The Smell of Other People's Houses Read online

  The ribbon is balled up in my fist, and I swim out to the middle where I can just barely make out the outline of a brick building through the trees. The only problem is that the river gets shallower on the other side, so pretty soon I’m walking in just knee-deep water over jagged rocks, hoping to God that this is truly as secluded as the man made it sound. On the opposite shore I’m immediately greeted by a cloud of mosquitoes thrilled to find so much naked skin.

  I follow the sound of the abbey bells up an incline, careful to stay hidden in the scrubby spruce trees. This has got to be the most asinine thing I’ve ever done. I told the man back at the store that I had no intention of causing trouble; I hope walking naked around the abbey doesn’t count.

  Just a few yards away from where I’m hidden in the trees is a clothesline with some sheets and towels whipping in the breeze. I’ve lost my nerve and think I’ll just tie the ribbon onto the clothesline and get out of here, when the pregnant girl comes walking toward it with a white basket pressed over her stomach.

  She pulls off the wooden clothespins and tries to grab the corners of a white sheet, which is flapping on the line like a giant goose. I almost don’t believe it myself when I hear my own voice say, “Uh, hey, hello there.”

  She spins around and gets totally tangled in the sheet.

  “Who’s there?” she yells, and then, almost as an afterthought, she says, “I have a knife. Don’t you come near me.”

  I’m pretty certain she doesn’t have a knife.

  “I won’t come near you,” I say.

  “Come out of the woods. Now!” she shouts.

  “I don’t think you really want me to do that.”

  “I’m going to call Mother Superior.” She is backing slowly toward the abbey.

  “No, please. I’ll come out if you throw me the sheet.”

  “Are you some kind of pervert?” She’s still trying to untangle herself.

  I am definitely getting off on the wrong foot here.

  “No, I was just swimming in the river and I—uh—well, my clothes are on the other side.”

  “You know what—forget Mother Superior, I’m going to get Sister Agnes and you’re really going to be sorry.”

  “Okay, don’t call anyone. I’ll come out.” I don’t know who this Sister Agnes is, but if she’s scarier than a Mother Superior, it can’t be good. “And I really hope you were joking about that knife.”

  This is definitely the most embarrassing moment of my life, I think as I manage to grab a bouquet of wild bluebells and hold them in front of myself, edging slowly out of the trees.

  “Can you throw me the sheet?” I plead.

  She stares at me in disbelief. The good news is that people are far less likely to call for help if you look ridiculous. That’s what I’m banking on, and thank God, she giggles.

  “Oscar?” she says, her eyes sparking with recognition. She is beautiful when she smiles, I can’t help noticing, despite the situation.

  “Actually, that’s not really my name,” I say. “If you give me the sheet, I’ll tell you what it is.”

  She thinks about this but takes one more long look at me, bluebells and all, as if committing the image to memory. Then she finally tosses me the sheet.

  “You still can’t come up here,” she says as I wrap it around myself and she glances over her shoulder at the abbey. “Sister Agnes will have my head on a platter if there’s a boy here. Especially one, well, obviously…” She trails off. “You have to get out of here.”

  I think about giving her the bluebells, but I’m afraid this might not be the right time, so I toss them aside.

  “You dropped your ribbon,” I say, holding out my hand so she can see it. What idiot would forge a river buck naked just to return a dirty ribbon? I can name only one.

  “And I was wondering if you were okay,” I add, lamely.

  She looks back at the abbey, then gestures toward the trees.

  “So, your real name?” she asks, once we get in a few yards.

  “It’s Hank,” I tell her. “My brother is Jack.” It seems important that she know our names. Even though I doubt I’ll ever see this girl again.

  I hold her hand to help her down the steep incline, trying not to trip on the sheet. The tiny beat of her pulse against my fingers surprises me. I wonder who touched her last, then feel like a jerk for thinking it.

  “Want to sit?” I ask.

  I can tell she’s hesitant, but then she relents, “Okay, but just for a few minutes.”

  We plop down in the middle of a low-bush cranberry patch without saying anything. The red berries are staining the white sheet, and I wonder if she’ll get in trouble for that, too. She picks some berries but doesn’t talk at all. I’m sure the few minutes are already up.

  “I’m just dealing with a lot,” she says finally, glancing at her belly. “I’m sorry you had to see me…you know, lose it like that.”

  “It’s fine.”

  But she doesn’t say any more about what caused her to “lose it.”

  “Um—it’s just that—you were looking over at us and then you sort of…you know…fell apart.” I must sound nosy, or maybe vain, like I wanted it to be about me. But she doesn’t answer anyway. Instead she changes the subject. “I’m from Fairbanks, the place you’re headed. I heard your brother mention that yesterday.”

  She says it the way someone would say, “Lovely weather we’re having.”

  “Is it nice there?” I ask.

  God, I am making awkward small talk.

  She shrugs.

  I don’t ask her why she is here, or if she is married, or what she is planning to do with her baby. For a second I wish I were Jack, who always sees the gossamer threads floating invisibly between people. They are so translucent, it’s no wonder most people don’t see them—or they bumble along and end up destroying them without ever knowing they existed.

  “It was your brother,” she says, cutting into my thoughts.

  “Excuse me?”

  “I mean…it was the way you were looking at him.”

  “How was I looking at him?”

  “Like he meant something.” Now she’s the one who seems embarrassed. “I mean, to you. It just hit me—funny, you know?”

  No, I don’t know. But I don’t say that. I’ve been so caught up in Sam going missing and making decisions for Jack and trying to be “the man of the family” that it surprises me how nice it is to talk to someone else about their life. Even though I really don’t understand why me looking at Jack made her cry.

  “Maybe I just miss being around people my own age,” she mumbles.

  I could ask her why she’s here and a million other things, but instead I say, “Maybe I can see you in Fairbanks someday?”

  She smiles.

  “You mean, like something to look forward to?”

  I nod. Why not?

  “Ouch,” she says, her hand suddenly flying to her stomach. “Sorry, I’ve got a little boxer inside me these days.”

  Her dress is stretched across her belly, and underneath it’s moving, rippling like a taut canvas or a drum being played from the inside.

  “That is so freaky,” I say without thinking. But she doesn’t seem to mind.

  She smiles at me, and I hope she’s never smiled at anyone like that before.

  “I’m Ruth,” she says, “Ruth Lawrence, and I should get back.” I help her up. “I need the sheet, too.” She smirks.

  “But first, here.” She ties the ribbon I’ve been holding around my wrist.

  “Take this—because sometimes you just have to hold on to whatever you can,” she adds, mysteriously. Then she turns her back and waits.

  I drop the sheet at her feet and whisper in her ear, “See you in Fairbanks, Ruth.” I never take my eyes off her and she doesn’t turn around, even when I am back in the middle of the river and I’m sure she can hear me splashing. She picks up the sheet, and I watch her slowly make her way back up the hill toward the abbey.

  �
�

  I’ll never understand how certain things that happen to us can climb under our skin and make us someone new. Big things can do it—like Sam going missing. Small things can do it, too, like having a stranger fall to pieces right in front of you. I’m beginning to think that everything changes us to some extent.

  I can’t explain any of this to Jack, who is smart enough not to ask. But I catch him trying to size up the new bits of me that he can see around the edges of the person he’s always known.

  We sit very silent in the back of the yellow Datsun as it crawls slowly along the Alcan Highway, the muddiest, dirtiest, potholiest road you’ve ever seen. It’s slow going. I just keep thinking about Ruth walking back up that hill alone. All the questions I didn’t ask start to plague me, as she becomes less of a reality and more like something I dreamed up.

  It takes almost two weeks to drive instead of the one Isabelle had expected, because of how bad the road is. We have four flat tires in the span of a week; we lose a whole day just sitting on the side of the road. We run out of gas and have to wait for someone to come by and give us a lift to the next station—and then a lift back. And we spend countless hours waiting in the middle of the road for things like mountain goats to cross so we can pass. Isabelle is thoroughly grumpy by the time we hit the outskirts of Fairbanks, partly from sleeping in the car with two smelly boys and partly because she’s just realized she’s going to have to drive it all again in reverse. Jack thinks she’s sad that we won’t be with her, but I think that’s just Jack again.

  Isabelle has grown on us, though, and when we see the sign that says WELCOME TO THE GOLDEN HEART CITY, a shadow falls inside the car. We pull into the parking lot of a dirty brick building.

  “I have to go talk to this woman at the newspaper—alone,” she says. “Can you guys just wait in the car?”

  We stare out the window without talking, both of us wondering if Isabelle is inside sealing our fate, handing us off to another family.

  There is a murky gray river and a white church with a pointy steeple perched on its bank. People meander by, waving casual greetings or pushing strollers; kids on bikes wobble between wary pedestrians, making them jump off the sidewalk. It’s a busy town, full of construction workers and big, muddy trucks. And it’s noisy.

  “Is that girl keeping her baby?” Jack asks suddenly, watching a woman fiddle with the strings of her child’s sun hat while the infant squirms and screams.

  “Her name is Ruth Lawrence,” I say, just so I can hear it out loud, exactly the way she said it. “And I don’t know, I didn’t ask her.”

  I should have asked.

  —

  We keep watching the woman on the sidewalk as the infant pulls its hat off for the third time. The woman looks exasperated; both of them are red-faced and irritable.

  Just watching this mother try to put on a hat looks like a nightmare. Being pregnant is one thing; a real, live, kicking human being is something else. I think of Ruth saying, “I’m just dealing with a lot,” and wonder if she thinks I was an ass not to ask her more about it.

  Jack has pulled out the brown paper towel that Phil gave him and is tracing the thick black letters with his finger. He’d been doing it all across Canada. At one point I told him he was going to wear it out before we even got to Fairbanks.

  “But it feels like the wing of a bird, or maybe a butterfly—it’s addicting.” He held it out to me to trace, but all I felt was a scratchy paper towel.

  “You don’t feel that?”

  I gave him the look.

  “I can’t help it, Hank,” he said, and he sounded so old for a fourteen-year-old boy.

  I did not envy Jack.

  —

  “You could lie,” he says, still tracing Selma’s name.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Just lie and say you’re eighteen so we don’t have to live with a foster family.”

  “I can’t, Jack. We can’t risk them separating us and I don’t want to get caught lying. I promised Phil we’d keep it honest after how much he helped us.”

  I stare at the sky. Canada geese are flying in a V shape overhead. It’s August, but fall is right around the corner. Isabelle said it can come and go in just a day. I imagine the geese flying over the route we just drove, looking for warmer waters. Life would be so much easier with wings.

  Right then Isabelle comes flying out of the newspaper building as if she’s also a Canada goose, in a huge hurry to get somewhere. “My friend is at a ballet audition that’s just starting. We need to meet her there.”

  “Isabelle, what about us?” I ask.

  “What? You have an expiration date all of a sudden? You’ll keep until after the ballet,” she says.

  Jack raises an eyebrow at me and shakes his head, but I know what he’s thinking because I’m thinking it, too. We’re both really going to miss her.

  It’s been weeks since Selma’s last letter telling me that Dumpling’s in a coma. Worrying about Dumpling takes up all the extra space in my head, even the space I was using to wonder if Hank was really real. I want to call home and see how she is, but Sister Bernadette says international calls are strictly forbidden. I tried to write, but what would I say? And if Dumpling is in a coma, she wouldn’t be able to read it anyway.

  Dumpling, the only person who even bothered to say good-bye to me. Of course, Gran couldn’t have come outside to wait for the bus the night I left Fairbanks, because what would the neighbors have thought? She had to teach me a lesson, and in some ways you had to admire how hard Gran sticks to her guns. It doesn’t hurt any less, but it does help to understand where she’s coming from.

  I hadn’t expected anyone to sit with me, but Dumpling had showed up on the merry-go-round, just like she’d done on the steps of the church as we watched the river.

  Dumpling had this way of being there without saying anything that was so soothing. But that night I could hear the minutes ticking by in my brain, closer and closer to the time I’d have to get on that bus.

  “I’ve seen my gran give your dad letters,” I told her. I would normally have been embarrassed talking about my family like this, but I was desperate and I could hear the bus just a few streets away. The grinding gears and loud air brakes made my spine prickle; it was like hearing the future before you’re ready to be in it.

  Dumpling did not flinch. She also didn’t pretend that her dad wasn’t involved with my family in some way. Did she know about my parents? Did her dad talk to her in ways that Gran never talked to me? Or did she piece it together the same way I did—by watching her dad stop by every other week under the guise of being neighborly, bringing a fillet of salmon one day, some venison jerky another.

  Gran would smile at him and exclaim over his generosity. Then she’d slide him a crisp white envelope with cramped handwriting, the address too small to read from a distance. He would tuck it into his Carhartt vest pocket and tip his hat to Gran respectfully. After a while I guessed it might be for Mama, because who else did Gran know? The look on Dumpling’s face told me I’d probably guessed right.

  “Do you think your dad might be okay with delivering a note from me, too?” I asked.

  “I can ask him,” she’d said with a shrug. But I could tell by the way she looked at me that she knew it was no small favor.

  “Ruth, your mom isn’t well. I don’t think she would have left you and Lily if she could have helped it.”

  “Did your dad say that?”

  She just nodded, but her eyes wouldn’t meet mine. Nobody admits to talking about other people behind their backs; it’s just not done.

  When the bus arrived, I gave her the blue note and climbed on board. “Bye, Ruth.” Her voice was so soft. It floated up the steps behind me like a tiny bird.

  At a truck stop somewhere near the Canadian border, I turned seventeen all by myself. I used my emergency money that Gran gave me knotted up in the corner of a handkerchief to buy a Hostess apple pie as a birthday cake. The baby seemed to like it, o
r at any rate it woke up and played me like a bongo from the inside for the next few hours. I guess I wasn’t truly alone on my birthday after all.

  —

  Now my thoughts about Dumpling squish right up against my anxiety about the impending birth. I’m tired of thinking only of myself, but I’m tired of worrying about Dumpling, too.

  To keep myself busy, I ask if I can help out more in the kitchen. Sister Agnes still scares the pants off me, but I’ve learned that her bark is worse than her bite. Today she tells me that the abbess is having a private meeting and we should make scones and use the nice cups for tea.

  I head out to pick blackberries for the scones—the bushes are loaded down and I pick my way through the woods overlooking the river. I sometimes feel like I imagined Hank being here in these woods, except that when I braid my hair the red ribbon isn’t tied to the bottom of it anymore.

  I’m deep inside my own head when a lime-green Gremlin drives up and parks in front of the abbey, alerting me to the fact that I’ve been daydreaming again. These must be the abbess’s guests, and Sister Agnes is probably champing at the bit for the blackberries.

  As I come through the woods, a man and a woman are getting out of the car. He is tall and wearing a plaid shirt like a lumberjack. She has fiery red hair and is wearing a springy dress with a peach cardigan that clashes a tiny bit with her hair. They look nice. She’s carrying a bouquet of bluebells in a glass bottle. I think of Hank again, and I can’t help but smile to myself. More proof that he was really here. (I couldn’t have made up that part if I tried.)

  There has been a stream of visitors like these over the past few weeks, although it seems that Sister Agnes finds a lot of things for me to do every time guests arrive. Keeping me and my belly hidden is proving more and more difficult every day.

  I slip through the back door of the kitchen, where Sister Agnes is waiting. “What did you have to do? Grow them yourself?” she barks.

  Sister Bernadette is preparing a tray with a white hand towel and three bone-china cups and saucers dotted with crimson flowers; she winks at me behind Sister Agnes’s back.