The Wrong Family(53)
23
JUNO
Juno broke the cable box. That was her big plan. She unplugged the whole thing and then, lifting it above her head, threw it at the carpeted floor in Nigel’s den. Once lightly...twice...she heard something rattle loose the third time. Then she put everything back the way she found it and waited. Nigel holed up in his den, watching an endless stream of CNN and ESPN for his mindless entertainment. To fuck with his cable box was to fuck with his precarious mental stability. But that’s what Juno wanted—everyone unstable, so she could get some answers.
Nigel spent two days arguing with the cable company over the phone. Juno, who risked a night in Hem’s Corner to hear everything, for once appreciated his loud anger. No, he would not be paying for a replacement...no, it was their faulty box, not his inability to handle it... Yes, he needed someone to come out, hadn’t he been saying that all along? The soonest was when! No, that wasn’t acceptable, there was a game he wanted to watch this weekend and he would not be put out by their incompetence...if that’s all they had...Thursday. “And can you give me a window, so I know when to be home?”
“That’s an eight-hour window!” She could almost hear the defeat in his voice. “Fine. Yes... I’ll leave the alarm off for the day and the back door unlocked. If your guy can give me notice when he gets here and leaves so I can come and lock up. Is it in the notes? Put it in the notes.”
On Thursday morning, Juno was waiting in the closet by what she guessed was 5:00 a.m. She’d had a carton of chocolate milk to drink and a few oyster crackers before she came up, and the sugar was making her feel squirmy. Squirmy was better than limp, she thought. She was wearing a gray Seahawks hoodie with the hood pulled up and a pair of Nigel’s giveaway jeans, belted with twine Juno had found in Winnie’s craft drawer. Nigel always left earlier than Winnie, usually heading out the door by six, and she wanted to be ready. On her feet were the same sneakers she’d worn the day she moved in—since they’d brought her here in the first place, she wore them for luck.
Nigel’s steady, methodical footsteps echoed above Juno’s head. She crouched beneath the coats and costumes, breathing through her nose and smelling the faint aroma of urine. A cough stirred at the back of her throat, and she tried to swallow it down before it became a thing. That was one of her biggest fears—discovery by coughing. Her thighs burned, muscles she hadn’t used in weeks being forced to hold her weight, however slight she was. His boots were on the stairs now; soon he’d put off the alarm and open the closet to grab his bag. Juno heard him clear his throat, then the faint beeping of buttons as he tapped in the code, disarming the alarm. The code was Sam’s original due date: 0602. She’d once overheard Winnie reminding Dakota of it. The door opened and closed, and Nigel was gone. He hadn’t taken his gym bag today, and she stared at it hard before crawling over. She checked the zippers first, then the inside. There was a five stuck in the inside pocket; she smoothed it out on her knee and kept looking. She pushed past a change of clothes and a small bottle of cologne. At the bottom of the bag was an Altoids tin that didn’t rattle with mints when she nudged past it. Juno brought it out and flipped open the lid. She didn’t have time for this; Sam would be waking up any moment.
Her mouth went dry as she stared down at a credit card, a wad of twenties that looked like it amounted to about five hundred dollars, and a single, foil-wrapped condom. She unwrapped a twenty from the wad and shoved it into her pocket with the five. What she did next didn’t surprise her as much as it amused her. Juno crawled back to the hot dog costume, the one she liked to hold against her face. She’d had a big surprise one day when the tip of a safety pin had jabbed her in the cheek. She’d reattached it to the hot dog, the sharp pin tucked away. Now she retrieved the pin with only minutes to spare; Sam was in the bathroom. With the aspirin coating her pain, Juno was actually pretty fast. She liked the way it felt to stick the sharp end of the safety pin past the foil and into the rubbery onionskin beneath it. She pushed the pin all the way through. Then she put everything back the way she found it; that was the trick. Juno was out the front door before Sam had even flushed the toilet. She had an eight-hour window.
* * *
At three-thirty, she carried a bag of cereal she bought at the Dollar Tree to a bench by the water. Pulling open the plastic, she sprinkled a handful across the dirt and in two seconds she was surrounded by the blue-barred chests of a dozen pigeons. They pecked away, stoic, their amber eyes casting Juno sidelong glances. She didn’t prefer these little rats with wings, but they were always the first to come.
“There are usually three turtles over here.”
Juno jumped, almost dropping the bag. The sun was out—a rare moment—and it was shining directly into her eyes, temporarily blinding her. But she knew that voice, she knew it well.
Samuel was standing close to the water, right where the dirt dipped into the lake at a sharp angle. He was wearing a green hoodie and a ratty pair of jeans, and a backpack much like Nigel’s was slung over his shoulder. He wasn’t looking at her; his eyes were focused on the lily pads a few feet beyond the mud. Juno knew that’s where the turtles usually rested, craving sun like the rest of the folks in Washington.
“Yes. They were out earlier.”
“I’m offended that they didn’t wait for me.”