Gram was quiet for several minutes. I got back to my drawing, a castle, with a moat and a drawbridge and four tall towers.
“We need to talk, duckling.”
“I’m very busy right now,” I said.
“Aubrey …” Gram gently took the clipboard and pencil out of my hands. “I need your help if we are going to find her. I know it might not be easy for you—but can you tell me anything about the time before she left that would help us figure out where she would go?”
I turned around, but I kept my head tipped low so that Gram couldn’t see my face under the visor. “Please?” she asked.
“She never said anything about leaving.”
“Nothing?”
“No. She just, I don’t know, stopped noticing I was there.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, sometimes she would get new groceries, or wash and vacuum all the floors, and she seemed normal, but that last week before she left… I tried to tell her things, about having dinner or maybe going to bed, and she wouldn’t even see me, or hear me, it felt like.”
“She took her address book, but she never said anything at all?”
I didn’t know which would be worse, if she had left in that hazy not-my-mother state, or if she was normal when she left, and might have known that she was leaving me behind.
“No. She never talked about… them, either.”
Gram considered me for a moment. “Do you want to?”
“What?”
“Talk about them.”
I lay down with my head on the pillow and faced the wall.
“We don’t have to talk about them,” Gram said gently. “I do need your help to find your mother, though.”
“No,” I said.
“No?” Gram asked.
“No!” I said again, shouting this time, sitting back up. “I don’t want to help you! I don’t want to know where she went or why!”
“It wasn’t the right thing, what your mother did to you, but…”
I could tell Gram was trying to keep her voice steady. She was getting angry. Maybe it was at me, but maybe it was at Mom.
“Don’t be mad at her!” I yelled.
“Aubrey, honey, it sounds like you are mad at her.”
“You don’t understand,” I said. “Leave us alone.”
Gram stood up from the bed. She picked up the laundry basket and left the bedroom.
When Gram asked what I wanted from the grocery store, I told her I was fine, thanks. She went anyway. She bought lots of food, and when she came back, she started making dinner. It smelled so good I couldn’t help opening the door to my room and letting the smell of baking chicken float in. When I heard plates and silverware being set on the table, I came out.
“Hungry?” Gram asked. I answered her by sitting down at the table. She had made plenty of food: a whole chicken, yellow summer squash and zucchini, and corn-bread muffins. She loaded up a plate. “You prefer white meat, right?”
I nodded. She passed the plate to me.
I tried to act like I wasn’t enjoying the food too much, but it was nice to have a real meal.
“More?” Gram asked.
I nodded.
Gram didn’t say anything at all about what had happened that afternoon. When dinner was over, she said she would clean up. Then she fixed me a big bowl of ice cream, vanilla with caramel on top, and sent me out to sit on the front porch. It was hot out and my dessert melted fast, but the cold ice cream felt good.
Gram kept making phone calls, learning nothing. She didn’t ask me to help again with the looking-for-Mom business, and I didn’t volunteer. She didn’t even make me help when the police came to ask questions; she just told them what I had said about Mom leaving.
I parked on the couch in front of the TV and numbified my brain.
“Don’t you have friends to play with?” Gram asked.
“Nope,” I said.
“You used to play with lots of kids.”
“Yeah, well… they started treating me different. It wasn’t fun anymore.” After that chocolate-ice-cream incident with Pennie Layne, even my best friend, Maggie Rose, had decided I was—as she put it—crazy as ants on a Popsicle.
After that, Gram didn’t try to make me do anything. She let me sit in the living room, on the couch that had her bedding on it, because that was where she was sleeping at night.
I listened to her talking on the phone. She kept calling my aunts and uncles on both sides of the family, and even those dumb church ladies. Mostly, I’d hear her talk about Mom, but then I heard her talk about me. I was pretty sure she thought I couldn’t hear her from the living room. But I did. I got up and went to the kitchen doorway to listen better.
“Aubrey needs… I mean, I don’t know…” She was having a hard time talking. “I just don’t think I can take care of them both, Aubrey and Lissie…. You would?… You would?… That would help so much.”
I didn’t know who she was talking to or what she was planning. I couldn’t stand it. I walked into the kitchen and slammed against one of the chairs as I walked by. It made a big noise hitting the table. Gram looked up, startled. I went in my room and shut the door. I put on my waltz music and lay down on my bed.
An hour later Gram came into my room. Her eyes were red. She must have been crying.
I got off the bed and turned the music up. I put on my Disney World visor and got my softball and started tossing it against the wall and catching it.
Gram looked as if she wanted to say that I was going to hurt the wall, but she didn’t. Instead, she said, “Sit down, Aubrey.” When I didn’t listen, Gram said again, with an edge to her voice, “Sit down.”
I sat, but kept tossing the softball up and down. Gram took it from me.
I folded my arms over my chest as she left the room. By the time she came back, my door was locked and I was in bed with my sheet pulled over my head, even though it was a hot night. I blocked out the sound of Gram’s knocking on the door by listening to my music first, and then the loud crickets and cicadas outside my window.
I couldn’t stay shut in my room forever. The first reason was because I had to pee. The other reason was because Gram made fried eggs and bacon and toast for breakfast and it smelled really good. I broke down and opened the door. Neither of us said a word as I ate breakfast.
Gram spent almost all day on the phone again, and I spent almost all day in my room. I expanded my castle drawing onto more sheets of paper and started taping them to my wall. I opened my favorite book about the Middle Ages and copied some of the things from the pictures. I drew the stables and the banquet hall. I made the walls really thick, in case of enemy sieges with battering rams.
“Aubrey? Can I come in?” Gram asked in the late afternoon, pushing my door open.
I finished taping up a new piece and shrugged.
“Sit down,” she said, but she said it kindly, not like she had the night before. I nodded and sat; she sat next to me and took my hand. Her hand was surprisingly soft for someone who liked to wash dishes so much. She smoothed my hair with her free hand.
“Everybody’s going to help us look for your mother. They’re going to help us find her.” She kept her fingers in my hair even though I didn’t say anything. “Did you know that your parents picked someone to take care of you if anything ever happened to them?”
I shook my head slowly. “Who?”
“Me,” she said.
“Oh,” I said. After I had been so horrible over the past few days, she was probably going to decide she didn’t want me, either. “I’m fine,” I said. “I’ll be fine here by myself. I like it.”
“You can’t stay here,” she said.
“What am I going to do, then?” I asked.
Gram squeezed my hand and got up from the bed. “I’m taking you home.”
Gram woke me up in the morning by climbing into my bed and telling me a story. I didn’t hear the beginning of it, just the middle.
“So this child nam
ed Aubrey was the bravest of children—”
“Why?” I interrupted. “What made her so brave?”
“I’m not sure. I think it had something to do with her heart.”
“Yeah?”
“She wrapped it up in cellophane, to keep it fresh for later.”
I didn’t know whether to laugh or not, so I just said, “Gram.” She seemed done telling the story, now that I was up.
“Today we are going to go on a great adventure.”
“Yeah?”
“Of course. We are going to go to Vermont.”
“Oh,” I said. “I don’t feel like an adventure.”
“Well, you can’t get around having them. It seems to me you just had a big adventure, taking care of yourself.”
“I guess,” I said. “What about Sammy?”
“Of course Sammy may come, too! Everything you need can come with us.”
I wondered if I could pack a big box of cellophane.
It turned out everything I needed had to fit in three bags. One for Gram to carry with her own bag, and two for me to carry. I didn’t have any luggage, just a backpack. Gram said to take something from Mom and Dad’s room. She was busy, for some reason believing the house had to be clean before we left. While she scoured the kitchen counters, I went upstairs to my parents’ room.
I stood outside their door for a minute, my hand frozen on the knob. I hadn’t been inside since she left. Finally, I pushed the door open and crept quietly into their room. When I opened the closet where Mom and Dad had kept their suitcases, Mom’s was already gone. Some of her shirts were missing from the hangers. Her dresser’s top drawer was open, the underwear drawer. It was empty.
I shut the drawer and stared at the picture of our family on the dresser. It was from last summer’s town picnic. Savannah is six, I am ten. I’m poking her, just for fun, and she is smiling, hanging on to Dad’s leg. Dad has his arms around Mom, and she leans back to rest against him. If you wanted to split us all up, you couldn’t, because you couldn’t tear just one of us out of the picture without ripping someone else.
The picture slid easily out of the frame. I wanted it but I didn’t want to look at it right away. I found an envelope in Mom’s stationery drawer, tucked the photo inside, and sealed it. After taking Dad’s small suitcase with wheels and his duffel, I went downstairs. I was carrying too many things at once, so I dropped the envelope on the kitchen counter and went into my room to pack.
The train station was an hour away. Gram called for a Town Car. It came and parked in our driveway. The driver was nice, an older man named Stan who said he “apperciated our bizznezz,” and that he and his wife could go out to dinner as a treat because we had called. He told us that while he put our bags in the trunk.
I held Sammy myself. He was inside a plastic bag, inside his fishbowl, inside a plastic-cloth camera case. I could hold the case on the train and open the plastic bag for him to get air. I also held my pillow. I pressed my face into it because it smelled of home and my own bed, and me, I guess.
Stan held open the door to the backseat for us.
“Gram,” I whispered. “I can’t.”
“Come on, duckling. It’s okay.” Gram took my elbow and guided me off the porch steps to the car, and made me climb into it. She sat right next to me, continuing to squeeze my elbow. We put on seat belts. I looked out the window, silently saying goodbye to my house, which was locked up and empty. I wondered if Jilly was still inside, or if even she had left.
The driver dropped us off at a small platform along the side of the road in the middle of a town. The platform had a little house for the ticket seller, a restroom, and a pay phone. I stood on the platform with the luggage and Gram bought us tickets. One-way tickets north.
“We’re going to be on this train overnight,” Gram said. “Then in the morning we have to change trains in New Haven to get on the special Vermont line!”
She announced the plans with excitement. I wondered if that was excitement in my stomach. If it was, it felt just like wanting to lean over the tracks and throw up. Nervous sweat wet my forehead. I had to sit down and hold my stomach.
I was sick of feeling sick all the time.
“Here.” Gram handed me a train schedule with my first ticket tucked inside. “I’m going to go use the ladies’ room. I’ll be right back.”
I opened the train schedule. I started reading train times. Ours would come at 5:30 p.m. I looked at our path north. Then I read the opposite side, which showed the same train line going south. To Georgia. Where Dad’s family was from. We used to live there, too, until I was six. I followed the list to the stop—Savannah, Georgia—where my sister was born. I stared at her name in bold on the train schedule. Savannah.
I slid my ticket out of the schedule and held it in my hands. I tried to read the information on it, but it was all blurry. I found a little notch in the edge of the ticket and pulled at it.
By the time Gram got back from the bathroom, I was sitting with a pile of stiff paper shreds.
“Aubrey!” she exclaimed when she realized what the blue paper bits were.
She was going to kill me. I knew it.
“I didn’t mean to,” I said, my voice shaking. “I don’t know what happened.”
Maybe she would yell at me, I thought. Maybe then I could yell at her again, and blame everything on her.
She scooped up all the pieces. When she spoke, it was softly. “Aubrey, you can’t stay here.”
I couldn’t agree with her, but I couldn’t argue with her, either. I took three deep breaths. Gram took out her wallet, which was fatter than I would have expected. She counted out four twenty-dollar bills and handed them to me.
“They won’t replace a ripped-up ticket. You’ll have to get a new one. Go inside and tell the man you need a ticket to New Haven on the next train.”
My feet shuffled, but they went. They walked me into the little house and up to the counter. My mouth mumbled, “One ticket to New Haven on the next train, please.”
Gram didn’t say anything about the money I’d wasted. She just took my hand when I came back to the platform and said, “Everything’s going to be okay.” When I shook my head, she added, “Think of this as a trip. Just a grandma and her girl, off on their adventure.”
I took more deep breaths. An adventure. An adventure. Just a little trip with Gram. Kids could go on trips with their grandparents for any old reason. I was beginning to calm down.
When the train came, we hauled our bags on board. I wondered if we’d have to pile them in our laps, but there was plenty of room on the shelf above our seats.
I had never ridden on a train like this one before. The seats were big, with tray tables and footrests. Each car had a bathroom, and there was a dining car. I relaxed as I watched Virginia roll by the windows. The tracks were lined with towns and houses. I wondered what it was like to live along the tracks like that.
I took out my book and my headphones. I held Sammy’s bowl in my lap. After a few hours we passed through Washington, D.C. We didn’t really see all that much of the city from the train.
At dinnertime, we went to the dining car. They served hot food! A picture menu hung above the counter where you paid and picked up what you ordered. We got hamburgers. They came in little plastic bags that the attendant heated in a microwave. We sat down in a booth, and about ten minutes passed before I could even hold my burger because it was so hot. It was a little soggy from all the steam that had collected inside the plastic bag. I peeled off the bun and squeezed three packets of ketchup on it.
I watched Gram eat her burger.
“Have you eaten on a train before?” I asked.
“Yep,” she said. “On the way down.”
“What did you get?”
“Pizza.”
“Was it good?”
“It was hot. If you’re hungry again later, you can get one.”
That sounded good. I would have to remember to get hungry.
“Gram
?”
“Yeah?”
“Is it weird to eat kid food?”
“Kid food?”
“Yeah. Squishy burgers and squishy pizza from the microwave?”
“What’s kid about it?”
“I don’t know, it’s just plain and soft.”
“Old-people food and kid food are the same thing. Think about it. Baby food for babies. One day someone will feed me mush off a spoon again. This squishy food is all just part of the fun of riding on the train.”
“You’re not that old, Gram,” I said. She had gray hair and sun wrinkles, but she could still carry around all that luggage without complaining.
“Sixty-six, don’t you forget it. Until my birthday,” she said. “Then, add one.”
I suddenly remembered the photograph I’d left on the kitchen counter. “I forgot…”
“What did you forget?”
“Oh, nothing.”
“Anything you forgot we can replace when we get there,” Gram said.
I doubted it.
There were fewer passengers on the train after dinner. Gram moved to the seat across the aisle from me and told me to try to get some sleep. I was happy I’d brought my own pillow. I nestled it under my head and curled up on the seat. I fell into a funny sleep for a while; then Gram woke me up again.
“New York City,” she said, pointing out my window.
I had never seen New York before, and was glad she’d woken me up. The string of glittery lights across the water stretched on for a very long time. I watched it until it disappeared, and then I fell back into a dreamy sleep. Once I woke and looked out the window to see water lit up by the moon, and another time I looked out to see what I thought was forest.
In the early morning Gram woke me up with a cardboard tray of breakfast.
“Breakfast in bed,” she said. It was another hot sandwich in plastic. Ham-Egg-Cheese Croissant, the label said. She had also bought me a plastic cup of orange juice with a foil lid.
A few minutes before we got to New Haven, Gram had us collect all our things so we’d be ready to get off the train. This station was bigger than the one in Virginia. There were lots of platforms and many trains coming and going. Gram said that we had a while to wait for our next train, so she let me curl up next to the luggage and nap, and after a while she bought us turkey sandwiches. The morning air was cooler than it had been in Virginia, and it felt like it rushed through my nose when I breathed. That made me feel like I had a little bit of a headache.