The Smell of Other People's Hou - Bonnie-Sue Hitchcock Page 0,34
rain tamed it enough to sit flat against her skull. She looked like an injured bird herself, watching them load her precious chicken crate into an old Toyota truck. I could tell she wanted her chickens to go inside the cab, out of the weather. A young woman and a man got out and wrapped themselves around her, ignoring that she was wearing a garbage bag for a raincoat.
Maybe the man who picked her up was her son, shaking hands with the car deck crew like they were old friends, but I know from listening to whispered conversation that she was listed as a missing persons case. I overheard it when Jack and I were hiding in a life raft nearby, using puffy orange life jackets as pillows. She was supposed to be in a home for the mentally ill, but somehow she just walked away without anyone noticing. Jack was torn up about that part—that nobody even noticed. And he was pretty upset when I told him we had to distance ourselves from her, so as not to be connected with a missing person. But as she got into the blue truck, I whispered, “What did you see? Did he really fall overboard?” The door slammed shut behind her, and in that instant all hope of knowing what really happened was wrung out of me like water from a washrag.
Things between me and Jack have been tense since then.
“I had a dream about Sam,” he tells me. I ignore him.
“It was a bouncy dream, with a boat and some whales.”
I say nothing.
“It smelled like tea and flowers,” he continues.
“Flowers are bad luck on boats,” I say.
“Well, it smelled good, like lilacs.”
I don’t respond.
“Maybe we should think about going back,” he says hesitantly. “In case Sam is looking for us.”
His incessant optimism grates on me. I used to think it was sweet, but now it just reminds me of everything we’ve lost, and I can barely hold it together. “He’s gone, Jack, so just knock it off.”
He wraps the empty brown arms of Sam’s jacket around himself like a hug and says nothing. I’ve lost one brother, and the other one is dissolving right in front of me. Even though I’m afraid I will lose him, too, I can’t seem to stop it from happening. I don’t know how to make a new plan, not knowing where Sam is. With no good plan, I just stay the course, which I know frustrates Jack.
He thinks I don’t see his little private connection with the night watchman, either. But I do. When the watchman makes his rounds, the big, fat key ring jangles against the leg of his blue trousers, and I feel Jack’s body alert like a cat. They make eye contact and I wonder what Jack is doing. There is part of me that wants to wave a white flag and surrender, retire from being “the man of the family,” because I’ve done such a lousy job of it anyway. But even that would take energy, and I only have enough left to keep moving every couple hours, changing spots every time the memory of Sam catches up with me.
We have slept like french fries under heat lamps in the solarium, in the life rafts with the life jackets as pillows, under the stairwell near the car deck, and now in the little play area with the humongous plastic Legos, which is deserted because it’s three a.m. Parents have been known to leave their kids here and go off to the bar. At least, that’s what you believe if you listen to the announcements that come over the loudspeaker at least twice a day. “Will the parents of a four-year-old girl wearing a Mickey Mouse jean jacket please return to the play area on the second level.”
For now we’re the only ones here, sleeping on thick blue mats under a sign that says DO NOT LEAVE CHILDREN UNATTENDED IN THE PLAY AREA.
The night watchman has a clicker in his hand that I’ve grown accustomed to. He must have to click when he’s inspected a part of the ship—some sort of log—so I have heard his clicks from almost every spot on the boat. I can feel Jack relax, as if the clicker is comforting. He seems worried that maybe, like the chicken lady, nobody has even noticed we’re gone. Not even the people we were trying to get away from. I imagine he hears the night watchman’s footsteps and then