The Decoding of Lana Morris (2 page)

She got used to Alfred first. He was like a fifteen-year-old middle-aged man. Every day he wore a green golf shirt, blue slacks, and polyester socks with loafers. When nothing else was happening, he copied words out of magazines and ads, sometimes for hours, rubbing his teeth together to make a sound that reminded Lana of a purring cat or a croaking toad, depending on her mood. “Bruxism,” Whit called it. “All part of the Down’s deal.” If Alfred didn’t have a special kind of black pen and paper, he rocked or hit himself. The strange thing was, after he filled a whole piece of paper with copied words and phrases, he wadded the paper up and threw it away.

Then she got used to the others, too. She learned their full names—Carlito Guiterrez, Garth Stoneman, and Tilly Oates—and the peculiarities that went with them.

Carlito, an enormous, blocky boy of fourteen, was the shoulder toucher—he repeatedly walked up and touched your shoulder and quietly walked away, as if this was his job—and his favorite snack was dill pickles with Tabasco sauce. It was Tilly who said that when Carlito touched people’s shoulders, he was blessing them. “Who told you that?” Lana had asked, and Tilly stared at her a second or two and said, “Nobody. I just know it, you bet.”

Garth was twelve and he wore superhero T-shirts every day—Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, or the Hulk—and he was so skinny he wore suspenders to keep his pants up. He always carried a plastic Popeye doll, kind of like a Barbie, and he twisted the head when he was nervous, which
was a lot of the time. He didn’t like anyone to touch him, and if you got too close, he’d scream. (“Give him his inches!” Veronica would yell if she was anywhere nearby at the time.)

First thing every morning and every night right after supper, Garth took his Popeye and sat in a chair by the front door. Whit told Lana that Garth was waiting for his mom to come and pick him up. He said that one day about three years ago, Garth’s mom came to the house with Garth and a social worker and introduced him to Whit and Veronica. Garth carried two shopping bags, one in each hand. One bag held all his clothes and the other was full of plastic action heroes, including Popeye.

Garth’s mother, according to Whit, seemed like an average woman, not too skinny or fat or short or tall or pretty or plain. But hidden by all the averageness, Whit said, was a hardness like nothing he’d ever seen. After introducing Garth to Whit and Veronica, Garth’s mom went down on one knee and said, “This is your home now, Garth. I’m not coming back today or tomorrow or anytime after that. I won’t be sending birthday cards or Christmas presents, and you shouldn’t expect me to. This is your home now, in this house with these people.” Garth’s mom stood up. She didn’t hug Garth or kiss him. When he tried to follow her, she pushed him away. She took his hand, shook it firmly, and let go of it. Then she went to the door, opened it, and, without a look back, closed it behind her. Garth had gone to the closed door and stood by it until at last he was tired of standing and then he sat on the floor and finally he lay down and fell asleep.

Whit and Veronica had carried him to bed, but when they woke up in the morning, Garth was again sleeping curled by the front door. He wrapped himself in a rug and clung to his Popeye doll and didn’t eat or leave his spot for three days, except to go to the bathroom. After a week, he began to eat with the others and began to fall into the routines of the house, but he’d never stopped his waiting hours, which were between eight and nine in the morning and six and seven in the evening. “Guess that’s when his mother picked him up when she left him places overnight or during the day,” Whit said. “So that’s when he thinks she’ll pick him up now.”

Garth and most of the kids moved toward and away from Lana in casual, unpredictable ways, but Tilly Oates was different. After a week of watching Lana from a safe distance, Tilly began to move ever closer to Lana, and then, once close, she didn’t leave. She followed Lana from room to room like a shadow. At first it was unnerving, but then Lana grew used to it and realized there was no obligation to talk or listen to Tilly in the usual ways. They fell into easy company.

Tilly liked to wear pink pants with lots of pockets—her favorite pair had a pocket total of ten—and she liked using the pockets for the special objects she found—a small, smooth red rock, a stick resembling a fork, a leaf shaped like a heart. And any kind of feather. Feathers were her specialty, and nests, though she didn’t put these in her pockets—she always hand-carried the nests. Often she presented them to Lana as gifts, and Lana made a point of arranging them along the windowsills in her room.

One day Tilly said something strange. She’d been sitting
with Lana in the backyard watching her draw, and out of the blue Tilly said, “I’m a big mistake.”

Tilly was normally cheerful, but her tone now was forlorn. Lana looked up from her drawing. “What?”

“I’m a big mistake. No one should have had me.” Tilly’s lower lip began to tremble like a toddler’s. “That’s why no one wants me.”

These words sent something like an electrical shock through Lana’s system. She herself had thought this very thing of all the Snicks, and more than once. “Who told you that?” Lana asked.

“A girl at my school,” Tilly said.

Lana thought it was one thing to think it, but saying it was worse. Much worse.

She leaned forward and took Tilly’s hands in hers. “Well, I want you, Tilly,” she said. “I like to be with you.” She hadn’t thought this before, but once she said it, it felt more or less true. Tilly needed somebody, and, well, Lana was somebody.

That night when they were all watching TV, Tilly yawned and put her head in Lana’s lap and took hold of Lana’s hand and almost immediately fell asleep, and Lana hadn’t minded having this odd, stocky, cuddling creature snoring gently against her. From then on, Tilly slept on the other twin bed in Lana’s room, which was fine by Lana. Tilly wasn’t bad company. It was true she brought with her a pink Cinderella alarm clock, a pink Cinderella bedspread, and her pink shoe boxes full of feathers and nests and rocks and smashed bottle caps. But she didn’t steal. She wasn’t devious. She said thank you, please, and excuse me more than most people. And most of the time,
she saw the sunny side of things, even when there wasn’t much sunny to see.

Now, on the front porch, on this normal-seeming Saturday morning, Tilly shouts gleefully, “Slinky winky coming after us!”

T
he swirling dust devil has swept along the street, lifting leaves and candy wrappers, moving past Chet’s house next door, veering north and now, suddenly, it is whooshing toward the Winterses’ house, toward the front porch, toward Lana and Tilly.

“We’d better go in,” Lana says, snatching the two-dollar bill from her ear, clapping a hand over her drawing tablet, and standing up.

But Tilly stays where she is, grinning, exultant, wearing her red tornado pack and sucking on a Froot Loop.

Lana hunches over the sketch pad, closes her eyes, and waits. The hot wind pours through her clothes and goes right inside her, finding all the little corners, sucking up stray thoughts and idle notions, and then abruptly it is gone, leaving behind a feeling Lana can’t remember feeling before. A lightness, she thinks. A pleasant emptiness that makes her feel strangely hopeful.

She opens her eyes.

Papers litter the yard, the Froot Loops box is upside down on the driveway, and Tilly is still grinning. Sheer pleasure beams in her face. “We were in the slinky winky!” she says.

Lana nods and wipes at her skin to see if she’s dusty. She is, a little. She slips the rolled two-dollar bill back into place behind her left ear. The odd elation still fills her.

Tilly says, “Did it carry us away?”

Lana thinks she
did
get a little carried away by the dust devil, but not in the way Tilly means, so she says, “We’re still here, aren’t we?”

Tilly nods. Then she smiles her usual satisfied smile and says, “It was
fun
!”

Lana thinks that in a way, it was. If Tilly hadn’t been here, she would have gone inside and missed the whole thing. “You weren’t scared?”

“No!” Then, “You was here!” Then Tilly opens her tornado pack, takes out one of her emergency granola bars, and starts to eat it.

Lana says, “You’d better put your pack in the window seat before Veronica sees it.”

Tilly evidently sees the wisdom of this—she starts zipping up the pack’s compartments. Lana folds open her tablet to the drawing of Whit. There’s nothing wrong with doing a portrait of him, she tells herself. She’s drawn faces before, though not of men, certainly not her guardians.

But Whit is different. Back in December, at Lana’s arrival, Whit smiled and said, “Well, hello, Miss Morris,” while Veronica stared with cold gray eyes at Lana for about a minute. Lana stared right back. Veronica’s lips, unglossed, had a faintly bluish tone.

Finally Veronica said, “One more L.M.A.”

Don’t ask
, Lana thought, but she couldn’t help herself. In a sullen voice she said, “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Veronica seemed pleased that Lana had taken the bait.
“It means one more Little Miss Attitude,” she said in an icy voice. Then, “We’ve seen a few, just so you know. They come and they go.”

And Lana, feeling something close down inside her, said, “F.U.” She made a small, stony smile. “But just so you know, F.U. doesn’t mean anything personal toward you—they’re just my adopted middle initials.” She kept her hard little smile. “They stand for Faith and Unity.” She narrowed her gaze on Veronica.

Veronica, satisfied that her worst expectations had just been confirmed, gave a cold, knowing nod and walked away. But Whit Winters just stood there with a loose grin on his face.

He was a man, Lana knew, but his look was boyish, and he had narrow hips and skin so smooth Lana wondered if he ever had to shave. His eyes were frisky and deeply brown and exerted on Lana what felt like an actual pull. Still, he was connected to Veronica, so Lana stared at his mouth and said, “I would call that grin moronic.” A word her father had liked to use.

Whit Winters seemed actually amused. “You’re kind of a desperado, aren’t you?”

Lana stared over his shoulder, away from his eyes.

He said, “Lana Morris. Is that what you said your name is?”

Lana wouldn’t even nod. She kept her eyes drilling into the wall behind him.

In a mild, almost playful tone, he said, “Well, you know what? I’m going to make it my personal mission to learn the Morris code.”

These words affected Lana, but she didn’t want to
show it. She said sullenly, “That’s the
Morse
code. My name isn’t even spelled like that.”

Whit Winters shrugged. “Didn’t say it was.” He waited until she was looking at him again and then, when she was, he said, “Everybody’s got their own secret code and then one day”—his grin slid up on one side—“along comes the Decoder.”

That was how it all started.

Now, six months later, Lana puts her pencil lead on the line of Whit’s mouth and begins to make a shadow. Tilly, who has stopped eating her granola bar and recovered the Froot Loops box from the driveway, reaches into it, rummages, and says, “I like Froot Loops and Trix, Lana. But I don’t like Kix and Chex. Not really.”

“Okay by me,” Lana says, and sneaks a glance at the house next door. Chet’s house. The blinds of Chet’s bedroom are still pulled.

“Chet’s a sleepyhead!” Tilly says, and Lana realizes Tilly is on to her.

“He keeps late hours,” Lana says, and—does she actually hear Veronica approaching or just sense it?—she casually folds back the page on her yellow legal pad and quickly begins a crude sketch of the dust devil. A few seconds later, Veronica pushes open the screen door.

“You’re lunch duty, Lana,” she says.

In fact, Lana has already made the sandwiches—bologna with mayo and mustard for everyone except Carlito, who screams if you give him mustard—but she doesn’t say so. She doesn’t want to give Veronica the satisfaction.

“Did you hear me?” Veronica says with an edge to it.

Lana says, “I nodded, didn’t I?” though she knows she didn’t.

“It’s bologna and cheese,” Veronica says, “but we’re out of cheese.”

“Then it’s not really bologna and cheese, is it?” Lana says. She knows it’ll go on Veronica’s report as bologna and cheese, or maybe ham and cheese.

“Technically, yes, it is,” Veronica says. “We’re just out of cheese.”

Lana gives Veronica a look, but she’s not going to argue. She herself wouldn’t eat the cheese even if they had it, because what Veronica buys is a horrible, Velveeta-like knockoff she gets at some big-box store in Rapid City. This isn’t anything unusual. Veronica’s always whining about money, and Lana’s noticed that Veronica makes a habit of cutting corners on the Snicks’ food. Once she bought a cheap Froot Loop knockoff and put the stuff in real Froot Loop boxes, but none of the Snicks would eat it.

“And no mustard for Carlito,” Veronica says, and Lana under her breath says, “Thanks for the mighty advice.”

A mistake, because Veronica must’ve heard it. She steps out onto the porch, and when Lana glances up, Veronica’s eyes are on the drawing paper.

“What is that?” she says in her cool voice, and then, “No, don’t tell me, I already know. It’s a pathetic doodle. But that’s okay, because I’m sure that out there in the real world, there are all sorts of really great opportunities for pathetic doodlers.”

“Faith,” Lana says in the droning, stretched-out voice
she imagines to be in the style of a chanting Himalayan monk. “Unity.”

Veronica presents a frosty smile. “What exactly is that behind your ear?” she says. “Is it a dollar bill of some kind?”

Lana says, “Of some kind, yeah.”

“What denomination?”

Sullenly Lana says, “I can’t recall.”

Veronica’s eyes brighten slightly. “Really? Isn’t it a two-dollar bill? Isn’t it a two-dollar bill that you unfold and hold flat in your hand when you want to feel the presence of whoever it was who was once, ever so briefly, your father?”

These are things Lana has told Whit privately and confidentially, and when they come back at her from Veronica’s lips, the sensation is that of a puncture wound. How could Whit have passed these things on to her?