Getting Somewhere (5 page)

TUESDAY, MAY 22

SARAH HAS SIGNED UP FOR PACKAGING TODAY. THAT
means she got to sleep later but will have to work right up to group, no break after lunch. Grace will do the pick-up by herself today, the first one of the season, but eventually, Ellie said someone will get to go with her. They haven't signed up past this week yet.

At first, Sarah wanted to go to town more than anything, her mind racing and vaulting to determine what might allow her to be the first. It didn't take long for her to realize she doesn't really want to go at all. It's not like this is her town or she'd see someone she knows, be free to wander around, buy a Coke or sneak a toke. Town is just another promise that won't pan out.

Sarah frowns over the bag of salad mix she is filling, her hands a little rigid, clumsy with the repetition. She fumbles a bit with the little twist tie, embarrassed that it takes her a few tries to get the hang of it. Shit, who can't put on a twist tie? She'd thought this was going to be easy. Her hands are still shaky, and she imagines the little electrical impulses traveling from brain to muscle as twinkling lights, Tinkerbell hopping and jingling along the strands of nerves, learning the route again after having been on a drug vacation. Vacation in the trenches, ambrosia for the wenches.

Sarah smiles to herself, glances up to see if anyone is watching her. Grace is busy bunching together baby beets in neat little groups of five, the blood red–streaked leaves of the ones she's already done sticking up from the edges of the forty-seven baskets she has lined up in rows on wooden pallets along the wall. Grace doesn't seem that interested in her, in any of them really, and Sarah is almost glad about that. She's tired of the attention, the vigilant scrutiny of the counselors at rehab. Sarah had seen her own chart, noticed the red stamp for “suicide watch.” She smiles again at that. She guesses it must have been the scars, though Sarah's not like the real cutters who are addicted to it. It was just a game, something they did when the high wasn't enough. She doesn't need it, can stop,
has
stopped.

And it never meant she was suicidal. They should know that cutters rarely are. They made too big of a deal out of it, asked her all kinds of questions. Sarah almost felt sorry for them, how important it was to them, so she told them what she figured they wanted to hear, parroted their own words back to them; said she used it as an escape, how everything was too painful to face, that the pain of cutting gave her a feeling of control. The woman counselors wanted to hear the emotional stuff. The men seemed to want to hear that you were punishing yourself, knew how bad you were and were repenting for how you'd hurt your parents or your siblings or the family dog.

She doesn't actually know why she did it, kind of wishes now she hadn't. She took off her sweatshirt earlier today when it got so hot in the sun, but she's put it back on because she feels uncomfortable when she's in close quarters with someone else, when the red slashes, turned mostly white now like thin slices of the onions they pulled in the garden earlier, are so obvious, so . . . intimate. She doesn't want to have to talk about it anymore, explain it again. She doesn't know these people at all, but guesses they are just like the counselors at the Center or the people from the shelters who tried to round up the kids at night, promising food and a bed when they were just going to turn you in in the morning.

The salad bags are supposed to read .53 on the scale, half a pound for the contents, .03 for the bag. Tare weight, Grace said. Sarah likes that. Tare. She likes the precision of it, aiming for the exact total, sometimes having to push in another handful, sometimes removing a few leaves until the digital numbers blink the right combination, like a ship loading ballast in the hold, a special word for the balance. She is becoming part of a new vocabulary. Mesclun, arugula, mizuna, CSA, humus, sycamore, pullet—a raft of girls floating on a new sea, a garden wind blows to set them free.

Grace is looking at her, must have said something that Sarah didn't hear. Sarah tries to look attentive, smiles.

Grace nods toward Sarah's bag, asks, “Are you tired of that? Would you rather do something else?”

Sarah looks down at her hands, wonders if she's been completely distracted, lost her focus, if she's held this same bag long enough to attract Grace's attention.

“No,” Sarah answers, “I like it, unless, you know, you
want
me to do something else or I'm not doing it right or something.”

Grace chuckles. “No, you're fine. Just checking. If you're okay, we're going to head out.”

Sarah looks toward the door, sees Lauren standing there, her back to Sarah and her hands on her hips, face raised to the sun. Grace says, “And you remember about the onions when you're done with that?”

Sarah nods. “Oh yeah, no problem. I'm almost done here.”

Sarah doesn't want to admit how disappointed she is about not getting to pick the watercress. Grace had shown them that first day on their garden tour where it grows, a spring-fed pool a few yards up from where the creek water joins the river. She'd shown them the path where you have to wade in, keeping your feet on the sandy spots where the current makes firmer footing, and then how you reach into the mound of green and use scissors to cut off the branching, leafy tops. Grace had even picked a couple of leaves, had them taste it, the radishy bite sharp on Sarah's tongue. The spot was shady, idyllic, as if the scene belonged in some book about the English countryside. Sarah could see herself sitting there, dangling her legs off the bank.

However much Sarah wanted to help, she didn't think she should ask, expects that they frown on that sort of thing. When Grace told Lauren earlier that she'd be the one going along today, Sarah had to almost laugh trying to imagine Lauren wading in the creek water, getting her hands muddy. The girl can't even play a simple game of Wiffle ball without getting hurt. Sarah still can't figure out what that was all about. Maybe Lauren has some issues with physical contact, the way she'd yelled, “Don't touch me!” when all Grace was trying to do was help.

And Lauren sure didn't seem too happy about going with Grace either. It kind of makes Sarah mad the way Lauren gets the best job by being the worst worker and doesn't even seem to realize it. But that's the way it always is, the squeaky wheel thing, girls like Lauren just assuming that privilege belongs to them. What the hell is she even doing here?

Sarah starts back to the cooler to get the onions. Maybe she's being too hard on Lauren. Maybe it's just taking her a while to adjust. She's probably unhappy, and maybe Sarah hasn't tried hard enough to be friendly, though she has to admit that any gestures she's made in Lauren's direction so far have been rebuffed.

Standing at the wash basin scrubbing the dirt out of the hairs of the funny little onion people, Sarah's hands are so cold she can hardly feel them. She stares at the mottled red skin as if trying to remember where she's seen those hands before and then tucks them into her armpits, allowing herself a short break to admire the scene in front of her: Jenna and Cassie out in the garden, Ellie a little distance away, their bent backs to Sarah, the greens and golds and browns merging together like the watercolor strokes of some French painting she once spent almost a whole afternoon staring at. Cold hands, just like that day, so cold that her fingers felt frozen solid right through the gloves she'd found, separately, lying on the sidewalk in two different places. The museum day.

“Remember the museum day?” Shannon would say. They'd washed their hands and faces again and again in the hot water in the bathroom, stood in front of the steamed mirrors and made faces at themselves. Shannon had laughed out loud. Sarah will never forget Shannon's laugh, so deep and rough for such a small body. Then they'd wandered through the galleries, so stoned that Sarah found she could hardly pull herself from one canvas to the next. They'd gotten kicked out, of course, threatened with calling the police and so never dared to go back.

And here she is again, another day both like that one and not—the confusion of excitement mixed with terror, the sense that the images in front of her are unreal, too good to be true, as if, at any moment she'll be caught and sent away.

Here come Lauren and Grace, returning, but Sarah has to turn away, fight the flooding disorientation that paralyzes her, erase that picture of Shannon she thought she'd already banished: all the blood, the misshapen skull, the sirens and cops crawling everywhere afterward, picking people up for questioning and Sarah wondering what she would say, whether she would tell them that she saw him, knew what he looked like, wanting it and running from it at the same time. And now why isn't Lauren even headed this way? She is walking, instead, to the house, and Grace is staring after her, the crate mounded with green resting on her hip, her head shaking, her mouth forming words that Sarah can't hear and Lauren is ignoring. Sarah is clutching her chest for breath, her temples thudding, a line of sweat breaking out above her lip, but, even through the swirling trance that threatens to overtake her, Sarah notices that Lauren's borrowed boots aren't even wet.

Grace nearly sweeps past Sarah, slowing to squint at her face. Sarah tries to plant a smile there, to peel her hands away from the side of the tub she's been gripping to remain upright and casually drop them back into the water where the remaining onions still float. “Cold,” she says, and Grace nods briefly and moves on into the shed to place the crate of cress in the shade until Sarah has finished the onions, drained the tub, and refilled it with fresh water.

Grace goes out to pick a few more radishes while Sarah washes the cress and hurries to package it so that Grace won't notice how clumsy she is with the small bags. It would be better if she could keep her thoughts fully at this farm, stop tumbling back into that former life every other second, but her mind refuses to let her. She hears her stomach growling, and suddenly she is back on Western Avenue, hungrier than she has ever been, and so tired, too, ready to crawl into any old doorway and get some sleep.

She'd left early the previous day, had gotten up for school like always, pretended to eat her breakfast, wishing later she really had. She'd made the decision days, maybe even weeks, before but never could get the gumption to go. Learning her mom had gone to working nights at the hospital full-time had finally clinched it. She couldn't do it anymore, couldn't stand the waiting, the dreading, the pure nausea and humiliation when she heard his steps in the hallway, saw the knob turn on the door, felt his weight on the edge of the bed as he bent to remove his shoes. She'd almost told her mom, had formed the words a dozen times, tasted them on her tongue, knowing, always knowing it would do no good, that she'd take his side, refuse to believe it.

Even with the hunger, the fear, the cold, all the men she'd been with since just for a place to sleep or a meal, a couple of joints or a few dollars, she'd never considered going back. She knew it was a different Sarah they'd known, a girl that wasn't even her. The others, they never asked Sarah to be different from who she was. She'd seen them, that first day, moving through the streets and alleys like ghosts in a cemetery, before, she'd thought, they even noticed her. But she was wrong. They knew she was there almost before she knew it herself, had expanded their circle to include her before she'd known she needed it, that her life depended on it. Sarah instantly became a part of something, a world that, as different as it was, she understood perfectly. She's not sure how she'll survive if she can't find that here.

It's always all about survival. Sarah's never been asked to define love but she knows without a doubt that survival is figuring out who you can depend on. She'd probably say they are the same thing.

W
HEN
S
ARAH ARRIVES
in the living room, Lauren is already sitting there, her arms crossed tightly over her chest, legs crossed, too, a distinctly peevish look on her face. She doesn't acknowledge or make eye contact with Sarah so Sarah sits at the other end of the couch, as far away as she can get without seeming totally rude.

All four girls are seated by the time Ellie enters. She smiles at each of them, but Sarah imagines that she is also evaluating the scene, making little notes in her head about where they have chosen to sit, how they've distributed themselves, how tense or relaxed they appear. Ellie scans once and then returns her gaze to Lauren, frowns a bit, probably without even realizing it. Sarah sees it, too, how Lauren's demeanor has transformed today from her usual snootiness and superiority to something much darker, sullen and contemptuous. Sarah wonders if something happened between Grace and Lauren back at the creek today or if this is just a natural progression for when the evil queen realizes she's not nearly as powerful as she thought. Sarah thinks Ellie had better watch out for poisoned apples.