Hit the Ground Running

  Copyright © 2017 Alison Hughes

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Hughes, Alison, 1966-, author

  Hit the ground running / Alison Hughes.

  Issued also in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-4598-1544-5 (softcover).—ISBN 978-1-4598-1545-2 (pdf).—ISBN 978-1-4598-1546-9 (epub)

  I. Title.

  PS8615.U3165H58.2017 jC813'.6 C2017-900780-7

  C2017-900781-5

  First published in the United States, 2017

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2017932499

  Summary: In this novel for teens, Dee and her younger brother, Eddie, make a run for the Canadian border when their father disappears and social workers start snooping around their Arizona home.

  Orca Book Publishers is dedicated to preserving the environment and has printed this book on Forest Stewardship Council® certified paper.

  Orca Book Publishers gratefully acknowledges the support for its publishing programs provided by the following agencies: the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Province of British Columbia through the BC Arts Council and the Book Publishing Tax Credit.

  Edited by Sarah N. Harvey

  Cover design by Jenn Playford

  Cover image by Creative Market, Dreamstime.com

  Author photo by Barbara Heintzman

  ORCA BOOK PUBLISHERS

  www.orcabook.com

  Printed and bound in Canada.

  20 19 18 17 • 4 3 2 1

  For my mother, Claudette—our family’s anchor.

  CONTENTS

  SANTACINO, ARIZONA

  WEDNESDAY

  ARIZONA

  THURSDAY

  UTAH

  FRIDAY

  IDAHO

  FRIDAY

  MONTANA

  SATURDAY

  THE BORDER

  SATURDAY

  LETHBRIDGE, ALBERTA

  SATURDAY

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  SANTACINO, ARIZONA

  WEDNESDAY

  Dee stared out the open kitchen window. There wasn’t much to see even if she’d really been looking. A stretch of gravel peppered with stalks of scrub grass leading down a hill, past other ramshackle houses, into the endless, barren desert that led all the way to Mexico. Tumbleweed desert. Wile E. Coyote desert. Looming, enormous saguaro cacti stood at meaningless attention. From a distance, they were eerily humanoid, arms raised to the scorching sun, waiting rather than growing.

  The early evening was dead still. Silent. No scuttling animals, no traffic. Everything paused, still and mute. Even the crazy acrobatics of the tumbleweeds were stilled by the crippling heat that had already killed the wind. They lay exhausted, inanimate, exposed for what they really were—matted, tangled balls of dead weeds. They were only interesting when they moved, because they moved. They briefly enlivened the stillness, the mile after mile of Mars-like sand and burnt-red rock.

  Dee’s father was drawn to this lonely emptiness that merged into the hazy, blue-brown horizon.

  “It’s like we’re at the edge of the world!” he would marvel, as if that was a good thing, an amazing thing, not something scary or apocalyptic. In the evening, he would sometimes drag a little stool out and sit watching the nothingness, waiting for the sun to sear its horizontal stripes lower and lower, protesting in a scream of red before it bled itself out.

  Was the desert big and empty enough to absorb whatever washed over him during his dark, silent times? Dee never knew. She would watch him for a while, then close her eyes, block out the dust and heat, and remember the feel of cool, soft grass on her bare feet and the smell of pine trees on fresh mornings. Although it was all her brother, Eddie, knew, they had not always lived here in the desert at the edge of the world.

  Today was one of the heat-wave July days, some of the hottest in the town’s history she’d read in the local paper at the gas station. Something non-record-setting, like fourth hottest. But Santacino was a small town, and in small towns the weather always makes the headlines. Animals too. Whenever a honking, stinking gang of javelinas—wild, ugly creatures that people called desert pigs—snorted through town, it was a sure bet they’d make the front page of the Santacino Current. It would be a dark, murky picture, though, with lots of wild, rolling pig eyes. Those pigs were smart; they only ran at night, when it was cooler.

  It made no difference at all to Dee that the window was wide open. Furnace-hot inside, furnace-hot out. The three fans that had at least shifted the hot air around had all broken in May, like dominos falling. They probably only had a psychological effect anyway, the movement of air convincing everyone it was marginally cooler. But at least the fans had been activity, noise, movement. Now their poky carcasses were just one more tangled pile of junk in the living room.

  “If we lived in, I don’t know—Italy? Milan? We’d be artistic prodigies with this sculpture,” Dee had said to Eddie one day, idly considering the pile of fans as Eddie burrowed into an old chest, pushing out yellowing sheet music like a mole excavating dirt. “The ‘It Kids’ of the art world.”

  They’d tried out various names for their “installation”: Still Life with Three Fans, Death to the Fans, Junk Heap #14. They’d tried to think of any Italian words they might know, seeing as they were prodigies in Milan, but only the Spanish words they’d learned at school bubbled to the surface. They’d tried out varieties of pasta (Linguine! Fettuccine!) and finally came up with ciao and arrivederci. They were pretty sure those were Italian. Eddie added Chow Arivaderchee to the list of titles in big, scrawling letters, taping the piece of scrap paper to the bottom fan.

  But that was then.

  Now was the problem.

  Dee’s hands gripping the edge of the sink were cold. In the stifling heat, she was cold right through, shivery cold down to her feet, paralyzed with it. A trickle of sweat ran down the side of her face.

  Fear and panic welled up and smothered everything but the single word blinking in her mind. Friday. What was today? What day was it? Her mind was blank and numb.

  “Hey, Eddie,” she called to the boy in the yard, who crouched as still as the landscape. Her voice was stiff and forced. She licked her lips, straightened a bit and called his name again. “Eddie, what’s today? What day is it?” Eddie always knew.

  He was squatting on his haunches, chin on his hands, elbows on his knees, carefully observing an insect.

  “Wednesday, July 23,” he answered automatically, not looking up, not wanting to startle the thing he was watching, not wanting it to take flight. It did anyway, unfurling its wings and swooping away.

  “Shoot.” He stood and checked his huge watch, twisting it the right way around on his thin wrist. “6:16 PM.”

  Oh God, Wednesday! That’s right—it’s already Wednesday. She watched Eddie pick up a rock, look at it, rub it on his shorts, then examine it more closely. He looked very small out there in the field, scuffing along and kicking up dust in his oversized cowboy boots.

  Wednesday night, almost Thursday. Dee’s heart was pounding, her knuckles whitening as she gripped the sink. We have a day. One day. Tomorrow. By tomorrow we have to be gone.

  A hot wave of fury bubbled up and momentarily blotted out her panic.

  Dad, where the hell are you? One day, Dad. One day…

  The visitor at the door an hour ago had been a shock. Dee hadn’t known they w
ere under surveillance or being monitored or whatever language social workers used. Probably something nicer, less cop-like, kid-friendlier. Observation?

  Anyway, they’d been ratted out, red-flagged by some nosy, disapproving, meddling adult. Dee wondered who. She’d thoroughly covered their tracks at school, signing her father’s name convincingly on their report cards, mentioning to one or two teachers that her dad said to say hi. And Mr. Werner, Eddie’s school counselor, was such a phenomenal screwup himself that Dee couldn’t believe he could have discovered that her father had vanished almost six weeks ago. Mr. Werner, the school joke, who wanted to assess Eddie’s “substandard performance,” Eddie’s “issues.” But school had been out for over a month…no, she was pretty sure the betrayal hadn’t come from the school.

  Dee thought it must have been number 27 down the street. The woman with the frizzy hair, the chain smoker with the mean husband. Dee didn’t even know her name, but she’d felt her watching every time she and Eddie walked past her house. Nothing better to do than rat out two innocent kids, the old hag, thought Dee. With other people, like Mr. and Mrs. S. or Theresa’s mom, Dee might have understood some well-meaning concern behind their being reported. But not with the hag down the street.

  The social worker had been a nice lady, comfortable and practical, with kind eyes, beat-up Birkenstocks, stretch pants and short graying hair. But she was from children’s services. Government-land. She may have seemed an unlikely enemy, but Dee knew immediately that she was dangerous.

  Why did I open the door? They almost never opened the door. It was never good news. It was either their scrawny, anxious landlord or some utility guy or stony-faced men with trucks and orders to repossess something. Unwritten house rule: let people mill around awkwardly on the front step for long enough, and they will eventually give up and go away. They’ll be back, but later.

  This time she’d run to the door and flung it open, her face expectant. She’d been sure it was her father, showing up after having lost his key, delighted with some new piece of junk he’d convinced himself was a treasure, some people he’d met, some adventure he’d haplessly lucked into, vaguely unaware that he’d been away so long.

  It wasn’t him.

  “Hello, Dee?” The woman had held up a plastic-covered name tag on a pink string around her neck. “My name is Susan Whitby, and I’m a social worker with the county children’s services department. If I could just come in and chat for a few minutes I’d appreciate it.” She indicated her clipboard with a grimace, as though she had to tidy up paperwork, had to tick those boxes.

  Dee’s heart had started hammering at the phrase children’s services. She knew about these people. In sixth grade a girl in her class had told her about a family called the Johnstons, whose four kids were all picked up one day by children’s services. Those kids had been running wild for months, busting windows and stealing bikes, while their mom drank openly on the porch. “Rum,” Dee’s friend had said, “and vodka. From the bottle.” She and Dee had shaken their heads knowingly, like: What can you even do with people like that?

  Their family wasn’t like that. Their dad didn’t even drink. But these well-meaning children’s-services people could pack her and Eddie up just like they had with that family. Nobody ever knew exactly where the Johnston kids had ended up. One rumor was that some were in Yuma, some as far away as New Mexico. A long way away from Santacino, a long way away from each other. She and Eddie could be like those kids, legally kidnapped and separated and shipped off to different states to live with strangers. And her father would never know, because if Dee couldn’t find him, how would children’s services?

  Where the hell are you, Dad? Dee wondered for the thousandth time.

  The nice woman had waited expectantly, sweating on their hot porch. Dee hesitated, on her guard, tense, like a dog making up its mind whether a person was safe or not.

  There was really no option.

  “Uh, all right. It’s…well, come on in…”

  She led Susan through to the kitchen, walking her past the living-room mess. The small, stuffy room looked like a flea market, crammed to the ceiling with stacks of books, old vinyl records, boxes and furniture piled high. Couches with end tables and chairs on top, their legs in the air, boxes on top of those. Dad’s antique stuff. Some of it might be worth something when it was fixed up, but Dee suspected most of it was complete junk. He was working on it. He was always working on it.

  Eddie had a fort in an armchair surrounded by bookcases, covered by an old sheet. He called it “the snake pit,” and the book he’d been reading was on the floor, open to a cross section of a snake’s fang. The Path of Venom was spelled out in oozing green letters.

  Two loads of laundry—one dark, one grayish—were dumped in the only small clearing. None of it ever seemed to get folded and put away; they just rummaged and pulled the least wrinkly things off the pile. Eventually the pile got smaller, then got replaced by the same clothes again in a few weeks. It wasn’t exactly a system, but it worked. Until you had to bring people into the house, which was never until now.

  We live like frigging lunatics. We look like a crazy family. This poor woman’s probably wondering how many more scruffy kids will be crawling out from under the junk-shop furniture…

  She’d thought the kitchen would be the best place to sit but, taking it in at a glance, she saw it wasn’t much better. Dirty dishes were piled on the counter by the filthy stove, dead plants sat desiccating in rock-hard soil on a shelf, and Eddie’s collections, neatly labeled, lined the floor and table in old baby-food jars and yogurt containers. A fine layer of desert grit covered the floor, there no matter how much it was swept, which wasn’t often. They always kept their shoes on.

  Is this normal? Surely at least some of the houses this lady goes into must be kind of messy. Or weird. Not everyone has a perfect, spotless house…

  She glanced back at Susan, but the social worker was rummaging in her purse.

  Eddie was sitting on the kitchen counter, labeling another set of glass jars. Insekts. Rocks. Dung. Bonse. He was interested in every little treasure the dusty desert coughed up.

  He was wearing only dirty shorts and his cowboy boots. Like some little psycho hillbilly, Dee thought. But he always ran around that way in the house, and there didn’t seem to be any harm in it. Those boots had saved him from a scorpion bite once, and he wore them everywhere.

  But seeing things through the social worker’s eyes, Dee thought she and Eddie may as well have painted a sign in dripping red letters on the front door: KIDS IN CRISIS, with an arrow pointing the way.

  “Hey, Eddie, I need to talk to this lady from children’s services,” Dee said, shooting him a warning glance. Danger, danger. It was as clear as if she’d screamed it, and he understood at once. Them against her.

  “Okay,” he said, sliding off the counter, his face settling into the blank, bland look he reserved for strangers. Dee noticed that his nails were too long and caked with a thin black line of dirt.

  “Hey, bud”—Dee couldn’t seem to stop her voice from sounding fake—“why don’t you go find a shirt?”

  “Oh, that’s okay, Eddie,” said Susan, coming into the kitchen close behind Dee. “Don’t mind me.”

  She called him Eddie! She knows his name! Wait a second, did I just call him Eddie? Maybe she heard me. No, wait, she called me Dee at the door. She knows who we are. What else does she know?

  Eddie glanced at Susan, turned and stomped down the hall to his room, swinging his arms. The boots made him really throw his little hips into the walking.

  “Nice pictures,” Susan said, indicating Eddie’s surreal first-grade artwork that was tacked to the kitchen wall to cover the peeling plaster. Dee liked the bright colors, but the pictures themselves were undeniably odd. A person’s head with a snake thing springing out of the top. A dragon-like creature apparently vomiting up a gushing river of blood and people-parts. A fanged humanoid scuttling disturbingly on short, scaly, purple, hea
vily clawed legs. Nope, nothing normal here. Dee’s glance slid away from purple reptile-man.

  “Eddie’s school art,” she said. “He’s…creative.” And weird. So very weird.

  She walked to the other side of the counter, sliding an empty milk carton in front of an open tin of Alphagetti and shoving some dishes into the sink. She picked up their only apple and set it prominently beside the milk, like props in a presentation on the four food groups. Dairy products. Fruit and vegetables.

  “Sorry the place is a bit of a mess,” Dee said. “We just got home. I haven’t had much of a chance to…” She made vague cleaning motions with her hands.

  Susan pulled out a chair, slinging her purse over the back. She glanced around casually, but Dee knew that she was sizing things up, already ticking those boxes.

  “Oh, not to worry. You should see my house.” Susan checked her watch. “Hope you were out somewhere having fun?” She was smiling, and her eyes were kind.

  “Just working. I’ve got a part-time job at the highway gas-station store—you know, with Mr. and Mrs. S.? Just for the summer. Pretty good hours and at least there’s air-conditioning. But Dad says school comes first during the year.” Complete lie. When has Dad really given a rat’s ass about our schoolwork? “Eddie comes in sometimes and does homework and reads in the back while I’m working.” And eats Skittles and helps stack cigarette boxes, but I’m not saying that. Stop talking now. Just. Shut. Up.

  “Well, that’s a good arrangement, I’d say,” Susan said and seemed to mean it. She sighed and glanced down at her clipboard.

  “Dee, I’ll tell you why I’ve come. We’ve had a report that you kids are here on your own, that in fact there’s no adult with you at all.” She sounded almost apologetic. “Has your dad gone somewhere, honey?”

  Dee froze. This was tricky. Technically, it was true. For the last six weeks they had been on their own. No word so far from Dad. But how did you explain to a stranger that he’d always done that, come and gone, an estate sale here, an antique fair there, trolling through huge barns full of crappy old stuff, bringing it back triumphantly to stack in the living room, to work on later to resell for a few more bucks? He always came back, Dee reasoned with herself, like she did late at night when the worry set in. He always comes back, he loves us, we’re his family, this is his home. The last time he’d been away, he’d spent a week in Wickenburg helping a complete stranger, somebody he’d met at an antique barn, build a house.