I’M EXPECTING ANOTHER SLEEPLESS NIGHT, but Mom seems to have adapted to her bed. Maybe it’s the restraints, which I apologized for before putting them on her, but she doesn’t make a noise all night long. What I’m not expecting is someone pounding on the door at 5 o’clock in the morning, an hour before I’m usually up.
I’m dreaming about watching a marching band when the pounding starts, so I don’t get out of bed for at least a few minutes. By the time my brain figures out the noise isn’t the drums but a fist on my front door, I’m totally disoriented. I stumble out of bed and to the door, which I have to open without benefit of the chain lock, since Jerry broke it.
“Oh,” I say when I see who’s on the other side of the door. “Are you here to fix the lock?”
Mr. Garcia, the landlord, shakes his head. He’s dancing a little on the front mat, which, like a lot of the stuff here, came with the apartment. It used to say WELCOME. Now it just says WE ME.
“No. No lock.” He peers over my shoulder and seems disappointed not to see anything.
I look over my shoulder. Nothing. Opal can sleep through almost anything. “So … what do you want?”
I have a long list of repairs that need to be done, but it occurs to me that Mr. Garcia’s not there for any of them. Why come now, and so early in the morning, when he’s been steadily ignoring us for the past six months? There can be only one reason, but I’m not going to bring it up first.
“I got a call from Jerry Wentling.”
“Yeah? Did he tell you he broke my lock?” I pull the door open to show him the splintered wood, the dangling chain.
Mr. Garcia looks at the lock, eyes narrowing. “No, no, he didn’t say nothing about the lock.”
“How about the fact his mother’s dog barks all the time?”
“No, no,” Mr. Garcia says. “Mrs. Wentling’s dog is fine.”
“You wouldn’t say that if you had to live next door to it,” I tell him. My bare feet are cold, but there’s no way I’m stepping aside to let him in. He’s the landlord, but I’m not sure he has the right to push his way past me. Then again, I’m not sure he doesn’t.
“Jerry told me about … it.”
For one split second I’m hoping he means the Connie in the laundry room. That Mr. Garcia’s come to tell me he’s added security, or even that he’s called the police. Suddenly I’d rather face the cops about a suspected murder than deal with what I guess Mr. Garcia’s about to say.
“What?” I can play really dumb when I have to. It’s particularly useful when dealing with adults or people in government agencies about things like trying to cash the same assistance check twice. Yeah, I knew it was the same check, but “oops, I’m sorry” and an innocent look got me out of that one.
“It,” Mr. Garcia says again with a swift look over my shoulder. “He says you have one of them in there.”
I make a show of looking over my shoulder. “A … kitchen table? A couch? They came with the apartment. I don’t really like them, though, so if you want to take them—”
“No!” Mr. Garcia turns an angry gaze to me. “You know what I’m talking about. One of them. Those Connies! You have one in there!”
“My mother’s come home,” I tell him as calmly as I can, even though I can feel the fury starting to build. It’s paired with familiar sickness rolling in my gut. Two sensations I hate but can’t seem to get away from anymore for longer than a few hours. I think I used to not feel so angry all the time, but honestly, I’m having a hard time remembering it.
“She can’t stay here! The lease is for you two only. No others allowed.” Mr. Garcia points a stubby finger at me.
I don’t flinch. “You take assistance tenants, right? You have a government contract? That’s why we got placed here. The government pays you money so you can house kids like me and my sister, right?”
“Yes.” He eyes me warily, like I’m trying to trick him. This annoys me, because I’ve never done anything to Mr. Garcia but complain about the stuff that needs to be fixed. I’ve never even been late with the rent. Yeah, we get a portion of it from assistance, but the rest of it comes out of my paycheck. I’ve always made sure he has it on time, which is more than what the Wentlings do. I know that for a fact.
“Well, I have paperwork releasing my mom into my custody under that new law—”
“Law? What law? You talking about that stuff on the news?” He grimaces and waves a hand, and, yeah, I know the news is mostly a bunch of crap, but that doesn’t make this any less real.
“Yeah. You heard about it.”
A lot of new laws have been passed. The one lowering the age of adulthood from eighteen to seventeen, for example, that let me take guardianship of Opal and declare myself emancipated. The ones that deal with all the money tied up in the accounts of the Contaminated, where it goes, how it’s distributed, what happens to it if the accounts have nobody to claim them. And of course, the one about taking them home.
“I haven’t heard nothing.” Mr. Garcia crosses his arms and glares at me. “The lease is for two people. Not three. And people! Not … them!”
“I have paperwork,” I tell him again. I feel like a CD skipping, the same lyrics blurting out over and over. “She’s entitled to residence in the same place as I am. I’m her guardian. Legally. I can show you the papers.”
“No, no! I don’t wanna see no papers! I got nothing to see! This is still my place!” Mr. Garcia’s voice rises, high like a little girl’s, as his face gets red. “They say I got to take your money and charge what they say, they don’t say nothing about me having to let you stay here!”
My stomach’s sinking, twisting into a knot at the same time. “But I have paperwork. I have …”
“I don’t care.” He points his finger at me again. “You and your sister can stay here. It can’t. I can’t have something like that in here! People are scared about that sort of thing! It’s not right!”
“Well, it’s not right that you don’t lock up your laundry room, either!” I shout.
He steps back at my sudden forcefulness. I follow him out onto the landing. The WE ME mat’s squishy and cold under my toes.
“I got attacked in there! Yeah, Jerry didn’t tell you that, did he? That an unneutralized Connie attacked me in there! Could’ve killed me! What do you think I should do about that, huh? Maybe I should sue you!”
Mr. Garcia’s threatened only for a second. “You see? Dangerous! Too dangerous! No, no, it has to go!”
Stupidly, I gave him too much ammunition. “She’s my mother, not an it. She’s got the collar—”
I can see curtains twitching in the Wentlings’ apartment across the landing, and in the apartment next door to me. The one next to the Wentlings’ has been empty for the past few months, but if it had occupants, I’m sure they’d be peeking out, too. Mr. Garcia doesn’t care if he’s making too much noise for this early in the morning, and I’m sure the neighbors appreciate the show even if it woke them.
“I don’t care about your collar or your papers! I don’t care about nothing! You get out of here by the end of the day! That’s it!” Mr. Garcia crosses his arms.
He’s about half an inch shorter than I am and not at all intimidating, but there’s no question he means what he says. I soften my tone, try a different way. “Please, Mr. Garcia. We don’t have anyplace to go.”
I might be imagining him bending a little. “Not my problem.”
I try a bit harder. “Please? I have to take care of my baby sister, and my mother isn’t a problem, really. I promise.”
“Jerry Wentling says she attacked him!”
“Jerry Wentling broke in my door and busted my lock!” I cry. “She was scared! Besides, did he also tell you the collar did what it was meant to, and totally knocked her down? She couldn’t have attacked him even if she tried.”
Something flickers in his gaze. “I don’t trust those collars. No. You go. Get out.”
I remember something in time to try again. Mr. Garcia’s daughter, Josie, went to my school. “What if I were your daughter, Mr. Garcia? Trying my best to just keep my family together—”
I know I’ve said the wrong thing the instant I say daughter. Mr. Garcia’s mouth slams shut, his eyes burn bright with anger. He shakes his head, then his fist right in my face. I step back.
“My daughter died,” he spits through clenched jaws. “She was a little chubby her whole life. I said, ‘Don’t you worry about it, Josita,’ but she did. And she died! So, no, you can’t have none of those things in there, I don’t care who it was! Now it’s an it, and you get it out of my apartment by the end of the day!”
I know when to stop. There’s nothing to say to him after this. I nod and step through my doorway. He’s still shaking.
“She died!” He shouts and raises both fists. “Right there in the street! Right in front of me!”
Any hope of gaining his sympathy is gone. Instead, I feel sympathetic for him. “I’m sorry.”
“Your sorry don’t mean nothing,” he says, more quietly, in a voice raw with pain. “They should all be put down. They’re not who they were anymore. I would rather she be dead than what she had become.”
“I’m sorry,” I say again, then add, “but I’m glad I found my mom. I don’t want her to be dead.”
He only looks at me with blank eyes worse than any Connie’s. “By tonight. Or else I get the police to throw you out.”
I’m not sure he can do that, but I don’t want to find out. And this place, it’s a dump, anyway. I hate living here. I don’t like anything about it, so this is a chance to move on to something better, right? Except I have no idea of where I’m going to go or what we’re going to do. As Mr. Garcia stomps away down the stairs, the Wentlings’ curtain twitches again. I see Jerry looking out. He’s smirking.
I flip him a rude gesture. He makes an exaggerated frowny face, then puts both his fists to his cheeks and twists them like he’s wiping tears. Jerk. I can’t forgive him for this, even if he did save my life.
I close the door behind me and turn, jumping when I see Opal standing there. “You scared me!”
“What’s wrong with Mr. Garcia? Why was he shouting?”
Cotton candy–colored explanations want to come out of my mouth, but once again I figure it’s best to be honest. “He wants us to move out.”
“Oh.” She ponders this. “Because of Mama?”
“Yeah.” I sigh, scrubbing at my sleepy-eyed face. “Yeah, because of Mama.”
“He’s a jerk.”
“Yeah, but unfortunately, because he owns this building, we have to do what he says.” Suddenly, I have to sit at the table. My legs won’t hold me. My sore butt thuds hard in the chair, which creaks. I almost hope it breaks, since it’s not ours and we can leave behind a broken chair.
“What … where are we going to go? Hey, does this mean I don’t have to go to school today?” Opal rustles in the fridge for something, pulling out a carton of orange juice she drinks from without a glass. “Gross! Use a cup!”
She shrugs and tosses the empty into the garbage. “There wasn’t enough left, anyway. So, school?”
“You have to go to school.” Before she can protest, I hold up my hand. “I need to figure all this stuff out, Opal. Where we’re going to go. All of that.”
“But I can help you—”
“Not this time. And if you miss another day in school, you could get into trouble. Or worse, I could. You remember what I told you back when we were first moving here, right?”
I’d had to petition for guardianship of her, even though I met the new lowered age for stuff like that. Everything was a mess, social workers didn’t know what was going on, getting help meant standing in line for hours or being sent to group homes until things could be figured out. Kids are used to grown-ups telling them what to do. Most of us, if we were told we had to go to a group home, went. The only reason I’d fought against it was because of Hope, our neighbor across the street. She’s the one who told me about the new laws and how to apply for whatever we needed. She and Garry were moving away, too, to someplace closer to her kids, she said. Someplace in the Midwest, which hadn’t been hit as hard as Lebanon had.
“You said that you were going to be able to take care of me,” Opal says.
“You said we had to work extra hard to make sure we proved we could do this on our own, because …”
“Because why?” I prompt. I know she knows the answer. She’s just being stubborn, and really, I can’t blame her.
“Because we can’t give them any reason to take me away from you, or to treat us like kids who don’t have anyone. So they won’t make me go into a group home or something.”
“Right.” Because of the new laws, I’m considered an adult, no group home for me. But they could take Opal away, place her with a new family, even have her adopted. “If we want to stick together, we have to do stuff right. Not get into trouble at school.”
She sighs and scuffs at the floor. “I know. I just hate school! I hate it!”
“I’m sorry, school sucks. I know.” I’m sympathetic, but there’s nothing I can do. “But you have to go today.”
From Mom’s bedroom, I hear a low noise and leave off the conversation with Opal to go check. Mom’s fine, sitting up with one arm held awkwardly behind her because of the restraints. She’s tugging a little.
“Hold on, Mom, I’m sorry.” I unloose her. She gets up before I can stop her. She pushes me, not hard, but hard enough. She lurches past me and is through the doorway before I can do anything.
But it’s okay. My heart’s thudding, but she’s just going to the bathroom. Using the toilet, thank goodness. She breathes a sigh that sounds a lot like relief. I can’t say I blame her.
“She went to the bathroom all by herself!” Opal sounds proud.
“Yeah. Let’s give her some privacy.” I keep the bathroom door cracked open, though, in case she needs us.
“Velvet, why can’t we just go home?”
My mind’s whirling with everything that’s going on, but I fix on this. “To our house?”
“Yeah. It’s still our house, isn’t it?”
“I think so.” The freeze on accounts means the bank can’t repossess a mortgage until everyone whose names are on it have been legally determined to be dead or Contaminated. I don’t know enough about that sort of thing to understand it, just that some people are saying it’s good because it means they’re not losing their houses, and others are blaming the bad economy on the fact the banks aren’t being paid.
“It’s still there, isn’t it?” Opal looks hopeful.
“It should be.”
From the bathroom, we hear the toilet flush. Then the sink running. She’s washing her hands, and I peek in to check. Mom’s standing there with the water running, not doing much of anything, so I put the bar of soap in her hands and she finishes.
We haven’t been back to our house since the soldiers came to round us up. Not just us, everyone in the neighborhood, because of the high numbers of Connies in the woods. The military was supposed to come in and clean it up. They said they wanted us all out for our own safety, but I’m not so sure they didn’t have other reasons. Like not wanting witnesses.
“Just take the essentials,” the soldier had said. “Pack a bag for yourself and your sister. We’re taking you someplace safe.”
My mom had been gone for a few days by that time, but I knew she was out there. She’d been standing at the sink peeling a potato with a knife when she started twitching. The knife had clattered into the sink, like in slow motion—that’s how my mind had seen it. That’s how I remembered it. I remembered the way she’d gripped the edge of the sink with both hands, so tight, her knuckles turned white.
“Get your sister and go upstairs,” my mom had said in a low voice, nothing like her normal one. “Lock … lock … lock the door, Velvet. Go! Now!”
I don’t know what happened after that, because I’d done what she said. We listened to the sound of screaming, Opal and me, and crashing. Of things breaking. But she never came upstairs, and after a few hours, when the noises had stopped, we came down.
A few days later, the army came.
“Velvet?”
“Huh?” I shake myself, trying to keep myself together for Opal’s sake. And my mom’s.
“It’s still our house. I want to go home. Can’t we go home?”
It sounds like our only option. I know enough about paperwork by now to know that the only way to get approved for a new assisted-housing apartment is to fill out tons and tons of forms, and wait. Then wait some more. I think all these places have waiting lists. We could find a shelter, probably, but only for a night or two.
And then of course, there’s Mom. If Mr. Garcia can throw us out, the chances of anyone else letting us in is pretty small. I’m not even sure a shelter would take her.
“You get ready for school. I’ll go to the house today. Check it out. If I think we can move back in—”
“Hooray!” Opal’s already squeezing me.
From behind us, I hear a soft chuff, not laughter, but something else. My mom’s looking at us both, her expression still blank. But I know I heard her make that noise. I think it means she wants to go home, too.
“I’ll pick you up after school and we’ll figure out what we’re doing, okay? You need to go pack your stuff and hurry up, the bus will be here soon!”
Opal’s already begun dancing. “Hooray, hooray! Woohooooooo!”
She fist-pumps the air and disappears into our room. I turn to look at Mom. She’s not paying attention to me; she’s going to sit at the table. Her steps are shuffling and slow. She can’t go very fast and she surely can’t carry very much.
Our house is almost four miles out of town off the highway that the bus line doesn’t service. I don’t have a car, or any way to get there. But I know someone who does.
I dial quickly, praying he answers the phone, that his mother’s already gone to work, and for once things work out the way I want them to. “Tony,” I say. “I need you to help me.”