Leaving Fishers (25 page)

Authors: Margaret Peterson Haddix

Tags: #Juvenile Fiction, #Religious, #Other, #Social Issues, #Peer Pressure, #Social Themes, #Runaways

DORRY LIFTED THE FAMILIAR BRASS knocker and hesitated. This wasn’t going to be easy. She let the knocker fall. Once it struck the door, there was no turning back.

In a few moments she heard sounds of a familiar frenzy, Zoe shouting, “Mom-mee! Someone’s at the door!” But there were unfamiliar sounds, too: barking and a dog’s toenails scratching on the hardwood floor, and an unfamiliar woman’s voice calling, “Do you want me to get that, Mrs. Garringer?”

Soon the door creaked open and there was Mrs. Garringer. “Dorry,” she said, neither welcoming nor turning her away, just acknowledging she was there.

“I came to apolo—” Dorry started, but couldn’t finish because suddenly a big golden retriever jumped at the door, and Zoe cowered behind Mrs. Garringer screaming, “It’s Dorry! Mommy, make her go away!”

“Strudel, down,” Mrs. Garringer commanded the dog. “Zoe, it’s okay. Nothing’s going to happen. I’m going to talk to Dorry now. Why don’t
you and Strudel go watch TV with Jasmine and Mrs. Faunt?” She gave Zoe and the dog a little push for emphasis and the two trotted away, Zoe clinging to the dog’s hair.

“Well,” Mrs. Garringer said, facing Dorry through the screen door as if deciding something. “Want to come on back to my studio? It’s quiet there.”

Silently, Dorry trailed behind Mrs. Garringer, everything she’d planned to say bubbling in her head. In wild moments she’d had hopes of being received like the Prodigal Son, the kids jumping over her with delight. Obviously that hadn’t happened. But neither had her greatest fear—Mrs. Garringer hadn’t refused to speak to her, or slammed the door in her face.

In the studio, Dorry stopped in surprise. Ahead of her was a huge sculpture, almost as tall as the ceiling, and as wide as the Stevenses’ kitchen table. It wasn’t shaped like anything—Dorry could tell it wasn’t supposed to be a human or a tree or anything real. But the swirls running up and down and twisting along the entire piece conveyed such a sense of power and majesty that Dorry thought of a phrase from the Bible: “Be still and know that I am God.”

“I never saw what you were working on,” she said in awe. “I didn’t know it was—this.”

“No. I didn’t show it to anybody for a long time. I always draped it before letting anyone in.” She laughed. “Anyhow, I figured you might think it was a graven image or something.”

Dorry turned to face Mrs. Garringer. “I left Fishers,” she said. “Right after—you know. I’m really sorry about what happened. I was wrong to tell your kids about hell. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it.”

Mrs. Garringer accepted the apology with a curt nod. “I thought you would be sorry. I’ve felt bad, too, about the way I handled things. But you really spooked the kids and my mother-bear instinct came out—”

“They’re okay now, aren’t they?” Dorry asked anxiously.

Mrs. Garringer waved her hand toward a pair of stools, indicating Dorry should sit down. Dorry sat, and so did Mrs. Garringer.

“Want something to drink? A Coke? Coffee?”

“No, thanks,” Dorry said. “Are the kids okay now?”

Mrs. Garringer sipped from a clay-caked cup of coffee that looked like it had been sitting there for days. “Mostly. They had nightmares for a long time—I wasn’t too happy with you the third or fourth night Zoe woke me up
screaming at 3
A.M
. You had bad timing, because our neighbor’s house had burned down the week before. I don’t know, maybe they would have had nightmares anyway. But we got the dog, and now they think Strudel will protect them—my husband wanted an excuse to get a dog anyway.”

“Oh,” Dorry said. She looked around. The back of Mrs. Garringer’s studio was a row of windows facing the spacious backyard. Dorry saw dozens of trees full of new, unfolding leaves.

“So you left Fishers,” Mrs. Garringer said. “My neighbors—remember the Murrins?—they did, too. I thought you might. You didn’t have scary eyes like that friend of yours.”

“Angela?” Dorry asked.

“Yes. She gave me the creeps. I almost didn’t hire you because she bothered me so much. And then when you left the room that first day, she told me a long story about how you needed the money to pay for your mother’s medical care, but you didn’t want people to know you were so poor . . . I didn’t think it was true. Was it?”

“No,” Dorry said, burning with shame.
“Why didn’t you ask me about it before?”

Mrs. Garringer shrugged. “I would have if you’d made it a little easier for me. But you never seemed to want to talk.”

Dorry remembered how uncomfortable she’d always felt around Mrs. Garringer, how antisocial she must have seemed. She knew now that she’d been afraid Mrs. Garringer would say something to make her question Fishers.

She gulped. “Why did you hire me?”

“I thought you’d be good with the kids. Your references recommended you highly. I was desperate. And, I figured, I’d be right here the whole time, so if anything happened, I could stop it.” She frowned ruefully “So much for my plans.”

Dorry thought about Zoe running hysterically to her mother. “I’m sorry,” she said again.

Mrs. Garringer took another sip of coffee. “There was an upside to all of this,” she said. “I was a little distressed to find out Jasmine thought God was imaginary, like Santa Claus. So we’ve been talking about religion, what other people believe.”

“What do you believe?” Dorry asked.

“Oh, I’m still figuring that out. What about you?”

“The same,” Dorry said. She and Mrs. Garringer laughed together. “I believe . . . I believe it’s important to find out. I still believe in God, just not the sick and twisted version Fishers gave me.”

“Sick and twisted” was a Zachary description. Dorry stopped to think if she was just parroting him, or if she agreed.

“So have you found another version you like? Or are you going to make something up on your own?” Mrs. Garringer asked, as if God were just a piece of art you could sculpt however you wanted.

Dorry frowned. “It’s more like, I pray a lot, asking God how I should see Him, what I should do. And I read the Bible, trying to understand what it means, why it has so many contradictions. It’s a lot harder than Fishers, where someone always told me what to do and what to believe.”

Mrs. Garringer cocked her head thoughtfully. “Are you doing this alone?”

“No,” Dorry said. “I have a friend, Zachary, who left Fishers, too. We kind of balance each
other out. He wants to expose Fishers, and I’m his fact checker, making him investigate things, instead of believing every bad thing people say about Fishers. And I’m making him think about what he wants to stand for, instead of just automatically opposing everything about Fishers. Then he challenges everything I consider believing. He says he doesn’t want me to fall for the Moonies or something next.” Dorry grinned to let Mrs. Garringer know that wasn’t likely.

“And we’ve gotten a group of other former Fishers together, to talk about what we went through and what we believe now. We’re going to invite religious experts and psychologists and stuff in to talk to us. Zachary wants to call us The Ones Who Got Away’—playing on the fishing theme, you know? I’m lobbying for ‘Seekers,’ because it’s not just about leaving Fishers, but finding something else.”

“Seekers of Truth?” Mrs. Garringer proposed.

“No,” Dorry said. “Truth’ is too—” She couldn’t come up with the right word. Hard-edged? Extreme? Absolute? She thought about the first meeting of the former Fishers. Even Lara had been there, looking lost and pitiful. The others had made Dorry feel downright
stable and self-assured. But maybe she was now. She wanted to convey that to Mrs. Garringer, to let her know that she’d brought her grades back up to mostly As instead of mostly
Cs
, that her parents weren’t worried about her anymore, that there was no more talk of sending her back to Bryden.

“Anyhow,” Dorry said. “I wanted you to know that I’m not, uh, fanatical anymore. And I’m really, really sorry about what happened.”

Mrs. Garringer nodded thoughtfully. There was a pause, with Mrs. Garringer drinking more coffee and Dorry looking down at her hands folded on Mrs. Garringer’s paint-splattered table.

“Dorry,” Mrs. Garringer said. “I can’t give you your job back. I hired someone else, and anyhow, I don’t think it would work. I can’t—well, I can’t trust you anymore.”

“I know,” Dorry said, swallowing hard. “I didn’t expect you to.” But, even saying that, she knew that somehow she had. She had thought that she could erase all the problems Fishers had caused her, and just carry away the good things she’d learned. But of course life didn’t work that way. She looked out at the Garringers’ trees again, the thousands and thousands of new green buds.

“Can I tell the kids I’m sorry?” she asked.

After a moment, Mrs. Garringer nodded.

They went out to the family room, and Dorry knelt in front of Zoe and Jasmine. Mrs. Faunt, an older, heavyset woman, sat beside them knitting, while Seth played with her ball of yarn.

“I’m sorry I scared you the last time I was here,” Dorry told the girls.

“That was bad,” Zoe insisted gravely. “You’re bad.”

“No,” Dorry said. “And yes. I’m good and bad both. Everybody is.”

Zoe looked puzzled, but then she threw her arms around Dorry and laughed. “I still like you,” she said. “You’re good.”

Dorry felt the little girl’s arms around her shoulders, and then, as if it were a competition to see who loved Dorry more, Jasmine hugged her, too. For a minute Dorry wished she could see the world the way Zoe did: good, bad, black, white, no shadows, no grays, no half one thing and half another.

But she’d tried that in Fishers and it hadn’t worked. Life wasn’t that easy—or that hard.