The Most Perfect Thing in the Universe

by Tricia Springstubb

  “If I start to feel woozy, I’ll put my head between my knees,” Loah promised.

  Miss Rinker had reduced the napkin to smithereens. Shredded paper hearts littered the table. She seemed to hesitate, then looked away.

  “I’d rather face this alone,” she said quietly. “It’s what I’m accustomed to.”

  Loah’s eyes filled with tears. She didn’t know if the tears were for Miss Rinker, Theo, herself, or all of them at once.

  Miss Rinker lifted her sharp chin. She rapped the table with her knuckles, as if calling herself to attention.

  “You’ll stay home.” She swept the torn hearts into a small pile. “It will be one less thing to worry about.”

  Loah was a thing to worry about. The words cut her to the quick.

  Miss Rinker believed in speaking the truth, even if it hurt. Especially if it hurt. Now she crossed the room and dropped the paper shreds in the trash.

  “I promised my brother you’d call him.”

  He didn’t answer the phone, and when they tried again later, he sounded groggy and hoarse, as if he’d swum up from the bottom of the sea. Loah still ached from Miss Rinker’s words, but she tried to push the hurt away and pay attention to Theo. She told him how well her fish was doing, and how she was keeping the birdbaths clean and the feeders full, and that as soon as she was allowed, she’d visit him. Lowering her voice, she told him she’d bring gummy worms. Soon, she told him, he would be better. Soon he would come home.

  “Home,” she repeated, and was sure she heard him smile.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Once while she was playing Egg, Loah had a disturbing thought. How could a baby bird breathe in there? Where did it get air?

  “A bird’s egg is permeable,” Dr. Londonderry had explained. “It has minuscule holes that let in air. Isn’t it amazing? The shell is that thin, but at the same time it’s strong enough to take the weight of the parent bird incubating it. Its oval shape and convex surface—they make it perfect for withstanding pressure.” Not for nothing had Dr. Londonderry written The Egg: Nature’s Greatest Feat of Engineering. She’d stroked Loah’s curls and smiled the smile that turned her plain face beautiful. “As if that’s not enough, eggs come in a myriad of sizes and colors. Some are plain as dirt, while others are exquisite jewels. But no matter what they look like, eggs all have the same job. In the end, they’re meant to break.”

  The next morning, Loah woke just as the birds began to sing. She rushed downstairs, but she was too late. Miss Rinker was gone. A note written on a strip of cardboard torn from a saltine box was propped against the (not) sugar bowl.

  Keep bus.

  Miss R.

  Busy, she meant. Standing in the (very) empty kitchen, Loah hated the word with all her heart. Keeping busy was for people who were not in charge. Keeping busy was a plot to prevent them from remembering that they were small, helpless things to worry about.

  Loah kicked Miss Rinker’s E-Z Boy. She opened a cupboard and slammed it shut. Then opened it again, took out a can of sardines, and threw it. Then picked it up. At last she hurled herself into Theo’s lounger, pulled up his blanket, hugged her legs, and tucked her chin to her chest. Closing her eyes, she tried to imagine nature’s most perfect construction curving around her, protecting her from every harm. Her mother bird nestled over her, tucking her close and snug.

  Within minutes, Loah’s legs cramped. Her neck kinked. It became hard to breathe. Back in the day when she’d played Egg often, the game had comforted her, but now it was painful. She shifted this way and that, trying to cozy herself into the shell, but it was useless. She no longer fit.

  Who knew being safe could hurt?

  A rap on the back door made her jump. Who could it be? A classmate on a dare? Inspector Kipper with his dastardly clipboard? She held her breath and scrunched herself smaller. Ouch. Her leg muscles twitched. Her arms grew numb. Ouch.

  Another rap, louder this time.

  Pretend not to hear. They’ll give up and go away.

  “Loah? Are you all right?”

  Loah peeked from under the blanket to spy Ellis’s freckled nose squished flat against the window screen. She jumped up and ran down the back steps (careful on the last one). Ellis wore the usual washed-out T-shirt, rolled-up jeans, and holey sneakers, but she’d added a faded denim jacket. Her bulging backpack leaned against the steps.

  “Are you all right?” she repeated, worried. “You looked like you were sick.”

  Loah might have said the same words Ellis once said to her—I knew you’d come. But she hadn’t known. Ellis coming here was the best kind of gift, one you didn’t know you wanted, very much wanted, till someone gave it to you. Before Loah could say any of this, Zeke zoomed into the yard on a beater bike. His face was flushed, and his once-spiky green hair drooped. He skidded to a halt and toppled over sideways.

  “What are you doing here?” cried Ellis.

  Ignoring his sister, Zeke scrambled to his feet and advanced on Loah. “This is all your fault!” he said.

  “Me?”

  “She never ran away all the way before. Just to the bottom of the driveway. It’s all ’cause of you, you fat, cockeyed, robot-alien birdbrain!”

  “That’s enough out of you,” said Ellis, yanking him by the neck of his shirt. “Go sit down.” She pointed at a lawn chair. “Now.”

  “You can’t make—”

  “You know I can, and you know I will.”

  Sulking and pouting, Zeke threw himself into the chair. Ellis turned to Loah.

  “Sorry. I didn’t know he was following me. Don’t take his idiotic name-calling personally.”

  She gave her brother another poke. Perched in the ivy on the side of the house, a house finch launched into its jolly song. Ellis looked all around, and her narrow face slowly filled with wonder.

  “When you said you lived in this house I was surprised. From the road it looks kind of deserted. It still kind of looks deserted, to tell you the truth. But enchanted-deserted.”

  A perfect description, in Loah’s opinion.

  “Are the Stinkers here?” Ellis asked.

  “Rinkers!” Loah smiled in spite of herself. “No, they’re not.”

  “Are you hungry?”

  Loah realized she was. Starving.

  Ellis opened her backpack and took out a sandwich wrapped in paper. It was made from thick slices of what looked and smelled like homemade bread. When Ellis held out half, Loah’s mouth watered in a way that was embarrassing. But what was that in the middle? Loah never ate anything she hadn’t eaten before.

  “No thanks.”

  “It’s almond butter,” Ellis said. “Try it. It’s good.”

  It was. Not just the almond butter but also the honey, oceans of honey, what Miss Rinker would consider a year’s supply of honey. Loah tried to eat slowly but the sandwich was the most delicious thing she’d eaten in months. She licked her fingers, then licked them again. Sparrows clustered, hoping for crumbs, but she’d eaten every last bite.

  Meanwhile Zeke escaped his lawn chair. He shinnied up a maple tree, hung from a branch, dropped to the ground. He gathered woody seedpods from the sweetgum and pelted their feet.

  “Just ignore him,” said Ellis. “He’ll go away.”

  “No I won’t. Not ’less you come with me,” Zeke said.

  “He pretends he’s so tough,” Ellis told Loah. “But he cries when he squishes a firefly by mistake.”

  “That was when I was little!”

  “Like last week!”

  “I hate you!”

  “Not as much as I hate you.” Ellis noogied his head, then set him back in the chair and gave him the rest of her sandwich. “Eat this.” She turned to Loah. “He’s an amoeba, but he’s right about one thing.” She pulled a breath and slowly let it out. “I finally did it. I’m running away.”

  “You mean…” Loah took a step back. “From home?”

  “Where else do you run away from?”

  Zeke tried to stand
up, but Ellis flattened her hand on his head and pushed him back down. He howled.

  “I hate you, Squirrel Smith!”

  “Shut up!” Ellis snapped. She blushed, freckles drowning in a sea of red.

  Squirrel?

  “Ignore him,” Ellis told Loah again. “He makes a doorknob look smart.”

  “A birdbrain and a squirrel brain! And you’re both possum butts!”

  Zeke jumped up, knocking over the chair. He was trying to act tough, but his hair had lost its spike and his ears were pink as seashells. He was just a boy trying his best not to cry. He swung back up into the maple tree and huddled in the crook of a branch.

  Loah turned to Ellis. Who looked at Zeke, then the house, then her feet, where her big toe wiggled. At last, reluctantly, she turned her dark eyes to Loah.

  “Squirrel’s my real name,” she said.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  They sat side by side on the next-to-bottom (not rotten) back step. When Ellis bent her head, her hair fell forward clumpily, and Loah could see it needed a shampoo.

  “Squirrel Smith, that’s me.” She fingered the hem of her faded denim jacket, and Loah saw that it was embroidered with a garden of flowers. “When my mother was having me, she looked out the parlor window and saw a squirrel burying a nut. It looked so serious and determined, she said, but soon as its work was done, it started playing, climbing to the top of the shed and leaping through the air.” Ellis let her finger rest on a yellow flower shaped like a heart. “My mother thought to herself, the squirrel knows how to work in the earth like a human, but it wants to soar through the air like a bird, too. Right then she decided my name.” Ellis shook her head. “I was really small when I was born. PopPop—my grandfather—he added the Little part, and it stuck.”

  Little Squirrel. L.S. Ellis.

  “Soon as I’m legal,” Ellis went on, “I’m changing it. Maybe to Samantha or Melissa or even Ellis. I didn’t decide yet. But no way I’m going through life named after an animal.”

  “But… you’re not really. You’re named after… after an idea. The idea of an animal.”

  Every flower stitched on Ellis’s jacket was different. Some had rounded leaves. Others were pointy or feathery. Some had big show-off blooms, and others were shy, closed-up buds. Whoever had embroidered them knew a lot about flowers.

  A robin began to sing. Robins are mostly known for being signs of spring, but they have one of the most beautiful songs of all backyard birds. The notes string together like bright beads on a silky cord. Close your eyes to listen, and you might find yourself wishing you were a robin so you could sing back.

  “My mother named me for an animal, too,” Loah said.

  “I never heard of an animal called loah.”

  “It’s a bird. But it’s at risk of being extinct. It’s on the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List. You can look it up on their website.”

  “You mean if we had internet I could.”

  “Oh.”

  “Your mother named you for something extinct?”

  “She hopes not. That’s why she’s still in the Arctic. She’s on a one-woman expedition to find the loah bird and protect it.”

  Ellis mulled this over. “The loah must be really special.”

  “Mama thinks all birds are.”

  “My mother loves birds, too. The kind that live here, I mean. She’s never been to the Arctic, that’s for sure.”

  The robin sang one last note, and the yard grew quiet.

  “Your mother must be a very strong person,” Ellis said then. “Strong and brave.”

  “She is.” Loah felt a surge of pride. “She really is. She never gives up. If anyone can find and save the loah bird, it’s her. Only… I miss her. It’s been sixty-seven days now, and I still don’t know when she’ll be home.”

  “Our mother’s brave, too,” Zeke called down from his perch in the tree. “She can’t help what happened to her.”

  “What?” Loah looked at Ellis. “What happened?”

  “Your house is so big.” Ellis jumped off the step. She craned her neck, pointing. “Nobody would even notice if I stayed here awhile. I could sleep in that tower. At night I’d sneak down to your room so we could have a sleepover. In the morning I’d sneak back up.”

  “It’s a turret,” said Loah, glancing up nervously. Its witch-hat roof gleamed dully in the sun. “And I couldn’t let you stay there. It’s…” She bit her tongue to keep from saying haunted. “Unstable.”

  “It looks haunted,” said Zeke. “I bet there’s skeleton bones up there.”

  “There must be lots of other places in your house to hide,” said Ellis, ignoring him.

  This was why she’d come. Why she’d worn her jacket and why her backpack bulged as if it held everything she owned. Ellis had run away, hoping Loah would help her.

  “I’ll tell PopPop,” said Zeke. “He’ll turn you inside out.”

  “If you rat on me, I’ll kill you so dead you…” Ellis faltered. “So dead.” Her head dipped. So did Loah’s heart.

  “Ellis.” Loah stood up. “Is your mother all right?”

  Ellis moved away to sit on Loah’s swing. Curling her thin fingers around the ropes, she pushed off with one foot. Pumped.

  “Last fall, Mama and PopPop were in the barn trying to move a piece of equipment. It was an old piece of junk he should’ve got rid of long ago, except PopPop never gets rid of anything. We live in a scrap yard.” She kicked her legs out, swinging higher. “The piece of junk fell and crushed her leg and damaged her nerves, and they never got all the way better. It’s hard for her to walk. Mostly she uses a wheelchair.”

  “Oh no! Ellis!”

  “The medical bills wiped us out, and she can’t help with the goats and garden like she used to. So the rest of us have more chores than ever, but there’s no keeping up. And PopPop? I think he blames himself for the accident. You know about black holes?” She swung even higher, feet punching the air. “How they suck in anything that comes near and destroy it?”

  Loah didn’t see how the story could get worse, but then it did.

  “I try to help. I do my chores and I study and I keep Mama’s bird feeders full and… But sometimes I get so sick of it, I can’t stop myself saying mean things. Really mean things.”

  “She does!” Zeke jumped down from the tree. “She’s mean as a snake!”

  “Then PopPop hollers, and Mama tells him, Hush—Little Squirrel doesn’t mean it, and that makes me feel guilty so I say, Yes I do!” Ellis stopped pumping, and the swing began to slow. “Then this crybaby here starts blubbering, and Bully howls, and I really am sorry, but it’s not like being sorry helps anything. So see? It’s better for everybody if I just run away.”

  Zeke grabbed one of the swing’s ropes, yanking it crooked. Ellis jumped off and caught him in a headlock.

  “You gotta come home.” He flailed his fists. “You gotta, Squirrel!”

  “Shut up,” said Ellis, her voice suddenly weary. She set her brother on the swing, then squeezed in beside him. He quieted, just the way Aquaman had in the meadow. She rested her chin on top of his head, murmuring something Loah couldn’t hear.

  A strong big sister with her arm around a sad little brother—they reminded Loah of something. What was it? A movie or a book or… No. It was Theo and Miss Rinker, abandoned by their mother on the orphanage steps.

  “The day I met you, I was running away. I meant to go someplace really far, where they’d never find me.” Ellis looked at Loah over the top of her brother’s head. Her eyes were black seeds. “But then… there you were, at the bottom of the driveway. And something about you…” Her dark eyes flicked away. “It sounds weird but…”

  “What? Tell me.”

  “You were like some sign that life wasn’t all bad. That the world had good things in it, too. Happy things and funny things and interesting things and things I didn’t even know anything about yet. It was like you showed up to remind me. And then…” She shook
her head. “You came back! Just like I hoped you would. Nobody ever comes back to our house, not if they can help it. But you did. So I thought… maybe…”

  When Ellis looked at Loah now, her eyes had begun to shine with that gleaming expectancy, the hope that Loah was who Ellis thought she was.

  Loah didn’t know what to say. So often in life she didn’t know what to say, or was afraid that what she wanted to say was not what others wanted to hear, so that it had become much easier and safer to say nothing. Yet now when she said nothing, the light in Ellis’s eyes dimmed. That spark faded away, as if she was realizing that Loah was just any old person, not someone with a hidden patch of gold.

  Loah couldn’t stand to have Ellis look at her that way.

  “Ellis, guess what? It’s the same for me. You showed up now just when I was feeling… I’m here all alone and I don’t know what to do! Theo’s having heart surgery. Right now.” Before Loah could stop herself, she added, “He could die.”

  “Die?” Zeke sat up straight. Ellis jumped off the swing.

  “Loah,” she said, “what are you talking about?”

  Where to begin? Loah told them how the Rinkers had taken care of her for as long as she could remember, how she still slept with the baby blanket Miss Rinker once wrapped her in, how Theo had made that wooden swing, how he’d taught her to skip, though she wasn’t good at it, how he’d knocked over a display of bargain beach balls and they’d discovered his heart was leaky, how Miss Rinker refused to let her come to the hospital—

  “Stop. Stop right there.” Ellis held up her hand. Her scowl was fierce. Great-horned-owl-defending-its-owlets fierce. “What do you mean, she wouldn’t let you come?”

  “She said I’d be in the way.” Loah swallowed. “She said I’d be one more thing to worry about.”

  “You? How could you ever be in the way? You’re helpful, thoughtful, and very smart.” Ellis’s scowl grew so ferocious, even Zeke looked scared. “I can’t believe she left you here all alone. That’s cruel and hard-hearted.”

  “She doesn’t mean to be cruel. It’s just how she is.”