Otherwise, Flat Hill was exactly as I preferred not to remember it. Balding, patchy lawns surrounded by picket fences whose white paint had peeled away years ago. Bedraggled flower beds overgrown with weeds. Televisions flickering behind closed windows, even though it was the middle of the day. The late-morning sun already baking down into the carless streets while a dirty-faced girl on a tricycle wheeled around in bored circles. Flat Hill was a place people took their dreams to die, if they’d had any in the first place. I’d never loved Flat Hill, but after Oz it looked even uglier, dirtier, and poorer.
My mom’s new apartment building hadn’t been fixed up much despite the fact that it was now housing people again, and it had seen better days. It was just four stories, and didn’t look like it had more than a dozen apartments. The siding was a shabby, sad gray that was falling off in places. Some of the windows were boarded up. From the looks of things, they had been that way since long before the tornado. The awning was torn and flapping in the wind, and the glass in the building’s front door was cracked. I ran one finger down the list of names next to the intercom until I found Gumm in grimy pencil next to apartment 3B. Maybe she at least had a prairie view. I took a deep breath and pressed the buzzer.
After a minute, the intercom crackled. “Hello?” The voice was cautious, but it was definitely hers. I cleared my throat.
“Hi, Mom,” I said finally. “It’s me. Amy.”
There was silence for a second—a long second—and then the intercom blasted me with a shriek so loud I covered my ears. “Amy? Oh my god, honey—don’t move, don’t do a thing, I’ll be right down—” The intercom crackled again and my mom was gone. A minute later, she was flinging open the front door of the building and sweeping me up in her arms. Instinctively, I stiffened, and she let me go awkwardly.
She looked just like she’d always looked on one of her supposedly good days—too-short skirt, too-low top cut to reveal way too much of her overtanned cleavage, too much cheap makeup hiding the fact that if you took away the tacky clothes and terrible eye shadow she was actually still pretty. But there was something different about her, too. Something sharper, brighter. More alert. She held me at arm’s length and looked at me hard, her eyes welling up with tears, and I realized what it was. They were red, but red from crying, not from pills. She didn’t smell like booze. Was it actually possible my mom was sober? I’d believe it when monkeys flew. Oh, right. Well, I wasn’t ready to believe it yet.
“Amy, it’s really you,” she said, still crying. “Where have you been?”
Oh, crap. Where had I been? I couldn’t believe it hadn’t occurred to any of us to think up a story to explain my month-long absence. It’s not like I was going to tell my mom I’d been spending my time hanging out with a band of witches learning to cast spells, beheading the Cowardly Lion, and fighting a glitter-spackled chick no one in Kansas believed existed. “Uh,” I said, “I was—I was in the hospital. In Topeka. The tornado picked me up with the trailer and I, um, I got—hurt. So, that’s where I’ve been.”
My mom stared at me for a minute. “But I searched all the hospitals. When you disappeared—wait, what am I thinking?” she said suddenly, shaking her head. “Come upstairs. I still can’t believe this is happening. I missed you so much.” She gave me another fierce hug I couldn’t dodge and then beckoned me into the building.
Inside wasn’t much better than the outside, and I couldn’t help but notice a faint but unmistakable whiff of eau de cat pee in the hallway. I followed my mom up three flights of stairs to a short corridor lined with doors painted an industrial gray green. My mom opened the door to 3B and I followed her into the living room.
It was sort of depressing that this crappy apartment was way nicer than our trailer had ever been. It was twice as big, for one thing, and a picture window at the far end of the living room let in the afternoon sun. It was sparsely furnished with just a couch and a little card table with two chairs, but she had tacked a couple of cheerful prints on the walls and there was a bright rainbow-patterned rug on the floor. None of the furniture was the same as our old stuff, obviously—the government must have given her some kind of stash of emergency funds, because it’s not like we’d had money for new stuff before. But it wasn’t just that the apartment was nicer—it was clean.
Reflexively, I checked the couch for my mom’s usual nest of Newport cartons and takeout containers and blankets, but it was bare. The apartment didn’t even smell of cigarette smoke. Three doors lined one wall, suggesting that this apartment actually had bedrooms. Maybe even more than one. My mom was coming up in the world.
“It’s not much,” my mom said from behind me. “Just until I can save up enough to get something nicer. I lost everything in the storm.” She looked away for a second. “Including you,” she added quietly. I must have looked uncomfortable because her tone shifted and she brightened.
“Here,” she said, patting the couch. “Let me make you some tea. Sit. We have a lot to talk about.” I perched gingerly on the edge of the couch as she bustled around the tiny kitchenette, boiling water and putting tea bags into two mugs. I wasn’t sure my pre-Oz mom even knew tea existed. When we both had steaming mugs of tea, she settled into the opposite end of the couch as if she was afraid I’d run away if she got too close. Like I was a wild animal.
“I’m sorry you were so worried.” Looking at the emotion in my mom’s eyes, I was sorry. “I couldn’t leave the hospital,” I explained. “Because, um, I had amnesia,” I added in a fit of inspiration. “I lost my wallet and everything in the tornado, and I got hit on the head really bad. So I was in a coma for a while. When I woke up, I didn’t know who I was. The hospital kept me while they tried to find my parents. And then, um, I just woke up the other day and remembered who I was, and they—um, they must have contacted the emergency housing place, because they told me where you were, and here I am.” I took a sip of my tea.
It was an insane story with about a million holes—who had paid for the hospital visit? How on earth had I even survived being carried that far by a freaking tornado? Why hadn’t the doctors contacted my mom themselves? How had I gotten from Topeka to Flat Hill? I found myself holding my breath as Mom’s eyes drifted back and forth while she thought it all through.
“That must be why I never found you,” she said. “If you didn’t know your own name, you couldn’t have told the doctors.” She frowned. “But why didn’t they realize I might be your mother, if you were the only patient with amnesia? I made flyers and passed them out, I went to every hospital—”
It took everything I had not to scream at her to just shut up. How many times had my mother lied to me in my life? I’ll take you to Disney World next year. I don’t know where the cash in your underwear drawer went. Of course I haven’t been drinking. If I tried to make a list of every lie, it would take me a year. The least she could do for me now was just let it go.
Mom looked at me carefully. “Your hair’s different,” she said.
Right. Back in the caves, at the Order’s headquarters, Glamora had magically changed my hair from pink to blond. That definitely didn’t fit too well into my “I spent the last month in a hospital” story either. I opened my mouth to say something, and my mom shook her head.
It was like she knew exactly what I was thinking. It was like she could hear all my complaints. She might not have known everything that had happened, but she understood. If that wasn’t a first, it was close. She really had come a long way, I guess.