The Last House on Needless Street by Catriona Ward (guided reading books .TXT) 📕

Mommy goes to the woods. She is gone a long time and I almost start crying, because she is really gone, this time.

I wait, and wait.

It seems like many hours, but it’s probably one or two. Mommy comes out of the forest. She walks through the long dark shadows of branches where they stretch across the sidewalk. When she goes through the breaks of silver moonlight, I see that the suitcase is heavy now. She pulls it slowly along the sidewalk on its little wheels. She goes right past our house without looking or stopping! I am surprised. Where can she be going?

The green trim on the terrier lady’s house looks grey in the moonlight. Mommy goes around the back of the house. I get into my bed and hide under my covers but I do not sleep. She comes in quietly, a long while later. I hear running water in the bathroom, the sound of her brushing her teeth. Then there comes another tiny sound. Mommy is humming.

In the morning she is as usual. She gives me a small jar of applesauce for breakfast, and a piece of bread. Her hands smell like damp cellar earth. I never see the big suitcase again, so I guess she sent it on to Meheeco without her. I hear her ask Big Ted to go to the store for ice cream.

I kept trying to tell Big Ted. I took him back to the yellow house with the green trim again and again but he still didn’t get it. I think he always knew somewhere deep down that it was Mommy. But he hoped so hard it wasn’t. Now he can’t avoid the truth any more. Bam, pow, like being hit with a punch.

I can hear Big Ted crying.

Ted

‘Don’t move. You’ll make it worse.’ Rob’s face is hung above me in the sky. It is even paler than usual.

‘We have to tell someone.’ My beard is wet with tears. ‘I know where she is. Please, please, we have to go now.’ Another good thing about Rob is that he does not waste time on questions.

Everything happens both quickly and slowly. We stagger back to the car, and Rob drives us to a police station. We have to wait there for a long time. I am still bleeding a little but I won’t let Rob take me to a hospital. No, I say, no, no, no, no, NO. As the ‘NO’s get louder Rob backs away, startled. At last a tired man with pouches under his eyes comes out. I tell him what Little Teddy saw. He makes some phone calls.

We wait for someone else to arrive. It is her day off. She hurries in, wearing fishing waders. She has been on her boat. The detective looks very tired and kind of like a possum. I recognise her from when they searched my house, eleven years ago. I am pleased by this. Brain is really coming through for me today! But the possum detective looks less and less tired the longer I talk.

I wait on another plastic chair. Still the police station? No, this is full of hurt people. Hospital. In the end it is my turn, and they staple me up, which is weird. I refuse the painkiller. I want to feel it. So short, this life.

By the time Rob drives me home, it is dawn. As we turn into my street I see a van stopped outside her house. Cars with beautiful red and blue lights, which play on the green trim and the yellow clapboard. The lady is crying and she holds her Chihuahua tight, for comfort. The dog licks her nose. I feel bad for her. She was always nice. Mommy never hurt the Chihuahua lady’s body, but she hurt her all the same.

They put up big white screens around the Chihuahua lady’s house, so that no one can see anything. I stay at the living-room window, watching, even though there is nothing to see. It takes some hours. I guess they have to dig deep. Mommy was thorough. We all stay there, awake and alert in the body, watching the white screens. Little Teddy cries silently.

We know when they bring her out, Little Girl With Popsicle. We feel her as she passes. She is in the air like the scent of rain.

The next-door-neighbour lady has not come back. She was calling the little girl’s name as she ran from me into the woods. That made me think. I told the possum detective about her. When they looked through her house and all her things I felt bad for her – even after everything. It was her turn to have all those eyes on her stuff. Then they found out she was the sister of Little Girl With Popsicle. When I heard, I thought, Now they’re both dead. I felt sure. I don’t know why.

They found Mommy’s yellow cassette tape in the sister’s house. It had her notes on Little Girl With Popsicle. The possum detective says it sounds like she was already dead when Mommy got her. Still, I can’t think about it.

I’m sure Mommy mistook the Little Girl for a boy. Mommy never messed with girls. So Mommy took her because of all those chances coming together. A haircut, a trip to the lake, a wrong turn. It makes my heart hurt and that feeling will never go away, I don’t think. Like a cut that never heals.

The possum detective and I are drinking sodas in my back yard. Our fingers ache after yanking out so many nails. Plywood lies in broken stacks all around us. The house is so strange with its windows uncovered. I keep expecting it to blink. It’s still warm in the sunshine, but cold in the shade. The leaves are thick on the ground, red and orange and brown, all the shades of Rob’s hair. Soon it will be