Doorways blur by me as I run back down the corridor. The gray-haired woman is still in her wheelchair in the hall. She calls out something as I race by. I hear émile’s voice shout, but I don’t stop. Once I get to the parking lot, I’m stuck. I don’t know the way back home, and I have no money for a bus. People are looking at me, so I slow to a trot and look for émile’s two-horse car.
Why did I say those horrible things? Rosemary, the girl who is always so afraid to speak, spews poison words when she opens her mouth. Maybe darkness is all that I have left. I feel the cloud of sludge churning inside me, burning like acid. I feel it in every cell of my body. I’m supposed to be happy right now for someone else. Someone I thought dead is actually alive. But the sludge took over, and it won’t let me to feel anything but darkness.
émile’s orange deux-chevaux is parked ahead, with the wheels halfway up on the curb. I try the doors, find them unlocked, and throw myself onto the backseat.
After what feels like a year of slow, crawling, empty moments, émile and Sylvie come outside. They get in, the engine starts, and we drive back to their apartment. No one speaks. I don’t care. They’re not my family. They don’t need me like I thought they did. Ansel isn’t dead.
Twenty-Two
“I’d like you to finish the work you started yesterday,” Sylvie murmurs, not quite meeting my gaze. “I’ll be back later.” And with that, she’s gone, leaving only a hint of her lemon scent in the air.
I haven’t even seen émile once this morning. Hazy sunlight from the windows hurts my tired eyes. The nightmares danced in my head for so, so long last night.
I lift my brush and try to work on the picture I’d begun yesterday, the portrait of the strange little girl. It should be easy. I only need to paint my bad dreams, but it’s impossible. I can’t concentrate. I feel more and more like my oxygen was cut off. I destroyed my phone, so Mom can’t contact me. By now, she and Zander must know that something is up. But that hardly matters. There’s no way they’ll find me.
The problem is, what do I do when the summer ends and Ansel comes home? I have nowhere to go. I have no one. My plan lies in a million pieces on the cool tiles of a hospital floor. I never saw this coming.
“It’s all your fault, Ro,” I whisper out loud. I was blind to how stupid my plan really was. Blame it on how badly I wanted it to work. I thought Sylvie was the perfect choice. She was the one who would most likely believe me and take me in. But I didn’t understand what she said in her blog about Ansel. She said she “lost” him. She never said he died.
Minutes go by and the soft hum of the refrigerator is like a background lullaby, soothing me a tiny bit. After a while, I lift my brush, dip it in some paint, and try to do that “stream of consciousness” thing Sylvie once told me about, where you start painting with random colors and see what happens. Long strokes create dark hair pulled into pigtails tied with bows. The child I’m painting is a girl wearing a yellow sundress and sandals. She has wide, frightened eyes and a small nose, but no mouth, because she has no voice.
And my confusion melts away and I remember.
The girl in the painting is lost, and something about the way she stands, clutching the ragged teddy bear, shows her fear. She can’t find her mother. She walked away in the store, and it was such a big store. She can’t ask for help, because no one understands what she says.
It all plays in my mind. Finally, the nightmare images make sense. The dress, the sofa, the peanut butter.
As if I’m watching a video on a tiny screen in front of me, I watch as the other figure on the canvas, the old man, reaches out to the girl. He’s kind but confused. He takes the girl’s hand. He says that he will help her. He takes her to his home and gives her watery soup and canned peaches, and she sleeps on his torn sofa, and wakes and cries because she doesn’t know where she is. The old man sings to her, and calls her a funny name. “Don’t cry, Jenny-girl,” he says. She tries to tell him her real name, but she can’t. She asks for her mother, but he covers her with a blanket and she goes back to sleep.
As everything comes into focus, I paint all my nightmare images on the canvas. A red dress with puffed sleeves. Scuffed black shoes, stretched out by someone else’s toes. Squares of stale crackers, smeared with peanut butter. An old black and white TV set that shows fuzzy-pictured cartoons. And a calendar, with four days marked in red. The girl stays with the kind, confused man for four days. She eats his food and wears the ragged red dress with puffed sleeves and the black shoes, and watches fuzzy no-color cartoons. The man braids her hair and calls her Jenny, and she cries, but he pats her head and sings songs about pretty horses and twinkling stars. And on the fourth day the doorbell rings, and it’s a woman named Jennifer, the man’s grown-up Jenny. Her eyes grow wide and she says, “Daddy, who is that little girl?” and she calls the police.