Homecoming (14 page)

Dicey could barely see the words and prices. Food smells filled the diner, and she
was out of the rain. It was warm and bright. The words on the menu swam before her
eyes. She looked at their rescuer.

He sat with James beside him. He had dark curly hair and a black mustache and black
eyebrows that moved up and down or wrinkled as if they had a life all their own.

“Who’d believe this?” he asked, meeting Dicey’s eyes. “I ask you.”

The waitress put his coffee down before him and gave each child a tall glass of milk.
“Y’want straws?”

Dicey shook her head and grabbed for the glass. They drank, in large gulps at first,
and then, when their stomachs had welcomed the first eager swallows, more slowly.
All four glasses were empty when the children put them down.

“What can I getcha?” the waitress asked.

Windy looked at them. They had forgotten the menus. He grinned. “Four hamburgers.
No, make that eight. Four large orders of fries. That’s all for now, but we’ll probably
have dessert. Do you have any apple pie?”

“Yeah.”

“Give me a piece of pie now, please,” he said. “And save four pieces for the kids.”

She shuffled away, writing on her order pad. “Is that okay?” Windy asked Dicey. “We
can change it if it’s not okay. It wouldn’t be any trouble. But I thought maybe it
would be hard for you to decide, and the little one doesn’t look old enough to read
yet.”

“I can too,” Sammy said.

“Apologies for insulting you,” Windy said, and his eyebrows waggled, as if they were
laughing.

“I wanted hamburgers,” Sammy said. “Anyway. And french fries. That’s what I wanted.”

“Ah,” Windy said. “And what is your name?”

Sammy looked at Dicey. She nodded.

“Sammy,” he said.

“How old are you?”

“Six. How old are you?”

“Twenty-one. Really very old.”

Dicey remembered her manners. It was easier to remember manners with milk in her stomach
and food on the way. “I’m Dicey and this is Maybeth and that’s James.” She answered
the question in his eyes before he asked it: “I’m thirteen, Maybeth is nine, James
is ten.”

His dark eyes studied her. “I once ran away, when I was James’s age,” he said. He
told them a long story about running away one morning when he was afraid to go to
school because he was short and skinny and somebody was waiting there to beat him
up. In the middle of the story their food was set before them. Dicey stopped listening.
Windy could eat and talk at the same time. But the Tillermans ate in absolute silence,
in huge bites, barely tasting what they chewed before they swallowed it. They all
had apple pie for dessert. Throughout the meal, Windy’s voice blew over them, smooth
and steady. It didn’t matter what he was saying.

Windy paid the bill and left a dollar on the table for the waitress. Dicey, warmed
from within, tried to thank him, but he shrugged it off. He took them back to the
Green, saying he wished he could stop the rain because he, for one, had had enough
of it and he suspected they had too. He led them across
the Green to the long dormitory building. There, the hallways were narrow and brown,
like tunnels. They climbed up four flights of stairs, twisting past closed doors.
Finally, Windy threw open a door and ushered them into a room.

It was a mess. Ashtrays overflowed with cigarette ashes and butts. A newspaper had
been left scattered on the floor around one armchair. Books were piled on the three
desks and on the low table before the sofa and along the mantelpiece. Beer cans lay
around a wastebasket that was so full it looked as if it wanted to erupt like a volcano
and spew trash all over the room. It was warm and messy and comfortable, and filled
with yellow light. Outside, dark rain fell. But they were inside.

Windy went through a door and turned on a light in the next room. Dicey caught a glimpse
of bunk beds and dressers. He returned with an armload of clothing, mostly T-shirts
and sweatshirts. “The bathroom’s through that door.” He pointed to the door beside
the one they’d entered through. “Go get off your wet clothes and put some of these
on. I guess you might want to go to the bathroom too.”

“I do,” Sammy said, so definitely that Dicey smiled.

“Meanwhile, I’ll see if anyone’s around.”

When they had gone to the bathroom, they covered themselves with Windy’s dry shirts,
which, if none too fresh, were dry and warm. They hung their own clothes on the towel
racks to dry. Dicey washed out all of their underwear, using the cake of soap on the
sink. They returned to the living room. Windy waited there and another young man was
with him.

“Stewart,” Windy said, “let me introduce my findlings.” He remembered all of their
names and ages. “This is Stewart, my roommate,” he said.

Stewart smoked on his pipe and looked at them. He was tall, taller than Windy, and
skinny like Windy. He had blond hair, so
pale it was almost white, hanging fine and straight down to his ears. He had a strong,
square jaw and a mustache as blond as the hair on his head. His eyes, as he looked
at the Tillermans, might have been gray or blue, Dicey couldn’t decide which. It was
as if his eyes changed back and forth between gray and blue, but she wasn’t sure if
that was possible.

“What’s going on?” he asked Windy.

“I found them, as I said. Dicey first, and then the others. They need a place to sleep
and it’s raining cats and dogs, and mice and pterodactyls, and God knows what else
out there—so I thought to myself, why not here with us?”

Stewart smiled quietly. “Why not indeed? I’ll come in with you and they can have my
bunks.”

James grinned at Dicey. Real beds.

Stewart took them into his room. He cleared books and papers off the top bunk, and
James climbed up onto it. Sammy and Maybeth lay down on opposite ends of the bottom
bunk. Dicey thought they looked like two little dolls in a dollhouse, lying there.
James was half-asleep before she turned out the light and closed the door behind her.

She thought she would go back and sleep on the floor in that room, but Windy said
she should take the sofa in the living room for her bed. He brought a pillow and blanket
from his own room. “What do I need those for?” Dicey asked. “You keep them. I’ll be
fine.”

Windy passed her the armload of linen. “Go ahead. Live it up. I can do without for
one night.”

“
You
can do without,” Stewart said. “Listen, he took them off the bed where I’m going
to sleep. And if you really don’t want them, I’d be glad to have them.” Dicey passed
them over.

“Can we talk a little before you go to sleep, Dicey?” Windy asked. “Are you too tired?”

Dicey was so comfortable that she would have been glad to talk all night. She didn’t
want to go to sleep, because then she wouldn’t be able to enjoy being comfortable.
But she wasn’t sure she wanted to answer any questions. She was too brain-tired to
be as careful as she ought.

They all sat down. Dicey sat alone in the middle of the sofa, and the young men took
two arm chairs.

Stewart started. “Windy says you’re not lost.”

“No. I know where we are.”

“A fundamentalist,” Windy said to Stewart. His eyebrows moved. He asked Dicey, “What
about your family? Do they know where you are?”

Dicey shook her head. “But that doesn’t matter.”

“Why not?” Windy asked. Dicey didn’t answer that.

“Are you in trouble?” Windy asked.

“I don’t think so,” Dicey said. “I hope not.”

“Okay,” Windy said. He leaned forward and rested his chin on his hands. His eyebrows
were temporarily still. “What
will
you tell us? We’d like to help if we can. Do you believe that?”

“Yeah,” Dicey said. “Yeah, I do.” She thought. “I mean, you already did, didn’t you?”

“How about your parents?” Stewart asked. He was resting his head against the back
of the chair, looking at her.

It wasn’t that she couldn’t lie to him. She could lie to anyone and make it good,
if she had to—she’d certainly discovered that. But she didn’t want to, not to him
or to Windy. She wasn’t going to lie to them, she decided.

“We don’t have parents. We’re on our own,” she said. Stewart’s eyes did not change,
but waited, quiet as water.

“Wait a minute,” Dicey said. “Let me think a minute, okay?” He nodded. “We come from
Provincetown, in Massachusetts. On the Cape.” He nodded his head, just a little. She
heard
Windy swallow back a question. “My father walked out on us when I was about seven.
Just before Sammy was born. We were okay until lately, when things happened wrong.
My mother lost her job. And things. So she told us we were going to Bridgeport, where
she has an aunt, and we all packed into our car.”

Stewart held her eyes with his.

“We were in Peewauket and she left us to wait in the car while she went into a big
mall. But she didn’t come out, and we couldn’t find her. So I decided that we should
go ahead to Bridgeport and hope she’ll meet us there.”

Stewart asked, “How long did you wait for her?”

“All day and all night,” Dicey said. “We waited in the car. She didn’t come back.
I’m hoping . . . I don’t know. The only place I know she might be is Bridgeport.”

“What if she isn’t there?” ’ Windy asked.

“There’s this aunt Cilla,” Dicey explained.

“Do you know her?” Stewart asked.

“No. But she sends us cards every Christmas.”

“You didn’t ask anyone for help?” Stewart asked. “The police?”

Dicey shook her head firmly. “I don’t know for sure what they would do. They might
send us to a foster home. Or split us up. I don’t know what Momma—she didn’t say anything,
she just disappeared . . . I have no idea what happened. No idea. I couldn’t risk
telling the police. And that’s all true,” Dicey said.

“How long ago was this?” Windy asked.

“In June. Maybe two weeks, maybe three.”

“And you’ve been walking from Peewauket all this time?”

“We stayed at a park once. The little kids can’t go very fast.”

“Is that all you want to tell?” Windy asked.

“Please,” Dicey answered.

He nodded his head and his eyebrows arched as he smiled at her. “Then I say we get
some sleep. What do you say, Stew?”

“Just thinking about all that walking makes me tired,” Stewart said.

“You okay here, Dicey?” Windy asked.

Dicey nodded. She hoped she hadn’t made a mistake in telling them.

Windy turned off the lights and Dicey stretched out on the sofa. She didn’t even hear
the door close behind them.

D
icey opened her eyes to the gray ceiling of the living room. She opened her ears to
city noises floating in on warm air that came through the open windows. She sat up,
alarmed at finding herself alone. Then the events of the night before came back to
her, and she relaxed, stretched, bounced on the sofa and smiled to herself. She went
to the window and looked out.

The rain had been swept away with the darkness. Everything on the green below sparkled
in the early morning air. It even smelled fresh outside.

Dicey remembered that in the bathroom she had seen a stall shower. She went in quietly.
She folded up their clothes hanging on the rack, except for her own, and put them
in a pile on the sofa. Then she went back and turned on the hot water, so it would
be hot when she had gone to the bathroom. When she was ready, she stripped off Windy’s
T-shirt and stepped into the warm water, pulling the curtain closed behind her. The
warm water beat down on her back and her chest and her hips and her arms. She revolved
slowly, her eyes closed, like a wind-up toy that was running down. She had forgotten
just how it felt to take a bath or a shower. It felt gentle and warm, like somebody’s
arms around you.

Dicey took a cake of soap and washed herself, head to foot, hair and ears, toes and
fingers, face, torso. The soap slid onto the
floor. She bent over to pick it up and the water tattooed on her fanny.

She took one last slow turn under the water that turned into five last slow turns.
Then she turned both handles off and stepped out.

As she rubbed herself dry and dressed, she thought: I can do anything. Anything. We’re
going to be all right. It’s all going to be all right.

She squeezed some toothpaste onto her finger and brushed her teeth. Her teeth squeaked
and her mouth tasted minty. She grinned at herself in the mirror and ran her fingers
through her damp hair.

She opened wide the door of the bathroom and saw, not only her brothers and sister,
sleep still in their dazed eyes, but also wild-haired Windy, and Stewart. Maybeth
came to take Dicey’s hand.

Dicey asked Windy if they could all have showers. She turned on the water for Maybeth
and returned to the living room.

“So. What’s next?” Windy was asking. Stewart had sat down in the same chair he occupied
the last night. He looked around, but didn’t speak. His face looked fuzzy and confused,
not quite awake. Windy answered himself:

“Breakfast is next. And then we have to see about getting these kids to Bridgeport.”

“Really?” Dicey asked.

“Really,” Windy said. “Stew has a car and it’s only—an hour from here? You’ll do it,
won’t you, Stew?”

The gray-blue eyes rested on Dicey. “I’ve got an eleven o’clock class.”

“Then after the class,” Windy said.

“Okay. Sure. Do you mind waiting?” Stewart asked Dicey.

Dicey shook her head at his foolishness. “Do you know how
long it would take us to walk it? Three days. Maybe four. I’d be a jerk to mind waiting
a couple of hours,” she said.

“And you’re not a jerk,” Windy said. He was leaning against the mantelpiece, looking
down at her.

“Nope,” Dicey said. Maybe she should have been more polite, but she felt too happy
for that. “Other things. Bossy. And I lie and I fight, but I’m not a jerk.”

Windy looked amused. He exchanged a glance with Stewart.

The little children paraded in and out of the bathroom, putting their clothes on in
their bedroom. At last, everybody was dressed.