Small Bones Read online

  I grabbed my suitcase and started walking back down-town. I’d been ditched before. Dumped on some doorstep in the middle of the night in nothing but some guy’s moldy old coat. I’d survived. I could do it again.

  I just wasn’t sure how.

  Something would come to me.

  I kept walking.

  The shops in Buckminster were closed, and the side-walks almost empty. I passed a couple of men strolling home with their hats set back on their heads and damp gray patches spreading across their chests. A family in sandals jostled through the door of the Esquire Café, everyone laughing and jockeying for position. A white-haired lady shooed a bunch of girls in flowered shorts off the steps of the Memorial Library. They spilled onto the sidewalk, breaking around me like a school of minnows splitting up to dodge a weed.

  There was a little park at the end of the main street with a war cenotaph and benches. I sat down to rest my feet, but my eyes wandered over to a community bulletin board.

  A job. I could get a job.

  I jumped up and riffled through the notices. Most of them were about missing cats and strawberry suppers and nearly new rowboats available for sale or rent, but then I spotted a yellow sheet almost hidden right at the bottom.

  Now hiring, it said. Waitresses required immediately. Room and board provided. Apply at Dunbrae Arms, just off Highway 7 on Lake McKie. Ask for Mrs. Smees.

  A lady in Gina Lollobrigida sunglasses pointed me toward the highway, and I headed off.

  I’d never been a waitress before, but I’d cleared the table at the Home every night since I’d been big enough to carry a plate without tipping over. I figured I could do it.

  I took a big breath. This was going to be okay.

  Buckminster petered out into gas stations, vegetable stands and the odd chip wagon. There was a T-intersection at the edge of town with a billboard showing a pin-up girl speeding off in her pink bikini and matching motorboat. Come again to beautiful Buckminster, she was apparently saying. Capital of Cottage Country!

  After that, it was just blue sky, yellow fields and the hot, black strip of Highway 7.

  I hoped I’d see a sign soon for the Dunbrae Arms, but that was before I did see one and realized I had six miles to go. The sun was getting lower, and my shadow longer and weirder. I thought about how it made my head look like the Bride of Frankenstein’s and how there was no way I’d get to Dunbrae Arms before midnight and how there was nothing I could do about it. I dabbed at my blisters with my hankie and kept walking.

  Sara and I’d had this thing. We used to stay up late, working on our sewing projects, talking, laughing. We’d pooled our money and bought a transistor. We kept it low so we wouldn’t wake the Littles, but every time “Runaway” came on, we couldn’t help it. We’d get up and dance.

  That’s what was in my head now. That song.

  As I walk along, I wonder

  what went wrong…

  My little runaway

  a run-run-run-run-runaway.

  It was like a cruel joke. Some runaway I was. Throwaway, more like. But it had a beat, and it kept me going, so I plodded along to it.

  I was way outside of town before I stopped for a break. It must have been around seven but still hot. I took off my jacket and opened my suitcase to stuff it inside.

  And there was the coat.

  Joe had wrapped it in an old plastic sheet so the mildew wouldn’t spread through my clothes. It was just taking up room, weighing me down. I should throw it out, I thought.

  Something about that struck me as monumentally tragic. I crouched on the highway shoulder, staring into the suitcase like I was staring into the casket of my beloved. What good was it to me now? There was no Howell’s. My one hope of finding my parents was gone. I didn’t even have my letters.

  My letters.

  I put my hand over my mouth.

  I knew I was being ridiculous. But all orphans are, when it comes to stuff like this. We all had something. Some dream, some delusion, some proof—ha!—of our real parents. For me, it was the letters.

  It’d started six or seven years earlier. Christmas at the Home was always a bit of a crapshoot. People from town would just go and buy something that more or less looked like a present. They’d slap some wrapping paper on it, mark it with a tag (Suitable for 10- to 12-year-olds), then scratch good deed off their holiday to-do list.

  Occasionally, you’d get something decent, like a bag of humbugs or a bunch of Archie comics. Way too often, though, you’d tear open your gift to find a three-pack of cotton under-pants, which were always enormous but, as such, at least good for a laugh.

  That Christmas, I got a box of pink notepaper and matching envelopes. Printed at the top of each page, in big swoopy letters, was Thinking of you…

  Toni cracked up. “Thinking of who exactly? We’re orphans. Who the hell are we going to write to?”

  She had a point. Frankly, I’d rather have gotten the ten-gallon panties. I put the notepaper under my bed and tried to forget about it.

  But every night as I was going to sleep, I’d find myself picturing the same thing: Joe walking up from the mailbox, saying, “Well, lookie here. A letter for Miss Dorothy Blythe.”

  It started out as a little game, a way to fill a boring afternoon when I was sick in bed with bronchitis. I got out the notepaper and wrote myself a letter from Queen Elizabeth, who was youngish and pretty and apparently desperate to find her beloved long-lost daughter—i.e. me. I put the letter in an envelope and slipped it under my mattress.

  Every now and then, when no one was around, I’d take it out and read it, as if it had just arrived in the mail. It was so perfect, I’d almost forget I’d written it myself.

  I had bronchitis a lot that year. Her Highness never came to rescue me, so I chose someone else. (One benefit of being an orphan: disposable parents.)

  Later, I moved beyond moms and dads. I saw Sandra Dee in a movie. When I realized she was too young to be my mother, I made her my sister. Then she introduced me to her co-star, Bobby Darin, who, naturally enough, fell madly in love with me from afar. (His letters got pretty steamy, although on rereading them later, it was clear I had absolutely no idea what the word screwing actually meant.)

  When I’d gone through all the notepaper, I bought myself a new box.

  Pathetic, I know. Some of the other girls were flirting and kissing and what have you with real boys, and here I was, still playing with my imaginary friends. But I couldn’t help myself. I’d get lonely or mad or worried about something, and bingo, what would arrive but an adoring letter from my dad or my mother or some famous teenage heartthrob who only had eyes for me.

  I wasn’t nuts. I knew the letters weren’t real. But still. Watching the fire rip through our room that night and knowing all those people from my past were disappearing with it kind of killed me. That whole part of my life was gone. I couldn’t throw out the coat too.

  I was trying to snap the suitcase shut and thinking about stuff like that and not fully keeping my wits about me when I realized a cool black shadow had fallen over me.

  “I thought that was you,” the boy from the train said, and I leaped over the suitcase as if I’d been hurled from an ejector seat.

  “Whoa!” he went. “What are you, a toad or something?” He was sitting high on his bike, eyebrows gone all funny, lips rippling back and forth between laughter and horror. “Seriously. You’re like a toad.”

  “Gee. Thanks,” I said. I scrambled up and pushed my hair off my face and squished my foot back into Lorraine’s shoe and did my best not to look at him any more than I absolutely had to. His shirt was unbuttoned. He was taller than I’d thought.

  He waved his hands at me, palms out. “No. No. Just in terms of jumping, I mean. As far as I can tell, that’s your only toad-like quality.” He took another look at me. “Except maybe the way you’re holding your mouth right now.”

  I immediately did something different with my mouth, which made him laugh even harder. He hunched o
ver his handlebars, big hands dangling off the ends, head bouncing.

  I think he was saying, “That’s worse,” but it was difficult to tell, what with the gasping and everything. I picked up my suitcase and dragged my bleeding dignity away from the scene of the crime.

  After a while I couldn’t hear him except in my head, which was almost as bad, but then there was that sweeping sound tires make on pavement and his shadow crept up on me again.

  “Sorry,” he said. “Sorry.” His voice sounded really serious and halfway down his throat, the way people’s voices do when they’re worried they’re going to crack up if they’re not careful.

  I kept walking.

  “I mean it.” He reached out and put his hand on my bare arm, and this time I didn’t do anything toady.

  I did that thing frogs do when you shine a flashlight into their eyes—they go into a death trance (and usually pee, which, mercifully, I didn’t do).

  “Look. You see a pretty girl crouched on the side of the road, you don’t expect her to suddenly, like, catapult herself through space. I was just surprised”—he shrugged, looked cute—“and in my surprise, I mistakenly said toad. Which I realize now was a poor choice of words.”

  More shrugs, more cute.

  I tried to get going again, but he’d steered his bike in front of me and was blocking my path. Boys’ belly buttons have hair in them. I’d never realized that before.

  “Not just because it could be misconstrued as insulting, if you didn’t know how much I in fact like toads—but also because it doesn’t do you justice.”

  The sun was hitting his face in a way that turned one eye as green and see-through as a 7-Up bottle. The whiskers on his cheek looked like grains of sand. He had a small chip in one of his otherwise perfect front teeth. I made myself focus on the chocolate bar in his shirt pocket instead.

  “Because, whoa. That was some jump. No mere reptile could have done that.”

  “Toads are amphibians.”

  “Right.” He laughed. “Good point.”

  For years, Know Your Swampland Creatures was my favorite library book, which, of course, is absolutely no excuse for ever quoting it, let alone at a time like this.

  “No mere amphibian. Exactly. I should have said you’re like”—he scanned the sky for a better example—“like Catwoman or Wonder Woman or something.”

  He thought I was an idiot. You’d only say something like that to a person you knew for a fact was a moron.

  “Excuse me,” I said, “I have to be going,” and I tried to step around him.

  “Ach. Be going where?” he said, in some sort of leprechaun accent. Why was everything I did funny? He looked down the empty highway. “Where could you possibly…be going?” That accent again.

  I considered lying, but I’m not very good at it, least of all when a boy is looking at me with his eyelashes still wet and stuck together from laughing at the last thing I’ve done.

  “The Dunbrae Arms,” I said and did get past him this time. He turned his bike around and started coming after me, one foot pushing along the pavement like a barge pole.

  “You’re walking there?” I was apparently weak in the head. “In kitten heels?”

  That almost made me laugh—a boy with messy hair and wrinkled chinos actually knowing what kitten heels were—so maybe I smiled a bit.

  Somehow he was in front of me again and doing that winking thing he’d done on the train. I curled my shoulders forward and sort of muffled a laugh into my neck, which Toni was always telling me not to do because it made me look mentally deficient and it’s bad enough being from the Home without appearing like there was some reason you were put there in the first place.

  He stuck out his hand and said, “Eddie Nicholson.” I stared at it for a second, then put down my suitcase, and we shook. “Dot Blythe,” I said.

  He said, “What?” so I said, “Dot. Like Dorothy,” and that was apparently funny too.

  He said, “Oh. Okay, Dot…give me your suitcase.”

  I said, “Why?”

  He pulled back his chin like it was so obvious and said, “I’m double-riding you there.”

  I didn’t answer—only because I couldn’t, not because I agreed—but he smiled like, All right then. He got me to hold the bike while he figured out how to strap my suitcase onto the back. When he’d rigged something up with his belt and a bit of twine he had in his pocket, he got on his seat, put his hands around my waist and went, “Okay. Up you go.”

  He had his arms on either side of me, and every breath he took sent goose bumps up my neck, so pretty soon it felt like all the skin on my whole body was pleated behind my ears. I’d never been on a bike before. I’d never been that close to a boy before (regardless of what Bobby Darin implied in his letters). I’d never felt so far away from the Home before.

  Someone honked as they drove by. Eddie waved and the bike swerved and I fell back, and the whiskers on his chin grazed my shoulder and made me think of sand again. Then he swerved to avoid a pothole, and we bumped into each other and he went, “Whoa!” Then he swerved another time, even though the road was perfectly flat and no one was driving by. That’s when I figured out he was doing it on purpose.

  I went, “Hey,” and he said, “Took you long enough.”

  A little later he said, “You smell good,” and I thought I was going to die until he added, “All smoky. Like bacon or something.” I was afraid he was going to realize I was one of the girls who’d escaped the fire at the Home and drop me on the side of the road right then and there, but he just asked if I wanted to split his Malted Milk. He tore open the wrapper with his teeth and snapped the bar in two without even waiting for an answer. Then he asked me, mouth still full, if I was going to work at the Arms, and I nodded. He asked me if I’d missed my ride or something, and I nodded again. (The or something part meant I wasn’t lying.) He wondered if my parents would be worried. (I shrugged, which was vague enough not to be lying either.)

  And that’s the way it went. He talked. I nodded, shook my head or shrugged. It was hard to keep my wits about me. Eddie smelled like fresh laundry and chocolate and Ban deodorant and way better than I was led to believe boys would smell.

  I don’t believe I’d ever encountered anything that terrifying in my entire life, and I’m including the fire when I say that.

  Three

  I MUST HAVE said thanks. No way I’d have let him double-ride me for a good five miles and not said thanks.

  Would I?

  I don’t remember. Eddie took me right to the front door of the lodge—that’s what he called it—tipped the bike over and sort of pitched me off. Just before I tumbled onto the gravel, he caught me around the waist. My hand gripped his arm—warm and solid—and I felt like I’d discovered a whole new species.

  “Whoops. Almost lost you,” he said.

  I stood myself up and patted down my skirt and moved my mouth around my face without managing to do much else with it.

  He twisted back, like the discus thrower from that book on Ancient Greece I’d taken out six times before the librarian suggested someone else might like to read it, and undid my suitcase. “Must be meeting Mrs. Smees, are you? You know where?”

  I don’t know what my face did then, but he said, “She’s not that bad. Go downstairs to the basement and it’s two, maybe three, doors to the right.”

  He passed me my suitcase. I held it in front of me and stared at the little gold stripe on the handle.

  He said, “So how about I take you for a ride around the lake sometime?”

  I no doubt emitted some sort of squeak at that and was maybe preparing to say thank you then, but by the time I could make myself look at him, Eddie was riding up the driveway, his shirt ballooning out at the sides, his bike ticking back and forth between his legs like a windshield wiper in a downpour.

  I asked myself if I was making him up. It’s the type of thing I’d do and, frankly, the only logical explanation for him. I turned away before he disappeared into
a puff of smoke.

  The lodge was a fancy, four-story stone building with a wide driveway, flowers everywhere and a big engraved sign out front saying Welcome to the Dunbrae Arms that somehow made me feel exactly the opposite.

  A man with gold piping on his shoulders opened the door for me and smiled. He was somewhat less nice when I said I was there for the waitressing position. He jerked his head toward a staircase and said, “One floor down. Housekeeping,” then turned his smile on again for a man coming through the door with a red face and a tennis racket.

  I crossed a big hall with a high ceiling and a chandelier made out of antlers. The floors gleamed. I imagined this was the type of place the Welshes went to on holidays.

  A door straight ahead swung open, and a red-haired girl in a green uniform came flying out. She had an ear pressed hard against her right shoulder to make room on her left for a big black tray loaded with greasy stacks of thick white plates. A fork fell off and clanged against the floor, but the girl kept going.

  A couple of seconds later, a blond girl bolted out, carrying an armload of tablecloths. She was sucking on her lower lip, laughing about something she clearly shouldn’t be. She saw me looking, wiped whatever was amusing her off her face and chased after the first girl.

  The stairway to the basement was tucked away on the right. I carried my suitcase the first few steps, then thumped it down the rest of the way. Everything was perfect upstairs, but down here it was just bare floors, bare lightbulbs and the smell of laundry detergent.

  Eddie was right. A sign on the third door said HOUSEKEEPING, and underneath, in flaky black paint, M. Smees. I knocked once.

  “Yesssss.” The woman sounded as if she’d already had enough of me.

  I stepped into a big room cluttered with piles of papers, folded sheets and, along the back wall, canvas bags shored up as if someone was bracing for a flood. In the corner, half hidden by a massive heap of laundry, was an old Singer sewing machine just like the ones we’d had at the Home.

  In the middle of the room was a skinny woman, sitting at a desk, typing.