Livvie Owen Lived Here (16 page)

“It's not going to come yet,” I reassured her confidently. “It's going to be an hour yet or more before it comes.”

“How can you tell?” she asked with a skeptical laugh. Having been my sister for so long, she was nonetheless not always certain when I was being definite and when I was just making guesses.

“It just doesn't feel like it's ready yet,” I said. “Trust me. I'm sure of it. It might drizzle, but it isn't going to storm till after three.”

It was the last day before school started, the last day before I had to commit myself to eight-hour days of trying to fit myself into a mold I didn't understand and had no use for. I really wanted to spend this last hot August night of freedom with my Orange Cat. And I really didn't want him out in the storm.

“Orange Cat!” I yelled into the wind, gleeful hope picking up my step so I was dancing under the clouds as we worked our way along Pendleton Street. “Come back now, you silly thing! You've been gone three days now! You've made your point!” Humming with glee,
I skipped a few steps. “You're going to be sorry if you stay out in the storm! You're going to wish you had listened and just come home when I first asked you!”

Beside me, Tash stopped walking and made a small sound in her throat.

The houses were small along this street, but they were familiar and I liked them. The yards stretched a little farther than on some streets, and they were filled with interesting things like clotheslines or gardens or leftover yard sale items. One house had six mailboxes, all in a row propped by the porch, like they were making them or selling them or saving them for something.

That's where my eyes were—on the mailboxes. My peripheral vision was something we had talked about at length, last school year. Sometimes I saw things differently there. Sometimes something I saw as huge or dark or scary out of my peripheral vision turned out to be commonplace once I faced it head-on. But this time it was different and I knew it.

He looked too pale, so I was certain it wasn't him. Who knew part of his orange came from the inside? Without the life inside him, he was only dull yellow. Tash grabbed my hand and started to cry.

But not me. I didn't cry as I yanked my hand free. I only walked toward him as my hands balled into fists, as my eyes refused to stay closed.

I couldn't look him in the eye because his face was messed up. Instead I took in his stomach and his paw pads and the rings around the tail, and even as my brain said no, I knew yes beyond a doubt. I was a girl who noticed details and I couldn't deny them now. I knew the weight, the color, the specific slant of his patterns. As different as he looked in death, I knew who I was seeing.

The storm came then, just one thing more that I was wrong about.

No Sun House. No Orange Cat. Only cool colors left. The tantrum was like no other, at least not since the night Orange Cat died. Before I woke up enough to know what I was doing, I had already broken my alarm clock and ripped several pictures off the walls.

It was neither a scream nor a hum, the sound I was making, and it took me a long time to realize who was making it. When I realized it was me, I tried to stop it, but the pressure was exploding behind my eyes and slamming into my stomach and it was either scream or explode, so I exploded. My hands flew into my hair and I began to rock wildly, yanking at my hair while my back thumped against the wall over and over.

I was barely aware of my mother arriving, her
hands tugging uselessly at mine. Then my father, stronger and more determined. Suddenly he was holding my hands instead of my hands holding my hair.

I fought him, flinging my head forward to catch him in the chin, then scratching at his fingers with my nails. The whole time, I was horrified at my own behavior. I didn't want this to be happening. But I needed the pressure to stop and he wasn't letting me make it.

I knew my parents were talking, shouting, but I couldn't hear them over the whooshing in my head, over my own strangled screaming. I heard something crack the next time I flung myself into the wall, and I knew I had lost us our damage deposit, if it wasn't lost already. Funny the clear bits of sky that could appear in the midst of a storm.

Simon gathered me up again, holding so tight I couldn't move. After a minute, the tight hold began to feel comforting, as though the pressure from the outside was reversing the pressure from the inside.

As soon as the screaming was gone, it was replaced by tears. This was something new. I almost never cried during a tantrum. But as soon as the screaming was gone, the dream had a chance to come
back. I wrapped my arms around Simon's neck and sobbed, terrified he wouldn't hug me back, terrified I had just done something irreversible.

Simon shushed me and rocked me as he had when I was small, while Karen's hands stroked my hair and her soft voice soothed me.

When my eyes could focus, they focused on Natasha, holding Lanie's hand in the doorway. Funny, I could hear my parents, but I still couldn't hear my sisters. It struck me nervously that maybe they weren't talking.

“I'm sorry,” I started saying, mostly to fill the void of my sisters' silence. “I'm sorry. I'm sorry.” Over and over. So many times I didn't notice feet approaching till Natasha was there beside me.

“Shush, Livvie,” she said with a hint of firmness in her voice, sounding very much like our mother. “You're all right.”

I was so tired right that second, I almost believed her on the surface. Underneath, I thought maybe I would never believe her. Underneath, I felt like my insides were shaking. I was scared. I didn't like this girl who kept throwing tantrums and breaking things. I wanted to get as far away from her as possible.

I rocked back hard against Simon. “Livvie, stop this!” I demanded. “You're ruining everything!”

Simon shook his head against me. “You're not ruining anything, baby. You just need to calm down.”

“I can't. That's why I'm ruining everything!” I sniffled, switching at last into first person. “I can't calm down when everything is so hard! I can't calm down, Simon!”

“Ssssh.” He continued to rock me against him. “Ssssh.” His hands stroked my hair, his lips brushed my forehead, and despite my words, I found myself beginning to relax.

“That's my girl,” he whispered. “That's my Livvie-bug.”

“Am I?” I ventured after a very long moment.

“Oh, hush,” he said like Karen. “You always will be.”

These were the words, at last, that made it possible for me to relax, still wrapped in my father's arms. He eased me back into my bed and pulled up my nine blankets, taking care to get them even. Karen kissed my forehead, then turned Lanie by the shoulders and headed her back to bed. Simon was left to straighten my torn-up pictures, to right my fallen lamp.

Tasha slid into bed beside me and propped herself up against the pillows. Her hand reached around me to pluck one of my old favorite books off the nightstand.

“What are you doing?” I asked with sleep in my voice. Now that I was calm, I felt heavy, like I was sinking down into the bed and getting swallowed by the pillows.

“I'm visiting an old friend,” she answered, her voice sounding very far away. She began to read, words coming alive and drifting dreamily off the page, and I sank into sleep almost at once.

I woke in the night, but for the first time in a long time, it wasn't the whistle that did it. Playing sounds back in my head as I drew on my night sweatshirt and stuck my socked feet in my sneakers, I knew the step that had stolen down the hall. The only question now was why. Why would Lanie Owen, ever sensible, be sneaking out at this hour?

I slipped past Tasha, asleep with her book on her chest. I knew which sections of carpet to avoid, which would give me away with their creaking. Good thing Lanie hadn't known. Outside, the November air was bitter and my breath was snatched away almost the minute I stepped out. I took the wooden steps carefully, wary of the frost, and at the bottom, I found one footprint blackening the grass between
the bottom step and the gravel of the driveway. I could still hear her footsteps fading away.

“Wait,” I whispered into the darkness. Then, when the sounds kept fading, “Lanie,
wait
!”

In the darkness, I wasn't sure, but then I came across her waiting. She stood with her hands cupped in front of her and tears running down her cheeks. In the darkness, in the night, without a bit of mean or angry in her, she looked much younger than eleven. Much younger than her big sister, too, for the first time in a while.

The emotions on her face had no name, but I knew it wasn't just me this time. No one had a name for this, although we all felt it some horrible night.

Gently uncupping Lanie's hands, I found Bentley cradled in them. He was grayer tonight, the part that made him the whitest gone forever. I kept my hands under him and leaned my forehead against hers.

We stood like this perhaps longer than any other two people might have done. Then I whispered, “Where are you taking him?”

Lanie sniffled and gulped huge. “I don't know,” she said in a small voice. “I'm just . . . taking him.”

I took her hand then and tugged her with me. “Come on, then.”

“Where—”

“Don't argue with your big sister,” I said firmly. “Trust me, Lane.”

She did, cradling Bentley's small body to her chest with her free hand. Tears continued to slip down her cheeks, but she didn't argue with me, following me through the darkness as if she trusted me. It was a great responsibility, but I knew at once I could handle it. We stole through Nabor-with-an-A for what I knew would be the last time at this particular hour, deliberately skipping Probart Street for safety's sake. Mrs. Rhodes would only mean well, but she mustn't stop us this time.

There was a car in front of the Pendleton Street rental house, and boxes on the porch. In a few hours' time, we had missed our chance for that one. I heard Lanie sigh in the darkness and then she sniffled again, harder. As difficult as it was for her, losing her little mouse friend and science partner, I knew that wasn't the only sadness running down my sister's cheeks.

The Sun House looked softer tonight than it had in the day. I wasn't even scared as I led Lanie up the broken front walk, up the wooden steps onto the porch. There we sat, backs against weathered wood that remembered us well, no matter how little and how different we had been, all the way back then.

I couldn't smell the heat or the water from here,
but I had memories, the kind you aren't sure you're really remembering until they keep drifting up in your head the same way. I remembered me and Tash with our blankets, me and Tash trying to light the fire on the wall while Karen and Simon were still asleep. I thought maybe the fire escaped from its box. I thought maybe I remembered the way the water looked in the air as it was spraying, and then we left like the paper mill and didn't come back.

Someone must have tried to fix up the place, after. Painted the walls. Took out the gas furnace. But the Sun House was never the same after that.

“I don't remember this place,” Lanie whispered, “but I kind of do, you know?”

“It remembers you, too,” I promised, reaching for her mouse. I took off my sneaker and sock, then replaced the sneaker and helped Lanie wrap her little mouse in my sock. “It's clean, more or less. I promise.”

She laughed through her tears. “He doesn't care.”

I hummed for a minute and rocked, taking Lanie in my arms so she rocked with me.

“Is this . . .” Lanie ventured in a small voice after a moment. “Is this how you've been feeling, Liv? Like it's your fault, about Orange Cat?”

I nodded. “Orange Cat and other stuff, too. Only
Mrs. Rhodes said it isn't. And Tash said it isn't. And Karen and Simon said it isn't. And guess what?”

“What?”

“It
isn't.
”

Lanie sniffled. “You promise?”

“Livvie doesn't lie. Not much.”

Lanie giggled a little through her sniffling. Then went quiet again. “I hope he was happy,” she said, and sighed. Her voice drifted off across the weathered old porch, blending into the creaking of the doorway and the distant laughter I might have just imagined. My fingers picked at wet old wood and bits of it came apart in my hand. My bracelet caught on the splinters and Orange Cat's collar fell away. I caught it with my fingertips and rubbed the brass tags that had become so worn.

“He looked happy, he looked really happy,” I finally said. “He got to be in science fairs and he got to sit on the kitchen table when Karen wasn't looking. And he did his job good, just like Orange Cat.”

Lanie looked at me funny. “What do you mean, his job?”

“He was supposed to be happy and get you a scholarship, and he did.”

“Then what was Orange Cat's job?”

“To teach me,” I admitted, feeling more clear than I had in a while.

She gulped again. “And did he?”

“Yep.” I stroked her hair and wiped the tears off her cheeks with my thumb. “He taught me.”

We sat together on the porch, rocking and humming Bentley's favorite song, which Lanie insisted was the theme from
Star Wars
. And
I
was supposed to be the odd one. When it was finished, Lanie swallowed and sat up straighter.

“He wants to stay here,” she said. “He wants to be buried here, where we started.” It was the sort of thing I might have said, and the whisper-soft way she said it, I knew she noticed.

“I know he does,” I said as my hands slid Orange Cat's collar back and forth between them.

We buried them along with the Condemned sign, digging in the dirt with broken timbers from the porch. Lanie began to cry again as she placed Bentley into the ground and covered him with the soft earth of our first home. I stroked Orange Cat's collar as though there were someone inside it. Then placed it in a hole not much bigger than Bentley's, touching the worn tag one last time.