Subtle gestures were lost on my co-worker. “I said, you moved?” she asked even louder. It was a bellow.
How had she gotten that information? I would have a serious talk with the people in HR. “Is that something you need to be concerned with?” I asked, but I did it with a smile to take the sting out of the words. She needed to be quieter and less intrusive—but just as she wasn’t my boss, I wasn’t hers either, so I couldn’t come out and say it. I also wasn’t her mother,the person who should have taught her about “inside voice” and “boundaries” years before.
Rashelle, who happened to be walking by, also stopped at my doorway. “Do we have to report it to HR when we move?” she questioned. “Because I’ll have a new address after I get married to Abram and I…oh, sorry.” She looked apologetically at me.
“I really meant it when I said that you can talk about your fiancé and your wedding,” I told her. “And yes, you’ll need to let them know your address.”
“Why did you move?” Octavia asked me, and now Munir and Zosia paused on their way down the hallway.
“Camille, you got out of that apartment? I’m really glad. Do you know where she lived?” he asked Zosia, and he grimaced terribly. “My mom used to tell me not to drive on that street.”
“It’s not that bad,” Rashelle chided him, but when he asked if she would live there? “Of course not!” she answered immediately.
“Is that why you left?” Octavia asked me. “Did you finally realize that you’d made a terrible decision when you picked the place?”
“No, that’s not the reason,” I said, and I was having trouble keeping the “focused” face. I had a feeling that I looked “annoyed” or, as Lyra had said to me this morning when she’d sneered at the lunch I’d packed, I looked “pissed off.” I stood up from my desk chair and walked the two steps across my office. “I’m very busy right now,” I told all four of them, and I used the glass door to slowly sweep them out. But after it was closed, my coworkers stood just outside to continue the conversation about how terrible my former building had been and Octaviaquestioned, as loud as she ever was, what I had been thinking when I’d chosen it.
I had been thinking that I needed to save money and I’d been thinking that I was safe, since I was living with someone else. And now? I was still saving money and I was still living with someone. Now I had two roommates instead of one, the street was great, and the neighborhood was, too.
But Octavia had been right. I had made a terrible choice when I picked my former apartment and then I’d made another one of those: I hadn’t said no to Silas’s offer and I’d gone to stay in his house with him and his sister. I could only explain that decision now by remembering how I’d felt when I’d stood in the destruction of my belongings, the slashed bed and the smeared makeup, the food dumped out of my refrigerator, my ripped clothes. It was obvious that I couldn’t stay in that apartment and I had been ready to tell him that I would be going to a hotel, alone.
But then Lyra had come out of the bathroom. “Silas, I got scared in there,” she told him, and he had immediately picked her up and hugged her.
“You don’t need to be scared,” he’d said, and patted her back. “Nobody’s going to do shit when I’m around. It’s ok. Everything’s ok.”
Someone had started yelling in the street outside the building, and then someone had started yelling in the building, too. An ambulance passed with the siren screaming and I had put my hands over my ears. I was still able to hear the words I spokenext, though. “Maybe I could stay at your house, just for tonight,” I’d told him. “Just a night or two.” He had looked up and grinned at me, and he’d told me I wouldn’t regret it.
I already did, but now…now there were other considerations. I thought about those as I went to the gym but in a pleasant change for the employees there, I didn’t stay until they started turning off the lights. I was leaving my office earlier and bringing a lot of work with me, and the explanation behind that was the same reason that I’d hadn’t closed down the gym. There was a new place that I had to be. Someone needed me, even if she didn’t quite understand that yet.
“Camille’s home,” I heard Silas saying as I opened his front door. I had my own key and I had moved what was left of my stuff into the guest bedroom the weekend before, but it did still feel like it belonged to him. It was actually like it belonged to his grandma, since everything in there had been picked by her. That wasn’t bad, but it definitely had me feeling like a guest rather than a tenant. Despite his discussion of a written agreement, I hadn’t actually signed one, either.
“Hi,” I said as I walked into the kitchen. He greeted me back, but Lyra was already frowning. She had expressed, both to her brother and to me, that I shouldn’t be here. I didn’tneedto be here, she’d announced, and she’d repeated it a lot.
But I thought differently, and one of the reasons why emerged now. “I started dinner,” he said. “I did what you told me,” he promised, when I glanced at him. He was a terrible cook, and the food he produced wasn’t even fit for a raccoon. He would actually suggest things like, “I enjoy marshmallows.What if we added some?” and I would have to argue back that marshmallows did not belong in soup, no matter how good they might taste in other liquids. Hot chocolate, for example, was great with marshmallows, but gazpacho was not. His odd ideas about food preparation explained the strange ingredients I’d found in his cupboards the first time I’d been here, all the disparate items that would not combine to make something tasty. They probably wouldn’t have combined to make something edible.
But the larger problem with cooking in this house was something that I thought needed immediate attention: Lyra refused to eat most foods. Pancakes? Yes. Scrambled eggs? Yes. I had hit the jackpot when I’d picked those two dishes on the morning after I’d first stayed the night. In the time since I’d “moved in,” I hadn’t experienced the same success. Ok, gazpacho wasn’t for everyone (even without the marshmallows), but she wouldn’t touch things that most people enjoyed. Pasta with marinara sauce? No. Hamburgers? No. I’d tried those after she’d pretended not to see the fish Silas and I had made (without the grenadine syrup that he’d recommended) and also the baked chicken (I had told him that there was no way we were adding pickles before putting it in the oven). Brown rice had made her cover her mouth and run from the room. Sometimes, he had informed me, she ate the white kind, but only with butter. I had shaken my head but what was I going to do about it?
That, there, was the larger problem. Just like I wasn’t Octavia’s mother at work, I wasn’t Lyra’s mother in this house, either. When she pushed back her plate and said she wouldn’t eatdinner, I couldn’t respond with something like, “Then go ahead and make yourself a sandwich, because I’m not a short-order cook.” That was what I probably would have heard if I’d dared to turn up my nose at one of my own mother’s meals. But having been hungry in my life, I’d known how to appreciate food. In fact, they’d had to train me out of overeating and hoarding it under my bed, or hiding it in my backpack and in the closet. Lyra didn’t have to do that and she was aware that her brother would throw something together for her if she told him that the meal on her plate was making her feel sick, for example.
In my opinion, she—but again, my opinion didn’t really matter. I was a temporary guest (rent-paying) and a mentor, but that was as far as our relationship went and after only a little while here, that limit was already causing some friction between us all.
“How was your day?” Silas asked me next. He was folding something complicated, which I’d learned was one of his habits. He had injured his hand pretty badly a few years before and someone had recommended origami to exercise his fingers and help him regain movement. Somehow, he managed to produce incredibly intricate and fragile paper items with those huge hands he had.
“It was all right,” I answered. “Hi, Lyra.” She didn’t respond and I wasn’t in the position to tell her that it was rude to ignore someone like that. “I saw Mrs. Alford as I pulled in,” I mentioned. I removed the lid of the pot on the stove and inhaled, and it smelled right. No one had adulterated this sauce with crumbled potato chips for an extra crunch, for example. “That woman will never forgive me for the way I first showed uphere.” Silas and I had gathered what was left of my belongings and when we’d driven back to his house, I had still been wearing my nightclub outfit. His neighbor had stared like her eyes would fall out of her head, then she’d ignored my wave and “hello” and gone into her house, shutting the door hard.
“I hate Mrs. Alford,” Lyra remarked.
“That’s not a nice thing to say,” I answered, and I glanced over at both of them staring at me.
“If Ly feels that way, she’s free to tell us,” her brother stated. “The woman is poison.”
“Well, if Mrs. Alford is truly hateful, like she’s mean to puppies and she doesn’t eat brownies, then that’s one thing. If you just don’t know her well or she rubs you the wrong way, then that’s a bad reason to hate someone. You should try to understand them first,” I said, and both of them snorted in the exact same way.
“Fine,” I told them. “You can finish up this dinner while I change.” I left and walked upstairs to the bathroom I shared with Lyra, where she mostly forgot to flush the toilet. Apparently, that hadn’t been something she’d been taught either, and as far as I could see, the list of things to learn was very long. Flushing, clean language, eating normally, compassion, understanding…she was only seven but she needed someone to tell her about those topics. Someone should have been, all along.
She didn’t need to hear conflicting opinions, though. So far, every time I’d voiced an idea about her behavior, Silas shot me down, just like he’d done in the kitchen a moment ago.Flushing the toilet? “Yeah, that’s gross, but she’s saving water.” Refusing to eat the meals that he and I cooked—and then him preparing something else? “How are you going to force her to like something? She’s already so little,” he had told me. “She’s gotta eat.”
What was my role? I supposed I was just an example of how Lyra could behave if she chose. But she didn’t have to, because her brother wouldn’t force her and he wouldn’t even try to explain why it was a good idea. How would she learn to act better if there were no instructions? If people (my mother and father) hadn’t taken me firmly by the hand and led me down the right path, I wouldn’t have found it for myself. I had needed to be told to wipe my nose on a tissue instead of my shirt. I had needed to learn to brush my hair and to say “please” and “thank you.”
