joking.”

  “Not so much, no.”

  “Who doesn’t have a phone in this day and age?”

  “My grandmother. For one.”

  As I stopped to try to imagine such a thing, it struck me that I was taking the word of what you might call an unreliable narrator. In other words, a liar.

  “Are you lying to me so I won’t call her?”

  She raised her hand as if in a court of law. “May God strike me dead if I’m not telling the truth.”

  She didn’t glance up at the sky or anything, as if expecting a lightning bolt. Not exactly ironclad proof. But I figured there was maybe a sixty or seventy percent chance that her grandmother honestly didn’t have a phone.

  “I don’t know what we’re supposed to do here,” I said. I didn’t realize how defeated I felt until I heard myself say it.

  “Me neither,” she said.

  I mean, I couldn’t just put her out on the street. Could I? I resented having somehow become responsible. I tried to track how and when that had happened. But somehow it had happened. If I put her out, she might end up dead. And someone could come to me and say, You what? You put a defenseless eleven-year-old girl out on the street by herself? Why didn’t you help her?

  No one would come to me and say that, of course. I would do it to myself.

  I said, “I guess you’ll have to stay here just until we figure out what to do with you.”

  “I’m not going into foster care,” she said again.

  “Yeah, I got that.”

  “If I find out you called Child Protective Services, I’m gone forever.”

  “Oh, now there’s a threat that has me shaking in my boots.”

  That seemed to bump her out of her gangster mode and remind her she was a lost child with precious few options.

  I chewed on our precious few options for a few moments. Until she said, “What are you thinking about?” Like whatever it was, I could hurt her just by thinking it.

  “I was wondering if my piece-of-crap old car would make it almost as far as Canada.”

  A long silence. I could hear her breathing. I could feel the world—at least her world—freeze solid into her fear.

  “What if she won’t take me?”

  “I think it might be harder to say no if she was looking you right in the face.”

  “But what if she won’t?”

  Good question, actually. But when only one possible option remains, I find it best not to question it too thoroughly. And I said so.

  After that she didn’t have much to say. So I guess the doubts were more or less all she had.

  Journal Entry _________________________

  Writing: The day the kid showed up

  About: Now

  To fail to see the significance of this thing, a person would have to be blind, deaf, dead, and stupid. Maybe I flatter myself, but I like to think I’m none of the above.

  It’s as plain as the nose on my face. The Universe has sentenced me to perform community service.

  It’s about time someone sentenced me to something. Someone besides me, that is. Which is not to say I’m the least bit happy about it.

  First of all, I’ve had to slip down into the barn just to get the privacy to write this. And the barn is the last place I saw James alive. So that’s not fun at all.

  Second of all, how am I supposed to help somebody get through something when I’m completely lost in that same something myself?

  Journal Entry _________________________

  Writing: The night of the day the kid showed up

  About: Now

  Last-minute change of plans. The kid is sleeping up in my little room. With Leevon. I’m down in the barn.

  It’s sort of hard to explain.

  I couldn’t sleep in the same room with her. The room is just too small. And she kept looking at me. I was getting claustrophobic.

  It’s not so bad down here. I know I just complained about it last time I wrote in this journal. I haven’t forgotten that. But I was just weirded out by the whole James thing. It’s not exactly like the whole “barn as it relates to James” thing has evaporated. It’s more like it’s stopped feeling so bad to me. It almost feels like a good thing.

  I can remember his face tonight. Not struggle to put it together feature by feature. Remember it. Not just the hair color and the shape of his face but fully animated, actual James. I can picture him over in the corner of the barn, getting me a soda.

  Just in my imagination. I’m not hallucinating.

  I miss James.

  But that’s not really fair, in a weird way. Because if he’d just walked out of my life that night, I’m not sure I ever would have. It’s genuine, my missing him. But why did it take a thing like that to wake it up?

  Something about the whole thing doesn’t seem right.

  The coolers are gone from the corner of the barn. Of course. The only leftover from the party is the hay an
d the straw. I guess there was no point dragging out all that hay and straw.

  So I’m fairly comfortable in the stall where James and I…were.

  It seemed wrong to kick the kid downstairs. Make her sleep in the barn. Like child abuse or something. She’s been evicted plenty enough for one lifetime.

  And I’m really okay down here.

  I wonder if I’ll feel better after I’ve done my community service. I wonder, also, if just giving her a lift to Bellingham will turn out to be enough. Maybe I’m also supposed to know how to help her deal with what happened. In which case I’m going to have to learn whatever it is I need to know as I go along.

  I figure we’ll leave tomorrow. So I guess I’m going to have to find wisdom tonight in my sleep.

  TWO

  Betrayals Large and Small

  So that’s what I get for allowing about a cubic millimeter of soft spot to form in my heart for that juvenile delinquent. I gave her my bed and slept in the barn, and this was how she repaid me. I got home in the morning with this pathetic bag of fast-food breakfast for both of us, and the little shit was lying on the bed reading my journal.

  The minute she saw me, she threw it back under the bed.

  “Ah,” I said. “Very good. Now it’s all erased again. Now you’ve rewound time and nothing is wrong at all.”

  I was still in the process of processing my anger. And we both knew it.

  She sat very still with her eyes wide, waiting for me to say it.

  So I did. “Get out.”

  A long silence. No movement. No glorious lack of juvenile delinquent journal invader.

  Then she said, “Out?”

  “That would be the operative word, yes. Out.”

  “You mean, like, for good?”

  “Yes. It will be very good to have you out.”

  “But you were going to drive me to my grandmother’s.”

  “Yes. I was. Before you betrayed my trust completely.”

  She slunk out without further comment. I was beginning to see her mother in a slightly new light. There was definitely something about the kid that made you want to see her walk out the door.

  Sometime around dark the door opened and Frieda walked in without knocking. See? I’m occasionally right about something.

  She had a pile of my clean laundry in her hands. Stuff I had left in the dryer. She had even folded it. Frieda is like that.

  “Okay,” she said. “Tell me the story about the kid sitting on the curb.”

  For reasons hard to explain, I decided not to hit that one head-on. “Now why would you even notice a kid sitting on a curb? What’s it to you?”

  “It’s making my parents paranoid. Or I guess I should say even more paranoid. They’re hiding behind the curtain, drinking vodka and peeking out the window at her. They probably think she’s some kind of miniature CIA agent watching the house.”

  She might have been exaggerating to be funny. But with her parents you never know.

  “So why would you think I know the kid-sitting-on-the-curb story?”

  She pulled a very small pair of jeans off the top of the pile. Much smaller than I could ever wear. They were, in fact, the kid’s jeans. “Maybe because she’s sitting out there in hugely oversized jeans and a T-shirt I know is yours, and some clothes her size seem to have made it into your load of laundry. That and the fact that you and the little curb sitter are just about the only two females in the world with that rather unusual haircut.”

  I rubbed my eyes. Sighed. “Do I really have to tell you the story? Or can I just go out and take care of it?”

  “You’re not much of a storyteller,” she said. “I’ll take door number two.”

  The kid glanced over as I sat next to her on the curb. But she said nothing. We both said nothing. For a truly bizarre length of time.

  Then she said, “I wanted to know something about you. You don’t tell me anything. I wanted to know the things you won’t tell me.”

  “The things I won’t tell you are none of your business.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s not that easy. You can’t just do bad shit and then say you’re sorry. Two words don’t erase what you did.” A long silence fell as I considered my words in light of what she might have just read in my journal. Speaking of the things we do wrong. But maybe she had only read a couple of pages. Which was probably still enough. “How much did you read?”

  Long pause. “Up to the part where you were talking to your father. After you came home.”

  “So basically just about all of it.”

  “I guess.” Long pause. “I’m sorry.”

  “Yeah, you said that.”

  “Except I’m not. I mean, I am. But if I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have known…you know.”

  I raised a finger and pointed it at her nose in warning. But it took me a minute to figure out how the warning was going to go. “Don’t start thinking I have what you need. Because I don’t. Don’t think I can march you through what to do after something like this happens, because I’m still totally lost in it myself. If I can’t even save myself, how am I supposed to save you? It’s pretty hopeless, kid.”

  She chewed on that a moment. Then she said, “At least we’re in trouble together.” A bit too brightly, I thought.

  “God. What did I do to deserve you? Oh. Never mind. I just remembered.”

  We sat quietly for a minute longer. I could hear crickets singing, and a tree frog. They have big lungs, those tiny frogs. A guy rode by on a bicycle with flashing reflector lights blinking in the dark. I envied him. I wanted his life. I knew it was simpler than either of ours. Probably better than the lives of two pathetic curb sitters put together.

  I said, “I ate both of our breakfasts. Hours ago. But I might have an energy bar or something. You get to sleep in the barn tonight. We’ll leave in the morning.”

  “So you’re still gonna take me?”

  “I have to do something with you.”

  “Thanks. I really am sorry about the journal.”

  “Let’s just try to get some sleep. We’ve got a long trip ahead.”

  Journal Entry _________________________

  The last entry I will ever write in this journal

  I really only took it out because I was going to destroy it. Seriously. I was going to rip out all the pages a few at a time and burn them in the bathroom sink. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Some weird little thing in the back of my head says I wrote it all down for a reason and I might want to see it all laid out. Someday.

  Besides, now that I’ve quit smoking, I don’t have a match. I don’t have one single item designed to create fire.

  I like to think the first reason is more important.

  On the other hand, I’m damn sure not putting any more of my guts out in black and white so other people can sneak a look without my permission.

  I think when I’m done with this final entry I’ll fold this journal up in a sweater and put it in the drawer. Hopefully it will be safe while we’re gone. After all, the little sneak thief will be with me.

  Speaking of the devil, as I write this she’s using my laptop. Visions of hard-drive crashes dance in my head. But she swears she just wants to look up directions to her grandmother’s house. But I might be getting better at knowing when she’s lying. And she might have been lying. But I’m not sure. Maybe I’m being too suspicious. Hard to blame me by now.

  I only get a wireless connection about half the time. And I have no printer up here, so she has to write down the directions. Which may explain why she’s taking so long.

  Meanwhile I’m trying not to obsess about her teeth.

  She came here with the clothes on her back. Which means no toothbrush. Which means it’s been about three days since she brushed her teeth. And we’ll be another two or three days on the road.

  I guess we have stops in our future.

  What a note to end on, eh? Somebody else’s teeth. But this is the end. My journaling days are over. Not a
moment too soon.

  THREE

  Irritating Role Reversals

  So there we were. Headed up Highway 101 in my crappy old car. With the juvenile delinquent journal invader sneak thief in the shotgun seat. We hadn’t made any stops yet. I was trying not to obsess about her teeth. No point being codependent. After all, they were her teeth. Not mine.

  Things were actually looking fairly good. Something about the aimless, unfinished feeling of driving. I’m loath to admit it, but I actually had that Willie Nelson song, the one about being on the road again, running around in my brain.

  It might almost have been a good day.

  Then the kid opened her mouth.

  “So we have to go through San Francisco anyway. Right?”

  I glanced over at her. Sensing a bit of subtext.

  “Not exactly. Why?”

  “Doesn’t this road go to San Francisco?”

  “Yeah. More or less. But we’re going to skirt around it. Not go right through the city. Otherwise we’ll get bogged down in traffic.”

  “Oh.” Disappointment. Subtext.

  A knotty feeling in the pit of my stomach. Which means I’m smart enough to know when I’m about to be sucker punched.

  “Why? What’s in San Francisco?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Then why are you asking?”

  “No reason. I guess.”

  I sighed. “Why not just spit it out, kid?”

  “If we’re not going through there, then it doesn’t matter.”

  “Okay. Theoretically. Let’s just say for the sake of conversation that we were about to go through San Francisco. What’s in San Francisco?”

  “I just thought maybe we could stop and see James’s mom.”

  My foot hit the brake with no forethought whatsoever. And stayed there. The driver behind me leaned on his horn and then passed me on the left. I pulled over onto the shoulder. Pulled on the hand brake. I could feel my heart racing. I could hear my pulse pound in my ears. Feel it throb in my neck. I held the wheel tightly so I would never need to know if my hands were shaking. But I suspected they might be.