Right as Rain Page 2

  Izzy will be leaving for the bus stop in three minutes, which is about how much time I have to say goodbye, if I run my fastest time back to our house too.

  I knock three times hard on her door. “Iz!”

  “Rain!” The door swings open fast, and before I can even say anything we’re hugging so hard and my eyes are burning, and after such a short run why my legs are buckling and giving out is a big who-knows. And then we’re in a big heap on her front step.

  “I can’t believe you’re really—”

  “I don’t want to—”

  “How will I get through the rest of sixth grade without you?”

  “I won’t have anyone.”

  And then I cry. It’s the first time I’ve cried since the memorial that spilled out of the high school auditorium where Guthrie used to play his guitar at talent shows, across the parking lot, and into the baseball fields behind the school. Here I have all those people, a whole crowd of people, who want to read poems and sing songs and tell funny stories about how my brother was the best. And maybe it feels pretty terrible to have all of his old teachers look at me with big sad eyes in the hallway and ask me if I’m OK all the time, but starting tomorrow I’ll have no one. Not any sad-eyed teachers, not Coach Scottie, not Izzy, not our backyard garden, and not Guthrie’s bedroom floor.

  I hug her tighter. “I have to go. My mom said ten—”

  “Screw what your mom said,” she snaps. “This is her fault. She really needs a new job right now? At the end of the school year? In a whole different state?”

  “Yeah.” I sniff. “Screw her,” which are definitely words I’m not supposed to say, but I don’t really mean it, because not even Izzy knows what I know. She doesn’t know that I said OK to moving, and that none of this is my mom’s fault.

  “I have to go.”

  We stand up from the front step and she grabs her book bag. “I’ll miss you so much.” Tears are still wet on her cheeks.

  “I’ll write,” I say. “Real letters, with paper and envelopes and stamps and everything.” My mom says that we develop empathy when we turn off our devices, have actual conversations, read books made of paper, and write long letters to people we miss, thinking of them the whole way through. Sometimes I write Izzy letters and send them in the mail even though I can run to her house in three minutes, seventeen seconds.

  “I’ll keep an eye on the mailbox,” she says.

  I hug her one more time, then I take off through her backyard, past the tree house, and onto the path. I breathe deep the smell of pine and wonder what would happen if I just keep running, curve with the path down toward the Morrisons’ house and on as far as my brother and his friends cleared, until the mud warms and sloshes up my Converse. I wonder what would happen if I just keep running instead of popping out in our yard, and through the sliding door of the moving van.

  I can feel the corner of his guitar pick against my thigh each time I lift my leg. It feels good knowing I have something of his. It’s sticking and chafing just enough to remind me over and over that I have it. It’s there.

  I slow down when I get to our yard.

  Their voices reach me before I can see them.

  “We don’t have to get there exactly at three.”

  “Henry. We get the keys at three o’clock. They didn’t say ‘around three’ or ‘whenever you get here.’ They said three o’clock.”

  “If we leave in thirty minutes and drive sixty-five miles per hour with one ten-minute stop, we’ll get there at three o’clock.”

  I smile big because that’s exactly what I was thinking.

  “Aren’t we just getting the keys from the superintendent anyway? Doesn’t he live in the building? I’m sure it’s fine,” he says.

  “The furniture is supposed to arrive between five and six. I’d like to be settled before then.”

  “We don’t have anything to settle.”

  She shakes her head and points at his shirt. “Fix your buttons.”

  “Seriously?”

  Then Mom looks up and sees me. “Good. There she is. Let’s go!” She’s waving me over, and Dad isn’t fixing his buttons.

  The back of the van is packed tight with our thirteen boxes.

  And for a split second I think if there isn’t a seat for me, I’ll just live with Izzy and her family. I’ll tend our garden, go to my regular school, and run in the Vermont state championships in sixteen days while Coach Scottie and all the sad-eyed teachers cheer me on. Even though I’m only eleven, and only a sixth grader, I know I have a shot at winning. I’m faster than any of the eighth graders at my school, and Coach Scottie says I’ve been training smart.

  But then I remember Dr. Cyn and how maybe this move is our best shot at a good, fresh start. And maybe it’ll make Dad open his door and make Mom stop hustling off and stay in one place, one place where she doesn’t have to walk by Guthrie’s room every day, even if I want to.

  “Where do I sit?” I ask.

  Mom slides into the driver’s seat and pats the spot next to her.

  “In the middle?” I ask.

  Mom yanks on the belt. “Three seats up front in this truck.”

  “Van,” I say. Then I scooch into the middle and scrunch my knees up toward my chest. Dad slips into the passenger seat, closes the door, and settles back against the headrest.

  “Ready?” Mom says as she shifts the van into gear.

  Screw you! I want to yell. But instead I try to make myself smaller, pulling my shoulders in and sinking down, smushed between my parents. I give my knuckles a good crack, and look up at our house. I try not to think of the time Guthrie and I dropped bubble-wrapped and marshmallow-padded eggs out his bedroom window for his physics project. I try not to think about burying my dresses in the backyard.

  I try not to think of that night.

  We back out of the driveway and start off down our street, and I’m watching our house grow smaller and smaller in the rearview mirror until we turn, and it’s gone.

  “Goodbye,” I whisper.

  Chapter 5

  That Night

  “I’ve got it all planned,” he said. “I just need your help. One favor.”

  My heart beat with the quickened pulse of being wanted, being needed by my big brother.

  “OK,” I agreed.

  Chapter 6

  288 Miles

  For the first forty-seven minutes, no one says anything. We just listen to the radio and look straight ahead down the interstate.

  When the music starts crackling with static, I adjust the knob left and right, but the only things I can get are Christian rock and talk radio. I leave it on talk radio because then at least someone will be talking.

  The host is interviewing hikers who completed the entire Appalachian Trail from Georgia all the way to Maine. They’re talking about what they carried in their packs.

  My harmonica, one says. It was a huge lifesaver, especially on rainy nights, when I was stuck in my tent.

  Anything you wish you’d left behind?

  The hiker laughs. My book. I figured I’d be doing all this reading and finish it by the time I got out of Georgia.

  Not the case? the interviewer asks.

  Not a page. The hiker laughs again. I left it in the first town we crossed.

  Another hiker butts in. See, that’s funny, because reading was my lifesaver. Books are heavy, but I ripped out the pages as I read, and recycled them when I crossed through towns.

  I like imagining the pages of a story scattered between Georgia and Maine.

  I guess you just bring what you think you’ll need out there, the first hiker says. And that’s different for everybody.

  Dad humphs and glances across me at Mom.

  I try to change the channel, but all I can find is static.

  “What, Henry?”

  I keep turning the dial, but nothing is coming through clearly.

  “I can’t imagine having to go that far with so little,” Dad says.

  “Sounds p
retty liberating to me,” Mom retorts. “Being on the move with only what you need.”

  My shoulders are trapped tight between theirs, and it feels like the space in the front of the van is getting smaller.

  Dad humphs again. “Put it back on that interview, Rain.”

  I turn the dial back toward the talk radio station, but I’m hoping that it’s been taken over by static, or that they’ve moved on to some boring subject that Mom and Dad can’t argue about. Though something tells me they’d find a way.

  A voice breaks through the static.

  “There,” Dad says.

  The hiker says the trail is about 2,190 miles long. It crosses fourteen states, and about one in four people who set out to hike the whole trail actually make it. Everyone else quits.

  One in four.

  That’s the same odds as marriages that survive the death of a child. And that’s a fact, because I’ve been researching.

  After reading pages and pages of Dr. Cyn’s blog, I basically know that most marriages don’t make it. She writes about the stages of grief, and support systems, and emotional stress, and how the death of a child goes against nature.

  And even though she wrote a post seventy-four days ago that finding a fresh start could help a couple come back together, she admits that a lot of why a marriage suffers or survives through it all is still a big who-knows.

  And if I want my parents to be that one out of four, I know I have a big job to do. And that’s a fact, because they argue over garden equipment and some stranger on the radio’s hiking pack.

  The thing is, you don’t really know exactly what you’ll need or what works for you until you’re out there on the trail. It’s a lot of trial and error and getting what you need along the way.

  Now Mom says, “Huh, this is interesting.”

  Another hiker, a new voice, speaks up and adds, It’s not about the what, it’s about the who. It’s with who you choose to walk this trail.

  Dad crosses his arms over his chest and leans back against the headrest. Mom has both hands high on the steering wheel and looks far down the interstate.

  We’ve only gone sixty-eight miles, and I’m already feeling like the air in the van is disappearing fast. And I want to yell. Yell at them both to just stop. Stop arguing over stupid stuff. Stop humphing and edging closer to the middle because they’re taking up my space. Just stop because I already miss Izzy and right now I’m supposed to be stretched out and reading in Ms. Carol’s room, but instead I returned my book to the school library yesterday when I was only forty-six pages in, and hugged Ms. Carol goodbye forever.

  Instead of yelling like I really want to and taking back all my space in the front of the van, I just crack my knuckles and stare down the interstate and my brain tells me that maybe if I can keep the station from going staticky the whole way to New York City, everything will go back to the way it was, and my parents will be one out of four.

  Chapter 7

  The Heights

  “We’re here, Rain! This is Washington Heights!”

  Mom is nudging me awake. The radio is off, probably because it faded into static and no one bothered to fix it, and for some reason that makes me so mad at both of them for not even trying. Or maybe I’m mad at myself for falling asleep.

  I’m craning my neck to see out the windows. Buildings stretch up and up four, five, six stories. A red, white, and blue flag flaps from a second-story window of a gray brick building. It’s not the stars and stripes that I’m used to seeing. Instead, white lines divide the flag into four big rectangles of color.

  I look at it again and memorize the blocks of colors and the little design in the middle and tell my brain to remember to look it up later.

  In the next window over, an older woman leans out and calls to a man on the street. He’s wearing tall boots and watering the sidewalk outside his store with a hose, and why anyone needs to water pavement is a big who-knows. The water is washing over the curb and down into the gutter. He looks up and waves to the woman overhead.

  “My hospital and your school are on the same street just ten blocks north or so,” Mom says, gesturing behind us. “And our apartment isn’t far. We can walk together in the mornings! Can’t you feel the energy here already?”

  My dad lets out a little snort. And I know what he’s thinking—Where’s the grass?—because it’s what I’m thinking too.

  “I guess,” I answer.

  “You guess? Oh, come on. Look around!” She’s trying to get me excited, but if I show any enthusiasm, then my dad will keep sighing and resting his bed head against the closed window and it’ll look like I’m taking my mom’s side in this whole new-job-move thing. Which I’m not. But I’m not not either.

  My mom only started looking for new brain research opportunities and planning this big hustling-off after that night. And if I hadn’t done what I did, I don’t know what we’d be doing. But it wouldn’t be this.

  We stop at a red light. The average red light lasts 120 seconds, and that’s a fact, because I’ve counted many times before.

  Before the light turns green again, ten people cross the street in front of our van. And that’s just at this light! When I look down the avenue I can see three more red lights and people crossing in front of those stopped cars too. Plus, all the people walking along the sidewalks, on both sides, in both directions, and there are people sitting on benches in the median that divides the four lanes of traffic. And all the people in the cars that are bumper-to-bumper from here all the way down Broadway, probably all the way through Times Square, where the big lights flash all night, and down to whatever’s past that.

  In our neighborhood back home, there are four houses around a cul-de-sac and fourteen residents. That means that over 70 percent of our neighborhood’s population back home just crossed in front of our van in 120 seconds at this one red light in Washington Heights.

  “Come on, Henry,” Mom says, and points to a restaurant on the corner. “Look, barbecue! You love barbecue.”

  Dad nods and looks out the window like maybe he’s trying, but he doesn’t say anything.

  Then I remember that our neighborhood’s population isn’t fourteen anymore. It’s thirteen. And it will be ten until the next family moves in tomorrow.

  And all of a sudden, three people in this little van is too crammed. I’m feeling hot and it’s hard to breathe and I want to get out now. I reach over my dad and roll down his window.

  “Looking for fresh air?” he asks. “Good luck.”

  “Your dad can make any opportunity negative,” Mom says. “Don’t mind him.”

  “And your mom insists that all things be made positive and shiny and fine.”

  Then we stop at another red light.

  I unbutton my flannel shirt to the tank top underneath, and six people cross in front of our van.

  One woman wears too many layers for a sunny day and pushes a cart overflowing with big, clear garbage bags full of cans and bottles. The cart has a wobbly wheel and the glass clinks as she pushes. Two young guys with book bags rush around either side of her and disappear down below the pavement where it says Subway. Another woman, whose head is wrapped with a blue-and-gold scarf, pulls the hand of a little dark-haired boy and says something that makes him hurry up.

  There are just so many people. And so much stuff.

  There’s a deli right next door to another deli and three barbershops on the same side of the street, and all the chairs are full. Barbers wear colorful smocks and carefully drag electric razors behind the ears of their customers. Fruits and vegetables are piled on displays outside of tiny corner stores, and one woman sells doughnuts shaped like sticks from a plastic shopping cart. Another ladles something hot out of a big orange cooler into Styrofoam cups and passes it to outstretched hands clutching dollar bills. A man peels oranges in perfect circles and sells them on sticks next to whole pineapples. Another spreads out used CDs and books on a red sheet across the sidewalk and calls to all the people passing by to ta
ke a look. Music blasts from a parked car, and five men sit on milk crates in short sleeves, talking in loud tones and shuffling their feet to the beat.

  All the signs taped to the store windows are handwritten in Spanish. Se necesita lavaplatos . . . Tenemos cincuenta colores . . . Especial de jueves: sancocho. After two years of taking Spanish in school, this is the first place I’ve actually seen Spanish outside of my textbook or the back half of the manual that came with our new TV that we left in Vermont. And after two years of Spanish, I still don’t understand all the window signs. One needs wash plates? And I know that sancocho is Thursday’s special, but I don’t know what sancocho is.

  We cross over 158th Street, and 157th, and I like that the streets are numbers. It makes things feel organized and exact, and at least I won’t have to memorize a complicated map with streets like Oak and Elm and Main, like the ones we have at home.

  When we cross 155th Street, Mom says, “Now we’re in Hamilton Heights—at least that’s what the real-estate agent called it.”

  Hamilton Heights looks just like Washington Heights, with buildings that go up and up and up. I count two more barbershops and one salon with chairs tipped all the way backward, and the employees with long dark ponytails and pink aprons are doing something to the women’s eyebrows with what looks like sewing thread. I tell my brain to remember to look that up too.

  Next door, people sit shoulder to shoulder at picnic tables outside a bar that has Grand Opening drawn in bubbly handwriting with colorful markers right on the window and a big wooden sign above the door that says Hamilton’s Bar and Grill. They eat French fries out of fancy cone-shaped holders, lean in to hear each other talk, and order foamy beers off a long list etched on a chalkboard.

  It’s sixty-seven degrees here, which is twenty-four degrees warmer than it was when we left Vermont this morning, and everyone is shedding layers and pulling sunglasses down from the tops of their heads. Fast-food wrappers and supersize cups litter the curbs, and daisies, carnations, and irises wrapped in plastic bloom from buckets on either side of the automatic sliding doors of a supermarket.