PROLOGUE
The dream begins and stops the same way always: Daddy starts up the stairs.
CHAPTER ONE
We had gotten off the train because we were supposed to wait for another, which Daddy said would come soon.
“I promise,” he had said, which made me wince.
I remembered how much Mama hated promises. She told me that promises are only good for things people will or won’t do. It’s not necessary to promise it will rain or snow or the sun will come up in the morning. She said, “It’s not even necessary for your mother or father to say, ‘I promise if you keep doing that, you will get hurt.’ In your heart you know you will, so you stop. Why promise that something that has to happen will happen? A promise is a cousin to a lie. It’s just a way to get someone to stop asking for something or believe in something that very well might be untrue. Your father’s an expert when it comes to that. Don’t believe in his promises.”
When the Umbrella Lady appeared, I was already sitting on the bench with my new blue and white carry-on bag beside me. Daddy had bought it for me yesterday. I had been totally absorbed by the new coloring book he had bought me, but I had paused to take a rest. My wrist actually ached, I had completed so many pages.
I didn’t know Daddy had gotten me a new coloring book before we had left. Because we had departed so quickly and he had so much on his mind, I imagined he had forgotten. He had kept it in his black leather briefcase with his three initials in raised bold silver on the outside, DFA, Derick Francis Anders. Besides saving me, it was the only other important thing he was able to rescue, because, as usual, he had left it in the entryway when he had come home that day, and all he had to do when we rushed down the stairs was scoop it up while still balancing me in his arms, avoiding the flames, and charge through the front door.
After we had stepped off the train and he had led me to the bench, he had snapped open the briefcase and taken out the new coloring book and a box of new crayons.
When he had handed them to me, he had said, “Work on this until I come back from getting a few things.”
“What about all the other things we’ll need, Daddy?”
After all, I thought, we had to fill a new house.
“Don’t worry. I’m getting us everything essential soon after we get there.”
“We’ll be shopping and shopping,” I had said. “And without Mama to help us get the right things.”
It was more of a warning, because I knew he didn’t like shopping. He was always hurrying Mama and me along when we went to malls, even if he was with us at the grocery store. If Mama ever forgot anything, she’d blame it on his rushing us, and they’d argue about it. Sometimes, mumbling under his breath, he’d have to go back to get what we had forgotten. I wanted to feel sorry for him, but Mama wouldn’t let me. “Don’t pity him,” she would say. “It’s his own fault.”
He had pulled the collar of his dark-blue cashmere overcoat up around his neck and stared at me a moment before replying to my concern about our new home. Shadows were washing over him so that he looked like a man without a face, just like the man in my dream.
“What you’ll need, you’ll have. Stop worrying. You’re too young to worry.”
“I’m almost nine. How old do you have to be to worry?” I had asked.
Just like always when I asked a question he didn’t want to answer, he had looked away, shaken his head, taken a breath, and talked about something else.
“I’m off just to get some things we absolutely must have before we get on another train. I want a newspaper, and I’ll get you something fun to read, among other small things like toothpaste. I don’t want to go shopping as soon as we get there. It’ll be late, and you’ll be tired. I’ll be tired, too. Stay busy, and don’t move,” he had said, jabbing his right forefinger at me. Mama often called him a “tank commander” when he spoke like that. After he had left the house, she would imitate him and, with her finger jabbing, say, “You will do this; you will do that.”
I thought she was joking, even though she didn’t laugh.
I had watched him walk off the train platform.
He had started away slowly, pausing and almost turning back. Other departing passengers bumped into him because he had stopped so suddenly. I saw that some excused themselves, but most did not. Some looked angry at him. He didn’t turn to look back at me. He made sure his collar was up and continued, picking up his pace until he was close to running, weaving in and out around other people. He went around the platform corner and disappeared.
Daddy had looked so frantic and confused when we had left in the morning. He had still looked that way when we had stepped off the train. He had been gazing everywhere as if he was expecting to see someone and had forgotten to take my hand. I had hesitated on the last step, and he had turned around to help me off as if he had just remembered I was with him. The last step was high up, and I was small for my age.
During our train ride here, he had sat with his eyes squeezed closed, not like someone sleeping but more like someone who didn’t want to see where he was going or like someone expecting to feel a pain. I often did that with my eyelids when I didn’t want to see something, especially in our house. I hoped that when I opened them again, what I didn’t want to see would be gone. Sometimes it was, but more often than not, it wasn’t.
“Temporary blindness cures nothing,” Mama had said when she saw me doing it once. Mama could stop herself from seeing without closing her eyes. At least, Daddy said so.
After a while, I had fallen asleep on the train and hadn’t woken until I felt it coming to a stop at this station. Daddy still had his eyes closed. The fire in our house and Mama’s funeral seemed like a long, bad, never-ending dream, and dreams could make you very tired. Many times during the past days, I had closed my eyes and wished and wished it had all just been in my imagination, but what I saw and heard when I opened them reminded me it was real and it wouldn’t go away. No matter where we were, I couldn’t get the smell of smoke out of my nose. I thought Daddy’s plan for us to run as far as we could from all that was a good idea.
For a little while after he had left me at the bench, I simply sat there and stared at the corner of the train station to see if he would suddenly reappear and come rushing back to me. I had no idea how long he would be gone. He didn’t say. Thinking about time and how much had passed was like watching an icicle melting off a corner of our roof. Staring at it too long would make me nauseous, because after a while I could feel the drips falling into my stomach.
When he hadn’t reappeared quickly, I opened my new coloring book and then opened the box of crayons. I always liked to inhale the scent of them. Once, I mentioned that to my mother. I said, “They smell good enough to eat,” and she said, “Chew up a coloring book first.”
She didn’t smile. She simply said it and walked away. This was when she started to say things like “Falling is a wonderful feeling. For a few seconds, nothing holds you or traps you. The higher up you are when you fall, the longer the wonderful feeling lasts.”
Everything she had said recently would make me think and think until I had packed her words of cloudy thoughts into an imaginary trunk decorated with wooden forget-me-nots. Sometimes they slipped out and fluttered around me like confused butterflies.