Between the Notes (3 page)

S
omeone had slipped off my shoes and unpacked a blanket to cover me. I’d slept in my clothes on that bare mattress straight through to Sunday morning and didn’t wake until the sun hit my little dormer window at just the right angle to shine in my face.

I went down to use the bathroom, which was next to my parents’ room on the third floor, and down again to find my family unpacking the kitchen. Mom fussed over me. Made me eat an egg. Brady wanted me to see his bunk bed. My legs ached. But I followed him up, huddled with him on the bottom bunk for a while.

I really needed to brush my teeth and shower, but the thought of climbing stairs again to get my stuff made me want to cry. The apartment was so vertical, I wondered if we wouldn’t have more space if we laid the building on its side. Carla lived on the lower level, which had a kitchen addition out the back that made it a bit more spacious than the upper floors. A narrow stairway led from the front door to the second floor, which contained our living
room and kitchen, and there was a little landing out the back with another set of stairs to the backyard.

Mom was not amused when I referred to the staircases as “two means of escape.”

Next to the twins’ bedroom was a little hallway where more stairs led up to my room, a.k.a. the attic, the fourth floor, the tippy top. Somehow, when I’d imagined living in a penthouse someday, this wasn’t exactly what I’d had in mind. There wasn’t even a proper door, just a rainbow-striped curtain I could pull across the opening at the top of the stairs.

The “walk-in closet” my mother had promised consisted of a bar mounted between the sloping walls of my attic room. It was more of a dive-in closet, since the single bed occupied the entire width of the room and I had to leap over it to get to my clothes. The tiny desk and dresser sat on either side of a dormer window that looked out the back.

The view out my window wasn’t as bad as I’d expected. No snarling dogs pulling against chains. No yards littered with broken-down cars. There were some lawn ornaments you might not find in Westside Falls—like the small flock of plastic pink flamingoes a few houses down. But the yards were neat and tidy for the most part. People were out on their stoops or hanging their laundry or fixing their cars, talking or laughing or arguing.

Nobody I knew ever hung laundry outside or fixed their own cars.

On the road behind ours, sitting next to someone’s trash, I
spied the answer to at least one of my problems: a bicycle with a
FOR SALE
sign taped to its spokes. My parents had sold mine in a last-ditch online auction frenzy, thinking I wouldn’t care since I hardly ever rode it. But now that I faced total humiliation on the state penitentiary bus, I cared.

Our new neighborhood might have been light-years away from my old life, but it was only 3.5 miles to Vanderbilt High. So I pulled the last of my dwindling cash from my purse and walked over there.

“How much for the bike?” I asked the elderly man who answered the door.

He limped outside, leaning heavily on a cane, to size me up. I wished I’d thought to put on scruffier clothes. “Fifty,” he said.

“For that old thing?” The bike was rusty. I didn’t even know if the tires could hold air. “How about twenty?”

The man gasped and held a hand to his chest. “You insult me,” he said. “That’s a classic Schwinn. Vintage. People pay a lot of money for bikes like that.”

I nodded slowly. “Well, thanks, anyway.” I smiled and headed back toward the road. I had fifty dollars, but that was
all
I had. Considering the man had sat the bike so close to his trash, I had a feeling he’d take my twenty bucks. Nobody else had come up to make an offer in the hour I’d watched out my window. And from what I could tell, every other kid around here already had a mode of transportation.

The man cleared his throat a few times as I walked away.
“Now, wait up. Just a minute. I didn’t say I wasn’t willing to negotiate. You can have it for twenty-five.”

I stopped and turned around. “If you throw in a tire pump, you have a deal.”

He paused, then shuffled over to a little shed and dug around in it until he found a tire pump. I took it, gave the man his twenty-five dollars, and wheeled the bike away. It squeaked and rattled, but it rolled.

I searched for a place to hide it. The playground across from our house was surrounded by woods. I found a path that cut through the trees and tucked the bike behind a snarl of vines a few feet off the trail. Secrecy was my new best friend, apparently. It was a matter of survival, I told myself. My parents would never let me ride that thing to school. They’d have plenty of good reasons: too dark, too bumpy, no headlights, no helmet. And there were stretches where the road to school had no shoulder.

But the bus? So much scarier. I might survive the bus trip itself without being physically harmed (I heard an armed police officer rode along), but I’d be seen. And everyone would know. And that would be worse. Westsiders and Lakesiders did not mix at our school. We sat on separate sides of the cafeteria and in different sections of the bleachers at football games. It was bad enough Lennie and his friends knew I lived here, but I could be fairly certain they wouldn’t be chatting with any of my friends about it. Stepping off the state pen bus in front of the building, though? I might as well announce it at a school-wide assembly.

Satisfied that the bike was sufficiently concealed, I turned for home—or, rather, that brown thing we were living in. I spotted Lennie walking from his backyard toward a pickup truck that was idling along the gravel road in front of our houses, so I lingered in the shadows of the tree line. He handed something through the driver’s window, and the guy took a few bills from his wallet and flipped them into Lennie’s hand. They chatted, laughed. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but had a pretty good idea what they were doing.

And it happened three more times that day. I saw out of our window a vehicle arriving, Lennie going out, an exchange, and the car driving off. Each transaction took less than five minutes.

“Shouldn’t someone report that?” I asked when the fourth one had come and gone.

“What?” Dad continued ripping tape off empty boxes and flattening them under his foot in the backyard.

I told him what I saw.

“Don’t jump to conclusions. You have no idea what’s going on there.”

Oh, I had ideas, all right. I just couldn’t believe the guy was so bold about it.

By the afternoon, we were settled in. When your living space is roughly the size of a shoe box, it doesn’t take a whole lot of time to unpack. Clothes were jammed onto that bar across my room and shoved under the bed in plastic bins. Still, I’d left at least half my wardrobe behind. “The half you’ve worn once and
never looked at again,” my mother pointed out. I could’ve added,
Because Willow or Wynn said it made me look fat, or wasn’t the right color, or was frumpy or bunchy, or OMG their cleaning lady had the exact same blouse!
Mom was taking it all to a consignment shop, where other unsuspecting girls could relive my fashion faux pas at half the price.

The bunk beds and a marathon game of hide-and-seek had kept the twins entertained for most of the weekend. Kaya didn’t even mind that Brady crawled under the exact same box whenever it was his turn to hide. She still searched and searched, calling out his name before finding him. I took them to the playground and helped him up the ladder and down the slide about eight hundred times, and he squealed with delight every single time. The monotony of it would drive most people crazy, but Brady’s smile was probably the only thing keeping me from crying. So we kept on sliding.

Then came bedtime and we tried to go through our usual routine, but Kaya started noticing which of her toys were missing, like the sock monkey she hadn’t played with for three years. Suddenly, it was her all-time favorite. Brady fixated on his train puzzle, one stupid train puzzle that hadn’t made the cut when Mom packed their favorite things.

Kaya’s shoulders quivered as she tried not to cry, but eventually, the tears came. She just couldn’t hold it in anymore. I knew how she felt. Brady started rocking back and forth on the floor saying “train puzzle train puzzle” over and over again. I found a
different puzzle, with dump trucks on it, but he merely clapped his hands to his ears and squeezed his eyes shut tight.

Dad appeared in the doorway to the twins’ bedroom and pressed his forearms against its frame, as if he was holding the walls from crashing in on us. We all stared up at him. The crying and rocking stopped.

“Kids?” His tone was grave. “This isn’t going to be easy, adjusting to our new home. It’s a lot smaller. Everything we had before won’t fit here. Okay? But we all need to try our best, and make do with what we have.”

Kaya started whimpering again and Dad held up his hand like a stop sign, as if that would work. But, oddly, it did. She pressed her lips hard together and held her breath.

“We will make one more trip to the house. You may each pick one item to bring back. Just one. Then that’s it. Got it?” His eyes locked on mine first, then Kaya’s, then Brady’s. We each nodded in turn.

“Get in the car,” he said.

“Like this?” I gestured to the pajamas we were all wearing.

“Yep. Let’s go.”

Mom let out a huge sigh, and the air went back into the room. We all tumbled down the stairs and into the car. Nobody said anything the whole way there. Brady even stopped his puzzle chant. When we pulled up the driveway, our house looked so dark and empty, so lonely. So enormous.

I went to my room first, scanning the remains for that single
left-behind item that would make my life in Lakeside bearable. The one thing I wanted wasn’t in my room, though. It had a room of its own.

My mother had purchased my piano before I was born. It was one of the reasons they’d bought this house. She’d seen this room and known immediately it would make the perfect piano room. I started playing when I was three, but ever since the talent show debacle in fifth grade, my performances were reserved for the twins only.

Mom came up behind me then and laid her fingers next to mine on the keys. “We’ll get you a keyboard for the apartment,” she said. “I promise. Everything will work itself out. You’ll see.”

I nodded and closed the lid. We both knew it wouldn’t be the same. Leaving my piano behind was like chopping off an arm. No . . . more like wearing a blindfold. Music helped me see things. Whenever I was confused or upset or frustrated, I went to the piano like it was my own private shrink. Reesa called it “Dr. Steinway.”

“You’re selling it,” I said. It wasn’t a question.

Mom nodded and stroked her hand along the curved body of the piano. “Not right away, though. The realtor for the bank said she’d find out if the people who buy the house want it.”

“That’s nice.” I don’t know why I said that, because it wasn’t nice at all. But it gave me a little glimmer of hope. Maybe the house wouldn’t sell. Maybe we’d get to come back and my piano would be here waiting for me.

Maybe I was still in denial.

“We have to do this for Brady,” she said quietly. “We need the money. If he doesn’t get the therapy now . . .”

“I know, Mom.” I strode to my room before she could remind me how much the sacrifices we made now would mean for Brady’s future. Even with twenty hours a week of therapy—speech and physical and occupational—his life would be a constant struggle. Without it, he didn’t have a chance. Didn’t I want the best for him? I would say, “Of course I do.” Because I did. I only wished it didn’t mean the worst for the rest of us.

I went to my wall of shelves to search for that special something to take with me and ran my fingers across the spines of my favorite books. I wanted them all, not just one. So I had decided to leave the lot of them behind. Good-bye,
Will Grayson.
Farewell,
Jane Eyre.
See ya,
Stargirl.

I looked around. Resting on the top shelf was the ukulele my aunt Betty had given me. I hadn’t played it much. It was too quiet. It could never make the entire room vibrate like the Steinway could. I reached for it and blew the dust off its frets, strummed a badly out-of-tune chord. Maybe I’d give the uke another chance. Maybe it was just the right instrument for our tiny apartment and the smallness of my voice when my throat felt tight. I tucked it under my arm and went down to the car. Dad smiled but said nothing.

Kaya got her sock monkey. After tearing through the entire house in his Superman pajamas, Brady had decided he didn’t
want his train puzzle after all. He chose a small, fuzzy accent pillow from the couch in the TV room. Dad raised an eyebrow, but he certainly wasn’t about to argue. We’d made our choices, and that was that. Mom hadn’t picked anything, though, so Dad disappeared into their room and came out with one of her slinky evening dresses.

“I don’t think that’ll fit you,” she joked, but wrapped her arms around his neck. “Shouldn’t you pick something more practical?”

He gave my mother a long kiss, long enough to make Kaya hide her eyes. “Just because we can’t afford a beautiful house doesn’t mean you can’t have any beautiful things,” he said. “It doesn’t mean we’ll never have an occasion to celebrate again.”

Mom looked up at the house, swept her hand from one end to the other as if brushing it away. “We never needed all this,” she said. “I don’t know why we bought it in the first place.”

The mother I knew, the one who took such pride in our home and fussed over every tiny detail of its décor—the fringe on every pillow, the angle of every chair, the potting of every plant—seemed to disappear before my eyes.

I knew our furniture would be disappearing soon, too. At least we wouldn’t be there when it was carted off by the auction house. Mom said they’d get better prices than she could, but I had a feeling she just didn’t want to witness our life being sold to the highest bidder, piece by piece.

Back at the apartment, my father tucked the twins into their bunk beds and read to them. Their room was directly below
mine, and I could hear their soft voices filtering up the attic stairs. When Dad snapped the book shut and kissed their cheeks, I heard that, too. He flipped off the light. Click.