Chapter 6 #3
“Well, that’s a good start! Once you’re friends, she’ll be all ears.
I remember how you soaked up things like a sponge.
” She described how I’d been when I’d first arrived at their house, and I remembered some of it but not all.
I did recall piling furniture in front of my bedroom door and my dad installing a lock on it instead, so I’d feel safer.
I didn’t remember crying before I went to the new school, but she told me that I’d bawled every day for at least a month.
“You got over that and then you had friends and loved it. You were the most popular girl in that place! And the smartest.”
“Mom…” I smiled. “Thank you.”
“The best advice I can give you is to have big ears and a small mouth. Listen but don’t say too much,” she explained. “Be a steady, dependable presence.”
That was what Silas was for his sister, and I nodded. I could do that, too.
“Has Lyra started school yet?” my mother asked.
“Next week.” The thought made my stomach roil. She was on thin ice at that place due to the issues she’d had the year prior, and if she acted like she had today?
I turned my head toward the thump on my door.
“I have to go,” I said. “Thank you for listening to me. I always appreciate it.” She said that she loved me and I said it too, and then I told Silas to come in.
It had to have been him; Lyra always invited herself to enter without knocking whereas he pounded like he was trying to bust through the wood.
“I’m leaving for work,” he told me. “Ly’s in her room.”
I looked anxiously across the hall. “Is she still crying?”
“No, and she’s not going to try to kill Boris, either.”
“I know that,” I retorted. “I’m sorry that I overreacted.”
“Nah, I don’t think that you did. If she had hit him, it would have been…
” He let the sentence die and ground his big fist against his forehead.
“Little punk told her that her parents left because they didn’t love her.
He didn’t come up with that shit on his own,” he said angrily.
“Mrs. Alford needs to mind her damn business. Now she’s going to spread this story around the street and stir up everybody against Lyra again.
Shit.” He looked at me and with his next words, I discovered that our thoughts had traveled a similar path.
“What if my sister hurts some kid at school?” he asked.
“I remember what happened to me. I don’t want her to be like that. ”
He seemed totally lost, and I swallowed so that I wouldn’t cry again. “Go to work, and this is going to be ok. I’ll figure out Mrs. Alford.”
“How?”
“I can,” I said. “And tonight, we’ll talk more about Lyra. There are ways to fix all of this.”
“Yeah?”
I nodded and tried to project “assured confidence” with my expression. “Definitely.”
“I hope so,” he said, and then he did have to leave.
I was in the kitchen when Lyra joined me there, her eyes so swollen that the first thing I did was give her a cool, wet towel. “Hold it here,” I said, motioning to my own face. She sat at the table, small and miserable, and rested her head on it.
I kept moving around the room, making dinner because no one had eaten yet. I doubted there was much besides moldy maraschino cherries at Chateau Moderne for Silas. “Are you hungry?” I asked her.
“No,” she said, her voice also small. But when the pasta was on the table, noodles with butter the way she liked them, she did pick up her fork. I moved onto the next phase of my plan.
“What are you doing?” she asked me after a while.
“I’m making blondies. It’s a bar cookie, like brownies but with no chocolate, and I hate them,” I explained.
“Then why are you making them?”
I sat down next to her at the table. “I’m going to talk to Mrs. Alford,” I said. “I’m bringing blondies because I’m guessing that she doesn’t like chocolate.” Only someone of that ilk would have told her grandson that Lyra’s parents didn’t love her.
Lyra’s lower lip started to tremble. “She’ll be mean.”
“Not to me. And I don’t care what people say, anyway.” I tried to be that way.
“You don’t?”
“I already know what’s true and what’s a lie,” I said.
“Even if she says hateful things, like that I’m trashy and dumb, I know that I’m not.
” That was what I’d heard from kids when I’d first started at my new school, when I’d come to live with my parents.
It made sense to me that I’d cried every day.
“Mrs. Alford was definitely wrong when she said that nobody loves you.”
“She didn’t say it,” Lyra corrected me. “Boris did. She’s his grandma.”
“But Boris learned it from her. He probably didn’t know how to be mean like that until somebody taught him. People can teach us to be mean, but they can also show us how to love. Your brother does that for you,” I said. “He loves you so much and you’re the most important thing in the world to him.”
She looked at me silently.
“I know that’s true, without any doubt. He’d do anything for you,” I said. “And you also have me. You may not want me around, but I’ll always help you, too.”
She nodded, just a little, and I realized that I was talking too much.
“When you finish eating, do you want to help me bake? We can make brownies for us to have, too.”
She nodded more and we did that. When the pan of blondies was ready and our brownies were cooling, I told her to watch me through the window as I went to Mrs. Alford’s house. “I won’t let her be mean,” I promised, but I could tell that Lyra didn’t totally believe that.
I knocked on the door and that woman answered, but she didn’t open her screen. “Hello,” I said through the metal. “I brought you something.” I held up the baked goods but she didn’t look.
“You better have brought an apology,” she stated.
“Yes, Lyra shouldn’t have sworn at your grandson, and I’m sorry about that,” I said. I wasn’t acting in the capacity of Lyra’s attorney but I still wouldn’t admit to potentially criminal behavior.
Mrs. Alford didn’t have a problem saying it, though. “She tried to hit him with a bat! Come Monday, I’ll be letting the children’s authorities know.”
“No, please don’t do that.” The words themselves were pleasant but I said them very firmly. “Lyra is only a little girl and she’s had a lot to deal with in her life.”
The other woman snorted. “I know it.”
“So does your grandson, and he taunted her with that knowledge. It was cruel but she still shouldn’t have reacted like she did. Can you give her a little grace? She’s only seven and as you just admitted, you already know that she doesn’t have her parents around.”
“She has that brother. What’s he doing about all this?”
“The best that he can,” I stated. “Everyone in the situation is doing the best he or she can, including me. That’s why I’m here, to ask if you could please let this incident go.”
“I don’t even know who you are!”
“I’m Camille Carpenter. It’s nice to meet you and I hope you’ll enjoy these blondies. My business card is tucked in the foil if you need to get in touch with me in the future.” I held up the pan again to show them off.
She looked at it and then started to open the screen, so I stepped to the side. “I don’t want my grandson to get hurt,” she said. She took the bars from me, but she didn’t look any happier.
“I don’t want that either. I never want a child to get hurt, certainly not physically but also not with words.
Lyra knows that she did something wrong and she’s very sorry.
It will not happen again.” The concrete steps didn’t crack apart to let me fall into Hell, so maybe that was the truth.
“As I said, we would appreciate if you could give us all some grace as we try our best. Please.” I turned and walked down her steps.
“He overheard me.”
I stopped. “What?”
Mrs. Alford stepped out onto her porch. “Boris heard me saying something on the phone to another neighbor, something about Lyra and her parents. I didn’t tell him directly but I…
maybe I shouldn’t have said it at all. He remembered.
Probably stuck with him because he doesn’t live with his own mother, either. He doesn’t do well with that.”
“Thank you for telling me.”
She shrugged, and then she went into the house and the screen door slammed. I walked across the street as Lyra watched me from the front window.
“Did she yell at you?” she asked me anxiously when I went inside.
“No, we just talked. I said that you were sorry, because I heard you tell Silas that.” Her lip started to poke out. “I don’t think Mrs. Alford is going to yell at anybody. I hope not. And I hope that her grandson apologizes to you for saying something that wasn’t true.”
“He won’t.”
I didn’t think so either but there was always a possibility, even if it was faint.
“This was a fun day that turned into something hard,” I mentioned, and I watched her eyes get wet.
So then, just hopefully, I opened up my arms as if I was ready for a hug.
I was, but maybe Lyra wouldn’t ever be. She looked at me and walked up the stairs, and I listened to the soft thumps of her feet and sighed.