Circa Now Page 5

  Mom pulled a chair out from the kitchen table and told the boy to have a seat. Circa settled into her usual spot while Mom unstacked two plastic cups.

  “I’m Mrs. Monroe,” she said, setting down water for the kids. “And this is Circa.”

  Circa realized that she hadn’t yet spoken a single word to the stranger.

  “Hi,” she said, nodding shyly toward him, suddenly embarrassed by her sadness-swollen face spotlighted under the kitchen light. But the boy had such a glazed-over look of his own, if he’d noticed her puffs and streaks, he sure didn’t seem to care.

  “I’m, um…my name’s Miles,” he said, like he wasn’t real certain of it. He turned the cup up and downed his water in three gulps. Mom studied the boy as he drank. Before he could even set the cup down, she was swiping it from him to refill.

  “Miles?” she said. “Do we know you from somewhere?”

  “I don’t know. Do you?” asked Miles. Were it not for the hopeful look on his face, Circa would have thought he was being a smart aleck.

  Mom handed him his second cup of water. “Miles what?” she said.

  “What?” he gurgled through his sip.

  “What’s your last name?” she said.

  “Oh,” Miles said, putting down his cup. “That.”

  The water dripping down the boy’s dirty chin made tiny mud trickles. As the two, maybe three, of them waited for an answer to Mom’s question, Miles quickly surveyed every inch of the Monroe kitchen, darting his eyes across each dirty bowl, musty dishrag, and empty canister. Circa wondered if he was scoping it out to steal something, if that backpack was maybe full of someone else’s silverware. She finished off her own water, and then secretly stared at Miles over the rim of her cup. Judging by his knobbly tallness and his cracked voice, the boy seemed to Circa to be thirteenish. He had at least a couple layers of dirt on him, mosquito bites on every finger, and that kind of sunburn that’s already peeled, letting the new shiny skin show through.

  “My last name, well, uh,” he said. Miles squirmed, letting the backpack slide off his lap to the foot of his chair. To Circa’s relief, it didn’t clank.

  “It’s just,” he stammered. “It’s just that I really don’t know that.”

  Circa’s still-raised cup pressed against the top of her nose.

  Without turning her attention from the boy, Mom reached toward the counter behind her for a decent piece of fruit.

  “Circ, you want something to eat?” she asked.

  “No thanks,” said Circa, her voice echoing in her cup. “I’ll have something later.”

  Mom grabbed up a whole pineapple from a basket, sawed it crudely into wedges with a bread knife, and sat down at the table with a few pieces on a paper towel. “Miles, are you all right?” she said. “Are you injured in some way?”

  The boy nodded, but Circa didn’t know if he was nodding to the all-right thing, or to the hurt thing. He looked like he was trying to figure it out himself.

  “Um. Can I have the pear instead?” he said. “The one in the fridge?”

  Mom and Circa puzzled at each other. Mom leaned back in her chair to check the refrigerator. “There isn’t a pear,” she said, “And anyway, how would you—”

  The boy’s face went even redder. “I meant, if there’s one in the fridge,” he said.

  Circa got chills all over. She knew good and well there had been a pear in the fridge before that morning. The question was, how did he know that?

  Mom put her chair back down on four legs. “Miles,” she said slowly. “What were you doing in our backyard?”

  Circa slid to the edge of her seat, as Miles hung his head.

  “Living there,” he said.

  Circa’s eyes grew wide.

  Mom leaned in closer. “Living there?” she said.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “For how long?”

  “A few days.”

  “Why? How? Why?” stammered Mom. “Did you run away?”

  “Sort of,” said Miles.

  Mom patted her pockets and looked around the room. “That settles it, then,” she said. “We’ve just got to call your parents.”

  Miles nodded. “I think that would be good,” he said.

  Mom excused herself to find the phone. “Holler if you need me,” she said, leaving Circa and the boy sitting in awkward silence. Miles tore into the hunk of pineapple, as Circa set down her cup and focused in on the wooden door directly opposite her. She briefly considered making a fast break for the studio, locking the door, and settling in at Dad’s computer until Mom had all this weird boy stuff figured out. But one thought alone kept her glued to that chair.

  “You’re the raccoon,” she said.

  “Where have you guys been?” Miles said at the same time. “Wait. What? Raccoon?”

  “The scuffling noises I heard,” said Circa. “It was you.”

  Miles chewed longer than an aged pineapple needed chewing and gulped bigger than well-chewed pineapple required. “You were here?” he said, suddenly sounding frustrated.

  Circa knew that her sudden suspicions about the boy should be giving her a major case of the heebie-jeebies, but for some strange reason they didn’t.

  “Did you sneak into our house?” she said. “And eat our casseroles?”

  Miles nodded sheepishly. “I was only in the kitchen,” he said. “And that bathroom there. That’s all, I promise. And the casseroles were furry. So I ate the chips instead.”

  “No way,” said Circa. “How did you get in here?”

  “Why do you have so many dead flowers?” Miles said obliviously as he bit off hunks of rind that nobody eats unless they’re starving.

  “They were sent by people,” said Circa. She was suddenly distracted from her own unanswered question by the inevitable sadness of what had to come next. “My dad was killed,” she said, keeping her voice low. Circa glanced toward the foyer and could see Mom sitting at the bottom of the steps clearly not searching for a phone, but instead trying to keep herself together with what looked like slow breathing and whispered prayers. “A few weeks ago,” she continued. “In the, um, ordeal.” Lily, her nurse friend at Maple Grove, had taught Circa to use the word ordeal in place of just about any big, bad thing.

  As expected, Miles looked puzzled.

  “In the storm,” Circa explained, wishing she could have left it as ordeal.

  “Oh, man,” said Miles. “That’s awful.”

  “Mom and me have been up the street at my friend’s house,” said Circa. “But I came back over here some.”

  The boy struggled to wipe the bits of sticky pulp from his fingers.

  “Hey,” said Circa. “Don’t mention the breaking-in thing to my mom, okay?” She slid him a napkin, quickly so he wouldn’t notice her nonpinkie. “I don’t think she’d handle it too well right now.”

  Circa hoped to goodness the boy had not been lying about being only in the kitchen and bathroom. Surely he’d not been messing around the studio.

  “I didn’t exactly break in,” said Miles. “The back door was unlocked.”

  He wiped his mouth. “Hey, I remember something about that,” he said. “Not about your dad…but about a storm.”

  Mom came back in with an ounce of composure and a phone.

  “Sorry,” she said, sitting back down and handing the phone to Miles. “I had to find one that still had some charge on it.”

  “Thanks,” said Miles, but he didn’t seem eager to dial for help. He held the phone tight in his palm and stared hard at it. He closed his eyes for a second. Then he glared at the little screen again.

  “Sorry,” he said, giving the phone right back. “I guess I was hoping you all might know the number.” He looked searchingly at Mom, who drew in a deep breath and let it out without saying a word. Then he looked to Circa, who shook her head as sli
ghtly as possible, like a full-on “no” would crush him.

  Mom clapped her hands together and stood up quick, startling both the kids.

  “Know what I think?” she said. “I think you just need something more to eat, and then it will all come back to you.” She instantly set to searching the cabinets.

  “Some protein,” she mumbled, knocking around old sardine cans and packets of noodle soup. Mom even searched the drawers, which were stuffed full of all the as-seen-on-TV gadgets Dad used to buy to make food into special shapes or to slice things even thinner.

  “I don’t get it,” said Miles, resting the back of his head on the chair. “Something about this house feels so same to me.”

  “‘Same’ how?” said Circa, wondering if he was having the same weird déjà-vu that she’d felt on the porch.

  “Not sure,” he said. “It’s like it matches up with a thought I can’t find,” he said.

  “Here we go. Protein,” said Mom, grabbing a jar of crunchy peanut butter from the last cabinet.

  Circa imagined Miles playing a memory card game, the matching-pairs kind the folks would do up at Maple Grove. Mom held the bread bag upside down and dumped out the very last pieces, the end pieces, and plopped two sandwiches’ worth of peanut butter on them.

  “Maybe this looks kind of like your house,” Mom suggested, spreading the peanut butter so fast and heavy, it tore the bread in half. She patched the sandwich together and put it on a paper plate for Miles. Then she poured the last of the orange juice into his cup. Circa noticed there was only an inch of juice, making the cup start out looking like somebody had already finished it.

  Mom held her fingers over her mouth like Circa had only seen her do when she and Dad talked about serious things like overdue taxes and people with cancer. “Miles,” she said, “how exactly did you get here?”

  The boy rotated his sandwich again and again, maybe stalling, or maybe looking for the least globby part.

  “It only goes back so far,” he said.

  “What does?” said Mom.

  “How I got here.”

  Miles finally settled on a decent first bite.

  “I came from that way,” he said, all globby mouthed and pointing in the general direction of half the country. “I just walked until I couldn’t walk anymore, and then this nice old man picked me up and drove me the rest of the way.”

  Another bite.

  “I told him my name was Miles,” he said. “Mainly because I saw it on a sign right after he asked me.”

  The boy took his one sip of juice.

  “But I’m pretty sure it’s not really my name.”

  He set down his sandwich, like the next part of his story couldn’t be mixed with peanut butter.

  “I came from someplace where people were screaming, and stuff was getting thrown around in the wind.”

  Circa and Mom darted a sidewise look at each other.

  “A tornado?” said Mom.

  “I think so,” said the boy, running his hands through his hair nervously. Mom’s jaw clenched tight, the way it had when she’d gotten the phone call about Dad. Her composure was leaking.

  “Ordeal,” Circa said quietly, thinking it might help them all to switch to that word.

  The boy’s eyes got glossy with tears, but not enough to spill over.

  “I don’t—” he said, clearing some hurt from his throat. “I don’t remember what came before that.”

  Silence. Circa stared at the brass knob on the studio door.

  “What do you mean?” said Mom.

  “I mean I don’t remember anything before three weeks and four days ago,” he said.

  Mom looked desperately at the remains of the sandwich as if she was willing it to do some kind of magic on this kid. Comfort him, make him remember, make him go home.

  “I don’t understand,” she said. “How have you gotten by? How have you been surviving out there?”

  Circa knew the answer. Miles knew the answer. But the boy just looked at her and shrugged.

  “Okay then…why did you stay here?” Mom asked. It came out like she was nearing the end of her rope. As much as that question needed answering, Circa knew they couldn’t have been the words the boy was counting on.

  Suddenly, he sat straight and toughened up a bit.

  “Because I’ve been waiting for you guys to get home,” he said. “Because I thought you might know who I am.” Miles reached for the backpack on the floor. “All I’ve got to go on is eight dollars, two T-shirts, a pair of jeans…and this,” he said.

  Circa’s heart beat faster as Miles unzipped the pack and reached his hand inside. He pulled out a crumpled paper and pressed it out flat against the table before sliding it over for Mom and Circa to see. It was water-smeared and badly creased, but Circa recognized it so immediately and so certainly, it nearly stole her breath.

  The Linholt family reunion photo.

  The last time she’d laid eyes on the print, it had been safe in a stack and held tight in her dad’s arms.

  Mom gasped. Circa snatched up the photo and took in every smeary inch of it.

  “Where did you get this?” she said, no less spellbound than if she held the world’s biggest diamond in her hands.

  Miles rubbed at his temples. “I woke up in this grassy place near some bricks, under a bunch of leaves,” he said. “All around, people were yelling and running and trees had fallen and tables were turned over and junk was everywhere. That picture there was on the ground right next to my face. So I grabbed it, crawled out fast as I could, and got out of there.”

  “The reunion,” said Mom, frozen in shock. “You were at the reunion?”

  Circa felt a jolt of hope course right through her. What if the boy had come all this way to give them a message from Dad?

  “I saw the Studio Monroe address on there,” Miles continued. “And hoped that they—you all—could maybe help me sort things out. I figured you were my best chance at some answers.”

  Circa flipped the print over to see the studio info stamped on the back. Her spirit went limp from the dose of reality. The boy wasn’t here with a message from Dad. He’d just followed a lousy address.

  “I didn’t even know there was a picture on the other side until I stopped for the night,” he added.

  “So why didn’t you just call us?” said Mom.

  “I did every chance I could,” said Miles. “But you guys didn’t answer.”

  “Oh. Yeah. I guess not,” said Mom.

  Miles continued. “I wandered from torn-up place to torn-up place, getting food and water from relief stands. I slept on whatever soft something I could find in the shade during the daytime heat and then walked along the highway at night. Then one day when I couldn’t hardly stand the walking anymore, this old soldier guy offered me a ride,” Miles said.

  A tear let loose from Mom’s jaw and landed on the table. Circa flipped the picture back over and pressed it out flat on her place mat as she summoned one last ounce of hope.

  “Did you see my dad there? At the reunion?”

  Miles rested his head on the table for a minute like his thoughts were heavy.

  “I don’t think so,” he said. “It’s really all so jumbled.”

  Mom laid her hand on Circa’s. “Then what happened?” she said.

  “The man dropped me off at the end of your street and left,” said Miles. “He said he lived here in town, but that’s all. He’d hardly said anything the whole way, and I couldn’t wait to get out of the van because the guy had the heat blowing full blast. I was about to melt in there.”

  Mom took the picture from Circa. “Do you know any of these people?” she said. “Could the Linholts be your family?”

  Circa leaned over Mom’s arm to search for a young Miles in the picture.

  Miles shook his head. “I don’t kno
w them,” he said. “I don’t know them at all.”

  Mom gave the picture right back again, as if it had begun to hurt her fingertips. Circa fixed her eyes on the image, wishing she were looking at the Shopt version instead. They could sure use a few pixels’ worth of giant grinning potato right now.

  Such a silence came over the table that all three of them jumped when the phone rang. Circa picked it up quick. She knew the number well.

  “Hey, Nat,” she answered quietly. “Um…I can’t really talk right now.

  “Yeah, everyone’s sitting right here.

  “Yes, we’re okay.

  “No, Nat.

  “Really, Nat.”

  Circa rolled her eyes.

  “Yes, I mean really, really.

  “Nat, I gotta go.”

  Circa hung up. Mom had her elbows on the table, her chin resting on her fists. Miles tugged at his dirty ear. They were both looking at her.

  “She wanted to know if he…if we saw her, um, get pooped on,” Circa said.

  Mom took the phone and nodded in the direction of the studio.

  “Miles, there is a little bathroom over there to the left in that short hallway,” she said. “You may go in there and clean yourself up a bit if you want.”

  “Okay, thanks,” said Miles, gathering his backpack and shuffling into the bathroom that Circa knew good and well he was already acquainted with.

  Mom touched Circa’s arm and leaned in close. “Let’s try not to get overupset about this,” she whispered. “I’ll just call the police and they’ll come get the boy and take him to where he needs to be.”

  “To his home?” asked Circa.

  Mom hesitated. “Of course,” she said, dialing 911.

  Mom then proceeded to tell Miles’s story in a nervous, wandering way to the dispatcher. Within seconds, though, Circa noticed that her mother looked far more troubled than relieved.

  “I don’t see why you won’t just send someone here,” Mom argued.

  “But we’re not…

  “We just…

  “We can’t…