Harry Sue Read online

  … There is nothing more frustrating than blossom rot. I’ve spent more of my mad money than I care to count on those home remedies. In the end, I’ve given up on the tender things. What you need are the rot-resistant varieties, my dear….

  One morning, I felt the heat of her words on my face … and I smelled sunshine … and when I opened my eyes, I was blinded by a brilliant light.

  And the thought came to me:

  This is it. My eternal reward.

  But then I began to focus. The hospital room came into view.

  Over my bed hung letters, hot, flashing, orange neon letters. They spelled out:

  LIVE

  Part 5

  Home

  The Scarecrow listened carefully, and said, “I cannot understand why you should wish to leave this beautiful country and go back to the dry, gray place you call Kansas.”

  “That is because you have no brains,” answered the girl. “No matter how dreary and gray our homes are, we people of flesh and blood would rather live there than in any other country, be it ever so beautiful. There is no place like home.”

  —The Wizard of Oz

  Chapter 33

  Most cons would say the time I did at Ottawa County General and after, at St. Mary Free Bed’s Rehabilitation Hospital, was a catnap. Six months. That’s not even serious change. But that was hard time, Fish, learning things any crumb snatcher should know. Like how to twirl spaghetti on your fork and how to pronounce words with ch or ph in them.

  Living in that bed, it seemed like I was taking J-Cat’s cure whether I wanted to or not. I was going back in time to before the fall. Like I woke up and I was five again, learning to put sentences together, learning to add numbers, learning to read all over again.

  Life on the outs went on at a furious pace while I lay in the hospital having the wires in my head uncrossed. Sink and Dip went home to mommy, Granny got stripped of her license and a catnap for neglect. She’s doing all her time at the minimum-security facility down in Brownfield on account of her age.

  Needless to say, I won’t be visiting.

  J-Cat lost her job as a home health aide for the county due to a history of disrespecting authority, and Baba’s term as a substitute art teacher was up in the spring. So they decided to go into the child-care business together.

  “I wanted to call it Deadwood Day Care, seeing as we got gimps and half-wits from front to back,” she told me on her daily visit to make me practice flexion and build up the sorry excuse for muscles that were left in my body. “But Baba said it wasn’t a good marketing concept.”

  And when he’s not thinking up inventions, Homer Price comes down the ladder to serve good time with J-Cat and Baba in exchange for teaching the crumb snatchers all about the trajectory of a spitball.

  Remember when I thought my poor old heart had broken for good on that sprint over to Baba’s house? Well, I was wrong. That was the water gushing out of Moonie Pie’s swollen lungs. I guess I didn’t burn through all my luck during that fall. Either that, or knowing the circumstances of my crazy life, the celestial beings have given me more than my fair share. Soon as I’m ready, I’m due back at the Marshfield EMS to get me another certificate.

  When the time came for me to get sprung from St. Mary’s, I got a couple of sound offers for a place to flop. Ariel Dinkins said she’d take me in until Mary Bell had done her time, but so did J-Cat and Baba.

  “I won’t bring in as much as a day-care kid,” I warned them.

  “We got a mind you can work off the rest,” J-Cat said. “Helping Baba in the kitchen.”

  “Telling stories to the children,” Baba said, putting his arms around me. “They don’t like Anna so much. She gets off track.”

  What with all the medical bills and the doctor visits, the social worker said it would be easier if they got legal guardianship over me until Mary Bell was back in the picture.

  So as soon as they thought I could make the trip, we headed north to Gillikins, the joint that Homer and his girlfriends at the Wisconsin State Lottery had discovered was where Mary Bell was doing her time.

  Chapter 34

  As you might imagine, I had mixed feelings about seeing Mary Bell. Seems like everybody had an opinion about what she’d been up to. I guess I didn’t know who to believe. The time had come for me to get my information from the source. Every con and conette gets to make a list of the people who can visit. Fish, don’t even bother adding those who cannot respect authority. I’m no expert in that department myself, but there is a look in the Harry Sue catalog for such instances. I’ve only called upon it once or twice since it seems to want to slide right off my face. It’s a mixture of fear and stupidity with a little awe around the edges. It is a look that says, Yes, indeed, O great and powerful Oz!

  I figured seeing Mary Bell was worth conjuring up the look.

  I had never seen a prison for real, and I have to say that Gillikins and my imagination did not keep company on the subject. As we drove up, it looked like a big school or a hospital, with bushes and flowers and signs telling you where to park. But then, schools don’t have fifteen-foot fences with razor ribbon hanging all over them, either.

  And when we went inside, it reminded me more of an airport than a prison. Not that I’ve ever seen an airport for real, but I do have a television.

  “Now don’t forget to pee right before you go in,” J-Cat said for the fourteenth time. “They’re not gonna let you pee once you get in there. If you got to pee, it’s over.”

  I don’t really have any problems in that area, so I figured she was talking more to herself than to me. Baba had everything together in a file: my birth certificate, their foster-care papers and driver’s licenses. Then there were the papers Mary Bell needed to sign and all the papers we had to fill out just to get in. Seems like it would’ve been easier to commit a crime.

  Soon as we walked in the main entrance, Baba took my hand and we went up to a counter where a lady hack made sure everything was in order.

  “Thank you,” she said, stamping one of the papers and handing the file back to Baba. “Have a nice visit.”

  She handed us a key on a chain with a big piece of wood on the end. “Everything in the lockers,” she said, “except two dollars in change.”

  Baba already had the two dollars in his pants pocket. We could use that for the vending machines, he said. He found the locker with the same number as our piece of wood.

  “Empty those pockets, Anna,” he told J-Cat.

  “I know the rules!”

  After that, we found three plastic chairs against the wall and waited in silence. You didn’t have to be there long to know the drill. The room was filled with waiting people: old people, crumb snatchers, T-Jones. Every so often the lady at the counter would say, “Visitor for Christina Switt will proceed to the security checkpoint.”

  Some group or other would pull themselves together and go to the metal detectors at the far end of the room. The rest of us shifted around a lot. I just couldn’t get comfortable. J-Cat had bought me a new green blouse and shorts for the occasion, and they were making me itch something terrible. Every person I looked at, from the tired dusty visitors waiting to go through the metal detector to the man who was repairing the vending machine in the waiting area, might have seen Mary Bell since I had. Seemed like they were all looking at me funny. Would she?

  “Visitors for Mary Bell Clotkin will proceed to the security checkpoint.”

  Baba took my hand and squeezed it. We stood up. The metal detector wasn’t so hard. We put our change in a cup and went through. Then a man waved a wand over us just to make sure that machine hadn’t missed anything. Big glass doors opened with a swoosh and we were in another room. Seemed like everything here was made of glass. I could see half a dozen hacks behind glass in a room filled with computers and other machines.

  “Will you look at that,” J-Cat said, pinching my arm. “It’s like command central.”

  We had talked about this part in the car. Baba h
ad talked, mostly to J-Cat.

  “They have good reason to search us, Anna. Your job is to do as they ask.”

  “But I’m ticklish.”

  “Then don’t come in.”

  “I’ll behave,” she said, crossing her arms and hunching down in her seat. I meant right then to tell her about the “Yes, indeed, O great and powerful Oz” look, but she turned up the volume on the radio and we went on to something else.

  I didn’t like the lady hack touching me one bit, but it didn’t matter so much when I told myself why. I’d had a fair amount of practice pretending I was somewhere else when the place I was seemed unbearable. So I let that guard look into my shoes and socks and then run her hands up and down my legs and my sides.

  “Are you wearing a bra, young lady?”

  “No,” I mumbled, and looked down at the floor. Across the way, Baba looked just as miserable as me with some strange man’s hands between his legs. But we got through it and stood aside, fingers crossed for luck, waiting for J-Cat.

  She glared at the lady as she did her job.

  “Are you wearing a bra, ma’am?” the lady hack asked.

  J-Cat squinted. “You think I can carry this rack around without support?”

  The lady hack put her hands on J-Cat’s private parts. She reached into the neck of her sundress and pulled out a couple of tissues.

  “What’s this?”

  “That’s a snot catcher,” J-Cat said. “Code name: Kleenex.”

  “What about only two dollars in change don’t you understand?”

  “You mean I can’t bring in some Kleenex?”

  “No, you can’t bring in Kleenex. Those are the rules.”

  They each had a hand on the folded-up tissue that J-Cat had stuck in her bra.

  “What if my nose runs while I’m visiting?”

  “Use your sleeve. C’mon, you’re holding up the line.”

  “Use my sleeve? Do you know where I got this turtleneck? Do you? Value Village, that’s where! Cost me three dollars and ninety-nine cents!”

  At this point, the guard took a step back and put her hand on the shiny brown stick hanging at her side.

  Baba handed me the folder. “Allow me to apologize for my wife’s behavior,” he said, prying the tissues out of her hand and dropping them into the plastic tub on the table. He took her firmly by the hand and whispered something in her ear. J-Cat’s wild eyes landed on me.

  I was giving her my “please, please, don’t burn the spot!” look. She shook her head to one side like she was trying to get water out of her ear. And smiled up at the guard.

  “Sorry,” she said, and sat down on the bench to put her shoes back on.

  “I’d like to see her get snot out of a polyester blend,” she muttered to herself.

  “That’s it, lady! You! Back here!”

  With one shoe on, J-Cat jumped up and started stalking toward the hack, her fists clenched.

  “Anna, please!” Baba said.

  “You can take the kid,” the lady hack told Baba. “But she’s gotta wait outside. It’s that or a termination. Make up your mind.”

  Baba and I held our breath. We both knew the next ten seconds would tell us whether or not we had two conettes in our crew.

  J-Cat’s face was beet red, but she let another hack take her by the arm.

  “Can I have my tissue back?” she asked through clenched teeth as they disappeared back through the swooshing glass doors.

  The visiting room looked like the cafeteria at the hospital minus the food. There were more plastic chairs and round tables, and, at one end, another hack, sitting up high behind a wood desk so he could look down and see everything that was going on. Over in one corner, there were toys for crumb snatchers to play with and a fold-down table for changing the babies. Two little girls twirled an imaginary rope, while two more jumped between them, calling out, “Miss Mary Mack, all dressed in black,” to use up their energy.

  Baba and I stood on the edge, looking for somebody alone. Somebody with long dark hair who smelled like home. I thought I saw her, maybe. I touched Baba’s arm. We started walking toward the lady who was chewing her fingernail and looking out at the crowd like she was looking real hard for somebody. As I got closer, it was all I could do not to throw myself into her arms.

  But then we heard the words, “Harry Sue?” coming from another direction. I swung around, trying to find the voice, but I couldn’t find a face that even came close to matching the picture I held in the palm of my heart.

  Baba was walking somewhere. He turned back and put his arm around my shoulder.

  “Is that my Harry Sue?” an old lady asked me. She sat at a chair against the wall, the fingers of one hand pressing against the other.

  Black hair streaked with gray fell down around her soft face. She had on lipstick, but the lines weren’t exactly right. It was the same with her body. There seemed to be too much of her for her head.

  I looked at her, wondering how she knew my name.

  Baba was close behind me, pressing me forward with his big hands.

  I wasn’t thinking too clear. My instincts took over. I started to run.

  But I didn’t get far because Baba had me again by the shoulders. He was pressing my face to his ribs, whispering in my ear.

  “She’s in there, Harry Sue,” he kept saying. “She’s in there.”

  And a little piece from The Wizard of Oz floated into mind. When some Munchkin asks Dorothy where Kansas is, she says: “I don’t know, but it is my home, and I’m sure it’s somewhere.”

  I forced myself to turn around and look at her. She was perfectly still, sitting on the chair. But I had never seen the look on that face before. She was crying, biting her lip and getting lipstick on her teeth. I can’t even give you words for it, Fish, it was that far south of sadness.

  Was this really my somewhere?

  I stepped forward. “Mom?”

  She made a little gulping sound and I ran into her then and crushed myself up against her and started crying like a baby, and we were just the same as the time I saw her before she was sent up. Only now it didn’t seem so much like she was my mom, but like we were just two people, lost together.

  When I finally pulled away, I sure wished they had let J-Cat come in with her tissues. Mary Bell had some, though, and she gave me one. Baba had moved away from us. He was being polite, giving us space. But as I watched him, playing peekaboo with a wandering crumb snatcher, I wished he was back by my side.

  “I heard you been looking for me,” Mary Bell said, trying to smile.

  Fact was, Fish, I could hardly look at her. She had changed that much from what I remembered.

  “You got …” I pointed to her mouth, and she laughed, twisting her tissue until it broke in pieces and rubbing it against her teeth.

  “Guess you can tell I never wear it,” she said. “I just … Well, I was trying to look presentable.”

  I wanted to ask why it mattered, after all this time. I didn’t, but she seemed to know what I was thinking.

  Mary Bell pressed her lips together. “I been such a disappointment, I know. I just thought …”

  “There’s something I gotta know, Mary Bell,” I said, looking at my feet, forcing the words out of my mouth. “Did you … did you ever try to find me?”

  Mary Bell wasn’t in any condition to be talking. Her shoulders were working up and down like the seesaw on the playground and her face was twitching something terrible. I looked over at Baba, who’d lowered his hands from his eyes and was staring at her, too. It was so hard to watch that I left her face to study the little crumb snatchers calling out rhymes and pretending to jump rope in the corner.

  If they could jump with no rope, I figured I could imagine my way out of this situation. I tried to use my mind to put a different face on the lady in front of me. But no other face would come.

  “It’s okay,” I said finally. “You don’t have to say.”

  “Baby,” she said, sucking up her snot and r
ubbing the rest away on her sleeve. “I wanted you more than breathing, but I tried so hard not to … not to be selfish. There were girls here said it wouldn’t do you any good to see me, that you’d lose all your respect for me. That it was better for you to remember us like we were before.”

  I felt mad then, Fish, wondering what kind of waterhead goes to other conettes to get educated.

  “It took me a while to find you after you moved. But I did. And when I called—you know we can’t call except collect—Granny—” Mary Bell broke off there like just the name made her tongue burn. “Granny wouldn’t accept.”

  Mary Bell covered her face with her hands and her shoulders started pumping all over again. When she finally looked up at me, her face was crumpled up just like that Kleenex she’d been worrying.

  “Look what you went and did, Harry Sue. You went and grew up, anyway. And I had no part in that.”

  From out of nowhere, another conette slid into the seat next to Mary Bell and put her arm around her.

  “That one yours, Mary Bell? I didn’t know you had a kid.”

  Fish, there was so much churning inside me at that moment, I felt like a washing machine that’s been dragged out of balance. Knowing Mary Bell didn’t even talk about me to the other conettes was worse than knowing she didn’t write those letters like I thought. It felt like … like, well, like taking a sucker punch to the heart.

  I went over to Baba and pulled on his sleeve.

  “I gotta pee,” I said.

  Chapter 35

  I believe we drove thirty miles in silence on the way home. Baba held on to the steering wheel with his big hands and I stared out the window at the little streets that flew past as we drove along the one-lane highway. What would I look like coming out of one of those houses? I asked myself, desperate to keep from seeing Mary Bell’s old face all messed up with despair. What about that one with the petunias in the wheelbarrow? Or maybe that one with the plastic windmill?

  “Is somebody going to tell me what went on in there? Or don’t you remember I was detained in the visitors’ waiting room for over fifteen minutes?”