The man behind the counter was reading a paper. He looked up when I came in, pushed his glasses up onto his bald head, and waited.
“Can you tell me where ABC Cab is?” I asked.
“Two doors down,” he grunted, nodding his head just hard enough to knock his glasses down onto his nose.
I went back outside. Another flash of lightning split the sky, followed by a boom of thunder so loud, it rattled the windows behind me. Rain was coming down hard and fast at an angle, and I had to jump over several large puddles to get to the tiny little storefront two doors down with a faded cardboard sign in the window I hadn’t noticed before. ABC CAB.
“How much to Hilltop Home?” I said, shutting the door behind me and wiping the water off my face with my wet sleeve.
“Hilltop?” the man behind the counter said, giving me a slow, long look. “I thought that place was closed down.”
“It’s not,” I said.
“If you say so. It’s quite a ways from here though. Cost you fifteen.”
I knew that already, of course, but I was stalling for time. I was supposed to call Bernie back in a few minutes. Maybe if I called her from here, she would be able to talk the man into driving me up to Hilltop for free somehow. I looked around for a phone, and that was when I noticed the jelly-bean jar on the counter filled with ancient candy, faded and crackled. The sign taped to the side of the jar said, GUESS HOW MANY—WIN THE BEANS, PLUS A FREE RIDE!
“Can I hold the jar?” I asked the man.
He jerked his head toward it as a way of saying okay. “Feeling lucky?” he asked.
Was I? When I’d played the slots in Reno and bought the lottery ticket with Georgia, I hadn’t felt lucky. Luck didn’t feel like anything; it was just there. Like air. Then when the phone lines had gone down and I couldn’t reach Bernie and my money had been stolen, I felt like my luck had deserted me. Left. I could feel its absence, like when you lose a tooth and there’s an empty space there that you can’t help touching with your tongue because it feels so strange.
The man watched me as I picked up the jar and turned it slowly all the way around. All the colors in the rainbow, just like Mama’s shoe box full of crayons. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. Suddenly I was home, sitting in the kitchen having “school” with Bernie. Books and papers lay on the table in front of us.
“Blue!” shouted Mama happily from the other room.
“You go, Picasso!” Bernie called out to her. Then she turned to me and smiled.
You go, Picasso!
“One thousand, five hundred twenty-seven,” I said.
When I opened my eyes, the man was staring at me. “That your guess?” he asked.
I nodded, and he opened the cash register drawer and pulled a little piece of cardboard out from under the money tray. His jaw dropped. He looked at it carefully, as though he couldn’t believe his own eyes, and then handed it across the counter to me. The number I’d guessed was written there in small black handwriting.
“I’ll be a son of a—How in blazes did you do that?”
I smiled. Turns out my luck hadn’t deserted me after all. I stood there with that big jar of jelly beans in my arms, thinking just because you can’t feel something doesn’t mean it’s not there.
“Can you take me to Hilltop?” I asked.
The man shook his head and clucked his tongue.
“Like I said, I thought the place was closed down, but hey, it’s up to you where you wanna go. You won the ride fair and square. Ha, fair—fare—get it? My shift’s done anyways. I’ll take you up myself.”
The “cab,” an old dented station wagon, its back bumper tied on with rope, was parked in the lot across the street near where the bus had let me off. I got in the back with my suitcase, backpack, and the jar of jelly beans. I was supposed to call Bernie back, but it was still raining hard and I decided it would be better to get up to Hilltop first and to call her from there.
“Somebody ’specting you up there, are they?” the man asked as he started up the engine and set the wipers on high speed. “’Cause this free ride ain’t a round trip, just so’s you know. I hope they’re waiting with a big towel to dry you off with.” He chuckled, looking at me in the rearview mirror.
I looked out the window and caught sight of a young girl standing in the rain, her long tangled wet hair framing a narrow, serious face. For a split second I wondered who she was and what she was doing out there all alone, and then our mouths fell open at the same time as I realized I was looking at myself reflected in the window glass. She was me, Heidi It.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Pretty
It looked different from the photographs. Older. The shutters had been removed and the whole place was painted dark green instead of white. Only the sign was the same: HILLTOP HOME, LIBERTY, NEW YORK.
“Here we are,” said the driver, stopping at the bottom of the long dirt driveway. “You’re sure it’s still open?”
“I’m sure,” I said. “See? There are lights on up there.”
“Oh, yeah, I see. Well, I brung a fare up here once years ago, and I think I remember there’s no good place to turn around up top, so since it ain’t raining no more, you mind walking up?”
I said I didn’t mind, thanked him, and got out.
“That was some lucky guess you made back there, kid,” the driver said just before he pulled away. “Man oh man, what I’d give for a little of that kind of luck on bingo night.”
I stood there looking up at the place I’d traveled all this way to get to, and it looked back down at me with half-shut window eyes and a porch mouth full of railing teeth.
Listen to the eyes, Heidi.
But I couldn’t tell anything from Hilltop’s face.
Even though it wasn’t that far away from downtown Liberty, only about fifteen minutes or so, the storm had either skipped over the area or not reached it yet. The sky was an ominous dark gray, but the ground was still dry. As I started slowly up the steep driveway, a sudden gust of wind blew through and caught in the shaggy boughs of an old hemlock tree. Soof, they whispered softly as they swayed overhead. This time I didn’t cover my ears. I was glad to hear Mama’s word there, reminding me one more time why I had come. My shoes kicked up little clouds of fine brown dust as I quickened my pace and hurried up the driveway.
Up the wide porch steps, past a couple of pots of flowers and a pair of white-painted rocking chairs with wicker seats. The square panes of glass in the front door were covered by a lace curtain inside. I knocked but nobody answered. Setting my suitcase and the jar of jelly beans down on the porch, I knocked again, and when nobody came, I turned the knob and walked in.
It smelled old and musty, like Bernadette’s medicine cabinet when you first slid it open. There wasn’t much furniture in the front room, just a vinyl couch with big round buttons on the cushions and a couple of matching armchairs.
“Hello?” I called out, and after a minute again—“Hello?”
No answer, so I went down the hall toward the sound of the voices. I passed a large kitchen on my left with big metal pots hanging from a rack over a long counter, and on the right a bathroom with white-and-black checkered floor tiles. Then came a small room set up like an office, with a phone and a typewriter on the desk. The voices were coming from behind a tall wooden door at the end of the hall, and as I got closer, I was able to make out bits and pieces of what was being said inside. There was music playing, either a record or someone strumming a guitar.
“David, do you want to be the cheese?” I heard a woman’s voice ask.
At least that’s what it sounded like she’d said. I felt uncomfortable standing out in the hall like that, eavesdropping,
“Hello?” I called again, hoping maybe the woman inside would hear me, but the door was heavy, and too much was going on behind it for anyone to hear me calling. I glanced to my right, into the little office with the typewriter and phone. I hadn’t noticed at first, but there was a big gray filing cabinet in
there too, stuffed so full of manila folders, the drawers couldn’t possibly have shut. So many folders. Hundreds. Each one tagged with a small blue label across the top that looked like it could have a name written on it.
Get whatever answers there are to be gotten, Heidi.
I wish I could say I had trouble deciding what to do next—but I didn’t. I knew it was wrong, but the thought that one of those folders might contain the very truth I’d come so far to find made it easy.
Once I’d stepped inside and closed the door behind me, I found that the room was in fact considerably larger than I had originally imagined. There was a separate alcove off the little office, with a patterned rug on the floor, several plants in heavy clay pots, and a red armchair that sat with its high back toward me in front of a nice big window, overlooking a wooded hill.
Our apartment in Reno didn’t get much light, so things had a hard time growing there. We tried keeping plants—ivy and jade and even an avocado we sprouted from a pit stuck round with toothpicks and hung over a jar of water—but eventually everything always died. So instead, Bernie ordered silk plants and flowers from one of her catalogues and set them in rows on the windowsills to brighten things up. Sometimes she even sprayed cologne on them.
“Wouldn’t fool a bee, but it does the trick for me,” she’d say as she spritzed them with the old atomizer with the faded pink squeeze ball that had belonged to her grandmother.
The plants in the alcove at Hilltop were so perfect, I wondered if they could possibly be real, especially the one that sat right next to the red armchair. It had long, slender, pointed, dark-green leaves, and off the tips of those leaves dangled strands of the prettiest flowers, so delicate and white, I just had to know for sure.
I crossed the carpet and was just about to touch one of the flowers, to rub the petals between my thumb and forefinger, when suddenly I gasped and had to clap my hand over my mouth to keep from crying out. I was not alone. There was a man sitting in the chair.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to bother you. I thought—I didn’t think,” I stammered. “There was nobody out front when I came in, so I…”
His face was turned away from me, and it took me a minute to realize that the reason he wasn’t responding was that he was sound asleep. I heard the slow, even sound of his breathing as his chest rose and fell. I could have turned and left then, or taken a chance and done what I’d planned to do in the first place—go through the files looking for Mama. Instead, I tiptoed around to the other side of the chair in order to see his face.
His neck was bent to the side, his chin and cheek pressed down against one shoulder like a bird trying to tuck its head under a wing to sleep. His dark hair was mowed short, not much more than prickles across his scalp, and his skin was smooth and so pale, I could see blue veins pulsing in his forehead. Suddenly he shifted and stirred in his sleep, and then his head snapped up and back and he opened his eyes and looked straight at me. At first his look was blank, his jaw hanging loose, his right cheek streaked with a red imprint from the chair’s upholstery. Then all of a sudden his face lit up with recognition and he broke into a wide toothy grin.
“Sooooof…” he said in a strange, soft, guttural voice, “soooooooof…”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Now
“Elliot? You awake? Elly?” a woman called from out in the hall. The same voice I’d heard earlier, coming from behind the big heavy door. Now she was turning the handle and coming into the room, heels clicking, crisp white pants swishing. When she saw me, she stopped short and stood with one hand on her hip, looking at me, puzzled.
“Can I help you?” she said.
I didn’t answer. I couldn’t. I was staring at the man in the red chair who knew Mama’s word. There was something oddly familiar about him.
“Who are you?” the woman asked.
Elliot answered for me.
“Soof,” he said, taking hold of my hand and looking over at her with the same wide grin he’d given me before.
Mama had said soof when she’d seen the photograph I’d torn in half, and I had wondered if soof was the woman in the red sweater, or maybe Mama herself. Then Georgia had made me wonder if it could be my father. Now Elliot’s touch unfroze my voice just enough so that I could ask a question I hadn’t thought to ask before.
“Am I soof?” I whispered.
Elliot smiled at me again, and the woman laughed.
“I certainly hope so. He says that word at least a hundred times a day. I’d like nothing better than to know who or what the heck he’s been talking about all this time. Not even Mr. Hill seems to know,” she said. “Or if he does, he won’t say.”
“Thurman Hill?” I asked.
She nodded.
“Elliot’s father,” she explained.
“But am I soof?” I asked again.
“You tell me.” She laughed.
“Ruby?” I heard a man’s voice calling from out in the hall.
“In here, Mr. Hill,” she called back over her shoulder.
When Thurman Hill, tall and thin with a full head of thick white hair, walked into the room, I felt exactly the way I’d felt looking up at Hilltop Home for the first time from the bottom of the driveway. His face was impossible to read. Especially his eyes, which were a shade of blue I’d seen only one other place before: in the cloudy chunk of sea glass Bernie always kept in her jewelry box.
“Who are you?” he asked in a voice that sounded like it too might have been tossed about and polished smooth by a million grains of sand.
“My name is Heidi It,” I said, trying hard to keep my voice from shaking, “and I have some questions I need to ask you, Mr. Hill.”
“Are you a reporter for your school newspaper or something?” asked the woman he’d called Ruby. “Mr. Hill isn’t much for that sort of thing, but I’d be glad to let you interview me if you’d like, though I’m boring as bread.”
“I’m not from the newspaper. I just want to know if my mother used to live here,” I said.
Something changed in Thurman Hill’s face.
“What did you say your name was?” he asked. He bent down to get a closer look at me, and I noticed the gold watch he was wearing. The thin white hands on the blue oval face said that it was four o’clock. It had been an hour since I’d spoken to Bernie.
“Heidi It,” I said.
“It? That’s your last name? I-t?” he asked.
I nodded.
“And that’s your mother’s last name too, It?”
Again I nodded.
“There’s never been anyone here by that name,” he said, standing up straight again. “It’s rather unusual. I’m sure I would remember.”
“Maybe somebody else remembers,” I said.
“Not very likely. This is a home for the mentally disabled. Did you know that?” he asked, not unkindly.
“My mother is mentally disabled,” I said.
“That may be, but I’m afraid she wasn’t here,” he said. “I know everyone who’s ever been here at Hilltop.”
“He would. He’s the big cheese,” said Ruby with a wink.
“Cheese stands alone,” said Elliot suddenly. “Cheese stands alone.”
Ruby laughed.
“That’s right, Elliot, the cheese stands alone. Good for you.” Then she turned to me to explain, “It’s from ‘The Farmer in the Dell.’ They all seem to love it for some reason. You know the song? The farmer takes a wife and the wife takes a child and all the rest, until in the end the cheese stands alone.”
“What makes you think your mother was at Hilltop?” Thurman Hill asked me. “Did she tell you that?”
“No, but I’ve got photos,” I said, reaching for my backpack.
“Wait a second. Something’s ringing bells here. Are you by any chance related to somebody named Bernadette?” asked Ruby.
“Yes,” I said, “she’s my neighbor.”
“That’s the woman who’s been calling from Nevada, Mr. Hill. Remember I told you abou
t her and you said I should—”
Now there was a definite change in Thurman Hill’s face, though it would have been hard to say exactly what.
“Never mind what I said, Ruby. Is this Bernadette person with you?” he asked me, and I noticed two small red blotches had begun to form on his cheeks, just below his sharp cheekbones.
“She couldn’t come,” I said.
“So you’re telling me you came here by yourself?” he asked. “From Nevada?”
The sea-glass eyes were sharper now, and colder, and they bored into me as he waited for my answer.
I swallowed hard and nodded.
“Did you run away?” he asked.
“No,” I said.
“Shall I look up her mother in the file, Mr. Hill?” Ruby asked.
He ignored her, still staring at me intently as if I was some sort of puzzle he was trying to work out.
“May I see these photographs you say you have?” he asked quietly.
I opened my backpack and pulled out the photos, holding the stack out to him. When he reached for them, his fingers brushed against mine, and his skin was so cold that I jerked my hand away, scattering the photographs all over the floor. Ruby quickly bent and began to pick them up.
“Hey, look at this,” she said, holding one of the photos out to Mr. Hill. It was the one of the people standing out on the porch under the Hilltop sign. “That’s our sign, isn’t it?”
“Where did you get these?” he asked, and I saw that the blotches on his cheeks were spreading like two bright red stains.
“I found the film in an old camera in a drawer,” I said. “We think the pictures were taken about thirteen years ago, because Bernadette says maybe Mama was pregnant with me in the pictures and I’m twelve now.”
Thurman Hill stood very still, looking at the photo in his hand, and as I watched, the color completely drained from his cheeks, until his face was absolutely powder white.
“Is this your mama here? She looks like you around the eyes,” Ruby said, holding another of the photographs out to me. “And who’s this other woman? She’s got the same sweater on as you do. Is this your granny?”