All Good Children - Catherine Austen [71]
All the time I’d thought I was playing it cool. Yet there I am on camera with my eyes soft and dreamy and my tongue hanging out. There’s no way she couldn’t have known how I felt about her.
It’s cold in her empty house. I pull my arms out of my sleeves and hug my naked chest. When the recording ends, I watch it again. I project it onto my hand as if I’m holding her, but that just makes me sad. “Goodbye, Pepper,” I whisper.
I crack open the door of her bedroom, half expecting an ambush of cops and nurses in the hallway. But there’s no one in the house or on the street. I lock the door behind me and drop the keys in the mailbox. I won’t be coming back here.
Mom’s crying when I get home. Ally’s at the kitchen table coloring, and Mom’s sobbing on the couch. I sit beside her, but not too close because it unnerves me when she cries. I break into her sadness as gently as I can. “Hey, Mom, I found us a car. From Kim, my hairdresser. Her son fixes cars. Supreme, huh?”
She looks at me and nods. Her eyes are red and her face looks ten years older than yesterday. “That’s great news, honey.” She tries to smile, but it’s contorted with her sadness so it just looks pained. I recoil, and a sob bursts out of her. She puts her face in her hands and rocks back and forth.
“Did someone else die?” I ask. “Is Xavier okay?”
“He’s fine.”
“Did Dallas call? I know he says he doesn’t want to go but he’s just scared. He’ll change his mind.”
She shakes her head.
“Did Rebecca tell us not to come?”
“Stop, Max,” she whispers. “It’s nothing like that.” She pats my knee and opens her mouth to speak but nothing comes out. She wipes her eyes and shakes her head.
“Are you sick?” I cringe as I say it.
She laughs. It takes me by surprise so I laugh too. Her eyes are shiny bright and she sounds like a girl my age. “No! I’m not sick.” She laughs some more, then sighs and shakes her head at me.
“Good,” I say. “Whatever it is, you shouldn’t worry, because it won’t matter in a couple of weeks. We’ve got our wheels. We’re getting out of here.”
She sucks in a big stuttering breath.
I figure it must be hormones. “I’m here if you want to talk about it,” I say, though I’d rather eat my own waste than have a chat with Mom about her hormones. I rise. “It’s good about the car, right?”
She nods.
“Anything to eat?”
She grabs my hand. “Stay here for a bit.”
“Sure. I’ll grab something and bring it over. We’ll watch a movie or something. Okay?”
I don’t wait for her answer.
I open the fridge and look for something to eat. “Hey, Ally, how are you doing?”
“Fine, thank you, Max. How are you?”
“I’m all right.” I shift bottles of ketchup and pickles, as if a grilled chicken sandwich might be lurking behind them. “What did you have for supper?”
“We had soup with bread and cheese.”
“Yeah, I guess that’ll have to do.” I lift the lid off the pot on the stove. There’s a bit left, so I warm it up. “I had a great day today, Ally. How about you?”
“It was fine, thank you, Max.”
“Did you leave the cream cheese out?” I find it behind the milk and pull them both onto the counter. I pour a glass, drink it, pour another. I sniff the cheese before I spread it on a bun because in this house, you never know. “You didn’t mind going back to school?” I ask. “Everything went okay?”
“Everything is good at my school,” Ally says. “Every child who goes to school is lucky.”
“What did you say?” I turn around and set my plate across from her. But I don’t sit down.
Ally’s sitting very straight, with her head bowed toward her work. She looks intently at her page and fills in a numbered space slowly and carefully with a black pencil, her fingers moving back and forth in tiny overlapping lines.
“What did you just say, Ally?” I repeat.
She stops coloring when the space is entirely black. She sets her pencil down and looks up. Her eyes drift over the air before settling on me.