Where I'd Like to Be (12 page)

I leaned back on my elbows and looked up at the sky. I used to get pintos and corn bread when Granny Lane felt rich and took us to dinner at the K&W Cafeteria. I took in a deep breath and breathed out more quiet.

“Where we used to live, it was a real nice house,” Donita told me, pulling up a handful of grass and throwing it toward the garden. “Painted white, fresh right when we moved in. It was me and Mama, Rita and Russell, and out back we kept a nice garden. Grew everything in it: beans, tomatoes, squash, lettuce when it got a little cooler. Russell grew sunflowers, too, just like here.”

Donita propped herself up on her elbows. “I think about that garden every time it’s my turn to come over here and do the watering. Think we ought to put a scarecrow up to keep the
birds out. Russell made a scarecrow for our garden. Took Mama’s old, wore-out gardening hat and stuck it to the end of a rake. Then he got some of my cousin’s overalls and stuffed them overalls with hay, and he tied pie pans to the overalls. It was the craziest thing. Made Mama laugh and laugh.”

It seemed to me that for every word I didn’t say, Donita said five. She reminded me of Randy, who would start telling you a story the second you walked into the room, no matter if it was first thing in the morning or the last thing at the end of the day.

“Feel free to add a word here and there,” Donita said, reading my thoughts again. “If you got any questions or anything.”

I shook my head. I didn’t have any questions.

“You like videos? We rent a lot of videos on weekends. Only G-rated ones, though. They’re real religious here. It’s okay if you ain’t. Nobody’s gonna force you to believe anything you don’t want to. My mama, she was religious, but not as religious as some. Some folks
on our street spent every free moment at church. Mama spent all her free time in the garden. Russell too. He loved the outside. He was real special.”

I turned and studied Donita’s face. She was smiling at her memories, but it was the sort of smile that you might call brave, like it was working extra hard to stay on her face.

That’s when I said my first words in seven days. “What happened to Russell?”

Donita stared straight ahead. “You think nine is too young to get real sick, but it ain’t.”

Then she turned to me. “You should have seen his room in that house. He painted it himself. He was a real good painter. You never would’ve believed how good that room looked.”

T
hat’s exactly how Donita told her story in the fort that day. She talked about her house and Russell’s paintings and how Russell was in the hospital for three months before he died.

“Leukemia,” Donita told us. “That’s what he had. He was real brave about it, though. He said mostly he was sad about not having more time to paint his pictures. That’s what he loved doing best of all.”

Donita traced her finger along a picture of a small, white house with a flower garden blooming beside the front walk.

“On one wall of his room, he painted a scarecrow, just like the one in the garden,” she said, staring hard at that picture. “And on
another wall, he painted a row of sunflowers and a big fat sun hanging over ’em. That was my favorite. And on the door, he painted a picture of our entire family, me and Mama, Russell and Rita, all dressed up like Christmas.”

Then she looked over to Murphy. “Bet you didn’t know I was going to tell such a sad story. You probably wouldn’t have asked if you’d known.”

“I wish I could see those paintings,” Murphy said to her.

“Well, I’ll be going back there one of these days to see ’em again myself. Mama’s still in that house, and Rita’s living with a family not three blocks away. Just as soon as Mama can get Russell’s medical bills paid off, she won’t have to work so much. And then she can take care of us better. That’s what happened, case you were wondering. Rita started a fire on the stove one night when Mama was working third shift. Social Services got called in, said Mama wasn’t fit to raise no children if she wasn’t ever home.”

Donita picked up a magazine and flipped through the pages without really looking at them. “I never saw anything like that fire,” she said after a minute. “It started out this tiny little flame you could probably spit on and put out, except it just sort of exploded before Rita knew what to do about it. Rita, she was all upset about ruining Mama’s kitchen, but me, all I could think about was that Russell would’ve loved to have seen that fire.”

“He wouldn’t mind your house burning down?” Ricky Ray asked.

“Nah, that ain’t what I mean,” Donita told him. “He just loved excitement. Loved big, dramatic things, and there ain’t nothing more dramatic than a fire. If you hung around with Russell, you started seeing the excitement in everything. He could find it, boy. He’d find it, he’d study it, and then he’d paint it.”

“He sounds like he was a born artist,” Murphy said. “You can always tell.”

“Yeah,” Donita said, nodding. “Yeah, I guess he was.”

I couldn’t tell if Donita was softening to
Murphy or not. Sometimes telling a sad story can make you feel more open to other people, but Donita was stubborn. It might take more than Murphy wanting to see Russell’s paintings to make Donita like her again.

Murphy turned around slowly, examining the walls. “We ought to paint a mural in here,” she said. “I’ve been thinking for a while we ought to do something more in here to give it more of a feeling.”

“What kind of feeling?” Logan asked, giving Murphy one of those googly-eyed looks he hadn’t had much time to practice on her lately. “How can a fort have feelings?”

“Any place can have a feeling to it,” Murphy said, beginning to pace. “The library at school has a different feeling than the Elizabethton library, right? My dorm room feels a lot different from my old bedroom.”

“My old bedroom had brown carpet in it,” Ricky Ray said. “It felt a lot different from the floors at the Home.”

“That’s not quite what I mean,” Murphy said, stopping by the door and poking her head
out for a second. “But imagine if we had wall-to-wall carpet in here. A soft, white carpet and big, silky pillows you could lean back against. You’d feel like you were in an ancient story, ‘Aladdin and the Magic Lamp,’ something like that.”

“This fort’s fine the way it is,” Donita said. But then her voice softened. “Though I suppose a mural might be nice. Maybe some sunflowers on it.”

“And a scarecrow,” Ricky Ray added. “I like scarecrows.”

Murphy turned around and faced us. “Okay, it’s my turn to tell a story. I’ve been trying to think up a good one for a while, and I think I’ve almost got it.” She turned to Ricky Ray. “I’ll need a helper, though.”

Ricky Ray nodded. “I’m good at helping.”

Murphy settled herself in front of the easy chair and patted the space beside her where she wanted Ricky Ray to sit down. Then she pulled a folded manila envelope from her back pocket and opened the clasp. Ricky Ray brought her the
Book of Houses
, and then sat
down beside her chair, posture-perfect and ready to be of assistance.

“So once upon a time there was a castle in the middle of a forest,” she began, pulling a picture of a castle made of crumbling stone out of the envelope. She handed the picture to Ricky Ray, who ran a glue stick over its back, then stuck it into the book. She shook the envelope onto her lap and out fluttered a few trees. “That’s the forest,” she told Ricky Ray. “Paste it in next to the castle.”

She plucked a paper chair from the pile of pictures on her lap. “This is the throne upon which sat the queen. The queen was a sad queen, and a mean one, too. Her husband the king had died only a few months before. Ever since his death the queen had been a cruel ruler. She never listened to the king’s wisest advisor, a young woman named . . . ”

And here Murphy looked up and grinned. “A young woman named Bonita.”

Donita shook her head, like she couldn’t believe such foolishness, but a smile broke through to her lips all the same.

“Nor would the queen let the king’s court jester, Logarth, keep the court amused anymore. She had no time for silly jokes.”

“Oh, man,” Logan groaned, and Ricky Ray giggled.

“Even worse, the queen no longer allowed the court artist, Maddelina, to come paint magic pictures for the court’s delight, and she had banned everyone’s favorite puppy, Micky May, from the castle.”

“I’m a puppy?” Ricky Ray asked gleefully. He barked a few times for good measure, but Donita shushed him.

“Go on,” she told Murphy, pulling her chair a little closer to where Murphy sat.

Murphy handed Ricky Ray a picture of a wall with a small window placed in the upper right-hand corner. “One morning, a red bird appeared at the window next to the queen’s throne. ‘I will bring you three gifts,’ the bird told the queen. ‘One each morning for the next three mornings. Each gift will last into forever, and you will never feel lonely or sad again.’ ”

Ricky Ray had finished pasting the picture of the wall into the book. When he turned the page, he let out a gasp. “This is the last page! The book is almost over!”

“We can get a new book,” Logan assured him. “I’ll get my mom to buy me one.”

Murphy leaned over and looked at the book, then looked down at the pictures that remained in her lap. “I think we have enough room for the rest of the story,” she said.

“Well, keep telling it then,” I said. It was like I was caught in a spell, like I was sitting right next to the queen waiting for the bird to return.

Murphy smiled. “Okay, okay. Let’s see,” she said, then pulled out a picture of a piano. “The next morning the bird came to the window and whistled a beautiful song to the queen. ‘This song is now yours,’ the bird said. ‘Whenever you hum it, you will feel great happiness.’ The queen hummed a few notes, and sure enough, she felt wonderful. She couldn’t wait until the bird came back the next morning.”

“I hope the bird brings her some candy,” Ricky Ray said, taking the piano from Murphy and pasting it into the book.

“No, the bird brought the queen something even better,” Murphy said. “When he came back the next day, he whispered a beautiful poem into her ear. She memorized it immediately, and whenever she felt the least bit sad, she said a few lines of the poem under her breath, and she immediately felt as though she were running along a beautiful beach, blue skies stretching over her head.”

Murphy handed Ricky Ray a picture of a bookcase. She looked up and smiled. “That was the closest thing I could figure out for a poem,” she said. “Poems come in books, right?”

“So what did the bird bring the third day?” I asked, impatient for Murphy to get on with it.

Murphy looked down at her hands and shook her head. “I still haven’t figured that part out yet,” she admitted. Everybody groaned.

“Girl, you can’t be starting a story and not have the end to it,” Donita complained. “You
better think hard tonight and come back tomorrow with something good.”

We packed up our stuff, and Donita, Murphy, Ricky Ray, and I began our hike back to the Home. I was quiet, thinking about Murphy’s story: what it meant, how it would end.

“Hey, Murphy,” Ricky Ray said, as we turned down Dewey Payne Road, “are you the queen in your story? Is that supposed to be you?”

“No way,” she said. “I’m not the queen type.”

I looked at her, wondering about that. She was bossy enough sometimes to be a queen, and she was pretty like a queen in a fairy tale would be. But I knew Murphy well enough by then to know she wasn’t the queen in her story.

No, Murphy could fly. Murphy was the red bird.

I
thought about Murphy’s story all the next morning, trying to come up with a good ending for it. I knew that the third gift wouldn’t be the end. There had to be something that came after, something that made you think everything was ruined until something or someone appeared to make everything right again.

I wasn’t very good at fairy tales, though. Granny Lane never told me any. She liked her stories real-funny or real-sad. She never much went in for make-believe.

“Maybe the bird’s going to give the queen a bottle filled with water from the fountain of youth,” I told Logan and Donita at lunch. “So that she’ll live forever.”

“Too boring,” Donita said, tearing the crust off her grilled cheese sandwich. “It’s got to be something with a little more spark to it than that.”

“Why don’t you ask her yourself,” Logan said, nodding toward the cafeteria entrance. Murphy hurried through the doors, holding something close to her chest. I waved to her, but she was headed for Olivia Woods’ table and didn’t notice.

Donita shook her head. “Murphy’s going to be sorry she ever got mixed up with that crowd, that’s my prediction,” she said, taking a bite of her sandwich. “They’re mean as a pack of jackals.”

I watched as Murphy sat down next to Olivia Woods. She smiled at everyone and chatted for a minute, leaning over once to touch Olivia on the arm. Katha Coleman and Jaycee Laws gave her some sniffy looks, but Murphy ignored them. She said something to Olivia and placed a black and white–speckled notebook on the table.

That’s when I knew what happened next in Murphy’s story.

“The bird brings the queen a magic book,” I said, standing up slowly.

“Are you okay, Maddie?” Logan asked. “Maybe you ought to sit down and eat something.”

By the time I reached Olivia’s table, she was gingerly fingering the speckled cover as though it might have something contagious on it. Cautiously, she began to leaf through the pages.

Then, to my everlasting surprise, Olivia Woods smiled.

It was an honest-to-goodness smile, not a smirk, not a sneer, not a grimace. I suddenly saw how she must have looked when she was six or seven, before she became the sort of person who made kids miserable because they’d bought the wrong brand of tennis shoes. It was like everything good that had gone into the
Book of Houses
—the afternoons spent in the fort making jokes and cutting up, the dreams of the day we’d have houses of our own with real families in them, the feeling that maybe
we
were a real family, just sitting there and telling each other stories—it was like all of that got under Olivia Woods’ skin for a
minute and made her soft and new as a spring morning.