The Decoding of Lana Morris Read online

  She pushes the drawing kit under her bed and slides out one of the three cardboard boxes stored there. Probably Veronica went through all of these, too, and probably she pushed them all back under, wondering what she’d just looked at.

  The boxes contain old photograph albums, the smallest of which is an almost empty souvenir book with black pages and a leather cover celebrating the completion of the Hoover Dam. On the first page of this book, Lana keeps a picture of her father at seventeen. Dee Morris catches dee most! someone had written across the front, in the sand below the bare feet of her father, who was holding a string of trout. Dee’s face was lean and sweet-looking, and his grin was so goofy and wide that you’d think he could never die or hurt people. When Lana was in kindergarten, learning her letters in Miss Marsh’s class, her father was in the House of Corrections. Lana wasn’t supposed to tell people, so she didn’t, but then they came to the letter D. “Bad little, sad little d” was the rhyme for remembering which way the d faced—toward the wall, ashamed of something, and Lana heard it as Bad little, sad little Dee and thought somehow Miss Marsh knew about her father.

  Things changed in her father’s life, but he never got over fishing, and now, staring at the photograph of her father, Lana remembers how one day instead of taking her to school, he drove her off to a deserted lake where they ate egg salad sandwiches and drank cocoa from a thermos and fished and talked and fished until Lana looked up and saw her mother striding their way wearing a look that meant things were going to get bad and get bad quick. Lana gauged her mother’s position against that of her father’s car and realized that if they made a break for it, her mother would never catch them. “Run for it!” Lana yelled, reeling in her line as fast as she could, but her father took hold of her arm and looked into her eyes and said, “We don’t run, Lana. And we don’t hide.” He smiled. “That’s not who the Morrises are.”

  Which was very much a big fat laugh. It seemed like all Lana and her mother ever did after her father was gone was run and hide, hide and run. And now her mother had run and hidden who knew where.…

  Shame and sadness. This is what Lana almost always finally feels when she looks at the Hoover Dam souvenir album, shame and sadness, which is probably why she prefers the other albums, the ones full of photos of families Lana doesn’t know. The books are old, with triangular corner pockets for the black-and-white photographs to fit into—Lana has purchased most of these albums at secondhand stores. The pictures Lana likes are the ones of families on their picnics and Christmases and vacations to Yellowstone or Yosemite. Lana only buys an album if the photographed family seems friendly and happy and has some other indefinable quality she likes. She now has seventeen such albums in the boxes under her bed.

  One day a few weeks earlier when she was sitting on the edge of her bed paging through one of the albums, she looked up to find Whit standing just beyond the door staring in at her. He took a step forward and said, “Can I come in?”

  The rule was foster fathers didn’t come into the room of a girl without someone else there, but Lana didn’t care. She nodded, and in he came.

  “So what’re these?” he said, sitting on the edge of the bed a full three feet beyond her. A safe distance, but she could smell the faint lime scent of his shaving cream.

  “Old photograph albums,” she said. “I kind of collect them.”

  Whit leaned closer to look.

  “I call this one the Vee family,” Lana said. “The father’s Victor, the mother’s Virginia, and the two kids are Victoria and Virgil.” The picture in front of them showed the boy and girl muggingly opening their mouths in preparation for first bites of huge hot dogs and was labeled Victoria & Virg eating footlongs at the Great Salt Lake.

  “Funny,” Whit said, and Lana nodded. Then he said, “So, they’re your grandparents?”

  Lana shook her head no, and paged through the album while he watched. “I mean, I buy them at shops.”

  “Oh,” Whit said. A bit later, he said, “Victoria looks a little like you.”

  This pleased Lana, but what she said was, “She’s prettier.”

  Whit without looking at her said matter-of-factly, “No, she’s not.”

  They went through two more albums page by page and then several more albums quickly. As she closed the last one, Whit said, “Well, I think I finally broke the Morris code.”

  Lana looked over at him with open curiosity.

  “All the families in these albums are happy-seeming. And they all have a girl with hair like yours.”

  This surprised Lana. She’d never looked at them this way. But still, even if it was true, what did it tell you? “So?”

  Whit was smiling now, an encouraging, generous smile. “I think you just want to belong.” A pause. “Which isn’t so strange. It’s what we all want to do.”

  Lana started to put the albums away, and Whit picked up the little Hoover Dam book, which had slipped to the floor. He opened it, and they looked in silence at the photo of her father, which unlike all the rest was in color, faded yellows and browns and greens that looked muddy now.

  “ ‘Dee Morris catches dee most!’ ” Whit read. “I guess this one’s somebody you know.” He glanced toward Lana. “Your dad?”

  Lana nodded.

  “He died in an accident, right?” Whit asked.

  “Sort of. It happened when he was in jail. I was six.”

  Whit didn’t say anything, just as most people didn’t. It was like she’d shown them a disfiguring scar.

  Then she heard herself say to Whit, “How come you never had kids?” A question she’d thought before but never expected actually to ask.

  He looked at her for two or three seconds, then he said, “Veronica can’t is all.”

  Whit pushed himself up and started to go but turned back. He let his eyes settle on her eyes, and he touched a finger under her chin, tipping it lightly up, and leaned forward and gently kissed her forehead, so gently that, in speech, it would’ve been a whisper. He left the room then without a word, but she knew he knew it would mean something to her, and it does.

  Lana folds closed the photograph album she’s been looking at, tucks it into its box, and slides the box under the bed. The pills and the purse, she thinks. She needs to stop thinking about Whit and focus on the pills.

  The pills are in Veronica’s blue purse.

  Which is in the cupboard over the refrigerator.

  Which isn’t quite as secure as Veronica thinks it is.

  Lana goes quietly downstairs, past the living room (the Snicks, sprawled on the floor and sofas, stare raptly at the talking vegetables on the TV screen) to the kitchen cabinet where the spices are kept. Toward the back of the cabinet, among several dozen tin boxes, she finds the one marked Ground Cumin. This is where, Lana learned one day while experimentally dipping a finger into various spices, Veronica hides extra keys to the cupboard and her car. Lana slips the cupboard key from the mustard-colored powder and wipes it clean.

  “Hello?”

  It’s Louise, calling from the living room.

  “Just me,” Lana calls. She looks around. “I’m just eating some grapes.”

  Which is beyond-belief lame, but it seems to work: Louise doesn’t investigate further. Lana actually eats a few grapes—they’re collapsed and pulpy, some week-old crap Veronica picked up cheap is Lana’s guess—then when it seems safe, she quietly unlocks the cupboard, eases open the door, and stops short.

  It’s not there.

  The blue purse isn’t there.

  But it has to be somewhere, because Veronica didn’t have it when she left.

  Veronica’s room. Maybe she left it in her own room.

  Lana grabs a bunch of the horrible grapes and in passing the living room she pokes her head in, chewing, smiling, letting Louise know everything’s fine, then she heads back upstairs. She opens and closes the door to her room but doesn’t go in. Instead she tiptoes toward Veronica and Whit’s room.

  The door, at her touch, swings s
ilently open.

  Stacks of clothes lie on a nearby chair, pants and blouses in layers of complementary colors, outfits Veronica must’ve tried on and discarded before going out. On the unmade bed, one pillow is plumped, the other flattened. She picks up the flattened one and brings it to her face—it has on it the mixed smells of Whit’s hair oil and lime shaving cream—and she doesn’t want to put it down, but she has to. She has to find the purse.

  She looks around. Tries to imagine Veronica’s idea of a hiding place. Lies on her stomach and peers under the bed, pokes into every corner of the closet, eases the corner cabinet away from the wall. Pulls open every dresser drawer deep enough to hold a purse.

  In the cabinet under the bathroom sink, she doesn’t find the purse, but she discovers something else. Toward the front, there is a large glass bottle of something called T.L.C. Primera, and before she puts it back in place, Lana unscrews the cap and smells it. It smells like alcohol. She looks at the label, where T.L.C. Primera is described as “a skin restorative blend of oils of sensimilla and clove.” Lana pours a little on her hand. It’s clear and thin. It isn’t body oil at all. She touches her tongue to her wet palm. It’s alcohol, one of the clear ones, gin or vodka.

  Well, well, well. This is like the keys Veronica keeps in the cumin box. Something worth knowing.

  Lana recaps the bottle, sets it back into its place, then, standing still in the doorway, her gaze, as if guided or drawn, lights upon the heat register in the floor.

  And then she is there, leaning down and looking through the grill. She gets to her knees, but still, she can see nothing, she needs light, and when she straightens and looks around the room for a lamp or a match, she sees Louise and her husband standing in the doorway, staring at her.

  “I thought I heard something in here,” Lana says.

  Louise and Marvin just keep staring.

  “Something gnarly,” Lana says. “A rat, I think. I could hear it all the way from my room.”

  Louise and Marvin don’t say a word.

  “I can’t relax at all with a rat in the house,” Lana says, and when Mr. and Mrs. Louise remain quiet, Lana decides this is as good a time as any for her exit. She walks toward the door where Louise and her husband are standing, and as she approaches, they part and she passes by.

  Nobody speaks. It’s as if the silence is the solution required for Louise and her husband to preserve Lana’s behavior in their minds. Lana walks as unhurriedly as she can back to her room and closes the door behind her.

  At once she hears footsteps down the stairs and back up again, then the squeak of something being pried free. She cracks open her door. The lights are on in Whit and Veronica’s room, and she can see the thrown shadow of a standing person. She drifts close and when she reaches the open door, things suddenly change in the room.

  “It’s her,” Louise hisses, and beyond the bed her husband, who has set the register grate on the floor and is kneeling beside the open vent, both straightens himself and slides something behind him, but Lana has glimpsed the blue purse, she’s almost sure she’s glimpsed it.

  “Find the rat?” she says.

  Marv, at a loss, looks from Lana to Louise, who says, “We certainly did.”

  Lana knows what this means. It means the rat they’ve caught goes by the name of Lana, and she can tell by the brightness in Louise’s eyes that she’s excited by her catch and can’t wait to report the news to Veronica and her PTA friends and church friends and God knew who else.

  “Need any help?” Lana says as gamely as she can, and Louise in a cool voice says, “None whatsoever.”

  Lana glances at Silent Marv, whose eyes say, Sorry, and she realizes that he is a nice man, which would only mean something if he was in charge, which he unquestionably is not.

  14.

  An hour or so later, after pajamas, toothbrushing, and peeing, Tilly crawls into the bed beside Lana’s. “Love VeggieTales!” she says, and then she snugs her head into her Cinderella pillow, smiles, and falls asleep. This moment, repeated almost nightly, is the only moment of the day when Lana feels truly envious of Tilly.

  After the afternoon thunderstorm, the skies have cleared. There is a waxing moon, and it silhouettes the ash tree branches that reach past Lana and Tilly’s second-story window. The leaves move under a gentle breeze. Doomed, Lana thinks. I am unquestionably doomed. She’s had wild-eye thoughts about the foster father. She’s been accused of hiding pills in her own room. And now she’s been caught in her foster parents’ room. She knows that all these things are connected, that, starting with the wild-eye thoughts, one thing has led to another. That no matter how horrid Veronica the Ice Queen and her Jesus-freak friend Louise are, it is her own Lana self, or maybe her own Lana heart, that has put it all into motion.

  Lana’s thoughts float through the shadowy tree and off toward the moonlight and then return again.

  Doomed. Unquestionably doomed.

  Lana slides two fingers into the crease between her ear and skull, between the soft on one side and the hard on the other, where the last gift from her father had always rested, except now it lay in a dark drawer of an old cash register in a town so small no one had ever heard of it. She needs to go back there. She needs to get two dollars and go back there tomorrow. Maybe Chet could borrow a car and take her.

  Or, better yet, Whit.

  And just like that, there she is, thinking of riding down dirt country roads sitting on the smooth bench seat in the cab of Whit’s old Dodge truck, listening to Little Walter, just riding along with neither of them saying anything because, deep in their hearts and deep in their bones, they both already know everything they need to know.

  Lana gives her head a quick shake. This is just the kind of dreaming that will doom her and Whit, too. She looks down at Tilly, who, fast asleep, seems in the moonlight to be smiling.

  15.

  From deepest sleep, Lana becomes aware of a ringing telephone. Finally it stops, and Whit’s voice, as if at a great distance, can be heard saying, “Hello?” and then, “What? What?”

  The Cinderella clock says 2:22. Tilly is gently snoring.

  Whit’s voice again comes muffled through the wall.

  Lana gets up, puts her ear to the wall, and hears Whit’s voice grow loud with alarm. “When? But how? Where? No, I can come. About ten minutes.”

  Whit stops talking, and there are the sounds of rapid movement within his room, then his door creaks open and Lana barely has time to get back into bed before he opens her door and pokes his head in. “Lana?”

  Lana sits up in bed.

  The moonlight still pours into her room, and she is wearing just a sleeveless white T-shirt. She pulls the sheet up around her.

  “Veronica’s been in some kind of accident,” he says. Something hangs from one of his hands. Veronica’s blue purse. Louise and her husband must’ve given it to him when he got home. But maybe not the story that went with it. Louise would’ve wanted to save that for Veronica.

  “Wasn’t she with you?” Lana says.

  “What?”

  “Wasn’t Veronica with you?”

  “When?”

  “She told Louise and Marvin she was meeting you for dinner.”

  He seems distracted. “Yeah, that’s right. But we had two cars.”

  Lana waits, but he doesn’t say more. “I don’t get it,” she says. “You had dinner but didn’t come home together?”

  Whit seems exasperated. “Look, Veronica gets things in her head, goes looking for me. It’s just her way. Last night she found me, we had dinner, did some bar-hopping, and I was ready to come home before she was.”

  “And she stayed out at a bar?”

  A strange look, a look that seems to hint at private misery, passes across his face, and then it’s gone. “This isn’t the time, Lana. She’s been in a car wreck. I’ve got to go.”

  Lana glances again at the bag hanging from his hand. “You’re taking her purse?”

  He nods. “Women always need the
ir purses.”

  “Not in the hospital,” Lana says. “They’ll probably just ask you to bring it home.”

  But he seems barely to hear this. “Look,” he says, “if I’m not back, can you take care of breakfast? There’s slow oatmeal in the Crock-Pot.”

  His knowing there’s slow oatmeal in the crock is a little surprise. When it comes to food preparation, he’s always passed himself off as clueless. “Sure,” Lana says, “I can do breakfast.”

  “And I left something downstairs by the computer for you,” he says. “I was going to give it to you tomorrow.”

  When Tilly stirs, both Lana and Whit look at her, but she resumes sleep, and then, for a long moment, she and Whit are looking at each other in the moonlit room until finally he says, “Thanks,” and turns and is taking the stairs two at a time.

  Lana lies in the dark listening to the sound of his Dodge diesel roaring off and has a string of thoughts. Maybe this will keep Louise from ratting on me. Maybe this will keep Veronica from sending the pills downstate. Maybe this will put Whit in charge of the house. And then these and other smaller thoughts are gathered together into one large thought so horrible it shames her.

  I hope she dies.

  She knows this thought is terrible, worse than terrible, so she tells herself, No I don’t, no I don’t, no I don’t.

  16.

  Lana can’t sleep. She lies on her back, she lies on her stomach, she turns up the cool side of the pillow, but she still can’t fall back to sleep. She keeps thinking of Whit staring at her in the moonlight, and the longer she thinks of it, the longer and more meaningful the brief scene seems, when in fact it meant just slightly more than nothing, she knows that, she absolutely knows that.

  The tender little secrets between a wife and her husband, that was the phrase Louise had used. So what do you call Veronica going out to hunt down her husband, suspecting the worst? And what do you call them having dinner together and then going bar to bar until he comes home and she doesn’t? Tender little secrets? Lana doesn’t think so.