The Decoding of Lana Morris

Also by Laura and Tom McNeal

Crooked

Zipped

Crushed

N
ebraska, June, the sky white with heat.

The dust devil begins with a pocket of unstable air where a farmer’s field of irrigated beans meets the heated asphalt of Highway 20, sending up a sudden rush of warm air that swirls and stretches higher, increasing speed. The twisting funnel of dirt and debris moves east through fields of alfalfa and wheat and corn toward the town of Two Rivers, where, in a two-storied foster home, a girl named Lana Morris lives.

Lana is sixteen and slim, with watchful dark eyes, brown hair that falls in straight lines down her long back, and a slot between her two front teeth that was once called her most charming feature by one of the least reliable in her mother’s long line of unreliable boyfriends. He said she was pretty, too, but the truth is Lana doesn’t think anything about herself is charming or pretty, only that the slot between her front teeth is the exact thickness of a dime, something she learned by trial and error.

Slipped into the crease behind Lana’s left ear, where some people might store a pencil or even a cigarette, you will normally find a tightly rolled two-dollar bill. With use and with time, this bill has been worn soft as cloth. Lana
believes the bill was left to her by her father, believes that by unrolling it and holding it flat in her hand, she can sometimes feel the presence of the person he must have been. Lana has always believed in things. Fortune cookies. Horoscopes. That one of these days her mother (whereabouts unknown) would stop drinking, get a steady job, and buy them a little house somewhere. That her father, before he died, was nicer and less foolish than people said he was.

Lana stares down at her open hand with mild surprise. A minute before, she’d been drawing on a yellow legal pad, and now, without remembering doing it, she’s smoothing the two-dollar bill across the flat of her palm.

Lana rolls and fastens the bill, then tucks it behind her ear.
Today will be okay
, she thinks,
if I can just get out of the house
.

Always a big
if
.

It’s Saturday morning, for one thing. School is out for the summer. Whit Winters, her foster father, is upstairs asleep. His wife, Veronica, is in the backyard hanging sheets. Lana makes a point of being where Veronica isn’t, so she’s sneaked out to the front porch and sits sketching on a yellow legal tablet and eating Froot Loops from a box with a foster girl named Tilly, who is also sixteen. With her curly brown hair, green eyes, and round body, Tilly looks almost normal, but she isn’t.

“Look, Lana!” Tilly says, and Lana looks. Tilly holds open her pudgy hand to display a dozen or so Froot Loops, all pink. “Look! Look!”

“Pink is definitely your favorite,” Lana says.

Tilly says seriously, “Pinkies are better than yellows, Lana. You bet.”

They both fall quiet in the thick heat. Lana goes back to sketching Whit Winters’s face from memory. She can do his wavy hair, and she’s never had trouble with his eyes, but there’s something wrong with the chin, and if the chin’s wrong, everything’s wrong. He looks sharp and bony instead of smooth and boyish. She erases quickly, whisks the pink rubbery dust away with the side of her hand, and starts again.

Cicadas are whirring in the cottonwood, and a crow descends on the front lawn. Lana, lost again in her drawing, presumes this is a Saturday morning like any other Saturday morning, but in this she is wrong.

“L
ook, Lana!” Tilly says. “A slinky winky!”

Lana follows Tilly’s gaze. “That’s just a dust devil,” she says, frowning. “I hope it doesn’t come this way.”

This has no effect on Tilly’s position. “Slinky winky!” she says with a hint of truculence in her voice, and why not? Lana thinks. What does somebody like Tilly have other than her half-baked opinions? Tilly goes into the house, and when she comes back, she’s wearing one of the red backpacks that are kept in the hollow part of the living room window seat. The backpacks are for emergencies—to put on if there’s a tornado and they have to evacuate.

“It’s not a tornado, Tilly,” Lana says. “Are you scared?”

“No, Lana. I’m not scared. No.”

Lana isn’t sure what’s wrong with Tilly, but Lana’s being of sound mind and body is the exception here—the rest are special-needs kids, or Snicks, as foster mom Veronica calls them. Lana thought it was some kind of slur until she saw the way Veronica wrote it out on receipts and accounting forms:
SNKs
.

Six months ago, on Lana’s first day at the Winterses’,
she called her caseworker, Hallie Simpson, and without bothering to say hello announced that there’d been a mistake. “And not a little one,” Lana said. “As mistakes go, Hallie, this one is stellar.”

Hallie in her low, rich, mellifluent voice said, “Hello, Lana. And how are you? Are you well? Because I hope you’re well.”

Lana likes Hallie. She is the best caseworker Lana has ever had and one of the few adults she can trust. Still, Lana said, “You put me in a home for retards is how I am, Hallie.”

“Special needs,” Hallie said evenly. Hallie Simpson is six feet tall, black, and—Lana knows this for a fact—unflappable. Lana has tried it all; Hallie cannot be flapped. Hallie said, “The correct term is
special needs
.”

Lana was using the house phone at the time. She lowered her voice slightly. “Does that mean they each have a special need to be packed off to outer space?” she said, and when Hallie said nothing, Lana said, “Did I mention that one of them has his mouth open all the time? And he keeps walking up to me and touching my shoulder and walking off. Touching my shoulder and walking off. Again and again. Have you ever spent extended time with someone who does that, Hallie?—because I have to tell you, it’s a little creepy, and every one of the rest of them is … just … as … 
special
.”

“Special needs,” Hallie said smoothly, “is a category into which you arguably now fit, Lana, although yours is really more of a compound category. Let’s call it … special needs and limited options.” She paused and softened her voice. “Look, Lana, the Winterses are decent enough fosters, and they said they’d try you.” Another pause. “As
for the other, less fortunate kids who live there, I’d suggest a small dose of compassion.”

Which was easy for Hallie to say because she didn’t live in Snick House, where all the faces were a little too big and a little too flat and a little too elongated, like, Lana thinks, jumbo eggs drawn on a page without shading or shadow.

Lana kept her purse with her every minute after the boy named Alfred Mobilio took it off to a corner and ate all her Life Savers and Tic Tacs and started to eat her earplugs because they were packaged like mints in a cellophane bag. He stole her Little Walter CD, the one that her mother gave her because it was her father’s favorite, or so she said. Alfred kept it in his canvas tote bag for a whole day. When Lana told Veronica it was missing, Veronica had gone right to Alfred’s bag, fished it out, and said nonchalantly, “Pilfering’s part of his makeup. Keep your stuff out of sight.”

Lana kept her distance, fingered her two-dollar bill, and watched television. She washed her own dishes before she ate because the Snicks, who had rotating dish duty, usually had to be reminded to wash their own hands when they left the bathroom. There was a lock on the fridge to prevent food-stealing. A lock on the medicine cabinet. Behavior charts everywhere.

Then one night about a month into her stay, Alfred Mobilio, who for sure had Down syndrome, sat down on the sofa beside her and said, “Jamha far yesterday.”

“You want to try that in English?” Lana said. Alfred at least could talk, but he wasn’t easy to understand.

“J-J-J-Jamha farted yesterday,” Alfred repeated, more clearly this time.

Lana didn’t know who Jamha was, so she said, “Did Jamha say excuse me?”

“Naw,” Alfred said cheerfully, “Jamha’s a dog,” and Lana had to laugh.