The Hidden Summer (2 page)

CHAPTER 2

INTRODUCING MY MOTHER

My mother doesn’t answer me. She moves toward the sofa, turning on one dim lamp. It makes the room look slightly green. I take a step toward her, trying to read her mood. I keep my voice friendly.

“It’s sort of dark in here,” I say.

She shrugs in a way that might be good natured. I am an expert when it comes to reading my mother, but that doesn’t mean I don’t make mistakes. The trick is to tell when she’s in a carnivore mood or an herbivore mood. (Carnivores have sharp teeth for biting. You shouldn’t get too close. But herbivores never attack.) In her carnivore moods, Mom is usually moving—pacing or fidgeting, tapping her foot or drumming her fingers on her leg. A cozy seat on the couch makes me think she might be in the mood for a conversation.

“Mom, what happened with Lydia’s mother?” I ask. “She said Lydia can’t see me anymore.”

She leans forward on the sofa in a way that makes me step back. “And you figure I did something to her?”

She’s staring at the floor, and I know this is a mistake. But losing Lydia has left me desperate. And angry.

“I don’t know,” I say, frustration in my voice. “Did you do something?”

She stands up fast and I take two steps back, turning away from her. I’m headed for my bedroom, where I can lock the door and wait until she calms down. Then my head snaps back, hard—she’s grabbed my hair. She holds tight, so I can’t move. I try to look at her out of the corner of my eye, but it makes my head hurt worse. I don’t feel angry anymore. I feel like one of those gazelles on the National Geographic Channel that looks up from a nice cool drink of river water and sees a lion staring back.

Escape, escape, escape,
the gazelle-me thinks.

“If you speak to me like that again,” Mom says, “I will rip the hair out of your head. Do you hear me?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She doesn’t mean it. She’s never actually ripped the hair out of my head. And she hardly ever touches me, period. Not to hug me, not to smooth the wrinkles out of a shirt, and not to yank my hair. It’s a bad sign when she touches me. My mother has a quick temper. That’s the perfect phrase for it—it’s so fast you can’t see it coming.

“And don’t you smirk at me,” she snaps.

“Yes, ma’am. I’m sorry.”

I say this with no tone whatsoever. I am a salesclerk on the store intercom announcing a sale on Aisle Three. I am the person who takes your ticket at the movies and tells you to enjoy your show. One thing you learn when your mother has a quick temper is to keep calm and collected. Parents have all the power anyway. They control whether you leave the house and where you can go and who you can see. You can’t lose your temper if you want to have the slightest chance of winning, even if they have the luxury of losing theirs. I should never have let my anger show in the first place, no matter how upset I was about Lydia. I know the rules better than that.

It’s taken me my whole life to figure out how to deal with my mother, but the rules aren’t really all that complicated. These are the most important ones: When Mom is in a carnivore mood, avoid her if possible. Disappear—in your room, in the backyard, to Lydia’s. If you cannot avoid her, disappear inside your own head. Make your face a mask and hide behind it. Show her what she wants to see.

“I didn’t mean to smirk,” I say in my Aisle Three voice. “But Lydia’s my best friend, and I don’t want to spend the whole summer without being able to see her. I just wondered what happened.”

Sometimes, when I keep calm, Mom starts to realize that I’m the one who sounds like an adult and she sounds like a toddler having a temper tantrum. It makes her uncomfortable. She doesn’t apologize, but she’ll back down. She’ll stomp out of the room and pretend like she never wanted to talk to me anyway.

“You can be so hateful,” she snarls at me now, pulling me closer.

Well, sometimes it doesn’t matter how calm and friendly I am. Sometimes her temper is so loud inside her head that she can’t even hear what I’m saying. It looks like this is one of those times.

One more try. I try to ignore the sharp sting of my scalp.

“Did Lydia’s mom do something to you?” I ask, trying to sound sympathetic.

She lets go of my hair, then spins me around by my shoulders, bringing her face close to mine. Her eyes are red and her blond hair is mashed flat against her head like something stuck to the bottom of your shoe. Sometimes she can be pretty, but she’s not right now.

“Just go to your room,” she says, and lets go of me.

I don’t argue. I’m nearly to my bedroom door when she speaks again.

“It wasn’t my fault,” she says. “She came over here because the branches from the crape myrtles are over her driveway. All those little buds are landing on her car and making a mess. Our landlord won’t return her call. She asked if I would try to reach him.”

So far this sounds believable. Lydia’s mom is very into how things look. She refuses to leave the house without lipstick, and her purse always matches her shoes. She hates for her Honda to get dirty. And our landlord never returns phone calls.

My mother crosses her legs as she sits back on the couch. The blue polish on her toenails is flaking off. She has long, slim legs that look like a magazine ad for panty hose or razors. She always says she doesn’t know where I got my short, stubby legs.

“She treated me like I was her secretary,” she says, although that’s not how it seems to me. “I told her that it’s harder to deal with that sort of thing when you’re single. If she had a husband at home, he could do the yard work.”

This also sounds believable. Mom has a talent for sensing people’s sore spots. Lydia’s mom is not single. She has a husband—Lydia’s dad. But he’s gone a lot. Like for months at a time. Lydia’s mom says he travels a lot for business, but she says it like there’s a period after every word—He. Travels. A. Lot. For. Business. You can tell she does not want to talk about it. And, of course, without anyone every mentioning it, my mother would know that. She’d smell it like sharks smell blood in the water.

I can imagine Lydia’s mom’s face as she stormed away from our apartment. She wouldn’t have said anything nasty to my mom. She would have stewed about it all the way home, probably talking under her breath. She talks to herself when she’s angry.

“She did seem upset,” says my mother, leaning back into the couch. She reaches for the remote control. “She seems very sensitive.”

I hurry into my room, close the door behind me, and walk to my window. The top of a dark red sun is vanishing over the trees. The knees of my stubby legs are weak. I want to be sure she’s done with me before I relax. Soon I’ll curl up on the bed and lose myself in a book, and then my mother and Lydia’s mother and our whole apartment will go away.

I’ve read plenty of books. I spend a lot of time trying to disappear at home, and I like to find some place where no one will find me, like under the honeysuckle or behind the basement stairs. When you tuck yourself into a small space and plan to spend a lot of time there waiting until it’s safe to come out, it’s nice to have a book.

One thing I notice is that in books, a lot of kids’ parents are dead. Or they’re missing or on vacation. If they are around, the parents are kind and wise and do things like braid your hair and play board games with you. In books, parents aren’t bad unless they’re stepparents. (That’s not fair, in my opinion. I’ve had several stepparents, and some of them were very nice.) Real parents are nice to their kids.

That is not my experience.

I have a list of things I wish my mother had never said.

“I wish you had brown eyes instead of blue ones.”

“Why don’t you smile more?”

“How can you love your father as much as you love me?”

I don’t know where she came up with that last one. I figure I love my parents exactly the same. Which is to say that I love them but don’t really like them very much. My father lives a few miles away, and I see him every other weekend. He lives alone at the moment. Mom just keeps getting married. She’s always crazy about them in the beginning, but they never last long. At the moment she’s married to Lionel, who’s pretty okay. He likes doing crosswords with me and he makes great waffles. But I’m not going to let myself like him too much—it’s easier that way.

Lydia has been my friend through five total stepparents and I don’t know how many boyfriends and girlfriends. Sometimes Dad forgets to pick me up on Fridays, and sometimes Mom won’t even look at me when I walk through the door, but Lydia is always there. She always wants to see me. She is the one person who I knew would never leave, and now she’s gone.

Or she might as well be.

I turn to my map wall. When you can’t concentrate on a book, maps are another good way to vanish and pop up in another place. The wall across from my bed is covered in maps. I have a city map of Boston and a funny map of the Gulf Coast with pictures of crabs and ice-cream cones. I have an old map of Iceland with really strange names and pictures of sea monsters in the ocean.

My favorite is a map of Europe done in gold and silver. I like the names I haven’t heard of and the images they paint in my head. The Adriatic Sea makes me think of turquoise water and snow-colored shells. I like the names of all the little islands around Greece: Kythnos, Ios, Mykonos. I picture them shaped like giants coming out of the sea. I imagine Naples has grapevines everywhere, that Istanbul is shiny and bright like Christmas tree ornaments, and that Paris smells like coffee and bread.

I hear the soft thuds of moths hitting my windowpane, and I look out at the sky. As much as I like thinking about other cities, I like Birmingham the best. Here’s the thing: I may not like what goes on in our apartment very much, but I love living in my neighborhood. I bet it’s as good as Paris or Istanbul or even Venice. We’re in an old part of the city that used to be elegant and stylish. Some of the houses are like castles, with turrets and balconies and big marble columns. A lot of them have their roofs fallen in and ivy growing up the walls, and they make you think of fairy tales or ghost stories, depending on your mood.

Our apartment building is more in the ghost story category. It’s three stories tall and there are cracks in the plaster walls. Some people have balconies, but you wouldn’t want to stand on them because they’d probably fall off the building. We have roaches the size of house cats, which could be okay if they actually ate the mice that sneak through the holes in the cabinets and the rotten spots in the staircase.

But all you have to do is look through my window, and you’d see what I love most about being here. Our honeysuckle spot is only the beginning. The honeysuckle and the dead tree are in a big wild expanse of undergrowth—a sea of weeds that are as high as my waist, plus vines and small trees and wildflowers and dead stumps. We call it the Wasteland, and it’s between my yard and the golf course.

I mean an actual golf course, an old one that hasn’t been used in years, and it’s maybe a hundred feet from my back fence. It still has a wooden sign at the closed-off entrance: T
HE
L
ODEMA
G
OLF
C
OURSE AND
T
ENNIS
C
LUB
. Lydia’s mom said the owners went bankrupt or something. It’s an eighteen-hole course with a putt-putt course attached, the kind with big fake animals and windmills and mountains at the holes. From our apartment you can see the overgrown trees—wide strong oaks and puffy white Bradford pears and Christmassy rows of pine trees—and past the trees you can see the lights and skyscrapers of downtown Birmingham. In winter I can see the course itself, which still has the flags sticking up out of the holes. The grass is tall and shaggy, though—not at all like those golf courses you see on TV with grass like carpet. But the best thing about Lodema is that you can see the main attractions at the putt-putt course—there’s a dried-up waterfall, some kind of tower, and the head and neck of an orange dinosaur. I call him Marvin. I named him after Stepfather No. 2, my favorite of the temporary dads.