“But I don’t want her to get in trouble. I don’t want—”
“Let me talk to her.” He smiled. “I’m a professional, okay? I’m good at these conversations and you don’t even have to think about it. Not right now.”
“Okay.”
“Come back here when you’re all set with your assignments and everything. And close the door behind you?”
So I went to my teachers, the ones I could find, and got the assignments I’d missed. Some of them looked at me funny and remarked that I’d really only missed a couple of days, like I was making a big deal out of nothing. I made them tell me anyway, and I also asked for ones that were coming up in case I missed some more days. Mrs. Cantrell was out; I got what I could from the sub. I asked if the reading journals had been handed back, but he didn’t know what I was talking about.
My locker didn’t have much in it. Two textbooks, a sweatshirt. I carried the things in my arms as the bell for passing period rang. Helena from my English class walked by, then stopped and turned around. “Hey. Gem.”
“Hi.”
“Where were you?”
“Sick,” I said.
“Sick and . . . shopping?” she asked, pointing at my new outfit. “I love that coat.”
“Oh, thanks.”
She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “Well, we have a Grapes test tomorrow, so.”
“Grapes?” I asked.
“Of Wrath.”
“Oh. Thanks.”
“Later, Gem,” she said, and walked off down the hall as if it was just a normal day.
28.
MRS. MURPHY was a lady that Mr. Bergstrom knew from his church who used to take in older kids from the foster system but didn’t anymore, not officially, not since she got divorced. Mr. Bergstrom got permission from Mrs. Harjo, the assistant principal, to drive me to her house. And also from my mom.
“How did she sound?” I asked him. “What did she say?”
We were pulling out of the teacher lot in his car, which was kind of old. You couldn’t even see the backseat because of all the papers and boxes piled onto it.
“Well, she was upset.”
I ran my finger through the dust on the dashboard. “She gets angry. If she feels like people are judging her.”
“No, no, Gem, not angry. Upset. Like crying.” He drove carefully, below the speed limit, it seemed like. “She’s glad you’re all right. She understood. I proposed it like . . . what we call ‘respite.’ That we have this person, vetted by the system, inviting you to stay so that your mom can have a break. I proposed it as a break for her.”
I looked at him. “From me?”
“I know it’s not entirely accurate, but it was the best way to get you the space you want.”
“And I don’t have to go back?”
He paused. “I can’t promise that. We have to approach this as temporary—a break—unless you want to go through a whole different process with courts and all of that.”
I didn’t want that. Not if I could help it.
Mr. Bergstrom took his phone from the cup holder and held it out. “Why don’t you call her? I think she’d like to hear your voice.”
“I don’t . . . I don’t think I know her number.”
He reached into the chest pocket of his shirt and pulled out a sticky note with a number on it and “Adri True” in neat printing.
“What should I say?” I asked.
“I don’t know. What do you want to say?”
I held his phone, and the number. I looked out the window and saw how we were driving in green now, trees everywhere, like on the island.
“Can I just say that I’m all right and I’ll talk to her more later?”
“Sure,” he said. “That’s fine.”
I put in her number. “It’s going to voice mail,” I told Mr. Bergstrom. Her message didn’t have her voice on it, only the opening of Stone Temple Pilots’ “Interstate Love Song.” I hung up.
“Do you want to try again?” he asked. “Leave her a message? I think you’ll feel better if you do.”
I tried again. She picked up. “Who’s this?”
“It’s me.” There was a pause and I almost said Me, Gem, your daughter, like I’d done with Dad. But I should have known she’d know my voice a lot better than he did.
“Gem,” she said.
I started crying again, when she said my name, not big like I had in Mr. Bergstrom’s office but the second time in a day after going so long without, and weighed down by what I couldn’t express. “I’m calling because . . .” My voice faltered; I couldn’t finish the sentence. “Is Dixie okay?”
“Yeah, she is,” Mom said. She sounded tired, she sounded small. “She’s right here with me. I mean, she’s asleep at the moment but we’re together here at home.”
I pictured Dixie in our room, just her, and my empty bed.
“I’m going to stay with this . . . with this lady for a while.”
“I think that’s good. Just until I kinda get my shit together, you know,” she said, and then it sounded like she was crying, too.
I didn’t know what to say, where to begin. “Me and Dixie were talking about that time we went camping. With Roxanne?”
Mom sniffled. “Yeah?”
“Remember that?”
“Sure I do.”
Mr. Bergstrom reached into the backseat and handed me a box of tissues. I guess I was crying more.
“I’m going to try to work days,” Mom continued. “So I can be here for Dixie at night. I should have . . . I don’t . . .” She stopped, and when she started again, her voice was stronger, bigger. “I don’t want you to worry about us. And if it’s no good with that lady, if you don’t like it, you come home.” Another pause. “Okay?”
“Okay, Mom.” I waited a second, then I said, “Bye,” before there was too much space full of what she wasn’t saying.
I put the phone back in the cup holder.
“That was good, Gem,” Mr. Bergstrom said. He looked over at me and nodded. “That was really good.”
Mrs. Murphy lived in a small two-bedroom house in Bellevue. She had two blue parakeets, Edgar and Edith, that she kept in the living room. They chirped whenever she talked and were quiet whenever I talked, tilting their heads to listen. “They like new voices,” Mrs. Murphy said. She had gray hair in a bun, pleated jeans, and an oversized beige T-shirt with a picture of a wolf on the front. Hiking sandals over socks. She was tall and heavy and capable looking.
She didn’t talk for very long after Mr. Bergstrom left, and I hardly talked at all.
The tour of the house took only a few minutes. The furniture wasn’t anything special. Everything was ruffled—the pillows, the curtains, the bedspreads.
“You’ll sleep in here,” Mrs. Murphy said, showing me the second room off the hallway. “I know it’s small. Go ahead and throw those extra pillows on the floor if you don’t want them.”