Hand Me Down (10 page)

The man who sits next to me on the wobbling plane in seat 31B says, “Goodness, this is getting choppy,” as we head over the Sierras. Out the window the clouds look like an infinite sea of thickly overlaid white feathers, fluid and solid at the same time. When I
grab the armrest he pats my hand and says, “There’s really nothing to worry about.” He smiles wide. “God will take care of us.”

My nostrils flare and I smile back without showing teeth. “I’m not on real good terms with God right now,” I say. “But if he likes you, maybe we’re safe.”

“Where are your parents?” he says, peeking over the seats in front of us. He tilts his head toward me and leans closer. “Are you running away?” He glances at my chest.

“If I were, I wouldn’t go to Utah,” I say. I would go to Mexico, or Hawaii, or Greece. Somewhere warm.

“How old are you?” he says, shifting his weight toward the center armrest.

Even though his wandering eyes bother me less than Terrance’s leers, I say, “Old enough to know about sexual harassment.” It works; for the remaining hour of the flight the man keeps his pudgy face turned toward the aisle and lets me cry in peace. A small voice in my head chants,
Mom left me. She actually left me
. I hadn’t believed it would happen until she drove away from the terminal with the newly pruned version of her family while I stood on the curb in the rain.

The clouds outside the aircraft thicken into a moving gray-white wall of swirling haze.
Tammy’s great
, I think,
but she likes to travel. She has a boyfriend on another continent. She won’t want me forever
. I close my eyes against the glaring white outside and try not to imagine where I’ll be sent after this short-term solution fails.

My intestines tangle themselves into knots beneath my belly
as I picture Mom and Terrance and Noah getting home, rushing inside to get out of the rain, laughing at the splashes made by their feet. I picture Mom’s attention to Noah and Terrance—getting them dry and warm like a mother should, rubbing shoulders and arms with firm hands, making hot chocolate and getting blankets, and a cry bubbles up my throat. What if Mom always chooses Terrance over us? What if Jaime and I never live together again? I shove my fist in between my teeth and sob with my face turned toward the churning mist outside the window.

My cheeks are still wet but I’ve stopped crying by the time we land in Utah. Aunt Tammy picks me up at the gate wearing khaki pants and a zip up fleece jacket. “How ya doing?” she says and hugs me. She’s warm and she holds me longer than Mom had in the rain, and I stand there frozen, squeezing my eyes tight against her shoulder. She smells like clean stream water and a hint of lavender and I inhale that freshness in the first deep breath I’ve taken in weeks. Tammy kisses the top of my head before she moves away and my chest tightens back up when she does.

Tammy carries my duffels to the parking garage while I keep my backpack. We step onto the moving walkway but Tammy doesn’t stop like everyone else. We stride past businessmen, white men in blue suits with briefcases, four of them, one after the other. Then I put my backpack down and lean against the railing. Tammy stops and stands next to me, still lifting my bags.

Snow outside the windows floats in a light drizzle, a whirling of small spots against empty space. The mountains are huge and topped with pure white. “That’s a lot of snow,” I say.

“It’s about right for January.”

I say, “Can we make a snowman in your yard?”

“Sure,” she says.

“I’ve never done that.”

“Your mom and I grew up with snow until we moved to California,” she says. “We ice-skated on the neighborhood pond, had snowball fights in the yard.”

“Mom said she fell through the ice once.”

“It’s true,” Tammy says. “I helped pull her out.”

The floating snowflakes mesmerize me. On the freeway into town in the front seat of Tammy’s car, I let my eyes lose focus and look past the window to the space where the white specks dance in the lights and seem to come right at me like 3 D warp tunnels on movie screens. The capitol building’s white domes rise illuminated against the dark span of jagged mountains behind them. Inside the car, classical music plays on the radio, and the heater vents all point at me. Tammy’s profile shows a longer nose than my mom’s, thinner lips, a similar chin. The same small frame Mom carries too much weight on is more fitting on Tammy, her muscles toned and lean. Her skin is darker than Mom’s, too, evidence of time spent outside on desert bike rides and mountain walks under tree-scattered sunlight, and if I live to be Tammy’s age, I hope I look as fit as she does.

“I’m glad you’re here,” Tammy says.

“Really?”

“Really, Liz,” she says and looks at me. “I was excited when your mom called. I
am
excited.” Her long fingers grip the steering wheel. “You are one of my two favorite people on this planet,” she says. I smile but can’t hold it. I try to say thanks but my voice falters. I’ve never been anyone’s favorite anything before.

She glances at me sideways and pats my thigh. “Are you hungry?”

At her condo I watch her pull the fold-out bed from the green-and-red plaid couch in my new room, which used to be her office. She spreads out green sheets and then puts the blue comforter she picked out at Macy’s on top. “I thought you liked blue. Do you like blue?” she says. I nod. I’ve never owned anything from Macy’s or had anyone consider purchasing what I would like before what was on sale.

Tammy folds a wool throw at the foot of the bed. She smiles. “This blanket is older than you,” she says and smooths her tanned hands across the threads. “I used this to study late at night in college.” She pats the fabric. “Tucked over my feet on our lumpy couch.” I nod but don’t say any of the jumbled thoughts bombarding my brain:
Mom left me. I need to check on Jaime. Don’t get too comfortable here.

Tammy takes a hesitant breath and clears her throat. “Anything else I can do?” she says. I shake my head. All my clothes are still packed and I just want to curl into a ball under the covers. She rubs my back lightly, and her warm hands melt a little of the day’s strain from my muscles.

“Thank you,” I say.

“Sure thing,” Tammy says. She pats my shoulder and half-hugs me with just her right arm like I might shatter if she applies too much pressure. She leans back and smiles at me. “Make yourself at home,” she says, and I believe she means it. I already feel safer than at Gary and Carol’s, or Dad’s, or even Mom’s with Terrance there, and right now that is more than enough to be grateful for.

Before Tammy can move away, I grab her around the waist and push my face into her hard collarbone. Her back stiffens and for a fraction of a second I think she’s going to pull away, but when I whisper, “Thank you so much,” her athletic body relaxes and returns the hug full force like she was waiting for this chance.

Tammy squeezes me with both of her strong arms, and a tiny bit of me dares to hope that someone will finally take care of me, even if it’s not permanent. She kisses my forehead, and skims her hands along my shoulders. “No problem, little girl,” she says. “No problem at all.”

When she leaves the room, I slip on a pair of pajama pants and slide under the crisp sheets and comforter. Tammy’s welcome sprouted a kernel of optimism in my chest, and though Mom’s easy release of her daughters still smolders in my gut, I fall asleep with mountains outside my window and Tammy puttering about downstairs.

It’s cold in this city
. So cold it’s past the point of being able to see my breath because the air is already white and heavy with freezing moisture. So cold my nose and feet are always numb and it’s quiet, too, like there’s water in my ears and everything sounds blurry. The snow drifts in spirals beyond Tammy’s windows, muffling the sounds of the outside, and inside, the chill that invaded my lungs from that first breath of frosty air in the parking lot of the airport burrows into my chest like a tick and spreads out until I worry my fingers might actually fall off.

Tammy tells me I’ll acclimatize. I have teeth-chattering shivers
the whole drive to school and Tammy says, “Oh, stop that,” but she blasts the heater. She says, “It’s not really that bad, is it?” I shove my hands deeper into my new coat pockets but can’t stop shaking. She laughs. “You’ll get used to it, kiddo,” she says.

Tammy drops me off two blocks down from the giant redbrick building that looks like the East Coast high schools I’ve seen on TV, with ivy climbing up the corners, patches of snow out front, and in big brass letters,
YOUNG HIGH
, above heavy wooden double doors. She pats my leg before I get out of the car, says, “Good luck.” She waits a minute after I start walking before she merges with moving traffic and leaves me alone. I step on the spaces between the big squares of damp concrete sidewalk.
Step on a crack, break your mother’s back.

Inside the red bricks are long tiled hallways lined with full-length lockers, expansive stairwells with portraits of historical figures on the walls, and brass spheres on the handrails. I go unnoticed until French class where I say, “Verb conjugations suck,” to no one in particular and the girl I’m sitting next to asks me not to swear in her presence.

“I didn’t say the
F
word,” I tell her.

“I know,” she says. “You said the
S
word.”

“I thought
shit
was the
S
word,” I say, and she doesn’t look at me for the rest of class.

I eat lunch alone in one of the enclosed back stairwells. Tammy packed me Havarti cheese squares and wheat crackers, strawberry yogurt, carrot sticks, gingersnap cookies, and an orange juice box. In biology, a class way too easy to pay much attention to, I write letters.
Dear Jaime
, I write, adding a heart above the
i
in her name.
The mountains are huge. The air smells like the frozen food aisles at grocery stores and snow doesn’t always melt in the sun. You’d hate the cold but my room is big enough for another bed. You know, just in case.
And I can’t help it, I write at the bottom,
Stay safe
next to
I love you
.

To Rachel I write,
They have off-campus lunch here. And lockers. And no black people. People say
pop
instead of
soda, flip
in place of fuck, and ditching class is called
sluffing.
I hate eating lunch alone. I miss you
, I write and wish there was some way to express how much.

In algebra, I sit in front of a junior who asks me where I’m from during homework time. We are supposed to trade papers and correct the other person’s equations. But he hasn’t done it, and I, of course, haven’t, either. I’m a week behind in the semester but I’m confident I’ll be in class regularly now so I’ll catch up fast. “California,” I say.

“You look like California,” he says. His accent is delicious, like melted chocolate I want to lap up.

“What does that mean?”

He shrugs. “Beach boy, surfer girl, blond and blue eyed…” He holds up his hands, smiles. “You know.”

“Have you been there?”

“Nope. Afraid Utah is my American experience.” Mrs. Sanders asks the class to pass their homework forward. She frowns at the small stack from our row and then glances at me. I’m looking forward to starting fresh with teachers here, but it’s only my first day.

I say, “You’re from England?”

“How could you tell?” he says and smiles again. “Dean.” He sticks out his hand. I shake it. His skin is cool and dry.

“Elizabeth,” I say. I ask him what he’s doing in Salt Lake and he says his dad got a job here a year ago. Mrs. Sanders asks us to face the front again. Dean puts his finger to his half-smiling lips and whispers, “Shhh,” so I turn around and watch Mrs. Sanders’ butt shake as she erases the chalkboard. Right before the bell rings, Dean leans forward and says into the back of my neck, “Let’s talk again soon.” His lips graze the tiny hairs across my skin and when I open my eyes, the classroom is almost empty.

Once bootless and inside Tammy’s
condo, I turn the heater up to seventy-five, put on flannel pants, two pairs of wool socks, and four shirts. I make myself hot chocolate from a packet, add some Häagen-Dazs coffee ice cream like Tammy does so it melts and forms a creamy foam layer on top. I pull the purple chenille throw over me on the couch. I wish her fireplace was real and not gas so that I could actually watch the flames eat the wood, the reds and oranges dancing with the smoky wisps of gray, and the hot logs cracking and splitting and sacrificing themselves to provide heat.

Tammy has more money than my mom, degrees instead of children. She owns stocks and bonds, buys my mom furniture for her birthday, sends us brand-name clothes and electronics for Christmas. Her house is bright and clean, like a museum filled with paintings or sculptures, and beautiful, breakable things are positioned carefully around the rooms here, too. A huge fire-glazed plate on the mantel sits next to a black wood figure of a woman
with legs twice the size of the rest of her, an African stringed instrument Tammy and Sam carved their initials into lives in a glass curio along with a crystal vase and a cactus garden, a handwoven Mexican rug, and a golden Arabian urn, all collected from trips abroad. Only original artwork decorates the walls: a painting of a cow in a field with one cloud in the background; a three-foot horizontal framed picture of a birch tree forest; a watercolor of a tribal mother supporting an infant in her disproportionately large arm and hand, like she’s cradling the whole earth in her little baby.

I wake up to Tammy switching on the light above where I lie on the couch huddled under the purple throw. While I slept the sky darkened and Tammy is closing the blinds in her classy dark brown business suit minus the low-heeled pumps or loafers she always slips off at the door.

“What do you want for dinner?” she says. “Salad? Homemade chili?”

“I’m not really hungry.”

She says, “You have to eat something. How about some pasta at least?”

I nod, rub my hands together. “Sure, thanks.”

Tammy brings me a wooden breakfast tray with a big bowl full of pasta that smells like garlic and basil. Sun-dried tomatoes glisten like rubies among the noodles. “Something simple,” she says as she sets the tray on her smooth wood coffee table above her white carpet.