Over the Tracks (Suspended) Read online

A lot of the time, I tried to remember what Mom used to look like, when her hair was brown and tied up on top of her head. She’d glance up from the garden with a stripe of dirt across her face. She was always wiping her chin with her garden gloves and forgetting that her hands had been buried in soil.

  “Want a snack?” she’d say.

  “Totally starving.”

  “Great, will you make me something too?” She’d laugh every time, smudging more dirt across her jaw, and I’d roll my eyes. There was always something made already. Popcorn with chili pepper or tomato salsa and chips. She was great at snacks, if not meals. Dinners were more like picnics. Sliced vegetables and bread and hummus. I thought of the cold lasagna in the kitchen. The boxes of pasta.

  That night Mom was completely still in her sleep. The lamp on the table next to her seemed to tower over the pill bottles and the ashtray.

  I moved toward her bedside table. The container of thin-rolled cigarettes. I counted—there were six of them. Mom still didn’t move. Her breath was slow. I always listened for her breath now. Carefully, I slid open the top drawer. Piles of envelopes, pens, lip balm, hair ties, and a square silver bag that reflected the lamplight. I reached in and picked up the bag. There it was—the musty, spicy smell. I pulled open the bag’s seal and examined the dense clumps inside. The stuff Jeff would roll into joints for Mom as he sat beside her bed.

  I looked into the bag again. Four small chunks and some loose crumbs. I reached in and dropped one of the small balls of marijuana into the palm of my hand.

  Just then, the front door creaked. “Hello!” It was Jeff. I slipped the ball into my pocket, sealed the bag, pushed the door shut, and moved to the doorway.

  “Hi,” I called down the hall to Jeff. He was hanging his coat by the door. He turned to me and nodded. His tired smile and his gray beard were sort of familiar and comforting and out of place all at once. He’d always been in our lives, but Mom kept him at a distance too.

  I moved back into the room. In a minute, Jeff was standing next to me. He kissed the top of my head, and we both watched Mom. And as if she knew, she breathed deep in her sleep, turned her head, and blinked her eyes open. She tried to smile, but it was a slow, tired smile.

  Jeff leaned down and kissed her forehead. I stayed still. She smiled toward Jeff but looked at me.

  “Lucy,” she said. Her voice didn’t sound like her voice anymore. She lifted her hand out, so I moved forward and took it. Jeff settled back into the chair. Mom’s hand felt thin and dry in mine. Even though she was looking at me, her eyes didn’t look like her eyes.

  “How was school?”

  “Fine,” I said. I thought about New York and my sneakers. I didn’t know what else to say. Her eyes fluttered. I could tell it was hard for her to keep them open.

  “Don’t you have any stories for me?” She tried a half-smile again, still holding on to my hand.

  “Not really, Mom. Nothing exciting.” I laid her hand down on the sheet and moved back. Jeff was watching me, his eyes kind of sad. “You’re tired. I’m gonna let you sleep.”

  She nodded her head against the pillow.

  “I’m gonna go do some homework.”

  “Okay,” said Jeff.

  “Come kiss me good night before you go to sleep,” Mom said.

  I nodded as I walked back down the hall, but I knew I wouldn’t go back to her room tonight. And she wouldn’t know. She’d be asleep before I got to the kitchen.

  And anyway, my pocket was burning. What had I done? I’d never stolen anything before. Not from a store, not from my mom. But I didn’t feel guilty exactly. I felt kind of excited. And I had an idea.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  In fifth and sixth grade, Jenny Bauer had been my other friend besides Pete. When Jenny moved to town in fifth grade, she had already dyed her hair bright red. She was always raising her hand to ask the teacher “But why?” Even though Jenny got sent to the principal more than any girl I’d ever seen, I liked her. She did things that I’d be afraid to do, and she was kind of fun.

  By seventh grade, Jenny Bauer’s rule breaking wasn’t as fun anymore. She started hanging out with high school kids, the kind that had stared down at us with bright, mean eyes. She picked up smoking, and my mom could smell the smoke from miles away. She cut class. And I was afraid to cut class. Basically, Jenny Bauer and I just stopped hanging out. No hard feelings, just different lives.

  But when I decided to sell my mom’s marijuana so I could buy new sneakers and maybe go on the New York trip, I knew right away that Jenny Bauer could help me.

  Jenny hung out in the smoker’s yard. Which isn’t really a yard at all. It’s more like a dirt parking lot, a forgotten piece of land between the gas station and the main road up to the school. Crossing the parking lot to head down to the yard, I zipped my sweatshirt up to my chin and pulled my hood low over my head. I was trying to hide in plain sight.

  As I approached the lot, people shifted in small groups or looked up and down. No one cared that I was there. No one looked twice. Which was a relief. So was the fact that Jenny was standing by herself, smoking and staring at her toes. Her hair was white blonde now, one side long and smooth, one side shaved close to her head.

  “Hi, Jenny,” I said. I realized I had no idea what I was going to say after that. Jenny squinted and took a drag.

  “How’ve you been?” I said stupidly.

  “What are you doing here?” Jenny said. It was a good question. Since I hadn’t planned any of this, I thought the best way to answer was with the truth.

  “So I have some pot that I need to sell. And I wasn’t really sure where to go.”

  Jenny laughed hard and shook her head. She dropped her cigarette and stomped it out with her toe.

  “So you thought, what? I’ll go talk to the girl who wears black and smokes?”

  It didn’t sound so unreasonable.

  “No, Jenny, I—”

  She put her hand up to cut me off. “Listen, Lucy. You don’t know what you’re doing. Forget about it, okay?”

  And she turned to walk back up the hill to school, leaving me standing in the smoker’s yard.

  •••

  “You did what?” Pete said at lunch. We were at our usual back corner table in the crowded cafeteria. He had stopped unwrapping his sandwich.

  “You heard me right,” I said.

  Pete shook his head, a lot like the way Jenny Bauer had shaken her head at me a few hours earlier.

  “You are really losing it, Lou,” he said. “Do you know how stupid that is?”

  Something about the way he said it made me mad. Pete was just sitting there, living his perfect life with his perfect two parents and his perfect new sneakers.

  “You don’t know anything about it,” I said. I didn’t really know what “it” meant—my mom’s pot, Jenny Bauer, cancer, being alone.

  Pete picked up his sandwich and went back to unwrapping it.

  “Don’t be mad at me, Lou,” he said. “I’m trying to help.”

  I wanted to tell him what it felt like when I came home after school. The front of the house always dark, Mom asleep and pale in her smoky, dark back bedroom. It was like I was already living on my own. I couldn’t ask for anything. I couldn’t hope for anything. The idea of Mom getting better was so far away, I didn’t even know what it looked like.

  “Um, your dumb idea may not be dead,” Pete said, looking over my shoulder. I turned to look behind me. And there was Jenny Bauer, moving toward us through the cafeteria, her blonde hair bright against everything else. She came to the edge of our table.

  “Everett,” she said, nodding to Pete. Everyone but me called him by his last name. Pete nodded and looked back to his sandwich.

  “So I’ve been thinking about your situation,” Jenny Bauer said, turning to me.

  “Okay.”

  “And you’re going to get yourself in trouble if I don’t help you out. So I’m gonna help you out.”

  “Okay,” I said again. I felt s
omething flutter in my stomach. Something like excitement.

  “Listen. Meet me in the bio lab before school tomorrow. Mr. Tay coaches morning soccer, and he always leaves his room open.”

  “He does?” I said. Like that was the most interesting part of the conversation.

  “7:45,” Jenny said. “And don’t bring him”—she nodded toward Pete. “No offense, Everett.”

  Pete shrugged, but he was looking at me and shaking his head.

  “Okay,” I said to Jenny. Apparently that was the only thing I was capable of saying to her. Jenny nodded and walked away.

  “This is stupid, Lucy,” Pete said.

  But I ignored him.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Every morning, Jeff or Rosie comes to pick up my mom. She has to go to the hospital for her chemotherapy treatment. She sits in a chair, and they put an IV in her arm and hang a clear plastic bag from a machine next to her. The room is filled with strangely cheerful nurses and patients with turbans and hats and dark circles under their eyes. I only went with her twice. It made me sick to my stomach. Mom told Rosie it wasn’t good for me to be there, and Rosie didn’t argue.

  That morning it was somehow easier. I had a mission. I wasn’t even thinking about the sneakers or New York anymore. I was just thinking about the idea of it all, of what I was about to do. Did this make me a drug dealer? Would I start hanging out with Jenny Bauer instead of Pete? Would I shave my head?

  Pete waited for me at the edge of my driveway, like always. He didn’t say anything when I came outside. He just nodded and turned, and we walked next to each other down our normal path, across the tracks, into the open field, and up the hill toward the school. If he wasn’t going to talk, I wasn’t going to talk. I knew he thought what I was doing was stupid. And I couldn’t really explain why I was doing it. It had started out being about the money. But now I didn’t even know if that explained it.

  We stopped together at the door to the science hallway.

  “Are you sure about this?” Pete said.

  “I think you’re making too big a deal of it,” I said, even though my heart was pounding through my chest.

  “All right,” he sighed. He didn’t say see you at lunch or anything. He just walked toward his locker with his head down.

  Jenny was already in the bio lab when I got there. She sat on one of the lab tables, swinging her feet. When I walked in, she pulled her headphones out of one ear, but she didn’t move.

  “Well, here we are,” she said. I nodded. I don’t know what it was about Jenny Bauer that made me unable to speak.

  “Well,” she said again. “Let’s see it.”

  I reached a hand into the pocket where I’d stuffed the Ziploc bag. Inside the bag, I’d stuffed an old cloth headband wrapped around the purple-and-green bud I’d stolen from my mom. I handed Jenny the bag. She looked at me, raised one eyebrow, and hopped down off the table. I watched her unwrap the headband and inspect its contents.

  “I’m not even gonna ask,” she said when she finally looked up at me.

  “Well, it’s my—”

  “No, seriously. I’m not gonna ask where you got something like this. I don’t wanna know.”

  “Okay.” My favorite Jenny Bauer word. And then I suddenly remembered where we were and what we were doing. My heart raced against my chest again and the back of my throat felt tight and I just wanted it to be over.

  Jenny reached into her pocket and pulled out a folded wad of bills. She handed it to me. We’d never talked about money. I wouldn’t have known what to say. But the wad of bills felt thick.

  “Nice job, Lucy,” Jenny Bauer said.

  “Thanks,” I said, and I turned to go. And there was Mr. Tay, standing in the doorway, swinging his soccer whistle in his hand. My stomach dropped to my feet.

  “Morning, Mr. Tay,” Jenny said brightly from behind me. I tried to smile, but I was trembling.

  “Ladies,” Mr. Tay said slowly.

  “Lucy here is tutoring me,” Jenny went on.

  “In a class neither of you take?” Mr. Tay asked, knowing Jenny and I had both been in his bio class last year. And I hadn’t even been very good at it.

  “No, in math,” Jenny said. “But we were just trying to find a quiet place to work. You know how loud the library gets in the morning.”

  Neither Jenny nor I was holding a book or a calculator. Jenny didn’t even have a backpack. At least her hands were empty. She’d stashed the headband and its contents away in a pocket. I stood frozen while Mr. Tay studied us.

  “Listen,” he said finally, moving toward his desk. “Loud or not, the library is supervised, and you know you’re not allowed to be in an unsupervised classroom.”

  “Of course, Mr. Tay! You have a great day.” Jenny basically pulled me out of the classroom. She squeezed my arm once we reached the hallway. “Later, Lucy.”

  Jenny Bauer walked away. The hallways were filling up with students. I felt like I was in a movie and everything was moving in fast-forward around me.

  Sweat dotted the back of my neck, under my hair. I could feel it running down my shoulder blades. I saw my mom’s bedside table in my mind and felt some mix of adrenaline and terror and sadness. And I tried to put that away.

  I walked slowly through the fast-forward hallway, with lead feet and a pounding heart, toward first period, the money still clutched tight in my fist.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  I couldn’t spend the money. Not yet, anyway. I rolled it up inside the toe of a gray sock and tucked the sock in the back of my drawer.

  On Friday night, Jeff came over. He spent the whole time in Mom’s room. I listened to them whisper and watched the light pour into the hallway. I was waiting for them to notice, to call out to me, to say “Lucy, what did you do? We can’t believe you.”

  But it never happened. No one said a word. I finally fell asleep in my clothes, my door still open.

  I woke up on top of my covers, still not in trouble. Mom never would have let me fall asleep like that. She would have pulled off my jeans and stuffed a pillow under my head and tugged on the blanket so she could pull it over me. She would have kissed my forehead—even if I pretended to still be asleep—before she left my room, shutting the door softly behind her.

  I sat up, rubbing my eyes. I could hear noise in the kitchen. Of course it wasn’t my mom. My mom never even got out of bed anymore. Whatever medications, whatever sort of legal but illegal drugs, whatever hours of chemotherapy, my mom still couldn’t manage to make her daughter breakfast—even once.

  It was Aunt Rosie, unpacking a bag of groceries.

  “Good morning, Sunshine,” she said.

  “Not really.”

  “And why have you started the day already sour?” she said, pushing me toward the table where she had set two places. A tray of fat blueberry muffins sat in the middle.

  “Muffins?” I said. I smiled. I couldn’t help it.

  “Muffins,” Aunt Rosie said. “Now, chin up.” She folded the empty grocery bag and laid it on the counter. “I need to get going.”

  “What about breakfast?” And as I said this, I heard the tapping of my mom’s walker. There she was, in the doorway, her pajamas hanging long and baggy on her. But she was smiling.

  “Hey, kiddo,” she said. And her voice almost sounded like her voice. I watched Aunt Rosie take Mom’s arm to guide her to the chair, and I moved forward to pull the chair out. Aunt Rosie kissed our heads. A few seconds later, it was just me and my mom, staring at each other over the muffins.

  “Well,” she said. “Eat your muffin.”

  “I’m glad you got up,” I said. Even though I wasn’t sure what it was I was feeling. Her skin was pale and thin, but her eyes were the same. When she smiled, which I knew she was trying to do, she looked like herself.

  “Tell me something about your life.”

  That was my mom. She wasn’t going to get sentimental. She just wanted to know what I was doing. She was going to use this time to act like things wer
e normal.

  Except they weren’t.

  “I can’t remember the last time you were up, Mom.”

  “I know, kiddo. I’m trying.” She reached across the table to squeeze my hand. Once she did, she didn’t let go. She just held it on the table. I tried to pick at my muffin with my free hand.

  “I have a meet this weekend?” I don’t know why I said that. I knew it was impossible for her to come—the cold, the germs.

  “You know I wish more than anything I could watch.”

  She watched me eat with one hand. When I was little, my mom and I always held hands. When we were walking places, when we were watching TV. Even in the car, she’d reach into the backseat. Before I was big enough to sit in the front, she’d gesture around for my hand.

  “Just making sure you’re there,” she’d say. She’d keep holding on to my hand while she drove, her one arm twisted back behind her. Until she had to shift. So I let her hold my hand. It was the most normal thing I’d felt in a long time.

  “How’s Pete?” she asked to keep me from thinking about the meet.

  “He’s mad at me,” I said. And then I wished I hadn’t.

  “Why?”

  I felt that hole in my stomach, that twisting guilt.

  “Oh, nothing. Just stupid stuff.”

  “He should come by the house. I miss seeing him.” At the end of the sentence, Mom’s voice cracked. She put her elbow on the table and leaned on her free hand. She started to look like she looked with her sheet pulled up to her neck. Suddenly I didn’t feel like eating anymore.

  “Hey, Mom. Let’s go back to bed.”

  She tried to smile, but her mouth just sort of smushed into her hand. I walked her back to her room and helped her lie down. Her eyes fluttered as I pulled the sheet up to her chin.

  “Hey, stay with me awhile, will you?” she said through closed eyes. I pulled Jeff’s chair closer to the bed and sat down. I reached under the sheet and took her hand. It was hot and small in mine.

  I didn’t know what to do. Her breathing was even now, as she slept. I stared at the table next to her bed, the green canister, and the pills.