Where I'd Like to Be (2 page)

If Murphy were the sort of person who cried, she would have burst into tears at that very minute. But I learned that first night, Murphy wasn’t the crying type.

Turns out, she was more the type to tell a bold-faced lie. Only I didn’t know it then. I believed everything she told me.

Well, almost everything.

G
ranny Lane always said, “God don’t like ugly.” She said it whenever I smart-mouthed her, and she said it when I made Roger Arnette a valentine out of black construction paper back in kindergarten. In fact, “God don’t like ugly” was the main thing Granny Lane said to me when I did anything the least bit mean or rude.

But she also said, “Some people just feel like home,” and she was talking about me. She was talking about Mr. Virgil Willis, too, who often as not was sitting across the kitchen table drinking coffee when she said it. Mr. Virgil Willis was Granny’s best friend. “Just as good as a woman,” she liked to say, “ ’ceptin’ that he
don’t know how to sew or put up preserves to save his own life.”

I can’t tell you how many mornings of my life started out with me sitting at the kitchen table with Granny Lane and Mr. Willis, all of us eating oatmeal cereal and discussing the weather, just like a regular family. Mr. Willis always showed up first thing in the morning, and he always had some excuse for being there. “Thought you’uns might care to know there’s a big storm headed up over the mountain,” he’d say, taking off his cap and combing his fingers through his thick, white hair. “I know it ’cause my left big toe is like to fall off my foot, it hurts so bad.”

“Mr. Willis, don’t you know you don’t have to have a reason to come visit,” I told him one day, around the time I was six. “You’re here so much, it’d be strange if you didn’t show up.”

Granny Lane shushed me and sent me to the bedroom, hissing, “God don’t like ugly, Miss Maddie.”

Mr. Willis and Granny Lane were the first family I ever had, though I guess I should tell
you up front that Granny Lane’s not my real granny. She was just the old lady who lived next door when my mama decided to take a break from baby-raising, right about the time I was three months old. My mama never bothered telling Granny Lane who my daddy was, and she never bothered coming back to Roan Mountain, either. The last time anyone heard from her was when she sent the papers giving up her rights over me. After that, she kept quiet as quiet gets.

I’ve had a few families since Mr. Willis and Granny Lane, and they’ve been better in some ways, worse in others. One or two held on to me for as long as they could, and one or two couldn’t wait to see me go. All I can say is, whenever I walk through a new door, I’m always looking for someone who feels like home.

I never thought that person might be Murphy.

“Corinne told me to give you the tour of the Home,” I reported to Murphy on her second day there. “You need to learn your way around.”

Murphy had been lying on her bed, staring up at that little blue stone of hers. “I suppose so,” she said. “Not that I plan on being here forever.”

The next second she was out of bed and marching down the hallway, looking left and right, up and down, her hands behind her back, like she was visiting a museum.

“This is a fascinating tour so far,” she said. “Very interesting.”

“I don’t think you need a tour of the dorm,” I told her, ignoring her sarcasm and sliding in front of her. “You’ve seen the kitchen and the common room; you know the laundry room is downstairs. Let’s go out and I’ll show which dorms are which.”

I led the way down the brick path from our dorm to the road that circled around the different buildings that made up the Home. A plane engine roared overhead. I turned to Murphy and said, “Hey, maybe that’s your aunt flying over to the airfield. Maybe she’s come back to get you.”

Murphy shook her head. “I predict that at
this very moment my aunt is in Paris having tea at some very nice castle. Believe me, her interest in me is limited.”

“So why would she promise to be your guardian?”

“Who knows?” Murphy said. “Maybe she was just being polite.” She didn’t sound all that mad about it, not like she had the night before.

We walked up the hill toward the Children’s Dorm. Our dorm was the Older Girls’ Dorm, and it looked a little bit like a house you might see in a regular neighborhood, red brick with cheerful windows. The Children’s Dorm looked like an old motel: two stories, wide windows running across the front, air conditioners sticking out from every other one.

“All the little kids stay there,” I explained to Murphy. “The boys are on the bottom floor and the girls are on the top floor. That low, brick building next to it is the administration building,” I said, pointing. “You already know that’s where the dining hall is.”

I scooped up a rock and threw it at the dining-hall door. “The thing that bugs me about those
two buildings being next to each other is they don’t match. It’s like you’ve got the Sky High Motor Lodge next to Jones Ferry Elementary School. All I can figure is one got built way earlier than the other. It makes me itchy to look at them side by side.”

“Things should fit together,” Murphy agreed, picking up her own rock to throw. “Especially if you have to live with them every day. When we lived in this tiny village in South America, all the houses were exactly alike, small and pink, except for this huge, four-story town hall right in the middle of the village square. I walked a mile out of my way every day just so I didn’t have to look at it.”

I gave her a sideways glance. Murphy was the first person who’d ever understood how I felt about buildings. Of course, she was the only person I’d ever mentioned my ideas to, other than Ricky Ray, who was six and lived in the Children’s Dorm. Ricky Ray hadn’t given a whole lot of thought to the subject of architecture, though he always listened politely when I aired my views.

We trudged farther up the hill, past the Older Boys’ Dorm, with its very own driveway and basketball hoop. Then we tramped down the road as it looped around behind the Older Boys’ Dorm and back down the hill, passing the back of our dorm. In the middle of the loop was a playground next to a large garden area and some benches.

“We grew a lot of stuff there this summer,” I said, pointing toward some drooping sunflowers. “It’s a good place to come if you need to sit and think.”

“I never think in public,” Murphy said. “It makes people stare.”

“Just about anything you do around here makes people stare,” I told her. “There’s not much privacy. You’ve got the staff and the house-parents, plus there’s always somebody from the Department of Social Services running around. Don’t expect to get away with too much.”

“I’ll put on my invisible shield,” Murphy said, putting her hands up in front of her face, palms out. “Then no one will know what I’m doing.”

“Just don’t forget where you set it down after you take it off,” I warned her.

Murphy nodded. “That’s how I lost my last one.”

We looked at each other.

I smiled.

Murphy did her best to keep from smiling.

“So is that it?” she asked, turning toward the Older Girls’ Dorm. “Because there are things I need to take care of if we’re through.”

“That’s it, I guess,” I said. But neither of us moved. Our attention had been caught by two kids over by the swing set. They were seven-year-olds: a round, redheaded boy named Toby and a scrawny kid with glasses named Kevin. Toby was circling the swings, chanting, “Your mama ain’t no good; she’s got a butt that’s made from wood,” over and over. Kevin’s hands were stuck tight to the chains of his swing, like Toby’s words were holding him prisoner there.

Toby wasn’t saying something that kids everywhere don’t say, on the bus, on the playground at school, even out behind the Sunday
School trailer over at the First Baptist Church. But when you’re a foster-care child, someone saying something about your mama can hurt as bad as stepping on a nail. Mothers are a real sensitive topic. Once you get older, you learn how to hide your hurt better. But a little kid like Kevin didn’t stand a chance.

Without saying a word to each other, Murphy and I marched in step over to the swing set. Murphy planted herself in front of Toby. “Hey!” she yelled at him. “Leave that kid alone! You’re a bully, and I don’t like bullies. So scram! Get out of here! Run like the wind!”

You could see Toby take a quick measure of the situation. He looked at Murphy, who was a good foot taller than him, if not but a pound or two heavier, and then he looked at me. I folded my arms across my chest and glared.

Toby took off like a shot.

Poor old scrawny Kevin tried to say something, but he only managed to stammer, “I . . . I . . . ”

Murphy rolled her eyes. “What are you talking to me for? Go eat some graham crackers, why don’t you?”

Then she turned to me. “Now is that it?”

“Yep,” I said. I trailed her over to the Older Girls’ Dorm and up the back door stairs. Inside, Murphy turned and looked at me.

“Are you following me?” she asked.

“I live here too,” I said, shrugging. “So I guess I am.”

“Well, don’t.”

Murphy made a beeline to the bathroom, leaving me standing open-mouthed in the hallway. Back in our room, I stood in front of the mirror, looking at my yellow reflection, my arms folded across my chest. First I glared, just like I did at that kid Toby. Then I grinned. Out on the playground, me and Murphy had been a team. She could deny it all she wanted, I didn’t care.

I knew what I knew.

A
fter dinner that night, I took my championship rodeo belt buckle off my belt and started polishing it, the way I do every evening. It’s oval-shaped and silver, with a picture of a horse rearing up on its back legs, and I put it on first thing every day, along with jeans, a T-shirt, and a pair of Keds tennis shoes. I’m not by any stretch of the imagination a fancy dresser, but I think my rodeo belt buckle shows a little flair. It was a gift to me from Mr. Willis, who found it at a flea market over in Cranberry one afternoon.

“Where’d you get that?” Murphy asked when she saw me hold the buckle up to the light and inspect it for marks. “Did you ever
ride in a rodeo?” She got up from her bed, where she’d been staring up at the ceiling like she was studying it for a test, and walked over to my desk. “Can I see it?”

I handed her the buckle, suddenly a little scared she was going to steal it from me and claim it as her own. A girl in second grade had taken my favorite drawing pad from me once and went so far as to tell everyone she’d drawn the pictures in it. I’d considered almost everyone I met a little untrustworthy ever since.

“A friend gave it to me,” I told her. She peered at it closely, as though she were making sure it wasn’t a fake. “I know it’s on the small side, but I’m pretty sure it’s real.”

“Oh, it’s real all right,” Murphy said, nodding like an expert. “I knew a boy once who was a famous rodeo star, and he had twenty or thirty of these in a trunk in his room. I’d know if this one were fake.”

She walked back to her bed still carrying the belt buckle, and I had to keep myself from jumping over to snatch it back from her. When she went on talking, it was like she was having
a conversation with the buckle, not me, since she never once looked me in the eye.

“This boy grew up on a ranch in Arizona, so riding horses was like walking to him, and breaking colts was something he’d been doing since he was a little kid. He started riding in rodeos when he was really young, too, and he was pretty good, but he wasn’t the best, and he was the kind of kid who wanted to be the best at whatever he did.”

“So what did he do?” I asked, inching my chair closer to her bed, in part to let Murphy know I was interested in what she had to say, in part to lunge for her if she tried to make a break for it with my belt buckle.

Murphy balanced the buckle on the palm of her hand. “He went east to live with his aunt. I don’t know if you ever heard of Ocracoke Island, but that’s where he went because that’s where they have wild ponies. Worse than wild. Those ponies were feral.”

“Doesn’t
feral
just mean
wild?
”

Murphy shook her head, still not looking at me. “You might think so, but they’re two
different words completely. Feral is wild to the furthest degree. No one could ever break those ponies or even get near them. But this boy, he figured out how to talk to the ponies. For hundreds of years, people had been trying to break the feral ponies of Ocracoke Island, and this boy finally learned the secret. After that, he was never bucked from a horse again. If you know anything about rodeo, you’d know his name.”

I had to admit that I didn’t know a thing in the world about rodeo. “But what
was
the secret?” I asked, reaching for my buckle and feeling relieved when Murphy handed it back to me.

“Poetry,” Murphy said. “He told them poems, and after awhile they got so hungry to hear them, they’d do anything he asked.”

Murphy’s story made me want to draw something, which is usually how a good story affects me. I was about to ask her if she wanted some paper and pencils, thinking she might want to draw too, but before I had a chance, she’d already flipped off her desk light and headed out of the room.

Later, when I was lying in bed, I tried to
figure out whether Murphy liked me or not. Every time I thought she wanted to be friends, she up and walked out the door. Maybe she thought I was too boring to be her friend. After all, she’d traveled all over the world and had artifacts hanging over her bed. What did I have? A belt buckle? No wonder she wasn’t the least bit interested.

Just when I’d halfway decided to give up on ever being friends with Murphy, her voice reached across the dark alley between our beds.

“Hey, Maddie,” she whispered. “Look at the clock.”

The digital clock on my desk read 11:11.

“What about it?”

“Make a wish. Whatever you wish for at 11:11 will come true.”

I thought about it for two seconds. “Okay, I wish for a million dollars.”

“Don’t tell your wish! Keep it to yourself. And make it serious.”