The Decoding of Lana Morris

  Also by Laura and Tom McNeal

  Crooked

  Zipped

  Crushed

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors’ imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2007 by Laura McNeal and Tom McNeal

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House,

  Inc., New York.

  KNOPF, BORZOI BOOKS, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Excerpt from “Hiawatha” by Laurie Anderson copyright © 1989

  by Difficult Music.

  www.randomhouse.com/teens

  Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at

  www.randomhouse.com/teachers

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  McNeal, Laura.

  The decoding of Lana Morris / Laura & Tom McNeal.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  SUMMARY: For sixteen-year-old Lana life is often difficult, with a flirtatious foster father, an ice queen foster mother, a houseful of special-needs children to care for, and bullies harassing her, until the day she ventures into an antique shop and buys a drawing set that may change her life.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-48367-6

  [1. Foster home care—Fiction. 2. People with disabilities—Fiction.

  3. Drawing—Fiction. 4. Supernatural—Fiction. 5. Nebraska—Fiction.]

  I. McNeal, Tom. II. Title.

  PZ7.M47879365Dec 2007

  [Fic]—dc22

  2006023950

  v3.1_r2

  For Sam and Hank

  And for Jane Morris

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Part One Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Part Two Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Part Three Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Acknowledgments

  About the Authors

  There is nothing more properly the language

  of the heart than a wish.

  —Robert South

  Part One

  1.

  Nebraska, June, the sky white with heat.

  The dust devil begins with a pocket of unstable air where a farmer’s field of irrigated beans meets the heated asphalt of Highway 20, sending up a sudden rush of warm air that swirls and stretches higher, increasing speed. The twisting funnel of dirt and debris moves east through fields of alfalfa and wheat and corn toward the town of Two Rivers, where, in a two-storied foster home, a girl named Lana Morris lives.

  Lana is sixteen and slim, with watchful dark eyes, brown hair that falls in straight lines down her long back, and a slot between her two front teeth that was once called her most charming feature by one of the least reliable in her mother’s long line of unreliable boyfriends. He said she was pretty, too, but the truth is Lana doesn’t think anything about herself is charming or pretty, only that the slot between her front teeth is the exact thickness of a dime, something she learned by trial and error.

  Slipped into the crease behind Lana’s left ear, where some people might store a pencil or even a cigarette, you will normally find a tightly rolled two-dollar bill. With use and with time, this bill has been worn soft as cloth. Lana believes the bill was left to her by her father, believes that by unrolling it and holding it flat in her hand, she can sometimes feel the presence of the person he must have been. Lana has always believed in things. Fortune cookies. Horoscopes. That one of these days her mother (whereabouts unknown) would stop drinking, get a steady job, and buy them a little house somewhere. That her father, before he died, was nicer and less foolish than people said he was.

  Lana stares down at her open hand with mild surprise. A minute before, she’d been drawing on a yellow legal pad, and now, without remembering doing it, she’s smoothing the two-dollar bill across the flat of her palm.

  Lana rolls and fastens the bill, then tucks it behind her ear. Today will be okay, she thinks, if I can just get out of the house.

  Always a big if.

  It’s Saturday morning, for one thing. School is out for the summer. Whit Winters, her foster father, is upstairs asleep. His wife, Veronica, is in the backyard hanging sheets. Lana makes a point of being where Veronica isn’t, so she’s sneaked out to the front porch and sits sketching on a yellow legal tablet and eating Froot Loops from a box with a foster girl named Tilly, who is also sixteen. With her curly brown hair, green eyes, and round body, Tilly looks almost normal, but she isn’t.

  “Look, Lana!” Tilly says, and Lana looks. Tilly holds open her pudgy hand to display a dozen or so Froot Loops, all pink. “Look! Look!”

  “Pink is definitely your favorite,” Lana says.

  Tilly says seriously, “Pinkies are better than yellows, Lana. You bet.”

  They both fall quiet in the thick heat. Lana goes back to sketching Whit Winters’s face from memory. She can do his wavy hair, and she’s never had trouble with his eyes, but there’s something wrong with the chin, and if the chin’s wrong, everything’s wrong. He looks sharp and bony instead of smooth and boyish. She erases quickly, whisks the pink rubbery dust away with the side of her hand, and starts again.

  Cicadas are whirring in the cottonwood, and a crow descends on the front lawn. Lana, lost again in her drawing, presumes this is a Saturday morning like any other Saturday morning, but in this she is wrong.

  2.

  “Look, Lana!” Tilly says. “A slinky winky!”

  Lana follows Tilly’s gaze. “That’s just a dust devil,” she says, frowning. “I hope it doesn’t come this way.”

  This has no effect on Tilly’s position. “Slinky winky!” she says with a hint of truculence in her voice, and why not? Lana thinks. What does somebody like Tilly have other than her half-baked opinions? Tilly goes into the house, and when she comes back, she’s wearing one of the red backpacks t
hat are kept in the hollow part of the living room window seat. The backpacks are for emergencies—to put on if there’s a tornado and they have to evacuate.

  “It’s not a tornado, Tilly,” Lana says. “Are you scared?”

  “No, Lana. I’m not scared. No.”

  Lana isn’t sure what’s wrong with Tilly, but Lana’s being of sound mind and body is the exception here—the rest are special-needs kids, or Snicks, as foster mom Veronica calls them. Lana thought it was some kind of slur until she saw the way Veronica wrote it out on receipts and accounting forms: SNKs.

  Six months ago, on Lana’s first day at the Winterses’, she called her caseworker, Hallie Simpson, and without bothering to say hello announced that there’d been a mistake. “And not a little one,” Lana said. “As mistakes go, Hallie, this one is stellar.”

  Hallie in her low, rich, mellifluent voice said, “Hello, Lana. And how are you? Are you well? Because I hope you’re well.”

  Lana likes Hallie. She is the best caseworker Lana has ever had and one of the few adults she can trust. Still, Lana said, “You put me in a home for retards is how I am, Hallie.”

  “Special needs,” Hallie said evenly. Hallie Simpson is six feet tall, black, and—Lana knows this for a fact—unflappable. Lana has tried it all; Hallie cannot be flapped. Hallie said, “The correct term is special needs.”

  Lana was using the house phone at the time. She lowered her voice slightly. “Does that mean they each have a special need to be packed off to outer space?” she said, and when Hallie said nothing, Lana said, “Did I mention that one of them has his mouth open all the time? And he keeps walking up to me and touching my shoulder and walking off. Touching my shoulder and walking off. Again and again. Have you ever spent extended time with someone who does that, Hallie?—because I have to tell you, it’s a little creepy, and every one of the rest of them is … just … as … special.”

  “Special needs,” Hallie said smoothly, “is a category into which you arguably now fit, Lana, although yours is really more of a compound category. Let’s call it … special needs and limited options.” She paused and softened her voice. “Look, Lana, the Winterses are decent enough fosters, and they said they’d try you.” Another pause. “As for the other, less fortunate kids who live there, I’d suggest a small dose of compassion.”

  Which was easy for Hallie to say because she didn’t live in Snick House, where all the faces were a little too big and a little too flat and a little too elongated, like, Lana thinks, jumbo eggs drawn on a page without shading or shadow.

  Lana kept her purse with her every minute after the boy named Alfred Mobilio took it off to a corner and ate all her Life Savers and Tic Tacs and started to eat her earplugs because they were packaged like mints in a cellophane bag. He stole her Little Walter CD, the one that her mother gave her because it was her father’s favorite, or so she said. Alfred kept it in his canvas tote bag for a whole day. When Lana told Veronica it was missing, Veronica had gone right to Alfred’s bag, fished it out, and said nonchalantly, “Pilfering’s part of his makeup. Keep your stuff out of sight.”

  Lana kept her distance, fingered her two-dollar bill, and watched television. She washed her own dishes before she ate because the Snicks, who had rotating dish duty, usually had to be reminded to wash their own hands when they left the bathroom. There was a lock on the fridge to prevent food-stealing. A lock on the medicine cabinet. Behavior charts everywhere.

  Then one night about a month into her stay, Alfred Mobilio, who for sure had Down syndrome, sat down on the sofa beside her and said, “Jamha far yesterday.”

  “You want to try that in English?” Lana said. Alfred at least could talk, but he wasn’t easy to understand.

  “J-J-J-Jamha farted yesterday,” Alfred repeated, more clearly this time.

  Lana didn’t know who Jamha was, so she said, “Did Jamha say excuse me?”

  “Naw,” Alfred said cheerfully, “Jamha’s a dog,” and Lana had to laugh.

  She got used to Alfred first. He was like a fifteen-year-old middle-aged man. Every day he wore a green golf shirt, blue slacks, and polyester socks with loafers. When nothing else was happening, he copied words out of magazines and ads, sometimes for hours, rubbing his teeth together to make a sound that reminded Lana of a purring cat or a croaking toad, depending on her mood. “Bruxism,” Whit called it. “All part of the Down’s deal.” If Alfred didn’t have a special kind of black pen and paper, he rocked or hit himself. The strange thing was, after he filled a whole piece of paper with copied words and phrases, he wadded the paper up and threw it away.

  Then she got used to the others, too. She learned their full names—Carlito Guiterrez, Garth Stoneman, and Tilly Oates—and the peculiarities that went with them.

  Carlito, an enormous, blocky boy of fourteen, was the shoulder toucher—he repeatedly walked up and touched your shoulder and quietly walked away, as if this was his job—and his favorite snack was dill pickles with Tabasco sauce. It was Tilly who said that when Carlito touched people’s shoulders, he was blessing them. “Who told you that?” Lana had asked, and Tilly stared at her a second or two and said, “Nobody. I just know it, you bet.”

  Garth was twelve and he wore superhero T-shirts every day—Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, or the Hulk—and he was so skinny he wore suspenders to keep his pants up. He always carried a plastic Popeye doll, kind of like a Barbie, and he twisted the head when he was nervous, which was a lot of the time. He didn’t like anyone to touch him, and if you got too close, he’d scream. (“Give him his inches!” Veronica would yell if she was anywhere nearby at the time.)

  First thing every morning and every night right after supper, Garth took his Popeye and sat in a chair by the front door. Whit told Lana that Garth was waiting for his mom to come and pick him up. He said that one day about three years ago, Garth’s mom came to the house with Garth and a social worker and introduced him to Whit and Veronica. Garth carried two shopping bags, one in each hand. One bag held all his clothes and the other was full of plastic action heroes, including Popeye.

  Garth’s mother, according to Whit, seemed like an average woman, not too skinny or fat or short or tall or pretty or plain. But hidden by all the averageness, Whit said, was a hardness like nothing he’d ever seen. After introducing Garth to Whit and Veronica, Garth’s mom went down on one knee and said, “This is your home now, Garth. I’m not coming back today or tomorrow or anytime after that. I won’t be sending birthday cards or Christmas presents, and you shouldn’t expect me to. This is your home now, in this house with these people.” Garth’s mom stood up. She didn’t hug Garth or kiss him. When he tried to follow her, she pushed him away. She took his hand, shook it firmly, and let go of it. Then she went to the door, opened it, and, without a look back, closed it behind her. Garth had gone to the closed door and stood by it until at last he was tired of standing and then he sat on the floor and finally he lay down and fell asleep.

  Whit and Veronica had carried him to bed, but when they woke up in the morning, Garth was again sleeping curled by the front door. He wrapped himself in a rug and clung to his Popeye doll and didn’t eat or leave his spot for three days, except to go to the bathroom. After a week, he began to eat with the others and began to fall into the routines of the house, but he’d never stopped his waiting hours, which were between eight and nine in the morning and six and seven in the evening. “Guess that’s when his mother picked him up when she left him places overnight or during the day,” Whit said. “So that’s when he thinks she’ll pick him up now.”

  Garth and most of the kids moved toward and away from Lana in casual, unpredictable ways, but Tilly Oates was different. After a week of watching Lana from a safe distance, Tilly began to move ever closer to Lana, and then, once close, she didn’t leave. She followed Lana from room to room like a shadow. At first it was unnerving, but then Lana grew used to it and realized there was no obligation to talk or listen to Tilly in the usual ways. They fell into easy company. />
  Tilly liked to wear pink pants with lots of pockets—her favorite pair had a pocket total of ten—and she liked using the pockets for the special objects she found—a small, smooth red rock, a stick resembling a fork, a leaf shaped like a heart. And any kind of feather. Feathers were her specialty, and nests, though she didn’t put these in her pockets—she always hand-carried the nests. Often she presented them to Lana as gifts, and Lana made a point of arranging them along the windowsills in her room.

  One day Tilly said something strange. She’d been sitting with Lana in the backyard watching her draw, and out of the blue Tilly said, “I’m a big mistake.”

  Tilly was normally cheerful, but her tone now was forlorn. Lana looked up from her drawing. “What?”

  “I’m a big mistake. No one should have had me.” Tilly’s lower lip began to tremble like a toddler’s. “That’s why no one wants me.”

  These words sent something like an electrical shock through Lana’s system. She herself had thought this very thing of all the Snicks, and more than once. “Who told you that?” Lana asked.

  “A girl at my school,” Tilly said.

  Lana thought it was one thing to think it, but saying it was worse. Much worse.

  She leaned forward and took Tilly’s hands in hers. “Well, I want you, Tilly,” she said. “I like to be with you.” She hadn’t thought this before, but once she said it, it felt more or less true. Tilly needed somebody, and, well, Lana was somebody.

  That night when they were all watching TV, Tilly yawned and put her head in Lana’s lap and took hold of Lana’s hand and almost immediately fell asleep, and Lana hadn’t minded having this odd, stocky, cuddling creature snoring gently against her. From then on, Tilly slept on the other twin bed in Lana’s room, which was fine by Lana. Tilly wasn’t bad company. It was true she brought with her a pink Cinderella alarm clock, a pink Cinderella bedspread, and her pink shoe boxes full of feathers and nests and rocks and smashed bottle caps. But she didn’t steal. She wasn’t devious. She said thank you, please, and excuse me more than most people. And most of the time, she saw the sunny side of things, even when there wasn’t much sunny to see.