The Journey Back (8 page)

A
fter my eyesight cleared up, I also had a good look at this girl, Nora. First thing I noticed is that she was pretty. Plus she had a nice figure, which I was very aware of because her jeans were skintight and her tank top clinged to every nice curve she had. Her hair was long and shiny black—except for a single stripe of blue. She liked to twist and drape her long hair over one shoulder. Her bangs were long, too, and hid the tops of her eyes, making her seem kind of mysterious.

Different.
That's a word you would definitely use to describe Nora. Besides being pretty, she had a tiny silver stud on one side of her nose, a rose tattoo on her upper right arm, and she wore blue eyeliner that matched the stripe in her hair. She looked sort of punk, but she didn't act weird like some of the punk girls I knew back in middle school.

True, she did still have an annoying, I'm-better-than-you attitude but maybe 'cause she was so smart. She took all college prep classes at the local high school where she was a freshman (which is what I'd be if I hadn't been sent off to Cliffside). And the second day she ever talked to me she told me she was going to be a doctor. I couldn't understand then why she'd want to waste her time coming to see me every afternoon after school, but I'm glad she did. One day, she brought over my boots, which she had cleaned so thoroughly they looked like new. Another day she brought me a pair of crutches 'cause I was still hobbling around.

“So how do you like Woody?” she asked one afternoon. She and I were sitting at the picnic table waiting for Luke to finish his homework in the tent. When he was done we were going to walk down to the river to go fishing.

“Woody?” I looked across the table at her, but hesitated saying anything because I still wasn't sure what to think about him—
or
about Nora.

“Well, one thing's for sure,” I said. “He's a good dad. Every night, he and Luke have a game of checkers, then they read a book together.” I kind of shook my head like in disbelief. “My father never once read me a book.”

Nora kind of snorted. “Yeah. I don't even
have
a dad!”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean I know I
have
a dad,” Nora went on, “but I've never met him. He lives down South somewhere. Mom said he already had a family when he met her. He paid my mom a bunch of money to go away. He'd probably have a heart attack if I showed up on his doorstep one day. Believe me, I've thought about it. . . .

“Anyway, you're right that Woody really does love Luke,” she continued, “but there's something else about Woody I haven't figured out yet. I babysat for Luke this summer and, I don't know, sometimes I had these weird vibes. If I were you, I'd be careful about getting too involved.”

She looked at me like she wanted me to agree with her. But so far, Woody had been nothing but kind to me. Plus I didn't plan on sticking around so I wasn't worried about getting too involved. I just shrugged. “Okay,” I told her. “Thanks. I'll be careful.”

A pause.

“So you live with your mom then?” I asked her.

“Yeah. We've lived here a few months 'cause it's inexpensive. I mean, some people are here on a vacation, sure, but a lot of people live here because it's cheaper than renting an apartment and paying utilities.”

“Utilities?”

“You know, like gas and electric?”

“Ah.” I didn't volunteer the information that we'd had the electric cut off at my house a bunch of times when my parents didn't pay the bill.

“A lot of people here have seasonal jobs,” Nora explained. “Picking vegetables or doing construction. My mom works at a horse farm.”

Nora pushed a pen and a napkin toward me across the picnic table and I saw that she had drawn a tic-tac-toe grid on it.

“A horse farm?”

“She's a trainer. I work there on the weekends with her. You could get a part-time job there, too, if you wanted. They always need people to muck stalls.”

I put an
o
in the tic-tac-toe grid. “Muck stalls?”

“You know, shoveling manure, pitching hay. It pays minimum wage.”

“How much is that?”

Nora added an
x.
“I think minimum wage is seven twenty-five right now.”

My head sprang up in surprise. “An hour?”

When Nora nodded I thought, wow. If I worked an eight-hour day that would be like fifty-eight dollars a day. Quickly, I placed an
o
.

“Would I have to give somebody an ID?”

“I don't think so,” she said. “The woman who runs the farm is super nice. Now that her summer volunteers are gone, she really needs the help.”

Nora made her next move and I made mine.

“Got ya!”
Nora exclaimed as she added a third
x
and drew a diagonal line through the grid.

While she drew up a new game, my mind was spinning. It would be nice to make a little bit of money. I could work there while Luke was in school, or on weekends. And working at a farm would be safe. I could pretty much keep out of sight. But this was the other thing: farms had all kinds of stuff lying around. At my grandfather's farm, my friends and I once discovered a rusted sword in the upper hayloft. It was on a windowsill, up high where the pigeons flew in. Grampa didn't have a clue where it come from. Not only that, but we ran across rat poison, old containers of kerosene, cattle prods, shotgun shells, all kinds of dangerous stuff. I would need some kind of weapon if I was gonna protect my mom and the kids when I got home. Maybe I'd find it at this farm.

“All done!” Luke exclaimed as he came from the tent with his tackle box in hand. I put the horse farm job in the back of my mind, and we three set off for the river. Luke ran ahead with Buddy, while Nora carried the fishing rod and walked slowly beside me as I hobbled on the crutches.

Another hot day. When we got down to the river I was sweating. “You and Luke ought to jump in and take a swim,” I suggested to Nora. “If I didn't have this sprained ankle, that's what I'd do.”

Nora wrinkled her nose. “Nah. I don't want to get my hair wet. Besides, Luke can't swim.”

“No kidding.” Having grown up near a river myself, I never knew a kid who couldn't swim.

I helped Luke get a fly on the end of his hook, then Nora and I sat on two nearby rocks. We watched Luke cast out and reel in.

“Slow!” I called out to Luke. “Don't reel it in so fast. You gotta give those fish time to see your bait. You want that fish to think that spinner is a worm or a bug. What you're trying to do is trick the fish.”

Right off, Luke started reeling in more slowly. “Like this?” he called out.

“Yup!” I gave him a thumbs-up.

Nora smiled. “He likes you.”

I smiled, too. Then stupid me, I blurted out, “Back home I have a brother the same age, and a little sister, too.”

Nora didn't seem to catch the look on my face. “You're lucky,” she said. “I don't have a brother or a sister. It's just me and my mom. I mean, we're really close and all. But I think it would be nice to have a sister to talk to sometimes. We move around so much it's hard for me to make friends.”

“You don't have friends at school?”

She shook her head. “I don't
want
friends at school!”

“I thought everybody wanted friends.”

“Not me!” she said. “I don't let anybody at the high school get close. I don't want them to know I live at the campground because then they'd write me off.
And
probably give me grief about it.”

She was quiet, then added, “So if you ever
don't
want friends, just do something really weird with your hair or else pierce your nose. People leave you alone when you're different enough. A tattoo here and there doesn't hurt either. Shows people you're tough.”

I felt like I should've said something to her then. I punched out kids plenty of times so they'd leave me alone. And I knew what it was like to have to hide something. But if I told her stuff, how'd I know what she would do with that information? Undecided, I just sat there again saying nothing while another whole minute went by. I watched Luke casting in and out.

“So,” Nora said, “who is Michael Griswald?”

“What?”
I swung my head around fast.

“Michael Griswald,” she said, repeating my name.

My mouth fell open. Like how'd she know?

“Here,” she said, not waiting for me to come up with an answer. “You left this card in the pocket of those pants I threw away. I forgot to give it to you.”

It was the white card from Cliffside. I forgot about the card! And the fact it had my name on it. Although she had no way of knowing it was
my
name.

“I—I don't know what this is,” I said, letting her place the card in my hand. I was dumbstruck. Only thing that card didn't have on it was where I'd been. Like it didn't say juvenile detention center or anything like that.

“I saw it lying on the towpath and picked it up,” I told her.

She reached into her pocket and pulled out some folded dollar bills and a little bit of loose change. “Here,” she said, handing me the cash I'd taken from the truck driver. She dug into her other pocket. “Oh, and this jackknife.”

I couldn't believe I'd forgotten those things! I tried to study Nora's face. Like did she suspect anything? What was she going to do? But I couldn't tell 'cause all at once she stood up and brushed off her shorts.

“I've got to get back and do some homework,” she said.

I was totally speechless and sat there staring at the stuff in my hands until it sunk in that she was leaving.

“Hey! Thanks again for the crutches!” I called after her.

“Sure thing,” she replied. And she waved, but without turning around.

B
esides making dinner with Luke, I was also helping him with his homework. The math was easy for him, but reading was another story. My little brother, Hank, could read a whole lot better than Luke. I also got Luke started with some exercises to build himself up. He said he wanted to be like me and I guessed that meant he wanted some muscles like I got from doing all those pull-ups on the rusty swing set back home. “We'll train like the Marines,” I told him.

“Is that what you're going to be? A Marine?” Luke asked.

“I hope so.”

“How come?”

“'Cause Marines are tough,” I said. “Nobody messes with a Marine.”

“I want to be a Marine, too!”

I laughed. “We've got a lot of work to do then!”

 

—

One day, when Woody got off work early, he suggested we drive into town and get me some clothes at the Goodwill store.

“But I don't have any money,” I said. Plus I was anxious about being seen.

Woody shrugged it off. “Don't matter. It won't cost much at the Goodwill.”

I didn't protest 'cause I needed something that fit right and looked better than those baggy plaid shorts. No way was I going to wear those shorts down to the basketball court when my ankle got better.

We three squeezed into the front seat of Woody's pickup. It was my first time out of the campground since I came. Soon after we left it we drove over a set of railroad tracks so I saw where the trains come through. The town wasn't much farther away, but there wasn't much in Harwick—a bar, a pizza joint, a gas station, and a bunch of old buildings, some that looked lived in and some that didn't. Luke pointed to a church and told me it was a coffee shop now called Holy Grounds, which I thought was pretty funny. You know
, coffee
grounds,
holy
grounds . . . Besides coffee, Luke said, the café had computers that kids used after school.

At the Goodwill store, I hobbled up and down the aisles on my crutches. We picked up two pairs of jeans, a couple T-shirts, a long-sleeved shirt, and a Washington Redskins sweatshirt. I'm not a Redskins fan. I root for the Ravens. But it's not like there was a big choice or anything. It only cost about ten bucks for all that stuff. I told Woody I'd work to repay him but he waved his hand at me. When he went to the food store, he even bought Buddy a big bag of dog food. And later, when he gave me two packs of new boxers and socks, a toothbrush, and a stick of deodorant, he shook his head again and said, “Don't worry about it.”

But I did worry. He must've known I couldn't repay him. So I wondered why he was being so nice. I mean, part of me was
still
waiting for the other shoe to drop.

The next evening, after we had shared a pizza at the picnic table and Luke went to bed, Woody and me sat in the two flimsy beach chairs around the fire we'd made, in part to keep the bugs away.

“How's the ankle?” he asked.

“Still hurts a little, but not bad,” I said.

“I sure hope you didn't break a bone or nothin'.”

“Nah, I don't think so. Just a sprain.”

Then Woody asked, “So what are you runnin' from?”

I tried to be cool. “What? You think I'm a runaway?”

“Course I do,” he said. “You don't look a day older than fourteen or fifteen. I figure you're either runnin'
from
something, or
to
something. Ain't my business to know what. But I'll tell you this, Gerry—if that's your name—I do understand. I run away from home myself when I was sixteen. Never went back neither.”

I didn't say anything. I didn't want to confide in him, but I didn't want to lie any more than I had to either. Cautious, I looked up at him.

“Don't worry,” Woody said. “I ain't gonna turn you in.”

I stayed silent. Woody stared into the fire.

“Quite frankly, I'm glad you're here,” he went on. Then he looked at me. “I like you. And I appreciate you helpin' Luke with dinner and homework. Glad, too, that you're here when he gets home from school. So it seems a fair enough trade for me. You sleepin' and eatin' here. I feel like I can trust you to take care of Luke until I get home.”

I gave him a slight nod.

“Think I can do that?” he asked. “Trust you?”

I couldn't help but remember Nora's warning to be careful of getting too involved. But really, it did seem fair. I'd have a place to sleep and three squares a day in exchange for taking care of Luke.

“Sure,” I agreed. “It's the least I can do for all the help you give me.”

We went to bed soon after that. But I would think back on that conversation for a couple reasons: one,'cause Woody suspected the truth about me running, and two, on account of the fact that the very next day, the other shoe dropped.

—

What happened is that without a word, note, or phone call to anyone, Woody simply didn't come home from work.

I mean, the day started out like all the others. In the morning when I got up, Woody was already gone. So I had a dish of cereal with Luke and got myself a cup of coffee. I offered to make Luke a sandwich but he said he got free lunch at school. “I didn't want it, but Dad said I had to take it,” he mumbled.

“Hey, I know how you feel,” I told him. “I was on free lunch for years.”

“You were?”

“Yup. Free breakfast, too.”

Luke kind of frowned and glanced at me. “Weren't you embarrassed?”

I shrugged. “Maybe—in the beginning. But I wasn't the only one in that corner of the cafeteria every morning. I was grateful for that food.”

“You were? How come?”

I shrugged. “Sometimes for dinner at home, all I had to eat was Goldfish!”

Luke's eyes got wide. “What? Those little crackers?”

I nodded. “Yup.”

Then I cut off the conversation and told him he'd better hurry or he'd miss the bus.

The whole routine reminded me of Hank and LeeAnn. Normally, I'd be gone to school before them, but if Mom and Dad were either not home, or not functioning, I'd be the one to get the kids up and out of there. Hank and LeeAnn shared bunk beds, and I'd have to reach up and practically roll Hank out of the top one. He was deadweight that time of the morning. I'd find clothes, sometimes dirty ones off the floor, and then walk them out to the road to wait for the bus. They whined a lot, like how come I could stay home, but they couldn't. But I was tough. I always figured they were better off at school than at home. Plus they'd get breakfast—lunch, too—and on Fridays, I knew their teachers would stuff granola bars and little cereal boxes in their backpacks for the weekend.

After Luke left, I straightened up the campsite a little. I put the milk away in the cooler and threw the paper bowls we used for cereal in the trash. The spoons we ate with went in a little plastic tub. Every once in a while we took the tub to the bathhouse, Luke and me, to wash everything in the sink where there was hot water.

I went into the big tent to toss Luke's slippers by his bed and while I was there I set my crutches down and sat on his cot to rest a minute. Luke slept in a sleeping bag, but he had smoothed it out and zipped it up all neat with his floppy stuffed tiger tucked in at the pillow. He had a milk crate tipped on its side by his cot for a night table. On top was an old-fashioned windup clock that ticked really loud, a box of Kleenex, a smooth white rock he found at the river, and a cup of water he'd had overnight. Inside the crate, at the bottom, was the book Woody had read to him last night and, beside it, a framed picture facedown. I picked it up and saw it was a picture of Luke when he was maybe three or four years old, being hugged by a woman with a lot of freckles and thick, curly red hair. This is funny: they both wore cowboy hats. I took a closer look. That woman's eyes—and her nose—looked like Luke's. I wondered if it was Luke's mom and, if so, where she was.

I set the picture down the way I found it and returned to my tent thinking about my own mother. I hadn't forgotten her, or the kids. But I knew I couldn't get far down the path on crutches, plus I'd stick out like a sore thumb with my poison ivy. I needed to chill for a while. And let's face it, with Luke and his dad, I had a pretty good thing going at that camp. Except that now, a whole day had gone by, and Woody hadn't come home. It was after six o'clock and usually, he got home around four. I knew Woody had a cell phone, but Luke didn't so how could he call us?

“Is your dad ever late like this?” I asked Luke as we gathered some sticks to make a fire.

“Sometimes,” he said.

“So you never know?”

Luke shook his head.

Boy, I could identify with that. Parents gone. No word on who was where.

After we had a fire going under the grill, I cooked cheese sandwiches in a frying pan for supper. Then we toasted a couple marshmallows on sticks for dessert. While we were pulling them off, all drippy and gooey, Nora showed up. She had her hair all twisted up into a pretty ponytail bun kind of thing.

“Hey, I wondered if you guys wanted to come into town with my mom and me,” she said. “She's going to drop me off at Holy Grounds Café so I can use the Internet. It's air-conditioned in there and they have a lot of comfy couches. Luke could get his homework done and it would be a change of scenery for you.”

“Can we, Gerry? Can we?” Luke asked eagerly. “I have some money Dad left me, so we could get something at the snack bar.”

“You do?” I wondered how much more money he had.

When he disappeared into the tent to get the money I told Nora that Woody hadn't come home from work yet. “I'm not sure we should go. Besides, don't you think my face will freak everybody out?”

She giggled. “I don't think so. I mean it looks bad, yeah—”

“Oh, thanks!”

“But it's obvious it's just poison ivy,” she insisted.

“Just?”

“You know what I mean. It's not like you have the plague or anything.”

I grinned. “But maybe I should call Woody. Do you have his number?”

“No!” Nora said right away. “I don't have his number. And besides, my cell phone's not charged.”

No big deal, I thought. I decided we'd go. Having been in Harwick once before I wasn't too concerned about being seen by many people. I did worry a little about Buddy, but we'd left him at the camp before and he was all right. Besides, I couldn't let the dog rule my life.

With a piece of paper I tore from Luke's notebook, I left a note for Woody under the big citronella candle on the picnic table.

Nora's mom pulled up in a little red Chevy missing its front bumper and, from the sounds of it, part of the muffler, too. Nora piled into the backseat with Luke so I could have more room with my crutches in the front seat.

“Hi there!” Her mother shook my hand. She was a small woman, but since she was wearing a sleeveless top I could see she had muscular arms and a lot of tattoos—horses and flowers mostly. “My name's Miranda.”

“I'm Gerry,” I had to tell her.

When she dropped us off, she said she'd be back in a couple hours, that she was just running over to the Walmart in Charles Town, which was in West Virginia. That sounded far, but she said it was ten minutes away.

It was nice in the old church coffeehouse. The air-conditioning was really cranked up and it felt great 'cause we'd had a streak of hot weather despite it being fall. But it killed me to see Luke pay so much money for the snacks they sold. Most of it was high-class kind of stuff like scones and shortbread and muffins the size of a grapefruit. Luke bought a huge chocolate chip cookie which we split, and two lemonades, which used up half of that twenty.

While Nora started piling her books on one of the tables, I checked them out. She was taking American history and biology, and she was already in algebra II. There was also a white book called
Vocabulary for the College-Bound Student
. I felt a twinge seeing those books. Guess 'cause I should have been in school, too. Maybe not with college prep classes, but at least so I'd graduate.

“Come on, Gerry,” Luke said, tugging me over to a nearby couch.

He whispered, “This story is called
Walking on a Wire
. You read it first, Gerry, then me.”

Gerry
. Boy, every time I heard that name I felt weird.

We put the book between us on a pillow and I pointed to the words as I read quietly: “In 2001, the Wallenda family did something that had never been done before. First, four men in the family stood on a wire high in the air. Then they held poles between them.” I finished the other four sentences in the paragraph ending with this line: “They made a pyramid of eight people, all standing on a wire!

“Your turn,” I said, taking my hands away.

But Luke didn't want to read the next paragraph. Instead, he tried to read the same paragraph I had read—only he couldn't get past the first sentence.

“In 2001, the Wa . . .Wa . . .”

“Wallenda,” I told him.

“In 2001, the Wallenda family did something that had never been done before . . .”

“Go ahead,” I urged him. “First, four men . . .”

Luke pushed the glasses up on his nose. “First, four men . . .”

“In the family.”

“In the family,” he repeated.

I had to help again: “Stood on a wire.”

“Stood on a wire,” he echoed. Then he read the entire line again. “First, four men in the family stood on a wire.” After which he repeated the title of the story,
Walking on a Wire
, and the first two lines a second time.

I rolled my eyes 'cause I realized it was going to take us a very long time to get through this story.

When we finally finished, I told Luke to do his math while I sat at an unused computer and went online for fun. Well, actually not for fun. What I wanted to do was check to see if there were any articles about my escape. I googled “youth prison escape Maryland.” And up popped a story from a couple days ago: