Lock and Key (6 page)

“You don’t know,” I said. “You weren’t there.”

“I know what I read in the report,” she replied. “I know what the social worker told me. Are you saying those accounts were inaccurate?”

“Yes,” I said.

“So you weren’t living without heat or water in a filthy house.”

“Nope.”

She narrowed her eyes at me. “Where’s Mom, Ruby?”

I swallowed, then turned my head as I reached up, pressing the key around my neck into my skin. “I don’t care,” I said.

“Neither do I,” she replied. “But the fact of the matter is, she’s gone and you can’t be by yourself. Does that answer your question?”

I didn’t say anything, and she turned back to the clothes, pushing through them. “I told you, I don’t need to borrow anything,” I said. My voice sounded high and tight.

“Ruby, come on,” she said, sounding tired. She pulled a black sweater off a hanger, tossing it over her shoulder before moving over to another shelf and grabbing a green T-shirt. Then she walked over, pushing them both at me as she passed. “And hurry. It takes at least fifteen minutes to get there.”

Then she walked back through the bathroom, leaving me behind. For a moment, I just stood there, taking in the neat rows of clothes, how her shirts were all folded just so, stacked by color. As I looked down at the clothes she’d given me, I told myself I didn’t care what the people at Perkins Day thought about me or my stupid sweater. Everything was just temporary anyway. Me being there, or here. Or anywhere, for that matter.

A moment later, though, when Jamie yelled up that it was time to go, I suddenly found myself pulling on Cora’s T-shirt, which was clearly expensive and fit me perfectly, and then her sweater, soft and warm, over it. On my way downstairs, in clothes that weren’t mine, to go to a school I’d never claim, I stopped and looked at myself in the bathroom mirror. You couldn’t see the key around my neck: it hung too low under both collars. But if I leaned in close, I could make it out, buried deep beneath. Out of sight, hard to recognize, but still able to be found, even if I was the only one to ever look for it.

Cora was right. We got stuck in traffic. After hitting every red light between the house and Perkins Day, we finally pulled into the parking lot just as a bell was ringing.

All the visitor spaces were taken, so Jamie swung his car—a sporty little Audi with all-leather interior—into one in the student lot. I looked to my left—sure enough, parked there was a Mercedes sedan that looked brand-new. On our other side was another Audi, this one a bright red convertible.

My stomach, which had for most of the ride been pretty much working on rejecting my breakfast, now turned in on itself with an audible clench. According to the dashboard clock, it was 8:10, which meant that in a run-down classroom about twenty miles away, Mr. Barrett-Hahn, my homeroom teacher, was beginning his slow, flat-toned read of the day’s announcements. This would be roundly ignored by my classmates, who five minutes from now would shuffle out, voices rising, to fight their way through a corridor designed for a student body a fraction the size of the current one to first period. I wondered if my English teacher, Ms. Valhalla—she of the high-waisted jeans and endless array of oversized polo shirts—knew what had happened to me, or if she just assumed I’d dropped out, like a fair amount of her students did during the course of a year. We’d been just about to start
Wuthering Heights
, a novel she’d promised would be a vast improvement over
David Copperfield
, which she’d dragged us through like a death march for the last few weeks. I’d been wondering if this was just talk or the truth. Now I’d never know.

“Ready to face the firing squad?”

I jumped, suddenly jerked back to the present and Jamie, who’d pulled his keys from the ignition and was now just sitting there expectantly, hand on the door handle.

“Oops. Bad choice of words,” he said. “Sorry.”

He pushed his door open and, feeling my stomach twist again, I forced myself to do the same. As soon as I stepped out of the car, I heard another bell sound.

“Office is this way,” Jamie said as we started walking along the line of cars. He pointed to a covered walkway to our right, beyond which was a big green space, more buildings visible on the other side. “That’s the quad,” he said. “Classrooms are all around it. Auditorium and gym are those two big buildings you see over there. And the caf is here, closest to us. Or at least it used to be. It’s been a while since I had a sloppy joe here.”

We stepped up on a curb, heading toward a long, flat building with a bunch of windows. I’d just followed him, ducking under an overhang, when I heard a familiar
rat-a-tat -tat
sound. At first, I couldn’t place it, but then I turned and saw an old model Toyota bumping into the parking lot, engine backfiring. My mom’s car did the same thing, usually at stoplights or when I was trying to quietly drop a bag off at someone’s house late at night.

The Toyota, which was white with a sagging bumper, zoomed past us, brake lights flashing as it entered the student parking lot and whipped into a space. I heard a door slam and then footsteps slapping across the pavement. A moment later, a black girl with long braids emerged, running, a backpack over one shoulder. She had a cell phone pressed to one ear and seemed to be carrying on a spirited conversation, even as she jumped the curb, went under the covered walkway, and began to sprint across the green.

“Ah, tardiness. Brings back memories,” Jamie said.

“I thought you could get here in ten minutes.”

“I could. But there were usually only five until the bell.”

As we reached the front entrance and he pulled the glass door open for me, I was aware not of the stale mix of mildew and disinfectant Jackson was famous for but a clean, fresh-paint smell. It was actually very similar to Cora’s house, which was a little unsettling.

“Mr. Hunter!” A man in a suit was standing just inside. As soon as he saw us, he strode right over, extending his hand. “The prodigal student returns home. How’s life in the big leagues?”

“Big,” Jamie said, smiling. They shook hands. “Mr. Thackray, this is my sister-in-law, Ruby Cooper. Ruby, this is Principal Thackray.”

“Nice to meet you,” Mr. Thackray said. His hand was large and cool, totally enveloping mine. “Welcome to Perkins Day.”

I nodded, noting that my mouth had gone bone-dry. My experience with principals—and teachers and landlords and policemen—being as it was, this wasn’t surprising. Even without a transgression, that same fight-or-flight instinct set in.

“Let’s go ahead and get you settled in, shall we?” Mr. Thackray said, leading the way down the hallway and around the corner to a large office. Inside, he took a seat behind a big wooden desk, while Jamie and I sat in the two chairs opposite. Through the window behind him, I could see a huge expanse of soccer fields lined with bleachers. There was a guy on a riding mower driving slowly down one side, his breath visible in the cold air.

Mr. Thackray turned around, looking out the window, as well. “Looks good, doesn’t it? All we’re missing is a plaque honoring our generous benefactor.”

“No need for that,” Jamie said, running a hand through his hair. He sat back, crossing one leg over the other. In his sneakers, jeans, and zip-up hoodie, he didn’t look ten years out of high school. Two or three, sure. But not ten.

“Can you believe this guy?” Mr. Thackray said to me, shaking his head. “Donates an entirely new soccer complex and won’t even let us give him credit.”

I looked at Jamie. “You did that?”

“It’s not that big a deal,” he said, looking embarrassed.

“Yes, it is,” Mr. Thackray said. “Which is why I wish you’d reconsider and let us make your involvement public. Plus, it’s a great story. Our students waste more time on
UMe.com
than any other site, and its owner donates some of the proceeds from that procrastination back into education. It’s priceless!”

“Soccer,” Jamie said, “isn’t exactly education.”

“Sports are crucial to student development,” Mr. Thackray said. “It counts.”

I turned my head, looking at my brother-in-law, suddenly remembering all those pings in his UMe inbox.
You could say that,
he’d said, when I’d asked if he had a page. Clearly, this was an understatement.

“. . . grab a few forms, and we’ll get a schedule set up for you,” Mr. Thackray was saying. “Sound good?”

I realized, a beat too late, he’d been talking to me. “Yeah,” I said. Then I swallowed. “I mean, yes.”

He nodded, pushing back his chair and getting to his feet. As he left the room, Jamie sat back, examining the tread of one sneaker. Outside, the guy on the mower had finished one side of the field and was now moving slowly up the other.

“Do you . . . ?” I said to Jamie. He glanced up at me. "You own UMe?”

He let his foot drop. “Well . . . not exactly. It’s me and a few other guys.”

“But he said you were the owner,” I pointed out.

Jamie sighed. “I started it up originally,” he said. “When I was just out of college. But now I’m in more of an overseeing position.”

I just looked at him.

“CEO,” he admitted. “Which is really just a big word, or a really small acronym, actually, for overseer.”

“I can’t believe Cora didn’t tell me,” I said.

“Ah, you know Cora.” He smiled. “Unless you work eighty hours a week saving the world like she does, she’s tough to impress.”

I looked out at the guy on the mower again, watching as he puttered past. “Cora saves the world?”

“She tries to,” he said. “Hasn’t she told you about her work? Down at the public defender’s office?”

I shook my head. In fact, I hadn’t even known Cora had gone to law school until the day before, when the social worker at Poplar House had asked her what she did for a living. The last I knew, she’d been about to graduate from college, and that was five years ago. And we only knew that because, somehow, an announcement of the ceremony had made its way to us. It was on thick paper, a card with her name on it tucked inside. I remembered studying the envelope, wondering why it had turned up after all this time with no contact. When I’d asked my mom, she’d just shrugged, saying the school sent them out automatically. Which made sense, since by then, Cora had made it clear she wanted no part of us in her new life, and we’d been more than happy to oblige.

“Well,” Jamie said as a palpable awkwardness settled over us, and I wondered what exactly he knew about our family, if perhaps my very existence had come as a surprise. Talk about baggage. “I guess you two have a lot of catching up to do, huh?”

I looked down at my hands, not saying anything. A moment later, Mr. Thackray walked back in, a sheaf of papers in his hand, and started talking about transcripts and credit hours, and this exchange was quickly forgotten. Later, though, I wished I had spoken up, or at least tried to explain that once I knew Cora better than anyone. But that was a long time ago, back when she wasn’t trying to save the whole world. Only me.

When I was a kid, my mom used to sing to me. It was always at bedtime, when she’d come in to say good night. She’d sit on the edge of my bed, brushing my hair back with her fingers, her breath sweet smelling (a “civilized glass” or two of wine was her norm then) as she kissed my forehead and told me she’d see me in the morning. When she tried to leave, I’d protest, and beg for a song. Usually, if she wasn’t in too bad a mood, she’d oblige.

Back then, I’d thought my mother made up all the songs she sang to me, which was why it was so weird the first time I heard one of them on the radio. It was like discovering that some part of you wasn’t yours at all, and it made me wonder what else I couldn’t claim. But that was later. At the time, there were only the songs, and they were still all ours, no one else’s.

My mother’s songs fell into three categories: love songs, sad songs, or sad love songs. Not for her the uplifting ending. Instead, I fell asleep to “Frankie and Johnny” and a love affair gone very wrong, “Don’t Think Twice It’s All Right” and a bad breakup, and “Wasted Time” and someone looking back, full of regret. But it was “Angel from Montgomery, ” the Bonnie Raitt version, that made me think of her most, then and now.

It had everything my mother liked in a song—heartbreak, disillusionment, and death—all told in the voice of an old woman, now alone, looking back over all the things she’d had and lost. Not that I knew this; to me they were just words set to a pretty melody and sung by a voice I loved. It was only later, when I’d lie in a different bed, hearing her sing late into the night through the wall, that they kept me awake worrying. Funny how a beautiful song could tell such an ugly story. It seemed unfair, like a trick.

If you asked her, my mother would say that nothing in her life turned out the way she planned it. She was
supposed
to go to college and then marry her high-school sweetheart, Ronald Brown, the tailback for the football team, but his parents decided they were getting too serious and made him break up with her, right before Christmas of her junior year. Heartbroken, she’d allowed her friends to drag her to a party where she knew absolutely no one and ended up stuck talking to a guy who was in his freshman year at Middletown Tech, studying to be an engineer. In a kitchen cluttered with beer bottles, he’d talked to her about suspension bridges and skyscrapers, “the miracle of buildings,” all of which bored her to tears. Which never explained, at least to me, why she ended up agreeing to go out with him, then sleeping with him, thereby producing my sister, who was born nine months later.

So at eighteen, while her classmates graduated, my mom was at home with an infant daughter and a new husband. Still, if the photo albums are any indication, those early years weren’t so bad. There are tons of pictures of Cora: in a sunsuit, holding a shovel, riding a tricycle up a front walk. My parents appear as well, although not as often, and rarely together. Every once in a while, though, there’s a shot of them—my mom looking young and gorgeous with her long red hair and pale skin, my dad, dark-haired with those bright blue eyes, his arm thrown over her shoulder or around her waist.