Harry Sue (17 page)

Granny always drew the curtains. She didn't want strangers to know we had no man in the house. But the picture window at Baba's was completely bare. With the room lit up, it looked like the stage at the Cherry Creek Playhouse in Marshfield, where every fourth grader at Trench Vista goes to see a matinee to get some culture. Looking through that window was more interesting to me than any play in the whole world even though there was only one lamp, an overstuffed chair, and a worn-out rug on the floor.

This was the home of Baba, where strange fruits and chunks of meat and spices got mixed together, where he cleaned out the clay from under his fingernails, where he tossed and turned in bed after waking from a nightmare about real lions, not some lame movie lion who was just a buster in a cat suit.

What I wanted to do was sit outside his window until he walked into the room. I wanted to watch him turn out the light.

But instead, I went on searching.

The light from the living room had given me a little strength, but when I turned away, that strength poured out of me, like emptying a glass of water onto the ground. I was so tired. The backyard was dark and cold. Every once in a while, the
clouds would move and a little light would fall on the ground, but otherwise I had to make my way in the dark.

Baba took care of things. That was clear. There were still flowers, even though it was October, and there was shredded stuff in the flower beds to keep out the weeds.

I was going to grow stuff, too, someday, after I found Mary Bell and we got sprung. I liked flowers. Not those stupid cheerful all-day flowers, like daisies, that reminded me of teachers who smiled no matter what, even when they were boiling mad.

I liked big flowers, like poppies, that held secrets inside them. You can't cut a poppy and stick it in a vase. It just shrivels right up. You gotta leave poppies alone.

If you'd read the book, you would know that it was poppies that put Dorothy to sleep, not those stupid plastic flowers they made in some factory out in California and waved all over that stupid movie set. But even so, I liked poppies.

Or those other ones that make such a fuss out of their own petals, any wind can knock them over. They just lie on the ground, like Homer, helpless, but still beautiful. Mrs. Mead grew those flowers next door. You watched the buds getting fat for weeks, then right when they should bloom, they lie on the ground like they don't care for living at all.

My teeth started to chatter and I had to push
that mess about flowers out of my mind and concentrate. At the back of the little garden was a shed with the door held closed by a latch. When I lifted it, the door swung away, banging against the side. I was too tired to jump at the noise. I stepped inside, letting my eyes get used to an even darker darkness. There were sacks of things along the wall and big clay flowerpots stacked upside down in a tall tower near the door.

He wouldn't need those until spring, would he? I set down my backpack and pried the pots apart. That's where I set the letter. Then I fished around in the cold ashes of my backpack for the pieces of smoochy girl, the squirrel, the four-fingered princess, and the peasant boy. When I'd laid them on the ground, I stuck my hand in one of the sacks along the wall. Inside, it felt smooth and cold. Sand. I put Granny's pretties in the bag of sand. Maybe Baba would fill a hole in the spring with this sand and a china tree would grow from the nut held between the squirrel's paws.

After I closed up the bag, there was nothing left to do but surrender my mind to the real reason I was there, Fish. Not that you'll ever be bumpin' your gums about it. Drop a dime on Harry Sue and live to regret it.

I sat down on the floor of Baba's shed, put my empty backpack against my face, and started to cry. You know the sort of cry where you're afraid your
insides will leak out? Where your stomach's pushing so hard, you wonder if it will jump into your throat and make you choke on it? Well, I cried like that in Baba's shed.

And I knew then why I had found my way to this place, putting my hands in the very same places where Baba put his hands. Because I had to let the thought approach my mind that maybe there never were any letters from Mary Bell, Fish. It was possible that Mary Bell had forgotten all about me.

After I'd wiped the snot and the tears off my face, I dragged myself back around to the front of the house, where I saw another light had been turned on in the hall. Baba stood at the door, looking out into the darkness as if searching. I don't think he heard me and I was sure he hadn't seen me because I hid back in the bushes. He was looking for something else, something that wasn't there, like Dorothy searching for Aunt Em's face in the land of the Munchkins.

He pressed one big cream-colored palm to the window. I was frozen. Waiting. Finally he gave up looking for something out there and moved to the chair in the front room. A piece of bright-colored material was draped over one arm of the chair and Baba picked it up as he sat, pressing it between his fingers, as if what he might be looking for was hiding in the threads.

Then suddenly, he was attacked from behind by
a blur of fabric and red, red hair. Thrown forward onto the ground, they wrestled together, and I was just about to forget myself again and bust up the front door in a rush to protect him when it hit me like a sucker punch.

Baba was rolling on the floor with J-Cat. They weren't wrestling, they were hugging each other. Baba put his head on her shoulder and she stroked his ear slowly. They sat on the floor, her crazy flowered dress spread in front of her, spread over both of them, and she looked at the piece of cloth that he was holding.

He wiped his eyes quickly, like he was wiping away sweat, but I know he was crying, Fish.

That's the kind of secret that we shared.

As I turned to go, I saw J-Cat's orange Volvo in the pool of porch light that spilled into the garage.

On the way home, it started to rain again.

Imagine you've been sentenced to an all day, Fish. You're retired. And you've only done an eight ball. You wake up one morning, knowing you'll only ever see the sun rise through loops of razor-sharp ribbon wire. That's a place no conette ever wants to go. Why? Because it's the last stop before the ding wing, that's why. When you're faced with life in prison and you're not even close to checking out, you've got to find yourself some coping skills. As you have probably observed, Fish, coping is my middle name. When those thoughts occurred to me about Mary Bell, I did what the lifers do. I tried to think of something else. I started singing old songs in my head. I picked the lock on the cash box in Granny's bedroom and conned Ariel Dinkins
into a ride to Harvey's Home Improvement Center to score a safety gate. I put those thoughts of Mary Bell in a cupboard with Carly Mae's busted bear and I moved along.

“Okay, pick up the phone,” Homer said next day when I stopped in after detention. “I memorized the number.”

“That lady doesn't want to talk to us, Homes. I'm not calling.”

“Sure, Consuela wants to talk to us.” He looked pale. Even though it was getting colder, Homer still spent part of every day in his tree house. His hands felt like ice.

“I've talked to her three times since you did,” he said, looking very satisfied with himself. “All the conettes there know me.”

“Who's been dialing then?” I asked, trying to sound like it didn't matter.

“Recently, Mrs. Dinkins and I have been spending more quality time together,” Homer answered matter-of-factly, as if that wasn't news.

“
She's
been coming up here?”

Homer gave me his “and you were born … ?” look.

“Look, Harry Sue. I'm not the only gimp to exist on the planet, and you're not the only conette kid who's lost her mother. Consuela doesn't have kids, but her super has two and there's a ‘no contact’ rule
between them, mostly due to the fact that Alicia tried to hire an undercover cop to off her husband.”

“What are you on about?”

“They're rooting for you, dog. There's nothing more important than blood to a conette.”

“So?”

“So what's the matter with you, Harry Sue? You're awful funny today. Seems to me like the closer we get to finding—”

I put my fingers to Homer's lips to quiet him. At that moment, all I wanted to do was put grass under my feet. But you can't walk away from a conversation in a tree house.

I forced myself to look Homer in the eye and
focus!
as thoughts banged on the other side of the cupboard, trying to get out.

“I'm afraid, Homes,” I whispered. “Afraid Mary Bell doesn't want to be found.”

He was already mad that I put my fingers on his mouth. Shutting him up was a serious sign of disrespect. But now he was even madder.

“I say you're off your nut, Harry Sue. You're not afraid she doesn't want you. You're afraid you don't want her.”

Homer had gone too far. I stepped back from his bed, almost tripping over the big crusty rock that J-Cat had brought back from Grand Haven and now took up most of the floor space that was left.

“Because when you two do connect, that's what will be for real.”

“And you're the one who knows what's for real? Up here? In slam down?”

“Why don't you be honest, Harry Sue? I know why I'm here.”

“Okay, then. Be honest. Give it to me. Why are you here instead of down there?”
With her.

We were fighting. We were landing invisible blows. What was it Beau said about wounding with words? I didn't want to fight with Homer. I wanted to back down.

“Let's stop, Homer,” I said. I was pleading with him.
Before we go too far.

“We can't stop, Harry Sue. Just like you can't keep Mary Bell up there in your mind forever. She's gonna get sprung, dog. Sooner or later, she's gonna get sprung.”

“And I
do so
want to be there.” I folded my arms and turned to the wall.

“I know you do.” Homer sighed a long sigh. “Okay?”

I didn't answer him, but he tried to rally anyway, tried to pull us back.

“So Alicia knows a line hack in R and D. She promised to ask her. That's why we have to call today. Mrs. Dinkins says she'll dial if you lose your nerve.”

I tried to picture Mrs. Dinkins with an outside interest. It was a whole new game. Reuniting me and Mary Bell might be like getting the golden cap with the diamond and rubies on it that controlled the winged monkeys. Maybe the only way out of the hole she was in because of Homer was to do what the Good Witch did when she got the cap, and use her wishes to make everybody else's dreams come true.

It was all too much to take standing up. I couldn't be mad at Homer. Using his rock for a step, I climbed onto the bed and looked up at the little black pad with the shaky outlines of leaves he'd drawn, wondering who had been tearing off the pages for him. I knew I had no right to the information. It was Homer's cell and Homer's time.

Let Homer do his own time.

I tried to slow my breathing to his. “They look just like leaves,” I said.

“But they're not. They're not anything.”

“How can they not be anything?”

“Mrs. Dinkins checked out a book on Matisse from the library for me.”

I pushed myself up onto my elbows. “For real, Homes. Has she been up here?”

“Nah, she's got to yoke up before she can do that.”

There were sounds in the driveway, like more
than one vehicle was pulling in to park. Major sounds.

“J-Cat?”

“Can't be,” Homer said. “She's got to bring me that miracle, remember?”

But the sounds continued. At first, it was the same electric sound that Homer's bed made when it was being raised.

“There's something real wrong about her,” I said, resisting the urge to pull up the hatch and check it out … resisting the image in my mind of J-Cat the other night, holding Baba in her arms.

“You think come winter she'll put on a pair of pants?”

A loud smack shook the tree house. Instinctively, I rolled away from it toward the center of the bed. Homer's body rolled in my direction.

Then the sound of J-Cat's voice calling, “Stan! I marked it right between those lines.”

A man's voice answering: “Gotcha.” The sound of a machine starting up. “All clear?”

“What's going on?” Homer screamed over the drone. I put my arms around him and held his head, protecting him from I don't know what.

As if to answer the question that was right in the front of our minds, a chain saw sliced through the side of Homer's tree house at exactly the same moment J-Cat pulled herself up through the hatch.

“No need to panic!” she called out over the noise. “Just a little remodeling.”

“Just
what
do you think you are doing to my house?!”

Homer was yelling about as loud as he could, but he couldn't compete with the noise of the buzz saw. He kept yelling himself hoarse until it sputtered to an end and a square the size of a Monopoly board fell out of the side of his tree house. A rush of cold air replaced it and then the head of Stan.

“I repeat …,” Homer said. “What do you think you're doing?”

“Now, don't spit in my face, Homerboy,” J-Cat dished back. “Technically, this structure belongs to one Ariel Dinkins, and I've got a permit.” She held up a piece of paper with what looked like a child's crayon drawing of the tree house. Only in addition to the skylight in the roof, there was a window down near the floor.

“With this new window, you'll have a bird's-eye view of the underworld.”

I looked at the hole. Stan was now working away at the edges with a big file, sending wood shavings all over the place, and putting a level on the line to see if it balanced. Behind him, I could see Homer's house and the kitchen window where his mother stationed herself 24-7.

“Before the window goes in, I got something to
show you,” J-Cat said, swooshing her big fabric tulips around the bed and hopping on.

“Got it hooked up to that winch, Stan?”

“Check,” Stan said, and went back to his filing.

“Hand me that rope, Hairball, and make yourself useful.”

I looked hard at J-Cat, trying to figure out what Baba might see in her. I didn't think too much that way—you know, romantically. Far as I could tell, it didn't lead anywhere good.