Livvie Owen Lived Here (6 page)

I tossed sideways the other way and pulled my
pillow over my head. No one had put my blankets on, so they were tangled and not lined up properly. From the light outside, it seemed like four a.m., which meant I had almost two hours before I was supposed to be up.

Two hours. Two hours was a long time. Enough time to watch a movie and the beginning of another. Enough time to sleep and dream at least three dreams about Orange Cat, or the Sun House, or perhaps giraffes walking on tightropes. I thought of G and smiled, picturing her in bed right now, bouncing a little in her sleep, dreaming of a smiling giraffe teetering high above the circus tent floor.

But I was not G. I was Livvie Owen and as Livvie Owen, I had a job to do besides dreaming about the circus.

I really needed to know why the mill was calling only me. What it wanted.

The first blanket was the hardest to peel off, because my arms were trapped underneath. Wriggling one loose, I peeled back the soft quilt, then the fleecy blanket underneath, then the woven white blanket I loved best but kept in the middle so it would stay clean. One by one, I peeled my nine tangled blankets off, until I was shivering and barefoot in the four a.m. darkness.

Climbing from the bed carefully, wary of putting
weight on my still-bandaged foot, I stood uncertainly for a moment, shivering with the loss of my blankets. I was going outside, so I ought to wear shoes and jeans and a jacket. Only it was four a.m., which was when I was supposed to wear slippers and pajamas. The clock finally won, aided by the fact that my cold feet ached for fuzzy slippers. It would be almost like bringing bed with me out into the world.

It was cold outside, and almost too dark to be four a.m. My mind conjured up dark smoke, like from a factory, but I knew that really it was only clouds casting such shadows on the night.

I tiptoed the lightest past Lanie and Natasha's window. You couldn't wake Natasha, not for anything, once she was asleep, but if she had woken to read again . . . and then there was Lanie, who seemed to spring awake at the slightest little sound. I wondered again why my sisters and their sleep habits could not have been reversed, the one who loved me waking to help me and the one who hated me sleeping through my noises.

Night dampness seeped into my skin and the pressure inside got bigger. I was tempted to hum, but a hum from the driveway would almost certainly summon a parent or a sister, so instead I hummed in a whisper. It wasn't the same, but it was something.
Anyway, I told myself, I needed to keep my ears clear and sharp, in case the whistle blew.

It never took more than twenty minutes to walk from anywhere to anywhere in Nabor-with-an-A. We had lived so many different places in Nabor that I knew nearly every street, knew the best side to walk on if you wanted room away from cars, knew which houses had dogs and which houses didn't like children.

So it should be easy to walk to the factory, I thought, tugging my sweatshirt tighter around my shoulders. Drafts were working their way in from the back of my slippers and I really wished I had decided to wear shoes instead. It seemed maybe I had been wrong about which outfit was appropriate, but here I was outside and it was too late to go back.

My first job was to sneak through the trailer park. The park was slapped on the side of a hill and Simon sometimes joked that the whole thing would slip to the bottom if it rained too hard. This was our second time living in the trailer park. The first time, I was five and too little to walk down the steep hill by myself without falling. Those were different times.

I crept down the hill past sleeping trailers, long and still, looking smaller when they were sleeping.
The pink lace curtains in only one window showed a light on behind them, and a tall silhouette moved inside.
Neighbor-with-an-E,
I thought. He couldn't work locally if he was up for work already. Nabor-with-an-A didn't open till eight.

My feet didn't know the first block out of the trailer park as well as they knew other parts of Nabor. The next-closest place I'd lived was almost a block and a half away, and quite a few years ago. I remembered Lanie not hating me yet. I remembered we didn't have Orange Cat and that Gray Cat was only a kitten.

The house was small, but it was a house. White with black shutters that didn't serve a purpose, since they didn't actually shut. There were bikes out front now, too few and too new to belong to my family. I always drew the letters of my name on the wall I loved the most, so at this house, I'd left
Livvie Owen Lived Here
on the big back porch that looked tempting in the night. I thought the house winked at me as I passed, and I waved softly.

The street between this and the next place I'd lived was as familiar as Simon's hands or the hallway in my school. The next was an apartment, standing forlornly in a corner of an old building that was once a post office. I was much younger when we lived at this house. There was a wall in the kitchen that was
warm with sunshine, and this was where I'd drawn my sentence, each curve and loop of
Livvie Owen Lived Here
sketched from memory of a time someone had shown me the letters and told me what they meant. I couldn't remember who or why. What I remembered about this building was a water fountain in the kitchen and a mail slot between mine and my sisters' rooms. I remembered fluorescent lights that dimmed and brightened willy-nilly, and the way it made me hum a lot more. The memories were distant, as though I were dreaming and tomorrow G could tell me about it with the thought bubble picture on her Velcro strip. But the memory was warm, like fuzzy slippers or nine blankets.

“I think I liked you a lot,” I whispered to the apartment building. I was fourteen, so of course I knew apartment buildings couldn't whisper back, but I thought maybe it waved at me a little, just with its curtains. I gave it a wave and a soft, sad smile. It wasn't a sad place, but memories felt that way anyhow.

At the crossroads, I looked longingly left, toward the blue-and-white trailer with my name sketched on the door of the hall closet, toward the cabin with its rough walls and my name drawn on the bathroom windowsill.

Then turned right onto Pendleton Street.

There was longing on this road, too, but it was different. Older and less peaceful. It felt like a scratch that never closed up no matter how many Band-Aids my parents tried to slap on it. This road, it hurt to learn, didn't recall my step. It would have been easier to walk on the other side, where there was less gravel. If I had known in time, I could have crossed at the corner. It wasn't like there were cars at this hour, stealing through the darkness like a burglar, or like me.

“But I didn't know,” I said out loud. “I guess I did forget something.”

We stopped coming here once the whistle stopped blowing. When we lost our house at the end of the road, when we moved into the trailer park and started the string of rentals we had lived in ever since, none of us quite had the heart to turn right onto Pendleton Street anymore.

Still, as the lawns with their political signs and their plastic riding toys and their mailboxes gave way to vacant lots, to weeds and old beer cans and the start of the fence that would run alongside the factory all the way to the entrance, I felt a familiar feeling whirl up through my stomach and come to rest in my heart.

It wasn't sun yellow anymore, but there it was. The railroad track snaking behind it, the factory
holding its hand on the right. It was slightly bigger than the other houses on the street—not big in a fancy way but like it was simply overgrown, too big to be as fanciful as it was, a lot like me. I loved the way it looked at me like it remembered, windows familiar even though the paint had changed from sun yellow to moon white. I loved the way it still smelled of new paper and fried potatoes.

In the dark and the cold, I felt warm, conjuring memories of the gas furnace in the living room, the first place I ever drew my name. You lit it with a switch on top—Karen never let me touch that part—and it made clicking noises. Once it was lit, the fire sprang up inside. I was little, but I knew about fire, so I thought it remarkable that a fire could sit politely in a box on the wall and not burn down the house. The first few times you lit the heat in winter, you smelled gas throughout the house, a smell that always made Karen and Simon nervous, but to Natasha and me, it smelled like warm kitchens and fleece blankets. We stood together in front of the box of flames, arms outstretched with our blankets dripping off the backs of them, capturing the heat together. But even when we weren't there to catch the warmth, the house held it for us, no cracks or gaps for the heat to escape.

This house got a real wave. There was nothing shy about it.

I stood beside the sign tacked to the porch rail and looked at my old bedroom window, all the way on my left, the house's right, beside the factory fence. The window was acting weird, though. Instead of having warmth behind it, it felt cold and distant like it was staring at me, like maybe just this one window didn't recognize me now. Something about the windowpane made me worried, and I clenched and unclenched my shoulders a few times, then started walking a little faster toward the factory.

As I stepped through the gate, hobbling a little on my sore foot that was making me wish I hadn't walked so far, it occurred to me that I really didn't actually have much of a plan. Sometimes I thought ideas and plans were the same thing, and it turned out they were different and now it was too late, almost five according to the light. I was pretty sure the light was accurate, because the clouds had finally started to thin and drift their separate ways.

That's why it scared me so much when it started to rain, and I made a squeaking sound like Bentley and looked straight up into the sky.

Fat raindrops plopped onto my face and one
had the nerve to go straight into my eye. The rest hammered into the soft dirt at my feet, making it sticky. I knew now that I had made the wrong choice. Slippers were not for rain. Slippers were for inside only; there was that rule I had forgotten. Now my slippers would be wet and so would my sleep clothes.

I had really messed up this time.

I started to run, covering my head with my hands like I saw people do in movies. I knew it was silly because a hand is nowhere near as effective as an umbrella. I got mad at myself even for trying, but my hands didn't listen and stayed in the air. My slippered feet shuffled and tripped on the slick, wet dirt and I could feel wet blades of grass tickling up into the back of my slippers. It made me feel like I had swallowed something slimy.

“This was a stupid idea, Olivia!” I shouted as I ran for cover under the nearest roof I saw. My hand dropped from my head to cover Orange Cat's collar in my pocket, hoping I could manage to keep it dry. Cats didn't like wet. “You do not have very good ideas sometimes, young lady! Slippers are not for rain! They are to stay inside! Don't you dare go outside in your slippers, Livvie Owen!”

My voice cranked up a little louder, but the roof I had found was empty and no one would hear. It was the oddest thing, my roof. It was standing by
itself on stilts, with no walls. It seemed to be there solely to protect a bench.

The bench stirred something in the back of my memory and I shivered hard and did not sit, even though my foot was throbbing and my slippers were soggy. The night air cold but familiar on my face, I thought maybe I remembered this bench.

I smelled the paper. That was the strongest part, once the memory took hold. Somehow after all these years, the paper mill smell never quite faded from the streets and the trees and the sidewalks of Nabor, but back then it was different. More solid. Everyone hated it, talked about how awful it smelled, but to me it smelled like home.

We sat on the bench—all four of us, and that was the whole family then, although from the look of Karen, that was going to change soon—while we waited for the bus, back when there was a reason for Neighbor's bus to run to Nabor. When the bus came, a big, smelly contraption blowing smoke and darkness all over the sky and scaring me with its round, staring headlights, Natasha grabbed my hand on one side and Karen on the other and we all climbed aboard.

“Don't, don't, don't,” I said to Karen. I wasn't very good at words back then, usually using the same one over again instead of finding a second or a third. “Livvie, don't.”

“You're okay, Livvie-bug,” Karen said. “We're going to the city, that's all.”

It was the simplest, briefest memory, but it felt so warm and so familiar that I wanted to crawl under it like a blanket. Inching my wet self down onto the bench, I shivered in the darkness that was getting darker as the clouds came back.
Here I am,
I thought.
At the factory. Whistle if you dare.
But the whistle remained stubbornly silent and I realized, now that I was here, that I hadn't the first clue which building the whistle sounded from.

Funny thing about being Livvie Owen. Sometimes the more difficult thoughts, the ones like “I know the way to the paper mill, I might as well walk it,” occurred to me long before the simple ones. Here in the darkness, for the first time, it occurred to me that for a whistle to blow, a button had to be pushed or a chain pulled.

That meant a hand, which belonged to a person.

Tighter and tighter down into the bench I pressed myself. Closer and closer the dark pressed in around. Pressure started to build in my chest, in my stomach. Pressure and fear as I started to rock gently. My hands found their way into my hair and began to tug.

“This was a stupid idea, Livvie Owen,” I whispered.
“Don't you dare leave the house alone, young lady.”

Another thing, though, about being Livvie Owen. She rarely ever listened when I spoke to her. Usually when she did, it was already too late.

I rocked and tugged until the rain began to lessen, till the clouds began to go their separate ways. The shaggy fabric of my slippers was clumped together from the wet, and the backs of the slipper heels were muddy. My own heels were muddy and the feeling was cold and yuck and slime. My skin felt crawly, my muscles clenching over and over as I tried to release the pressure.