Picture This (2 page)

“I'd love to see what you've done so far,” she said. “Maybe you could show me after we clean up the kitchen.”

“Sure,” I said. If I had to name only one thing that I liked about the Ashdales, it was that they were really interested in what I was doing. It wasn't a put-on. They actually listened when I told them how my day had been or what assignments I was working on for school. So I was more than happy to get out my camera later that evening and show Mrs. Ashdale my pictures. She exclaimed over the ones that I thought were the best and asked a lot of questions.

“Who's that?” she said, pointing to the camera display screen. I squinted at it.

“Just some guy,” I said. He was a middle-aged man, and he was leaning on a shovel. He was in the bottom corner of two of my pictures. “I need those shots,” I said. “I figured I could edit him out.”

“You can do that?” Mrs. Ashdale said. She sounded surprised.

“With the software they have at the youth center, you can do anything,” I told her.

I had a few more pictures to show her, but we were interrupted by a crash and a shout from Alan: “Tricia's breaking things again!”

Mrs. Ashdale sighed.

“If you haven't already, you should make backup copies of your pictures, Ethan,” she said. She sounded like DeVon. He was always bugging me to back up my work.

“I will,” I said. “After I get the last few shots I need.”

She ran up the stairs to deal with Tricia. I looked through my pictures again and made a list in my head of what I needed to complete my project. It'll be easy, I thought.

Chapter Three

I got up early the next morning and made myself a couple of peanut butter sandwiches. I put them in my backpack along with an orange and a bottle of water. Then I headed out. I had to take two city buses and then transfer to a completely different bus line to get where I was going. It was like traveling to another country.

The bus driver let me off at the side of a two-lane highway. I darted across it and walked against traffic to a graveled side road. Fifteen minutes later, I left the graveled road for a path that led into the forest where Mr. Ashdale had taken me hiking that time.

It was cool and peaceful in among the trees. Everything smelled like pine and wildflowers, and I heard the babble of a stream running, hidden through the trees. Every now and then a chipmunk scurried across the trail ahead of me, and I heard the call of birds overhead. I wished I could tell what kind of birds they were just from the way they sounded, but I couldn't. I had to see them, and even then I only knew the basic ones: robins and blue jays, pigeons and seagulls, eagles and owls. And, of course, hawks.

I pulled out the map Mr. Ashdale had given me and that I had marked as best as I could so that I would remember where I had been. I used it to guide me deep into the woods where I had found my two hawks. They weren't in their nest, so I settled down to wait for them.

Quiet and patience were good things when you were looking for birds, Mr. Ashdale had told me. Anyone from my old neighborhood, the one where I used to live before I was put into foster care, would tell you that I am not a quiet or patient person. Normally I wasn't. But there was something about being in the woods when there was no one else around that made me feel calm and peaceful. And there was something about scanning the treetops through the lens of a camera or a pair of binoculars that made me pay close attention to what I was looking at. An hour passed before I knew it, and I wasn't the least bit impatient or antsy for something to happen.

I took out one of my sandwiches and ate it between peeks through my binoculars. I peeled my orange and ate that too. I was about to start on my second sandwich when I saw my two hawks soaring high in the sky, doing a slow, wheeling, swooping dance up there against the clear, bright blue before finally setting their wings to sail for home.

I got a couple of good shots. Then, once they were nested, I crept up to the bottom of their tree and pointed my camera directly up. I could barely see their nest from way down below. I took a picture. Then I extended my telephoto lens halfway so I could make out the clump of twigs and leaves and who-knew-what-else the two birds had glued together to make a home. I took another picture. Finally I extended my lens the whole way, for as close-up a shot as I could get. I took that picture too. I returned to where I had been sitting, unwrapped my second sandwich and ate while I waited for the hawks to go hunting.

It was midafternoon, and I hadn't done much except sit, watch and wait. But I finally got what I needed. I checked to make sure I had picked up all my garbage—like Mr. Ashdale had taught me—and I headed back to the highway to catch a bus home.

I was still in a pretty mellow mood by the time I got back to the city. I couldn't wait to show Mrs. Ashdale my new pictures. I knew she would appreciate them. So I was swinging along, humming to myself, when I got to the end of my street. That's when I saw the cop cars—two of them—pulled up to the curb in front of the Ashdales' house. In the old days, I would have been shaking all over, sure that they had come for me. But I hadn't done anything wrong since I'd been living with the Ashdales, so I knew I was in the clear. I ran up the street to see what had happened.

Mrs. Ashdale was standing on the front walk, talking to a cop in uniform. She nodded when she saw me, and the cop she was with turned. Just my luck. It was Officer Firelli. He'd busted me a few times over the years.

“Hello, Ethan,” he said with a smirk on his face to tell me he remembered me and how messed up I used to be.

I ignored him.

“What happened?” I asked Mrs. Ashdale. “Are the kids okay?”

“They're fine,” Mrs. Ashdale said. “I sent Meaghan to pick them up from the bus.” Meaghan was my age. She lived down the street. “Someone broke into the house while I was out shopping,” she said.

“Broke into the house? Did they take anything?”

“That's the weird thing,” Mrs. Ashdale said. “I can't see that anything's missing. But they made a real mess of the place. It's going to take forever to get everything put back where it belongs.”

“Someone broke in and
didn't
take anything?” That didn't make sense. Then, just like that, my heart stopped. “They must have been in the house when you got home. You must have walked in on them.” I could see it—some crack addicts were about to loot the place when they heard a key turn in the front door. “You could have been hurt, Mrs. Ashdale.” And, boy, I would have hated for that to happen. I liked Mrs. Ashdale. She didn't deserve to have some crack addict attack her.

“
You
wouldn't know anything about what happened here today, would you, Ethan?” Officer Firelli said. He was in his late twenties and a real hardnose. I always had the feeling that he didn't like me.

“Me?” I said. “What do you mean?”

He shook his head as if he had asked me the easiest math question in the world and I was so dumb I couldn't even find the answer by counting on my fingers.

“Come on, Ethan,” he said. “Are you going to pretend you didn't get that gang of yours to break into Mrs. Girardi's place when you were living there?”

I glanced at Mrs. Ashdale. My cheeks were burning. It was true what Officer Firelli had said. At first I'd hated being put in foster care, and I didn't try to hide it. The second week I was at Mrs. Girardi's, I got together with the guys I used to hang with. We broke the lock on the back door, tossed the place, took whatever cash we could find along with whatever we could sell, and took off.

A couple of the neighbors saw us. The only person they recognized was me, and there was no way I was going to give up my friends. But you know what happened? Mrs. Girardi refused to press charges. She just shrugged and said she supposed she and I were going to have to work on getting used to each other. Then she got started cleaning up the place.

I watched her for a few minutes, and then I pitched in. I felt awful when I saw her pick up a photograph album that had been thrown onto the floor. Some pictures had fallen out and someone had ripped them up. She looked sad as she held up the pieces, but she didn't say a word, which made me feel worse. Usually when I did something bad, I got yelled at or punished. But not that time. After that, Mrs. Girardi and I got along just fine—until she had her heart attack.

But I didn't know if Mrs. Ashdale knew about what had happened, and I didn't want to tell her. I was too embarrassed. So far I had done everything right at her house. I didn't want her to think I was still the kind of person I used to be.

“It's okay, Ethan,” Mrs. Ashdale said in a quiet voice. “The past is the past, remember?”

That was what she and Mr. Ashdale had told me when I first came to live with them: the past is the past, and now is now. I'd thought, yeah, right. That's the kind of stuff adults always say. But saying something is one thing, meaning it is another. When I looked at Mrs. Ashdale standing there on the front walk, I knew she meant it.

“I had nothing to do with it,” I said to Officer Firelli. “I wasn't even in town today.”

“No?” He looked like he didn't believe me. Worse, he looked like he didn't want to believe me. “What about your gang? What are they up to?”

“How would I know?” I said.

Mrs. Ashdale gave me a warning look. I knew what that meant: keep your cool.

“I mean, I haven't seen any of those guys in almost a year,” I said. “I don't hang out with them anymore.”

“You sure about that, Ethan?” Officer Firelli said. His tone was so snotty that I wanted to punch him in the face. But I didn't. Instead I looked—really looked—at Mrs. Ashdale. She looked back at me. She looked deep into my eyes. And she nodded.

“I'm sure,” I said. “If it's okay with you”—and even if it wasn't—“I'm going inside to start cleaning up.”

Mrs. Ashdale squeezed my arm as I passed her. “I'll be right in,” she said.

Mrs. Ashdale hadn't been kidding. The place was the biggest mess I had ever seen. Every drawer had been pulled out and emptied onto the floor. Every cupboard had been ransacked. Every bookshelf had been cleaned out. Mattresses, pillows, sheets and blankets had been tossed to the floor. The big calendar on the fridge where Mrs. Ashdale kept track of everyone's appointments and activities was lying on the kitchen floor.

“Are you sure nothing is missing?” I asked Mrs. Ashdale when she finally came inside.

“I guess we'll find out when we start putting everything back,” she said.

We got to work. When Meaghan showed up with Alan and Tricia, they helped too. So did Mr. Ashdale when he got home. It took most of the night, but we finally got everything back where it belonged.

“There's nothing missing,” Mrs. Ashdale said as she sank down onto the sofa.

“You must have interrupted them,” I said.

“Either that or they were looking for something, Anna,” Mr. Ashdale said.

“Like what?” Mrs. Ashdale said. “We don't have anything worth stealing, Bill.”

It was true. The house was okay, and there was always plenty to eat. But the furniture was kind of beat-up, the
TV
was old, the
DVD
player one of those cheapies from a discount store and the computer was so ancient it couldn't even run half the software that we used at the youth center. You'd have to be nuts to think you could find anything worth stealing at the Ashdales' house.

At least, that's what I thought at the time.

Chapter Four

I had to force myself to choke down the pizza that Mr. Ashdale had ordered as a treat, to reward Alan and Tricia and me for working so hard to get the house back in order. I couldn't sleep that night either. I tossed and turned and looked enviously at Alan, who always seemed to fall into a deep sleep the moment his head hit the pillow. I felt terrible about having lied to Mrs. Ashdale.

When I got put into foster care, my social worker said it would be good for me. She said at the very minimum it would get me away from the kids I used to hang out with, kids who were gang-member wannabes. I was one of those kids too. If you were in a gang, you were part of something. You knew there was always someone who had your back. You were respected. You had a place, which was more than I could say about the dump I used to live in with my father, who, if you ask me, is a total lowlife. He got busted for being part of a car-theft ring, but not an important part, not the brains of the operation. Not even close. He was one of the guys who worked in a chop shop for cash. But he knew what he was doing. He knew those cars were stolen. The prosecutor knew that my dad knew. They tried to make a deal with him—plead guilty and you'll do a little time. Roll over and tell us everything you know, you'll get probation. My dad refused. He claimed he had no idea what was going on. So they gave him as much time as they could, and I went to live with Mrs. Girardi. I didn't want to be there. I hated that I had no say over where I lived. That's why I got together with my friends and we trashed the place. I wasn't mad at Mrs. Girardi. Mostly I was angry at my dad. That was the last time I saw
all
of my old friends together. But it wasn't the last time I saw
any
of them.

A couple of weeks ago, just before the end of school, I went back to Mrs. Girardi's neighborhood. She'd always been good to me, and I wanted to see how she was doing. I'm glad that I went too. She was so happy to see me. But it made me sad to think about it now. Mrs. Girardi was in pretty bad shape. She had one of those little tubes that poked up both her nostrils to give her oxygen, and there was a big container of oxygen beside the chair where she was sitting. She had lost a lot of weight, and her skin was a dusty gray color. When I lived with her, she was always bustling around. But when I went to visit her, she didn't get up even once. I felt sorry for her, and I promised to visit her again.