Someone Else's Shoes

  “I said I was sorry.”

  Izzy’s mother waved her apology away. “You wasted my money on those silly shoes when you knew you needed a pair of sneakers for gym class. You act like it’s a terrible chore to spend time with your cousin, who needs us so much right now. This morning you were downright mean to Ben, who was only teasing you. And now this.” She pointed to the bathtub.

  “Ben wasn’t teasing! He said I looked—”

  “I don’t want to hear it, Izzy. You aren’t the only important person in this household. Uncle Henderson and Oliver, and yes, Ben too—they need our help. We have to put our own feelings aside for the moment and do what needs to be done for them—even if it’s not convenient. You complain about Ben, but he’s been a bigger help with Oliver than you have—and he barely knows him! Ben even helps me around the house. While you were gone this afternoon, he fixed that drainpipe that’s been broken for years, and he took the time to explain what he was doing to Oliver too.”

  “Just because Oliver likes Ben and follows him around—”

  But her mother was not ready to let her have her say. “And then I come up here and find that you’ve wrecked the bathroom you share with two other people—and you haven’t even tried to clean it up! I never thought of you as inconsiderate before, Izzy. But if this is what your adolescence is going to be like, we’re going to bump heads, and it’s going to hurt us both.”

  Izzy turned back to the stained shower curtain, tears stinging her eyes. Okay, maybe she’d made a mistake about the shoes, and she’d forgotten to clean up the bathtub, but the other charges were unfair. She did help with Oliver—he’d even told her a secret he hadn’t told anyone else. Well, he told Ben too. Ben. He was the one who was really causing all the trouble. Her mother thought he was some kind of angel, but that was just an act. Underneath, he was as poisonous as that scorpion on his arm.

  Izzy had to wipe her tears on the shoulder of her T-shirt in order to see what she was doing. She tried not to sniff too loudly. For several minutes no one said anything.

  “Bleach getting to you?” her mom said finally, her voice calmer now.

  Izzy nodded, but she didn’t speak.

  In a much quieter tone, her mother said, “I know this has been a tough time for you, Izzy. There’s been a lot going on, and you probably don’t understand all of it.”

  Izzy nodded again, but she kept scrubbing. The yellow stain was not quite as bright anymore.

  “We haven’t talked much about Aunt Felicia’s death, and we probably should. Is there anything you want to ask me?”

  Izzy shrugged. “I don’t know. Sort of.”

  Her mother touched her shoulder. “Stop cleaning for a minute and turn around. We need to talk about this.”

  Izzy let the scrub brush fall into the tub and sat cross-legged on the bath mat, facing her mother, whose hair was coming loose from its messy ponytail and falling around her ears.

  “I just don’t understand,” Izzy said, “how Aunt Felicia could have been so unhappy that she didn’t want to live anymore. Why would anybody want to kill themselves?”

  “It’s hard to understand if you’ve never been that depressed yourself. It’s not the same as being unhappy. It’s much, much worse than that. It’s a kind of terrible misery that takes over your mind and even your body. Sometimes you can’t sleep at night, and then you want to sleep all day. You can’t function anymore. You might even hear voices telling you to kill yourself.”

  “Did Aunt Felicia hear voices?”

  “That’s what Henderson said.”

  “Have you ever been depressed like that?” Izzy asked, and for a moment she was afraid to hear the answer.

  “No, I never have, not like that,” her mother said. “Do you think about, do you imagine…Felicia doing it?”

  Izzy nodded. “I don’t like to, but sometimes I can’t help it.”

  Her mother sighed. “I’m sure Oliver thinks about it too.”

  Izzy looked into her mother’s eyes, which were softer now. “Didn’t Aunt Felicia know how much it would hurt Oliver and Uncle Hen?” Izzy asked.

  Izzy’s mother grimaced. “I guess she thought if she was gone, they wouldn’t have to deal with her problems. She didn’t believe she’d ever get better.” Her mother’s hands grasped each other so tightly her knuckles were white. “And I think she felt like she was a burden to her family.”

  Izzy reached up to twist one of her yellow spikes. She already missed being able to pull her hair into the corner of her mouth. “But they loved her. Didn’t she know that?”

  “I wish this were easier to explain, Izzy. I have a hard time understanding it too. Felicia had been fired from her job because she was in the hospital so often, and that made her feel like a failure. She thought she wasn’t being a good wife or a good mother anymore, and that made her feel even worse. The sickness overwhelmed her. She got into a downward spiral, and she couldn’t pull herself out.”

  Izzy imagined her aunt falling, falling, falling, with no way to stop. “Couldn’t anybody help her?”

  “Many people tried, but the voices wouldn’t go away, and she couldn’t stand it anymore. It wasn’t anyone’s fault.” Her mother brushed away a lone tear that dribbled down her cheek. “I just wish I could convince Henderson of that.”

  That tear amazed Izzy. She couldn’t remember when she’d last seen her mother cry. Not when she fought with Izzy’s father. Not during the divorce. Maybe never. “Does Uncle Hen think it’s his fault?”

  Her mother nodded.

  “Why?”

  “He loved her so much, Izzy. He thinks he should have noticed something that day. But it’s not that simple. Hen did everything he could to help Felicia, but sometimes the illness wins anyway.” Her mother sighed and gave Izzy a shaky smile.

  “At least she’s not unhappy anymore,” Izzy said.

  Her mother was quiet for a minute and then she said, “No, but Henderson and Oliver certainly are.”

  “Won’t they ever feel better?”

  “I think they will eventually,” her mother said, squaring her jaw. “But it will be hard, and they’ll always miss Felicia. Our job now is to keep them safe until they can find some joy in their lives again and start to move forward.”

  “I think they’ll get better,” Izzy said, because the other option was too awful to imagine.

  Her mother pulled her to her feet and wrapped her arms around Izzy’s shoulders. “I think so too, Izzy. I think so too.”

  Dr. Gustino called every night, but he never seemed to know when he’d be able to leave St. Louis. He hadn’t found a caretaker he liked, and he was still visiting assisted-living facilities, some of which had long waiting lists. He apologized to Izzy’s mother for leaving his son with her for so long, even though she assured him, loudly, when everyone was listening, that Ben was no problem at all.

  Last night Ben had refused to talk to his father, so Izzy’s mother took the phone into her room and spoke to him privately. Ben’s face clouded over, and he clumped noisily down to the basement. When Oliver tried to follow him, Ben grunted, “Not tonight,” and the younger boy stared unhappily at the closed door.

  To prove to her mother that she wasn’t selfish, Izzy was determined to take up the slack. She led Oliver to her room and showed him some of her favorite SNL clips, but he wasn’t very impressed with them.

  “Let’s watch Monty Python!” he begged, until finally Izzy gave in. Grudgingly, she had to admit it was pretty funny when you watched the whole thing.

  She didn’t really mind hanging out with Oliver these days. Maybe because she was a little bit lonely herself. The first day she’d shown up at school with her neon-yellow hair had been traumatic. Cookie had barely even looked at her, much less spoken to her, and Pauline had only given her pitiful looks from across the room and pathetic little finger waves. Izzy had tried to be angry, but really she was just hurt.

  The rest of the student body was even less kind. They snickered at her to her face an
d laughed out loud the minute her back was turned. The most idiotic of the boys made chicken noises and threw wads of paper at her head.

  Today by lunchtime her gelled spikes had fallen over like weeds in a rainstorm. Stubbornly, Izzy stood in front of the mirror in the girls’ bathroom and reapplied the sticky goo, while all around her the cotton-candy blondes and the hair-halfway-down-their-back brunettes rolled their eyes. To keep her spirits up, she tried to imagine what Jerry Seinfeld would say. Who are these impeccable creatures? You see them at eight in the morning and already the hairdo is flawless—that perfect swoop over the eye, the curl lying on one shoulder. Do you think they sleep standing up? How do they even grow hair that long? Are there horses somewhere walking around without tails? A little funny, she thought, but not quite enough. It needed more work.

  After school Pauline and Cookie went off by themselves without telling her their plans, and Izzy walked to Hopkins Elementary to meet Oliver. At least he wasn’t ashamed to be seen with her.

  When she got to the school, she looked over at the bench and was surprised to find Oliver talking to a skinny girl with two bushy pigtails. They both looked sweaty, and the girl had a dirty swoosh on her forehead as if she’d wiped a grimy hand across it.

  “I’m Suzanne,” the girl announced when Izzy came up to the bench. “You’re his cousin, aren’t you? He told me about your hair.”

  Oliver looked a little embarrassed. “I didn’t say it was bad. I just said it was yellow.”

  Suzanne tilted her head, staring at Izzy’s droopy peaks. “I think it’s cool. I like people who aren’t the same as everybody else.”

  “That’s why she talks to me,” Oliver said.

  “Oliver told me he was awake all night, listening to his dad play the guitar,” Suzanne reported.

  “You were?” Izzy asked him. “I had my earplugs in. Why didn’t you?” Uncle Henderson had been singing and playing the guitar almost every night, and her mother had gotten them all earplugs so they could get some rest.

  Oliver shrugged. “When I sleep, I have bad dreams. Besides, I like to hear my dad’s voice. He doesn’t talk that much anymore.”

  It was true. Uncle Henderson’s transformation into a ghost was almost complete. During the day, when he wasn’t asleep, he stalked silently around the house in white socks that matched his pale face, and at night he just repeated his sad songs. You’d think it would be easy to ignore somebody who never spoke, but Uncle Hen’s silence was like that eerie moment before a thunderclap strikes. Izzy kept waiting for a fierce roar to break out of his throat and shake the whole house.

  “Sometimes I get tired of listening to my parents talk,” Suzanne said. “But if they stopped talking altogether, I wouldn’t like it either.”

  “They keep talking in your head,” Oliver said. “But it’s not the same.”

  Izzy wondered how much of Oliver’s story this girl knew.

  Suzanne pulled on her hair to tighten her pigtails. “Now that your cousin is here, I’ll go home. I just live a block that way.” She pointed off in the distance behind the school.

  “Nice to meet you,” Izzy said.

  Oliver waved as Suzanne stalked off, her skinny arms and pigtails swinging in opposite directions.

  “So,” Izzy said, “you’ve got a girlfriend now.”

  Oliver made a face. “No. She’s just a friend. She yells at Liam when he says mean stuff to me.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. He’s not as scared of her as he is of Ben, though.”

  “What’s Ben done to him?” Izzy asked. A lot of people were scared of Ben for no reason other than his scowling looks. Izzy wasn’t anymore, though. He acted as if he might sting you, like the scorpion on his arm, but mostly he only howled like the wolf on his neck.

  “Nothing, really,” Oliver said, “but one time when Ben picked me up, he said, real loud, so Liam and his friends could hear, ‘When you hit somebody, Oliver, go for the nose. It hurts like hell, and it bleeds like crazy.’ You should have seen the looks on their faces. That was my best day so far.”

  Izzy remembered the time she’d scared Liam too. That kid was not nearly as brave as he pretended to be.

  “Suzanne seems nice,” she said. “I’m glad you’re making friends. It’s getting better here, isn’t it?”

  He shrugged. “It’s okay. I mean, it’s not here that’s so bad. It’s…you know…everything else.”

  “Your mom, you mean.” Izzy didn’t usually try to talk to Oliver about his mother. It was too hard to know what to say, so she left it to the grown-ups. But she couldn’t ignore the subject forever. Oliver was a part of her life now, and his mother was always going to be dead. In a month, in a year, in ten years—she was always going to have killed herself. It was something that would never change. If Oliver could deal with it, Izzy guessed she could too.

  Oliver nodded.

  “What happened when you saw Cassie Clayton yesterday?” She’d forgotten to approach the subject cautiously, but Oliver apparently wasn’t as freaked out about it as he’d been the week before.

  “It was okay,” he said. “I mean, I still don’t want to talk about that, but we talked about other stuff.”

  “Like what?”

  “I told her about Ben. About his tattoos and about how he can fix things. And how his mother lives in California, and he never sees her.”

  It was as if a gong had been struck in Izzy’s head. Suddenly she got it. Of course that connected Ben and Oliver: neither of them ever saw their mothers. It was possible Ben might see his mother again someday, but still, both of their mothers had chosen to leave them behind. Which was, Izzy had to admit, even worse than having your father live two hours away with his new, pregnant wife. Her sudden realization of what Ben and Oliver shared made Izzy feel a little dazed.

  “Did Cassie say anything about you spending so much time with Ben?” she asked.

  “She said he’s sort of like a big brother to me. I like that idea. I always wanted to have a brother.”

  “I wanted a sister,” Izzy admitted. “I never much liked being an only child.” That was one thing all three of them had in common. But of course, pretty soon she wouldn’t be an only child—she’d have a half-brother who’d steal away the little bit of her father she still pretended was hers. She should have been more careful what she wished for.

  Oliver looked at her out of the corner of his eye and said, “I’m not supposed to tell you this, but…”

  “What?”

  “I promised.” He wriggled his shoulders, ready to burst with whatever his secret was.

  “Just tell me. You know you want to.” She didn’t really care if he told her or not. How interesting could a ten-year-old’s secret be, anyway?

  “Don’t tell your mom, okay?”

  “I won’t tell.” She crossed her heart with her finger.

  “Ben’s going to see his uncle Steve after school today. He’s hitchhiking.” The way Oliver said “hitchhiking” made it sound like a felony.

  “Really?” This was more interesting than Izzy had expected. “He promised his dad he wouldn’t go there.”

  “Yeah, but he’s mad at his dad. I think he’s always mad at his dad.”

  “Where does this Uncle Steve live, anyway?”

  “I think he said Eastman. Where’s that?” Oliver asked.

  “He’s hitchhiking to Eastman! That’s way up in the hill towns.” Even though Izzy would be much too scared to ever hitchhike herself, the idea of it excited her.

  “Ben says he hitches there all the time.”

  “What’s so special about this Uncle Steve guy?”

  “All I know is he’s Ben’s mother’s brother. And he fixes cars. And he drinks a lot of beer. And sometimes he smokes marijuana.”

  “Ben told you that? Jeez, if Mom finds out about this—”

  Oliver leaped in front of her so she had to stop walking. “You crossed your heart!”

  “I know! I won’t tell her. I’m just sayi
ng if she finds out some other way.”

  “What would she do?”

  “She’d talk his ear off about drugs, for one thing. And she’d tell his father, for sure.”

  “She won’t find out,” Oliver said. “Ben’s too smart.”

  Izzy grunted. “Yeah, he’s a regular genius. How come you like him so much?”

  Oliver thought about it and then stuck a finger in the air. “One, he looks at me. Right in the eyes, like I’m not just a little kid.” A second finger went up. “Two, he laughs at a lot of stuff, but he never laughs at me.” A third finger leaped to attention. “And three, he doesn’t treat me like I’m some kind of a freak.”

  Izzy digested this report for a minute and then mumbled, “Maybe that’s because he’s a freak.”

  “Maybe,” Oliver agreed. “But he’s the kind of freak I want to be.”

  When they got home, Oliver went upstairs to see his dad like he always did, while Izzy went into the kitchen to look for snacks. She hauled out a jar of pickles from the back of the fridge and put them on the kitchen table with a bag of tortilla chips. She was searching through the cabinets for her mother’s big pitcher when Oliver came back into the room with a wide-eyed, panicky look on his face.

  “What’s wrong?”

  His mouth was half open, as if he were searching for the right words. “My…my dad’s not here.”

  “He must be,” Izzy said. “He never goes out. Did you check the bathroom?”

  Oliver nodded. “He’s not upstairs.”

  Uncle Henderson had not left their house since he and Oliver had arrived more than a month ago. He hadn’t even sat on the front porch or gone into the yard.

  “He must be here,” Izzy said. “You look in the basement. I’ll check the parlor and the backyard.”

  But Uncle Henderson was not in any of those places. Oliver’s eyes were blinking wildly. “Maybe this is a good thing,” Izzy said. “Maybe he walked into town for something. To go to the bookstore or the food co-op or something.”