The Smell of Other People's Houses Read online

  “He dropped us at the high school and then went back to get my mom. The National Guard told him it was too dangerous—not to go back because the current had picked up. He wouldn’t listen.”

  “But your mom was safe. She’d already been rescued, right?” I know she’s fine because she’s here, and yet I can feel my heart racing along with Dumpling’s story.

  She shakes her head. Her pupils have turned from brown to black pools of muddy water that look like they’re watching her mother drown over and over again. “She was trapped in the basement and he had to swim to her and then pull her out. She was unconscious and he just kept pressing on her chest and blowing air into her nose. He said she finally spouted water out of her mouth and he was so happy, he wanted to drown her again in kisses.”

  “He really loves her that much?” I ask, before I can stop myself.

  “Yeah” is all Dumpling says. Then, “He grabbed the red silk slip out of the fence on his way back to the high school, but my mother was horrified by it.”

  I look closer at the red ribbon in her hair. I honestly cannot imagine Dumpling’s mother—who is round and plump like a loaf of bread—wearing anything like that slip. But I don’t say this.

  “I held on to it. Because of the way he said she’d look in it, like a beautiful salmon. I’ve never told anyone before,” she says.

  “Did you cut it up?” I ask, resisting the urge to reach out and touch her ribbon.

  “A bunch of little strips,” she says. “I have a whole cigar box full of them. I figure it’s good luck. You know, a reminder of what love can do.”

  “And if he had died?” I ask. “Or she had died?”

  “I’d still have saved it,” she says. “Because sometimes you just have to hold on to whatever you can.”

  Dumpling takes the ribbon out of her hair and hands it to me. “For you, Lucy,” she says, smiling and pointing to the name on my sweatshirt. “This one’s extra-long so you can cut it and give half to your baby.”

  I’m holding the scraggly ribbon in my hand and I’m so afraid I’ll start crying, I say nothing.

  “It works,” she says, “I promise.”

  And then she gets up and walks away with a slight wave of her hand.

  How does it work? I wonder. But the next time I look up she is already just a tiny speck in the distance, like a planet that is a million miles away.

  Winning the Ice Classic was both the best and worst thing that could happen to a girl like me. In between dreaming about all the things I could buy with that money—like new boots, thick woolen socks, and cherry-dipped cones whenever I wanted—there was the huge overriding fear that this would make my parents and their friends very interested in me.

  It reminded me of a poem we read in English class called “If They Chop Open My Body.” It was all about what they’d find inside the author if anyone dared to do such a thing. Some of the things were silly, like a silver Suburban with the keys in it still idling in her rib cage. But our teacher said it was metaphorical, and I sort of understood because of the bit that said when they chopped her open they also found a little girl in a magenta pinafore saying over and over, “I’m getting tired of walking.” A pinafore is an apron, apparently.

  One line said if they chopped her open they would find that all along a woman named Rita had been inside her doing the cha-cha in turquoise beads and a swishy black dress. I had nightmares that I was being chopped open so that people could find the money and buy booze with it. It didn’t feel like a metaphor, it felt real.

  —

  Someone from the newspaper kept calling and calling, asking to interview me. Dumpling’s father said “No interviews” in that firm but nice way he talks. My mom and her friends had been coming around more often; Dumpling’s dad would sit out on the porch and chat with them, and when Mom asked about me he’d just say, “Dora’s doing real fine.”

  There is nothing at all scary about Paula and Annette—or my mom, for that matter—unless you count the way they like to drink and how they avert their eyes from bad things happening right under their own roof. I would give them all my winnings if I thought it would change things, but even I’m not that dumb.

  Besides, the way the Ice Classic works is that the money goes directly into the bank, so nobody can get it. I’m not even sure how to get it myself.

  “Do you know how a bank account works?” I ask Dumpling.

  “I think you just walk in with your account number and school ID and tell them what you want,” she says, but I know she doesn’t know, either. Her mother wraps dollar bills in foil and stores them in the freezer in case the house burns down.

  I imagine a pretty bank teller with gobs of hair spray looking at my picture, smiling at me, and saying, “How much money would you like, Dora Peters?” It seems too easy, like a movie or a dream or someone else’s life. Dumpling’s dad said he’d go down with me and we could put it into an account where it wouldn’t be allowed to be touched until I was eighteen.

  I’m thinking about that, but there is a part of me that thinks it might be nice to have some money. So far, it seems safe.

  After almost a month the newspaper stopped bugging me, and then my mom and her friends stopped dropping by, so I figured maybe everybody had forgotten that I’d won, which shows how a person can get soft living with a family like Dumpling’s.

  —

  I also got sidetracked watching Ruth Lawrence get on a bus one night all by herself. She had a small brown suitcase and a ratty red coat, and from Dumpling’s upstairs window I saw her sitting on the merry-go-round, waiting for the bus. It wasn’t the suitcase or the way she obviously looked like she was leaving or running away that shocked me, but that Dumpling was sitting with her. When had they started doing that?

  It made me dizzy watching them, as if I were the one spinning around and around, because I should have been. We had rules in Birch Park, and those rules did not include Ruth and Dumpling sitting together, talking like friends, keeping secrets from me, like the scrap of blue paper that Ruth gave to Dumpling. I’ll admit that I was more than happy to see Ruth get on the bus with its Yukon license plate and squeaky brakes, so loud that you’d think someone inside the Lawrence house would have come out to see—or say good-bye. A curtain fluttered in their kitchen window, but that was all. Not even Lily?

  Inside the bus, Ruth just stared out the window straight ahead as if there was nothing she wanted more than for that bus to shift into gear and take her away, too.

  After the bus pulled out, Dumpling’s dad went outside and sat down on the merry-go-round next to Dumpling, his bulky frame out of place where only us kids usually ever sit. I wanted to know what they were saying and how Dumpling could possibly be friends with Ruth, and why she’d never even told me. Her father put his arm around Dumpling, as if something about Ruth Lawrence leaving could make them sad, or had anything to do with them.

  It hit me like a meteorite: I’m not really part of this family, no matter how nice they are to me. It’s possible that someday they might send me back.

  The next morning I watched Dumpling as she braided her hair. I waited for her to tell me what she and Ruth were doing on the merry-go-round and what Ruth had given her—there had to be a good explanation. She pulled a red ribbon out of her cigar box, and I saw the blue note, tucked into the pile of ribbons as if guarded by a bunch of fraying red snakes. But Dumpling just shut the lid without even mentioning it.

  “That Ruth Lawrence is sure getting pudgy,” I said.

  Dumpling tied the ribbon to the end of her braid without saying anything.

  Normally I am unflappable, like a still, still pond without one single ripple. I have had years of practice. But like I said, living with Dumpling’s family has softened me around the edges. I have started to let my guard down and not just wait for someone to beat the living daylights out of me. It’s not the big things that are undoing me anymore, but something as simple as Dumpling having a silly secret involving Ruth Lawrence. It feels like
my best friend has just skipped a pebble across the glassy surface of my soul.

  If you chopped open my body, you’d see every jealous little wave as it slapped against my sternum.

  She didn’t look at me as she ran her finger over the fake Indian on her cigar box.

  “Her dad and my dad were really good friends,” she said. “They worked together on native rights, trying to protect our land and stuff.”

  I stared at the ridiculous headdress and the long black braids of the cigar Indian. I’ve never seen an Indian that looked like that. And I’ve never thought about Lily and Ruth having parents, either; they’ve always just lived with their gran.

  “Her dad died in a plane crash,” Dumpling said. “My dad told me to try to understand how that might feel.”

  I know what it would feel like if my dad died in a plane crash—great. But I didn’t say that. I didn’t say anything, because Dumpling having anything in common with Ruth had left me totally speechless.

  —

  Summer kept us out later and later, just spinning on the merry-go-round and talking about the money I won, which still just felt like Monopoly money. We made a game of imagining all the things I could buy with it.

  “You could buy some new boots from Sears Roebuck next winter,” Dumpling said.

  “And socks that aren’t worn thin on the bottoms from someone else wearing them first,” I added.

  “Yeah,” she said wistfully, like she’d never thought of that before.

  “What would you buy?” I asked her.

  “Maybe a new outboard for my dad? He needs a bigger horsepower engine; the old one kept dying last summer at fish camp,” she said. “Or a new cookstove for my mom.”

  But I had too many things on my own list to think about others: boots, socks, big metal locks on all the doors, and if there was a way to buy Dumpling’s family permanently as my own and never have to leave, I’d happily use all the money for that.

  —

  When the reporter drove up in a brown-paneled station wagon, Dumpling and I weren’t paying that much attention. I certainly wasn’t expecting them to still care about the Ice Classic—we were well into summer now.

  I realized right away that it was Selma’s mom, because Selma was sitting in the front seat. Her mom got out and walked over to where we sat spinning around lazily, but Selma stayed put, breathing onto the window and then drawing little doodles on it. It was immediately obvious that Selma really is adopted, just like she’s always bragged.

  Selma isn’t fat, but she’s doughy, and she has thick ankles and a round face, while her mother is all pointy and angular, as if she was built by students in a remedial geometry class. She stuck out her hand, which looked like fanned-out twigs on the end of a skinny branch, and said to Dumpling, “Hi, I’m Abigail Flowers. You must be Dora.” Apparently Dumpling looks like someone who would win a big wad of money and I do not.

  Dumpling just smiled and tilted her head in my direction.

  “Oh,” she said. “Sorry. Hi, Dora, Abigail.” I shook the tips of her twiggy fingers.

  “So, do you feel like talking about winning the Ice Classic yet? People would still like to hear your version of things. It would be a great ‘feel-good’ story. A nice change from always reading bad news, you know?”

  She flipped open her skinny reporter notepad that looked just like her and licked the tip of a pencil.

  No, I didn’t know. A change from reading bad news in general, or just bad news about us? I still cringed at the way the paper had called me the first “native” girl to win the jackpot. Why didn’t they just say the youngest and leave it at that? Now she wanted me to be the poster child for a “feel-good” story? I would have laughed if it had been even the tiniest bit funny.

  I looked over at Selma sitting in the car and wondered what it’s like to live in a house where people ask what you’re thinking and how you feel. Is that why Selma blabs all the time about her life?

  I was glad she stayed in the car, but then I realized the real reason she hadn’t gotten out was because Ruth was the only reason Selma ever came here in the first place. If Dumpling knows where Ruth went, she has never said anything. Lily said Ruth went to visit family in Canada, but that’s a load of crap. Everyone knows what’s going on with Ruth, except maybe her own sister, because if her gran said that Ruth was now living on the moon, Lily and probably Bunny would believe that, too.

  When Selma’s mom asked me to describe how I felt about winning the Ice Classic, how I felt was that it was none of her goddamn business. If she chopped open my body, she might have been surprised that there were no dollar bills hanging off my clavicle or flapping from my rib cage.

  In the end, though, I said nothing, because the interview was interrupted by a white van flying into the parking lot, tires screeching and dust blowing everywhere. Its bumper hung at a crooked angle—like a half-smile on a drunk man—and I knew before the door even opened who was going to fall out of that van. And then he did, still in an orange jumpsuit, fresh from the Fairbanks Correctional Center. I knew he’d get out of jail sometime, and of course it had to be right then, because it is my life, after all.

  Dumpling looked horrified. Abigail Flowers looked surprised. From inside the fogged-up car, Selma just looked scared.

  “Dora, you get over here!” he yelled, stopping a few feet from us and looking at the notebook in Selma’s mom’s hand. I saw a flicker of recognition dart across her face. She was most likely the reporter who did the story on my dad shooting up the Sno-Go, too. It’s not like Fairbanks has a million reporters. She must know everything about everyone. Was this what she meant about doing a “feel-good” story? Yeah, there’s a twist: the girl whose father shot up the Sno-Go just happened to win the Ice Classic.

  “Mr. Peters,” she said, and instantly I knew she’d gone too far. She’d meant to sound polite, but his lip curled at the word Mr. as if she was mocking him.

  “You don’t want to break your parole in the first hour you’re out now, do you?”

  “Get away from my daughter!” he shouted.

  But instead of stepping away, like a sane person, she actually turned and put herself between me and my dad; Dumpling, too, as if her bony frame could protect us all.

  Selma’s terrified eyes were wide and unblinking in the front seat of the car.

  “Don’t make me call the police,” Abigail said.

  “No, it’s okay.” I tried to step around her. You’d think a reporter would at least know the rules. If she called the police, things would get even worse for me than they already were.

  “That’s right, Dora. Whaddya think? That you’d get to keep all that money for yerself?” he said.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Dumpling’s father coming out of their house. He made a beeline straight toward my dad, his hand extended in greeting, as if he were actually glad to see him.

  “Welcome back, Bumpo; let’s go have a chat down at the diner.”

  “If that little slut daughter of mine thinks she’s hoarding that money…”

  Dumpling’s dad winced at the word slut, but he put his arm around my father as if they were old pals and said, “Let’s discuss it with the brothers.”

  Hills Bros. coffee is just called “the brothers” around here. But I’m sure my dad would’ve preferred something stiffer. He must’ve been pretty thirsty if he really did just get out of jail.

  Behind his back, Dumpling’s father motioned with his hand that Dumpling and I should go inside the house. Nobody had to tell me twice.

  —

  We leave for Dumpling’s fish camp that very night when Dumpling’s father gets back. Nobody asks him where my dad is or what happened; we just load everything into their station wagon and drive through the bright reddish-orange night, up past the White Mountains and to the edge of the mighty Yukon River.

  Nobody says one word about my dad or the white van or Selma’s mom asking me questions. We drive farther and farther north, the single-lane road dipp
ing like a roller coaster where beneath it the ground has frozen and thawed—like it does every year—ripping apart asphalt that needs to be redone every single summer.

  I breathe easier with each green mile marker we pass on the side of the road. For most people, these numbers just mark the location of someone’s cabin, or gold mine, or a spot where they once shot a moose. But for me it means putting more and more distance between me and my dad.

  We drive for hours to the banks of the Yukon, then unload everything into the boat that Dumpling’s dad leaves here every fall—pulling off the not-so-white tarp and shaking off the debris that’s built up over the year. A lot of boats are already gone from their winter spots, as people head upriver like the salmon themselves.

  Up and down the Yukon, fish wheels punctuate the river looking like miniature carnival rides, with long-handled scoops made of chicken wire, turned by the river’s current. Dumpling has told me that there is nothing more exciting than reaching inside the fish box and lifting a salmon out by its mouth.

  Dumpling’s dad fiddles with the outboard, and her mom gives us all pilot bread smeared with peanut butter. It’s two a.m. but we are wide-awake, skipping rocks under the midnight sun, giddy about getting the boat in the water. I remember Dumpling saying her dad needed a bigger horsepower engine for this skiff and I hope it will still make it up the river, especially with an extra person on board.

  Dumpling looks at me as if she’s reading my mind.

  “He can make this thing run with nothing but duct tape and bear grease, don’t worry,” she says.

  Dumpling and Bunny sit on five-gallon gas cans, but since I am the guest, they let me lay across the gear—garbage bags full of blankets and coats and lumpier cargo like pots and pans and a cast-iron skillet. They laugh when I suddenly say “Ouch!” and feel underneath me, pulling out the ax we brought to chop firewood.