Kira lingered in front of the high school as long as she could before taking the long walk home. When she saw Paul’s beat up truck sitting in the driveway, she changed her direction and went around back to the kitchen door. As she neared the steps, she paused, taking in her last clean breath before venturing into what would now be a smoke-filled house. She pushed it open just enough so she could listen for voices and get a feel for where her mother and Paul might be. When she heard the television blaring in the living room, she tiptoed in through the kitchen and through the hall toward her room.
“Mouse, is that you?” her mother called in that sickeningly sweet way that always made Kira’s skin crawl. The last thing she needed was to deal with her mother’s patronizing tone and Paul’s rude remarks.
“Yeah, it’s me,” she yelled back. “Be there in a sec.” Kira swung her backpack off her shoulder and threw it on her bed, then tried to psych herself up for the confrontation.
Kira slipped her hands in her back pockets and shuffled her way down the hall and into the living room. She’d expected to find them sprawled out on the sofa watching afternoon game shows, but instead she saw a room full of cardboard boxes and her mother pulling pictures off the wall.
“What are you doing?” Kira took a few more steps into the room about the same time Paul entered through the front door.
“Hey, Rat. Looks like you’ll be rid of me soon.” Paul chuckled, took a long drag from his cigarette, then picked up a box and went back out through the door.
“Mom?” Kira said with a little more urgency.
“Not to worry, dear. Just putting some of our things in storage. Paul got a job in California and leaves tomorrow. As soon as he’s settled, he’s sending for us. Isn’t that great?” She ripped a piece of packing tape out of the dispenser and tore it off on the tiny metal teeth.
“If he’s sending for us later, why are you packing now?”
Her mom plopped down on the couch and wiped tiny beads of sweat from her brow with her hand, transferring the black print residue from the newspaper to her face. “We just thought it would be easier packing now. There will be less work for us to do when he finds a place, that’s all.”
Kira sensed there was much more to the story than her mom admitted. “I don’t want to go, Mom. What about school? It’s my senior year and I don’t want to move so close to graduation. That would suck.”
“Now, Mouse. You’re always such a worrier. It will all work out, you’ll see.”
When Paul reentered to get another box, the smirk on his face brought anger riling up in Kira and she found herself not wanting to back down like she usually did. She had never been one for confrontation, but for some reason, she couldn’t help herself. She propped her fists on her hips and shifted her weight to one foot.
“I’m not going!”
Paul dropped the box he’d just lifted from the stack and took two steps toward her. Kira was sure if there hadn’t been a dozen or so boxes between them, she would have felt the back of his hand across her cheek.
“How dare you speak to your mother like that.” His hand flew up, pointing a boney finger in the direction of her room. “Now scat—Rat!”
Kira backed out of the room and headed down the hall, but not before hearing her mother’s response to her outburst.
“Whew! I guess I’ll have to stop calling her Mouse. She’s not so weak anymore. But then, after tomorrow it won’t matter. She won’t even be underfoot.”
Kira felt like she’d been kicked in the gut. What was she talking about? She quietly backtracked to eavesdrop on their conversation.
“Ya think she suspects?” Paul’s voiced whispered.
“Nah, she’s not smart enough to figure it out. Besides, she’s almost eighteen. She’ll be fine. I was pregnant with her by the time I was seventeen and look how good I turned out.”
“Still, we should be outta here before she gets home from school. I don’t want a scene.” Paul cleared his throat.
The sudden silence coming from the living room made Kira uneasy. Maybe they’d stopped talking because they knew she was there. She took a step away from the doorway, then another, taking extra care not to make a sound.
No wonder they hadn’t asked her opinion on the move. They had no intention of taking her with them. She slowly made her way back to her room and closed the door behind her. She spent the rest of the night curled in a ball, trying not to feel the pain—but it came anyway.
By the next morning, Kira was numb. She went through the motions of getting ready for school before finding herself in front of her mother’s closed bedroom door. She paused there for a moment, her fist poised a few inches from knocking. Confronting her mother would be useless, she knew that. And now that she knew how her mother really felt about her—that she was weak and always underfoot—she wasn’t sure she wanted to change her mother’s mind anyway. Kira would be eighteen in a few weeks. How hard could it be to live on her own? She practically did it now.
Kira let her hand drop to her side, straightened her spine and slipped out the back door without a word. She didn’t remember attending most of her classes and there was still no sign of Lydia. Between what had happened on the mountain and her mother’s plans to move, it was all she could do not to burst into tears anytime someone looked at her. That’s all she needed, to cry in front of everyone.
The trip home after school took longer than normal as Kira postponed the inevitable. Somewhere in her heart, she held a tiny grain of hope that her mom would reconsider and stay. That all changed when she opened the door to an almost empty house.
Everything was gone except for the tattered couch, a rickety coffee table and a cracked mirror that hung slightly crooked on the wall next to the kitchen.
Panic set in as Kira thought about her own things. They wouldn’t. Kira dropped her backpack and ran down the hall to her room. She half expected it to be stripped of her belongings, but as she swung open the door she saw that nothing appeared to have been touched. From her grandmother’s handmade quilt to father’s photograph sitting on the table near her bed, it was all there. Even her laptop still sat on her desk where she’d left it.
She plopped down on the bed, pressed one of her many colorful pillows to her face and screamed until her throat ached from the strain. Her gut wrenched as she turned on her side and drew the pillow into her chest with knotted fists, letting the tears flow freely—again.
Several hours passed and the room grew darker. The house felt like a tomb—so quiet and cold. The only sound came from the tree branches just outside her window, brushing against the house as if dragging its sharp claws up the length of her spine. She shivered to the core, but lay still, not daring to move. She couldn’t, fearing that what was left of her world would crumble around her.