“It will be a total lockdown, that means, you have to be quiet like little mice and stay in your rooms. Elise is sleeping at the bottom of the tree house. We can’t have her waking up. She could spoil everything and give our plan away. We will be in lockdown until we are in the new place. It’ll take a long time. More than one day and one night. Sky, Luke, and Lilly will make sure we get there safely. I’ll be standing watch.”
Phoenix lets his gaze wander over our motley crowd. His eyes turn soft. He loves the kids. Always has, and we all love him for it in return. He’s the closest to a granddad they’ll ever have. It’s because of him that the kids don’t go into a panic every time we meet a grown man.
My gaze swings from Sky to Luke. “If we move to a new home, we need to take as many of our things as we can fit into the van. I assume we can’t come back and take the things we didn’t pack. Everything from the tree house comes automatically. What do we take from Elise’s room and the rest of the outside house? We are taking the van, aren’t we?”
“We are. I don’t want to risk waking Helen, so we have to get away quickly and make no noise. I don’t know how much we can take with us.”
Sky sounded tired. I’ve never seen her involving herself in our activities. Usually, she is the mastermind in the background. That she joins us today indicates how serious our situation is. She’s just not built for active duty. This must be a big stretch for her and a strain on her energy. I want to take as many burdens as possible off her shoulders.
“Leave it to me. I know what’s important. Mainly clothes and papers. I’ll see what else I find.” I was about to leave when I remembered something odd. “I caught Horace stashing away a stack of dollar notes in a shoebox in his bedroom. He thought I was asleep. We should get it, don’t you think?”
Lilly clapped. “Super. We’ll get it on our way out if it’s still there. I’ll disarm the alarm and make sure we get away without any detection.”
I’m glad I remembered the money. It’s not easy to keep track of everything but I do all I can to keep the body and the Tribe well cared for. It includes having the means to buy food. That’s my job, and I take it very seriously as if my life depended on it.
It’s time. I push all the kids into their rooms and then make my way to Elise. We can’t afford to forget important things in the rush to leave the house. We only have this one chance.
Sky says it’s the looney bin for us if we get caught. We can’t let that happen. Every time we end up in a mental facility our spirit shines a little less bright until finally, I am certain, the light will go out. Like every other human being, we cannot prosper without love and recognition. Neither is given in mental hospitals. How do I know? I lived through it every time we were admitted.
How often have I been at a point where I thought, I can’t do it anymore; but I pick up the pieces anyway and nurture our broken spirit back to something resembling normality? After each hospital admission, bouncing back becomes that little bit harder. Each time I have to dig deeper to find strength and hope.
When it comes down to it, we don’t have a choice other than being strong. That pretty much sums up our life.
I tiptoe through the room and get Elise’s backpack and two large sports bags out of the cupboard. Identification, personal papers, the computer, books, clothing… what else? I stop at her table and admire the new wall hanging she’s working on. There is no question; her ten-by-fifteen-inch weaving frame and her wool have to come to. Elise could earn good money selling her woven artwork. She has an amazing eye for colors and textures.
There is a still lot of room in the bags. It will be hard for Elise to leave a place that has been her home for twenty years. For most of the little ones, it wouldn’t make much difference. They live in the past, the time of their creation, and hardly ever leave the tree house. What happens in the outside world and that they live in the body of an adult woman, is something they don’t comprehend.
For us older ones who spend a lot of time in the body and interact with the outside world, it’s much harder. None of us deal well with change. If I’m honest, we are terrible at it. Because we spend only fragments of time in the body, we must be quick on our feet and good at hiding our confusion.
Like the time I was in the grocery store and a woman I’ve never met asks me when the next meeting is. I had no idea what she was talking about and, even though my mind raced, I couldn’t find the information. Yes, we all learned to cover these gaps. We had to. In the end, I acted shocked and told her I’d totally forgot. Living in a stable, predictable environment makes it so much easier to function well.
It’s already late, or better, early in the morning. I do a last mental check through the house. Nothing outside Elise’s room holds much meaning for us. We have
