Just Get Home, page 45
Praise for Just Get Home by Bridget Foley
“Thrilling, yes, but so much more than a thriller. Set to the tune of a life-altering (and vividly rendered) earthquake, Foley brings together two very different people who discover an ultimate commonality: knowing what matters. Written with aplomb, precision, and courage, Just Get Home is a breathtaking achievement.”
—Josh Malerman, New York Times bestselling author of Bird Box and Malorie
“I turned the pages of Just Get Home like I was reading a flat-out thriller, at that magical couldn’t-put-it-down, must-find-out-what-happens pace, but that’s only the beginning of this wonder of a novel because it’s also smart and insightful on timely, important, difficult ideas. Its characters and their relationships are heartbreaking and complicated in the best way, at once entirely relatable, instantly recognizable, and unlike anything you’ve read before.
This is addictive reading that changes you as you turn the pages and stays with you long after you’ve finished. It is a genre-bender in my favorite way: it has the best of everything.”
—Laurie Frankel, New York Times bestselling author of This Is How It Always Is and Goodbye for Now
“Just Get Home hits the thriller trifecta: a natural disaster, danger around every corner and compelling well-drawn characters who unite to survive the most harrowing journey of their lives.
Foley effortlessly weaves together the voices of Beegie and Dessa to chronicle a night filled with devastation, terror, heartbreak and ultimately hope as they try to make it home after a deadly earthquake. Inventive, emotional and addictive, Just Get Home is not to be missed.”
—Heather Gudenkauf, New York Times bestselling author of The Weight of Silence and This is How I Lied
JUST GET HOME
BRIDGET FOLEY
Originally from Colorado, Bridget Foley attended NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and UCLA’s School of Theater, Film and Television. She worked as an actor and screenwriter before becoming a novelist. Her first book, Hugo & Rose, was published in 2015.
To my Song and my Safe Place
Contents
Introduction
6 PM
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
11 PM
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
6 PM (earlier)
Chapter 7
12 AM
Chapter 8
7 PM
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
12 AM
Chapter 11
10 PM
Chapter 12
1 AM
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
1 AM
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
After
Acknowledgments
Reader’s Guide
Questions for Discussion
Resources
Assist the client in gathering possessions.
She had seen it written on a sheet Kate had in her folder. An unticked box next to it.
Beegie knew what the paper meant by possessions. Stuff.
And since she was “the client,” Beegie knew that the unchecked box was specifically about her stuff. Possession meant something that belonged to you.
But it was the other meaning of possession that soothed her as she and Kate drove away from the Greelys’.
The darker meaning.
That was the one she worked over and over in her head.
Beegie imagined her caseworker holding up a gray little girl, face obscured by black hair, asking, “This one yours?”
Beegie would nod. Yes, that’s my monster.
Together they would shove one snarling, demon-filled person after another into the garbage bags they had been given to pack her things. Soon the bags would fill, growing translucent with strain. When they were done, she and Kate would have to push down on the snapping, bloody faces of all of Beegie’s possessions so they could close the back of Kate’s Prius.
But the box on the sheet in Kate’s folder remained unticked.
Her advocate didn’t get to help collect Beegie’s possessions, real or unreal, because Beegie’s stuff was already on the street when she got home: just two garbage bags filled with nothing supernatural, or even that special, and Kate standing next to them with her folder and its helpful advice for what to do when a foster gets kicked out of her home.
It really was nothing special.
Just everything Beegie owned in the world.
Well, almost everything.
Whatever.
After Kate dropped her off and Barb had shown her “Her New Home” and given her the rundown on “The Way It Works Here,” Beegie unpacked her possessions into a bureau that the girl who’d lived there before her had made empty, but not clean.
The bottoms of the drawers were covered in spilled glitter. Pink and gold. Beegie had pressed the tips of her fingers into the wood to pull it up, making disco balls of her hands.
But she failed to get it all.
Months later, she would find stray squares of this other girl’s glitter on her clothes. They would catch the light, drawing her back to the moment when she’d finally given up on getting the bureau any cleaner and started to unpack the garbage bags.
There had been important things missing. Their absence was intentional and malicious. Eric had claimed victory.
That, Beegie had expected.
But what she had not expected was to find two other neatly folded garbage bags. These were the ones she had used to move her stuff from Janelle’s to the Greelys’. She had kept them, even though back then Mrs. Greely was all smiles and Eric seemed nice, and even Rooster would let her pet him.
Beegie had kept the bags because she’d been around long enough to know that sometimes it doesn’t work out.
In fact, most times it doesn’t work out.
And you need a bag to put your stuff in and you don’t want to have to ask the person who doesn’t want you to live with them anymore to give you one.
But when Mrs. Greely had gathered Beegie’s possessions, she had seen those bags and thought that they were important to Beegie. It made sense to her former foster mother that a “garbage girl” would treasure a garbage bag.
This idea made Beegie imagine the sum total of all of the things that ever belonged to her or ever would belong to her piled in an enormous heap like a landfill. All of it covered with flies, seagulls swooping overhead.
Everything she ever owned was trash or one day would be.
And somehow, even though it should have enraged her, seeing things this way comforted Beegie. It made her mind less about the things that hadn’t been in the bag...and other things that had been taken from her.
Beegie picked at ownership like a scab, working her way around the edges, flaking it off a bit at a time. Ridding herself of the brown crust of caring.
Because if you care about something it has power over you.
Caring can give someone else the ability to control you and the only real way to own yourself was to let go.
So she did.
Or she tried.
Some things Beegie couldn’t quite shed. The want of them stuck to her like the glitter. The pain of their loss catching the light on her sleeves, flashing from the hem of her jeans. The want would wait on her body until it attracted her attention and then eluded the grasping edges of her fingers.
6 PM
VAN NUYS
1
Tonight’s babysitter was new.
Hailey. Holly. Kristie. Something like that.
Dessa felt bad for not writing it down when Jen canceled. She had booked a gig, but she did have a friend in her acting class who could cover for her. If that was okay?
Of course it was.
It had to be.
It was for this reason that Dessa decided it would be best to get Olivia ready for bed before the sitter came. Just to cut down on the instructions. There was no reason to open all the drawers and cabinets to their life for someone who would never work for them again.
* * *
Dessa had always thought of her life in boxes.
Her family. Her job. Her past. The present.
Keeping each aspect sorted into a different mental space made it easier to deal with them individually. The word for it was compartmentalization, and Dessa considered it a skill. A gift that enabled her to deal with one thing at a time.
There had been a stretch, right after Olivia’s birth, when the needs of an infant and the complexities of her relationship with Joe had threatened to knock over her mind’s careful contents.
Her compartments were crumbling.
Joe called it “baby brain.” Told her it was normal.
He kissed her temple and Dessa imagined addled gray matter beneath his lips. That night, he swaddled Ollie and bounced her into calm after ordering Dessa to bed.
He was gone in the morning.
But the baby had slept five hours, her longest bit yet. The note Joe left called them his “sleeping beauties.”
She had kept it, slipping it into her jewelry box, among other precious things.
Soon after this Dessa was able to go back to the comfort of her compartments. The disparate parts of her life, neatly divvied up again. No one part unnecessarily mingling with another.
And now Ollie was a toddler, almost three and bright as a summer day.
Those long months when it had felt like Dessa’s life was crumbling seemed distant and impossible. A lifetime ago, thought Dessa.
A short lifetime, but almost her daughter’s entire.
* * *
To save time they showered together. Ollie played with the water as it fell in sheets from Dessa’s body, directing a channel from her mother’s hip across her small arm.
“Look! A river!”
Dessa turned to see Ollie’s river break into small tributaries across her chest.
“That’s lovely, sweetie.”
* * *
Later, in their underwear, Dessa stood her daughter on the edge of the mattress in their bedroom and wiggled a nightgown over her damp head. Ollie bounced, threatening to tumble off and hit her crib at the foot of the bed.
“Careful, baby.”
“Yes, Momma.”
Dessa reached into the closet and pulled two cocktail dresses from the rack. Both sheathed in dry cleaner bags, ghostlike.
She sighed. These were artifacts. Remnants from a former life. The one she had before Ollie. Before Joe. Before everything. Why had she even kept them?
But, of course, tonight was the why. She had kept them so she could pretend to be who she used to be.
Olivia pulled at the plastic above one of the dresses. “This one. The sparkly.”
Dessa peeled it free of its shroud. “Good choice!”
* * *
Back in the bathroom, Ollie aped her mother’s expressions as Dessa put on her makeup; Opening her little mouth in an O while her mother painted her lips, rapidly blinking her eyes when her mother brushed on mascara.
After she was done, Dessa found herself pulling Joe’s gifts out of her jewelry box.
Three diamonds. Two for her ears. One for her finger.
Ollie played with the ring box. Open, close. Open.
“Careful, baby.”
Dessa took a step back. The earrings were too much. Especially with the dress. Ostentatious. Just large enough that one questioned whether or not they were real.
She considered taking them off.
A simple hoop would be a better choice.
But then she thought about the looks that would pass between her friends tonight. Secret messages pulsing between them.
Dessa gestured for Ollie to hand her the box.
“Okay... It’s time for Momma to put on her ring.”
* * *
They were reading a bedtime story when a message from an unidentified caller chimed:
ON MY WAY. TEN BEHIND. SORRY.
There was a happy face tacked on the end.
Ollie tapped the book. Impatient.
“Sorry. Where were we?”
“The tree.”
Though she did not say tree. She said, twee, which was wonderful.
Dessa pulled her closer. On the page a mother tree reached leafy limbs toward her child in flight.
* * *
To keep from infecting Olivia with her own rising anxiety about the time, Dessa resorted to giving her piggyback rides. Her daughter squealed, hands clasped in front of Dessa’s throat. Little knees braced against rough sequins.
“Hold on with your legs, baby!”
A knock came. Finally.
Dessa answered it. The babysitter was blonde. Thin. Petite. Pretty.
Which didn’t surprise her. Pretty girls in Los Angeles are the least surprising thing of all.
“I couldn’t find parking,” the girl said. “Sorry!”
Dessa smiled. If she got out of here in five minutes, she had a shot at not being late. “Holly?”
“Hailey.”
“Yes. Sorry. Hailey. I forgot.”
Dessa let Ollie slide to the floor. Her daughter clung to her legs as she let this new person into their home. “Olivia, this is Hailey. She’s going to take care of you while Momma’s away.”
Ollie stuck her thumb in her mouth and gave them both a hard look. Her eyes flickering between her mother and the babysitter.
“She’s all ready for bed, so all I need you to do is give her dinner. I’m guessing hot dogs are okay?”
“Um. I’m a vegetarian...so...uh...”
It took Dessa a moment to realize what Hailey was implying. Not that she didn’t want to eat the hot dogs, but that she didn’t want to handle the meat in order that Ollie could eat them. Dessa was running out of time. She pivoted.
“Got it.” She opened the fridge. “Any objection to grilled cheese?”
* * *
Ollie refused to relinquish hold of her mother at their apartment door, and so Hailey was forced to accompany them the full three flights down to Dessa’s car. The sound of Dessa’s heels reverberated around the dim concrete stairwell.
“I’ll be downtown, and obviously I’ll have my cell—but just in case, I left the restaurant’s number on the counter.” Dessa looked back to make sure Hailey was listening. The girl was eyeing the shabby, chipping paint on the walls.
Someone else noticing the details that Dessa assured herself did not matter.
She knew that Olivia didn’t mind where they lived. She didn’t see the chips on the walls or the stains on the carpet. She didn’t know it was unusual to smell ammonia when your next-door neighbor bleached her hair, or to fall asleep to the lullabies of bad actors rehearsing the same scene over and over again.
What was the expression?
Fish don’t know that water is wet.
Ollie was her fish. Only Dessa knew how wet the water they lived in was.
They reached the fire door at the bottom of the stairwell. Dessa pushed her hip against it, flooding them in late afternoon sunlight.
Hailey winced.
The sound of a Korean soap opera bled from one of the apartments cantilevered above. Dessa led them to her assigned space, eyes on her daughter’s shadowy form. “Ollie’s father will be by around ten, but just to check in. He’s probably going to have to head back out again.”
“Wow. What does your husband do?”
Dessa looked away. Why bother correcting her?
“He’s a lawyer.”
“That sucks to have to work so late.”
Dessa’s eyes hurt from the adjustment of watching her daughter in the dark to the sun reflecting off Hailey’s face. She shrugged.
“You can learn to live with just about anything.”
A gentle pressure applied itself to Dessa’s leg. Ollie staring up. Big eyes.
“I want to go, Momma.”
“Momma has to go by herself. But tomorrow you and I can go on an adventure.”
“To the zoo?”
Dessa pictured herself the next day, hungover from lack of sleep, pushing Ollie up the zoo’s interminable hills. Melting in the city’s interminable sun. “Really? Again?”
Olivia nodded, her breath a little pant.
“Okay. We will go. Again.” She wrapped her arms around her daughter. “I love you more than the whole wide world.”
2
Dessa turned right for what felt like the seventeenth time, circling the block, yet again. LOT FULL signs abounded. She was sure she had looked on this block before, but after a while the old movie theaters and jewelry stores began to blur into each other.
