Where I'd Like to Be (11 page)

Murphy always cut out words.
Enchanted. Allure. Soar
.

We had boxes for our stuff, the blue box for the books, and a box Murphy had painted blue with yellow flowers to hold my curtains with the halfway-sewn hems. There was Murphy’s gold trash can filled to the brim with little scraps of paper.

Some days the fort filled up with other stuff, too. If someone did poorly on a test or had gotten yelled at by a teacher, then a corner would fill up with that person’s sadness for the
afternoon. When one of us came in with an A math quiz to our credit or a good day on the soccer field, the walls of the fort seemed to scoop up the joy and spread it around.

One afternoon the fort got so filled up with Ricky Ray’s knock-knock jokes, I thought if the walls didn’t explode, I surely would. A six-year-old, even one who’s almost seven, will knock-knock joke you to death if you’re not careful.

“Knock knock!” Ricky Ray yelled from where he was lying on the middle of the carpet. He was wearing the red-and-white scarf I’d bought him at Wal-Mart and looking mighty smart. He sounded cheerful as always, like that lunch with his mama had never occurred. But one afternoon when he was cutting out a picture for the
Book of People
, he pointed to the blonde-haired model and said, “Now this girl, her name is Amy, and she’s a famous movie star.”

Don’t ask me why, but that made me sadder than I’d been in a long time.

“Knock knock!” he called out again, not letting us pretend we didn’t hear him.

“Who’s there?” Donita, me, and Logan asked in a chorus, our voices dragging down low to the floorboards.

“Banana!”

“Oh, man,” Donita groaned. “Not this one again. Ricky Ray, can’t you get a book out of the library, figure out some new jokes?”

“Just say it, Donita!” Ricky Ray called out.

Donita sighed. “Banana who?”

“Banana banana.”

“You’re killing me, Ricky Ray,” Logan said from the armchair. “Please, could we get this over with?”

“Okay,” Ricky Ray said. “Orange you glad I’m not a banana?” He broke up in a fit of giggles and rolled around on the ground. “Okay,” he said, rolling into a sitting position and catching his breath. “I’ve got another one. Knock knock!”

Logan, Donita, and me all looked at each other and shook our heads. “Who’s there?” we answered.

I could tell you who wasn’t there, and that was Murphy. It had been a week since she’d been up to the fort. The math project she had
been working on with Olivia, a report on the subject of infinity, was due on Friday, so they’d been working on it every day after school. “I guess that could take an awful long time,” I’d joked when she’d told me about it.

“Don’t confuse infinity with eternity,” she’d told me, all serious. “It’s mathematically unsound.”

I had two thoughts when she finally showed up later that afternoon. The first one was it had seemed like an infinite number of days since Murphy had last been at the fort. The second one was
Thank goodness
. Now Murphy could take her turn answering those dagblasted knock-knock jokes.

Sure enough, Ricky Ray was the first one to greet her. “Knock knock, Murphy!”

“Who’s there?” she asked, still standing in the doorway.

“What’s black and white and red all over?” Ricky Ray asked her.

“That’s not a knock-knock joke, Ricky Ray,” Logan said. “That’s a black-and-white-and-red joke.”

“Oh,” said Ricky Ray, looking confused. “Well, the answer is a zebra with diaper rash.”

“I don’t know why that can’t be a knock-knock joke,” Murphy said. “Is there a rule that all knock-knock jokes have to be exactly the same?”

Donita buried her head in her hands. “Oh, man, here we go again. Madam Weird is back.”

“I think any kind of joke could be a knock-knock joke,” Ricky Ray said, and he was the only one who spoke. Now instead of jokes, the fort was filled with an uneasy feeling. “What?” Murphy asked, turning around to look at everyone. “Why’s it so quiet all of a sudden?”

Logan shrugged. “No reason. Ricky Ray just ran out of knock-knock jokes, I guess.”

Murphy began pacing the room, her mouth pulled into a tight frown. I wished I could explain to her that you just can’t abandon people for a week and expect them to take you back with open arms. Especially not a bunch of abandoned and neglected kids. We’re real sensitive to it.

After a few minutes of pacing, Murphy
broke into the circle and picked up the
Book of Houses
, which she shoved into Donita’s hands. “It’s your turn to tell a story, Donita. So quit being mad at me and start talking.”

Donita took the book from Murphy, her expression moving from irritation to uncertainty and back again. But she began turning pages, and when she stopped turning pages, she started talking.

I
stopped talking to the world exactly one week before I arrived at the East Tennessee Children’s Home. That’s when Mrs. Estep decided she didn’t want to be a foster parent anymore, no matter how much the monthly checks from the state of Tennessee improved her financial picture.

“What good does it do me to get a check from the state if them children are stealing from me?” I overheard her complain to her best friend, Mary Gaye Gaskins, over glasses of Diet RC in Mrs. Estep’s spotless kitchen. I’d been coming down the hallway to tell Mrs. Estep we needed to take a trip to the laundromat if she expected me to get dressed for
school in the morning. When I heard her say that about state checks and children stealing, I stopped dead in my tracks. My arms and legs felt shot full of electricity. She couldn’t mean me and Randy, could she?

She most certainly could.

“I feel sorry for the girl,” Mrs. Estep continued to her friend. “It’s that boy’s influence; I don’t doubt that for a minute. Why, he’s in trouble over at that school every other day. Tardy for class, stealing some child’s pencil, not doing his homework.”

“I don’t know how you put up with it,” Mrs. Gaskins said. “I’ve always said you were one of God’s angels, taking these children in the way you do. And then they rob you blind.”

I stood frozen to the carpet. Half of me wanted to rush into the kitchen and beg for forgiveness, and the other half of me was ready to run out the front door, never to darken the entrance to Mrs. Estep’s house again.

The only thing was, I hadn’t stolen anything from anyone.

Mrs. Estep sighed in the kitchen. “What
breaks my heart is, I’d been saving that cash to take James and Ronnie to Bristol to do some clothes shopping. Seems like so much of the money around here goes to children who ain’t even blood kin to us. But James and Ronnie don’t ever complain about it.”

James and Ronnie were Mrs. Estep’s sons. Nine and ten, neither of them had the least bit of interest in clothes or in anything besides television wrestling and firing off their BB guns at the neighborhood squirrels. If they had any idea a shopping trip to Bristol was in the works, they’d probably hightail it to the hills with their guns and a portable TV in hand.

When the front door opened and James and Ronnie themselves bolted inside, a plastic shopping bag dangling from Ronnie’s wrist, I quick made my way back down the hallway. I didn’t want them to know I’d been listening to their mama’s conversation. I heard them turn on the TV in the front room, and then the sounds of them wrestling over something and shouting, “Give me that!” flew through the air. It didn’t take me long to figure out what was going on.

“What did y’all get?” I asked casually, leaning over the back of an easy chair. “It looks to me like you been out to the mall.”

James held up several cartridges. “Video games. This one’s called ‘Mortal Victory.’ I’m about to set it up if old fart-breath over here would let me handle it.”

Ronnie lunged for the game, and the two fell to the ground in another battle.

I waited until they were done fighting before I said anything else. “So where did you get the money for it?”

“Uncle Pete,” James said.

“Collected some cans,” Ronnie said at exactly the same time.

“Well, it’s always nice to have some extra cash,” I told them.

James and Ronnie looked confused. Then they smiled, thinking they had gotten one over on me. I left the room, my mind in a jumble.

I didn’t know what to do first: Go tell Mrs. Estep that it was her own children, not me and Randy, who had stolen her money, or find
Randy so we could have a laugh over the whole situation. I decided to go tell Randy.

“You might as well start packing your bags,” he said after I had finished. “We’ll be out of here by tomorrow.”

“What do you mean? All we have to do is tell Mrs. Estep what really happened. It’s obvious those boys stole the money and bought themselves new video games.”

We were sitting on the carpet of the room Randy shared with James and Ronnie. Randy had a sketchbook in his lap. He turned it to a fresh page.

“Let’s map this one out, okay? You and me, we’re over here,” he said, drawing two Xs and circling them. “And James and Ronnie, they’re over there.”

He drew two more Xs on the other side of the page and circled them. “Now here’s Mrs. Estep,” he said. With a few quick strokes of his pencil, Randy made a perfect study of our foster-care mother. She sat at the bottom of the page, holding her hands over her heart and looking adoringly toward her two boys.

“Now it don’t matter to Mrs. Estep if we’re no good or not,” Randy continued, looking up at me. “She didn’t raise us and she can’t be blamed for our bad behavior, though I’ve heard her take credit for your good grades a time or two.

“On the other hand, she did raise them two boys, and besides that, she’s pretty sure they hung the moon, not to mention the stars. You tell her they stole the money she was saving to buy them some new BVDs and tube socks, and she’ll probably call the police and have ’em arrest you for maligning her boys’ characters.”

“But if I don’t tell her, she’s going to get rid of us and say we’re thieves.”

“Honey, she’s going to get rid of us and say we robbed her no matter what you do.”

I couldn’t believe it. Mrs. Theresa Estep was no saint, and she hadn’t impressed me with the overall quality of her care, but she wasn’t a mean woman to my knowledge. She wasn’t even all that unreasonable, unless the subject was her boys. Besides, Randy had been there
for two years and I’d been there over a year and a half, and that had to count for something.

“I’m going to talk to her,” I told Randy, standing up.

“Suit yourself,” Randy said. “Like I said, it won’t make no difference one way or another.” He drew a mushroom cloud over the circle that held the two of us together. “Mrs. Estep can’t afford to think ill of them boys of hers. They’re all she has. Us—she can think the worst of us. It won’t cost her a dime.”

I stomped down the hallway to the kitchen and demanded that Mrs. Estep face the truth: Her boys were the only thieves in that house. As soon as I spoke, I saw her face close to my words like a plant at nightfall, and then it bloomed again in rage.

“Why, I ought to slap your face,” she hissed at me through clenched teeth. “You better go get your things, missy. I’ll have Social Services over here to fetch you and that juvenile delinquent in there directly.”

No one could come pick us up until the next day. By then, my eyes were so swollen from
crying I could barely see out of them. “I demand a trial!” I screamed as soon as the grim-looking social worker appeared at the door.

She grabbed me by the wrist. “You hush up now, young lady. You’re in enough trouble as it is.”

So I hushed. And I stayed hushed all the way over to the halfway house where they put me and Randy until they found new placements for us, and I stayed hushed on the trip to the East Tennessee Children’s Home in Elizabethton, my sorry-looking Barbie suitcase by my side, an old Raggedy Ann doll stuffed inside it, and Randy Nidiffer’s grandmother’s address in my pocket.

What was the use of talking if no one was willing to listen to the truth? And why would I talk to people who didn’t understand you don’t just tear two kids apart like a sheet of paper. Me and Randy were family. I was all he had and he was all I had. We had each other, and we had the books. And nobody in the world cared. So why bother to say a word to anyone?

I didn’t intend to say a word to Donita when
I first met her, that was for sure. If I was the quietest person in our room, she was the loudest, cutting up with Kandy and giving Corinne a hard time in a joking sort of way—like why didn’t Corinne ever take us out to dinner at some fancy restaurant instead of making us eat the horrible dining hall food? That first night at dinner, Donita’d described five different business plans she had for getting rich before she turned twenty-five, and you could tell by the confidence in her tone that she was sure she’d be successful one way or another. There was no way on earth someone like Donita could ever understand what I’d been through.

“You sure don’t talk much,” Donita said to me after I’d been there for a couple of days. She’d been giving me a tour of the Home, showing me all of those mismatched buildings.

“I hate to tell you, but Corinne likes folks to talk,” Donita said. “You don’t talk, she’s going to send you to this therapist from our church, Dr. Pender. He does Bible therapy, quotes you the Psalms, reads Proverbs. It’s like getting an extra dose of church-going every week.”

I looked at her. She sounded like she knew a lot about it.

“Yeah, I went to see Dr. Pender,” she said, reading my expression. “Most people here do. Bunch of crazy kids running around here. I ain’t crazy, but I come from a crazy situation.”

I didn’t say a word. This is how I discovered that sometimes if you’re real quiet, people will tell you stories that they might not tell you otherwise.

Donita led me to a spot of grass beside a row of newly sprouted seedlings. “Our dorm planted those flowers,” she said, sitting down. “Me, I love sunflower seeds, so Corinne thought it’d be nice if we planted sunflower plants. Maybe she’s just trying to save some money on snacks, though; I don’t know.”

She lay back on the grass, her arms crossed behind her head. “By the way, the food here is real bad. Lotta good things about this place, but the food ain’t one of them. Now my mama, she could cook. That’s what I miss most about things, my mama’s cooking. You’d come home from playing outside sometimes,
and the house would just smell so good, you would not believe it. Biscuits and gravy, that was my favorite. My sister, Rita, she liked her a good piece of ham and a bowl full of butter beans, and my brother, Russell, he liked pinto beans.”