The Runaways

Chapter 22

He was supposed to be an old man with kids and grandkids before he went. Now, he’d never see thirty. If I got what I wished for, neither would I.

        “You know something, Hailey? Your old man’s killed just about all the family I have."

The old wooden beams of my bunk bed creaked to life as she got up off the mattress. If she’d known what I planned on telling her, she would’ve stayed sitting.

        “What are you talking about?”

        “The truth. I figure if you’re wearing my Ma’s clothes, you might as well hear about what happened to her.”

I didn’t need to see her face to know how she was looking at me. Those billboard-brown eyes of hers, wider than a Texas plain, staring at me liked I’d flipped her world on its head.

        “You hear anything about that big asbestos case in Manassas your dad got involved in a couple years back?”

She shook her head and stayed quiet like I needed her to.

        “My Ma used to work in one of the public schools he shut down. She taught kids, she loved it too. I wouldn’t have gotten through school without her.”

That same old ache flared up again, so I sat down on Marcus’s bunk before I fell into it.

        “So your dad shows up, being the great Virginia senator that he is, and tells the poorest schools in the district they were getting shut down. My Ma and the other teachers thought it was budget cuts or something political. He promised that everybody working in those schools would keep their jobs and transfer somewhere else.  So Ma came home, and waited by the phone for the district to call her and tell her where she’d be teaching next.”

I hated thinking about that day. She’d never cried so much in her life. Dad thought she was stupid for getting all torn up about her students. “She had her own brood, she didn’t need anymore”. That’s how he thought about it. He never understood anybody, not even himself.

        “After the first couple weeks, she started worrying ‘cause nobody called. So she reached out to the other teachers, the district, but nobody had any answers. She started looking tired, and awful all the time. I thought it was ‘cause she worried too much. Turns out she was sick.”

Hailey got so quiet that I couldn’t even hear her breathing.

        “That’s when the phone calls started coming in. The district told teachers who’d been at my Ma’s school to get checked out, something about asbestos in the walls. Me and Liam took her in to the doctors. My Dad wasn’t even around when they told us she was dying. ”

Nobody ever heard this story before. My brothers and I just lived it. Didn’t know why I was telling her. Maybe I wanted her to feel guilty about something that wasn’t her fault. Maybe I just needed somebody to tell.

        “After Ma died, all these court cases popped up against the state and school district ‘cause they’d known about the poison in the walls for years and didn’t tell anyone. By the time they called her to give her job back, Ma couldn’t even get out of bed.”

My throat closed up so fast it got hard to talk.

        “Your dad paid off the teachers trying to sue him, gave them new jobs, built new schools, and everybody thought he was a hero.  Nobody paid attention to the cover up, or the people who died, they just kept on going with their lives. My family couldn’t, Hailey. Sometimes people just can’t. ”

I thought she would’ve said something—called me a liar or told me to stop crying, ‘cause I couldn’t keep it together anymore. But she didn’t.