All the Ugly and Wonderful Things(73)

He must have said a lot more than hello, because she listened for several minutes. She got up and dragged the phone around to the other bed to sit down facing away from Leslie and me.

“Bill, I need you to drive up to Powell in the morning and pick up the girls. We’re staying at the Blue Moon Motel that’s on the highway into town. Room One-Oh-Seven. Bill, I don’t want to talk about it on the phone. They’re fine.”

She was quiet again, listening, her shoulders tight.

“I don’t care about your stupid meeting! Come get your daughters and take them home!” When she glanced over her shoulder at us, I could see she was getting ready to cry again. “They’re safe, but they want to come home.”

Mom came around the bed and held out the phone. “Tell your father that you’re okay.”

Leslie took the phone and said, “Hi, Daddy.”

“Leslie, are you okay? Your sister’s okay?” I heard my father say.

“We’re okay.”

“What happened? What’s going on?”

“Aunt Val’s dead. And Unc—”

Mom jerked the phone away from Leslie.

“Ow!” Leslie clamped her hand over her ear, and when she pulled it away there was blood on it. Mom had yanked her earring out. Not hard enough to tear the lobe, but hard enough to make it bleed.

“No. You don’t need to come tonight. It’d be after midnight by the time you got here,” Mom said to Dad.

It wasn’t, which meant he’d sped to get there. He didn’t wake us up, because we weren’t sleeping. We had changed into nightgowns donated by church ladies, and crowded together in a bed that smelled of bleach and cigarette smoke. Lying in the dark, we were staring at the ceiling when he pounded on the door.

He’d come straight from work, wrinkled and tired. Pulling all three of us into his arms, he hugged us hard. Usually I hated his stale coffee breath, but that night it was familiar and comforting.

“I’m so glad you’re safe,” he kept saying. Sitting on the edge of the bed, with Leslie under one arm and me under the other, he listened to Mom tell what had happened. When she was done, he said, “Let’s go home.”

Leslie and I didn’t have to be told twice. We were ready to leave that dark paneled room with the sticky carpet. We picked up the plastic bags that held our clothes and Leslie’s puked-on shoes, ready to go out to Dad’s car in our borrowed nightgowns. I thought of Wavy, going from one place to another, never knowing what stranger’s clothes she’d have to wear.

Mom stayed sitting on the edge of the bed.

“Come on, Brenda. We’ve all had a long day. You don’t want to hear it, but I have to be at work in the morning. Let’s go.”

“I can’t go.”

“Yes, you can, Brenda. There’s nothing you can do here. We can make the funeral arrangements from home.”

“Wavy and Donal are missing. I can’t go. They need me.”

“I’m so sorry about Val, but your daughters need you, too.” Dad jingled his car keys. “The police will find Wavy and Donal and take care of them.”

“What am I supposed to do? I can’t just walk away,” Mom said.

“That’s exactly what you can do. There’s a system in place to take care of kids like Wavy and Donal. There’s a reason I pay through the nose on my taxes, so that when things like this happen, we don’t have to disrupt our lives. So we don’t have to live in the chaos people like Val create. We keep stepping in, but let’s let the system work this time.”

“Are you serious? If something happened to us, is that what you’d want to happen to Leslie and Amy?” Mom stood up, not to come with us, but to fight.

I stood in my socks, on the sidewalk between the room and the car, waiting to see what Dad would do. He stepped out of the motel room and closed the door behind him, leaving Mom alone.

“Get in the car, girls.”

I slept on the drive home, curled up in the front seat. I dreamed in blood that night, speeding through darkness, with Dad’s hand on my back. Aunt Val’s skull ruptured on the kitchen floor in a sea of creeping red. Footprints running away. A trail of blood drops across a concrete floor. A calendar blotter on a desk, with a heart drawn around the nineteenth, and a smear of blood beside it.





6

KELLEN

I knew exactly how Wavy’s birthday would go. I would make her wait at the table with her eyes closed, while I set out the ice cream to spell the message I’d written on the lids. Then I would sit down across from her and say, “Okay, you can look now.”

She would uncover her eyes and stare. The same way the girl at the ice cream place stared at me when I ordered. After she got over the surprise, Wavy would laugh. Stuff like that cracked her up. Then we’d eat ice cream together, even if I had to close my eyes.

After that, I was gonna take her over to the shop to see her real birthday present, the Triumph Terrier. It wasn’t finished yet, but that way she could tell me how she wanted it painted. The guy who sold it to me planned to return it to mint condition, but I had my eye more on the size, only 150 cc. Now that she was fourteen, she could get her learner’s permit, and the bike would let her go where she wanted, when she needed.

Then there would probably be some fooling around. Okay, there was definitely gonna be some fooling around after two weeks apart. Not too fast, but maybe not that slow. I could not stop thinking about the magazine she left on my pillow.