Drenched in Light (30 page)

She looked over her shoulder at me, her eyes narrowing contemplatively.

“It’s beautiful,” I said, but my voice seemed out of place.

“I’ll be back,” she whispered, then turned and crossed the shallows, hopping easily from rock to rock. On the other side, she used a nest of exposed sycamore roots as a ladder and disappeared into the tall brown grasses.

Glancing uncertainly up and down the river, I considered following or waiting, then finally decided to cross the water myself. Other than sliding one toe briefly into the icy water, I made it across relatively unscathed, and climbed the opposite bank to a well-worn path that led through the dry leaves and up the hill. At the edge of the woods, the trail disappeared among thick unmowed weeds and cattails, now clothed in winter brown. A dog barked somewhere nearby as I pushed through the tangle and emerged on a gravel road. Turning toward the sound, I surveyed a row of decaying cracker box houses, the yards strewn with the carcasses of rotting furniture, trash, and discarded bits and pieces of automobiles. In front of one of the homes, a dog was straining at its chain, barking at Dell, who stood motionless in the road. She seemed oblivious, transfixed by something beyond the bend. Moving closer, I followed her line of vision toward a tiny house crouched in an overgrown field where the road turned. The place may have once been painted pale green or white, but was now just a fading relic with weathered wooden siding and a sagging roof partially bare of shingles. The entire structure leaned toward the river, as if it might slide down the slope and float away when the spring rains came.

“That’s where we lived.” Dell spoke the words with some amazement. Her eyes reflected the road, the decaying houses, the cornucopia of trash in the ditch. “I guess somebody else lives there now.”

I was momentarily mute. It was hard to believe that anyone could be living there, or had lived there recently. The distance Dell had come in the months since her grandmother’s death suddenly seemed so much more vast, her talent for music that much more amazing.

“I guess so,” I whispered, tugging the zipper upward on my jacket as a puff of breeze traveled past, warning of a cold night ahead. I tried to imagine what it would be like surviving the winter in that tiny house, where, as Dell had written, the walls were paper-thin.

Her gaze moved slowly back and forth, scanning the yard, the house, the rotten mattress, box springs, and recliner in the ditch. Watching her, I understood her in a deeper sense, and I realized something important about my job. Dell was coming from a place I couldn’t imagine, but so were all of the kids who passed me in the halls at Harrington. Some lived in good places, and some lived in difficult places, and I would never be able to tell the difference just by looking. In order to know who they really were, I had to go below the surface.

“What do you think of when you look at your old house?” I asked.

Shrugging, she turned her shoulder to it and started back the way we had come. “I think it’s gross,” she said flatly, her lips a thin, determined line. “I can’t believe I lived there.”

Falling in step beside her, I sighed softly, and she glanced over, surprised. “But there’s part of you that misses it,” I said.

“No, ma’am.” Her steps quickened, as if she couldn’t be gone from the place fast enough and wished she hadn’t been drawn to return there. “What’s there to miss? It’s a rat heap, and my granny was out cold on the couch most of the time from all her prescriptions, and I slept on a mattress on the floor, and half the time nobody got me up for school, or all the clothes were dirty, or there wasn’t any food in the house and all the food stamps were used up. Who would miss that?”

“Someone who suddenly feels a lot of pressure to keep up,” I said, watching my tennis shoes crunch through the dead grass as we crossed the ditch again. “To keep a schedule, keep up with grades, and music practice, and spring performance with the symphonic, and relationships with a new foster family.”

She shrugged. “But those are good things.”

“Yes, they are, but, sometimes we can get so focused on all those outside things that we don’t find time for the inside ones.” I pointed to my heart, swallowing an unexpected rush of emotion. “And while we’re doing all those outside things, the
to-do
list in here is getting longer and longer and longer until it’s so big we can’t face starting on it.”

Lips twisting into a one-sided smirk, she turned toward the trail again, her hair swinging around her shoulders. “Like when you clean the room by stuffing everything under the bed, and pretty soon you don’t want to look under there at all,” she interpreted. “Grandma Rose told me always sweep out under the bed and clean the closets; then you’ll be happy to have folks over to visit.”

I chuckled at the analogy. “Exactly. That’s it exactly. We all need time to look through the closet and consider what’s in there. We’ve stored all that stuff for a reason. It’s all part of who we are. If we let it stack up, then pretty soon we’re afraid to have anybody over, because we’re hiding a mess.”

Grabbing an overhanging vine, Dell flipped herself onto it like a gymnast, then sat looking down at me from above. The vine was worn smooth, as if she’d completed the maneuver many times before. “You sound like Grandma Rose.”

“Thank you,” I said, and moved on down the path, feeling surprisingly content with the footsteps I was walking in.

By the time we reached the farm, Karen and Kate were in the kitchen preparing supper, and Keiler was in the yard giving lawn-chair airplane rides to Kate’s kids, preschooler Josh and toddler Rose. The afternoon was growing dim, and an evening chill was coming in, so they followed us inside. We sat at the table with Ben as Kate and Karen took prepackaged lasagnas and garlic bread from the oven, and set them on the table with a hastily prepared salad and bottles of dressing.

“Sorry it’s nothing fancy,” Kate said as she and Karen sat down. “I figured easier was better, considering that there wasn’t anyone home to cook.”

Coughing indignantly, Ben raised his hand. “Excuse me, what am I—Casper the Friendly Ghost? I’ll have you know I slaved away all afternoon putting this together—boiling those noodle . . . things, and putting those other”—he leaned over to examine the concoction in the prefab foil pans—“things in there.” Grabbing the spoon, he scooped small portions onto Josh’s and Rose’s plates to cool. “See? I sliced mushrooms, and made minimeatballs, and put in some kind of white . . . cheese-looking stuff.”

Frowning, Rose bent close to her high chair tray, then curled her top lip. “Eeewkie,” she said.

“Not eewkie,” Ben countered, pilfering a minimeatball and popping it in his mouth. “Good stuff. Daddy made it.”

“Eeewkie,” Rose insisted, and the rest of us laughed. Then Keiler said grace over us, and Ben began dishing up lasagna. Only when my plate came back with a huge helping and a butter-covered piece of garlic bread did I consider the ramifications of having to eat in front of strangers—especially having to eat something as fattening as lasagna and garlic bread.

As I took a helping of salad, all the old excuses ran through my head—

The rest of the table, completely unaware of my insane mental dialog, fell into a conversation about Keiler’s road trip from New Mexico.

Taking a deep breath, I started picking at my food, trying to focus on the table talk rather than my plate. Keiler was telling the ski lift story again. The kid who fell on him was up to a hundred and eighty pounds by now.

Dell started laughing. “Sherita told him not to get between a fat boy and the ground.”

“That sounds like Sherita,” Ben observed. “So where does the Harley come in?”

Keiler began telling the tale of his wild night stranded in a truck stop-slash-Harley-repair-shop, during which he developed an understanding of biker Zen while sitting around a burning trash barrel with a traveling motorcycle gang. By morning, he had traded the broken-down green Hornet and the remainder of his ski resort salary, plus a small injury stipend, for a Harley that probably had more miles on it than the green Hornet. He ended the story with a hand over his heart and a few words of homage to his old car and his lost nest egg, then closed with, “Guess when I get back to the folks’ place in Michigan, I’ll have to get a job.”

Kate pointed a fork at him playfully. “Hopefully, something that doesn’t involve ski lifts.”

Frowning at his foot, propped on an extra chair beside the table, he nodded. “Not this year, anyway.”

“I wish we could keep you on at Jumpkids,” Karen said, giving Keiler a weary look. “We’re so understaffed, and Mrs. Mindia’s daughter just called and told me Mrs. Mindia has a serious case of the flu, and they’ve taken her to the hospital, so it might be a while before she’s back. You could stay at our house, but I don’t have any salary money available until summer internships start.” Her brows lifted hopefully. “We’d feed you.” Kate elbowed her, and she sagged, hatcheting the air with her hand. “I’m sorry; ignore me. Begging has become second nature since I took over Jumpkids. I didn’t mean to put you on the spot.”

The table fell silent as everyone dived into the food.

An idea struck me, and I jerked upright like a cartoon character with a lightbulb overhead. Everyone, including Keiler, turned toward me. “Are you interested in substitute teaching?” I blurted, and they all sat staring, surprised by the out-of-the-blue question. Keiler leaned forward curiously, and the prospect of having possibly found an algebra teacher for next week sent a tingle of exhilaration through me. “Seriously. It’s not
great
money, but it’s not horrible. I’m desperate for subs every single day, and there’s almost no one on the list who hasn’t already subbed the maximum number of days.” Raising a finger in a gesture of eureka, I grinned from ear to ear. “But
you
haven’t subbed at all, so you’d be good for . . . gosh, almost the whole rest of the year, even without teaching certification. School hours are eight to three thirty, so you’d have afternoons free for Jumpkids, or . . . Harley rides . . . whatever.” I realized I was babbling, probably looking as desperate as I felt. The strange thing was that I didn’t care. “Please?”

Karen turned to Keiler expectantly. “She’s not even going to apologize for begging.”

“I have no shame,” I admitted. “If I don’t get someone, I’ll have to teach algebra next week. I hate algebra.”

“It’d be so cool if you were at Harrington!” Dell gasped. “C’mon, Keiler. Say yes. You can stay in our guest room and ride to school with us. You and James can play guitars at night, and stuff. It’ll be . . .” She searched for a word, then finished with, “Cool.”

Tipping his chin back, Keiler pretended to think, his gaze shifting to and fro, as if he were weighing his options. “Sounds cool,” he said finally.

“There are no ski lifts involved,” Kate chimed in.

“We-hell, sounds like I got me a job offer,” Keiler drawled.

“Absolutely,” I rushed out, then bit my lip. “You do have to fill out some paperwork and a few things. You don’t have a criminal history, do you?”

Grinning, he leaned across the table, his eyes twinkling. “Not that anybody knows about.”

“Good enough for me.” I was surprisingly excited about the prospect of his coming to Harrington. “You’re hired.”

“Better get a haircut,” Ben interjected, and the rest of us burst into laughter before returning to our lasagna.

We finished dinner with conversation about Jumpkids, and Harrington, and the question of Jumpkids procuring used instruments from the Harrington storage room. When Dell described the number of discards, everyone was amazed. Keiler, it turned out, had worked his way through high school in a music shop, and knew something about fixing instruments. Soon, we were all making plans to save the world. Or at least add a little more music to it.

By the time we cleaned up the dishes, I felt surprisingly comfortable at the farm, as if I’d fallen into the fold of a second family. Looking at my plate, I realized I’d eaten most of my lasagna and wasn’t even worried about it. As Keiler and Ben took the kids to the living room, I helped Karen carry some of the leftovers out to the spare refrigerator in the guesthouse. Walking along the path, I took in myriad stars, watching my breath float like smoke on the air. In the farmhouse, I could hear Kate’s children squealing and Keiler telling a story that included numerous voice impressions.

“I have to apologize for the mess out here,” Karen said as we walked along the stone path. “Kate and I just recently started cleaning out the little house. It took us a while to bring our minds around to the task, after Grandma Rose passed away.”

My focus was still hovering thousands of miles from the earth. “I didn’t realize your grandmother had passed away.” The comment sounded strange and a bit insensitive, so I quickly explained, “Dell talks about her so often, I just assumed she still lived here, and maybe she happened to be gone today.”

Karen shrugged apologetically. “You’re not the first one to make that assumption. Grandma Rose passed away over two years ago, but Dell has never really let go. She has a habit of talking about my grandmother in the present tense. She says she has dreams about Grandma and they talk to each other. It’s one of the things we’ve had a little . . . issue over. We’ve tried not to make a big deal of it. Dell has had so many adjustments in the past few years. I think pretending she can still talk to Grandma Rose is a coping mechanism. They were very close before my grandmother passed away.”

“Does Dell talk about her biological grandmother?” I asked, as we walked up the steps to the guesthouse. “The one she was living with, I mean.”

Karen opened the door and turned on the lights in the cabin. “Not really. She’s never been willing to discuss it, and her caseworker’s advice was not to force her. Her grandmother only died last summer, so it’s all still pretty fresh.” Turning on a floor lamp on the other side of the room, she set the leftover lasagna on a small dining table and regarded me in the uneven amber light. “Has she talked to you about it? About her real family, I mean?”