Middle of Nowhere (18 page)

“MAYBE I SHOULD
take you to the doctor.”

I sat up too fast on the air mattress. I coughed when I hadn't been coughing before.

“Now?” I asked.

Mrs. Burt shuffled over to a chair and sank down on it.

“Fine.” Her voice was icy.

“Fine what?” I asked.

“We'll go back.”

“Really?”

“Artie!” Mrs. Burt called, and he came out of the bedroom where he'd been playing. “Get your stuff together. I'm taking you back.”

“Back where?” Artie asked.

“Home. Except you don't have a home, do you? I'll take you back to my place and we'll call Social Services. They'll find you somewhere to live.”

Artie ran over and clung to her. “I want to stay with you, Mrs. Burt.”

“I want to stay with you, too, believe me. But your brother won't let you.”

“Mrs. Burt,” I said, getting off the floor. “That's not true.”

“It is.” Her voice cracked and tears filled her glasses. “They won't ever let you stay with me.”

“Will they send me to the Pennypackers?” Artie asked.

“They won't, Artie,” I said. “I won't let them.”

Mrs. Burt said, “They're not going to listen to a boy.”

“We're going to find Mom,” I told Artie.

Mrs. Burt snorted and Artie wailed that he didn't want to. It made me so mad that I started shouting at Mrs. Burt.

“You don't know anything about our mother! You never even met her! She made a mistake. Maybe she's in the middle of another one, I don't know. I was too scared to stay and find out. But she was trying to make a better life for us. She was back at school so she wouldn't be a dropout anymore. So she could get a good job. She wants to be a nursing assistant.”

Mrs. Burt stared at me.

“And anyway,” I went on, “she's our mother. She loves us and we love her!”

“I love Mrs. Burt!” cried Artie.

“You can love Mrs. Burt, too,” I said. “You can love as many people as you want.”

Mrs. Burt got up off her chair and stumped to her room.

“Pack your stuff,” she said, just before she slammed the door.

I dragged Artie to the bedroom and took the pillowcases off the pillows. I stuffed some clothes for him in one and handed it to him to put his toys in. He made his fierce face, sucking in his lips.

“Artie, don't even think about a fit. We don't have time. Look.”

I opened Mom's wallet and showed him her I.D.

As soon as he saw her picture, he began to wail.

“Mo-o-o-m! I want my mo-o-om! Where's my mo-o-om!”

I wished I'd thought of doing it before.

I let him hold the wallet and kiss her picture while I finished packing. Then I went and knocked on Mrs. Burt's door.

She didn't answer. I called through it that we were ready to go. When she didn't answer a second time, I opened it.

She was lying on the bed holding her chest. Her cap had fallen off. She looked so old on the white pillow with her white hair and her white, white face.

“Mrs. Burt?”

“He's crying for his mother,” she gasped.

“Is something the matter?”

“He wants his mother,” she said.

“Of course he does,” I said. “Half the time he doesn't know what he's saying. He's just a little kid.”

“I lost my little boy.” She started panting so that it was hard to make out what she said next. “Bad mother,” I heard.

“She's not!” I said.

“Me,” Mrs. Burt moaned.

I knew then that something awful was happening to her. I called to Artie, who peeked in the door, clutching the wallet.

“I think Mrs. Burt is sick.”

Artie ran over. “Do you need me to pat your back, Mrs. Burt?”

“Oh, you dear child,” she whimpered. “Don't leave me. Please don't leave me.”

“Artie is staying, Mrs. Burt. I'm going to get help.”

WALKING TO TOWN
would take too long if Mrs. Burt was having a heart attack. Even if her heart was only breaking, it would take too long. Standing by the highway and waiting for a murderer to drive by would probably take too long as well. So would building a raft.

I put on the Stanfields. Mrs. Burt had explained why they were such good underwear, because wool stays warm even when it's wet. I was probably going to get wet.

We actually hadn't swum in the lake since we swam across it. We didn't even wash in it anymore because it was too cold. Mrs. Burt heated water on the stove for us instead.

I grabbed my life jacket and the air mattress by the stove. Dressed only in socks and long underwear, I went down to the shore and put my hand in.

The lake bit me. The cold crunched right down on my bones and hurt so much I had to pull my hand back.

As I put on the life jacket, I looked across to where Mr. Munro's smoke was curling up. The trees on the far shore looked like they were all on fire. While I'd been lying by the stove in the cabin, they'd changed color. The earth had turned and turned all the way to autumn.

I slid the air mattress into the water and I threw myself on top of it, trying not to get wet. Pushing off, one foot dipped in the icy water. Then I had to paddle, plunge my arms in right up to my elbows. Pretty soon they were numb. I was moving forward so slowly it would be winter by the time I reached Mr. Munro's place, if I reached it alive.

I had no choice. I had to swim. Holding my breath, I slid off the side of the mattress into the cold. There was only one way to beat it. By moving.

I
can
, I told myself.

For a few minutes I swam without looking around. When I popped up, it seemed that I hadn't moved at all, that the smoke wasn't any closer.

“Blast it!” I said. “Blast it, blast it!”

Then I looked back and saw the air mattress floating far behind me.

But there was still a long way to go. When I swam with Mrs. Burt, it took twenty-four minutes to get across and thirty-three minutes to come back. Mr. Munro's place was closer than the far shore, but the water was so much colder, and the life jacket held me back.

I kept on muttering, “Blast it! Blast it!” I probably sounded crazy, thrashing and swearing.

Next time I looked up, I'd almost reached the bay where Mr. Munro's cabin was.

I made for the rocks and when I crawled up on them, I saw the four or five tumbledown cabins leaning into each other. I was shivering so badly I hardly had the strength to pull myself out of the water. I tried yelling, but my voice sounded so weak and old. There was no way Mr. Munro would hear me from inside.

Then I remembered the whole reason I was there. Because of Mrs. Burt. Mrs. Burt who was probably dying.

Because my hands wouldn't open or close, I pulled myself up with my forearms. Once I was standing, I couldn't take a single step. I just stood there, swaying and helpless.

Like Mrs. Burt. I felt like Mrs. Burt.

14

“YOU'RE A VERY
brave young man,” Marianne said.

“Not really,” I said. “I was scared.”

We were in her hotel room close to the hospital, waiting for Mom and Artie to get back from our old apartment. Marianne asked me to stay and tell her the whole story, and when I was finished, she offered to order me something from room service. I was hungry from all that talking.

She pushed the menu across to me. Like Mrs. Burt, feeding people seemed to make her happy. Other than that, she was so different. She wore makeup and nice clothes and her teeth were white and straight. You would never guess they were even related, let alone mother and daughter.

I asked for a grilled cheese sandwich and a glass of milk, and Marianne went over to the phone and ordered it. She came back and sat across from me again at the little table with the same sad expression she'd been wearing the whole time I was talking. Well, I'm not sure it was the whole time because, at different points in the story, she walked around the room, or stood with her back to me, staring out the window. Some of the things I said must have really hurt her feelings, especially the part where Mrs. Burt called her a Big Shot. I didn't want to repeat that, but Marianne asked me to tell her everything and be truthful.

“What about Mr. Munro?” she asked. “What did he say when you showed up?”

“He jumped out of his chair like a jack-in-the-box. I didn't knock, just sort of fell inside. He dragged me over to the stove and stripped the Stanfields off me. Then he forced some of the stuff from his flask down my throat because I was shivering so hard and crying that I was dying and so was Mrs. Burt. When he finally sorted it out, he called for help. He had a short-wave radio.”

After I defrosted, Mr. Munro gave me some funny-smelling too-big clothes to put on and we set off in the canoe back to Mrs. Burt's place, with me huddled in a blanket in the bottom.

It seemed so quiet on the lake, like all the sounds had frozen except for Mr. Munro's paddle swishing through the water. When the droning started in the distance, I looked up. The first thing I thought was that it had been a while since I'd seen a dragonfly. Here came one now, the biggest ever, getting huger. Mr. Munro stopped paddling and both of us ducked as the plane sailed right over our heads and landed in the middle of the lake.

“It was a floatplane,” I told Marianne.

I knew she hadn't been listening. It was the end of the story anyway, so I asked, “Is Mrs. Burt going to be okay?”

Marianne frowned. “She'll recover from the stroke. How did you find out about your mother?”

“The pilot told me. The paramedics brought Mrs. Burt out of the cabin on a stretcher and put her in the plane. When Artie and I got in, the pilot said, ‘Looks like we found the two fellas everybody's been searching for.' He was the one who told us Mom was okay.”

“It must have been a terrible shock.”

“I guess, but I just started jabbing Artie and saying, ‘See? See?' Because I
knew
she wouldn't take off again. I just
knew
it. She promised.”

That last night we saw Mom, she got off the bus at her usual stop, three blocks from the gas station. She crossed the street near the stop like she did every night she worked at Pay-N-Save.

Except that night she never made it to the other side. Two cars were racing each other down the empty street but only one stopped. The other went through the red light and hit her. Both cars took off. When the ambulance got there, they found an unconscious woman in the road with no I.D. One leg was completely smashed. For almost two weeks she was in a coma.

When she finally woke up, the first thing she said was, “Where are my kids?”

Room service knocked and a waiter in a shirt and tie delivered my lunch on a tray. The milk was in a wine glass, the cloth napkin folded in a fan. There was a silver dome over the plate, which he lifted off, sort of bowing at the same time. Grilled cheese sandwich, French fries, coleslaw, a miniature pickle.

I ate the pickle. Then I offered Marianne some fries.

She shook her head. “Go ahead. Please. Eat.”

She watched, but it didn't seem to make her happy. I felt self-conscious and wiped my mouth with the napkin. She must have realized she was staring because she picked up the book about King Arthur I'd brought and started leafing through it.

“Is it a good book?” she asked.

“Pretty good. I'm just reading about chivalry. I thought the knights only had to slay monsters or find the Holy Grail, but they also had to swear to be kind and patient and have good manners. Stuff like that. They're like the rules Mr. Bryant gave us at the beginning of school last year. He was asking us to be knights, but I didn't know it.”

She smiled and set the book beside the tray.

“How's the sandwich?”

“It's good,” I told her. “But Mrs. Burt's are
way
better.”

When I said that, Marianne started to cry.

“Sorry,” I said.

“It's not your fault.”

She went to the bathroom for a minute, then came back drying her eyes with a tissue.

“You must have been worried about your mother, too,” I said. “Where did you think she'd gone?”

“Not to the cabin. She wouldn't ever go back after Clyde drowned. Of course, I never connected her to you and your brother, even though it was in the news. But afterward I remembered something. When my mother didn't answer the phone for a week, I flew out. I saw Artie's drawing on her fridge. The one of her with the walker and the rainbow shooting out the hose. I looked at it and thought, She doesn't know any kids. She doesn't even like kids. She doesn't like anybody.”

“She loves Artie,” I said. “And he loves her.”

“Then there's another good deed you did without even knowing it,” Marianne said. “Some people are so angry at themselves that they won't let anyone get close. It really says something about you and your brother that she let you love her.”