Livvie Owen Lived Here (2 page)

My eyes blinked back and forth, but my parents weren't lying, either. I could tell by their eyes not moving away from mine. So mine did the moving instead, rolling up to the cupboard, which now had an empty spot on the far right side of the top shelf. I started squeezing my joints tight, first my shoulders, then my elbows, then my wrists, all the way down to my toes, trying to use the technique Miss Mandy taught me to relax when I got upset.

After a few minutes, a breath went out of me and then I felt less pressure, maybe like I wouldn't explode now. I let myself lean back against Karen and relaxed my muscles a little.

“Ouch,” I said faintly.

“I'll bet,” my mother said, planting a kiss on top of my forehead.

“I didn't mean to wake you,” I said to Lanie.

She sniffed. “Whatever. Don't do it again. I have stuff to do.” I heard her feet shuffling with impatience all the way back to the bedroom.

My mother stroked my hair back out of my face and dropped another kiss on top of me. “She's just nervous about her science fair,” she said. “Don't worry about it, honey.”

“What were you doing standing on a chair in the middle of the night?” my father's somewhat-less-sympathetic voice asked from his place at my foot.

“Oh.” I forgot about that part. “It's not really the middle of the night. It's only a little after nine. I started thinking about how Lanie did the dishes, and she never does the cups right. I couldn't sleep.”

“Well, I think your old folks were right about standing on chairs not being safe,” my father said. I loved him for a lot of reasons, but one of them was because that was
all
he said. Lying on the floor with a dish towel around my foot and the remains of my mug scattered around me on the floor, I could easily see what a stupid idea it was to stand on a chair in the middle of the night. It was seeing these situations from the other end, before they happened, that was the hard part. Apparently, you just never knew when an imaginary factory whistle was going to startle you into breaking something.

My father finished wrapping my foot and hooked his arms under mine, lifting me onto my good foot. “Well, I think you're going to live,” he announced. Then added drily, “I think the floor's going to make it, too.”

“Don't move,” my mother said, perhaps a little more sharply than she intended, when I started to hobble toward my room. “Let me get the broom.”

Before I could answer, the trailer jumped with the force of a firm knock on the door. We all three tensed again and nobody moved for a minute.

Unless we were expecting a package or we'd moved next door to someone good at baking, a knock on the door almost never meant anything good. Sometimes it was the guy in khaki who came to shut off the water. Other times it was the neighbor complaining because my cats got loose in their yard.

Tonight it was one of two people, and neither one of them was welcome. It was either Glenna from one door down, or it was Janna from one door up.

“Please be Glenna!” I hollered as Simon finally moved to answer the door. Karen shushed me. The door opened and the first thing to blow in on the stiff October wind was three orange leaves.

The second was not Glenna. It was Janna and she wasn't smiling.

“Good evening,” my father said formally, and I
wished he slept in something other than his boxers and a T-shirt. I felt my face get red.

“Simon,” Janna said with a stiff nod for my father. Then, glancing at my mother, “Karen.” Her eyes slipped over the top of me without focusing. My eyes were more than happy to avoid her, too. Her stern lips and thin cheeks made me queasy.

“Bed,” Karen said firmly before Janna could say anything else. With her hands on my shoulders, she steered me around the broken glass. I limped on the tiptoe of my injured foot and hobbled down the hallway toward my bedroom, casting a nervous glance over my shoulder as I did. Simon offered Janna a chair, and she refused. Her sweatpants had stains. I didn't like the way she was frowning.

Karen looked at me lovingly as she led me to my room, but there were other emotions all tangled up in the creases around her eyes. I couldn't name them all. Miss Mandy liked to tell me it was okay not to know the names of all the emotions I saw, but I didn't like not knowing the names for things. I liked names. I liked to memorize lists of them. These emotions weren't simple like the happy and sad and angry flash cards Miss Mandy liked to show me. They didn't make flash cards for this.

“Sweet girl, please don't get up again tonight,” my mother pleaded.

I felt an uneasy feeling in my stomach that I think was called guilt. This one was familiar enough I had a name for it. “I promise,” I said quickly.

Her smile looked tired. “Good girl.”

“Hey, Kar—Mom?” She accepted me calling her Karen, but sometimes joy got crinkled up in her eyes when I called her Mom, so I tried to remember. “Was there really not a whistle?”

“I don't know, darling. I just didn't hear anything.”

“ 'Cause I heard it loud and clear. Just like at the Sun House. Six and six.”

She smiled and kissed my forehead one final time. Then turned on my fish lamp and turned off my big light. She piled my nine blankets on top of me so I felt weighted down enough to sleep.

“Good night, Livvie-bug.”

“Good night, Karen.”

Only, tonight I couldn't sleep, not with Janna's voice going on in the kitchen, loud enough to hear over the familiar whir of my fish lamp. I turned on my side and watched the little plastic speckled fish swim endless circles around their tiny swath of fake ocean. I wanted to hear the ocean, like Tasha showed me in a seashell once. Instead I heard Janna and caught the words “inconsiderate” and “out of control.”

Not quite forgetting my promise to Karen, but hiding it in the back of my thoughts, I slipped from my bed just behind her and crept down the hallway to listen. Janna was pretending to be patient. I knew she was pretending because she was talking faster than usual and I could hear a note of stress in her voice.

“When you first rented,” she said, “you told me she was better. After last time, I thought . . . but you told me she was better, and I took you at your word.”

“She
is
better,” Karen said quickly, as though offended about something.

“She doesn't
sound
better.”

“It doesn't happen overnight, ma'am,” Simon said. Anyone else might have thought he was calm, but I could hear the venom in his tone. “She's
better
, not
cured
. There haven't been any miracles, but she's grown up a lot and she has more self-control than she used to.” I sort of felt like I had swallowed something cold. I didn't like hearing them discuss me this way.

“Well, see that she manages to control herself at this hour in the future,” Janna said stonily. “Half the neighborhood is awake and if they complain to me, I'm going to have to complain to you.”

“Have a nice night, Janna,” Simon said firmly, and I heard him close the door behind her. Immediately,
he began to swear, running his hands through his graying hair over and over. I knew he was doing it because he always did. My mother shushed him and got the broom.

“You're all right,” she said softly.

“I'm going to start looking out of town,” he answered, beginning to pace the length of the kitchen. I could hear the linoleum creaking under him, back and forth across the darkened room. “I'm going to have to.”

“Oh, we're not there yet,” Karen said briskly. I heard stitches pulling and knew she was picking at her robe. It had almost no embroidery left anymore.

“Are we going to wait until we
are
there before we deal with it?” Simon asked tiredly. “If we lose this place, we're not going to find another one in Nabor. We've burnt all our damn bridges.”

I waited for Karen to tell him he was wrong. Not finding a place in Nabor meant living someplace else. Not acceptable.

“But Livvie loves it here, Simon. We all do.”

His voice got longer like the shadows down the hallway. “I can't always make everybody happy. We have to eat, Kar. We have to have a roof. If it's a roof in another town, well, it's still a roof and we still have to have one.”

She didn't answer and I wasn't sure I knew how to,
either. The tiles and the floorboards and the sidewalks of Nabor had been my home my entire life. I couldn't imagine living anywhere else. Slipping quickly back into my room, I burrowed under my nine blankets and had a serious discussion with myself.

“Livvie, you cannot do this again,” I whispered. “You have to control yourself.”

From deep inside me, a response wisped up like smoke, but it was only another question.

“Shush,” I answered in the darkness. “I don't
know
how. You're just going to have to do it.”

Heavy blankets were what Karen would call “a mixed blessing.” Heavy was good because it held me down to the bed and made me sleep. It was also bad because it made it difficult for me to jump awake in the morning and escape my scary dreams.

This morning my kicking feet made me remember quick that one of them was hurt. The events of the night before came flooding back, and my fingers clenched involuntarily as though trying to recapture my coffee mug.

“Oh, crap, what am I going to drink my yogurt out of this morning?” I mumbled to the plastic fish swimming circles by my ear.

It was my experience that whatever sentence I happened to say upon waking set the tone for the rest of the day. If it was a good sentence—something
like “No school today” or “Wow, Lanie, you look like you're in a good mood”—I could count on having a good day.

But if it was something bad—something like “Lanie, get out of my face” or “Oh, crap, what am I going to drink my yogurt out of this morning?”—I could pretty much count on a crummy day to follow.

I started blowing through pursed lips, hard. Sometimes doing breaths like this made the frustration stop building up inside me and the pressure never got big enough that I needed to let it out another way. As long as I could remember, the pressure had been there, but it got a lot bigger the year the whistle stopped blowing. Miss Mandy liked to talk with me about it, insisting that by talking, I gained ownership, which I think meant I was supposed to be able to make the pressure go away when I wanted.

“A lot of people who have autism,” she said, “have something similar to this pressure of yours. But they learn to control it and you can do the same. Just breathe with me.” She would take several deep breaths, blowing out through her lips. Her breaths made her teased bangs wobble. When I did it, my tangles got tangled up further and my bangs brushed
my forehead, making me shiver. “There now. Isn't that better?”

I said the words to myself as I worked on getting calm. “There now, Livvie. Isn't that better?” After a minute, I was calm enough to peel off my nine blankets one at a time. My bandage had shifted a little in the night and blood had seeped onto my sheet. I covered it up quick with the blanket so I wouldn't have to look at it; I didn't like seeing spots on things. Squirming out of bed, I limped across the flattened carpet to stand on the metal heat vent on my one good foot. The metal dug stripes into the bottom of my foot, but it was worth it to catch every breath of warm air the aging trailer could cough out.

Properly warmed, I stuck my good foot in its slipper and adjusted the bracelet on my wrist. The bracelet used to be a kitten's collar, back when Orange Cat was little enough to fit into it. The jingling ID tag was still attached, and my remaining cat, Gray Cat, came skittering out from under the bed, hoping for a jingle toy. Halfway across my room, her claws caught the carpet and she skidded to a stop, staring in horror at the fuzzy slippers that I wore every single day. She never stopped being afraid of them.

“You're silly, Gray Cat,” I informed her, stretching my arms above my head to get awake. Hopping on my
one good foot, I headed for the kitchen, where I found Lanie pacing tiny circles on the green linoleum. Lanie spent a lot of time in the mornings getting ready, for a kid who was only in middle school. It was my first year of high school and I didn't spend half as much time, preferring to use my time wisely, petting Gray Cat or thumbing through a real estate catalog.

Lanie cleared her throat and faced the sink, which I think was her imaginary audience. “The reason I chose this topic for the science fair is because I wanted to make a difference in the way people perceive mice. Mice are not such bad creatures once you get to know—would you stop hopping? Once you get to know them.” She cleared her throat importantly. “Meet Bentley. Bentley is a mouse, but that doesn't stop him from being a caring and considerate friend. Bentley is also quite smart. He is—would you
stop hopping, please?
—he is able to find his way through a complicated maze to get to the—
Mom! Make Olivia stop hopping! She's driving me crazy!
”

“I
have
to hop!” I hollered back. “I cut my foot last night and I can't walk on it! How am I supposed to get to breakfast if I don't hop?”

“You could always starve,” Lanie snapped. “Mom, make her stop hopping so close to Bentley! If you knock over his cage, he'll get loose and your stupid
cat will eat him, and then I'll have to eat your stupid cat!”

“
Karen!
” I bellowed. “
Lanie's going to eat my cat!
”

“Girls!” Karen came into the kitchen, also hopping, pulling on her slipper with one hand and balancing herself on the door frame with the other. “Please get your breakfast and sit down without killing each other. Just one morning I'd like to not have to plot how I'm going to hide the bodies.
Simon!
Natasha's not awake yet and it's your turn!” Slipper in place, she lowered her other foot to the floor and shuffled to the counter to start the coffee.