Five Minutes More (21 page)

“You figure on wearing those clothes forever?” she asks. She picks up the T-shirt. “See? There's just a little hole here at the neck.” She stuffs it in the bag and snags one of the shoes. “Look at this. These are barely worn but someone drew stuff all over them. Like I care.”

I pick up the shoe that's in front of me. The red canvas is covered with stars and lightning bolts drawn with a black Sharpie. Harmony holds up the pink sweatshirt. “This should fit you.” She points to a white blotch on one sleeve. “Only thing wrong is this bleach mark.”

She takes the shoe and the shirt and jams them both in the bag. “C'mon,” she says. “Let's go before someone sees us.”

“What is this place?” I ask her as we walk.

“It's a store where people sell clothes they don't want anymore.” Harmony doesn't look at me when she talks. She looks everywhere else, watching everything all the time. “Anything that's damaged they just throw out.” She grabs my arm and pulls me down another alley. “If they catch you in the dumpster, they'll call the cops. They'd rather all that stuff be garbage.”

We come out behind the main branch of the library. Inside, Harmony takes me to a washroom at the far end of the children's department. With the door locked behind us, she climbs up on the toilet, pushes back a ceiling tile and pulls down another plastic grocery bag. She rummages inside, throws a pale blue sweater over her shoulder and tosses me a long-sleeve black T-shirt and a comb. She keeps fishing in the bag. “Now where is that?” she mutters. “Oh. Here.” She pulls out a big tube of toothpaste and hands it to me. “No brush. You gotta use a finger,” she says with a shrug.

Harmony shoves the bag back into the hole in the ceiling and puts the other bag with the stuff she just got from the dumpster up beside it. Then she slides the square tile back in place.

“Okay, you can go first,” she says, jumping down off the toilet. “I'll wait outside.”

The first thing I do when the door closes behind her is pee. Then I look at myself in the spotty mirror over the sink. My head is still pounding. My face is sweaty, and there's dirt and crap in my hair.

I wash my face with cold water and soap that looks like pink foam. I comb the knots and junk out of my hair and
pull it back into a ponytail. Finally I shake off my jacket and change my shirt for the one Harmony gave me. It's wrinkled but it smells clean, like bleach. I wish I had clean underwear. I wonder if Harmony gets that out of the garbage too.

I wait outside the door and watch the kids at story time while Harmony gets cleaned up. When she comes out, she's wearing the blue T-shirt with a couple of sparkly pink clips in her hair and frosted pink lipstick.

We head down the street and around the corner to a tiny diner I didn't even know was there. “This place is good,” Harmony says. “The Big Breakfast has a lot of stuff and it's pretty cheap.”

We sit at the counter and order two Big Breakfasts. That turns out to be scrambled eggs, a pancake, ham, fried potatoes and toast. I eat everything because suddenly I'm hungry and I don't know when I'll eat again. I haven't figured out what I'm going to do next. At least the food helps my headache.

After she's finished eating, Harmony takes a lipstick out of her pocket. There's a small mirror on the end of the cap, and she uses it to put on more shiny gloss. I look at the gold case and realize it's not some cheap dollar-store brand. “Did you find that in the dumpster?” I ask.

Harmony is playing with her bangs, squinting at the tiny mirror. “This?” she says. “Yeah, right. I picked this up at the library.”

“What? Someone just left it in that bathroom?”

She laughs. “Someone just left it in their purse and, whoops, it fell out.”

“You stole it?”

“Loosen up, Princess,” she says, snapping the cap back on the lipstick and slipping it in her pocket again. “Stealing is when you take money. I just sorta borrowed this. She probably won't even miss it, and if she does, so what? You shoulda seen that purse. Leather was so freakin' soft. It didn't come out of a dumpster. She can afford another lipstick.”

Harmony slides down off the stool. “Look, I got some stuff to do. Thanks for breakfast,” she says. “I'll find you later.”

She takes off and I count out enough money for the check and a small tip. I have a bit more than a hundred dollars in my purse—most of it money I conned out of my mother. I think about ordering something else just so I can stay here a bit longer, but I know I have to watch my cash.

My school
ID
card is tucked in the front of my wallet. I pull it out and look at the picture. I'm not her anymore. That life is over. Just the way my dad's and Seth's lives are over.

Tears fill my eyes and I swipe at them with the sleeve of my jacket because I'm not going to cry. Not here. I bend the card until it snaps in half, and I break those pieces too. I drop them all in the garbage can by the door.

I start walking back toward the library, and when I turn the corner, there they are. My mother and Marissa are standing on the sidewalk in front of the main library entrance. I back-pedal without looking where I'm going and step into a narrow alley between an art supply store and a candy shop.

They're stopping everyone who walks by. Is that my picture my mother's showing people? What's that pile of papers Marissa's holding? Flyers? What do they say?
Have You Seen This Girl
?

They want D'Arcy. I have D'Arcy's face, but that's all. Her life is over. She doesn't exist anymore. Would they understand that? Everyone D'Arcy loved is dead. Now D'Arcy is dead. Or close enough.

My mother and Marissa are looking for a dead person. I turn down the alley and walk away.

I head back to the hill and the old hospital, walking the way Harmony brought us, sticking to alleys and the back of buildings as much as I can. At the back of one old brick building, there's a row of blue recycling bins. One of them is filled with magazines and newspapers. I look around. I don't see anyone. I reach into the bin and yank out several magazines without even looking to see what they are.

Then I take off, hugging the magazines to my chest.

I don't stop for a breath until I've climbed up over the stone wall and found the path up the hill. I sit on the dried grass in the sun, with my back against the old hospital wall. The sun's already warmed the stones, and the heat soaks into my back.

I lay out the magazines. I have an issue of
People
from last week, plus
Vanity Fair
and
National Geographic
from a month ago.

I read the magazines and watch the cars go by on the street below. There's an article about Mexico in
National Geographic
. My dad went to Mexico to take pictures for a story in some other travel magazine. I'm never going to Mexico. I'm never going anywhere.

When I'm hungry again, I head down the hill and walk over to the park Harmony talked about, staying off the sidewalks as much as I can. I use the washroom and then I get something to eat at a little store across from the park that sells newspapers and cigarettes and other stuff—a wrapped sandwich with ham and pickles, a banana, a bottle of apple juice and a bag of chips.

Harmony doesn't come back until it's getting dark. “You hungry?” she asks. She's carrying a brown paper bag. There's a big grease stain on one end.

“Yeah, a little,” I say.

Harmony sits, cross-legged, on the ground and opens the bag. She hands me what turns out to be a bacon cheeseburger, unwraps one for herself and pulls out a bottle of wine cooler. She takes a long drink and offers the bottle to me. I wipe the opening on my shirt, then take a drink. It's kind of sweet, but I don't really care. I turn the bottle around—
Mandarin Mango
the label says.

We finish our food, passing the wine cooler back and forth until the bottle is empty.

“That's all I have,” Harmony says, setting the empty bottle spinning in the dirt. “You got any more money? I can probably get us a bottle like last night.”

“I have a little left,” I tell her. I take a twenty out of my
purse and hand it to her, careful not to let her see how much cash I actually have.

“Let's go,” Harmony says, getting to her feet.

We go back to the same place at the bend in the road. I wait, the same as I did the night before, and just like then we end up with a bottle of wine and a few cigarettes.

We walk back to our place along the old hospital foundation. “You don't mind I got a few smokes, do you?” Harmony asks.

“I don't care,” I say. The warm buzzing in my head from the wine cooler is already disappearing. All I care about is the bottle.

For some reason it seems to have more in it or be lasting longer. Maybe it's a magic bottle. Maybe it's never going to be empty. I hold the bottle up and try looking down the neck. When I do that, I see two bottles. My magic bottle has split into two bottles.

“I have to pee,” I tell Harmony.

She helps me partway down the hill because the magic bottle has cast an evil spell on my legs and they don't work so well. Behind a clump of alders, I manage to squat and get my pants down before I pee myself. “I'm camping,” I shout to the world, flinging my arms in the air.

I fall backward and slide a few feet farther down the hill. “Olympic luge,” I shout. “Go for the gold!”

Harmony helps me stand and fix my pants.

“I could do it,” I say. “I could be a luger. Or is that a lugette?”

“How would I know?” Harmony says. She sets me against the wall.

I reach for the bottle, almost knocking it over. “To luging,” I say, raising it high in the air before taking a drink. I fall sideways. Harmony grabs the bottle before I hit the dirt. And then there isn't anything else.

I'm puking. I feel puke on my face and my hair, and I can't get my head up. I press my hand over my mouth and vomit spews between my fingers and down my arm.

I can't...can't breathe. Can't...breathe. I try...I try to get a breath...no air...

Flashes of light go off in my head. My mouth hangs open and I'm twitching, grabbing at my throat, trying, trying to breathe.

I can't...no air...

Something, someone, kicks me hard in the back. I roll forward onto my face, vomit one more time, turn my face just a little and somehow suck in a breath.

“She's all right,” a voice says from far away.

I take another rough breath and another. Finally, somehow, I manage to sit up. I wipe vomit off my face. There are clumps of puke all down my front.

It's dark. Shivering, I curl into a little ball against the wall. My head feels like it's too big for my body, and I can't keep my eyes open.

It's just beginning to get light when I wake up. My head feels like someone is beating on it with a hammer. When I move, something sharp stabs into the middle
of my back. I get to my feet slowly, holding on to the brick wall.

My clothes are covered with dirt and puke. My hair is matted with dried leaves and bits of gravel. I know before I look inside my purse that all my money is gone. I feel sick.

I don't know what to do.

There's a crumpled piece of purple paper on the ground. Marissa was carrying a pile of purple papers when I saw her with my mother outside the library. Was that yesterday?

I pick the paper up and smooth it flat. The words float in front of my eyes as though they're going to sail right off the page:
SETH IS ALIVE
.

That's all it says, in big black letters. But I was at the hospital. He can't be.
He can't be.
I asked God to make it different, to make my father be alive, and he didn't. So how can Seth be alive? It's just a trick to get me to go home.

I hear the Chuck Wagon pull up. I take a couple of steps around the wall and look up the hill. The old van is there, the back doors already open.

And my mother is there, pouring coffee and showing the flyer to everyone. And then I see Marissa and Mr. Kelly and Alice from across the street in her sandals and wool socks.

I look down at the paper in my hand. My eyes swim with tears. I swipe at them with the back of my hand. I watch my mother move from person to person, slowly getting closer to where I'm standing. I should move, hide, but I don't.

She hands a cup of coffee to a girl in a long black coat, and as the girl moves away, my mother looks down the hill and sees me. She takes one step toward me, eyes on my face as though
she expects me to run. Then another step. And another. She slips, puts out a hand and almost falls, but she keeps coming, scrambling down the bank to me.

Her hair isn't combed. She's wearing jeans and a heavy dark sweater with buttons. She reaches for me and I take a step backward. Her hand drops to her side. “Oh baby, I'm so glad you're all right,” she says. A tear trails down her cheek. She brushes it away. “I'm sorry. I'm sorry you felt you had to run away.” She lets out a breath. “I haven't done this right. I don't know how to be a family without your father. But I'm going to find out. I promise.”