Harry Sue (6 page)

Shaking Mrs. Dinkins always made me feel lighter, so light I didn't even use my legs as I hauled myself up to Homer's tree house. Being
built
was part of my plan.

While most of his so-called friends couldn't see their way clear to visit Homer, I found being with him the most relaxing part of my day. Homer was my road dog. Unlike the crumb snatchers at Granny's Lap, who were fish and new to the system, Homer was thirteen and he'd been in the joint for two years and change already. He knew what it meant to do time. And he understood why I had to do it, too.

It was Homer who got me started with my notepad, just a small seventy-nine-cent pad of lined paper with a spiral binding at the top. Besides my toothbrush and an old paperback copy of
The Wizard of Oz
that Mrs. Mead had scored for me at a garage sale, it was my only personal. It had to be small, due to the fact that Granny regularly tossed out the little room I slept in at the top of the stairs, looking for I don't know what. Usually, I left it in the tree house for safekeeping.

Homer said I should collect evidence, like a scientist, to figure out just where my mom was and to prove she was doing her best to find me. There wasn't a lot in my notebook, but there was enough.

One time, for instance, I heard Granny say, “No, I will not accept … not from that party!” And then the phone was slammed down. Beau says only way a con or conette can call out from prison is collect. Said it might very well have been Mary Bell looking to connect.
Or another thing I put in my notepad was the day I ear hustled on Sink and Dip as they talked about a lady who'd been by the house while I was at school.

“Said she was just a friend, looking in on her. Since when does Harry Sue have friends with dragon tattoos?”

What I held out for was something real: an envelope with a stamp, maybe a colored square one postmarked just before my birthday. My pudding heart hoped that if Mary Bell couldn't connect with her baby girl by telephone, she would still try to write me some letters.

I admit that what I had in my notepad didn't add up to much. But like Homer says, “Even crumbs look good to a starving man, Harry Sue.”

I let him say things like that because, in a very deep way, Homer knew just exactly what I was going through. He still had a mom to fuss over him, but other than that, Homer had lost just about everything else that mattered.

Planning his tree house was about the only thing that kept Homer alive in the year following his accident. You can bet it was a pretty big design challenge. He needed a fully equipped hospital bed complete with an emergency alert system and a control panel for all the functions. Since Homer was alone most of the time, he had to be the one to operate it. All he had was a head and shoulders, a chin, and a tongue.

Every morning when the weather was fine, Mrs. Dinkins or Beau or some other home health aide from the county would lower the bed on a hydraulic lift and strap Homer in. They'd pin the emergency alert button onto his T-shirt so he could just reach it if he stuck out his jaw. If you want to
know what I mean, stick your bottom lip out as far as you can until your bottom teeth are in front of your top lip. Then push your chin down. That far away was where they put the alert button. Otherwise, Homer would set it off when he coughed or yawned.

With the flip of a switch, that bed was raised up, up, up, until it clicked into place in Homer's tree house. It looked just like a tree house, too, except for the bed. Mrs. Dinkins wanted to decorate, use a ladder to climb up there and put some calendar pictures on the wall from her Heavenly Highways AAA calendar. Glossy places like the Grand Canyon and Yosemite National Park, but Homer would have none of it. Busters, monkeys, T-Jones, rats—none of that in Homer's tree house. That's why he made it so if you couldn't climb the rope, you couldn't visit.

It's a wonder Mrs. Dinkins didn't build herself a home gym and start yokin' up, but even she has a teaspoon full of sense.

The bed was directly under the picture window, the one I was regularly recruited to keep free of bird poop and wet leaves and even the occasional flattened spider or nestling. Homer thought of the window as the viewing deck of a spaceship and he didn't appreciate me, his captain at arms, letting my duties slide.

He always knew I was coming before my head
popped through the hatch because the rope creaked on its metal hinge like the bellpull in a vampire movie.

And I knew as soon as I pushed open the hatch that it was without a doubt a bad day. I knew because I could smell Homer's tears. At least to me, they smell like hot pavement after rain. And I knew because his bed was flat and not raised.

“Harry Sue,” he said in a whisper as I came up to the bed. “I think it's gonna rain tomorrow.”

As a rule, I don't touch anyone. My heart, as you know, is in boot camp. But since Homer can't feel me, I figure touching him is the same as touching a statue or maybe better yet a tree since that, too, is a living thing that can't feel, and I don't have any special rules against touching trees. I stood up and took his hand. It was so cold that I started rubbing it. And then I brushed his hair out of his eyes. Yes, he could feel my fingers there, but would you have left a damp red-and-brown curl tickling at his eye and him with no defense but an eyelid against it?

“Let me get ‘Metamorphosis,’” I said quietly, reaching for the book we were reading.

It was about a guy named Gregor Samsa and how one morning he woke up to find he'd been turned into a cockroach. Just like that. One day he was a man working some boring job trying to sell pieces of fabric and the next day … cockroach.

Homer thought that was funny. But he felt for the guy, too, you know?

“I wish I could get him a bed like this right next to mine,” he said, “so we could be cockroaches together.”

I never answered statements like that, just kept quiet, looking down at Homer.

I wish teachers would test you on the things that were most important. I want Ms. Lanier to test me on Homer's face. He had the lightest sprinkle of sand-colored freckles across the top of his nose and the same golden sand flecks in his green eyes. His mother called them hazel, but she didn't know what she was on about. They were green. Not bright green, like Magic Markers or the first leaves of spring, but an old green, like tall grass in August or dry moss on the edge of the woods. His hair was always shining with loose red-brown curls. When the sun came through the skylight, those little bits of burnt red danced all over his face, in his eyelashes and his eyebrows.

I could make a profession out of studying Homer's face. I just could. But today, it was too hard to look, as his eyes were full to spilling over and he was biting his lip to keep the sound inside.

“No,” he said, letting his breath out. “It's a bad day, Harry Sue.”

Of course it was, I thought as I saw the salt trails leading from his eyes to his ears.

Take the cotton out of your ears, Fish. I feel a teachable moment coming on. Remember it: Cons don't hear crying.

Of course they cry; wouldn't you? Everybody cries, Beau says, especially at night, when you're thinking about your mama and how bad you hurt her. But no con will admit to hearing it. Not if he's your road dog.

“Want me to … ?”

Homer nodded and turned his head while I found the Kleenex box tucked into the metal rail and pulled out a tissue. I wrapped it around my finger and stuck it in Homer's ear where his tears always ran and plugged up his ear canal so he could barely hear.

On days like these, it seemed like Homer was on the edge of something, like he was starting to fall. He was just at that moment where he was about to lose his balance. I felt so nervous, not knowing whether I would be able to catch him, to save him.

Of course, I'm not talking about falling for real. It was more like a hole of sadness he was balancing on the edge of, a sadness that could swallow him up for days.

Beau says the real name for it is special handling unit, or SHU. Don't say the letters; say, “Shoe.” It's isolation, you little minnows. No people. No noise. No light. Crazy maker. But cons and conettes have their own name for it. They call it the hole.

Every once in a while, I could save Homer from the hole by grabbing him, not his body, but his mind, with an idea.

“Homer,” I said, trying not to, but sounding desperate anyway. “I need a favor. Remember Violet, that lousy cheese eater who can't do her own time? She disrespected me in a major way, Homes, and I need to lay it down.”

But my words were going nowhere. They were just puffs of air that came out of my mouth, just sound, like the traffic in the street below. I wasn't judging it right at all. Homer had already lost his balance.

I knew right then something that might work, but I sure hated to do it. Homer wouldn't make me if he could help it. Cons hate to go back to the scene of the crime. Nobody wants to relive it.

“Okay,” I said. “It's gonna be okay, Homer. Let me get the file.” I pressed the Kleenex to his face until he stopped leaking and reached under the mattress to pull out a file thick with yellowed news clippings.

Somewhere in this mess was the two-inch clipping about the Marshfield boy who'd broken his neck diving off the Grand Haven pier. But the bulk of the file, which his mother had dutifully clipped and collected at the urging of her young son, was
about me, Harry Sue, the little girl who'd survived being thrown from a seventh-floor window.

I sifted through the pile to find Homer's favorite clips, not the ones that described what happened— the who, what, when, where, how—but the ones that in the weeks following the tragedy analyzed what had happened from every possible angle.

“This one's from the
Ottawa County Courier,
” I said, my voice still shaking.

“LeDeaux,” Homer whispered, his voice hoarse. “The scientist.”

I took the cup of water from the holder at the side of the bed and put the straw in front of his lips, just barely touching. There was an important difference between the way his mom did it—parting his lips with the straw like he was a baby—and the way I did. Mine was a question: “You sound hoarse. You want to drink something?” Hers was a decision: “My baby needs a drink.”

Homer lifted his head, drank from the straw, and dropped it again.

“‘Girl Survives Ninety-Foot Drop,’ by Pierre LeDeaux. A five-year-old girl has lived to someday tell the story of how she survived a fall from the seventh floor of Destiny Towers.

“‘The statistics are rather clear,’ said Dr. Omar Melendez, chief of the emergency trauma unit at Ottawa County General. ‘Without extenuating circumstances, such as a parachute, we have no data
on the survival of individuals from drops above the seventh floor. Less than two percent of individuals survive drops from the seventh floor. By the fifth floor, your rate of survival increases to fifty percent, and most will survive a drop from the second floor as long as they don't fall headfirst.’

“‘The child's survival is attributed to a combination of factors,’ said First Response Team Leader, fireman Harper Rowell.

“‘You got rain, rain, rain, for three weeks. Heavy tree cover. Mulch. Go figure. If you'd dropped a watermelon from that high up, it's not hard to imagine what would have happened.’

“But survive she did. Little Harriet Clotkin will be a noteworthy addition to the record books….”

“Notice how he never says it,” Homer whispered. “He never says the word.”

I knew the word he meant. But for now I held it inside, like a winning card, tight against my chest.

Homer was trying. I could see it. But he was like the Scarecrow after the winged monkeys had done their work on him. All the stuffing pulled out of him, his legs in one tree, his arms scattered across the ground.

Let me fall again if it keeps him out of the hole
, I thought.
What difference does it make?

The words I read were the straw putting him back together. One word in particular worked magic on Homer. But it wasn't time to say it yet. We
were both keeping it with us in silence. Letting the tension build.

“Peter Ricci,” he said now. “Luck and chance.”

I pawed through the papers, dropping the folder to the floor once I'd found the clipping.

“‘Young Girl Lucky to Be Alive,’” I read. “Peter Ricci in the
Spring Lake Standard.
” I glanced up at Homer. His face was turned toward me. You have no idea what that meant. It was the smallest of hopeful gestures for him to turn toward me as I read, instead of facing the other plywood wall.

My heart seized up, but I looked back down quickly. I didn't smile. The thing to do was to keep reading.

“Young Harriet Clotkin is recovering from bruises, a dislocated shoulder, and two broken ribs after an argument between her parents nearly caused her death.”

I always paused at this point in the article, wanting to ask this Peter Ricci: What are you saying about my mom? You think she had something to do with this?

“Initially, Garnett Clotkin dangled his daughter out the window by one leg,” I forced myself to keep reading. “A drop from this position would have meant certain death. But she survives today because of a hard toss, a nearby elm, and a pile of mulch.”

“See how he says that,” Homer said, lifting his
head off the pillow. “It's like he's practically saying life's a crapshoot. He can't believe it, you not dying.”

Now I knew it was working. Homer's neck was stretched as far forward as it could go. If his hands were up to the task, he'd be pulling himself up.

Time for Mona Sears in the
Grand Haven Gazette.
I fanned the clippings out with my foot and grabbed the article.