She folded the paper and set it aside, watching me eat. She kept on the face she’d been wearing to read the news: a frown wrinkled across her forehead. She poured me a glass of juice.
I gulped down a ball of half-chewed bread. “No bacon today?”
“No bacon today. Vicky said we ran out of stamps for it, but she should be able to get some more this week.”
I gulped some juice.
“Take smaller bites and eat more carefully,” Mama said.
“I’m sorry, Mama. Where’s Joshua?”
“Mowing lawns to make a little money.”
I sighed. Joshua, usually busy these days. But it would get hot in the afternoon; he’d come home and probably want to go swimming.
“What are you going to do today?” Mama asked.
“I don’t know.”
“No? I do.”
“You do?”
“Yes. Apparently you’ll be playing with your cousin. She’s been outside all morning.”
I laughed. “Really? Why didn’t she just come inside?”
“I invited her to, and she said she’d rather stay out there if it’s all the same. I said I’d send you along.”
Jezzie comes over a lot. She has no brothers or sisters, so my aunt and uncle send her here to be around kids, to play and learn about sharing and things like that. Not that it’s done her much good so far. Mostly she comes here to boss me around. My school friends don’t live close enough for us to play together much in the summer, so I see an awful lot of Jezzie.
“Are you finished eating?”
“Yes. No, wait.” I took one more piece of bread, gooped it up, and stuffed it into my mouth in a few bites.
“Slow down with the bread and butter,” Mama said. “Especially the butter.”
“Is it like bacon?”
“Yes. We’re going to have to get you fake butter.”
“Fake butter?”
“Margarine. It comes white and you have to stir the yellow in.”
“Really?” I looked at the butter. How could you stir yellow in? “Does it taste the same?”
Mama shrugged: I don’t know. “You’ve had enough to eat. Get along now.”
I went right out on the porch, holding a piece of crust Mama hadn’t noticed I’d snuck, still in my pajamas.
Jezzie lay on her stomach on the porch swing, rocking it gently with her feet. She’s a bit bigger than me. She has long hair that makes me think of that last streak of pink in the sky over the ocean before the sun sets. It’s not that color, but that color must be hiding in there somewhere.
“I thought you’d never get up,” she said. “We can go pick strawberries next door. Nobody’s home and nobody’s watching them—I’ve been keeping an eye out. For heaven’s sake, why aren’t you dressed yet?”
I shrugged and crunched on the toast. Mm-mm, butter was good!
Jezzie took my free hand, dragged me back upstairs to my room, and found clothes: my short, raspberry-colored dress; white socks; black shoes. She knows my closet and bureau better than I do, she’s pawed through them so many times. Luckily, nothing I have fits her, and the only thing she can “borrow” are hair ribbons.
Jezzie does not return the things she “borrows.” None of my hair ribbons, and not the black knight she took from Joshua’s chess set. Boy, was he mad about that. But he was even madder when the next time they tried to play a game, she insisted on being the white pieces, because who wants to be down a piece? Clever, see, because Jezzie is good at using the knights in chess, too. I handed something to Joshua; he smiled when he saw it, and beat Jezzie using the rocking horse from my dollhouse.
Jezzie helped pull on my clothes and took care of all the buttons, like I was a baby. That’s the way she always makes me feel. I let her dress me because there’s no getting in Jezzie’s way.
She paused to press on her ears. Something’s wrong in there—she gets infections; they ring and buzz. Mama told me they are very painful to her.
Then Jezzie pulled me down the stairs and out across the yard, and through some trees and bushes until the house was out of sight and we were in someone else’s yard.
She pointed to some low plants in rows. “Go ahead. The redder the berries, the better.”
We picked small, round strawberries, soft and ripe, and ate as we picked. They were probably the most delicious, sweetest things I’d ever eaten.
“Lordy!” she exclaimed. “Be careful. You have strawberry juice all over your clothes!”
Jezzie didn’t let me eat them all, though; she made sure I was piling handfuls of them into her handkerchief (the red one, so her mother wouldn’t ask about the stains) for her to tie up and sneak home for later. I knew she’d eat them all by herself and not give any to me, so I stuffed as many as I could into my mouth.
Jezzie took my sticky hand and dragged me all the way back to my yard. At the water pump she splashed my face, hands, and dress. “Leave me alone,” I said. “Stop it!”
“But look what you did. Everyone will know that you’ve been naughty. Is that what you want?”
My heart thudded; she was right. But neat Jezzie, who had tucked away the bulging handkerchief somewhere, had not a trace of strawberry on her. I let her clean me off. She dropped my arm and pressed on her ears again.
“What if someone sees us cleaning up?” I asked.
“Easy. We’ll tell them you got muddy and we had to wash you up. Actually, that’s what you should tell them if they ask why you’re all wet.”
Jezzie smoothed her hair behind her ears. She wasn’t wet at all. No one would know that she had ever done something wrong.
I came to as if suddenly waking up from a nap. I blinked and looked around my room, the pen still in my hand.
But I hadn’t been sleeping: there was writing in my notebook, in that handwriting that wasn’t mine, about Jezzie and strawberries. About what I’d just seen.
I stared at the notebook page, trying to let what had happened sink in. I closed my eyes, opened them again … the words were still there.
I’d been inside a story, inside that little girl! I’d just followed what she was doing; I wasn’t me at all—I couldn’t think or act while I was in her. But I could taste the bread and butter and the delicious strawberries. It hadn’t been like writing; it had been like really being there, like being her.
Her body felt different from mine … smaller … she must have been younger than me. The house was definitely my house, though the furniture and colors were different. But what I saw, was it—or had it ever been—real? Was this the girl whose name came out of the pen that first time, Sarah Elizabeth Alberdine? It had to be, didn’t it? And why was the name Jezzie familiar?
But in any case, strawberry picking wasn’t the story I’d had in mind. Unless the house was now haunted by the neighbor looking for stolen strawberries.
I let my eyes wander around my room. The wallpaper was thin yellow stripes on white: sunny for vacationers, I figured.
What had the wallpaper been in what I saw? Pink with flowers? Or peaches-and-cream-colored?
If I’d made the story up, that stuff wouldn’t matter. But if I had actually been seeing something real … the real past … maybe I would be able to find that wallpaper.
I stood up and ran my hand over the wall. It felt pretty hard and smooth, not like a poorly done job of wallpapering over wallpaper.
But there might be somewhere … a spot that mattered less than the middle of the biggest wall. Besides, if I was going to peel back the wallpaper and have a look, it would have to be somewhere Mom wouldn’t notice and freak out.
The most hidden spot would be behind the door. There was only a small stretch of wall between the door and the closet.
I ran my hand down that small space all the way to the molding along the floor, and, sure enough, it felt a little off, like maybe there were some air bubbles or layers of paper. I crouched down and carefully peeled up the corner.
Aha! There was wallpaper underneath. Blue
. Arrgh.
I peeled up the next layer.
And there it was.
Pink. With just the edge of a cream-colored curve: a flower?
A series of chills came over me. Maybe the story I’d seen was real. Maybe I could see into the past just because I wanted to.
I rested my head on my knees and took several deep breaths.
I crawled into bed and hid under the sheet. But pulling a sheet over my head couldn’t keep out what was inside it.
8
The hillside slopes steeply out of the sea toward what once must have been a beautiful village. We reach it on foot, finding only a still-smoking ruin, buildings left in half-standing heaps. On most days the sun would have shone brightly here, but the sky looks gray under the lingering clouds and ashes.
Hello! my buddy John calls.
No one’s here, I say.
They must have fled, David says.
There’s a heavy smell in the air that tells me that many did not escape. The smell alone makes me sick, before my mind contemplates what it means. This is so-called “liberation”; these people are “free” now. I hold a cloth over my nose and mouth.
Listen. I stop the boys, whose heavy boots crunch the rubble. Do you hear that?
I turn back to find a little girl standing in a doorway.
Hello, I say. Are you alone?
She doesn’t answer. I’m sure she can’t understand me. She starts whimpering again—the noise I heard—and the whimpering becomes crying.
I’ve never seen her before, but somehow she seems familiar to me. It’s her little-girlness. The little girl I knew back home was blond and happy and well, and this creature is dark-haired, her bright pink cheeks streaked with tears, her nose running.
There now, it’s all right. I find a chocolate bar in my pocket, half broken off already, but chocolate all the same. I peel back more of the wrapper and extend it to her.
She turns away and wails, leaning on the doorframe. She covers her face with her hands. There’s no door on the frame, and I wonder, Has there ever been?
I slip past her into the house.
There’s her family—grandfather? and mother?—crushed when the back of the house fell in. The little girl must have been huddled under the stairs with the vegetables, maybe put there for safety.
I go back to the doorway, suddenly numb.
Come on, I say. I lift the girl up against my shoulder. She continues crying, frightened of me, of what has happened. Her little body is burning up.
Where are you taking her? David asks.
Somewhere safe.
Good luck finding a place like that, John says, kicking a large piece of rubble.
He feels the girl’s forehead.
She won’t make it, he whispers. And you could catch it, too. We all could.
She will make it. I’ll see to it.
I hoist the little girl up higher. I hope someone would do it for my sister. Someone should have done it for my friends in the water, for William. And I hope someone would do it for me.
The sun was up and I could hear the birds. Seagulls. My new room was becoming more familiar each time I woke in it, feeling more like home, but waking from this dream was like coming back from a place very far away. My stomach felt queasy.
There was something different about these two dreams. They weren’t like my repeated house dream, and they weren’t isolated. They were related somehow. Was I having them because I was in the house now? Did they have something to do with Sarah?
Trying to shake off the dream, I remembered the odd events of last night and hurried out of bed in time to catch Dad before work.
I had the SEA pen and a piece of paper in hand.
“Look, Dad,” I said, trying to keep my voice steady. “I fixed it.”
“Oh, terrific.” He collected the crumbs of his blueberry muffin on his fingers.
“Want to try it out?”
“I trust you that it writes.”
“No, really. Try it out.” I put the paper next to him on the kitchen island and held the pen out to him.
Dad brushed his hands off on his shorts and took the pen. First he made some loops and then he wrote his name a couple of times.
“Yeah, that works just fine. Good job.”
Nothing had happened when he used the pen. So it wasn’t just the pen making me see things. The pen helped me, but it wouldn’t if I didn’t already have … well, whatever it was that made me see things.
But at least with the pen, I could decide when I wanted to see things and when I didn’t. That would be an improvement. I took it back from Dad. I couldn’t lose it.
I was craving something for breakfast that I could cover with butter. I looked in the fridge and found a package of ready-to-bake rolls. I preheated the oven.
“Mom’s going to love that,” Dad said. “The oven on when we’re due for a hot day.”
“Oh well,” I said.
Dad left for work. When the rolls were ready, I sat with a whole plate of them and a container of butter.
Lucca came into the kitchen, looking sleepy but curious about the good smell. He stood next to me and tugged on my pajama shorts. I handed him a round, hot roll and he started eating.
“I’ve tried a couple things but so far haven’t figured out what happened here. I’m working on it, though.”
Lucca acknowledged me by taking a huge bite and smiling with his mouth full.
I was glad Lucca was up early, being his sweet, friendly self. It made the queasy feeling in my stomach subside, and suddenly the doughy rolls and melting butter tasted better.
Mom came in with play clothes for Lucca and started dressing him as best she could despite the fact that at least one of his hands was constantly pressing a roll to his mouth.
“We’re heading out the door, honey,” Mom told me, sounding pretty anxious. “We’re going to playgroup.”
Mom had already found a playgroup? She really did get down to things, didn’t she?
She knelt in front of Lucca to Velcro his sandals. “Maybe you can tell the other kids your name? I’m Lucca. Loo-ka? Loo-ka?” She pronounced it carefully for him, hoping he would repeat it, but Lucca just stared at her.
I rolled my eyes as she got up, and decided to encourage Lucca in my own way. I held out my palm for a goodbye high-five and pulled him in close. “It’ll be fun, I promise.” I kissed his temple and he squirmed to be let go. He ran out the door after Mom.
I headed back upstairs with the pen. I was going to try again.
It was Sunday and Dad told Joshua that he couldn’t go round asking the neighbors to give him work for money even if their lawns were ten feet tall. Which meant that after church Joshua had nowhere to go and instead went out on our front porch and took apart our radio.
“Why would you take apart a perfectly good radio?” I asked, drooping over the side of the swing in the heat.
“Well, it wasn’t perfectly good.” Joshua lined up the parts neatly in the cardboard box lid he’d set out so nothing would fall through the cracks in the porch. “I figured we could either spend money on a new radio or I could just see if I could fix it first. It was staticky all the time, so I thought maybe it was dusty inside.”
That sounded smart. “Static sounds like dust. If dust had a sound, it would be static.”
Joshua was quiet for a minute; then he said, “Dust could also make this sound: shhh shhh shhh. Or no sound at all.”
I lay on my back and repeated, “No sound at all.”
I closed my eyes but did not hear dust; I heard waves and bugs and the small clinky noises of the parts of the radio as Joshua cleaned them and began to put them back together.
“Should we sing a song?” I asked.
“Nah, too noisy.”
“What’s wrong with being noisy?” He was fixing our radio, after all. Someone who didn’t like noise shouldn’t have a radio.
Joshua didn’t answer. I sat up to look at him and saw him gazing over the porch railing, ou
t to the end of the water. ’Cept the water doesn’t have an end that you can see, it’s so far away.
“Joshie?” I don’t call him that much anymore; that was my name for him when I was little and Joshua was hard to say. “Joshie?”
“What, Little Bug?” he asked, coming back from wherever he’d gone in his head and choosing another piece to put back in his radio. Little Bug was his name for me.
I fell back onto the swing again. “Wanna play with me after you fix the radio?”
“Yeah, okay. What do you want to play?”
“Treasure Hunt.” That’s one of our favorite games.… We take turns taking something from the house, something that won’t get hurt outside, and hiding it on the beach, and then we play treasure hunt to find it. The only rules are you can’t hide something where the waves will come in and you can’t bury something deep, if you do bury it.
“You go first,” Joshua said. “You can get ready while I finish this up.”
I went inside and drew the treasure map of the beach and yard, selected my own metal cup as the treasure, and went outside to leave it for him to find.
I returned twenty minutes later and handed him the map.
“Oh, thanks,” he said, not seeming to quite remember why I was handing him a piece of paper. The radio wasn’t put back together yet. He’d just been sitting.
“Come on. Go find my treasure.”
“Nah.” He sat down on the step and I sat next to him. “You know what I’d like to do?” he asked finally.
“No.” I’d gone through all that trouble to get the game ready. Now he wasn’t even going to play?
“Go dancing. There’s a dance tonight at the community center. Want to come with me?” He suddenly seemed much brighter, like his usual self.
“Do they let kids in?” I asked. “You’re old enough, but they might not let me.”
“But you’ll be with me, so it will be okay. I just want to dance. Dance and dance and not think.”
“Let’s ask Mama.”
At first she wasn’t sure whether I should go, but she said okay in the end. She asked how we would pay for it, and Joshua said he’d earned enough money this week to buy two tickets. The money raised by the dance went to buy blankets for troops, so Mama knew it was a good cause. When Joshua went to take a bath, Mama brushed my hair out until it was shiny and soft and helped me put on my navy-blue dress, my special dress for parties. Then she found my wide white hair ribbon, one of the few nice ones left behind by my cousin, and tied it so my hair would be held back from my face a little but still be mostly loose. Oh, would Jezzie be jealous that I went to the dance!
Listening for Lucca Page 6
