So B. It (6 page)

“Oh,” I said, or tried to anyway. My lips could only manage to form around the sad roundness of the word; no sound actually came out. Now I understood. She’d known all along that I was lying. About the dancing and singing and the baking. About everything. She’d lis
tened to me and kept me going just the way I did with Zander, nodding and uh-huhing and egging me on, all the while knowing that I was making it up.

Why had she done that? Why hadn’t she told me she knew I was lying? Maybe for the same reason I didn’t tell Zander. She was more interested in trying to figure out for herself what lay underneath the lies. But I wasn’t like Zander—I wasn’t lying because the truth was too hard to admit. I wasn’t hiding the truth. If that’s what she wanted, I would just give it to her.

“I don’t have a birthday,” I said. “And my mama’s got a bum brain and I’m not sure if I have a grammy or not.”

She didn’t say anything.

“Bernie says it’s like Mama and I dropped from the sky,” I told her.

“Hmm.” Alice nodded and brushed a cat hair from her skirt, but she didn’t ask me to explain. She was an October Wilinsky. She had a grandmother who shared her name and told her secrets and loved her best of all. She didn’t need to know the truth about me. She
didn’t even want to.

The air between us was thick and uncomfortable to breathe after that. Alice read magazines, licking her fingertip each time she turned the page. The kittens cried, but she didn’t offer to let me hold them. When we finally reached Salt Lake City, Alice tucked the magazines back in her bag, put on lipstick, and combed her hair.

“You take good care now, Heidi,” she said as she slipped into her long green raincoat.

When she’d come and sat down next to me in the Reno bus station wearing that coat, I’d felt as though I’d been found, but as she stepped off the bus and I heard the kittens mewing and Alice clicking her tongue to comfort them, I was sure that I had never felt more lost in my life.

I called Bernie from a phone inside the Salt Lake City station. She was drinking her morning cup of coffee.

“I’m sorry I didn’t call you last night, Bernie. I slept through Lovelock,” I told her.

“I figured as much, but it didn’t stop me any from worrying,” she said. “How are you, baby?”

How was I supposed to answer that? After what I’d just been through with Alice, I wanted to tell Bernie the truth. But if she knew I was sad and homesick, she would tell me to turn around and come back. I wasn’t sure I would be able to say no—and what bothered me even more was that I wasn’t sure I remembered why I was supposed to.

A large red-faced man stopped right in
front of me to light up a thick black cigar. He puffed on it a few times, then puckered his lips and blew out the match. A soft familiar sound passed through the air to me on a stream of gray smoke—
soof
—and I remembered.

“You okay?” Bernie said.

“Yes, Bernie,” I said. “I’m fine.”

The line crackled.

“Oooh! Did you hear that?” she said.

“What was it?”

“Thunder boomers. It’s pouring buckets here today,” she said. “You know how your mama feels about rain. She’s been hiding under the covers since it started.”

More crackle, then the line hissed and cleared.

“Are you still there, Bernie? Bernie?”

“Calm down, baby. I’m right here,” she said. “And I’m putting a red pushpin right smack dab on Salt Lake City so I know exactly where you are the way I always—”

The line crackled again, hissed, and this time, when it cleared, she wasn’t there anymore.

“Bernie?
Bernie?
” I shouted into the phone.

I stood there for a while with the phone pressed tight against my ear, but she didn’t come back. There wasn’t time to call her again. As it was, I had to run to make it back to the bus in time. Luckily the driver wasn’t paying attention, or maybe he just didn’t care that Alice wasn’t with me anymore.

I found a new seat and sat by myself, sleeping on and off until we got to our next stop, Rock Springs, Wyoming. We switched drivers there, but not buses, so even though I desperately wanted to hear Bernie’s voice, I decided I had to play it safe and stay on the bus. I didn’t know if the new driver would have the same feeling about me traveling alone, and I just didn’t feel up to facing having to find someone new to get me back on. I ate the second ham sandwich, taking tiny bites to make it last as long as possible. Then I did the same with the last package of Devil Dogs.

The conversation with Alice played over and over in my head. I wished I had a mental switch to turn it off. I kept trying to convince myself that it didn’t matter what she thought of me since we’d never in a million years cross
paths again. I couldn’t help but wonder, though, if she was standing around with a bunch of other Alices at that very moment laughing about the silly kid on the bus who’d told her that Shirley Temple had tap-danced in her kitchen. It was humiliating to think about, but it wasn’t what was really bothering me.

What bothered me was not knowing why I’d done it. A lie is the opposite of the truth. Truth is good and lies are bad. Black and white. Simple. Still, I’d lied to Alice for no good reason, and I hadn’t even felt bad about it until I’d gotten caught. What did that say about me?

I got out my notebook and started a new list:

Thin
gs I Know About L
ying

By the time we reached our next stop, Cheyenne, I was sick. My stomach had gone from hollow to hurting and I was worried that I might need to throw up. Bernie always brought me a bowl and held my forehead for me when I threw up. And afterward she gave me a stick of Doublemint gum to get rid of the taste.

I was the first one off the bus and I didn’t care if it meant having to find somebody to help me get back on. Maybe I wouldn’t get back on. Maybe I would call Bernie and tell her I was sick and she would make me come home. Make me give up. And maybe I would go home. Home to Mama and Bernie.

I found a phone booth and dialed the number, but instead of an operator I got a recording saying that they were unable to complete the call at that time. I tried twice
more, but still got the recording. I was half doubled over from the pain in my stomach. Through the window of the booth I saw a little shop near the ladies’ room and decided to go buy a package of Doublemint just in case, but when I got there I changed my mind and asked for a cup of black coffee instead. The woman seemed surprised, and for a second I thought maybe she wasn’t going to sell it to me.

But I handed her a dollar and she handed me my change and a blue-and-white cardboard cup with a plastic lid. I took a quick sip. It was even more bitter than Bernie’s coffee, but I didn’t care—I wasn’t going to drink it. I was only going to hold it and smell it and let it lead me back where I wanted to be—in the kitchen with Bernie grinding beans in her bathrobe while Mama colored in the living room.

The phone booths in Cheyenne were the nice kind with little seats and a light that went on when you pulled the glass door shut. I found an empty one, went in, and closed the door. The familiar smell of the coffee quickly filled the small space, making it almost cozy, and I began to feel a little better. I set the cup
of coffee on the metal shelf beneath the phone and dialed Bernie’s number once more. This time an operator came on the line.

“Collect call from Heidi,” I said, relieved to hear a human voice.

“Sorry, Hon, they’ve got weather out there and the lines are down,” she told me.

“Down? For how long?” I asked.

“Hard to say,” she told me. “Couple of hours, couple of days. Depends on what the problem is.”

A couple of days? If I got back on the bus, in a couple of days I would be in Liberty.

“Can you try it again, please?” I asked. “It’s important.”

“Sure can, but it’s not going to change anything. Like I said, the lines are down, and down is down.”

I tried Bernie unsuccessfully several more times until finally I heard them make the announcement for my bus. The coffee had grown cold in the cup and the smell was working a darker kind of magic now. Panic had set in, and I felt sicker even than before. Bernie’s voice was the only thing I knew that
could possibly fill the hollow space that had finally taken over and was about to turn me inside out.

I hung up the phone with shaky hands and slid open the glass door.
Soof
, it whispered as it folded back on itself to let me through. I clamped my hands over my ears. I didn’t want to hear it. Not now. I didn’t want to be reminded. I didn’t want anything except to get to a trash can. I was going to be sick.

The overhead light had clicked off when I opened the door, and I stood in the shadows, shivering as a powerful wave of nausea washed over me. I could see the trash can, only a few feet away, but I couldn’t seem to move. I closed my eyes and tried to make myself step out of the booth, but I was frozen in place. Then a faraway voice came to me—at first I thought it was Bernie’s, a talking memory in my head; then I realized it was my own voice I was hearing. I was talking out loud to myself, the sound distorted and echoey because my hands were still covering my ears—

“Round the block, up, down, curl the tail onto the next. Round the block, up, down, curl the tail onto the next.”

I stumbled out of the booth and made a mad dash for the trash can, reaching it just in the nick of time. Three times I retched and gagged into the big blue metal can, and when at last it was finally over, I opened my eyes and blinked. There was Georgia Sweet.

“Doublemint?” she asked, holding out the pack to me.

She was tall and thin, and that day we met Georgia had on a long yellow dress with blue flowers on it. She told me she was eighteen years old and had lived in Wheatland, Wyoming, her whole life, but that she was on her way to New York City, to go to college. New York City is a long way from Wheatland, Wyoming, but it’s only two and a half hours from Liberty. We would be riding on the same bus for the next two days. Once again I had been found.

“How did you know about the Doublemint?” I asked her as we showed our tickets and got on the bus together.

Georgia had insisted on buying me a Coke to help settle my stomach, and I was feeling much better.

“My mom always gave me Doublemint after an urp,” she said. “Yours too?”

“My mother has a bum brain, so she doesn’t really take care of me. Bernie is the one who gives me gum,” I said, determined to get off on a truthful first step with Georgia.

“Is Bernie your dad?” she asked,

“No. She’s my neighbor, but she sort of lives with us. She’s family. There are just the three of us, plus maybe I have a grandmother but I don’t know for sure yet. It’s kind of a long story,” I said.

Georgia was the opposite of Alice. She was an asker, not a teller. I answered a million questions during the two days Georgia and I traveled together. Like I’d told her, mine was a long story, but apparently Georgia wanted to hear it, and I guess I wanted to tell it because I didn’t hold much of anything back.

“Want a Violet?” Georgia asked at one point during a lull in the conversation. She rummaged in her purse, then held out a roll of candies wrapped in silver foil.

I took a candy but spit it out after only a second.

“Tastes like perfume,” I said.

“Uh-huh. Makes your breath fresh, see?” She blew a little stream of warm flowery air in my direction.

“Yep,” I said.

“It’s very important to have good breath,” she said.

I wanted to ask her if mine was okay, but I felt too shy. Instead I slipped the Violet back in my mouth and sucked on it just in case.

“Do you think you’ll go to college when you get out of high school?” Georgia asked me.

I hadn’t told her yet about me not going to school.

“Bernie teaches me,” I said, “so I won’t go to high school. I guess she’ll teach me college, too.”

“I don’t think one person can teach college—it takes tons of professors to do it,” Georgia said. “Besides, what if you want to study something Bernie doesn’t know about?”

“Like what?” I asked.

“I don’t know. Like home ec. That’s what my mom majored in at college,” Georgia said.

“What’s home ec?” I asked.

“Home economics. Back then they taught
that kind of stuff to women, you know, cooking and sewing and how to be a perfect mother.”

“Is she a perfect mother?” I asked.

“Well, I guess she
was
, but I don’t really remember because she got cancer and died when I was five.”

I didn’t know what to say. Nobody I knew had ever died. Except for Bernie’s father—and I didn’t know him, I just knew about him. I felt really bad for Georgia—I couldn’t imagine how it would feel to lose Mama or Bernie.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t know.”

“How could you? It’s not like it shows on a person, what they don’t have,” she said.

Georgia was eighteen years old and on her way to college. She knew who her mother and father were and that they had chosen her name because her mother had been born in Atlanta. She had two sets of grandparents and a dog named Frisky who was allowed to sleep on her bed. But in spite of all that was different, in some deep, important way Georgia and I were like the two yellow ducks in the Memory game, one in the middle and one in the upper left-hand corner—matching.

“Do you miss her?” I asked.

“Not really. My dad is great, and since I’ve only really ever had him, it just feels normal, know what I mean?” she said.

Y.D. Yellow ducks. I knew exactly what she meant. You can’t miss what you don’t remember ever having.

“Have you ever heard of the word
soof
?” I asked.

“Spell it,” she said.

I did, but she shook her head. That’s when I told her about Mama’s list and how that word had been the reason I’d left Reno in the first place.

“Do you think
soof
is a person?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe.”

“Has your mother always been the way she is, or did something happen to her to make her that way?” Georgia asked.

“I think always, but I don’t know for sure,” I answered.

“What about your dad—did he have a bum brain too?”

“I don’t know who my dad was,” I said.

“Maybe he’s
soof,
” she said.

I had begun to think that certain things that seem to happen by accident don’t really happen by accident at all. Like luck, but even more mysterious. If I hadn’t met Alice and made myself sick over all that lying, and if the phone line had been working instead of down, maybe I wouldn’t have ever met Georgia. And if I hadn’t met Georgia, I wouldn’t have told her all the things I told her and she wouldn’t have thought to wonder if
soof
was something it hadn’t even occurred to me it might be. My father’s name.