“What are you two talking about?” Violet appeared in the doorway behind us, drying her hands after doing the dishes in a wash bucket out on the porch.
“Stephen going to school this morning.”
Violet glanced down at Dad and then fixed me with a no-nonsense gaze, her hands on her hips. “There’s nothing you can do for your dad that I can’t. I’m sorry, but that’s the way it is. I’m sure he would want you to go to school if you could. Don’t you think?”
“I—”
“Jackson,” she called back into the kitchen. “You have some notebooks and things to give Stephen if he wanted to come to school with you?”
“On my desk!”
“Upstairs to the left,” Violet said to me, turning back toward the kitchen. “Better get moving. Don’t want you two to be late.”
I was about to argue, to insist that I would stay behind with Dad, but there was something about the swift sureness of Violet’s command that had me falling into place behind her and following her through the kitchen. Besides, I had to admit I was curious.
The kitchen was wide and open with tall windows all along the back looking out onto a porch. Jackson was sitting at the end of the long table with a big book that said AMERICAN HISTORY on the spine. He peeked over it as I came in, then away again as soon as I caught him.
“Next to the bed,” he said. “Take a couple pencils too.”
I nodded and looked up the length of the dark staircase that sat behind him. I took the rail and climbed slowly, feeling a strange leg-shaking vertigo. Once I reached the landing at the top of the stairs I saw his open door, went through, and was instantly struck dumb. To my left there was a bed, an actual bed, neatly situated under a curtained window with a little nightstand next to it. The bed was crisply made with a bright red blanket and two pillows.
Standing there, I felt the same eerie sense as when I saw the pictures of their long-gone families. Everything they had was left over from the last inhabitants of the town. After they had died, the Greens and the others swept in, tidied up, and took their places. Slept in their beds. Cooked in their kitchens. Started their lives all over again.
I stepped farther in. Next to the bed was a shelf that, incredibly, held at least thirty paperback and hardcover books. I stepped closer and ran my finger along each book’s cracked spine. The same hunger I felt when Marcus laid down that first plate of eggs and bacon that morning twisted inside of me. I felt a stab of jealousy again — How could they have so much? — so I made myself look away. That’s when I noticed that there was a second room across the hall. From where I stood, I could just see the corner of a bed and a bureau with its drawers hanging open. Clothes, bits of paper, and nubs of pencils littered the floor.
Jenny’s room?
I scooped up a notebook and a couple pencils from Jackson’s desk and crossed the hall, lingering at Jenny’s door and listening. Glass clinked together as Violet put the dishes away. Jackson talked low to Marcus downstairs. I slipped inside.
Light flooded in from the one bare window, harsh and glaring on the bone-white walls. Where Jackson’s was clean and orderly and spare, hers was a junkyard. There was a bed stripped of its blanket with a couple coverless pillows and a balled-up sheet. Old clothes lay among dishes that were covered in congealed candle wax. A big hardback book was spread-eagled on the floor. It said CHEMISTRY in black letters.
Her mattress was small with thin blue pinstripes. I could imagine Jenny lying there, her hair spread out like a thick black cloud, staring up at the ceiling and waiting (like me?) for sleep that wouldn’t come.
I remembered Jenny’s body stretching in the sun, her heavy scar glowing white like a vein in marble, a sketch of a smile on her lips.
Violet’s voice drifted up the stairs. “Stephen?”
As I pulled myself out of the room, I caught sight of a spot to one side of the door where the wall had been crushed inward. I stepped up for a closer look. The hole was in the shape of a small fist. Smeared traces of blood lay where knuckles would have bit into the plaster. I opened my own hand and looked at it.
In the center of my palm were the four half-moon slashes I had made the morning after Dad’s accident. I reached my hand out, laid it over the hole in the wall, and closed my eyes.
“Stephen? You okay?”
It sounded like Violet was at the foot of the stairs now. Any second she’d come up to check on me.
“Coming!” I called, feeling strangely drained as I ran down the stairs to where Violet was waiting with two metal pails. I scrambled for an explanation for what I had been doing, but she handed one pail to Jackson and one to me. Puzzled, I peered inside and found a few big lumps wrapped in cloth.
“Your lunch,” she said helpfully.
“Oh,” I said and stood there awkwardly for a moment. Just over her shoulder I could almost see the edge of her big medicine cabinet. “Well… thanks.”
Violet pulled at my collar, fussing with my clothes to get them straight. “If I had known you were going, I would have heated up enough water for a bath. Marcus, I don’t know….”
“He’ll be fine.”
Jackson was hovering by the door, impatient.
“I’ll be fine,” I said. As I started to go, Violet turned me around and pulled me into a warm hug. Close up, she smelled like baked bread and dried flowers.
She said nothing, just held on, her breath rising and falling, matching the swell of my own. The feeling was familiar, nice at first, but as it lingered it was like being embraced by a ghost and I had to push myself away.
“We better… we should go. Right, Jackson?” I blew past him, not waiting for a response, and threw myself into the front door, relieved to feel the blast of fresh air that hit me as soon as I was outside.
“God!” Jackson said when he caught up to me. “She’s always doing stuff like that!”
I had my head down, watching my old boots slap against the asphalt, trying to swallow the thick lump in my throat and shake the warm feeling of Violet’s arms around me.
“It’s okay,” I said. “Moms are like that, I guess.”
Jackson and I fell in with a torrent of kids that pushed us faster toward the turn in the road that led to school. Jackson tried to explain the school day to me as we went, but I only caught bits of it. Six class periods broken up by lunch. Something about math. A buzzing nervousness had come over me. I craned my head toward the safety of the Greens’ house, wondering if I could turn back before it was too late.
“Hey, look, there’s Derrick and Martin!”
Martin looked half asleep. He stared blankly at the road in front of him, glasses slightly askew and shirt untucked, his chopped-up crew cut glistening wet. Derrick, on the other hand, reminded me of corn popping in a skillet. He bounced from toe to toe as though he could barely contain himself.
“Guys!” Derrick shouted. “Compadres! Mis amigos! Como estás?”
“Hey, Derrick,” Jackson said.
“Well, if it isn’t my little friend with the big appetite,” Derrick said to me. “What’s up, my man?”
Head cottony with nerves, I didn’t know what to say. I hitched my shoulders noncommittally.
“Awesome. We all ready for a big day of learning?”
The double doors to the school loomed ahead of us, and the crowd swept us right toward them. Derrick knocked a few little ones out of the way. I took a deep breath, and in we went.
We were herded into a narrow hallway lined with metal lockers and doors to other rooms. I had never seen so many people my own age in one place before. I marveled at their clean clothes and the way they coursed through the hall, full of purpose. As with the houses the day I came to town, I searched for any sign that these people had grown up in the same world I did, but found nothing.