Cherry Money Baby (23 page)

The car rocked, settled. Something hissed. Something clicked. Grunting, Cherry unbuckled and climbed out of the wounded car. She took a step back to examine her handiwork. The Spider was facing the wrong way in the breakdown lane, the passenger side crushed against the barrier, both windows shattered on that side. Long smoky skid marks chased each other across the pavement. Something was leaking from the engine block, and the hood had buckled down the center. There was glass everywhere. The car was dead. She knew a dead car when she saw one.

Feeling the nauseous sense of satisfaction that came with yanking a loose tooth, Cherry started on foot toward the trailer park. The dawn air was crisp and cleaned the sweat from her skin. Her eyes stung; her limbs twitched. Her chest burned where the seat belt had dug in. Good. She deserved pain. She hoped it would get worse. She hoped it would bruise. She hoped her eyes would burn for days. She liked the ringing in her ears, which made thinking impossible.

She knew something was wrong before she reached the end of the bridge to Sugar Village. She sensed movement at the end of the street. Then she saw Lucas. He was coming toward her out of the shadows, and for a hallucination he seemed awfully solid. He was running toward her, calling her name.

Cherry stopped, not sure what to do. She braced herself, her knees going weak. He knew. Somehow he knew everything about Maxwell. So this was it, the end of them. Would she cry? Would he yell? Whatever her immediate punishment, nothing could be worse than losing him. As he got closer, she saw his expression — something unfamiliar that frightened her more. He threw his arms around her and squeezed.

“I’m so sorry,” he said, his words thick, almost drunken. “I’m so sorry.”

“W-what?”

“It’s gone. It’s gone, baby.”

He looked at her beseechingly. He shook his head, but Cherry pushed past him, running toward the end of the street, where she now saw the slow sweep of red and yellow lights and heard voices. Somewhere water pattered on the ground. Mrs. Budzenia watched from her door in a bathrobe. Other neighbors peered from their windows.

Her trailer was a twisted black hulk. The roof had arched and caved like the convolutions of a roller coaster. The walls had come away in sections and lay on the scorched lawn. She could make out the cooked nub of the refrigerator, the chalky outline of the rooms. Everything was black and wet. Fire hoses crisscrossed on what used to be the driveway. And that was it. There was nothing else. The fire had taken everything.

“Cherry!”

Stew wore a starchy blanket around his shoulders, his face streaked with gray ash. He’d been crying.

“You the sister?” a fireman asked.

Something clicked in Cherry’s brain. “Where’s Pop?”

“We’ve reached your father. He’s on his way.”

Stew was holding her, his face pressed into her shoulder so hard it hurt.

“It’s my fault. It’s my fault! It’s my fault!”

There was a little circle around Cherry now. The fireman, Lucas, and her brother. They were waiting for her to say something, waiting to see what she’d do. Everyone was frozen.

And then all at once, she knew what to do. The pain in her head and joints vanished.

She held Stew away. “It’s not your fault. It was an accident. You hear me?” Stew sniffed. He didn’t seem so sure. She held his ears like she was about to rip them off. “You
hear
me?”

He nodded.

“You all right? You hurt?”

He shook his head.

“Then everything’s okay. Everything’s fine.” She turned to Lucas. “Can we stay with you tonight?”

“Yeah, of course,” he said. “I’ll tell Dad.”

“Go with Lucas,” she told her brother. “Take a shower. I’ll wait for Pop.”

Stew wanted to protest, but Cherry’s tone left no room for argument.

“Thank you,” she said to the fireman. “We’ll be fine. Thank you.”

The fireman touched his helmet and then motioned to the others.

“Hey,” Lucas said.

She looked at him in the pulsing lights of the fire trucks. She noticed he was barefoot, dressed in his sleeping shorts and tee. He didn’t want to leave her, but he would if she said to. Her guilt didn’t matter now. All that mattered was Taking Care of Things.

“Make sure he drinks water,” she said to Lucas. It seemed like the right thing to say.

He kissed her forehead, then put his arm around Stew and led him around the bend, toward his trailer.

The firefighters were packing up. There was nothing more for them to do. Cherry watched their careful efficiency, rolling the hoses, climbing onto the chassis, serious but not indifferent. The siren bleated once, and the two trucks pulled away. Mrs. Budzenia had gone back inside, and the neighbors’ windows were dark now. The sun had just breached the tree line, and long shadows fell across Cherry’s street. It was about time for her morning run.

Cherry turned back toward the wreckage of her home. She could see straight through to Lucas’s bedroom window, where the light was on. A morning bird chirped its two-note song. It was Saturday.

Cherry sat down on the curb and waited for her father.

A little after ten in the morning, Cherry went into Lucas’s room. The shades were drawn. He was awake, lying on his side. He held up the covers so she could slide in. She pulled off her skirt and the crumpled black top. She’d washed her face in the DuBoises’ bathroom, and her skin tingled where it was still wet. She tucked in beside him, warming herself against his thighs. Nothing had ever felt so good. It was the first time they’d been in a bed together since kindergarten.

“Everything’s going to work out,” he said.

She’d always been confident this was true. Life’s trampoline could bend only so low before rocketing you back up again. Now she wasn’t sure things would work out. It seemed likely they wouldn’t. Things would get worse, and keep on getting worse, until there was nothing left. But she didn’t say any of this.

“Say something,” Lucas said.

He thought she was in shock. And maybe she was. She didn’t deserve his pity, because she was a cheater. A traitor. She could still feel Maxwell’s lips on hers. She couldn’t confess, because if she did, his anger would be dampened by how sorry he felt for her. He’d forgive her because she’d lost everything and because he was a good person.

So that was her punishment. Having to keep the secret. Never getting to be a good person again. She’d stepped out into the cold, because she was curious, because she was covetous, and now she could never, ever get back in.

“I’m homeless,” said Cherry.

A trailer is too small for three people. With three people, spaces overlap, single rooms split into mini-rooms, shelves in the medicine cabinet subdivide into a tic-tac-toe of his razor, her shampoo, the other’s toothbrush, the shared floss. With the DuBois trailer now supporting five, there was no such thing as personal space.

They lived like refugees. Stew slept on the living-room floor, Lucas on the couch. Pop had a camper bed in Mr. DuBois’s bedroom —“Just like the army,” Mr. DuBois joked — but usually fell asleep in Leroy’s armchair. Because she was a girl, Cherry had Lucas’s room to herself, and on most nights Lucas would climb over her brother asleep on the floor, using the crackle of the TV to muffle his footsteps, and climb in beside her. His bed was a single. They both had to learn to sleep totally still, in spoon position, the edge of the mattress inches away. Cherry found it hard to keep still while he lifted the sheets and wrapped himself around her. She pretended to sleep. If he thought she was awake, they might end up talking, and if they talked at night, for that four or five hours they were actually alone, she might tell him what she’d done.

In the mornings, everyone was cheerful. It was a little like camping. Cherry made coffee and eggs, Stew put away the blankets and sleeping bag. Mr. DuBois read aloud from the
Aubrey Times,
and Pop would crack jokes about the stupidity of this politician or that coach. Stew teased Lucas about his snoring, and Lucas would make cracks about Stew’s toxic foot odor. They were double the family in half the space, something super-dense, like a collapsing star, and the only things light enough to escape were jokes.

Cherry kept an eye on her father. His initial reaction had been to just stand there in the ashy puddle of their lawn, hanging off himself like a wet winter coat on a rickety stand. When the shock wore off, he was almost relieved, as if the world were lighter without the trailer in it. He hugged her and Stew a little tighter now and a little more often. He spoke softer and moved more delicately, and it worried her. She worried and worried. There was more hair in the drain than usual — long, dyed-blond strands.

Cherry hoped school would at least feel normal, but no such luck. She was a celebrity again, but for worse reasons. Instead of envy, she got pity — sticky, sweet, and synthetic, like the syrup on the cafeteria flapjacks. Kids she’d never met said things like,
If there’s anything I can do
. . . which was meaningless. Still, she couldn’t blame them. If
their
homes burned down, Cherry would have felt the same vague pity and unease, as if a burned-down house were contagious, like chicken pox or VD.

And it did seem like misfortune had cursed her, what with the trailer
and
her beautiful car destroyed. It was hard for people to wrap their minds around both incidents at once. The two didn’t fit into a logical relationship. Had she crashed the car
into
the trailer, causing the fire? No. Had she seen the fire from the highway and lost control of the vehicle in a state of shock? No. The destruction of both trailer and Spider were simply unrelated tragedies, two awful things for the girl who’d rescued Ardelia Deen. It was so odd, most people had nothing at all to say about it.

The Monday after the fire, Principal Girder called Cherry down to his office and proposed a food drive for her family.

“Our trailer burned down, not the grocery store.”

“Well, then.” Girder straightened his pencil, aligning it with the edge of his blotter. “Maybe something else. Perhaps a charity fund-raiser?”

“We’re fine,” said Cherry. “We’ll be fine.”

Fine
was all she said anymore. When Coach White asked her if she wasn’t feeling up to running laps, she said, “It’s fine.” When Mr. Sackov asked if she needed an extension on her paper, it was also
fine,
even though she’d desperately needed an extension
before
the fire. It was like the fire was an excuse to get all the slack a normal person needed just to get through senior year. Maybe if everyone’s house burned down, kids wouldn’t be so stressed.

The only person who didn’t ask her how she was doing was Lucas. They ate lunch together on the bleachers, which was against the rules. They got away with it, though, and this was the extent of the charity Cherry was willing to accept.

“Someone tried to flush a hat in the second-floor girls’ room,” Lucas said, opening a can of soda. It fizzed everywhere.

“Who wears a hat?”

“Who tries to
flush
a hat?” Lucas said. They watched a flock of geese land on the field, readying a fresh barrage of grass-killing shit. The geese squawked at one another. Cherry decided she hated geese.

“Is this what it’s gonna be like?” Lucas said. “When we’re married, I mean. Living together.” He thought this over, chewing his roast beef sandwich. “I guess we won’t see each other during the day.”

“Not unless we work at the same place,” said Cherry.

“You want a janitor job?”

Cherry shrugged. She wanted to make a dirty joke about riding the floor buffer but didn’t have the energy.

She had to make do with only the clothes she’d been wearing the night of the fire and an ancient Minnie Mouse T-shirt she’d left at Lucas’s a million years ago. Her old photo albums, favorite DVDs, everything she’d ever owned was gone. She couldn’t begin to catalog it. The little trailer had held
so much.
Now everything was reduced, scarce. The Gremlin, made with love, had burned up, along with the attached garage. With no car, her whole world had shrunk to a slim hourglass, with Sugar Village and Aubrey High conjoined by a narrow path she walked every morning with Lucas. Chunks of herself, her
life,
had burned away.

During study period, Olyvya Dunrey approached Cherry in the library. She was sans entourage this time, her messed-up teeth hidden behind a pout. “Saw you on the news,” she said. “Again.”

Cherry didn’t look up from her textbook. “Yep.”

“I’m so sorry about your trailer.
House.
Trailer home. Whatever.” She seemed unglued, nervous. Cherry took a little pleasure in that.

“Thanks.”

“It’s not fair,” Olyvya said a little louder. Cherry looked up. Olyvya’s face was puffy and pink, like she’d swallowed something hot she was trying to keep down. “I just mean, you save someone’s life, and then this stupid, awful thing happens to you. It’s not fair.”

Cherry was stunned. Olyvya seemed genuinely upset. “Are you okay?”

“It’s just not fair.” She took a calming breath and handed Cherry a piece of construction paper with glitter. “I made you a little cheer-up card. I asked Vi to give it to you, but she doesn’t like me.”