The Decoding of Lana Morris Read online

Veronica stares at her a second or two, then says in a cold, hard voice, “Open the envelope.”

  Lana points to the manila envelope in front of her. “This one?”

  Veronica gives her a don’t-play-stupid look.

  Lana unclasps the envelope, tips it, and six or seven sheets of yellow paper slide out. They are sketches of Whit. Her sketches of Whit.

  “How …,” she starts to say, but stops. There is no how or why. Foster kids have no safe zones.

  Veronica, all ice, says, “I thought since you were gone, I might as well tidy up your room. I noticed the high spots especially needed cleaning. Do you know what I thought when I came upon your primitive little drawings of my husband? I thought, Well, well, well.”

  Veronica is quiet then, but there’s more; Lana can feel it. There’s more and it’s worse.

  Veronica wipes her hands on her apron and pulls a small sandwich bag from her pocket. It contains a half-dozen red capsules, which she pours onto the table. She smiles at Lana. “Familiar?”

  “No.”

  Veronica simultaneously nods and smiles. “I found them on the same top closet shelf, right along with your little drawings of my husband.”

  Lana knows this is a lie. She’s seen pills like these—they look like methamphetamines—but they aren’t hers. “You planted them,” she says.

  Veronica blinks a calm blink. “Ah, you planted them. The familiar first line of defense for those caught red-handed. Which is what makes it so fortunate that my friend Louise happened to be here when I found them. Louise was so surprised. She said she thought you seemed like such a nice girl.”

  Louise, Lana knows, is a born-again who sees Veronica as a potential convert, one that, for degree of difficulty, would earn Louise more than the usual number of conversion points. In other words, Louise is the kind of person who can be easily duped.

  Lana goes to the living room, pulls Tilly away from the Clifford cartoon, and leads her into the kitchen. She points at the pills. “Have you ever seen me with these pills?”

  Tilly, face white, closes her eyes and shakes her head no, and Veronica laughs a harsh, derisive laugh. “Thank you, Tilly,” Veronica says. “Go on back to the show now.”

  Tilly is happy to be set free, but she doesn’t go back to the show. She carries a pink shoe box into the backyard, where Lana can see her walking back and forth on the worn, wet grass, looking for prize specimens. The window is still ajar, and Lana knows that Tilly can hear every word Veronica says.

  “Let’s see. Three years ago I was Citizen of the Year in this twerpy burg. Louise is the president of the Angel Society, and her husband is a church deacon. Now who do you think is the credible source here?—Louise and me, or a shoplifting, foul-talking foster kid and her little half-wit friend?”

  Lana stiffens and glances toward the window. “She’s not a half-wit.”

  Another hard laugh from Veronica. “You’re right. It’s more like a quarter.”

  Lana wants to ask why Veronica is in the foster-mothering business instead of doing something more suited to her skills, like, for just one example, becoming president of the Sizzling Bitch Society, but she just clamps her lips and watches Tilly scanning the grass, her head tucked low.

  Veronica moves close to pick up the pills, then the drawings. Her hands leave behind the smell of garlic.

  “These,” she announces, holding out the drawings, “go into the fire.”

  She opens the front door to the wood-burning stove and shoves them in. For a moment Lana can see Whit’s face on one of the curling sheets, and then it’s turning black as Veronica closes the door.

  She holds up the plastic bag of red pills. “And these will go downstate to social services with an affidavit signed by Veronica Winters and Louise Booker. If laboratory analysis shows they contain an illegal substance, you’ll be getting a new address.” She smiles and drops the bag into her blue purse, which she then locks into the cupboard over the fridge. “When it comes to drugs, this house has-a zero-tolerance policy.”

  From overhead, Lana hears the sound of footsteps, hard-heeled and snappy. Then the flushing of the toilet, the running of water. Lana can tell Veronica hears it, too, because her eyes shift and her face takes on a listening stillness. Whit’s been napping, Lana bets, and now he’s getting ready to go out. That’s his pattern.

  “So what are those pills you planted in my room?” Lana says, and Veronica, snapped free of her listening, says, “What?”

  “The pills you put in my room. What are they?”

  “Oh. Those.” A smile. “You tell me—they were in your room. Not that what you say matters. What counts is what the lab says.”

  Lana wonders how long this will take. With the state you never knew, but she has the feeling drug analysis goes to the front of the line.

  A staccato click of quick steps on the wood stairs and then Whit breezes through the kitchen on his way out. He’s wearing a faded Huskers baseball cap, which he tips to say grinningly, “Night, ladies, using the term loosely.” Then he stops at the computer set up on a desk in the corner and does some clicking. The computer has programs on it for the Snicks, but Whit mostly uses it to download sports events and radio shows that he listens to while he drives or paints houses.

  “Where’re you going?” Veronica says, and it secretly pleases Lana that she uses the same icy tone on Whit as she uses on her. One more thing she and Whit have in common.

  Whit grabs an apple from the kitchen counter and says, “Got to see a man about a dog,” then throws a wink past Veronica toward Lana.

  “You’re not going anywhere, Lucian Winters,” Veronica says.

  This affects Whit not at all. He takes a crackling bite of the green apple. “Oh, I’m going somewhere, all right,” he says, and jangles his car keys. He begins to sing as he crosses the yard to the garage. “Some enchanted evening,” he croons in an exaggerated, comic way, but still, it sounds pretty good, “you will meet a stranger …”

  Lana has the sudden sensation that she is locked into a dream, a dream that goes on and on and moves easily from the real to unreal, from the house here on Cedar Street to Miss Hekkity’s shop and back again, a sensation so unsettling that she pushes a fingernail into the palm of her hand until she feels actual pain. And—she runs a finger over her left ear—the two-dollar bill is gone.

  So she isn’t dreaming.

  12.

  Before dusk that evening, when Veronica’s in the backyard fiddling with her hollyhocks and trying to ignore the Snicks, Lana sneaks to the kitchen phone and dials Hallie’s private number.

  “Hallie?” she says. Over the line, Lana can hear voices, clinking sounds, the happy shrieking of children, which is strange because Lana knows Hallie doesn’t have children. It was why, when Lana lived in Omaha, Hallie could occasionally take Lana to the movies, the mall, or the ice rink. “It’s me, Lana,” she says now into the phone.

  “Ah,” Hallie says in her smooth, silky voice. “It’s Lana calling my private cell number … in the evening … after hours, and here I am at my niece’s eighth-grade graduation party wondering, Why would Lana do that?”

  Lana sighs. Hallie is friendly when being friendly is her own idea, but it’s a different story when Lana’s doing the calling. “Veronica planted pills in my room,” she says anyway. “They look like meth.”

  Calmly Hallie says, “By Veronica, I’m presuming you mean Mrs. Winters?”

  “Mmm.” Through the window Lana watches Veronica pulling off her gloves and stepping into the garage.

  “And why would Mrs. Winters plant pills in your room?”

  “She says she’s going to mail them to a lab downstate and have them tested and that it will be my word against hers. Hers being like God’s, I guess.”

  “Why would she do that, Lana?”

  “Because she wants to get rid of me.”

  Behind Hallie’s silence, Lana hears something new: the low throb of dance music. She stares across the lawn at the garage. Behind the grim
y garage window, Veronica seems to be getting something from a cupboard.

  Hallie says, “Why would Mrs. Winters want to get rid of you?”

  Because she thinks I’ve got the wild eye for her husband, Lana thinks, but what she says is, “I have no clue.”

  Hallie doesn’t respond. Outside, Veronica emerges from the garage with a handful of bamboo stakes and a ball of twine, but they wouldn’t’ve come from the cupboard. Lana pulls hard on the stretchy coil of phone cord. “Hallie?” she says. “You still there?”

  Hallie says quietly, “If she just wanted you out of there, all she would have to do is file a five-day notice with us. Which means that if what you’re saying is true, she not only wants you gone but wants you gone with cause.”

  “Which means?”

  “That you’ve regally ticked her off for some reason.”

  For some reason seems to hang suspended in the silence between them.

  Outside, Veronica looks at the sky, then the street, then her watch. Whit, Lana thinks. Veronica’s worried about Whit. And what she’s doing to Lana is just one patch in the blanket she wants to wrap around Whit.

  These are strange, alarming thoughts and Lana says with sudden vehemence, “So what are you going to do about this shit?”

  “If I hear another vulgarity,” Hallie says evenly, “I will hang up,” and Lana knows she will, so she says in a softer voice, “Well?”

  “Let’s see if anything goes to the state lab. Then we’ll go from there.”

  Lana says, “That sounds like a mighty plan.”

  “Cynicism is not a winning quality, Lana.” Then, “Fortunately, I know that behind the cynicism, there’s an endearing young woman of whom I’m fond.”

  Lana doesn’t speak, and after a second or two, Hallie says, “Lana, you’ll have to excuse me, but I’ve just been asked to dance by a young man too handsome to refuse.”

  After one last look out the window—Garth is sitting morosely against the fence, twisting Popeye’s head, and Veronica is tying a drooping purple flower stalk to a bamboo rod—Lana tiptoes through the house to the front porch, but the minute she gets to the porch and slides her hand under the chair cushion to remove the drawing kit, Tilly comes to find her, the old shoe box in her hand, her fingernails grubby from scavenging. Her interest in the kit is immediate. “That yours, Lana?” she says in her thick voice.

  Lana nods.

  “Where’d you get it?”

  “A shop.”

  “Good,” Tilly says with finality.

  It’s warm out, but the setting sun makes everything seem beautiful and benign. The crickets are at it—laying down a dense reassuring track of sibilant sound.

  “Did you find anything in the grass?”

  “You bet,” Tilly says, and shows Lana a plastic square that Lana guesses used to close up a bag of bread. It’s faded enough to be pink.

  “Good color,” Lana says.

  Tilly says, “How come ’Ronica wants to get you a new dress?”

  Lana turns. “What?”

  “She said she’d get you a new dress.”

  This makes no sense at all, and then suddenly it does. “No, Tilly, she said she was going to get me a new address, not a new dress. She wants to send me somewhere else.”

  Tilly looks stricken. “When?”

  Lana shrugs. “I don’t know.”

  Tilly holds tightly to the bread fastener.

  “Don’t worry,” Lana says quickly. “I’m not going anywhere. Veronica’s just trying to scare me.” Then she says what she wants to believe. “Whit won’t let it happen.”

  Tilly seems satisfied with this, and then her face hardens. “ ’Ronica’s the devil!” she says, and Lana has to laugh, but the devil doesn’t seem like quite the right type for Veronica.

  “More like Ms. Blizzard,” Lana says.

  She opens the flat leather box, slides out a piece of paper, and takes a pencil in hand. She gazes off for a moment or two and then, all at once, her hand begins to move across the page as before—easily, fluidly—and in perhaps two minutes the living line has created someone who both is and isn’t Veronica, an icy, epic figure on her own ledge of a sheer frozen cliff, comfortable in the cold, happy with it, in fact, her white body wrapped in blankets of snow parted to show her creamy cleavage, and then the living line surrounds and shades a quiver of dartlike icicles that she tosses down at ant-sized humans who, in the valley below, run for their lives.…

  A sudden, sharp tapping.

  Lana blinks. She’s glazed with sweat—it’s as if she’s been suddenly returned from hard labor under a hot sun. She turns. A foot away, on the other side of a window, Veronica stares out at her with eyes that seem about to explode. And then she disappears for a moment before bolting through the screen door and onto the wooden porch.

  “How dare you?” she says through clenched teeth.

  “How dare me what?” Lana says, and as she looks at Veronica, it registers that she’s changed out of her gardening clothes into heeled sandals with tight black pants and an open shirt over a tight, stretchy top. Definitely not her house clothes.

  “How dare you do that,” Veronica says, pointing at the drawing. “It’s me. It’s me made ugly.”

  “No, it’s not. It’s Ms. Blizzard. The jolly Ice Queen.” She turns to Tilly. “Right?”

  Tilly nods. “You bet. ’Ronica the Ice Queen.”

  “It’s not Veronica,” Lana says quickly, but when she looks at the drawing, she knows it’s a lost cause. The fierce frozen eyes are Veronica’s eyes and the thin bluish lips are Veronica’s lips.

  “Erase it,” Veronica says.

  Lana gives an okay-okay shrug and reaches for the eraser. Veronica unzips her little beaded party bag, checks for something inside, rezips it.

  It is during the rezipping that Lana thinks something important: If she’s taking her beaded party bag, she won’t be taking the blue purse. And the pills are in the purse.

  Lana says, “You going somewhere?”

  Veronica ignores this. “Every line of it,” she says. “Erase every line of it.”

  Lana starts with a hand and is working her way up the Ice Queen’s quiver-holding arm when a car pulls up to the curb. It’s Louise and her church deacon husband. They’re wearing their Snick-tending clothes—white sneakers, creased unfaded jeans, and T-shirts—and they’ve got their little bag of VeggieTales videos for doing the Lord’s work on the disabled.

  So Veronica’s definitely going out.

  “Where’re you going?” Lana says.

  Veronica doesn’t answer. She walks out to meet Louise and her husband on the front lawn, where they talk briefly before Veronica departs.

  Lana stops erasing. She’s almost to the Ice Queen’s elbow.

  “Hi, Leeze,” Tilly says. “Hi, Marvin. Did you bring Bob the Tomato?”

  “Yes, Tilly, we did,” Louise says. Bob the Tomato is the funny one in VeggieTales, and, Lana has to admit it, Bob can be funny.

  “So where’s Veronica going?” Lana says to Louise’s husband, but it’s Louise who answers. “I believe she said she was meeting her husband for dinner.”

  “Well, that’s a good one,” Lana says. “Because her husband left two hours ago and wouldn’t say where he was going. I heard Veronica ask him.”

  “Oh,” Louise says airily. “He probably called.”

  “I suppose you’re right, but then if he called, you might think the phone would’ve rung.”

  “I imagine it was prearranged, then,” Louise says. “Some kind of little secret.” She lets her eyes settle on Lana. “It’s one of those aspects of matrimony you’ll learn someday—the tender little secrets between a wife and her husband.” Louise glances at her husband. “Am I right, Marvin?”

  Marvin nods, and Lana wants to say, You don’t talk much, do you, Marv? but instead she turns to Louise and says, “You’ve got a point there, Louise, and I don’t mean the one on your noggin,” and lets loose a big laugh to make it seem like just a jo
ke and nothing more, no offense intended, none whatsoever.

  They both stare at her, and then Louise manufactures the stiffest smile Lana has ever seen and says, “Jesus’ forgiveness is roomy, Lana, roomy enough even for you.”

  Lana despises Louise. From her clean white Nikes right up to her gold cross earrings, she despises Louise, and yet an image flows unbidden from Louise’s words, an image of an enormous gilded ballroom filled with all the people Lana has ever disappointed—her mother, Hallie, a whole assortment of foster parents and foster kids and teachers and coaches and headshrinkers. They are all there in beautiful dresses and suits and ties and in smooth slow motion they are dancing to perfection the dance they are doing, which is the dance of forgiveness.

  The screen door slams shut.

  Mr. and Mrs. Louise have gone inside, and Tilly has gone in, too. Lana hears her shout to the other Snicks, “Here comes Bob the Tomato! Yes, yes, yes!”

  Lana looks down at her sketch. She likes it—it has the same loose, free flow to it that her sketch of Chet had—and even with her lower arm erased and gone, Veronica still looks like an Ice Queen, which, in Lana’s book, is exactly what she is.

  She slides the sketch back into the black box and secures the lid. She smoothes her hand over the box’s pebbly leather cover. She closes her eyes and tries to imagine again the Giant Ballroom of Forgiveness, but it won’t come. She wants to see if she can find Veronica among the dancers, but the vision of the ballroom won’t come. It’s like a face you might recognize if you saw it on the street someday but that you can’t otherwise remember, like, for example, all the faces of her mother’s boyfriends.

  13.

  A half hour later, up in her room, Lana goes to the closet and sees how easy she’d made it for Veronica: the shelf high overhead but the empty milk crate—a handy step—sitting there below her clothes. Obvious. And stupid. Beyond stupid. Pilfering isn’t just in Alfred’s makeup, she thinks. It’s in Veronica’s, too.

  From downstairs the sounds of cartoon voices carry, then raucous laughter from the Snicks at something or somebody. Bob the Tomato, is Lana’s guess.