The Runaway Restaurant, page 12
The man with the white car didn’t return. May passed into June. Roy had been gone over two months, and it began to seem incredible no one missed him. Not a nosy neighbor, not the man who brought the mail. If I disappeared, who would worry about me? The school might send someone, but what if I vanished over summer vacation? Would Erin call the police?
Against my will, we were settling into the way life had been before Roy left. Erin and I no longer cooked together, or laughed or talked. I started to resent the sight of her dishes piling up in the sink, forks gummy with cheese, a fine brown crust burnt into the bottoms of Roy’s steel pans. She resumed her nightly walks. I wondered if she was visiting high school boys who slid their palms into her back pockets and nested their chins in her hair. The thought made my stomach burn.
When we entered houses, we went our separate ways and reconvened twenty minutes later at the truck, so it was easy for me to take whatever I liked. To my expanding wardrobe I had added a skirt and blouse, a sweater, three more dresses, a pair of white sandals, a pair of leather boots, and a lacy white shawl. Some of these items fit better than others, or fit only in certain places, but I cherished them as if they’d been tailor-made. I loved the sleek watery feel of silk, the reassuring stiffness of starched cotton, the knitted grip of wool. When sandal straps bit into the backs of my heels, I learned to love the sting.
But I would never have risked wearing any of it outside my bedroom if it hadn’t been for the pearls.
I discovered them inside a jewelry box beneath a fake velvet bottom that opened like a trapdoor. The house—a renovated Victorian near the mall—was the nicest place Erin and I had entered. There were deadbolts on all the doors to protect the flat screen TV, the antique furniture, the crystal vases stuffed with bamboo. Erin had to scale the ivy and go in through the second floor bathroom while I stood in the woods keeping watch. We thought there might be an alarm system, but it never went off.
In the master bedroom, I pinched the necklace between two fingers and slowly lifted, the strand of pearls unraveling with tiny clicks. They blushed with a hint of pink, chilly against my palm as if plucked from cool water. Jewelry hadn’t really held my attention on previous raids. It seemed so impersonal, less like it was made special for me. But those pearls. I had never wanted something more.
I folded the necklace in toilet paper and placed it in the pocket of my backpack. I tried it on later at home, shivering when the pearls rested like cold fingertips against my throat. I would wear these, I knew, to the Geva Theatre field trip next week. I would wear them with the skirt and the blouse and the white sandals already stained rusty from my split-open blisters.
On the appointed Friday, I brought everything to school with me in a paper bag so Erin wouldn’t see, and changed in the bathroom before we were loaded onto the bus that took us downtown. Some of the girls laughed when they saw me, but I didn’t care. For the first time I felt strong, like the outside of me matched who I’d always wanted to be. The usher told me I looked smart. The teacher complimented my pearls and wanted to know where I’d gotten them.
“From my mom,” I said. “She gives me lots of things.”
And as soon as I said it, it seemed to be true. The lights dimmed. Actors walked on stage. For homework we had to write an essay analyzing their performance, and I would have nothing to put. I had spent the whole show fingering the pearls and thinking about Roy and my dad and Erin, too—their small hands and feet, narrow waists, slim shoulders—knowing, finally, that my shape was my mother’s. The long torso, big feet, and growing breasts belonged to her.
Maybe the realization made me bolder, or maybe I’d been craving a confrontation with Erin all along: a shouting match to lift us from our painful silence. I didn’t change clothes before taking the bus back to Roy’s house. In the kitchen, my cousin stood before the lit microwave where a plate spun and spun. Dirty pots, cutlery, and glasses crowded the countertop. A spiral of fruit flies floated over two shriveled peaches and a blackened banana in the basket on the table.
“How could you have done this?” she said. “How could you be so stupid? Don’t you understand what we have here? How lucky we are? You start getting greedy, and it’s gone. Foster care. Locks on your door. People keeping track of where you go all the time. Is that what you want? To be a prisoner?”
Those were her words, but I think mostly she was mad that I’d gone behind her back. It didn’t occur to me to point out the secret photo collection I’d discovered behind the bathroom mirror. My audacity had evaporated. I had never seen my cousin truly angry before. I trembled as sweat dampened the blouse under my arms. In that gloomy room with its stench of mold and garbage, I felt myself at the center of a terrible ruin that had been creeping in on us for weeks.
The microwave had gone dark, the reheated food forgotten. Erin swept out of the house without bothering to shut the door behind her.
That night, I set out on foot. It was raining, a light drizzle that felt like mist on the skin, but soon soaked my T-shirt and jeans. The stolen clothing I had packed into Roy’s metal suitcase and slid underneath my bed. I envisioned burying it later, or heaving it dramatically over the High Falls. But the pearls were curled in my fist. If I could return them, I could take it all back. Erin would forgive me. It would be like none of it had ever happened.
It took over an hour to reach the house by the mall, perched like a great noble bird on its hill. For twenty minutes I stood in the wooded backyard, watching. Outdoor lights glared above the back porch, but there was no movement in the windows. I convinced myself the family must be out for dinner and a movie with friends. I believed it so deeply that even after the man sprang at me in the hallway with a baseball bat, pulling back just in time—“Jesus Christ, I almost killed a kid,” he muttered over and over while his wife dialed 911—all that registered in my mind was confusion.
“I thought they were out of the house,” I told the policewoman who drove me to the station. For hours, it was all they could get out of me. “They should’ve been out of the house.”
At some point I must’ve coughed up my name and address, because Erin joined me at the police station later that same night. She sat straight-backed and silent in the little room with the coffee machine where they’d set us up, and I copied her, grateful that she was there and could show me what to do.
Even so, it didn’t take long for the cops to work out that we were on our own. No one had heard from Roy in weeks. He’d missed his latest project deadline and the company figured he’d quit, such an oddball to begin with, just like him not to give any notice.
For a while the cops seemed to think Erin might’ve done away with Roy herself. They led me to a room with a bed to let me sleep, and the next day, a woman with square glasses drove me back to Roy’s house so I could gather my belongings. But for Erin, they had many days of questions. Where had her father gone? Did she know about the gun he kept in the safe behind the closet? Did she really expect them to believe he’d dropped off the face of the earth?
I found all this out later. Erin didn’t say a word to me in the station, still mad, I guess, that I’d gotten us caught. But once we separated, she seemed to forgive me, or maybe she was just lonely. She called me twice a week from the new facility where they’d moved her—“a little less than juvie, a little more than high school,” she once described it. She said she was okay and making friends and stuff, but at the end of August, a week before I started at my new middle school, she ran away. She never mentioned her plans to me, but I was unsurprised when Laura, my foster mother, broke the news.
“I don’t want you to worry. They’re gonna find her,” said Laura, squeezing my wrist in her warm fingers. I liked Laura, and her husband, but the pair of them didn’t really understand me. And they certainly didn’t understand Erin, if they thought she would ever let herself get locked up again.
After we finished talking, I went to my bedroom and shut the door. Laura’s house had three floors, and my room sat high at the top. Wooden beams sloped from the middle of the ceiling to the base of the walls. The window overlooked the long driveway and the distant county road, along which the occasional car skated like a rolled marble. There was no roof beyond the window, not even a ledge to place a foot. Just a straight drop, thirty or thirty-five feet to prickly rose bushes and hard gray slabs of sidewalk.
I didn’t want to run away. Not then. It was just a mental game I played, a daydream of scrolling countryside and wind whipping through my hair. It would be years, still, before the call came and I answered. By then they would’ve found Roy, living out west under a false name, eluding the people whose profits he’d been laundering until he got cold feet and fled. But not Erin. Not our mothers. I would follow their example. I would go where I couldn’t be found.
That summer evening in Laura’s home, I sat on the bed with the handmade quilt, content, tapping my toes against the floor and listening as echoes raced up the walls. The room remained mostly empty. From Roy’s house I had taken only my toothbrush, some old clothes, and the photograph of the skinny girl on the bicycle. I told the social worker it was a picture of my cousin, and she believed me. If you weren’t looking too closely, any of those photographs could’ve passed for Erin.
wonder in her wake
It was ten o'clock at night, and the doorbell rang again.
Dustin flipped onto his stomach and stretched his limbs until his hands and feet gripped the edges of the mattress. He stayed that way, stuck to the sheets like a barnacle, as the doorbell clanged five, six, seven, eight more times. The kid out there on the stoop must’ve had his finger pressed to the button. If Dustin were braver, he’d go barreling out there in his Avengers PJs, seize the prankster in both hands, and send him flying all the way to the mailbox with preternatural human strength. But Dustin wasn’t brave. He’d known this about himself for as long as he could remember, as assuredly as he knew the flaky texture of his always-chapped lips or the pattern of freckles on his skinny arms. He was nine years old.
He hadn’t been sleeping long, but as the doorbell’s final note faded to silence, a terrible alertness blazed through him. He climbed out of bed. His room was dark except for the glow of the street lamp coming in through the window. Two months ago, someone had thrown a baseball that fractured the glass in a starburst pattern. Ever since, the light had a squished, lopsided quality as it fell through the splinters. He put on his slippers and walked down the front hall. He peeped through the curtains, but the stoop was empty now. In the kitchen, he found his mother sitting on the floor, her collection arrayed around her in a messy ring. Tiny animal bones, feathers, cool blue rocks, bottle caps, and strips of fabric Dustin had torn free from the wire fence encircling the dump.
“Couldn’t sleep?” asked Frances.
Dustin shrugged. There was no point mentioning the doorbell. His mother had stopped hearing it, just as she’d stopped seeing the grocery store cashiers who grinned at each other when she came through the line with her bulk tubs of spices and rotten fruits. She beckoned to him. He joined her inside the ring, squatting with his arms folded on his knees.
“Once upon a time,” said Frances, “there lived a shapeshifter with many names. To some she appeared as an old woman, to others as a raven or a moth. You might not know it was her in the moment, but you always recognized her after she’d gone by the sense of wonder she left in her wake.”
Dustin rocked on his feet. Frances picked up a white feather and twirled it by the quill. She was fully dressed in blue jeans and a button-up speckled with tiny airplanes. Her body pushed against the fabrics when she moved. She was the biggest, tallest person Dustin knew, including their next-door neighbor Mr. Herman, a tree-cutter whom Dustin had once seen yank a dead sapling right out of the ground.
“One day the shapeshifter wanted to create something beautiful. She scooped up a feather from one corner of the universe, and the well-worn T-shirt of a little boy from the other. She folded the feather inside the T-shirt and buried it in her garden beneath a tree.” Frances took a scrap of green cloth from her collection and demonstrated, wrapping it around the feather like a bandage. “She waited. A hundred thousand years went by. Then a hundred thousand more. The shapeshifter wasn’t bored. She got to be all kinds of things during that time: a dinosaur, a sunflower, the snow on a mountain. Finally, she went back to the tree. There among the knotted roots sat a little boy with a perfect pair of silver wings. He was the loveliest creature she’d ever laid eyes on. The shapeshifter became a raven. Then she and the winged child flew across the universe together, looking for more things to create.”
Frances returned the feather and the scrap of cloth to their designated spots in the ring. She smiled. She didn’t tell her stories often. They were reserved for hushed, magical moments like tonight, when the house slipped beneath the surface of its silence and stayed there, holding its breath. Dustin thought of himself as collecting the stories the way Frances collected crumbs of dead or discarded life. Mentally, he gathered up the shapeshifter and the winged boy and added them to the display case alongside the cross-eyed wizards, talking cats, shy pixies, and invisible wolves of his mother’s worlds.
“What do you say?” asked Frances. “Are you up for the challenge?” She gestured to the ring and Dustin, eager, leapt to his feet. He left the house through the back door. It shocked and thrilled him that his neighborhood was full of people sleeping in their beds, that he should be the only one to feel the cold grass springing beneath his feet. He climbed over fences, a sense of mystery tingling between his shoulder blades as he flitted from yard to dark yard. A dog growled and strained at the end of its chain. The breeze smelled like damp paper. The sky was clear, the moon full and round as a pearl. Dustin slid down the creek’s banks and spread his fingers across the ground, looking for items that would please his mother. Heart-shaped pebbles. Shiny soda tabs. Flower petals crushed and leaking fragrance. “Garbage,” Dustin’s father used to say. “Why are you wasting your time with such garbage?” But he knew better than to mess with Frances’s collection. He’d toss a chair across the room when he got really angry. He’d rip the screen door off its hinges. Never would he touch those jars packed with stray bits of beauty.
In school the next day, Dustin was so tired his head slumped onto his desk. Mrs. Blakemore clapped to wake him the way Mr. Herman clapped to scare possums out of the garbage cans. His mother never tried to scare away anything. She never set traps smeared with peanut butter or sprayed poison along the baseboards. Their house teemed with scurrying. Mice skipped through the walls. A cat lived with her babies beneath the back porch. Dustin heard their mewling each morning when he ate his toast.
His classmates giggled as he roused himself and tried to focus on what the teacher was saying. A girl stuck out her tongue and twirled her finger around her ear in the sign for crazy, and a few others joined in while Mrs. Blakemore’s back was turned. Last year he’d had a friend named Brianna, who saw his neat handwriting and asked him to do the captions for her cartoon dog comic strip. Woof, Woof, wrote Dustin. He didn’t feel very clever, but Brianna shrieked with glee and they began eating their snacks together every day. Then she moved away. On her last day at school, she kissed Dustin’s elbow and said she’d never forget him. He still wrote her name in the margins of his language arts notebook, big bubble letters that looped around the page.
He walked home from school slowly, passing ranks of ash trees with orange blobs spray-painted on their trunks, marking them for slaughter. Mr. Herman said the ash borers were good for business, said those tiny green beetles paid for his new furnace and the lease on his car. Dustin only felt sad looking at the doomed trees with their furrowed trunks and bald heads.
The closer he got to his house, the more the injustice welled up inside him. It was not fair that Brianna had moved away. It was not fair that the ash trees were dying. It was not fair for his mother to send him on midnight scavenger hunts that left him puffy with exhaustion the next day. Already he’d forgotten his willingness, the fantasy of wings unfurling from his back. His mother’s magic was for nighttime and now it was day, the spring sunlight hard against his face.
At the creek, Dustin turned left and entered his neighborhood with its colorful clapboard homes. It was a straight shot to his house at the dead end, so he had time to observe the three girls before he reached them. They crouched behind Mr. Herman’s heap of leftover firewood, backpacks grouped at their knees. The breeze carried their giggles down the street.
“Hey,” said one of them as he walked by.
Dustin turned. These girls were older than him and wore the plaid green uniforms of St. Vincent’s. The one who’d spoken had lots of blue makeup gunked around her eyes and her skirt hiked up around her knees to keep it from dragging on the sidewalk.
“You know who lives there?” She jerked a thumb in the direction of Dustin’s house. In the gap between her legs he spied a triangle of purple underwear. The sight sucked all the air out of his body. He shook his head.
“I’m telling you, Mal—that’s the one,” insisted a pale girl with chubby arms. She pointed over the firewood to Dustin’s front porch. “My cousin says it’s got all those weird plants and her nasty old car in the driveway—”
“How about a crazy witch that lives around here?” Mal pressed. “You heard of her?”
“She killed her husband after he kicked one of her cats,” offered the pale girl eagerly. “Put a curse on him so a big beam fell on his head at work . . . Now she just lives off the money from the factory, sitting inside all day, working on more spells.”
Dustin shook his head again, mouth dry. “No, I don’t know anyone like that.”
