where i want to be
By ADELE GRIFFIN
G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS
Copyright © 2005
Adele Griffin
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-399-23783-6
Chapter One
HOMECOMING
Jane
"Augusta! Granpa!" Jane shouted. "I'm here!"
No lights lined the driveway.
The ancient maples blocked Jane's view of the house.
She could hardly see a step ahead.
She started to run.
A soft wind hushed in her ears as she sprinted up the
lawn. She smelled the verbena that grew in tangles on either
side of the porch stairs. On her way up the steps, she lost her
balance, stumbling against the front door and shifting the
welcome mat so that the watermark showed underneath.
"Let me in!" She rapped the brass pineapple knocker,
then made a fist and pounded the door. "It's Jane!"
The door opened. Light spilled onto the porch.
"Jane!" Her grandmother had grown up in North Carolina,
and her accent pulled long on Jane's name. But she
was not angry. She never was. Not even when Jane might
have deserved it.
Like the time she'd smashed Augusta's crystal vase into
a thousand needles all over the front hall.
Or when she let her grandparents' parakeet, Piccolo, out
of his cage and watched him fly away into the woods,
never to return.
Or when she'd taken a paring knife from the kitchen
rack and stabbed it through the soft skin between her
thumb and finger. Just to change something. Just to feel
something.
Even then, stanching the blood with a clean dishcloth,
her grandmother had looked maybe shocked, maybe fierce.
But not angry.
Never angry.
It might have been the thing Jane loved most about her.
"I didn't know where else to go ..." Jane stopped. She
had been alone for so long, stretched across the blackness,
terrified that she would not find Orchard Way at the end of
this journey. Now here she was, at the only place where
she'd always belonged.
She sagged into the door frame. She was out of breath
and strength. "I need to rest," she admitted.
Augusta pulled her close. Jane shut her eyes and let herself
be hugged, although hugs made her queasy. But it had
been more than two years since she had seen her grandmother.
The familiar smells wrapped themselves around
her. Augusta's lavender hand cream, the pine soap in the
floorboards, the mushroomy dampness and smoke in the
wallpaper. Tears prickled at the edges of Jane's eyelids as
she gently pushed her grandmother away. Hadn't she been
upset with Augusta for something?
The reason escaped her. It didn't matter. She was
through with reasons, and she was home.
Chapter Two
ALMOST SEVENTEEN
Lily
Jane died this past spring, but we can't talk about it. In fact,
we kind of give up on talking. It's not some kind of eloquent,
dramatic decision. It just happens. An eighteen-year-old
girl crosses a two-way street on a changing light.
A moving car hits and kills her instantly. The Metro section
of the paper reports that services for Jane Ellen Calvert will
be held on Saturday morning at St. Thomas, and to please
make a donation to Child Haven in place of flowers.
She's gone. What else is there to say?
We use work to cope, or maybe to hide. The college
grants Dad's request to teach a summer chemistry course.
Mom goes back to selling houses for Payne-Hazard Realty.
I start my job at Small Farms. We meet at home for dinner.
Sometimes Caleb joins us.
It's strange how so much life can be lived without
speaking. By the end of summer, the silence has grown up
as thick as weeds around our days. But at unexpected moments,
I can feel Jane with me. Silence can't keep her away.
She might be here when I'm stuck in traffic, or eating a
sandwich, or brushing my hair. Or she's inside my sleep, in
a waking dream where I kick the sheets and feel sweat stick
cold under my arms and at the backs of my knees. Memories
of every time I ever hurt Jane swoop like bats in my
brain. I am a monster. I hate myself.
At the end of August, Mom and Dad decide to take a
weeklong trip to Maine to visit Aunt Gwen and Uncle
Dean. They invite me along, but I can't go.
"You won't be too lonely?"
"I'd feel worse without Caleb."
Dad doesn't like that. He isn't the kind of dad who wants
to discuss guys or romance. He's proper, I guess. A mix of
Granpa's Yankee reserve and Augusta's Southern gentility.
"Look out for Mr. Wild and Crazy," Mom will tease if Dad
pours himself a second glass of wine or retells a joke he
heard in the faculty room.
When it comes to Caleb, Dad is not Mr. Wild and Crazy
as much as Mr. Frowning and Protective. But that's just
Dad. He'll never be totally at ease with my boyfriends-in
concept or reality. For the most part, though, both of my
parents are cool about Caleb. They know what Caleb
means to me.
And they agree to let me stay at the house by myself.
Jane never would have been given this privilege.
"You're almost seventeen," Mom assures herself, doing a
final contents-of-pocketbook check as Dad hauls their suitcases
out to the car. "You're responsible" Her cucumber
green shirt clashes with her hair. She's just started tinting it
to cover the gray that's been creeping in. Mom has-and
passed down-what Jane once called our spicy coloring.
Cinnamon red hair and nutmeg brown eyes and skin
cayenne-peppered with freckles. But Jane had a way of describing
things so that they seemed better or worse than
they really are. Other people would just call us redheads.
There's a pinch between Mom's eyebrows as she looks
at me.
"Mom, I'll be fine."
She doesn't look convinced. "You'll check on Mrs. Orndorff?
And you'll set the alarms at night?"
"Yes, yes"
"You have enough gas in the car?"
"Filled the tank yesterday"
"If you change your mind, you'll just hop the next train?
It's less than four hours from Providence. We'll keep our
phones on. Just let us know when you need us to pick you
up." Mom bites her bottom lip and her whole body seems
to soften from the pressure. "Oh, honestly, Lily. You've been
working hard all summer. You could use some time off before
school starts. You can swim in the lake...." Her fingers
are like rubber bands as she snaps them around my wrist.
The urgency in her eyes reminds me of my sister. "I worry
about you sleeping alone here."
"Mom, please. I've slept here my whole life."
"But never alone."
True. But I have no intention of sleeping alone. Not if I've
got Caleb. Some part of Mom has to have figured that one
out by now. She's not clueless. Or maybe this is why she's
letting me stay? Because she knows that Caleb and I have
each other?
After I hug them both and wave good-bye, I make a
bowl of cereal and watch the news on TV. Then I eat an
Italian ice and read one of Mom's gardening magazines.
Then I pour a glass of iced tea and sit on the patio stoop
and stare at the sunset.
Once it gets dark, I pad through the house. Inspecting it.
From the outside, 47 Clearview Circle is nothing much, one
of a dozen white-painted, black-shuttered, single-story
homes set on a quarter acre. It's the trees that make our
house special. The ming fern, the twin red Japanese maples,
the towering buttonwood-once the site of Peace Dale's
coolest tree house. Mom's trees are the pride of the neighborhood,
like movie stars who've shown up at a backyard
barbecue.
Inside, our house looks shabby. Mom and Dad will save
for college funds or retirement funds or rainy-day funds,
but never for something as wasteful as a redecorating fund.
Everywhere, I see thumbprints of Jane. Here's the butterfly-shaped
stain on the carpet where Jane spilled cranberry
juice. On the wall, a picture hanger minus its picture of
Block Island harbor that Jane had made for our parents' fifteenth
wedding anniversary, but then yanked down and
ripped up because of the "stupid amateur mistakes."
My own bedroom tries too hard to be cheerful. Rainbow
pillows are heaped on my polka-dot bedspread, and daisy-chain
lights are strung along the windows. A watercolor
poster from Peace Dale's Hot Air Balloon Festival is tacked
to my door. But my room is Jane damaged, too. Not from
what's there, but from what's missing. Like books Jane
"borrowed" out of my bookshelf and clothes on loan from
my closet. Or the empty corner that held my green frog
beanbag chair, thrown out after Jane plunged through it
with a pair of garden shears.
I walk to the end of the hall and open the door to Jane's
room. As soon as I switch on the light, I see something
new. A pile of freshly folded clothes rests on Jane's bed. As
if any minute she'll come bounding in to put them away.
Must have been Mom. Dad shares laundry duty, but only
Mom would cling to the hope that Jane might come back.
Most of Jane's belongings are secondhand. Mom's old
stuffed-animal horses, Rags and Patches, slump side by
side on her dusty dresser. Dad's desktop model of the solar
system is also fluffed with dust, and so is the seat on
Granpa's rocking chair that my grandmother gave Jane
after he died. Jane liked to surround herself with other
people's things. They comforted her, I guess, when people
themselves could not.
I snap off the light and the fuse blows, and I scream
softly as my fingers zap. That's when I feel it again. It grips
me, like two hands squeezing me around the waist, cutting
off the air from my diaphragm and knocking me from my
feet. I sit at the foot of Jane's bed, my arms cradled at my
middle, working to breathe.
"Jane?" I speak her name into the dark. The room holds
the word.
All through that morning, throughout the plump-cheeked
minister's sermon about shy, gentle Jane, I'd
wanted to laugh. Shy Jane? Gentle Jane?
Selfish, wild, thoughtless,
brave-I'd start with those words, but even they aren't
right.
I worry that I'm already forgetting pieces of her.
"Jane," I say, louder, "you'd laugh to see your room like
this, so clean. I'll mess it up a little, if you want. Just give me
the signal."
I sound like an idiot. I know I do. But I jump up from
her bed and tug the wrinkles from her bedspread. Then I
force myself to leave Jane's room. Careful to shut the door
on my way out.
Chapter Three
LINSEY-WOOLSEY
Jane
In the kitchen, Jane ate her special foods. Her grandfather
shuffled back and forth from the counter to the table. He
heaped her plate.
"All your favorites"
Jane clapped her hands. A banquet. Buttered, warm rolls.
Sliced ruby tomatoes. Perfect spheres of vanilla ice cream.
Cantaloupe. Pale, cold milk. Pinks and whites and reds, too
good to be true, and Jane knew that it wasn't true. Not exactly.
The food was here because she needed it to be here.
The rules were different now. Now everything was as real
as she made it.
Even her happiness felt too good. Like she'd borrowed
it from somebody else.
And she knew that she was too old to eat with her fingers,
but Augusta let her. Then she let Jane spoon-scrape
melted ice cream from the bottom of her dish.
"I'm going to stay with you forever." She used to say this
a lot when she was younger. "I'll sleep in Dad's old room.
I'll watch movies and eat ice cream. I don't need anything
else. I never did."
Augusta had Choctaw Indian in her blood, which gave
her bones their sensible shape. She had looked the same
for as long as Jane could remember. Tall and heavyset, a
rugged tree of a grandmother who wove her hair into a silver
cable down her back and dressed in pastel pants and
denim shirts, or vice versa.
"Let's get you to bed," she said. "I'll lend you one of my
nightshirts."
"I'll wash up here," said Granpa.
Her father's room was off the second-floor landing. Part
of his childhood was left behind here. A prism decal shimmered
in the window, and a paint-chipped bookshelf was
filled with weary hardcovers about Galileo and Einstein
and Crick. As a boy, her father had loved science, and he
still did. He was a chemistry professor at Providence Community
College, where students called him Ray instead of
Dr. Calvert and dedicated the yearbook to him an average
of once every three and a half years.
When she was younger, Jane used to imagine that her
father's room belonged to her instead. "Let's pretend," she'd
coax Lily. "Pretend I'm Granpa and Augusta's daughter instead
of their granddaughter. Pretend that you're visiting
me and it's olden days from when Dad was little. You start.
Say, 'Hi, Aunt Jane!' Then ask my permission to unpack
your suitcase"
"But you're not my aunt! We're
sisters," Lily would wail.
"One hundred percent
sisters. I
hate your stupid pretending
away of the truth! And I hate olden days!"
"If you can't pretend to be in other times and places,
you'll be stuck in the real world forever," Jane would warn.
"And the real world isn't half as good."
But Lily seemed to get along just fine in the real world.
Her grandparents were different. They liked olden days.
Granpa knew the whole history of Peace Dale. Before he'd
retired, he'd worked at the Rhode Island Historical Center.
It was Granpa who showed Jane the home of Mary Butterworth,
the sneaky counterfeiter who bought a mansion in
Providence with money she'd made herself, using a quill
pen and copperplates. Granpa who showed Jane the Old
Stone Mill that had been built a thousand years ago by
Norse Vikings.
Augusta was not much for field trips or stories. But her
presence was like a lullaby.
"Don't go yet," Jane said now, reaching out her hand.
Augusta did not leave. She stayed at the edge of the bed
and skimmed her fingertips up and down the length of
Jane's arm. The sheets were as crisp as a tablecloth against
Jane's skin, and the sink of the mattress molded to the
shape of her body. She closed her eyes and pulled the edge
of the linsey-woolsey blanket so that it brushed her chin.
A linsey-woolsey blanket was folded at the edge of every
bed at Orchard Way. They were famous blankets, knit by
Peace Dale's own textile mills and dyed with walnut shells
to mossy greens and browns. During the Civil War, thousands
of these blankets had been distributed to Union soldiers.
"Pretend I'm a soldier," Jane used to suggest to Lily, "and
I'm about to die from frostbite on the battlefield, and you're
a poor factory girl named Hepsbeth, and you find me and
cover me with a blanket just in time."
Lily had liked that game better. Lily liked to rescue
people.
"How long can I stay?" Jane asked Augusta sleepily.
"Until you want to go." Her grandmother's voice
sounded far away.
Yes, that was a nice answer. Sleep was falling softly over
her. "Orchard Way is my only place," she mumbled. She
burrowed deeper, darker, safer.
Her grandmother didn't answer, but her fingers continued
to trace the length of Jane's arm. Up and down, up
and down. She would not stop until Jane was asleep.
Chapter Four
COBWEBS
Lily
Caleb drops by late. After his own day at the Pool & Paddle
Youth Club, he had to work a shift at the Co-op for a
friend. But he bangs through the door with his dimpled
smile locked in place. His guitar is in one hand, and a bag
of something that smells yummy is in the other.
"You could have called," I say, wrapping my arms around
his neck. My lips touch his throat, his chin, and the tip of
his nose. "I'da picked you up. I hate thinking of you walking
all this way."
"The fastest journey is achieved on foot," Caleb answers
grandly. Thoreau, most likely. Caleb is something of a
Thoreau fiend. He lets me reclaim him a few seconds
longer. Then he shakes the bag. "You eaten?"
"No." The cereal was hours ago. I'm hungry again.
We set up for a nighttime feast at the picnic table out
back. I even light the tea candles and get out the coasters,
self-consciously adult without Mom and Dad around. We
talk about next month and the start of my senior year at
North Peace Dale High. I've gotten expert at dodging
around the subject of what Caleb is planning to do this
fall. My standing policy on that is to wait for him to bring
it up.
Instead, I ask him what happened today at the Pool &
Paddle, where Caleb teaches swimming. It's the right job
for him, mixing his love of kids with his near-perfect patience.
"Nothing much. Actually, one of my tadpoles drew me a
picture."
"Oh, cute! Do you have it? Let me see!"
Sheepish, Caleb pulls it from his wallet, unfolding it with
care, and passes it over. But he knows I'll like it.
The picture is of two stick figures. Same height, squiggly
spider hands joined and wearing shoes that look like flowerpots.
Behind them is a blue blob, which I guess is the
pool
For Coach Caleb love Sophie marches in painstaking print
across the bottom.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from where i want to be
by ADELE GRIFFIN
Copyright © 2005 by Adele Griffin.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.