The Rules of Survival (11 page)

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Authors: Nancy Werlin

BOOK: The Rules of Survival
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“No, we didn’t,” Callie said. I wished she would watch her tone; she sounded almost belligerent. “Aunt Bobbie invited us for dinner. But if she hadn’t, I’d have made something. Or Matt would have.”
Nikki shrugged, undisturbed. This was a good mood for the record books. She gestured firmly to us to sit at the table, and we did, although Callie pushed her plate away empty. “Bobbie served you dinner? She actually shared her food?” She laughed, her hands deftly placing five cartons of Chinese food onto the table, followed by utensils. Then she seated herself. “So, do tell, what’d you eat there, frozen chocolate cake? A bowl of potato chips?”
“Chicken,” I said.
“Kentucky Fried,” Nikki guessed instantly, correctly. “And Bobbie ate all the biscuits, right? Slathered in butter? My sister is such a freak. How much do you suppose she weighs?” She was looking at Callie now, who shrugged and didn’t answer. “Two hundred thirty?”
This was an old game of Nikki’s, making fun of Aunt Bobbie. There were lots of ways to do it; Bobbie’s weight was only the most popular. We had always participated before. There was no reason—then—to love Aunt Bobbie or to try to understand why it was she wanted and needed so much food, or to speculate about what it might have been like for her, growing up as the younger sister to the pretty, popular, selfish, headstrong, and maybe even crazy Nikki—and with a dead mother and a gambling father, too.
So, remembering my promise to Callie—go back to normal—I joined in. “Two fifty, I bet,” I said. “She ate all the biscuits except for the two that Callie and I ate, and I counted four pieces of chicken on her plate. Plus, she bought a whole spare bucket of chicken that she’s probably eating right now.” I tipped my head downward. Aunt Bobbie’s kitchen was right under ours.
“God!” Nikki said. “Sick!” Her eyes were bright with enjoyment, with her fork paused midway between her plate of beef with broccoli and her mouth. Then she stabbed a piece of broccoli and shook her head, smiling generously at Callie. “Well, girl, maybe you were right, then. About not eating more now. I wouldn’t want you to end up like my sister. You don’t have to eat anything else now. Just keeping me company like this, that’s enough. Hanging out with my kids is a good enough time for me. Actually, I should have gotten brown rice, and not this pork fried stuff. It would’ve been healthier. I’ll remember that next time.”
“Oh, I like pork fried rice,” I put in. “It’s a treat. And this way, we can have lots of leftovers. I love leftovers.”
“Unless,” lilted Nikki, “we send them on down to Bobbie!”
I laughed with her. I am ashamed to say that it wasn’t hard to do. Callie’s right, I thought, Callie’s right. We can do this. I can do this. Normal, normal, normal. Normal for us.
And then I realized that Callie wasn’t laughing. That she hadn’t said a word since we sat down. I looked at her. She had reached for one of the cartons and was spooning fried rice onto her plate. A lot of fried rice, I saw with astonishment. While Nikki and I watched, she added just as much of the beef with broccoli, cashew shrimp, and chicken chow mein, until her plate was heaped high.
“I thought you already ate,” Nikki said dryly. She still sounded fine. Calm. Mildly interested. What was she
on
? Whatever it was, I liked it; she was nowhere near an explosion. And she was watching Callie as carefully as I was, but with an expression that wasn’t her usual cat-at-the-mouse-hole. This was one I didn’t recognize. There was a little frown of concern in the middle of her forehead. But, at the same time, she was also sort of smiling.
“I know I said that.” Callie’s head was down over her plate. Her fork was moving rapidly between it and her mouth. “I’m just suddenly very hungry. It’s weird.”
For a few moments we both continued to watch her, and then—
“Callie?” Nikki asked kindly. “Are you getting your period?”
It was like a bomb thrown into the room. I nearly choked on my egg roll. I felt myself blush.
“Mom!” Callie’s head came up and for a split second she glared toward me. Then her face went right down again. She muttered, “I don’t, yet.” And then, her voice skittering high, she added: “God, don’t you even
know
that? What kind of a mother
are
you?”
I froze—Callie, no!
But Nikki only smiled. And then, suddenly, she was the other Nikki, the wonderful Nikki. Emmy, I haven’t told you much about this side of her, because—well, I don’t want to remember it. But sometimes, sometimes, she was this mother, too.
She got up from the table. She went over to Callie’s chair, knelt beside her, and touched Callie’s cheek gently. “Sweet girl,” she said, “I’m the kind of mother that knows everything she needs to know. Baby, listen to me. This happens to every woman. You are about to be thirteen. I was twelve. It’s natural.”
“That is so not what’s going on with me right now!” Callie wailed.
“Don’t be afraid, baby girl. Don’t be afraid. It’s a beautiful thing.” She held out her arms.
And Callie went into them and sobbed. Nikki stroked her hair. She looked across at me and said, “Go keep Emmy company for a little while, would you, Matthew? Thanks, dear.”
I was more than glad to leave.
But as I was getting up, the phone rang. It was well after eleven o’clock, but late calls were a fact of life at our house. Nikki waved an imperious hand toward Callie, indicating she was to shut up with the sobs now. Callie, thankfully, wasn’t so far gone that she didn’t obey. Then Nikki answered the phone, smiling.
“Rob,” she said warmly. “There you are. I’ve been waiting to hear from you. So, did you take care of that little thing for me like you promised? Remember, you also promised to tell me every little detail. Actually, you might need to come over here and tell me in person . . . What did you say?”
Several seconds ticked by. The warm, amused, happy expression on Nikki’s face faded and was replaced by pure rage. We’d seen this before, many times. Except we hadn’t. Not quite like this. I already explained about the demons, so I won’t waste any more time on it, except to say that they were suddenly there. They were inside her.
Eventually, Nikki spoke again. Her eyes were on us, on Callie and me across the kitchen table from her, but she wasn’t seeing us at all. She was communing with her demons. And Rob.
“What?” she said to Rob. “What?! You absolute loser, are you trying to tell me that Murdoch beat
you
up?”
24
 
THE NEIGHBOR
 
I went looking for Murdoch as soon as I could the next morning.
Nikki had gone on a rampage when she’d gotten off the phone the night before, screaming, hurling the cartons of Chinese food at the walls, and ranting about what had happened. “Get out of here! Get out of here!” she’d yelled at Callie and me, and we’d barricaded ourselves in the bedroom, which was dim with only your night-light on, while our mother raged.
“I’ll make him pay! He’ll pay!”
It went on for hours. At one point, sometime near two in the morning, Rob was actually there, trying to explain himself. Murdoch couldn’t have hurt Rob very much, I thought, if Rob could come over—drag himself up the steep flights of stairs. But of course I couldn’t see him. The three of us eavesdropped instead. It was hard to hear Rob, but Nikki’s voice was as audible as a bullhorn. I easily put the whole story together. There wasn’t a lot to it, actually.
Emmy, there was no possible way to protect you from hearing that our mother had hooked up with and seduced a stranger, a large man, intending to get him to do physical harm to her ex-boyfriend. And there was also no way to prevent you from understanding what you heard. You were six years old by then, and the fact that you had taken your time to speak didn’t mean you weren’t smart. And also, I figure you knew.
I figure you heard the whole plan during that day that you were with Nikki and Rob. I figure that was your punishment for praying for Murdoch: being forced to listen to plans to hurt him. Maybe being told that you were the reason it was happening.
It was just the kind of thing Nikki would do.
Your eyes were wide in the dimness as you listened. Then they got narrow. What you were thinking, I don’t know.
“I’ll go find Murdoch tomorrow,” I said. I hunched down on the floor next to you and whispered. To you, not to Callie, although Callie was listening, too, of course. “I’ll make sure Murdoch’s okay.”
“Murdoch is fine,” you said matter-of-factly. “Can’t you hear? That other man, he’s the one who’s hurt.” There was great satisfaction in your voice, even though it was as low as mine. I glanced at Callie to see if she heard it, too, and to see what she thought. But she was huddled against the wall with her knees drawn up in front of her, rocking herself. And suddenly she said, “I don’t care, I’ve got to go,” and at the next burst of screaming from Nikki, Callie thrust herself up from the floor and was at the door, pushing away the bureau I’d moved in front of it. I was afraid of her being out there, but I made no move to stop her. A while later, Callie came safely back. She flung herself onto her mattress and curled into a little ball, ignoring you and me and the screaming coming from Nikki in the living room.
I pushed the bureau back against the door. I picked you up and put you to bed, and then crawled into mine, and the three of us stayed awake the rest of the night, listening in the dimness until Nikki finally wound herself down, half an hour or so before dawn.
Not long after that, when Nikki had finally quieted down, I told you and Callie that we all were going to school that day like normal. Yes, we were all tired. But so what? School was our job, I said. I knew, though, that I was lying. I didn’t intend to wait until after school to try to find Murdoch. Once I had taken you to school, I went straight to Murdoch’s house on East Tenth Street.
Murdoch didn’t answer his doorbell when I rang, even though I pressed it repeatedly for ten whole minutes. But his extended cab Toyota truck was sitting in front of his house, with its windshield and side windows smashed. I stopped and stared at it. The windows weren’t broken, only spiderwebbed with cracks—I guessed that the glass was that safety stuff. But they had been comprehensively destroyed. I stepped closer to look, aware that I was finding it a little hard to breathe.
A baseball bat, I guessed, or something similar, had caused this.
No. Rob had caused this.
No again. Nikki had caused this. Our mother had caused this.
I wondered: Had Murdoch been in his truck, or getting out of it, when Rob went after him? How was Murdoch? What had happened, when, how? I had to know.
There was a big sign on the driver’s seat. It said:
Sam, please call me before you tow the truck. Thanks.
I could telephone Murdoch, too, I thought. I had the cell phone he’d given me, with lots of time still left on it because I used it so rarely, to save the minutes for emergencies. I didn’t want to talk to him on the phone, though. I wanted to just find him. I wanted to see him. I wanted—
My eyes fell on the door of the house next to Murdoch’s. It was attached to his, sharing the whole inner wall, and I knew the name—I groped for it—of the woman who lived in the first-floor condo. Julie Lindemann. That was it. I knew her car, too—that was it over there, across the street, a new white Beetle convertible. Its presence meant she hadn’t left for work yet. She and Murdoch had some joke about how she was a big gas-waster because she could take the bus to work but never did.
I sat down on the stoop of Murdoch’s house, which was also the stoop of Julie’s house, and waited, and after about half an hour, Julie let herself out of the door right next to me. I stood up and said her name, and she jumped about two feet in the air, dropping her keys.
“Oh my God, you scared me!”
“I’m sorry. I’m Matthew Walsh. Do you remember me? I’m a friend of Murdoch’s.”
I saw that she did remember me. Her eyes looked a little wary, though, and I wondered if Murdoch had said anything to her about us, about our mother. She bent down to pick up her keys, but I got to them first and handed them to her.
“Thanks,” she said.
I nodded toward Murdoch’s wrecked truck. “What happened?”
“I don’t know,” Julie said. But I could tell that she wasn’t shocked to see the smashed windows. I could tell from her expression as she glanced at the truck that she’d already seen them—maybe even last night, when it happened. Her front window was only twenty feet from where the truck was parked. She might have seen the whole thing. If she’d been home, she must have heard it. That whole end of the street must have heard it.
“Please,” I said. “I’m looking for Murdoch. I have to talk to him. It’s important. It’s about—it’s about that.” I nodded toward the car again. “Do you know where he’s working these days? Do you know where I can find him?”
“No, sorry,” Julie said. “I can’t help you.”
But she blushed as she spoke, and didn’t look at me, and I didn’t believe her.
“I have to go to work now,” she said. She headed for her car. I kept even with her.
“Please,” I said again. “I have to talk to him.”

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