Pieces of Me (11 page)

“I'm sorry,” he said. “I had no idea it would be like this. I'll take the key back and tell Goddard to forget it.” He started for the stairs.

I grabbed his sleeve. “Don't.”

He looked at me like I was nuts. “We can't live in that,” he said. “It's too dirty for bugs. You wouldn't even get a rat in a place like this.”

It smelled like puke and people who hadn't washed. But there was a big window that let the sun in and an old tub with feet in the small bathroom. “I can clean it,” I said.

Q shook his head. “No. There's gotta be a better choice.”

Except I knew there wasn't. Who was going to rent anything to a couple of teenagers and a kid? Nobody. Now it was me shaking my head. “It has to be here, Q,” I said. “It's better than no place.”

He slid both hands up over his face and down the back of his head. “Okay. What do you need?”

I'd cleaned the house a lot when I lived at home because it wasn't really my mom's thing. She'd walk over something on the floor rather than pick it up. I didn't know if she just didn't see the dirt, or she didn't care. I saw it and I did care, so I learned to clean it up. “Can we go to the grocery store?” I asked. “I need a bucket and some kind of cleaner—oh yeah, and a big jug of bleach.”

I loved the smell of bleach the way some people got off on nail polish or paint. I don't mean I went around sniffing the bottle and being all weird, just that it made me feel better, like everything had been sanitized for my protection.

See, I had this thing about germs. They scared the crap out of me. My dad had gotten pneumonia, and while he was in the hospital he caught some other germ. They called it a superbug. He died because the germ was stronger than the doctors, stronger than their drugs, stronger than my dad.

I spent my emergency fund on cleaning supplies. Dylan wouldn't go to the park without me, so Q brought in a blanket and we put him out in the hall by the open door.

Q got the window open, which helped with the smell, and then he swept the floor, which helped even more. I started washing the walls, and the smell of bleach pushed out the smell of rotting food and vomit pretty quickly.

I washed everything in the main room—the walls, the door, the doorknob. Then I washed my way across the floor to the hall. My hands were red and cracked in a couple of places from the bleach. Q looked at them and winced.

“I'm hungry,” Dylan announced.

“Me too,” I said. I put my arm around him and messed up his hair. “Let's go get some lunch.”

I pulled on my jacket. “Soup line?” I said to Q.

“Are you sure?” he asked.

I bent to zip up Dylan's jacket. “The food's decent, and it's not junk. And the price is right.”

“Okay,” he said. “I should be able to get supper from the hotel tonight.”

“That would be good,” I said. I mimicked his eyebrow thing. He laughed. I took Dylan's hand and headed for the stairs.

Q was walking on the outside, closest to the street, and a lot slower than he usually walked, so Dylan didn't have to run to keep up. I smiled down at him, and he smiled back. Then he leaned around me to look at Q. “You should hold Maddie's hand,” he said.

“Okay,” Q said.

I felt weird taking Q's hand, especially when mine were all dried out from cleaning. Like Dylan's, Q's hand was warm holding mine. His fingers were long and strong, calloused from the rough work he'd been doing. All this hand-holding felt strange—not bad, just not me. But then I wasn't exactly sure who
me
was anymore.

I wasn't the person Evan claimed was going to hell, although I might be a whole lot closer to ending up there. I wasn't the person who'd run away. I wasn't even the person Q had met a week ago. I didn't know who I was, and for now that was going to have to be okay, because I didn't have time to figure it out.

Lunch was a chicken stir-fry with rice. There were brownies for dessert, and I wrapped mine carefully in a paper napkin so Dylan could have it later.

The room looked a lot better now that it was clean, and God knows it smelled way better. Dylan walked around showing everything to Fred while Q and I stood in the bathroom doorway. Whoever had been in the room before had had a dog and hadn't been too picky about taking it out for a walk.

“It smells like a toilet,” I said to Q.

“I think whoever—or whatever—lived here used the floor as a toilet,” he said. He grimaced. “What do you want me to do?”

I looked around. “I don't know,” I said. “Shovel it out, I guess.”

He used the broom and a couple of pieces of cardboard to scrape the crap off the floor. Again, I washed everything. Dylan fell asleep on the blanket in a square of sunshine in front of the window. Three of my knuckles were bleeding by the time I was done.

“Shit, Maddie,” Q said. “Enough. This place is cleaner than a hospital.”

I sat back on my heels. “We need something to sleep on,” I said.

“I've got a sleeping bag in the car,” he said. “I didn't use it because it's kind of small, but it should work for the kid.” He made a fist with his hand and beat the end of it slowly against his mouth. “How about a couple of those floaty blow-up things, you know, to lay on?”

I nodded. “Yeah. You mean air mattresses.”

I was going to have to go to the thrift store for clothes for Dylan and maybe a couple more blankets, but I didn't like to buy anything that I couldn't wash. I'd gotten him some Spiderman underwear, a pair of socks and a slightly too large pair of sweatpants out of a seventy-percent-off bin at the grocery store. I'd also gotten two hideous orange towels. I thought about lying down in that tub until the water was up to my nose.

“There's that discount store up the hill,” Q said. “I'll try there. And I need to go give Goddard the money.” He pulled a bottle of juice out of his pocket. “It's warm, sorry.”

“Did you swipe that at lunchtime?” I asked. My hair was coming loose, so I pulled out the elastic and finger-combed it back from my face.

“I don't think they'll go broke over one bottle of juice.” He held out his hand and I got to my feet, following him into the other room, where Dylan was still asleep.

“Should I wake him up?” I asked.

“Let him sleep,” he said. “I think he's worn-out. I'll be back soon.”

I nodded.

Q paused in the doorway. “I like your hair like that,” he said. Then he was gone.

Okay, so what did that mean? Did he mean like, as in my hair looked better loose than it did in a ponytail? Or did he mean like, as in he liked me? And why did I even care? Q and I weren't like that. Not that it would be a bad thing. But we were friends. Nothing more.

I stretched out on the edge of the blanket next to Dylan and leaned my head against the wall. Did Q think we were something else? I'd held his hand when we'd gone for lunch, but that was because of Dylan. And I had hugged him, but that was only the once.

The next thing I knew, Dylan was sitting on my chest, poking my cheek with his finger. I opened my right eye and focused it on him. He giggled.

“Maddie, open your other eye,” he demanded.

I made a show of trying and failing to get my left eye open. “It's stuck,” I said.

He frowned and poked my left temple with a finger. I made that side of my face twitch.

“Do that again,” I said.

Dylan jabbed my face once more.

I did the twitchy thing again. “I think it's working.” I grunted and fluttered my eyelid. Then I opened the eye. “You did it, Dylan,” I told him. I swallowed him up in a hug and he laughed, throwing his arms around my neck. I put my mouth against the outside of his arm and made a loud, slurpy mouth fart. That sent him into a squirm of laughter again.

I did it again, just to hear him laugh. It was a great sound. Then I lifted him up and settled him sideways on my lap. “You want a drink?” I asked.

He nodded. I unscrewed the cap and handed him the bottle. He took a long drink. “I'm hungry,” he said.

Keeping one arm around him, I leaned right and snagged the strap of my backpack with one finger. I fished inside and found the napkin-wrapped brownie.

“Here,” I said.

He broke the brownie into three pieces. “One for me, one for Fred, one for Maddie.”

He fed Fred his bite, and helped with the eating. I made Fred rub his furry stomach and bow his thanks to Dylan.

Then Dylan and I ate our pieces. “Can I have a drink of your juice?” I asked.

He nodded, and I took a long drink. It was way too warm for me, but it didn't seem like a good idea to say that in front of a kid.

I put the cap back on the bottle and stashed it in the side pocket of my pack.

Dylan put an arm around Fred and settled back against my chest. “It smells better in here,” he said.

“That's because it's clean now.”

“Are we going to live here?” he asked.

“Uh-huh,” I said.

“Where are we going to sleep?”

I pointed to the wall opposite. “There. Q's gone to get us something to sleep on.”

“And nobody else gets to sleep here?”

“Nobody.” I made an
X
on my chest. “Cross my heart.”

He sighed softly.

“How about tomorrow we go to the thrift store and see if we can find some toys for Fred to play with?” I said.

“Can we look for a train?”

“Sure.”

“And crayons?”

“Why not?”

We were talking about our favorite colors when Q got back. He was carrying a large plastic bag from the discount store, so I was pretty sure he'd found the air mattresses. “You find them?” I asked.

He nodded and handed me the bag. “Lime green and two orange ones.”

I grinned. “Hey, they'll go with our towels.” I pulled the plastic packages out of the bag. “What color, kiddo?” I said to Dylan.

“Green,” he said.

“Okay,” I said. I took out the green air mattress, unfolded it and started to blow it up. Q had already started on one of the others. It takes a lot of air to blow up one of those things, I discovered. I had to stop twice—once because I got dizzy and almost fell over sideways, making Dylan giggle again.

But we finally got them all blown up. Dylan—and Fred—stretched out on the green mattress that Q had tucked in one corner of the room. He rolled around, and I hoped the damn thing wouldn't pop.

“Fred likes it,” he said.

“Good,” I said. “Just tell him not to bounce too hard or there's going to be a giant pop in here.”

“We need to empty the car,” Q said. “Goddard wants it in the morning.”

“Of course,” I said. He let the sarcasm go.

I'd only spent a few nights sleeping in the Honda, and it wasn't even my car in the first place, so why did I feel all squirmy about Q selling it to John Goddard? I'd never cared about stuff before, probably because after my dad died, my mom and I had moved a lot. Sometimes it was because of money, and other times it was just because she got bored.

We lugged all the boxes up the stairs, stacking them under the window. I couldn't help yawning as I set the last box on the pile.

“I'm gonna go get our supper,” Q said. “Just, I don't know, just do nothing until I get back.”

Kinda hard to do nothing with Dylan there. Fred wanted to try all three of the air mattresses, so I told Dylan the story of “Goldilocks and the Three Bears.” Except it had been a long time since I'd heard the story, so some of the “Three Little Pigs” sort of got mixed in too, but nobody seemed to mind.

Q came back with steak, baked potato and something that looked like lime-green cauliflower.

“That looks yucky,” Dylan said.

“What is it?” I said to Q.

“I don't know,” he said, spearing a piece with his plastic fork. “Mmm, it's good, though.” He looked at Dylan sitting next to me with Fred beside him on the floor, a takeout spoon in the teddy bear's lap. “Tell Fred it's got lots of cheese sauce. He can close his eyes if he doesn't want to look at it.”

I was ready for Dylan to pitch a fit, but he took a small bit of the green stuff and lots of the sauce and tried a bite.

“So,” Q said. “What does Fred think?”

“He likes it,” Dylan said.

“Yeah, the bear's a gourmet,” Q said with a grin.

“What's a gor…gor…”

“A gourmet,” I said.

“What is it?” Dylan asked, spearing another piece of the green cauliflower.

“Someone who knows about food,” Q said.

Dylan thought about it for a moment, then nodded and went back to eating.

And it was as easy and comfortable as that. I washed Dylan's hair and then he took a bath while Fred watched from the safety of the top of the toilet tank. I tucked Dylan and the bear into the sleeping bag, and he fell asleep almost at once.

Q touched my arm. “Go have a bath, Maddie.”

“I feel like I should be doing something,” I said, wiping a hand over my neck.

He reached up and pulled the elastic from my hair. “You should be having a bath,” he said. He tipped his head toward the bathroom. “Go before I pick you up and throw you in.”

I lay in the water trying to remember the last time I'd had a bath. Before Evan, that was for sure. When he was around, I took showers. It just seemed safer for some reason I couldn't put into words.

I lay awake for a long time on my air mattress. Not that it was uncomfortable. After sleeping in the car, and before that, covered in cardboard in one old building or another, this was like being at a fancy hotel. I just couldn't get my mind to shut off or even slow down. I finally did fall asleep, then woke up with a jolt. I stared into the darkness, remembering where I was and why. Q's mattress was a few feet away. He was on his side, head propped on one hand, watching me.