“OK, fine. You have more than this case going on in your very busy life,” he said. “But you seem interested in this case. You want to help. I didn’t read that wrong, did I?”
I wanted to help, but I wasn’t sure which side of the field I played for. I remembered Bo Ransey flinging off the hand of Deputy Lombardi as she escorted him from the premises. And Leila Ransey, skinny and shifty-eyed, out there alone with a cranky toddler. Did they have a place to sleep? Could she get milk without using the mother-in-law’s credit card? I made sure I had control of myself, and then tried it aloud. “I want to help.”
“And I need your help.”
“Sheriff—”
“Don’t go straight to shooting me down,” he said. “Just listen? It’s a little busy around here, what with taking social calls from Ranseys all day and of course everyone else because one missing kid means their kids are next.” He waved his hand toward the outer office as though they were lined up waiting for me to leave. “And, you know, all the dogs trying to annex new patches of backyard. Meanwhile, I’ve got a little—” He glanced at the door and lowered his voice further. “A little internal issue with some missing evidence. Drugs, to put it bluntly. Now. If there was a way you could pull some weight around here that no one else could? You would help me with that, wouldn’t you?”
When he had finished, I felt caught up. Caught. What choice did I have? I gave the smallest nod, noticing a headache I hadn’t felt come on. Leely, if you’re going to get away with this, be smart. Be smarter than you’ve ever been. Be smarter than me.
I WOKE SLOWLY. I’d come home from the courthouse with my head thick and gone to bed in all my clothes.
In my dreams I had visited places I’d long forgotten.
The room, now, was wrong. Before I knew where I was, when I was, I watched the room stretch and morph out of memory and into real life.
Leely Ransey had opened my memory like a can of tuna.
I remembered: my mother, her back to me. We wouldn’t look at one another after a rage. He’d leave for the bar, for three days, for the woods, we never knew. We wouldn’t share our relief. We didn’t share anything.
Now, I sat up and held my aching head. I felt as though I’d been sniffing paint fumes. I looked around at the bare white walls. But I had, in a way.
Yellow. As a child, the walls in every apartment we ever had were yellow, or at least the bedroom I slept in. Another move, another yellow bedroom. At first, I probably hadn’t noticed. When I did, it had seemed like a lucky accident. My favorite color.
And then I’d caught on. Room after room. Rooms I had lost track of and could never put into order. Some had windows with white curtains. Sometimes the curtains were dirty, and my mother would take them down and wash them again and again. Some of the rooms had no window and barely enough room for my small bed. Closets—holding pens, really—rooms that were not useful for anything else and therefore belonged, as much as anything belonged, to me. Lee-Lee.
Drowsing, I found that the name supplied itself. Just as the yellow rooms had returned, so had the name. I’d grown tired of the yellow rooms, hadn’t seen the point. When I was twelve, thirteen, I refused.
“What do you mean, you don’t want it?” My mother stood over me at the kitchen table of the new house, the newest new house, which was not really new at all. It was our new, someone else’s old. Most of my clothes were that way, too, and the furniture. The table I sat at in the kitchen was from someone else’s alley. My mother crossed her arms over her loose shirt. She always dressed in baggy clothes, jeans and long sleeves. Dark colors, though I thought she must love bright colors. I knew she did, because of the yellow paint. Daisy Smile yellow.
A can of the stuff left over from the last house was just feet away on the back porch. “I’m tired of yellow,” I said. I sat at the table with a textbook, eating a bowl of cereal without milk with my fingers, one piece at a time. It drove her crazy, which was one of the reasons I did it. My mother always twisted her mouth at the bowl and checked, every time, that there was milk in the refrigerator. The one thing I can do, my mother would say at these times, peering close at the date on the carton, is keep milk in this house.
My mother did not check for milk this time. She stood at the counter and looked into the sink. “I’m tired, too.”
Her voice seemed different. I looked over my shoulder. My mother’s shirt was the color of a one-day-old bruise.
I turned back to the textbook, but couldn’t think about anything other than the expression on my mother’s face. It wasn’t sad. I could do better than that, or at least that’s what my English teacher wrote on the margins of my essays when I wrote a sentence that said something obvious or tried to say something that I wasn’t really sure I understood. I stretched sometimes, using words I hadn’t looked up, or repeating things I’d read in our text or during library study. My teacher was never fooled, which was perplexing and pleasing, in a way. How did they always know when I tried to be someone else?
I could do better than sad. I glanced over. My mother looked—used.
That weekend we didn’t paint the room or even pick up the can to judge how much Daisy Smile was left. The next time I thought about it, the can wasn’t there.
I opened my eyes and looked around, willing and also not willing to leave where I’d been. The walls seemed more bare than ever before. They were white, always white, because they were someone else’s walls. We never hung things or put in nails. We never painted. If we moved, it was just too much trouble to make it right. Too much trouble, and too much time to spend, if we moved.
I swung my feet over the side of the bed to the floor and sat, staring at the pattern in the carpet I hadn’t chosen. Underneath my bed were the flattened boxes from our last move.
Who was I kidding? If we moved? If? The only question, really, was when.
Chapter Twelve
To shake off my coma, I washed my face in cold water, changed into yoga pants, and went to check the mail.
At Margaret’s door, I paused. I’d meant to check on her before now, but how did you get into the habit of checking in on people?
I knocked. “Margaret? It’s Anna, from upstairs,” I said to the door.
Shuffling feet and the chain sliding. The door cracked and swung open. She waved me in and lay back down.
“How are you feeling?” The table next to the couch had the glass of water I’d left her, but it was empty. I fetched more. “Have you eaten?”
She didn’t answer.
I turned up the volume. “Margaret, have you—”
“I’m fine,” she said. “I had some soup.”
There was no pan or bowl in the sink.
“Can I make you something? Or call anyone?”
“If I had anyone to call, I would have called them,” she said. Her hand fluttered as it reached for the water. “I used to have a lot of people.”