After reading time was over, we turned on the TV. We alternated days of who got to pick what we watched. Cutter liked animal shows, and I liked reality TV. We were both happy with animal reality TV, like the ones where they catch wild animals that get in people’s houses or the ones where they wrestle alligators. Sometimes we’d just watch cartoons. The TV company made a mistake and gave us more channels than we signed up for, so there was a lot to choose from, more than we’d ever had before. I told Mom we should probably tell them they made a mistake, but Mom said what they didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them and that sometimes life just works out. That had not been my experience, though. When I told her that, she laughed and laughed. I liked it when my mother laughed.
After TV time, it was time to eat again. Mom said Cutter and I were eating machines, so I tried not to eat too much. But Cutter didn’t give it a second thought. He scarfed down food, and he usually didn’t care what kind. Mom said he had a hollow leg. At lunch, I made him eat some fruit, even if it was just canned fruit cocktail. Sometimes we had chips to go with our sandwiches, and once in a while, we had cookies. I like homemade chocolate-chip cookies, but we only had those if Mom was in the mood to bake, which was hardly ever because she was always so tired from working. Mom worked one job during the weekdays and one on the weekends, so she was at work pretty much all the time. She had to do that, she said, so we could have the kind of life we had. Sometimes when I saw people with their fancy cars and their nice houses, I wondered how many jobs they must have had to work to have that kind of life.
After lunch, it was finally time to go to the pool. Cutter was not a very good swimmer, so I made him wait as long as I could to go to the pool, even though he started begging to go as soon as his eyes popped open in the morning. He made me nervous in the water, and it was hard to watch him all the time. I knew there was a lifeguard there who could save him if he started to drown, but Cutter was my responsibility. That’s what Mom said every night when she kissed me good night. She said the same thing: “I’ll be gone when you get up. Be good, be smart, and watch out for your brother.” Then she said, “I love you more than life itself.” And even though she couldn’t be home as much as I wanted her to be, I knew she meant it.
I didn’t like it when people said bad things about my mother. Her old boyfriend, Joe, said a lot of mean things about her, and about Cutter and me, too. He was not very nice to her, and that night after he’d said the worst things ever, I gave her a hug and told her not to listen to him. I felt bad because he’d caught me snooping in his wallet, and that’s what caused their fight. But she said it wasn’t my fault, even though I shouldn’t snoop in people’s stuff. (I was still working on that.) Then she hugged me and made me promise I’d grow up and have a better life than she did. She wouldn’t stop crying until I pinkie-swore I would. The trouble was, I wasn’t real sure how to get a better life or even what she had in mind.
At the pool, the moms and dads didn’t talk to me and Cutter. I didn’t really expect them to. They were parents, and parents usually don’t talk to kids unless it’s to their own. But it was more than that. They looked at us as if we were sand that got in their bathing suits. When I told Mom about it, she said, “Well, then, just don’t go up there, Cailey.” She had her tired voice when she said it, the one that told me I should just drop it.
But even though Cutter couldn’t swim very well and the people ignored us, I liked being there. I liked the water and the sunshine and the sound of people laughing. Even though we didn’t talk to each other, we—Cutter and I and all the moms and kids—were all there together. It was our pool. And so Cutter and I went up there every day after lunch. We walked a long way to get there, we swam, and we walked a long way back home. And then we did it all over again the next day. And that was, I expected, the way we’d spend that whole summer of my eleventh year and Cutter’s sixth. I was, of course, as wrong as could be.
JENCEY
Their days had settled into a routine, every day much the same as the one before it. Jencey had taken to going on walks after dinner, leaving the girls to play cards with her mother on the screened-in porch as the day ended and the first lightning bugs began to emerge. The girls loved the time with her mother. She watched the three of them, hunched over their cards at the rickety little table they’d set up on the porch. Pilar liked winning. Zara liked being included. Her mother, for her part, just seemed ecstatic to have the girls with her in any capacity and patiently reexplained the rules of rummy and spades and crazy eights night after night.
Every night Jencey told herself she’d stay and play with them, yet every night by the time dinner was over and another day was gotten through, she felt the pull to escape the confines of home and family, the magnet in her chest tugging her back to the streets of her youth. She wandered those streets looking for the childhood she’d forgotten, the good parts from before the hearts started showing up.
She’d been desperate to forget this place when she’d left at eighteen. Now she forced herself to remember, if only in an effort to forget the more recent past. She quizzed herself as she walked: Didn’t that house used to be gray? Was that the house that always smelled like curry? What was the name of the girl who lived in that yellow house, the one who was so crazy about horses? Was that the house that was always decorated so outlandishly for Halloween? She wondered if the same people still lived there, if the woman still sat on the porch dressed as a witch, scaring kids.
She would find out in October if she was still there. But she couldn’t still be here by then. She would dry up and blow away like the leaves, crunchy and brown and lifeless. She had to find a way out. She’d told herself this was just a visit, a stopping-off place en route to somewhere else. But where? She had no idea. For the first time in her life, she didn’t have a plan. Even when she’d run from here, she’d had a plan of what to do, forming it as she and her father drove north.
It took her more than a week to work up the courage to find out if the hideaway was still there. She took the path around the neighborhood lake, telling herself she didn’t have to veer from it, coaxing herself along with internal promises that chances were the little offshoot path wouldn’t be there any longer. It had been so long ago. Things had changed; progress had happened even there, in the neighborhood that time seemed to have forgotten. Her path along the lake was nothing more than a walk like any other night, she reasoned. And yet her eyes were already betraying her, scanning the landscape for the path with a kind of hope. She needed, she realized, to get back to it.
Walking along, she felt like a time traveler. With each step, she was closer to the young girl she’d once been. It came back to her a little more, the feeling that the future was something to be run toward, that good things were possible. There, on that dirt path, she was younger, brighter, more innocent. She didn’t know that life could end with the arrival of black SUVs containing agents in dark suits and sunglasses, that someone you loved could lie to you so completely, that everything you worked for could go up in smoke as surely as if someone had struck a match and set it all on fire.
As she stepped off the beaten path onto the less-traveled one that was right where she remembered, she felt special again. She was the girl who could do anything. She was the sophomore nominated to homecoming court, then improbably elected queen. The girl who still didn’t know that the next day the hearts would start arriving. This path was her looking glass, her wardrobe, her yellow brick road.