Nora & Kettle (11 page)

22. OLD FRIEND, ANOTHER LIFE

NORA

I almost forgot I had friends before. When I was ripped from school, I was also torn from the hands of girls and boys I’d grown to like. I wouldn’t say we were real close. Besides Frankie, I can’t be close to anyone. Secrets get in the way of friendship. They’re like a swinging knife always ready to sever ties. It’s just too hard.

My hand shakes a little as I write the lesson in my notebook. Miss Candace gave us homework this afternoon, which needs to be completed by tomorrow morning. Frankie is supposed to draw a picture of her favorite animal and write a description, but she’s distracted by… well… everything.

My fingers are sore from being crushed together in his iron grip. They shake even more when I think about my knuckles grating against each other until I felt sure the skin would break open. He’s getting careless. Doing things I can’t hide so easily. It’s like, now she’s gone, he doesn’t care anymore. I stretch my fingers and wonder,
Does he want to get caught?
But I dismiss the thought quickly. It’s more that he doesn’t think he
will
get caught.

“Frankie. Sit down and do your homework,” I say, trying to sound stern. Her eyes switch directions every second and then she leans over her chair and hangs upside down, her long, red hair swinging like a flaming curtain.

“What’s my favorite animal?” she asks, still hanging over her chair, which is dangerously close to tipping. She coughs once and giggles as she takes her hair in her hands and pulls it into pigtails, clasped by her freckled fists.

My pencil pushes too hard into the paper, and the lead breaks. I roll my eyes, sighing. “I don’t know. How about a monkey? They like hanging upside down. Or maybe the orangutan?” I point at her face, drawing circles in the air with my blunt pencil. “You’ve got the same hair.”

Frowning, she flips back up. She drives me mad by sitting on the edge of her chair, just one cheek of her backside touching the seat. “You tink I look like a monkey?” she says, breath whistling through the gaps between her teeth.

I pause, tapping my pencil to my lips, shaking off my irritation and trying to remember that she’s only seven. “You
are
a monkey. Didn’t they tell you? You were adopted from a jungle nursery when you were a baby.”

She stops lurching around in her chair and thinks about what I’ve just said.

Crossing her arms, she pouts and says, “That’s not… I’m not… You’re mean.”

I laugh. “Monkey’s don’t think people are mean. They don’t have the mental capacity for it.”

Frankie stands up on her chair, her lips set crooked in what I think is her attempt to look angry. “I bet they do. I bet if they saw you, they’d have the caper-osity to know how mean you are.” She pulls her hair in front of her eyes and sulks, sniffing and sighing dramatically.

I grab her pencil, write one more word, and then grasp her shoulders, pulling her to me. “Oh Frankie, I’m sorry. You don’t look like a monkey. You’re beautiful. Really.”

She frowns for a moment longer and then says, “Deddy thinks I’m beautiful. He says I look just like Mommy, doesn’t he?”

I nod, putting my chin on her head. “Mhm. Yes, he does.” Little creepy shivers crawl up my arms.

The doorbells rings, and I release Frankie.

“Miss Deere!” Marie shouts from the foyer. “There’s someone here to see you… It’s a young man,” she says, her voice peaking at the end.

I raise my eyebrows and stand up quickly. Straightening my clothes, I turn to leave but Frankie’s hand is crumpling a large section of my skirt. “Can I come with you, pleeeeease?”

I shake my head and pull her fist from my clothes like I’m squeezing out the water from the end of a towel. “No, you need to finish your homework.”

She theatrically falls to her stomach, burying her face in the rug as I shut the door of the playroom, and I walk downstairs to the rhythm of her thumping the floor with what I suspect is her chair.

I was expecting Mr. Inkham or perhaps a delivery boy, but standing before me is a boy I knew in another life. He ripples like a mirage in my vision as he leans against the doorframe and smirks at me, and I can’t help but smile back. “Noraaaa Deere,” he says, drawing the ‘a’ part of my name out.

“Robbie,” I say warily. “What are you doing here?” I’m trying hard not to smile too broadly, my hands gripping the back of my skirt tightly to stop myself from throwing my arms around his neck and confessing everything.

“I’ve missed you,” he states simply, taking a few steps into the foyer. “You know I thought you were just taking some time after your mother…” He makes an uncomfortable face. “But then you just disappeared.”

I gaze at my sensibly clad feet. “Father pulled me out of school.”

At the mention of my father, he grimaces. “Figures.”

I’m suddenly very aware that Marie is just in the other room and Frankie is upstairs. Marie will tell my father anything she hears; she’s almost as scared of him as I am. I lurch toward Robbie and grab his arm, dragging him out the door. “I need fresh air. Would you like to take a walk with me?” I ask under my breath.

He doesn’t get a chance to answer before I’ve grabbed my coat and pulled him out the door into the common area, shouting out as the door closes, “Marie, I’ll be back in half an hour. Frankie’s upstairs doing her homework.”

A neighbor turns her head just slightly in our direction as she pretends to sift through her mail. I walk quickly, dragging him with me as I push through the glass doors and outside.

Robbie turns his head to me, his brown eyes bright and untarnished. “Is that all I get? You’re not going to explain where you’ve been, what you’ve been doing all this time?” he asks, teasing.

“That’s all you get,” I say between my anxious teeth. I step up onto the stone barrier and turn. “Ready?” I say with a grin.

He steps up onto the barrier on the other side, arms out, pretending to be unsteady for a minute before straightening and winking at me. “Ready.”

We both run down the thick, brick walls at the same time. When I get to the bottom, I push up, my face turning from warm to cool as I sail through the air, legs straining. I land heavily but keep my feet, teetering just on the edge of the curb like a bird on a wire. I whip my head to my left to see where Robbie landed and laugh. “Beat you!”

He’s standing like a gymnast, arms out in front for balance, a good foot behind my line. He grimaces. “It’s not a fair comparison. You’re much lighter than me.” He flicks a hand in my direction. “You’re more aerodynamic or something.”

I link my arm in his. “Excuses, excuses.”

He tenses his arm like he’s showing off his muscles, which makes me quirk an eyebrow at him.

“What?” he asks, not very innocently.

I love this lightness. I wish it would last.

The clouds are thickening overhead. They are lighter than air, yet look like you could grab handfuls and stuff them in your pockets.

He’s still staring at me, waiting for an answer. I shrug. “Nothing. C’mon.”

We quickly cut across the street and head to the small park on the corner. It’s late afternoon and the traffic is building in the streets. Robbie takes my hand as we pass through the iron gate and into the cool, green garden.

I search for a private place and pull him silently into a group of bushy trees that grow in a secretive circle. He curses as a branch scratches his face.

“Nora, you’re being awfully strange,” he remarks.

I yank him through the trees, and he stumbles into the clearing. He stands before me, kind eyes, roundish face, and cap sitting sideways. He slides the hat from his head and holds it in both hands. I lean back, unable to control myself any longer, and launch at him, wrapping my arms around his neck and holding him close. The cap falls to the ground, and he awkwardly pats me on the back.

His voice breaks a little when he asks, “What’s going on with you?”

I release him and a tear at the same time. “Nothing…”
Everything.
“Nothing.”

He takes my wrists in his hands and looks down at me. We used to be the same height, but now he’s a few inches taller. “Nora, we’ve been friends for years.”

Have we?

“I know when something’s up,” he goes on.

Do you?

His eyes are pinched with regret. “I’m sorry I didn’t come sooner. Honestly, I just kept thinking you’d be back and when you didn’t appear in class that day, I’d think,
Tomorrow, tomorrow, she’ll be sitting in her chair and I’ll poke her in the back with a pencil. It’ll all be like it was
.” He slams his hands in his pockets and glares at the ground. “But it’s not, is it?”

“No.”

We’ve always skirted around the edge of the truth. Our friendship was only as close as I would allow it. So, bruises were a barricade, and slow and painful movements were a flag we folded meticulously and placed in a drawer. I’ve always felt guilty about lying, but I was protecting him. My father is not shy of revenge. He’s threatened my friends before. I look at Robbie’s old clothing, the clean but frayed look to them. Robbie is a scholarship student. My father could easily crush him and his family.

“Are you going to tell me what’s going on?” he asks, though he knows the answer.

I really want to. I want to throw this burden from my back. “I’m sorry, but I can’t.”

His eyes flick to the bushes, shaking with a breeze and washing out our voices, and then back to me. Pulling out an old-fashioned pocket watch from his coat, he taps it. “So how much time do we have?”

I bring his palm and the watch closer to my face and watch the minute hand vibrate, its arm pointed like the sting of a bee. “Probably about twenty minutes now.”

He pulls my arm down and brings me to sit down in the slightly damp grass. Above, a neat circle of sky changes constantly as clouds tumble through and disappear, dragging new ones behind them. I sigh, sending a puff of sadness and loneliness up to join them.

Robbie folds one arm under his head and looks up. I lie down next to him, and we watch the blue circle.

His finger grazes my hip in a comforting way, just a small touch to let me know he’s here and that he still cares about me. We talk about nothing. Nothing is exactly what I need. He doesn’t push for answers. I think maybe he’s as scared of the truth as I am to tell it.

“I think Donna’s glad you’re gone.” I elbow him in the ribs. “Now she can campaign for worst singing voice unopposed.”

I snort and roll onto my side to face him. Parts of my cream skirt are tinged green but since Mother’s been gone, no one seems to care about the state of my dress. “I miss her pointy face.”

“Oh, she’s not that bad…” he says quietly, and I sense the beginnings of a crush growing in his big heart.

“Oh, really?” I tease, “You and Donna? You going to take her to the Summer Fling?” I make a strange face.

He sits up, straightens his shoulders, and says, “Why not? I mean, I might as well.”

I blow a stray hair from my eyes and purse my lips. “Well, that’s romantic. Make sure you ask her like that. Hey Donna, you might as well go with me to the dance.”

He shrugs, ignoring my teasing. “Do you think you’ll ever come back? You know, for senior year? What about college?”

Suddenly, the grass looks awfully interesting. I stare down at it and pick at the blades, trying to pull the newer, paler shoots from the middle of tough outer leaves and squishing them between my fingers. It releases a sweet, fresh smell. “It’s not up to me. So I doubt it.”

“Right.” He hangs his head and counts the blades of grass with me. “You know, you could…” He stops midsentence and pulls out his watch, both of us avoiding all the things we know, but don’t want to say.

“I can’t leave Frankie.” I answer the question he didn’t even ask.

He points at the watch. I’ve let too much time pass. “You better get back, before…” Always missing words in our conversations.

We stand together and quickly hug.

“I’ll try and see you again soon,” he promises, with flurries of doubt in his voice. I fear our friendship will be like the passing clouds overhead. We can’t hang on, can’t fight the wind that wants to push us apart.

I clap a hand on his shoulder and look into his eyes. Sharp, short little eyelashes blink at me. “It’s okay if you can’t, Robbie,” I carefully say.

Annoyance flashes across his face for a moment, and I know he feels helpless. It’s how I feel too. I want to tell him there is hope, that years from now things will change and we might be able to be friends again, but I don’t. It’s not good to feed him something he may never get to taste. I want him to go live his life.

We walk through the break in the trees, and real life slaps us in the face. Car horns beep and people move, creating noise only masses of material rubbing against material and bodies bumping into bodies can make. The low sunlight spreads over the city in planes of golden light, skating between the buildings and making the craziness kind of beautiful. I blink and wonder what my life would be like if I was in it. A part of it. But I’m not.

So when Robbie asks, “Will you stay in touch?”