Free Livvie Owen Lived Here by Sarah Dooley

hill. My arm suddenly felt very tired and I let it fall limply at my side.
    Karen looked at me with something I think was called sympathy. “She’ll be all right. You just scared her, Livvie.” Eyes casting away from mine, crinkles getting deeper again by half. “You scared us all. Lord God.”
    I started to cry again, gentler this time but no less sudden. “I’m sorry. . . .”
    Karen let out this long, shaky sigh and pulled me into a tight hug, the very best kind.
    â€œOh, hush,” she said quickly. “You’re all right.”
    But I didn’t feel all right.
    â€œI feel like an idiot with a capital whatever
idiot
starts with,” I murmured into her sleeve.
    â€œIiiiii . . .” She drew out the sound. “What letter do you hear?”
    I drew back from her shoulder and put my hands on my hips like I had seen Lanie do a million times. “Do I look like I’m in the mood for phonics?”
    My mother threw her head back and laughed an amazed sort of laugh. She placed a firm hand on my back and guided me through the door. “All right, fine,” she said. “Forget I asked.”
    With weak water pressure, I wasn’t inspired to stay in the shower for long. Soon, I fell into bed, tucked in under nine warm blankets with my fish lamp swirling and a quilt over the window to keep out the sun. My mother fell asleep almost immediately, lying in bed with me with her arm draped over my shoulder. I think she was afraid to leave me alone, in case I would disappear again. She looked younger when she was asleep, and it seemedfunny—funny in a weird way, that is, not the kind that makes you laugh—to see her that way.
    I was glad she was able to sleep. At least somebody could. It was all I could do even to lie still and stay in bed. My fingers and toes kept crossing, my shoulders tensing and relaxing, my teeth chewing my lips, a hum just under the surface. There were too many things to figure out, too many memories of my midnight adventure to sort through.
    It was difficult to move slowly, as wound up as I was, but if I woke Karen, she would get upset that I was drawing the Sun House. She might think I was planning to run away again. So I moved slowly and carefully as I slid my notebook and pencil off the nightstand. I sketched the house as best I could remember, not as it used to be, not as I had sketched it a million times, but as it looked now. I wasn’t much of an artist and my drawings usually looked more like somebody had closed their eyes and attacked a piece of paper with a dirty shoe—at least that’s what Lanie always said—but if there was one thing I could draw, it was letters, so I finished the drawing by adding the letters I’d seen on the sign tacked to the porch railing.
    Sketching them in further and further detail—first their shapes, then their shades, then the dampnessof the cardboard underneath, I imagined what the letters must say. In my heart I knew they said For Rent. They simply
had
to. What else could a sign in front of the Sun House say? It couldn’t say For Sale because we had already done that, years ago. But we hadn’t rented yet, so surely that was still an option.
    Satisfied with my notion to rent the Sun House for my family, I was at last able to drop into a shallow sleep.

Chapter 6
    I woke up sick and said into the darkness, “Great going, Livvie, now you’ve messed up again.”
    Karen shifted in her sleep and mumbled something about potatoes, making me jump. I had forgotten she was over there.
    The light had changed. I could tell even with the quilt over the window that a big chunk of the day had passed while I was asleep with my face on my notebook. Sitting up and wiggling out from under Karen’s heavy arm, I rubbed the sleep out of my eyes and blinked around me.
    Someone sat so still in my chair, it took me a moment to process.
    â€œOh,” I said at last,