Have Mercy (Have a Life #1) (21 page)

“Jane!”  I screamed.  So much had happened since we got thrown out of the Mill, that how much I missed talking to her came rolling over me like a giant wave.  “Are you okay?  Where are you? Why didn’t you answer my calls?  When can I see you?  What are they doing to you?”

              “I’m fine, honey,” Jane said.  “Well, not really
fine
.  I’m in
jail
.”

              “Are you getting out?” 

              “They moved up my trial, I mean I’m not having a trial, I pleaded guilty so this stupid shit wouldn’t drag out.  In a couple more weeks they’ll sentence me, probably to community service or something, it’s complicated.”

              “Can I see you?”

              “Dutton lent me her cell phone so I could call you.  She’s a guard.  They confiscated my cell phone. That’s why you couldn’t reach me.  I’m not supposed to have contact with minors.”

              “I’m not a
minor
, I’m your
daughter
,” I said.

              “I know,” Jane said, “But you’re only fifteen.”

              “Almost sixteen.”

              “It doesn’t matter.  They won’t let me see you right now but we’ll fix that after I get out.”  She paused and I could hear her lighting up a cigarette.

              “I thought you would quit smoking in jail.”

              She laughed.  “There’s nothing else to do here.  I smoke more now than I ever did.”

              “Isn’t there a gym or something where you could work out?”

              “Mercedes, what’s all that noise?  Where
are
you?”

                I looked around at the people waiting to board.   Cowboys and cowgirls in pastel skirted business suits—a Texas dress code Principal Thwaite would definitely approve of—were talking loudly to one another. 

              “I’m at the airport.”

              “In Philly?”

              “Nashville, actually.”

              “
Nash
ville?  What are you doing in
Nash
ville?  Is my mother with you?”

              “I’m going to Houston.  To see The Griffin.”

              “The
Grif
fin?  Honey, he’s probably getting ready for his tour.  He’s not going to have time to see you.”

              “If I show up, he’ll have to make time to see me.” 

              “Mercedes, I don’t think it’s a good idea.  I’ll be off in a minute, Dutton.  Dutton needs me to get off the phone, Mercedes.  The shift is changing.  Mercedes, tell Granny O’Reilly to take you back to Milltown.  What the hell is she thinking?  Let me speak to her.”

              “She went to the bathroom.”

              “I’m almost finished, Dutton.  Listen, Mercedes.  I’ll be out of here in a couple of weeks then we’ll go see The Griffin together.  I promise.  We’ll go see his show.  I know you always wanted to do that.  Tell Granny O’Reilly what I told you.  Okay?”

              “Okay.”

              “I love you, Mercedes.  Do you love me, Mercedes?”

              “Yes I love you.  You’re my mom.  How could I not love you?”

              “I’ve been doing some thinking in here.  We’ll do things differently when I get out, okay?”

              Whatever Jane was planning to do differently when she got out I wasn’t going to be there to do it with her. 

“Okay,” I said.

              She sighed.  “At school?  The teachers and stuff?  What are they saying about me?”

              The loudspeaker was announcing my flight. 

              “I gotta go, Jane.”

              “You’re going home, Mercedes, right?  Promise me.”

              “I promise, Jane.  I’m going home.”

It was a crowded flight and I curled up to the window to see out.  A yellow skirted cowgirl business woman stowed her suitcase in the overhead and plopped down in the seat next to me. 

              “Good morning,” she hollered.  I think if I was sitting up she would have thumped me on the back she was so enthusiastic about meeting me.

              “Hi,” I said.

              “Is that your guitar up there?” she asked.  “My daughter Vera plays guitar in a band.  Do you play in a band?”

              I nodded.

              “Well, I told Vera I approved of her doing it on the side but not to make music her life.  What kind of a life does a musician have? They never settle down.  It’s degenerate.”

              “Not always,” I said.

              “
Always
,” she said.  “I said she could join the lawyers’ orchestra.  Houston has a quite good lawyer’s orchestra.  So does Austin.  Your mother isn’t letting you run wild with a band, is she?”

              “Of
course
not.”

                “And I hope you ate breakfast because they don’t give you anything to eat on this flight.  Not even a bag of pretzels.  It takes less than an hour but I mean, really.”

              “That’s okay,” I said.  “I’m fine.”

              I looked around.  Thankfully nobody was listening.  It was embarrassing that this woman thought I needed someone to mind me.  I hugged the dinky little pillow the steward gave me and snuggled up closer to the window. 

              “You look like you’re freezing.  Do you want my blanket?  I’m not going to use it.” 

              It seemed easier to just accept the blanket than to say no thank you.  I covered myself with it and closed my eyes so she’d get the picture that I wasn’t a big conversationalist.

              Finally we took off and the cowgirl businesswoman buried her head in the airline magazine that sold junk like matching saunas for your dog and cat, and I was left alone to look down at the clouds.  The pilot announced we would be cruising at 34,000 feet.  I quickly did the math in my head.  We were more than six miles up.  Mr. Dow had told us about how Neil Armstrong’s life had turned inside out when he looked out of his moon capsule and saw the earth shrunk to the size of a baseball below him.  He became a poet, Mr. Dow said, because being up that high he was able to get a completely new perspective on everything.  That’s what poets do, he told us. They see things that the rest of us can’t.  We weren’t up high enough for the earth to look like a baseball, but you did get a completely new perspective than from when you were walking down Walnut Street.  Everything seemed to fit together like an endless jigsaw—the houses were connected to backyards which were connected to driveways which were connected to streets which became roads which went out into the country where rivers and streams were the roads etcetera instead of everything being like a muddled mess when you were in the middle of it trying to punch your way out to something new.  From up here I could see how putting things in boxes that I kept separate from each other might be all wrong.  If the boxes didn’t connect, what was there to write songs about?  Nothing.  I thought about how Mr. Rajeet’s son didn’t seem to mind that two things could be possible at once.  I would have loved to talk to him about that now because from up here it looked like twenty things or a hundred things were possible all at the same time—depending on how you connected them—so that even though you were north of something that didn’t necessarily mean you were
in
the north. It just meant you had a northern perspective and your perspective could change all the time.  I was still in this mind loop when the captain announced that according to
his
perspective we were preparing to land. 

              My cowgirl businesswoman seatmate smiled at me. 

              “This is your first time in Texas, isn’t it?” she said.

              “How did you know?”

              “Texan girls love to fix up their hair.”  She made a tsunami motion over her own hair which was poufy and blond and matched her yellow business suit.

              “We don’t do that so much in Pennsylvania,” I told her.  “There’s not enough sun.” 

              I didn’t know what I meant by that, but she laughed and I did too.

              “Who’s picking you up?”

              Why did she think I was a kid who had to be escorted around?  Didn’t I just come all the way from Milltown, Pennsylvania basically by myself?

              “My dad,” I said. 

              “What part of Houston does he live in?” she asked.

              I didn’t actually know.  All I had was the address I glommed from the net.  I pointed out the window.  “Look!  What’s that building?”

              The building was the airport and in a second we were on the ground and Mrs. Big Hair Yellow Suit was standing in the aisle giving me instructions on how to navigate the airport because of course I didn’t know that it was the tenth busiest in the whole country and was constantly under construction so it could get even bigger—this was Texas after all!—until I turned on my cell phone and pretended to be texting people and she finally left saying, “Now don’t forget,” and I sat back down until I was the only one left on the plane. 

              A stewardess was picking up magazines and garbage from people’s seats and putting them in a plastic bag. 

              “Take everything with you,” she said.

              “Got it,” I said.  I unfolded myself and retrieved my guitar and backpack from the overhead and walked slowly down the narrow aisle out of the plane, across the jet way, and into the terminal which was frantic with activity and announcements on loud speakers.  Everyone was walking with purpose and I started walking fast too so I wouldn’t stand out.  But the fact was, I didn’t know how to find The Griffin now that I was here.  The flow of people was going in one direction so I followed them—catching a ride on a moving sidewalk—hoping to find the exit and finding myself instead at the baggage carousel where Mrs. Big Hair was reading her phone and waiting with other passengers from the flight for the bags to be unloaded.  I quickly turned and started walking in the other direction and found a line of people outside the building waiting for cabs.  I joined it.  A concierge was stewarding people into cabs, asking them where they were going.  I practiced saying the address “17644 Hockenberry Road” that I had never said aloud to anyone but myself.  Just saying it made me feel good.  17644 Hockenberry Road.  It’s where The Griffin lived with Marjewel. It’s where my half-brother Isak lived.  I would be living there soon too.  Why hadn’t I done this sooner?  I didn’t need to get
permission
to live with my father.  How laughable an idea was
that
?  We would celebrate my homecoming by entering my name as a resident of 17644 Hockenberry Road in Wikipedia and telling the folks at People Search that I was a person connected to The Griffin and please enter that.  I put my head back and laughed.  The man in front of me in line turned around and smiled because I was grinning from ear to ear.  I never felt happier in my life.  When I finally reached the front of the line, I asked the concierge how much he thought it would cost for a cab to take me to 17644 Hockenberry Road. 

              “Hockenberry Road?”  He thought for a minute.  “That’s in The Oaks, isn’t it?”

              “It’s a big house with a swimming pool,” I said, realizing immediately what a stupid thing it was to say.   

              “A hundred fifty, hundred seventy-five max,” he said.  “The Oaks is pretty big.”

              “A hundred and fifty
dollars
?”

              He pointed to a line of beat-up cars on the other side of the traffic island.  Several drivers were leaning against their cars, smoking.  “You can negotiate with one of them if you want.  They’re not licensed hacks, but they’ll get you where you’re going a little cheaper than these.  If one of them asks you for payment in advance try another one.”  And with that he swooshed me aside and put the next person in line into a cab.

              I crossed the street to talk to the driver of the first car in line, a beat-up red Honda Civic like Jane used to drive.  The driver was listening to Spanish music on an iPhone.

              “Hello,” I said and showed him the piece of paper with The Griffin’s address on it.  “How much?”

              He squinted at it, then at me, and it occurred to me he might not even know where Hockenberry Road
was
.

              “Two hundred fifty,” he said.

              “Two hundred and
fifty
!”

              “How much you wanna pay?” he asked.

              I started to explain my situation to him, how I was all alone and was there a bus or something I could take when a yellow sleeve came out of nowhere and yanked me away. 

              “I
knew
your father wasn’t picking you up,” Mrs. Big Hair Yellow Suit said.  “Now tell me the truth.  Are you a runaway?  I had a feeling you’re a runaway.
Are
you?”

              “No!  I’m going to my father’s.  He just texted me that he’s in a meeting and can’t pick me up.”

              “No responsible father would leave his underage daughter alone at the Houston Airport,” she said.  “Where are you going?”

              “Okay, look,” I said, looking around to see if anyone was listening to us.  “The truth is my dad doesn’t know I’m coming.  I’m surprising him.  He’ll probably be home by the time I get there.”

              “Which is
where
?”

              I gave her the piece of paper.  “That’s in The Oaks, I think anyway.  That’s what he said.”  I gestured towards the concierge.

              “My my.”  She gave me a funny look. “That’s where the Bushes live.” 

              “He has a swimming pool,” I said.

              “Everyone in Houston has a swimming pool, honey.  You would expire here without one.”

              She was pulling a suitcase on rollers and she handed the handle to me without letting go of my sleeve to get me moving.  “You pull this thing.  I’ll take you there.”

              “I don’t want to make you go out of your way,” I said.

              “It is way out of my way, but I have a daughter, too, and I would want someone to give her a lift if she was stupid enough to land in a strange big city without a clue of what she was doing.  Where’s your mother, by the way?”

              She glanced back and saw that I was groping for an appropriate answer. “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “Come on.”