Sugar Castle, chapter 4
Colin had found the secret cookies. He knew where all the hidden things were in the house, but the cookies were only nominally a secret. His mother bought things in bulk because it was cheaper, so at any time there might be as many as 20 boxes or bags of cookies in various storage areas. The secret cookies were the ones she liked the best. Colin also liked them best, peanut butter sandwich cookies shaped to look like peanuts which his mother dipped in chocolate when she had extra time, and packed away in Christmas cookie tins. He had found a stash of them at the bottom of the pantry, behind the cat food. He took three cookies, which he felt would hardly be noticed.
The house was empty and quiet with his sisters gone. This was probably what it was like when they used to go to school, when his mother had gone out to work every day instead of just once a week. In those school-going days, he had often wanted to stay at home. Sometimes school just seemed like too much work, not so much what they had to do, but the endless talking, the going from one place to another. The other kids went back and forth, upstairs and down, without thinking about it, but he had to put his mind to it. He could go faster (a little) but couldn’t run. He could go upstairs but had to walk to the end of the hall for the elevator. If he was tired, he could use his wheelchair, but that was even slower. He had to make a plan for everything, which he mostly took for granted. At home there weren’t so many places to go and not much of a distance between them, which he’d sometimes longed for.
But he hadn’t taken the boredom factor into account.
When he finished the cookies, and had brushed the crumbs off the couch cushions into the crack between them, he went into his room. His parents had bought him a journal for his last birthday. His father had said that he was getting old enough to have some deep thoughts, and he could keep a record of them in his journal. “Then when you’re grown up, you can look back at them and laugh,” he’d said. At the time, he hadn’t paid much attention to this, because the journal was one of the least exciting presents he’d gotten. But he thought about it sometimes now. Is that something his father had done? Did he have a journal when he was Colin’s age, and did he read it later and laugh? Or did he just remember those things, the deep thoughts, and laugh at them? It wasn’t the kind of thing he could ask his mother about, although she was the only one who might know.
He opened the journal. He’d started keeping records in it, of games he’d played, of how long it took to do his homework, of how many times Gindy texted one of the Sandras, how many times his mother sighed during dinner. He wasn’t sure he’d ever want to read this stuff over again, but there was a certain satisfaction in writing it down. Lately, he’d been putting in his dreams. He thought that they might be predicting the future, in a weird way, and it seemed like a good idea to keep a record. Last night, he’d dreamt about Dawn the cat. In the dream, she had opened her mouth and there was a flower on her tongue. This was not impossible in the real world, because Dawn was an adventurous eater. He wrote that down, and then added, “Sophie and Gindy sneaked out of the house. There still gone.” He added a mark for another texting session. So far this week Gindy had texted with Sandra Z or Sandra J 15 times that he knew about, and it was only Tuesday. He had started a list for Sophie, too – how many times she complained about something, but she did it too many times and he’d quit counting.
He was still mad at them about leaving. Would he tell on them or not? He hadn’t decided.
Sophie propped her artwork against the white board so that Gindy could see it. Her sister stared, put her head on one side, tapped her chin, which Sophie recognized as an imitation of their mother when she was thinking hard about something. Sophie didn’t look at it. She was a little afraid to. The way she’d remembered it in the weeks since they’d been out of school – was it as good as she’d thought it was? In her mind, it had been so bright, so perfect, like something in a book. She’d thought about it every night before she went to sleep, and it had gotten larger in her imaginings. She’d forgotten all the places where her brush slipped or where the paper mache was lumpy, but she was remembering them now.
“Does Mom know about this?” Gindy said.
“What difference does that make?”
“You know,” Gindy folded her arms. “Are you sure it’s a good idea to bring it home?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Sophie said. Although she did. She didn’t look over at it, but she knew all too well what it looked like. It was four feet high, a bas-relief sculpture, the art teacher had called it, of their family. Gindy and Colin standing, Sophie sitting in front of them. Behind the three of them, her mother, wearing her reading glasses, her hair in a bun. Standing next to her, their father. Sophie knew, without looking, that he was looking a little away instead of straight ahead like the rest of them. She hadn’t intended that. It was something about his eyes, which she had tried to fix, and then stopped when it started to make it worse.
“You can’t hang that up in the house,” Gindy said. Her voice was cold.
“I said I was going to put it in the closet for a while.”
“A while is not going to be long enough. You should just leave it here.”
“I won’t.” Still without looking at it, Sophie arranged it awkwardly under one arm and started toward the door.
“I mean it,” Gindy said
“I mean it, too. I’m not leaving it here.”
She heard Gindy following her, out into the hall. “The door locks by itself,” she told her.
“Sometimes I hate you,” Gindy said.
They didn’t say anything to each other until they were out of the school, walking across the parking lot. The paper mache wasn’t that heavy but it was so big. She tried carrying it on one side and then the other, but it banged against her legs. If she held it in front she couldn’t see her feet. Gindy was walking ahead, ignoring her. Sophie knew that her sister was angry in the way that she always knew things about Gindy. She had learned to read her before she could talk, when Gindy was hardly more than a baby herself. There was a certain way she held her head, a stiffness to her neck. Sometimes, as now, she pretended that Sophie was invisible. It could go on for days. Sophie told herself that she didn’t care. She’d done what she wanted to do and that was the important thing.
When they got to the road, Sophie felt a few raindrops. She looked up at the sky, which looked the same as it had all day, smooth and gray, but there was an edge of darker cloud coming on the wind. “It’s going to rain,” she said.
Gindy didn’t answer.
“I think it might melt if it gets wet.”
“I guess you’d better walk faster then.”
Sophie stopped and leaned her sculpture against the wall at the end of the parking lot. She took off the raincoat and wrapped it around the top. It went most of the way around, and she tried to button it so it would stay on. While she struggled with this, Gindy kept walking. By the time Sophie had it more or less covered, Gindy was all the way to the road, so she ran after her, the sculpture banging her legs and the raincoat flapping.
They walked in silence as the rain fell, first just a mist, then some larger drops. Every once in a while a car or a truck whooshed by them. Gindy put her hands in the pockets of her jeans. Her sweater was damp against her arms and the back of her neck. Sophie turned her head at everything that passed them, hoping for a ride, probably. How long would it take to get home? Only fifteen minutes, but it seemed too long to be trapped like this, in the rain, on the road, with Sophie. Gindy had said a few minutes ago that she hated Sophie, not really meaning it, but now she thought that she might, or anyway that she could imagine hating her. Sophie never cared about what other people were thinking or feeling. The stupid sculpture was a typical Sophie-ism. That she’d made it at all, as if they were still a happy family, an inseparable group.
Sophie was a little ahead and Gindy could see the feet under the flapping raincoat, in their various shoes in somewhat lumpy paper mache. Colin’s heavy supportive shoes, Sophie’s flipflops, Gindy’s flats. Their mother’s shoes were hidden behind the kids standing in front of her, but their father’s brown work shoes were there, jerking and bouncing now just above the surface of the road, as if he were taking a walks with them, in his shoes and raincoat. Which he’d never done and now wouldn’t ever be doing. I hate her, Gindy thought, a little at least. Her phone buzzed in her pocket and she pulled it out, surprised. They must be out of the dead-phone zone still.
Sophie looked around. “Is it mom?” Her hair had flattened wetly against her cheeks.
It was Sandra B. Gindy turned off the ringer and put it back in her pocket, not answering.
The world seemed to have gotten smaller, closing in around them. Mist rose from the ground and up around them so that it was hard to see much ahead. The wind was sighing through the tops of the trees although the rain fell straight down. Their father’s coat had wet spots on it, which meant that it wasn’t waterproof. What was the point of a raincoat that wasn’t waterproof? Gindy stepped in a puddle which splashed up her legs.
An SUV went past them, its headlights haloed in the fog, then stopped and reversed back. A man stuck his head out of the window, leaning across the front seat. “Hey,” he said. “You girls want a ride? You’re the Barnett girls, am I right?”
“No, thanks,” Gindy said.
“Stranger danger, I know.” He laughed. “It’s OK though. I knew your father. We worked together before they closed the plant.”
“Really, we’re fine. We’re not going far.”
Sophie turned to look at her, scowling, and then back to the man. “We’d love a ride,” she said.
The man opened the door of the SUV and Sophie pushed the raincoated sculpture onto the floor under the dashboard.
Gindy caught at her arm. “Are you crazy?” she whispered.
“He worked with Dad.”
“He says that he worked with Dad.”
“Say, do you want to put that into the back,” the man said.
Sophie shook her head. She climbed into the front seat and looked back at Gindy, who stood in the road, rain drippping off the ends of her hair. “What’s your name?” she said to the man. “What part did you work in?”
“Randy Sayre,” he said, smiling. He pretended to tip a hat toward her. “In Repairs. I saw your father every day even though we weren’t in the same department. He’d always be getting a coke from the machine and he’d pass me by.”
“See,” Sophie said, as if knowing that their father liked Coke was a dispensation from the Pope. When Gindy still hesitated, Sophie said, “I’m going. You can walk in the wet if you want to.”
The man pushed the button to open the back door, still smiling, and Gindy climbed in.