Beyond Summer (12 page)

Other than the let’s-pretend green-pants lady and the construction crew across the street, our part of Red Bird was quiet as an undertaker’s parlor most of the time. A few of the neighbors came and went from their houses, but they weren’t friendly, and the old lady next door peeked out her windows at us when she thought we wouldn’t see. One evening after supper, I heard some kids over in the park, squealing and playing and talking in Spanish. Cody wasn’t thrilled that we had neighbors that
talked Mexican
. I told him not to be such a redneck.

Maybe whoever was moving in across the street had kids. . . .

Setting the paint roller in the tray, I stood up, stretched my back, and looked at the newly red wall. I wasn’t even sure why I’d gotten it in my head to paint one wall of the living room red. I saw it on a home makeover show one night, and the next thing I knew, I was grabbing the keys and heading down to Walmart to get some red paint. On the show, they hung some family heirlooms in shadow boxes on the red wall. We had Cody’s granddaddy’s chaps and a hand-woven saddle blanket, and a Choctaw baby quilt my Nana Jo made, and a rawhide quirt, some woven blankets that’d been in the family, and a few other things in a trunk Cody’d brought from Hugo. I could picture it all looking real classy on the wall, impressing Dell, and eventually Mama and Jace, when they came for a visit.

But now I wasn’t even sure the red wall looked any good at all. Cody’d probably have a heart attack. He’d say there was nothing wrong with the off-white paint that was on there before. He’d probably notice the way the sun coming in the window bounced off the new coat of semigloss, making crooked lines that showed the places where the seams in the drywall were bubbled up.

“Maybe we can just let people come visit after dark,” I muttered, standing at the door with Tyler. “What’s going on over there, Ty? You see any people?” I touched his hair, and it was plastered to his head with sweat. The sun hit the boys’ room this time of day, and it was probably hotter than a firecracker. If I didn’t finish painting and turn on the air conditioner by the time Cody got home, he’d moan about it. I couldn’t exactly tell him that since I was pregnant and probably shouldn’t be painting anyway, I had to keep the place opened up, so there wouldn’t be fumes.

“’Ere’s a people!” Ty pointed to a big black guy with a ponytail of long braids. He was single-handedly unloading a mattress from the truck. I’d seen the guy there before, while the construction crew was working. He usually had a hard hat and a clipboard, like he was the crew boss. Maybe he actually owned that house and was gonna live there.

“Huh . . .” I muttered. He looked like a guy with money—Nike Shock shoes, a big gold chain around his neck, some kind of a tight-fitting bodybuilder T-shirt, and a massive diamond stud in his ear. That thing was so big it was catching the sun like a Morse code mirror.

It crossed my mind that Benji was being awfully quiet in the bedroom. “Ty, what’s Benji doing?”

Ty jerked his shoulders up and down, still watching the truck.

“Is he playing with his toy cars?”

“Him talk da gween-pans wady.”

The muscles in my back pulled tight like elastic. “What do you mean. . . . ? You mean she’s in the house?” I swiveled toward the hall, a creepy feeling prickling over my skin, leaving behind goose bumps. There was no way anyone could get into the house. . . .

Nobody real, anyway . . .

“In da window.”

“In the window? What?” Fear sizzled through me like the electricity from a bad electrical socket. The window in the boys’ room was open, but there was a screen on it, and the burglar bars were locked. Benjamin was safe . . . wasn’t he? “Benji?” I called, heading down the hall. “Benjamin?”

He didn’t answer, and I started running, my footsteps echoing against the bare walls and rattling the stacks of needing-to-be-hung family photos. “Benjamin, you answer me! Benja . . .” I skidded around the corner, sneakers squealing, and there was my big boy, sitting in the little cubby under the bay window. He was reading a book, the sun falling softly over his dark head and turning his skin the velvet tan of a fawn’s hide. My heart settled back into my chest, and I squatted down beside the window seat, brushing a hand over his hair. “Benjamin, why didn’t you answer Mommy? You scared me. I didn’t hear you back here.”

“I was readin’ this book.” Blinking, he wiggled away
.
“It’s about a family of mouses. About the mouse lady and her babies. She’s got a bunch. They gotta go all over the world and tell some stories to all the people.”

“Hmmm . . . storytelling mice, huh?” I repeated, sitting back on my heels. Even though Benji couldn’t read yet, he had a great imagination. He made up all kinds of things. The book in his hands was a takeoff from a Disney movie with mouse characters. “Where’d we get
The Rescuers
? I don’t remember buying that.”

“Huh-uh. It’s Lady Mouse, Mama.” Scooting his rear toward me, he held up the book so I could read the title page. “See?”

The Rescuers.
“Okay, and what’s Lady Mouse about, Benji?” If Cody’s parents had been sitting on the window seat, they would of been making Benji sound out the real title, whether he wanted to or not. Being a slacker mom had its advantages sometimes. I was okay with letting him call the book whatever he wanted. Probably, he was using
The Rescuers
book to tell me a tale he’d learned in Head Start class back home, or maybe my Nana Jo had told him the mouse story, sometime. Nana Jo was always sharing old Choctaw stories with the boys.

“About Lady Mouse.” He lifted his free hand palm up, as in,
Duh
.

“What does Lady Mouse do in the book?”

His finger touched the girl mouse on the page—Bianca, who was looking rather stylish in her mink coat, hat, and muff. “She tells some stories. She made different clothes for all her kids.”

“How come she made different clothes for all her kids?”

Benji snorted, rolling his eyes. “So they wouldn’t be nekked.” He giggled, and I laughed along.

“I guess that makes sense.”

“And ’cause they gotta have pretty clothes. All kinds’a different clothes.”

“Really? That’s cool. Who’s this mean lady here?” I pointed to Madame Medusa, the evil villainess in the movie.

Shrugging, Benji turned the page. “I dunno. A mean lady, I guess. She don’t want the Mouses to tell the little girl no stories.”

“I guess not.” I rested my chin on my hand, watching him look at the pages and think about the pictures, and I had one of those mom moments when all I could do was look at my little guy and feel wonder settling over me. Only five years old, and he was already turning into his own little person. Learning things. Growing.

Tipping up the cover, I looked at the book again. “Where’d we get this, anyway?” Between the gifts Cody’s mom bought the kids, what my mom gave them, and the hand-me-downs from older cousins, I was always coming across stuff I didn’t know we had.

“She brung it.”

“Who did?”

Benji looked out the window. “The green-pants lady.”

“Ohhh, the green-pants lady.” Guess we’d finally solved the mystery of the green-pants lady. She came from the same place as Lady Mouse—Benji’s imagination. A book couldn’t just morph through burglar bars and a screen and appear in his room. “Was she here just now?”

He shot me a low-browed glance, like he knew I didn’t believe him. “Uh-huh.”

“And she brought you a book this time instead of a little animal?”

“Uh-huh. She gots a little toad, but she can’t gimme it yet. She’s gotta turn it yellow. She just remembered, brown ones’re bad luck.”

Sometimes, when you were a parent, you had to just sit back and wonder how in the world a little brain came up with things. “Wow, that’s kinda bad news for toads, isn’t it? Most of them are brown.”

“Mah-ommm!” Benji could tell I wasn’t buying the green-pants-lady-bad-luck-toad story.

I rubbed his hair. “Sorry, buddy. But some things are just pretend, all right? Like the green-pants lady and the talking mice. There’s nothing wrong with pretending things, but you shouldn’t scare—”

“It’s not pretend!” he insisted, his hands flipping into the air, then slapping down. “The lady brung it.”

I laid my fingers over his and held them in his lap, wishing I hadn’t started the argument. Now I’d have to finish it. “Benji, no lady can make a book just appear in your room. That kind of stuff is in our imaginations, which is fine, but it’s not the same as real things. One’s real, and one’s just pretend. Understand?”

Benjamin nodded, and I let out a sigh. What a relief. For once, he was going to take my word for it. Usually with Benji, arguments got settled with a million questions and a minimeltdown. He was as hardheaded as his daddy.

“Okay,” I said. “You go on and read your book. I’m gonna get back to my painting.” I started to stand up, but Benji held on to my hand. Twisting his knees under himself, he scooted toward the window, pulling me with him. I watched him turn the book sideways and slip it through the bottom corner of the screen, where the netting hung loose.

“She brung it like this.” His voice was a whisper that slid over my skin, raising a prickle of goose bumps as he passed the book through the burglar bars, then brought it back in again.

A shiver ran across my shoulders, and I leaned close to the window, pressed my nose to the screen, looked both ways. The moving crew across the street was unloading some seriously nice furniture that totally didn’t belong in our neighborhood, but otherwise Red Bird Lane was deserted. Sunny and quiet. Peaceful.

You see the features on
48 Hours
and
Oprah
—stories of normal families living in nice homes one day, then just a few days, a week, a month later, they’re in a camping trailer, or a car, or a tent. On the news reports, their expressions are numb, bewildered, ashamed. You watch with morbid fascination—the way you’d turn to look at a car wreck you pass on the highway. You can’t help yourself. Deep inside, there’s a pang of empathy that tells you it could be you, but you don’t really believe it. It fades as soon as the scene disappears from view. That could never be you.

You don’t ponder it more deeply, because it’s too hard to think about. It means you don’t really have control over your own life. Control is an illusion, a skin-deep reality you sell yourself, until all of the illusions are stripped away. It really is possible to be the family on the news. It can happen quicker than you think.

If it hadn’t been for Uncle Boone, we would have ended up on the curb with nowhere to go, but after a week of living with him, the kids trashing his condo and breaking expensive electronics equipment, even he was ready to ship us off. Boone needed his space back, and we couldn’t leave the sum total of our remaining worldly possessions stacked in his construction truck. He needed that back, too. Considering he’d just figured out that all the money he’d invested with Rosburten was gone, the fact that he’d offered to move us to a little house he was refitting for Householders was remarkably generous.

“I can hold off finishin’ that house for a while,” he’d said. “Won’t be anything happening with Householders till they decide what to do with Rosburten and all the companies it owns.” The muscles in his arms tightened, and he cursed Ross Burten under his breath.

Barbie’s only reaction had been to open her cell phone and send text message number 1,004 to my father, hoping he would miraculously reappear and solve our dilemma.

“How are we going to get out of here without the media following us?” I’d asked. For the past week, we’d been virtual prisoners in Uncle Boone’s gated condo complex.

He’d thought about it for a moment. “I’ll go out the front with the truck, and y’all can head out the service gate in the alley after a while. I’ll drive around and stop off at a few construction sites till they figure I’m not worth followin’. Ain’t nobody gonna look for y’all in that neighborhood.”

In that neighborhood
, or the way he’d said it, stuck in my mind, flapping in and out of my consciousness as we packed up our suitcases, the sibs’ toys, and the cat, piled everything into what was left of Barbie’s Escalade, sneaked out the back gate like convicts, and headed across town. Since the hand-me-down MINI Cooper I’d been driving had already gone back to the bank, I didn’t have much choice but to make the trip.

When we exited the interstate, the pit of my stomach was swirling like a ten-jet Jacuzzi. The neighborhood didn’t look so bad, at first. On the corner by the highway, a new Walmart and some fairly upscale shopping centers seemed acceptably similar to home. Within a few blocks, we passed some recently built condo complexes. Looking down the streets, I could see old mansions that perhaps needed face-lifts, but weren’t bad. We could live in a place like that—at least for now.

The streets passed by, but Barbara didn’t turn. She picked up the map Boone had drawn for her and gave it a worried glance, then looked for landmarks as we drove along. The new construction stopped abruptly, and the neighborhood went downhill. Fast. We crossed under another highway overpass, and I glanced into the rafters. There were sleeping bags, and cardboard, and pieces of clothing tucked under the girders. A man in a ragged overcoat sat on the grass by the guardrail, blankly watching the traffic pass. I looked away and hit the door locks. Barbie jumped at the sound, her eyes wide, blue circles surrounded by bloodshot white.

Neither of us said anything. In the back, the sibs were quiet, as if even they were scared of the neighborhood. Barbara set down the map. I twisted sideways and looked at it. Unfortunately, we were on the right road. A few more blocks and we’d get to Red Bird Lane, where Boone and his construction crew were unloading our belongings.

Turning to the window, I picked up my cell and started to text Emity—something like,
SOS, come get me. You won’t believe this. . . .