The Steps Read online

  Chapter 13

  We were almost cozy, me and the Steps. For like a day.

  It was New Year’s Eve day, and we were all going to stay at home. Penny and Jack needed a quiet day after all the running around of the past few days.

  Jack had dug into the garage (or car port, as they call it in Australia) and found Lucy’s grandmother’s sewing machine in a box that hadn’t been unpacked yet. It didn’t even take him too long to find the box. He had everything in the garage categorized, labeled, and organized by size and weight. This was not the Jack I remembered when he lived with Angelina and me. That Jack was confused a lot of the time, disorganized, and miserable from fighting with Angelina. The Australia Jack was not incompetent, as Angelina and Bubbe said. This Jack could cook using metric measurements, he could drive on the left side of the road, he could soothe a screaming baby. And when Lucy saw that sewing machine sitting on her desk in her room, Jack was her hero.

  “I’m so glad you’re becoming friends with Lucy,” Jack said to me privately. “She’s had a tough time since we moved from Melbourne.” I raised my eyebrows at him. Who said we were becoming friends? Lucy and I were more like schoolmates from different cliques who had no choice about working on a history project together. I had only gotten to the point where I could barely tolerate her. That was all.

  Lucy set up the sewing machine on the desk in her room. Yes, the desk was plastered with sappy smiley faces and flowers, but it was a nice desk otherwise, painted a really cool yellow color with white trim. “My real dad made this desk,” Lucy told me. She opened a desk drawer and showed me some Barbie clothes her Granny Nell had helped her make years earlier on the same sewing machine, at the same desk.

  I had been staying in her room for a week, but I never felt like it was a room we shared. It was so totally her space, her things. And I was very into brown and gray that season and would never decorate my room in colors like yellow and pink.

  “Wouldn’t it be neat if I could have bunk beds and we could share this room?” Lucy asked. We were both standing over Beatrice and cooing at her. The baby was asleep on Lucy’s bed. Penny and Jack were taking a nap with Angus. They had let Lucy and me baby-sit Beatrice all by ourselves. “And then when Beatrice is older, we could add another bed for her. And we’d all be, like, sisters in the same room.”

  I may have steps and a half sister, but I will always consider myself an only child. And only children never share rooms.

  “Do you have a boyfriend?” I asked Lucy.

  She whispered in my ear, “I liked this boy when I first came to Sydney. He was in my class. He was from America. His name was Bo. He was from a place called Atlanta. Everybody made fun of him, too. But then his family moved back to the States last July. He sends me E-mail sometimes!”

  “You don’t have to whisper in my ear,” I said. “No one’s around.”

  Lucy giggled and blushed. She pulled a picture out of her desk drawer of a geeky-looking boy wearing an Atlanta Braves T-shirt and a goofy, sweet grin. “I know,” she said shyly. “Is there any boy you like?”

  “All the cute boys from my school graduated into ninth grade. I like high school boys.” It was true. There were no boys in my class or the eighth-grade class even close to dreamy. They were all either scrawny and peculiar, like Wheaties, or lost to their PlayStations. It was so distressing. I couldn’t wait for high school.

  Lucy really knew what she was doing with that sewing machine. After measuring a sleeping Beatrice, she cut a piece of plain blue cotton fabric and sewed together the body of a simple dress for Beatrice.

  “Next, we can sew on some buttons and stuff, and then we’ll make the sleeves,” she said.

  She tried to show me how to thread the needle, but I kept pricking myself. I was no more successful when Lucy tried to show me how to work the pedal on the sewing machine. I also couldn’t keep track of where to put the fabric under the needle.

  “How ’bout if I am the designer, and you be the seamstress?” I asked. I didn’t want her to see me struggling to do a craft she was obviously great at.

  “That’s a good idea,” Lucy said. I got my white sketch pad and pencils from my suitcase. She put on the radio, and we sat together for almost an hour, her sewing, me drawing, Beatrice sleeping.

  Penny came in, still a little groggy from her nap. “What a nice picture,” she said. She went to the living room and came back with her camera and started snapping pics of us. Penny is a really good photographer. The neat thing about her photos is they’re not simple portraits. People are always in action in her pictures: the Steps looking like they’re floating through space in a shot of them riding swings, laughing and waving; Lucy coming out of the ocean in her wet suit, carrying her surfboard, a face of pure joy and concentration from having caught an excellent curl; Angus staring through the glass at an octopus at the aquarium, totally mesmerized; Jack sitting in the rocking chair, feeding Beatrice, with a lazy smile on his face, and both of them asleep. Penny’s pictures are framed and plastered all over the house. She only photographs in black and white. She has a job as an aerobics instructor, but really she would like to one day make money from her photographs. I’ll give her this: She’s major talented. She could make money from her pictures.

  Angus came in, totally energized from his nap. He heard the radio playing and asked, as he always does whenever pop music is playing, “Is this hit from the seventies, eighties, or nineties?” He then ripped through Lucy’s room, knocking over a tin of buttons, dragging a spool of thread across the room, shouting, and laughing. “Take my picture, Mum! Take my picture!” Penny was so involved in her picture taking, she did not yell at Angus for being so wild. Somehow, though, for once Lucy and I did not care. He was so funny. We laughed and started decorating Lucy’s room with beads and buttons everywhere, and we ran around the beds waving ribbons, and when Beatrice woke up, she didn’t cry, she laughed, and you could tell she recognized us and was glad we were playing around her.

  Then Jack joined the party. When he came inside Lucy’s room, Angus pointed at me and said, “Annabel, now you take Mum’s camera, you take some pictures so we can have pictures of just our family.”

  Just our family. That’s when the fun ended. I got the message.

  Chapter 14

  I will not say that I had begun to like the Steps. No way, no day. Appreciate them, occasionally. But no matter what, I just never felt totally comfortable in their house. Their accent was weird. The food never tasted right. The television programs looked all wrong. I knew I didn’t belong. Like when I was offering to help with the dishes, and Penny said, “Thank you, Annabel, but you’re our guest. Lucy and I will do the dishes.” See what I am saying? Angus’s wanting me out of the family picture only confirmed that feeling.

  So by the end of the first week, even though I had come to love Sydney, I was ready to go home. I missed talking to Justine every night on the phone. I missed sitting on the floor at Angelina’s feet before bedtime, watching Nick at Nite as Angelina braided my hair for bed. I missed going clothes shopping with Bubbe and then sharing a gigantic chocolate sundae with her afterward, surrounded by shopping bags. I missed the energy of New York, the lights in all the buildings glowing in the crisp winter air, and the doormen at our building slapping me five as I came home from school every day. I missed home.

  So finally, on the night of New Year’s Eve, I laid it all out to Jack. I was supposed to be in Sydney for only four more days, so I figured I had better make my case so Jack would have time to prepare.

  For once I had Jack to myself. Angus and Beatrice were in bed. Lucy and Penny were upstairs fighting again. I think working on her Granny Nell’s sewing machine had made Lucy mad all over again about not getting to spend some of her holiday with her grandma. I would have been mad too.

  So Jack and I were sitting on that big chair again, me in his lap, only this time we weren’t making up from a fight.

  “Jack,” I said. I rested my head on his chest. “We need to t
alk. I think it’s time you move back to New York.”

  I could hear his heartbeat quickening. “That’s pretty funny, Annabel,” he said.

  I lifted my head and shook it so he would see I wasn’t kidding. He put his hand under my chin and rubbed it.

  “You know I can’t do that, sweetheart,” he said.

  “Why?” I could feel tears coming.

  “I have a family here,” he said. “I like it here.”

  He couldn’t come home because he liked it here? How insulting to me! That was it. “WELL, I DON’T LIKE YOU BEING HERE!” I yelled.

  “Don’t yell, young lady,” he said, startled. It wasn’t like my yelling would bother anyone. Lucy and Penny were yelling much louder upstairs.

  “You like them better!” I said. I started to cry for real. I hadn’t factored into my equation that Jack would have absolutely no interest in moving home where he belonged. “You forgot all about me.”

  He tried to grab me into a hug, but I jumped from his lap and shoved him away.

  “That’s not true, Annabel,” he said. “How could you think that?”

  “They call you Dad! They get to see you every day! The only way you remember me is by my school picture on the refrigerator.”

  He sat down next to where I had scrunched myself into a ball on the sofa and he rubbed my back. “Annabel, you’re one of the most important people in the world to me. You don’t know how hard it was leaving you and moving here.”

  “You seem to have done it pretty okay!” I said.

  He stopped rubbing. I could tell I had hurt him. I was glad.

  “Annabel, you were the only part of my life in New York that was good. I wasn’t happy there. And there was another part of my heart, and that’s Penny. You don’t know how many times I have wished that you could be here too, so all the pieces could be in place. But that’s not always possible.”

  I repeated my original point. “I think you should move back to New York.”

  He had let me get in one mean comment, but he wasn’t going to let in another. “Enough,” he said, and I knew he meant it. “Besides, what would you have me do about Penny, Lucy, Angus, and Beatrice?”

  “They could come to New York too.” I thought this was a pretty generous thing of me to say.

  Jack said, “Would it surprise you to know that Penny and I considered that option?”

  I nodded. I was surprised. Seemed to me like they had just decided to live their lives without consulting me, or Lucy, and asking what we thought the best options were.

  Jack continued, “New York is a very expensive city. And Lucy and Angus have already gone through so much, Penny thought it would be too much of a move to take them so far from home. Besides, I love it here. I’m happy here. Can you understand that? Penny and I hoped that you would like it here and maybe you would consider spending part of the year, during your summer and Christmas holidays, with us in Sydney. Be a part of this family, as well as the family you have with Bubbe and Angelina.”

  “Then, why do you always treat me like a guest?” Jack looked totally shocked by my question.

  I never got a chance to hear Jack’s answer. The phone rang. Jack answered it. The voice on the other end pained him even more than what I had just been telling him. His face took on that confused, sad, irritated look I remembered from Manhattan.

  He handed the phone to me. “It’s your mother,” he said. “We’ll finish this conversation in the morning, young lady.” What was up with the “young lady” business? Jack was only in his mid thirties. This new language was way too radical for someone so young. Australia and too many children had turned Jack into one big S-Q-U-A-R-E.

  Jack went upstairs, his shoulders slumped. Angelina also walks away in misery after she talks to Jack on the phone. Whatever is between them, they hate having to talk to each other.

  “Angelina!” I said into the phone. I was so excited to hear her voice, I didn’t care about the tears that had just been pouring down my cheeks.

  “Baby, baby, baby!” she screamed. The cutest thing about Angelina is that when she is excited, she talks a mile a minute. Also, you never met anyone who loves talking on the phone as much as Angelina. One time while she was waiting in a hallway for an audition, she was talking to me on her cell phone. The audition was for a telephone commercial, and she got the part because the producers heard her yammering on the phone outside their offices, and when they came outside to hear who was making all the noise, they were amazed that someone could be that pretty and also so excited about talking on the phone. Justine, Gloria, and Keisha still call Angelina “the fast-talking telephone lady” because for a while you could not turn on your TV and not see Angelina selling you a long-distance service.

  “You’re not going to believe what I have to tell you!” Angelina squealed.

  “What time is it there?” I asked her. I was used to talking to Jack on the phone from another hemisphere, but not Angelina. It seemed hard to believe that she could be in Hawaii, thousands of miles away, across an ocean and above the equator, and I could hear her like she was standing next to me.

  “It’s late night here. But I couldn’t wait to tell you what happened. Harvey proposed! We’re getting married!”

  I was so shocked I didn’t know what to say. This was welcome news—not! It was one thing to date Wheaties’ dad, but to marry him? And not ask me first? This felt worse than Jack moving to Australia.

  “Annabel? Are you there?”

  “I’m here,” I said, very quiet.

  “Are you happy for me, baby?” Happy for you? I thought. What about happy for me? I hadn’t even gotten used to Penny, the Steps, and a new baby half sister. I wasn’t ready to go through it all over again. I still hadn’t recovered from the first round.

  “I guess,” I said. NO! I thought.

  “It’s a big change, I know, Annabel baby, but it’s going to be great. GREAT! We’ve set a date for the wedding for next month, and I want you to be my maid of honor. I thought you could design the dress yourself and we could take it down to the Lower East Side to be made and as soon as you get home we’ll go shopping for my bridal dress and Bubbe is so excited you would not believe it she flew to Hawaii to look at bridal magazines with me and make wedding arrangements—you know how she’s been dying for a wedding—and guess what else?”

  Angelina must have known I wasn’t going to be totally thrilled by her news because if Bubbe had already flown from Florida to Hawaii to be with her, then Angelina must have known she was getting married for several days before calling to tell me.

  “What else?” I said, but I thought I already knew. Harvey had just proposed and they were having a wedding in a month? This whole deal was so 90210.

  “You’re going to be a big sister! We’re having a baby next summer! And Harvey wants to buy a new apartment big enough for all of us—”

  This is how mad I was: I hung up the phone, then unplugged it so she could not call me back.

  I went into Lucy’s room and lay down on the cot. Lucy was sitting on her bed, sewing lace trim onto a sleeve for Beatrice’s dress.

  “Parents are so stupid,” I said.

  “I don’t know what is wrong with those people,” Lucy added.

  “I’ve had it,” I announced. Whatever happened to normal parents who first got married and then had children, who stayed together, had regular jobs, and didn’t traipse around all over the world bringing new steps into their children’s lives?

  Lucy put down her sewing and jumped onto my cot. Beads from that afternoon’s play sprayed onto the floor. She grabbed my hand and said, “Then, let’s do something about it.”

  Chapter 15

  I never thought Lucy would have the guts to pull off such a stunt.

  I was wrong. Way wrong.

  I woke up the next morning, seated upright, my body gently rocking. As I opened my eyes I saw a conductor walking through the . . . train aisle? “Last stop, Melbourne, ten minutes,” the conductor said.

&n
bsp; Melbourne? Huh? Where was I? And why was Lucy’s sleeping head on my shoulder? I looked down at the light weight I felt on my chest as I breathed—and when did I get well-developed boobies?

  Then I remembered. Lucy and I had run away. She had masterminded an incredible escape. We would be arriving in Melbourne to visit her Granny Nell any minute.

  We had started the night before by walking in on Jack and Penny, who were making out on the sofa in the candlelit living room. They were listening to sexy soul music, and they obviously didn’t remember that Lucy and I were both mad at them. “Good night,” we called out over the mood music. “Happy New Year!” They were so into each other they didn’t even look up. And can I tell you that it was just past eight o’clock in the evening, and they didn’t even notice that we were saying good night so early? Disgusting.

  We placed a sign on Lucy’s bedroom door that said, PLEASE DO NOT DISTURB US UNTIL TOMORROW MORNING OR YOU WILL RUIN OUR SCIENCE PROJECT. THAT MEANS YOU, ANGUS! As an extra precaution we placed pillows under our blankets in the shape of sleeping bodies. Lucy figured it would be after breakfast before anyone even noticed we were gone.

  Lucy pulled out two short dresses from her closet. She handed me Kleenex to fill our training bras. We also dug into a pile of Penny’s discarded makeup, and we applied lipstick, eyeliner, and eye shadow.

  “Just trust me,” she said. “We’re teenagers going to a New Year’s party. Play the part.”

  We climbed out her bedroom window and walked toward the ferryboat station. “My feet hurt, I can’t walk anymore,” I said. Lucy had also made me wear a pair of play high heels. “Can’t we take a cab to the train station instead of the ferryboat?”

  “Genius, we’re twelve years old. We don’t have loads of money.” Lucy’s hair was moussed up into a blond skyscraper.

  “I do,” I said. Bubbe had given me a wad of emergency money at the airport in New York. She said it was for an “emergency,” but we both knew it was for shopping. And in Australia, because of the currency exchange rate, I actually had almost a third more money than Bubbe had given me. I put my fingers in my mouth and whistled like I was in New York again. Ten minutes later a cab came by after dropping some passengers off up the street.