Just Under the Clouds Read online

  I picture Willa’s apartment and the way we’ve invaded it. The old quilt tossed on the couch…our bags slumped in a corner like sacks of old potatoes…our schoolbooks…Adare’s filthy butterfly wings strapped across an arm of the couch.

  I let Adare turn the key and then peer into the living room. Everything but Sookie has been hidden away and Willa’s apartment looks like it did when we first arrived. I swallow hard. So Willa’s already annoyed by our stuff. She probably can’t wait to get us out.

  Our backpacks slip to the floor and we head straight for the glass windows. From this high we can see Brooklyn spread out in gray-brown rows. The East River slides beneath the bridge. Manhattan sits across it, all Lego-stacked and dotted with shadowed squares of windows. Adare runs her fingers across the glass like she’s touching it all.

  I point at the outside window ledge. “See anything?” I ask.

  She shakes her head. She knows what I mean. Her crows will be looking for a new place to leave their gifts.

  It’s impossible for me to count trees from here. There are too many. They swirl the edge of the park in big brown batches. Their branches reach out to the gold lines of the bridge like a rope.

  “I want to stay here forever,” I tell Adare. “Don’t you?”

  “Okay. Yeah.”

  Sookie rests at her feet with her fur against the warm glass. Her eyes are two sleepy blue slits as she curls up in the space between Adare’s shoes.

  “I think even Sookie likes it here,” I say because for some dumb reason I feel the need to convince Adare that this is where we belong. “She likes it anywhere you are.”

  Adare’s smile is wide and toothy. She giggles, like I’ve uncovered a great secret.

  I think of Adare’s peanuts. “Your crows. Are they going to come back?”

  “Yeah,” she says. I wonder if she’s really sure or if she’s just yeahing me to death.

  We watch the view change. The sun drips yellow at the tips of each silver building. The tugboats cross and disappear to where we can’t see. The Staten Island ferry glows orange, then becomes a speck and fades.

  After we get tired of gazing out, we go to the refrigerator. Willa said we can have anything we like. Mom told us, Don’t be vultures. So we settle somewhere in between. One snack each. Adare wants celery with peanut butter. But Willa’s got the natural kind, all dry and clumpy, so I choose cinnamon applesauce.

  It’s cold and sweet and I jam the spoon at the smallest stuck bits. When it’s finished, I scrape the little plastic container to get all I can. I have to have everything. Adare leaves peanut butter on her plate and puts the plate in the sink, like we were told, but I can’t stand the thought of it sitting there and nobody eating it. Dry as it is, I run my fingers along the smooth white plate and find every inch of peanut butter. It sits all wadded and gummy in the pit of my stomach. But I get it all.

  Next we do our homework on the couch. Which, for me, means worksheets. One after the other. Questions filled out in my crooked, scratchy handwriting. I stare at all the numbers like one day they’re going to make sense.

  For Adare, it means sitting with her to-do list that gets sent home in her backpack. I say sitting with because that’s what she does until I snatch the sheet and look it over. “Adare, which you gonna start with?”

  Her shoulders rise up and fall and her eyes have this wide way of looking at me like she’s trying to figure me out.

  “I’ve got to study, Adare.” I poke my finger at the list. “Pick one.”

  Adare can read, but she doesn’t read right. She gets pulled from one specialist to another because, when it comes to Adare, nobody can get enough of the word special. I hate the word because, when it comes to Adare, what they really mean is different. What they really mean is wrong.

  “How about this one?” I suggest.

  “Okay, yeah,” she says before I even read it out.

  “You have to read the story and write what you have in common with the main character.”

  She smiles at me and her hair falls to her soft cheeks.

  “Do you understand? Read the story. Then write what you have in common with the main character. We’ll write it together, okay?” I think how she writes like a first grader, in big block letters, the spelling all wrong.

  She doesn’t look away, but she doesn’t answer.

  “You have to do the assignments, Adare.”

  “Yeah.”

  She leans back, arms above her head, letting them rest on the couch’s white canvas. The falling sunlight dances across her face.

  “You have to fill out the answers. That’s how it works.” I dangle the to-do list before her eyes. She doesn’t even blink.

  I used to think this made Adare dumb, the way she stared back blank, like she didn’t understand. But sometimes I think Adare is smarter than any of us. Sometimes I think she has it all figured out.

  Because I can’t sit with cats and rip my shoes off when I don’t feel like wearing them. I can’t hand back worksheets empty. I can’t even fail a test without Mrs. Belz transferring me to remedial math.

  “Adare,” I say. “Do you know how lucky you are to be you?”

  She looks at me long and hard and for a minute I think she’ll tell me I’m wrong, because I can never figure out whether being Adare is good or bad or if I’ll ever find an answer to that kind of question at all.

  Instead, she laughs, from deep inside her belly, her shoulders shaking like a soft wind.

  That night, Mom promises us a fancy dinner from Willa’s kitchen, so I wear all my favorite things at once—yellow leggings, green shorts, and a purple tee with lavender hearts.

  Mom wears the crisp white apron from the hook and hands me a wooden spoon. “You’ll be my sous-chef,” she says.

  Then she curls her black hair around her finger and tacks it in place behind her head with a bobby pin. One small strand slips away.

  Willa watches from up against the wall, in flowy black pants and earrings that fall to her neck.

  “You look very elegant,” I tell her.

  “This is Corporate Willa,” she jokes.

  “There are other Willas,” Mom tells us. “Like Pro Bono Willa.”

  “On the weekends, I work on cases for free,” Willa explains.

  “She loves a charity case.” There’s something sour in Mom’s voice, like gnawing on a lemon, and I know she’s talking about us.

  Adare sinks to the kitchen floor, stroking Sookie. Her legs are out in a big wide V and her smelly bare feet stick up in the air. I wonder why she can’t keep her socks on.

  “Frijoles charros, huh?” Willa asks with a small smile.

  Mom nods. “Mexican cowboy beans.”

  “Like your meema used to make.”

  “The very same.”

  I have a memory, in some old cloud, of Mom making things on the stove, but I was too little to remember it right.

  “You’ve had this before?” I ask Willa.

  She smiles. “Of course. I was at your mother’s house for dinner all the time.”

  I try to picture Mom and Willa as little girls. The same dark hair, sliding to their elbows. Willa so tall and Mom short beside her. The two of them, playing slap games at recess, words and hands waiting to meet.

  “What can I do?” Willa asks.

  But Mom flicks her hand at the air, like she’s brushing away crumbs. “Nothing, nothing. You relax.”

  She moves around the kitchen like a dancer. One leg balanced on tiptoe on the smooth tile, the other tipping back as she reaches into a cabinet. She swirls from the counter to the stovetop, onions raining from her fingers into a pan. We haven’t had a real kitchen for the longest time, and I wonder, If we did, would she flit about like this every night?

  “What do I do?” I ask.

  She leads me to
a tall pot, places her hand around my fingers, which I curl up around the spoon. “You. Stir.”

  I peer into the pot, hot steam disappearing at my cheeks, watching the beans rise and fall. Sometimes we have pasta and jar sauce. Frozen meals defrosted in a microwave. Never Mexican cowboy beans from a meema we’ve never known.

  “How was school this week?” Mom asks me.

  “Fine,” I say. But I don’t mention my maybe new friend, Sabina Griffin. I just stir it up inside me the way I spin the beans. Sabina Griffin and her blur, running along the fence the way a skater would, her head down and braids over her eyes. It’s better if she stays invisible. A perfect secret kept safe. So when we leave her behind, like we leave everything behind, it’ll be like she was never there.

  “Remember Allister Ruffin?” Willa asks. “I was thinking of him the other day. I don’t know why.”

  Mom nearly snorts, one hand on her hip as she uses tongs to flip meat with the other. “The thief.”

  “Thief?” I ask. “What’d he steal?”

  Willa takes her finger and curls it through Adare’s auburn hair. “A bird’s nest.”

  “Um, okay.”

  “It’s true,” Mom says. “He was a climber. Like you.”

  Something in me feels proud when she says it. A climber.

  “But nests aren’t easy to spot in South Texas,” Willa continues. “We didn’t have winters like here. The trees don’t always lose their leaves.”

  “So how’d you know he took one?” I ask.

  “He wasn’t very discreet about it. He used it for an awful prank.”

  “He placed it in a tree,” Mom says. “Put eggs in it. Eggs—like from the supermarket. And he pretended the nest was tangled up with a kite. Then he got somebody to help him untangle his kite and the eggs fell on my head.”

  I laugh. “That’s pretty funny.”

  Mom shakes her head. “Not when you’re trying to get the yolk out of your hair before school.”

  Willa’s laugh starts out small, but soon she brings her fingers to her mouth, trying to stop it from fluttering too far. Mom turns to the meat, its juice sputtering over the high heat, but with her hair back, I see the bloom of her smile.

  I like Mom and Willa as almost-sisters. I like that they share the same story, one looping ribbon that used to be theirs.

  The sauce bubbles. A thick, popping, breathing, living pot of spices and beans. The smoky smell catches the kitchen air.

  When we sit down at the wood table, Willa wishes for tortillas. “We had them with every meal.”

  “Or a stack of white bread, if we ran out,” Mom says, and they both laugh.

  “It smells the way I remember it,” Willa says, and I imagine Meema’s cinnamon-smelling home, the way Willa talked about it like it was her own.

  Mom sits across from me. Her eyes are bright and she looks happier than I’ve ever known her to look. Like, maybe, we’ve finally found somewhere to belong.

  I place my hands around the bowl. Frijoles charros. All of a sudden, we’re living as if we have a past.

  * * *

  —

  “How come we never came here before?” I ask later that night. Adare and I are sitting on the couch, fitting across it just right. Mom sits on the floor while I braid her hair.

  “I love Willa,” she tells me. “Like a sister. But we’re different.”

  “Like how Willa works in some fancy building and you work at the store?” I ask.

  “Yeah. Like that.” She curls her knees up and rests them on the rug. “She doesn’t always like the choices I make.”

  “Choices?” I ask.

  “So many we have to make in life. Like school and jobs and picking the people you want to love.” Her voice falls away. “I know it’s not so easy to understand. But you have to make your own choices.”

  I nod, thinking how I choose to keep some things secret, how I don’t always know what I should and shouldn’t say.

  “Sometimes you make bad choices. But they’re still yours. And it’s better than people thinking they know what’s best for you, when they might not.”

  “Like Tilda?” I ask. Mom’s meetings with Tilda always end with Mom telling her she’s wrong.

  “I’ve met with Tilda. She’s working on getting a new placement for us.”

  I set one piece of hair at her neck, not wanting to hear about any placement, just wanting to stay right here at Willa’s. I loop the soft black strand between my fingers.

  It was Daddy who braided my hair before school. He’d take my messy mop and smooth each part with his big, clumsy thumbs. He’d fumble through the knots and tell me about Irish brides braiding their hair for power and luck, which I didn’t need because I had both already. Even when Mom offered him her hair ties from the drugstore, he’d use crumbly old rubber bands from the garden.

  On Palm Sunday, he’d do the same with his palm leaves, turning them around each other into neat, pretty twists. Adare and I would sit between him and Mom in the church’s stuffy wooden pew and I’d try to do the same with my leaves. They’d end up all crooked and lumpy. But Daddy’s looked like a ribbon of beautiful silk.

  “Did you wear a braid in your hair when you married Daddy?” I ask.

  “What made you think of that?”

  “Daddy said Irish brides wear braids. For power and luck.”

  “I wore my hair wild.” She turns back. “Like yours.” She says it with a smile.

  “Was Willa there?” I wonder. “When you got married?”

  She shakes her head.

  “Was Meema?” I ask.

  “No.”

  “How come?”

  “Meema had already died.”

  “And Willa?”

  “She didn’t approve of your father.”

  “Why not?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. He talked too much, he didn’t make a lot of money, he was dirty all the time.”

  We both laugh and I imagine Daddy in his muddy work boots, his fingernails caked with dirt, no matter how hard he scrubbed them in the bathroom sink.

  “She wanted me to marry some rich somebody. In a suit.”

  I laugh again, but I see Mom’s not laughing.

  “Did you get in a fight?” I wonder.

  She shakes her head. “It wasn’t like that. We just saw each other less. We weren’t the same kids we were in Texas anymore.”

  “You never talk about Texas,” I tell her.

  She flits her hand. “It was a lifetime ago.”

  “But we didn’t know about frijoles charros. We didn’t know about the cinnamon. We don’t even know what Texas looks like. Right, Adare?”

  Adare turns away from the window and looks at me. She surprises me when she nods and says all quiet, “Yeah.”

  “See?”

  “Well, there’s a river in San Antonio,” Mom begins. She sticks her hand out straight, then swerves it back and forth, like the head of a nosy fish. “It runs right through the city. And at night the lights have a certain way of hitting the water while they poke through the trees.”

  “What kind of trees?”

  She swirls her hand. “Oh, all kinds. Cypress and sycamore. Persimmon. Pecan.”

  I take stock of Mom’s trees and tick them off in my mind. Not like we have here.

  “And live oaks,” she adds. “They’re supposed to be the best climbing trees.”

  “How come?”

  She extends her arm out, as if she might take a bow. “The branches are long. I bet you could walk them like a tightrope.”

  I hear Willa emerge from her room in her silk pajamas. I look to Mom, who smiles and doesn’t seem worried that Willa might have heard what she said about her. Willa peeks her head around the corner, not looking mad, just like she’s happy to see us here at all.
“Mom’s telling us about Texas.”

  Willa laughs. “Story time, huh?” Then she fits herself into the armchair, scrunching up her legs.

  “What else?” I ask.

  “Some of the homes are brick and stucco. Painted pink and cream and peach.”

  “Like sherbet?” I ask.

  Willa laughs.

  But Mom is serious. She understands. “Like sherbet. And the people are real nice. Friendly. Sometimes you’ll be walking along and a stranger will just say hi.”

  I try to imagine people in Brooklyn looking up from their fast walks, arms swinging, saying hello to everyone who passed.

  “Not like here,” Willa says for me.

  “Nope. If you said hi to everybody you saw here, you’d lose your voice,” I say.

  “Maybe so,” Mom says. “But sometimes I think it would be nice.”

  “You could try it,” I tell her.

  “Maybe,” she says, and she actually looks like she’s thinking she might.

  “Why’d you come to New York?” I ask. It’s something I never even thought to wonder about until now.

  “We both wanted an adventure,” Willa says.

  Mom nods. “Willa was the smart, practical one. I was the one with artsy dreams. New York City is the only place that could fit us both.”

  “Why don’t you ever go back?” I ask Mom.

  Something in her face falls like she forgot to catch it.

  “It’s expensive to travel,” Willa reasons, echoing something I’ve heard Mom say before.

  Mom nods. “Right.” Then she says, “And without Meema there, there’s no one left.”

  “No one?”

  “No one who cares.”

  We’re all quiet for a moment and I try not to think about the people who don’t care about us. I think of tightrope trees, of the river of Mom’s hand, how Texas seemed to stretch from her heart to the tips of her fingers.