Someone Else's Shoes Read online

  Copyright © 2018 by Ellen Wittlinger

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. Charlesbridge and colophon are registered trademarks of Charlesbridge Publishing, Inc.

  Published by Charlesbridge

  85 Main Street

  Watertown, MA 02472

  (617) 926-0329

  www.charlesbridge.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Wittlinger, Ellen, author.

  Title: Someone else’s shoes / Ellen Wittlinger.

  Description: Watertown, MA: Charlesbridge, [2018] |

  Summary: Twelve-year-old Izzy’s life just seems to get more and more complicated: she is upset by her father’s new marriage, and a new baby on the way; she is expected to look out for her ten-year-old cousin, Oliver, who has moved in with her family since his mother committed suicide, because his father is depressed and having trouble coping; and now Ben, the rebellious sixteen-year-old son of Izzy’s mother’s boyfriend, is also living with them–but when Oliver’s father disappears, the three children put aside their differences and set out to find him.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017057210 (print) | LCCN 2017059484 (ebook) | ISBN 9781607349952 (ebook) | ISBN 9781580897495 (reinforced for library use) Subjects: LCSH: Families—Juvenile fiction. | Broken homes—Juvenile fiction. | Depression, Mental—Juvenile fiction. | Cousins—Juvenile fiction. | Missing persons—Juvenile fiction. | Friendship—Juvenile fiction. | CYAC: Family life—Fiction. | Divorce—Fiction. | Depression, Mental—Fiction.| Cousins—Fiction. | Missing persons—Fiction. | Friendship—Fiction. Classification: LCC PZ7.W78436 (ebook) | LCC PZ7.W78436 So 2018 (print) | DDC 813.54 [Fic]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2017057210

  Ebook ISBN 9781607349952

  Display type set in Lunchbox Slab by Kimmy Design

  Production supervision by Brian G. Walker

  Ebook design adapted from printed book design by Sarah Richards Taylor

  v5.3.2

  a

  For David, for forty-odd years.

  And for every comedian who has ever made me forget, even briefly, how heartbreaking life can be.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34: Three months later

  Chapter 35

  Acknowledgments

  We look before and after,

  And pine for what is not;

  Our sincerest laughter

  With some pain is fraught;

  Our sweetest songs are those

  that tell of saddest thought.

  —Percy Bysshe Shelley

  “Why are you running?” Oliver called to her.

  “Why are you such a slowpoke?” Izzy answered.

  Lately a small, gloomy shadow followed Izzy Shepherd everywhere she went. His name was Oliver Hook, and he was her cousin. Marching through downtown Coolidge, Izzy was at least three strides ahead of the kid.

  “Are you running away from me?” Oliver yelled.

  “No.” Of course she wasn’t running away from him. But a little pinprick of guilt made her slow down anyway. “I don’t see why I have to go with you, is all,” she said.

  “I never bought a pair of shoes by myself,” Oliver said.

  Izzy stopped walking and turned to stare at him. “You’re ten years old, and you’ve never bought a pair of shoes by yourself?”

  “That’s not weird. My mom always went with me. You always try to make me sound weird, Izzy.”

  “It’s not that hard to do,” she mumbled, hoping that Oliver couldn’t actually hear her. It wasn’t his fault he was suddenly her responsibility. She knew it wasn’t fair to take it out on him. She was really mad at the grown-ups, but they had so much else going on, they didn’t even notice.

  The sun bounced off the storefront windows, hit the sidewalk, and exploded into her face. She’d forgotten her sunglasses, and the dazzling light made her squint. All around her, people were rolling up their sleeves to enjoy the end-of-summer sun on their skin, but Izzy could feel the approach of autumn racing toward her, and she hunched her shoulders against it. She didn’t like change. In her experience, it never made things better.

  What was this, now? Some guy in baggy trousers, a striped shirt, and bright red lips on a white-painted face zigzagged through traffic and hopped onto the sidewalk behind Oliver. He wore white gloves and a big black hat and had red circles painted on his cheeks. Oliver wasn’t paying attention, but Izzy caught the movement out of the corner of her eye and turned to watch the man dragging his feet in obvious imitation of her cousin.

  Ugh, he must be a mime from the festival in the park. Why did people think mimes were funny, anyway? Nobody appreciated comedy more than Izzy, but she liked humor to come from words and ideas, not imitation. Mimes just exaggerated everything that was odd or silly about a person. That wasn’t funny—it was mean.

  “Stop following us!” she yelled at the guy. “You look ridiculous!”

  Oliver turned too, surprised to see the clownish figure. He smiled briefly, and the mime returned the same smile.

  “He’s making fun of you,” Izzy hissed, and then sped up again, hoping Oliver would too.

  “Why would he do that?” Oliver asked.

  “Because that’s what mimes do!”

  The man passed Oliver so that he occupied the space on the sidewalk between the two cousins. His shoulders pulled back and his neck stiffened as he matched Izzy’s aggravated gait.

  Oliver’s sudden, barking laugh surprised Izzy. She hadn’t heard a sound like that the entire three weeks the kid had been staying at her house. “He’s walking just like you do!” Oliver said. “Like you’re trying to get away from something.”

  Izzy put on the brakes so fast, the mime ran into her. “Go away!” she yelled at him. He shrugged and began to immediately follow a woman walking in the opposite direction. She had a big hand-bag over one arm, and he leaned to the right with the weight of it, just like she did.

  “Who is that guy?” Oliver asked. “He’s pretty funny.”

  “I don’t think so. All kinds of nutballs are hanging around the park this week, pretending to be artists.” If Oliver thought that guy was funny, Izzy would have to show him some of her DVDs. Wait till he saw Robin Williams as Mrs. Doubtfire.

  “We don’t have stuff like this where I live,” he said. “Our town’s too little.”

  “You’re lucky.” But then, because Izzy knew good and well that Oliver was certainly not lucky, she felt embarrassed and steered the conversation back around to herself. “Just because I’m a natural leader,” she said, “doesn’t mean I want to be followed by somebody.” Maybe her cousin would get that she didn’t only mean the mime.

  �
��Here,” she said, turning in to the shoe store. She held the door open while Oliver dragged his fingers along the window glass, ogling the merchandise. “Come on!”

  She’d never felt impatient with Oliver before—not until he and his dad had moved into her house. But Izzy thought it was better to feel annoyed with him than to feel sorry for him. Nobody wanted that, did they? In Izzy’s experience, pity made you feel like a mangy dog that people might throw some food at but certainly didn’t want to touch.

  Inside the store, Izzy’s attention was captured by a pair of pretty ballerina flats that came in lots of colors, including a sparkly silver. The silver shoe on display was just her size, so she slipped it on and admired the way it made her ankle look long and slim. If only her mother had given her enough money to get herself a pair of shoes too, but she hadn’t.

  Izzy needed new school shoes—her toes were squished in her old sneakers and the soles were coming loose. In fact, none of her old shoes fit right anymore—her feet must have grown over the summer. But her mother had hardly listened when Izzy had told her about her shoe requirements. All her mother seemed to have time for these days was worrying about her brother—Izzy’s uncle Henderson—and Oliver. Apparently there was a rule that if your mother was a nurse, she had to help everybody else on earth before she had time to listen to your problems.

  Oliver stood in front of her, holding a very ugly pair of brown sneakers with Velcro straps across the front.

  “I like these,” he said.

  “Are you kidding? Only babies wear Velcro.”

  “That’s not true.”

  Izzy blew out a stream of exasperated air. “You’re starting a new school next week, Oliver. You want the kids to think you’re cool, don’t you?”

  “How can shoes be cool? They’re just shoes.”

  “Also,” she continued, “don’t tuck your shirt in so tight. It makes you look nerdy.”

  Oliver shrugged. “I don’t care what anybody thinks. We’re probably not staying in Coolidge that long anyway.”

  Izzy hoped he was right about that, but she had her doubts. She found a pair of the kind of shoes boys were supposed to wear. Black high-tops with fat laces. When a salesman came over, she handed him the sample. “We need these in a size six.”

  “But I don’t like laces,” Oliver said. “They come open.”

  “God, Oliver, you’re going into fifth grade. You can tie your shoes, can’t you?”

  “You’re so bossy!” he said, but she could tell he was giving up the fight.

  Am I bossy? Izzy wondered. Is it bossy if you’re just helping somebody for their own good? Ten minutes later they left the store with the high-tops in a box.

  “I hear music,” Oliver said as they walked out of the shopping district toward Izzy’s house. “Can we go listen?”

  Izzy groaned. “There’ll be a million people in the park.”

  “You always exaggerate. Maybe a hundred.”

  They might as well go to the park. As soon as they got home, Izzy’s mother would just come up with some other boring task that fell under the heading of “being extra kind to Oliver these days.” She’d ask Izzy to “rise to the occasion,” as if she hadn’t been doing that for weeks already. Izzy was quite sure that being extra kind to her cousin wasn’t going to make a bit of difference to him anyway. Not six weeks ago Oliver’s mother had killed herself, which was about the worst thing that could happen to a kid. Nothing anybody could do for him was going to change that.

  Izzy felt bad for Oliver—how could she not? But his problem was so enormous and overwhelming, there wasn’t any room left for anyone to care about her smaller troubles, which didn’t feel all that small to her.

  They stood in the sparse circle that surrounded the guitar player, a middle-aged man wearing cowboy boots and a trucker hat. He could strum his instrument well enough, but his raspy voice grated on Izzy’s last nerve. Man, she thought, they let anybody play here.

  Oliver wasn’t impressed either. “My dad’s a lot better than that guy,” he said as they left the park.

  “Well, yeah,” Izzy said. “Your dad’s a professional.” Or he was, anyway.

  “I wish Dad would play his guitar again,” Oliver said. “He hasn’t even touched it since…you know.”

  “My mom says not to rush him. He’ll start performing again eventually.”

  Izzy didn’t actually hold out much hope for Uncle Henderson resuming his career as a singer-songwriter anytime soon. The man had barely even left the bedroom her mom had assigned him when he and Oliver moved into their big, creaky old house three weeks ago. He didn’t play his guitar. He didn’t sing. He just sat in the rocking chair and stared out the window, as if his dead wife were likely to come walking up the front sidewalk any minute.

  It was awful to say, but Izzy hadn’t been that surprised when she heard about Aunt Felicia taking the pills. Aunt Felicia had always spooked Izzy a little bit. She was quiet and nervous—just the opposite of Uncle Henderson—and when she smiled, it never seemed like a real smile, but more like a mask she didn’t want anyone to see behind. Izzy’s mother said that Aunt Felicia’s depression was an illness, and that mental illness was not that different from physical illness. She said Aunt Felicia wasn’t just sad—it was a lot worse than that—but Izzy still didn’t really understand it. She’d had a great husband, a smart little kid, and a job she liked as a gardener. Why wasn’t that enough to make her happy?

  Izzy was not a psychologist like that Cassie Clayton woman her mother had made her see for a while, but she was twelve years old, and she knew plenty. For one thing, she knew there was no point being overprotective of Oliver just because a bad thing had happened to him. Izzy knew that life could be hard, and sometimes you were going to get hurt. A person needed to toughen up to be able to stand it. That’s what she’d had to do when her dad left, and she intended to teach her cousin to toughen up too.

  “Izzy?” Oliver said shyly, cocking his head. “When we get home, will you swing me in the hammock?”

  She sighed. Her job was not going to be easy.

  Izzy and Oliver walked up the sagging front steps of her house to find her mother and Ms. Baldwin drinking iced tea on the front porch while Ms. Baldwin’s son, Liam, sat cross-legged on the floor, yelling at a handheld video game.

  “There you two are!” Izzy’s mother said. “Did you get shoes? Let me see.”

  Oliver handed her the bag, keeping his back to Liam.

  “Look, Liam,” Ms. Baldwin said. “Oliver’s here.” Liam grunted and kept poking away at his game. His mother tried again. “Put that thing down and come say hello to Oliver.” Liam ignored her.

  Yeah, this was going as well as it had the last time her mother had masterminded a playdate between these two. Izzy wondered how her mother could be so dense. Just because Liam was Oliver’s age and also headed for fifth grade at Hopkins Elementary didn’t mean the two of them were going to like each other. You could tell just by looking at them that they had nothing in common. Liam’s hair was completely buzzed off, and he was wearing a Patriots football jersey three sizes too big, whereas her cousin wore a T-shirt with a picture of SpongeBob SquarePants on it and had that smelly, little-boy hair that stuck up all over his head. Didn’t these women have eyes?

  Izzy went inside to get herself a glass of tea and find a book to read. By the time she headed back to the porch, Liam and Oliver had been talked into playing in the room her mother called the parlor, a room new houses didn’t have because, really, nobody knew what to use it for. Izzy glanced in to see them dumping Oliver’s big box of Lego pieces all over the floor. So far, so good.

  The front porch was large, and it wrapped around the corner of the house, so Izzy snuggled into a chair on the side of the porch where the women couldn’t see her. She opened her book and read the first paragraph, then read it again. It was hard to concentrate when her mother and Ms. Baldwin were speaking in such quiet voices. Obviously they didn’t want her to hear, which made Izzy want
to listen twice as much. She noticed that if she closed her eyes, her hearing became extra sharp.

  “I’m trying to get Henderson to talk to a therapist, but he just ignores me,” Izzy’s mother said. “It breaks my heart to see my brother in so much pain. And Oliver too, of course. He’s being so good, but I know he’s scared senseless. He wakes up with nightmares almost every night.”

  He did? Izzy must have slept through the noise.

  “Well, they’re fortunate to have you to help them,” Ms. Baldwin said.

  “I’ve always felt responsible for Henderson,” Izzy’s mother said. “He’s my younger brother, and after our parents died, he relied on me. We’ve always been close.”

  “Is poor Oliver seeing a therapist?” Ms. Baldwin’s voice was sickeningly sweet. Izzy could feel her teeth grinding as Ms. Baldwin said “poor.”

  “We have an appointment with Cassie Clayton next week. She’s wonderful with children.”

  Izzy wouldn’t have said Cassie was wonderful. The woman was nice enough, but all that talking had just made Izzy feel worse.

  “I don’t understand it. How could your sister-in-law do this to such an adorable little boy who needs her so much?” Ms. Baldwin whispered dramatically.

  “When you’re as sick as Felicia was, you can’t think about anything but your own pain,” Izzy’s mother said. “Her despair lifted sometimes, but never for long. Poor Hen was so hopeful after she came home from the treatment center. She seemed better this time, but it didn’t last.”

  Izzy could hear the ice cubes clink as the women swirled them in their glasses.

  “She took pills?”

  “Cleaned out the medicine cabinet and swallowed everything in it, including two half-empty bottles of cough medicine. Henderson was out at a gig, and Oliver was asleep in the other room.”

  These were details Izzy hadn’t heard before. She was careful not to move a muscle so as not to remind them she was there.

  “Oh my God. The child didn’t see anything, did he?”

  “I don’t think so. Henderson found Felicia when he got home. Oliver woke up when the ambulance got there, but a neighbor came over and took him to her house. I’m sure he knew, though. He’s a smart kid. I’m sure he knew immediately.”