Breadcrumbs - Anne Ursu [11]
“Yes. Please,” said Hazel.
“He was getting dressed. My husband’s in the shower.”
“Okay,” said Hazel.
Mrs. Campbell blinked down at her. “It’s nice to see you, Hazel,” she said, and she stretched her face into a smile that held nothing. She looked like someone had severed her dæmon.
And then Jack appeared in the doorway next to her. “Mom, what are you doing?” He looked from her to Hazel. Hazel looked at the ground.
“The doorbell rang.”
“I know, but . . . you should go sit down.”
There was something about Jack, something subdued about his very appearance, as if he had dampened his own hue so as not to contrast with his mother’s too brightly.
“Okay.” She nodded at Jack and faded off.
“Let me get my stuff,” Jack muttered. “Wait there.”
There had been a time, not so long ago, when Jack had had a mom and Hazel had had a dad—that is, a real mom, the sort who did things besides sit in a beat-up easy chair and watch twenty-four-hour news networks and stare blankly at the world, and a real dad, the sort who lived with you or at least came to see you once in a while. Then one day Hazel did not have a dad anymore, because hers had left. And a couple days after that Jack had showed up on her doorstep and handed her his most prized possession, a baseball signed by Joe Mauer. Hazel had stared at it as if he’d just handed her his still-beating heart. “You should keep it,” he had said.
“But . . . why?”
And he’d looked at her, almost bewildered, then said, “It’s a Joe Mauer signed baseball,” as if that was all that needed to be said. So Hazel took it, and she kept it on her bookshelf, and sometimes she looked at it and said to herself, That is a Joe Mauer signed baseball, and she understood.
Then one day Hazel went over to Jack’s house to find his mom in the easy chair, except she wasn’t there at all. It was like someone had snuck into their house in the middle of the night and stolen his mother. Except they’d forgotten to take her body.
And it wasn’t too long after that that Hazel’s mother sat her down and explained that Jack’s mom was sad, that she was sick with sadness. And she asked if Hazel understood and Hazel said yes, though she didn’t really.
“Why?” Hazel had asked.
“I don’t know,” her mother answered. “Sometimes there’s no why.”
Like an enchantment, Hazel thought. But at that moment she knew that it was not the thing to say out loud, and besides she could tell from her mother’s voice that it was nothing like an enchantment, not at all.
And Jack’s mother stayed sick with sadness, and her eyes were so dead, and it was like she didn’t see Jack, even when he was in front of her. And Hazel did not have anything for him, anything that was like her beating heart. And Jack never said a word about it, but sometimes he banged around and slammed doors, like he wanted to make sure he could still make noise, and sometimes he just kind of stopped, and it was like he had been frozen.
Now he stepped out of the house in his jacket and mittens, carrying his messenger bag, and closed the door firmly behind him.
“Sorry ’bout that,” he said with a shrug.
Hazel got the urge to apologize back, but she did not know what for. “Are we gonna go sledding?”
Jack shrugged. “Let’s go to the shrieking shack,” he said. “I’ll show you my new stuff.”
The shrieking shack was an old skeleton of a house tucked away in a field near the railroad tracks. Jack had found it last summer, and he’d presented it to her like it was a palace. And it might as well have been, because it was all theirs.
Well, not all theirs. People came and they left trash behind and cigarette butts and beer bottles. They wrote things on