Where I'd Like to Be (6 page)

“I hope building this fort will teach all of you responsibility,” he said, like he’d read a report somewhere that we were the biggest bunch of ne’er-do-wells in the county. “And I hope it will teach Logan some much-needed social skills.”

Murphy gave the Judge her own cheesy grin. “We appreciate you letting us use your yard, sir,” she said. I thought I saw her batting her eyelashes when she said it.

After Judge Parrish left, we stood there in the clearing in the woods behind Logan’s house, our shoes all wet from dew on the grass, the pile of boards in front of us waiting to get hammered and nailed; and our faces were big zeroes, just blank as could be. There didn’t seem to be any way to begin.

Then Donita took a few steps forward and turned around to face us. “All right, now, there ain’t no need to panic. Let’s start at the starting place. What do we need to get going with this?”

Ricky Ray squinched his eyes and twisted his cap in his hands, trying hard for the right answer. “Wood?”

Donita nodded toward the stack of lumber. “Okay, we got the wood. What’s next?”

Taking in a deep breath, then letting it out slowly, Ricky Ray said, “Nails?”

“Nails,” Donita agreed. “I see them cans of nails, but let’s put ’em in a specific spot.” She looked around quickly, then grabbed a long pine branch near her feet and walked it a couple of yards away from the pile of boards. Then she
moved the cans of nails so they were lined up against the branch. “Okay, this is where we keep the nails. Nails don’t get moved away from here, everybody got that?”

We all nodded. “Okay, then, Ricky Ray, what’s that leave us with?” Donita put her hand on Ricky Ray’s shoulder, like she had all the faith in the world he was going to come up with the right answer.

“Tools!” he yelled at top volume, and you could tell he felt confident as could be, having gotten the first two things on the list right. “We got to have tools, don’t we, Donita?”

“That’s right, honey, and we got plenty,” Donita said. She turned to Logan. “You got a tarp of some sort back in your garage? Garbage bags will do, if that’s all you got. Can’t have no tools lying on the wet ground.”

Ten minutes later, we were organized. The air around us seemed lighter from pure relief, like we thought this fort might just get built after all. Before we went to work laying out the boards for the floor, we took a few minutes to study for the millionth time the plans Mr.
Potter had helped Logan and Murphy draw up. Then, hammers in hand, we got down to the business of putting that fort together.

Do you know the smell of raw lumber? It’s the freshest thing you can imagine. Every time I pounded a nail farther into a board, it was like a little puff of perfume came out, and I breathed it in as hard as I could. “They ought to put this smell in a bottle,” I said to no one in particular. “I’d pay top dollar for it.”

“You know why trees smell the way they do?” Murphy asked, looking up from her hammering.

“Sap?” Logan guessed. “Chlorophyll?”

Murphy shook her head. “Stars. Trees breathe in starlight year after year, and it goes deep into their bones. So when you cut a tree open, you smell a hundred years’ worth of light. Ancient starlight that took millions of years to reach earth. That’s why trees smell so beautiful and old.”

I thought it sounded like poetry, what Murphy had to say about the trees. I shook my head. I could talk a blue streak, but I could never say things the way Murphy did.

I saw Donita roll her eyes, but she smiled, too. She held a bunch of nails between her lips, so it was a strange sort of smile, but it seemed real enough. Murphy appeared to be growing on her, though that didn’t mean they were living in harmony night and day.

Right around lunchtime, Murphy backed away from the building site and peered toward it, her hand shading her eyes. “You know, I think we should have some turrets,” she called out. “Like on a castle. I stayed in a castle once, with my parents, and it was really nice. Well, it got cold at night, but we just piled on the quilts and were warm as toast.”

“You’re kidding, right?” Donita asked, not even bothering to look up from where she was hammering in a joist hinge. “We’ll be lucky if the walls stand up. We can’t be adding no towers for Sleeping Beauty.”

I looked around at what we had so far, just the skeleton of the floor and the boards for one wall lying on the grass, waiting to be nailed together. “I have to admit, it’s hard to imagine adding anything fancy to what we’ve got,” I said.

Murphy came a few steps closer. “Do you want this thing to look like a shoe box? Completely boring?”

Donita stood and crossed her arms. “I want it to stand up and stay standing,” she said, sounding firm on the matter. “I don’t think we need to be having ridiculous dreams about what might could be.”

Logan jumped into the middle of the fray. “All right, ladies, all right! Let’s break it up. No catfighting on the premises, if you please.”

Murphy and Donita glared at him. Then they looked at each other and cracked up. They laughed so hard they were choking on their laughter and pounding each other on the back. Logan stood to the side and looked confused, until Murphy finally caught her breath and looped an arm around his shoulder, grinning at him. “Logan the Peacemaker,” she said.

Logan shuffled his feet. “I was only joking,” he said, frowning. “Nobody ever gets my jokes.”

I watched Murphy and Donita laughing together, and it made me feel shy. I wished me
and Murphy could cut up that way sometimes. We did a lot of stuff together, not even counting the fort, but I still couldn’t help but wonder if Murphy really wanted to be my friend or if she just needed someone to pass the time with until someone came to collect her from the Home.

Over the next few days our hammers kept pounding, and the air was a mix of sounds—birdsong fluttering between the ring of metal on metal and wood. Every once in awhile we’d hear the putt-puttering of Mr. Potter’s old truck pulling up in the Parrish’s driveway, and pretty soon he’d be walking around the edges of the fort, giving us building tips.

“Y’all know where your windows are going to be?” he’d asked us Monday afternoon. Murphy and I were marking the bottom boards of the frame so we would see where to place the studs, the boards we’d nail plywood to for the walls. “That’s going to influence how many studs you need to mark for.”

Donita was counting out nails. “We don’t need windows, Uncle Wendell. A door ought to do us.”

“We have to have windows,” I protested. “Otherwise it’ll be like hanging around in a dungeon.”

“Listen to me on this one, Maddie,” Donita insisted. “You got windows, you got rain coming in the windows. You got snow coming in the windows. You got God’s creatures coming in the windows. Windows are more problems than we need to be dealing with here.”

Mr. Potter put his hand on Donita’s shoulder. “I got some strong plastic covering you can put over the windows, baby. When the days get short, you’ll be wanting some light in there while you can get it.”

He turned to the rest of us. “All right, children, let’s talk about how you make yourself a window.”

Logan was the one who knew the language of houses: king studs and trimmers, rise, run, and span. He was the one who showed Ricky Ray how to drive a nail into a board, bending down low so he could guide Ricky Ray’s hands. “My grandfather taught me that there’s two ways to nail pieces of wood together,” he
explained the first day. “There’s face nailing, which is when you pound the nail through one board directly into another board, like this.” He gave an expert tap of the hammer, using just the right amount of force to shoot the nail through one piece of wood and into the next.

“But sometimes you’ve got to toenail,” he said next, and that cracked Ricky Ray up.

“I got ten toenails,” he said to Logan. “I know all about toenails.”

“Well, I wouldn’t recommend doing to your toenails what I’m about to do to this nail, okay?”

Ricky Ray nodded, all serious, as Logan showed him how to drive a nail down at an angle to make a T out of two boards. “That’s pretty hard to do,” he said when he finished, “so you better let me help you if you need to do any toenailing.”

I stood there watching with my mouth hanging open. It was like a new Logan Parrish had been born before my eyes. With a hammer in his hand, Logan didn’t just seem like a normal person, he was downright heroic.

•    •    •

We were starting to get somewhere; we had a floor, the side walls and end walls were ready to go, and the corner posts were up. I had it all in my mind’s eye as I sloshed a brush dipped in silver paint across our Journey Through the Mind time machine, wondering what Murphy, Donita, and Ricky Ray were doing at that very minute. We’d accomplished a lot so far, but it would probably be another week before the fort was finished.

“Do you think we ought to paint the outside?” Logan Parrish had come to stand beside me, his hands jammed in his pockets, his feet dancing in his shoes.

Any innocent bystander would have thought Logan was out of his head. Obviously we were already painting the outside of the time machine. But I knew exactly what Logan Parrish was talking about.

“I just don’t want to take forever for it to be finished,” I told him, waving my brush and accidentally flecking his arm with silver paint.

Logan nodded, rubbing his arm on his jeans
and making a big, silvery smear. “Me either. But at the same time, I have a hundred ideas for what we could do to it to make it completely great.”

“Like put shutters on the windows,” I said.

“Or build steps up to the front door,” Logan said, excitement threading its way into his voice. “And I was thinking that it couldn’t be that hard to figure out how to put windowpanes in the windows. And what do you think about trying to find a woodstove? It’s going to get cold soon. We could cut a hole in the roof for the stovepipe.”

“Logan?”

A woman wearing a bright blue sweater and gray slacks stood at the foot of the stage, looking up at us, her eyebrows raised as though she found what we were doing just the slightest bit amusing. “It’s four forty-five, honey. I promised Daddy dinner would be on the table by six. He’s got a board meeting tonight.”

“Is that your mom?” I whispered.

“Yeah,” Logan whispered back, not sounding all that happy about the fact.

I looked at her a moment longer. “She doesn’t really match you, does she?”

Logan shook his head.

Looking down at Logan’s mother, I could see she didn’t have a frog bone in her body. Mrs. Parrish was immaculate. Her frosted blonde hair was cut in a neat bob, not a strand out of place. Also, you could just tell she had a pocket organizer and a cell phone in her purse. Mrs. Parrish was the sort of woman Granny Lane had always admired. “Oh, that one, she’s got her act together, now don’t she?” she’d say. Granny Lane wasn’t the least bit organized herself, but that didn’t stop her from liking others who were.

The way Mrs. Parrish rattled her keys lightly, signaling that it wouldn’t be a good idea to test her patience, let you know right off that her act was more together than most people’s.

“Can we give Maddie a ride home?” Logan asked his mother. “She’s one of the kids working on the fort.”

Mrs. Parrish gave a brisk nod of her head. “Of course. But both of you, please. Dinner at six means dinner at six.”

It felt funny to walk out of the building
matching step for step with Logan Parrish. It suddenly occurred to me that we might even be friends. Logan gave me a half-grin and rolled his eyes at me as his mother held out her keys and beeped open the car door locks of a spruce green SUV.

Logan’s little sister, Marcy, was sitting in the front seat talking on a play cell phone, running her hand through her floppy, blonde curls as she spoke. When Mrs. Parrish introduced us, Marcy put her hand over the receiver and whispered, “Sorry, can’t talk right now. Important call.”

“Caroline?” she spoke into the phone. “Lunch on Tuesday?”

Mrs. Parrish smiled. “Marcy’s in the second grade, and already she’s quite the social butterfly.”

I looked at Logan, who was struggling to get his seat belt on, his face going red from the effort.

I was pretty sure he had to be adopted.

“So Maddie, Judge Parrish says that all of the children building the fort come from the
Children’s Home,” Mrs. Parrish said as she pulled out of the parking lot behind the auditorium. “How long have you been there?”

“Since April,” I told her. “Before that, I was living with a foster family over in Blountville.”

“It’s a good thing you came over here,” Mrs. Parrish said. “The schools are much better. And the Children’s Home is excellent. Our church sponsors a scholarship. We sent one young man from the Home to Cornell University.”

“I’m sure he was happy about that, Mrs. Parrish,” I said. Outside the car, the trees seemed to rush past us in a blur of green and yellow, the leaves just beginning to change over. I imagined a boy on a college campus that smelled like autumn and wood smoke, and a little shiver ran through me.

“It was a wonderful opportunity for him,” Mrs. Parrish agreed, glancing at me in the rearview mirror. “So is it your wish to be adopted?”

Logan looked at his mother. “Mom, that’s pretty personal.”

“Not at all,” Mrs. Parrish said, brushing
Logan’s remark away with a wave of her hand. “Maddie knows she’s in the foster-care system. I’m sure she’s given some thought to the question, and if she hasn’t, then perhaps she should. I’m sure all foster children consider adoption.”

I nodded. “I’ve thought about it some. Mostly what I want is my own house. Besides, the people who want to adopt eleven-year-old girls are few and far between.”

“That’s a problem you hear about a great deal,” Mrs. Parrish said. “Even for children as young as two years old.”

I liked the way Mrs. Parrish spoke to me, like she considered me her equal. You could tell she wasn’t the sort of person who wasted time talking to people not worth the effort.

“How about your parents, Maddie?” Mrs. Parrish had pulled the car up to the foot of the Home’s driveway and now turned to look straight at me. “Are they completely out of the picture? Or is there a possibility of reconciliation?”