Janice Carter - Summer Of Joanna

“I suppose the phone woke her. Sorry about that.”

“No, no. It’s okay. She’s gone back to sleep again. Worn out. Like me,” she whispered.

“Is she sick?”

“Teething. She was up all night, too. Look, Carla’s taken off again. I should call Kim. I…I don’t want to, Kate, but she really left me in the lurch. Promised to be home all afternoon ’cause you were calling. I’d hoped to catch a nap….”

Her voice drifted off, as if she were too exhausted to even finish the sentence.

Kate didn’t know whether to be angry at Carla or herself. If she’d called on time, would the girl have stayed? Who could tell with Carla?

“Okay, Rita. I’ll call again tomorrow.”

“It doesn’t look good.”

Kate sighed. “Yeah. It sure doesn’t.” She said goodbye and hung up. She understood Rita’s reluctance to call Carla’s social worker. It seemed like a betrayal of loyalty, going behind Carla’s back to discuss her. That was how Kate would have interpreted it, when she’d been in Carla’s shoes. But now she could see the other angles. What worried her was the fear that she’d no longer be able to get through to Carla herself.

Kate wandered into the darkened living room and flopped onto the couch. She felt drained of energy and initiative. No wonder, she thought, considering all that had happened that day.

Lunch in the most exclusive restaurant she’d ever been in, not to mention a ride in a foreign car that probably cost more than her annual salary. Two strange encounters with Matt Sinclair. She shivered. What’s his problem, anyway?

And how did he know which flat was hers, because he’d seemed to look straight up at her windows on the second floor. She took another sip of water, set the glass down on the coffee table beside the couch and lay back. A nap would be nice, she decided, plumping the pillows behind her. If she could clear her mind of all the unpleasant thoughts—Carla, in trouble again. Matt Sinclair. She sighed and closed her eyes. A brighter picture appeared.

Camp Limberlost. Now hers.

“I SAID I WAS SORRY.”

Kate closed her eyes and breathed a sigh of relief.

Carla hung back on the door stoop. “I wanted to phone, honest. But the others started laughing and calling me a baby,” she continued, her dark eyes fixed on Kate’s face, willing her to believe.

And Kate wanted to. Except that she’d heard it all before in a hundred different ways, so that even Carla’s turned-down mouth and slumped shoulders failed to arouse pity. But the hint of moisture in her eyes did the trick, because Carla never cried.

“Come inside,” Kate said gently, standing aside as the girl slinked past. Instead of making for her favorite canvas hammock chair as she usually did, Carla stood in the center of the room, hugging herself tightly. She was a pathetic sight, but Kate resisted going to her.

“Care for a glass of lemonade? I was just getting one for myself.” And without waiting for a reply, Kate headed into the kitchen. The few extra seconds gave her time to put together some kind of strategy. Confrontation, she knew only too well from her own turbulent adolescence, was like turning up the heat. Too much sympathy would offer an escape route that Carla had already learned to use to her advantage. Of course there was also appealing to reason. With an emotionally charged teenager? Forget it.

After handing Carla her drink, Kate casually sat down on the couch. She sipped, wondering how long it would take Carla to follow suit. Three seconds later, Carla perched on the edge of the wicker armchair Kate had bought at a yard sale. It was a horribly uncomfortable chair and Carla never sat on it. Kate had to stifle a smile. A sign, perhaps, that the teen wanted to punish herself? She waited, taking a longer drink of lemonade. Finally Carla began to talk.

“Okay, see, there’s this girl I met. She doesn’t live near me, but a couple of subway stops away. She belongs to this gang. And, like, she’s been trying to get me in.”

Kate reached over to set her glass onto the coffee table. She was afraid if she held it a moment longer, it would shatter from the force of her grip. I’ve been too complacent, she thought. Assuming that Carla’s problems could be solved with shopping trips and sleepovers. How could I have forgotten so easily? But then, by the time she was Carla’s age, she’d already met Joanna Barnes and made her promise to take a different path from the neighborhood kids.

“Go on,” Kate said, keeping her voice as neutral as she could.

Carla glanced up at Kate for the first time since she’d entered the flat. The expression in her face begged for understanding. “They’re nice to me, Kate. That may be hard for you to believe, but they are. They don’t try to get me to do, you know, bad things like shoplift or smoke dope.”

“Do they do those things?”

Kate realized at once it was the wrong question to ask. Carla stared down at her lemonade and simply shrugged. After a moment she mumbled, “I don’t know.”

But of course she did, thought Kate, and I’ve just made her rush to their defense. She tried to make amends. “It’s okay, Carla, I’m not asking you to snitch on them. Forget I mentioned it. Go on.”

But there was a wariness in Carla’s voice now and she spoke in a stilted way, as if talking to her social worker. Or a teacher.

“Anyway,” Carla said, “I told Rita I’d help her out when I got home and I would have, only…”

“Only?”

She swallowed a mouthful of lemonade, then said, “I didn’t realize how late it was, and Toni—that’s my friend—said if I waited a couple more hours, her boyfriend would drive me home when he got off work.”

“She has a boyfriend? How old is this Toni?”

“Sixteen.”

Kate took a deep breath. “What are the ages of the rest of the kids? In the gang, I mean.”

“I dunno. Maybe fifteen up to eighteen or so.”

“Carla, you’re only thirteen.”

Carla raised her head, eyes flashing with anger. “Yeah, but they don’t hold that against me, you know. They think I’m, like, cute and funny. They even call me their mascot.”

Kate resisted responding to that, in spite of images of inflated birds and oversize fluffy dogs.

“And you couldn’t have called Rita? Or even me?”

“Like I said, they’d have teased me. Besides, what would have been the point by then?”

Kate leaned forward on the couch. “It might have meant that Rita wouldn’t have worried half the night, wondering if she ought to phone Kim or maybe the police.”

“The police?” Her face paled.

“Carla, if you’d stayed out an hour longer, Rita would probably have called them.”

“So much for trust.”

Kate sighed. Here we go again. “You have to earn trust. There’ve been too many other times like this. Rita feels that she’s expended all of her options. She doesn’t know what to do anymore.”

Carla lowered her head, seemingly intent on picking at a scab on her finger. But Kate noticed the trembling across her shoulders. After a moment, Carla wiped her nose with the back of her hand. Silently, Kate went to the bathroom for a box of tissues, which she placed in Carla’s lap. Then she sat down, waiting for the girl to stop crying.

When Carla had used two or three tissues to daub her face, she set the box down on the coffee table and looked across at Kate. “I know I’ve been giving Rita a hard time, but…but I don’t mean to. I like Rita. She and Eddie have always been good to me. Strict, but fair. I’ve been with them for two years now and I want to stay with them. If they still want me.” She glanced away, her chin wobbling again.

“They do want you, Carla. They’ve never stopped wanting to care for you. It’s just that they’ve never raised a teenager before and—”