November showed up cold and wet. On the bus to school kids sniffled and sneezed and laid their heads against the windows, peering out through the rain to the skeleton trees. Christmas seemed a long way away, and spring was just a lie someone told you once that you didn’t really believe. I carried a book with me everywhere and avoided making eye contact. I wasn’t in the mood to communicate with anyone.
There was a hole inside of me. At first I thought it was just because the books were gone. But then I figured it had probably been there my entire life, starting from the time my mama left me. Granny Lane and Mr. Willis had filled it, but when I had to leave Roan Mountain, there was that hole again, only now it was bigger because it was the size of three people gone, not just one. It got a little bigger each time I had to say good-bye to someone I cared for.
After Murphy left the Home, and Donita and Logan discovered what happened to the books and stopped talking to me, well, I was pretty sure that hole was so big that it had eaten me up entirely. Teachers commented that I seemed real quiet lately, and then they stopped noticing me at all.
Walking around Elizabethton in rainy November is nobody’s idea of a good time, but that’s what I did, just to get out of my room in the afternoons. It had been a long while since I’d spent any time roaming around by myself. Even before the fort and Murphy and Logan and Donita, there’d been Ricky Ray, who was always ready to hike up to the Mini-Mart or spin in crazy circles on the swings. Sometimes on my walks I thought I could hear him running up behind me, keeping count of my footsteps for me, saying, “When my mama comes to get me, you can come live with us. You can have the top bunk.”
Of course, when I turned around, there was nobody there. But I kept turning around anyway, just out of habit.
It was my own fault I was all alone, I kept telling myself as I trudged along, my hands jammed hard into my pockets. Why wouldn’t Logan and Donita be mad at me? And I couldn’t bring myself to go knock on Ricky Ray’s door, even though he’d already knocked on mine a half-dozen times. The idea of somebody as sweet as Ricky Ray being nice to me after I’d been so stupid made me cringe farther into my jacket, as if a cold wind had slapped me across the face.
I’d start my afternoon at the library, trading out old books for new ones, then I’d shuffle over to the Limestone Grocery to buy a bag of chips. If Mr. Trivette was in his tiny office, I’d stop and pass some time with him until a customer came by for some coal, and then I’d make my way up the hill to Potter’s Used Auto Parts and Misc. Supplies and stand under the sloping roof until Mr. Potter saw me and knocked on the window for me to come inside.
“Now, Maddie, you don’t have to wait for an invitation,” he’d say, ushering me through the front door and putting two quarters in the Coke machine. “You’re always welcome here.” Then he’d hand me a soda and say, “You’re one of the best workers I’ve got.”
“Mr. Potter, you don’t have any employees,” I’d tell him. “So I don’t know how high a compliment that is.”
“If I was hiring, I’d hire you, little gal,” he always said.
Most times, I’d go into the storeroom and putter around a bit, take some inventory for Mr. Potter or start on my homework. Sometimes I’d take my sketchbook out of my backpack and draw for a while and think. I thought a lot about Murphy, trying to sort through my feelings. I spent a long time wondering which of the things she’d told me were true and which were lies. Oh, I knew what the obvious lies were, the lies about her parents and about her aunt in Europe. But what about that boy who whispered poetry to horses?
I really wanted that story to be true.
I’d learned a lot about Murphy in the past weeks, things Corinne told me, even though she worried she shouldn’t out of respect for Murphy’s privacy. I learned that Murphy’s daddy died from cancer when she was eight, and after that her mama fell all to pieces, drinking and laying out from her secretarial job. Murphy was the one who took care of things then, who went to the Winn-Dixie to buy the groceries and came home and cooked them up for dinner. She kept the house clean and got the laundry done. She’d been voted “Smartest Girl” in her fifth-grade class. She never missed a day of school. Sometimes her mama hit her, but mostly she just watched TV and drank. Murphy’s mama’d been in jail three times for driving drunk. Murphy had been in other foster-care homes. Her last foster family had been well-off, which accounted for all of Murphy’s nice stuff.
“So why’s Social Services letting Murphy’s mama take her back?” I asked Corinne one afternoon when I’d cornered her in the dorm kitchen and made her talk about it some more. “It sounds like she’s got too many problems to take care of a child.”
“It’s important that families be reunited whenever possible,” she said, picking up a plate from the dish drainer and drying it with a soft towel. “And it’s true that Murphy’s mother has serious problems with substance abuse, but she completed a rehabilitation program and is willing to spend the next six months in a halfway house with Murphy. They’ll talk to counselors, and Murphy’s mom will work on her issues.”
“And then she’ll take Murphy home and sit around getting drunk some more,” I complained. I grabbed a bowl out of the drainer and began rubbing it hard with the hem of my shirt. “Not that I care what happens to her.”
Corinne gently took the bowl from me and set it down on the counter. “The judge thinks Murphy’s mother will do a better job this time,” she said. “And the social workers think she can learn how to take care of Murphy.”
“What do you think?” I asked, slumping into a chair.
“Well, I’ve read Murphy’s files,” Corinne said. She held up a fork to examine it, rubbed it on her sleeve, and turned away from me.
I came over to the sink and stood close to her. “What? What do you think, Corinne?”
“I think it’s a long road, Maddie,” she said finally.
“For Murphy and her mom?”
“For everyone.”
• • •
One afternoon after it had been raining for days and days, Mr. Potter came into the back room where I was doing my math homework and said, “How’s that fort holding up in all this bad weather?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. I haven’t been up there in awhile.”
“You children lose interest? That comes as a surprise, seeing how much work y’all put in up there.”
“Well, you know, the weather and everything,” I said lamely. “It’s a long walk in bad weather.”
“Fort’s the best place in weather like this,” Mr. Potter insisted, “if the structure’s holding firm and the roof’s not leaking. Dress up in some warm clothes, and you can have a fine afternoon in a fort.”
Some odd expression must have crossed my face, because Mr. Potter came over to where I was working and put his hand on my shoulder. “You don’t go on account of Murphy being gone, is that it?”
“I guess that’s partly it,” I said.
I’d told Mr. Potter some of the story, not about the books, but about Murphy’s mother coming to get her, and how they were in a halfway house now, learning how to be a family. I didn’t tell him that Donita wouldn’t speak to me anymore. I was afraid he’d feel like he shouldn’t let me come to the shop.
Mr. Potter picked up a box of oil filters and lifted the lid, taking a moment to count its contents. “All I know is the weather’s supposed to clear up tomorrow or the next day,” he said. “You ought to go check on that fort. It’s a shame to let such a fine place go to waste. I believe Murphy would agree with me on that account.”
I grabbed the clipboard with the inventory list on it and pretended to study it. “I’ll give that some thought, Mr. Potter,” I said, trying to sound like I was about to get real busy with work. “I sure will.”
Mr. Potter made a growly uh-huh sound, but he let me be. I paced around the storeroom, checking things off the list, listening to the rain. Every once in awhile I’d pull out Murphy’s blue stone from my pocket and roll it around between the palms of my hand. She’d given it to me right before she left, saying she guessed I knew it wasn’t really a rare and valuable artifact. She said she’d gotten it at the gift shop of a nature museum and made a lot of wishes on it that hadn’t come true yet, but they might still someday.
When I held it, that stone didn’t seem nearly as mysterious as it had hanging from the ceiling in our room like some distant planet. Up close it was more gray than blue. If you looked at it hard enough, it was hardly a cut or two above ordinary. I thought about it awhile and decided it was a whole lot like me. Nothing special.
I guess you could say the same thing about Murphy. She was just a regular old foster-care child, no better or worse than any of us. I rolled that idea around my brain like a polished, blue stone, but it wouldn’t settle into a spot where I could get used to it. Maybe I was as mad as mad can be when it came to Murphy, and maybe I was hurting a little bit about her being gone, too. The fact was, it would be a long time before I’d sort out who in the world Murphy was.
That didn’t mean I didn’t miss her.
I slipped Murphy’s stone back into my pocket, wishing she’d stayed long enough for me to think of something good to give to her. But five minutes after she’d set the blue stone on my desk, she was gone. I should have given her my rodeo belt buckle, I thought, leaning my head against the window. Maybe there was some place I could mail it to where Murphy would be sure to get it.
I turned my head and looked out at the cold, gray sky. Wrong time of the year for the fort, I told myself. A picture of Logan, Donita, and Ricky Ray sitting up there cutting up and telling stories flashed in my brain, but I pushed it out and pushed it out again. It kept coming back in, though, and that hole inside me got a little bit bigger every time it did.