Where We Belong
Authors: Catherine Ryan Hyde
Catherine Ryan Hyde
“Hyde is a remarkable, insightful storyteller, creating full-bodied characters whose dialogue rings true, with not a word to spare.”
-Library Journal
Fourteen-year-old Angie and her mom are poised at the edge of homelessness… again. The problem is her little sister, Sophie. Sophie has an autism-like disorder, and a tendency to shriek. No matter where they live, home never seems to last long.
Until they move in with Aunt Vi, across the fence from a huge black Great Dane who changes everything. Sophie falls in love immediately, and begins to imitate the “inside of the dog,” which, fortunately, is a calm place. The shrieking stops. Everybody begins to breathe again. Until Paul Inverness, the dog’s grumpy, socially isolated owner, moves to the mountains, and it all begins again.
Much to Angie’s humiliation, when they’re thrown out of Aunt Vi’s house, Angie’s mom moves the family to the mountains after Paul and his dog. There, despite a fifty-year difference in their ages, Angie and Paul form a deep friendship, the only close friendship either has known. Angie is able to talk to him about growing up gay, and Paul trusts Angie with his greatest secret, his one dream. When the opportunity arrives, Angie decides to risk everything to help Paul’s dream come true, even their friendship and her one chance at a real home—the only thing she’s dreamed of since her father was killed. A place she can never be thrown out. A place she can feel she belongs.
By the bestselling author of DON’T LET ME GO, WHEN I FOUND YOU, and WALK ME HOME, WHERE WE BELONG is a poignant, heartfelt, and uplifting story about finding your place in the world, no matter how impossible it seems.
“Hyde has a sure touch with affairs of the heart.”
-Publishers Weekly
PART ONE
The Part When I Was Only Fourteen
By the time I was seven, I had twenty-two packs of playing cards. Twenty-two. And I never played card games with them. Not once. Card games are boring.
They were for building, not playing.
It started with the card house my dad showed me how to build when I was six, right before he stuck his hand in his shirt pocket and figured out he was out of cigarettes and then walked out of the house to get more at the corner store and got murdered. For his watch and his wallet and his wedding ring. The watch was just a cheap Timex, and the ring was only silver and thin. And he never carried a lot of cash, because he never had a lot to carry.
I graduated card houses and went on to card condos, card apartment complexes, card ranches, card palaces. It’s a lot of work for something that’s always going to fall down at the end. But then, all of life is like that. Right?
Take my dad. He was just showing me that perfect moment when the house is getting big, when you’re on the third or so level, and every card drop makes you hold your breath. You have to wait to see. You think it falls right away if it’s going to, but it doesn’t. There’s this weird little pause, like time skipping. That pause was everything that kept me dropping those damn cards. Everything.
“I’ll be honest, Angie,” my dad said. “It brings out the gambler in me.”
But nothing needed to bring out the gambler in him. He was a gambler. It was always out.
Right after he said that, he stuck his hand in his pocket.
Now I have no packs of cards. I got rid of them all after my sister, Sophie, came along. Not right after. Because… you know. She was in a crib and all. And even when she started crawling around, it seemed like everything was okay with her. And then it wasn’t. And it was hard to put our fingers on the moment when we knew it wasn’t. Probably a lot sooner than we said so out loud.
After that, I knew better than to keep anything delicate and easy to ruin around the house ever again.
Anyway, what difference does it make? Now that I’m fourteen, our whole life is a house of cards. Drop. Wait. Breathe. Or don’t.
I liked it better with real cards. I liked how you could just sweep them all up with your hand and start over again. Everything in the world is easier to clean up after than your own actual damn life.
It was our first full day at Aunt Violet’s, and I woke up wondering if it would also be our last. It can happen on any day. You think you know which ones are the most dicey, but it turns out you never do.
Besides, this one wasn’t looking good.
It was a Friday, and I should have been in school, except I had to go to a new school now, and my mom said signing me up on Monday would be good enough, which really meant she needed me to babysit Sophie while she went job hunting.
We were sitting at the breakfast table eating toaster waffles, Sophie and me and Aunt Vi—this old Formica table with these glittery spots on it, like manmade stars. Those spots were holding Sophie’s attention. She was eating her waffle with her left hand, and dropping the tip of her right index finger down on those little glittery spots, over and over and over. With a little grunt on each drop.
Her hair needed brushing. Probably my job, but I was ducking it. Pretend reason: because my mom didn’t make that clear. Real reason: because it’s kind of a rotten job.
Aunt Vi was watching Sophie in a way that made it hard for me to breathe.
Aunt Violet wasn’t really our aunt. First of all, she was our mom’s aunt, which made her our great aunt, and also, only by marriage. Did that make her our mom’s for-real aunt? I guess it did, since there’s no such thing as an aunt-in-law. I didn’t know, and it didn’t matter. Here’s what I knew, and here’s what mattered: We weren’t blood family. Which would make it a whole lot easier to throw us away.
“What kind of job is your mom looking for?” Aunt Vi asked. She never took her eyes off Sophie, which made it look like she was asking Sophie. But, of course, that was impossible.
“She’s really wanting to find a job waitressing at a dinner restaurant,” I said. Sophie’s grunts were turning to little squeals that hurt my ears. I could see Aunt Vi wince on each one. The sparkle pointing was half morphing into arm flaps. I talked through it as best I could. “Because the tips are really good. And then I can watch Sophie while she’s—”
“Can she be gotten to stop that?” Aunt Vi squeaked. Suddenly, and with her voice too high-pitched. And kind of desperate. Like she’d been just about to break that whole time.
Which I’d known. Which I’d felt. But I’d been telling myself it wasn’t as bad as I thought, half believing myself and half not. Uncle Charlie had died just a couple of months before, and Aunt Violet was fragile.
A weird silence followed, which wasn’t a silence at all, because Sophie didn’t stop her noise. It was just Aunt Vi and me holding still and saying nothing. Don’t ask me how all that noise can feel like an awkward silence. But it can. And it did.
Drop.
“No, ma’am. I don’t think it’s possible for her to stop.”
Wait.
Aunt Vi sighed.
I breathed.
“It’s just that I’m not myself since Charlie died. It’s like being sick. You think you can get up and do things, but then you’re still weaker than you thought. You know how when you’re sick, you just can’t abide anything? All you can do is be sick.”
I knew what she meant, even though I was either wrong about what the word
abide
meant or she was using it wrong in the sentence.
“I’m really sorry about Uncle Charlie. He was a nice man. I liked him a lot.”
Aunt Vi’s face held frozen for a split second or two. Then it twisted up into crying. And then I felt like eighteen different kinds of crap for saying exactly the wrong thing to her.
She levered up from the table. I had no idea that old woman could move so fast.
“I have to go lie down,” she said.
Of course, we’d all just gotten up for the day. I didn’t say so.
“Want some earplugs?”
I dug two out of my shirt pocket and held them out in my hand. These bright, dark blue bullets. Not foam. Foam earplugs don’t do much. Well. They don’t do enough. These were made out of beeswax and some kind of fiber. I held them out to her back as it hurried away.
She stopped at the kitchen doorway and turned around. She was wearing a housecoat covered with little pink flowers. It had seen better days. The pink flowers were fading. Practically out of existence. She held onto the doorway like the house had just hit an iceberg.
She always wore makeup. Even with that horrible old housecoat. I wondered who she thought would notice or care. Well. I noticed. I mostly wondered who cared.
I just stood there with my hand out. Like an idiot. I made a gesture toward the earplugs. So comforting. So safe. Such a good solution. Couldn’t she see that?
She shook her head hard. “I’ll just go lie down.”
“No, wait—don’t go, Aunt Vi. We’ll go outside.”
She only stood there, holding on for dear life. Probably waiting to see how I’d get Sophie to go anywhere.
I stuffed the last two bites of waffle into my mouth at the same time. Took my plate to the sink. Then I snuck up behind Sophie and grabbed the half-chewed dry waffle out of her left hand.
She shrieked.
I held it up like a carrot on a stick, just out of her reach. I knew she’d follow it right out the back door.
“I’ll give it back to you when we get outside.”
I didn’t know if Sophie understood when I said stuff to her. I didn’t even know if she listened. I said it mostly for Aunt Vi’s sake. So she wouldn’t think I was being mean to Sophie for no reason. Or maybe she wouldn’t care. Maybe it was only me who cared.
I looked over at Aunt Vi as we hit the back door—almost literally. Locked eyes with her. Without really meaning to.
Wait.
“You don’t know what it’s like,” she said. “How hard everything is when you’ve just lost someone.”
My face got hot, which it always does when I get mad. I always get mad really fast, but then I don’t do anything with it. I don’t let it loose. If I say I’m mad, I’ll cry, which is just so incredibly unfair. It ruins everything. So I don’t say.
Sophie was ramming into my side and bouncing off, over and over. Probably trying to get me to drop the waffle. It hurt, but I was only giving it half my attention.
I just thought it was a mean thing to say to me. Thoughtless. You know?
I drew Sophie out the kitchen door and onto the back porch and slammed the door hard behind us.
And gave her the waffle back.
And didn’t breathe.
Much.