Just Under the Clouds Read online

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2018 by Melissa Sarno

  Cover art copyright © 2018 by Christopher Silas Neal

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Visit us on the Web! rhcbooks.com

  Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at RHTeachersLibrarians.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  ISBN 9781524720087 (trade) — ISBN 9781524720094 (lib. bdg.) — ebook ISBN 9781524720100

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

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  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  For Tyler,

  my home

  Mom’s calling and I’m counting. My backpack’s tight on my back up here in the tree. Knees tucked neat over the branches. Bare feet dangling. One…two…three…I soar. Out and then down and I’m at the dirt, balancing on the tree’s roots, while Adare spreads out on a clump of Brooklyn brown grass, like a snow angel without the snow.

  “Coming!” I shout. I scoop up Adare’s hand. “Come on, you.”

  Her breath is caught. She’s got a habit of holding it.

  “Adare.” I stomp.

  But her eyes are wide and they shine like gray glass. The sun’s in them, all pretty, sparkling, the way light hits water.

  “Adare!” I close my eyes and wish her breath free.

  She lets go of it and squirms her hand out of mine, then takes off running toward Mom, who’ll take us from the park back to Ennis House.

  We’ve never lived in a shelter before, and even if we’ve never lived much of anywhere for too long, it feels like, for the first time, we don’t have a home. We’re homeless. For real.

  “Cora, I thought I told you to quit climbing. You’ve got to keep an eye on your sister after school,” Mom scolds as I chase behind.

  Adare is buried in the limp of Mom’s shirt.

  “I did,” I argue, but I know it’s no use. I take Mom’s hand in mine. It always feels like I’ve got to remind her I’m here, too. Her hands are pink and stained.

  “Why are they pink?” I ask.

  She smiles. “You’ll see.” Then she leans down so her whisper’s at my messy hair. “What do we have today?”

  I open up my own hand. “A butterfly.”

  She squeezes it tight because we might not have a ton of money or clothes, but now we have a monarch butterfly I drew in blue ink. Right there on my palm.

  We walk the sidewalks to Ennis House. Adare and I march on opposite sides of Mom.

  I call out trees as we pass. Pin oak. Honey locust. Linden. Maple. The female ginkgo drops berries that smell awful. I gave that one a name a long time ago. It’s called the vomit tree. When you pass one, you’d better hold your nose.

  “What’s that?” Mom asks, pointing at a piney-looking tree.

  I reach up and run its prickle over my thumb to count how many needles are bunched together on each branch. “White pine,” I say fast.

  She shakes her head in surprise. “How can you tell?”

  “Five needles per bundle.” I grin while she squeezes my hand again. She knows I’ve studied the photographs Daddy pasted in his field journal, which I call my Tree Book. She knows I’ve got my eye out for all the plants and trees I can find.

  Like always, Adare stops a few thousand times during our ten-minute walk. She looks toward the sky, her chin sailing up like a flyaway balloon. I keep my sighs secret. Loud enough in my head so only I can hear them. We’re getting nowhere fast, and even if everything in me is itching to complain, I don’t say a word.

  Adare was born special, Mom always says. She tells the story like it’s legend. She talks about the wind that night, in its quickening swirl. She talks about the labor, long and uneasy, Adare turning circles in her womb. She talks about the moment Adare came into the world without a sound—Not blue, no, more like lavender, like sunset—and in that moment all the oxygen gone from the world, the trees forgetting to breathe their gift, Adare forgetting, too.

  She lost oxygen to the brain, but Mom doesn’t call it a disadvantage, like others do. Adare sees things a different way, she always says. It’s like all of us see from here—she places her hand at the level of her heart. And Adare sees from up here—she sends her arm soaring.

  Up where? That’s what I always wonder.

  We stop at the corner. In the distance the big cranes dangle a bunch of car parts. The scrap metal piles are like rolling hills just past the BQE. We live near the canal now and I like it. The water might smell of dirt and weeds and rot, but when you stare at it real close, there’s a looping oil swirl and it looks like a broken rainbow nobody sees.

  Inside Ennis House, the stairwell lights are burned out and the glass is split. Old Lou hovers, his eyes like two brown beetles, as Mom pushes us past.

  “Don’t linger,” she says. We walk the dirty floor, past the smack of cockroach, which has been there three days. I’ve counted.

  Mom’s hand stiffens, then tightens, like it always does. She squeezes my butterfly palm flat and everything in me knows better than to complain.

  As we climb up the stairs, Mrs. Johnson shouts from behind the door with a voice that stomps the air an
d Fred C.’s place smells like sweet onions and old grill. My stomach starts roaring and in my head I tell it to quiet down. But it doesn’t listen.

  When we get to five, my legs are burning and my sunflower backpack feels so heavy, it’s like it’s full of sinking rocks. Mom holds Adare’s backpack for her—the one I picked out for her at Winn Discount. I made sure it was bright blue like the sky.

  The hall’s dark and narrow and we file through, Mom’s hand still crushing mine.

  “It smells like cat pee.”

  “It’s a trick,” Mom says. “To keep the mice away.”

  Mom says you can buy all you want at places like Miss Li’s grocery. She says it’s called predator pee.

  But we’ve got our own cat, Sookie, even if she’s more Adare’s than mine, sticking like glue to her and hissing at me. Mom jiggles the keys and opens the lock. Sookie takes one look at me and skitters underneath the quilt, which only draws attention to our messy mattress on the floor.

  Mom shakes her head, guides us in, and deadbolts the door. “I thought I told you to make the bed.”

  “What’s the sense in making a bed when you’re just going to get right back in?”

  Mom gives a Don’t get smart with me kind of look and I run around the mattress, pulling the sheets real fast, so they flutter-puff up and settle down. That always cracks Adare up, so I fluff them high again, and she’s got this sniffy laugh that always makes Mom smile.

  Adare throws herself on the settling sheets. Her laughs are trampled and caught. I pull up the candy-colored quilt over her, quick. I love how soft it is from years of washing. Then I sit gently on her bony legs, pretending she’s not even there.

  I announce it real loud: “Bed’s made!” Adare laughs and squirms, and Mom plays along, too.

  She says, “Cora, I can’t find Adare. Do you know where she is?” until Adare is wriggling and laughing and poking her head out, her hair falling over her eyes in a tangle. It makes me smile when she smiles, sweet and pink.

  Her voice is soft, like always, even if she sounds less like she’s ten and more like a baby. “I’m right here.”

  “You’re right here,” I say.

  “Yeah.”

  Then she runs for her butterfly wings, slips them over her shoulders, and heads to the open window. She sits next to the broken screen and sets out peanuts on the ledge. She rests her elbows and waits for her family of crows.

  “Adare, stop that,” Mom scolds.

  Mom doesn’t know what we know, that at our old place on Hoyt Street they came and left Adare gifts. She got a silver screw, a button, and a crooked earring, which she keeps in an old tea box on the sill. We’re wondering when the crows at Ennis House will start leaving things, too.

  I notice the curtains are different and I point. “They’re pink,” I marvel.

  “This morning’s project.”

  When Mom gets bored with a place, she starts in on art projects. But no matter how many ways she tries to make the space look like home, she’s never satisfied.

  She holds up her stained hands. “I dyed them with beet juice. Isn’t that amazing?”

  I groan. “No more beets.” We’ve been eating them for days, from boxes at the Red Hook farm. They’ve turned my pee a watercolor-pink swirl.

  “They’re beautiful,” Mom says. “Little purple moons.”

  A violet puddle sits beneath the dripping curtains in the shape of a lopsided heart.

  For six years since Daddy died, we’ve been making homes where we can get them, from place to place. Sometimes we cuddle up on Mom’s artist friends’ couches. Once we rode back and forth on the 4 train all night long, looking at the fluorescent lights like they were stars.

  Until a few months ago, we stayed the longest we ever stayed anywhere. Even if it was only one room on Hoyt Street in Carroll Gardens, it was ours, and sun poured in and Mom painted murals on the walls and I loved it so much I thought it’d be a forever home. Until one day Mom sat me down and said, We can’t keep up. Not every month. When I asked, Keep what up? she said, Rent, and it felt like before she could say anything else, we were tossed out with only our blankets and the things that matter, like my Tree Book and Adare’s butterfly wings, which she’s worn dirt-thin.

  That’s how we ended up here at Ennis House.

  We’re on a list, waiting for housing we can afford for real this time. Mom says we move up the list, like it’s a ladder. She turns her papers in on time, marches up all the right steps, knocks on all the right doors, and we’re waiting, as she says, for word. But it never seems to come. Our caseworker, Tilda, tells us over and over, like we need reminding, You’re not a bum. You don’t stink. This is not forever. All I can think is: If it’s not forever, does it have to be now?

  “How’re your seeds doing?” Mom asks, pouring water from the kettle for tea, a habit of Daddy’s she can’t let go of.

  She watches it sit and steam. When it’s ready, she motions the sign of the cross, in his memory. Forehead, heart, and shoulders. She closes her eyes and takes her first sip. I hope it matters. I hope the love finds its way to heaven. To him.

  I turn my attention to the windowsill, where my greenhouse sits. We’ve made a lot of greenhouses over the years and this is one of the best. It’s made into a cube of old windowpanes and the roof latches with fasteners Mom nailed down.

  I open them, careful, like a present where the wrapping’s so nice, it almost doesn’t matter what’s inside. My seeds are in tiny rows and I can’t wait to harvest the spinach and the lettuce when the leaves sprout up. We haven’t had much luck growing things in the past. Either the seeds stay hidden or we get one crooked green line shoot up and fall limp.

  But it’s March now and this spring is a first. This spring we’ve got all kinds of somethings sprouting and two small leaves from each stalk. They’re like the wings of a bird, the way little kids draw them sometimes. A bird that looks like the letter V. “Leaves.”

  “True leaves,” Mom reminds me, the way Daddy used to.

  “True leaves,” I repeat.

  True leaves are what you call the first leaves up. Like we can’t believe them until they sprout. Like until then it’s all been a lie. But I know you can only grow things if you have faith in them from the very beginning.

  That night, I can’t sleep. I’m holding in my pee because it’s too cold to go out in the hall and I don’t want to wake up Mom and we’re not allowed to leave without her because of Old Lou. We’ve got a bucket for emergencies, but it freaks me out—the idea of collecting it like that. It makes me think Miss Li will bottle it up and sell it like the predator pee.

  Sookie is at our feet and I try and curl my toes up into her belly, measuring the in and out of her breath. I listen to the steady rush of the highway and squeeze my legs tight. Just not too tight or I’ll explode.

  I lean in close to Adare. I listen for Mom, curled up underneath the mohair blanket in the pink beanbag chair. Adare and I, we’re the exact same size, even if I’m twelve and she’s only ten. Our eyes are like Mom’s. A kicked-up-dust brown, she calls them. And I say they’re mixed with gray storm clouds. We’ve got the same skin, a little tan and freckled, and the same skinny arms, all dangly and long.

  People say we’d be twins if it wasn’t for our hair. Mine’s a messy honey-colored thing, all tangled. Adare’s is auburn, especially in the sun, and it runs down her back like silk. Mom says that’s from our daddy’s red hair. That was the Irish in him. So the Irish in us is all in Adare.

  The rest of us is all Mom and the Mexican Americans in South Texas. Daddy called her his rose, like the song, his Rose of San Antone. When people ask why she doesn’t speak Spanish, she says her family’s more American than the Pilgrims. They moved a border, she says, drawing a line in the air, and we’ve been American ever since. When people ask me why I don’t speak Spanish, I say I speak Bro
oklyn.

  People say Adare and I could be twins, but what they really mean is, we’d be twins if Adare could speak right, if she knew how to read and write, if she didn’t have to go to special classes or get so excited about a red balloon or the sparkle in someone’s necklace that her breath speeds up like a set of wheezing drums.

  When Adare sleeps next to me, I like to match up our palms. I like to make our toes touch. I like it that underneath the old quilt that’s nearly lost its stitch we’re two noodles, stuck together. That in the dark, with Adare asleep and me dreaming awake, we’re one and the same.

  I squeeze my legs tight. Sookie’s fur is soft at my toes.

  Outside, the streetlamp is orange and it shines up the tree bark. It’s a London plane tree, but I call it a patch tree because the bark is peeling all over in yellows and browns and greens. There are six on this street. In my Tree Book I mark down all the trees around all the homes we’ve ever lived in.

  I remember that I didn’t mark down the white pine on the way from school to here. So I reach under my pillow and pull out my Tree Book.

  The worn brown leather is cold in my hands and I fumble in the dark, slipping out the turquoise ribbon, which keeps my place. Daddy used the book for field notes when he worked in gardens in Gowanus, and Mom gave it to me a few days after he died. She placed it in my hands and told me it held on to the secret of all the growing things.

  His notes are in fine print on the lined pages. All numbers. Measurements and temperatures. Rainfall and sun. There are charts on soil moisture. Inches. Dates. I try to read it, like code. I want more than anything to understand his chicken-scratch writing. But all I’ve got is numbers, and numbers are not what I’m good at.