I sighed. “It was my fault.”
“Everything has to be your fault all the time?”
I shrugged a little. “After the accident, Pop said they'd told him you never stayed in one place very long. But he said we were different, and that it must be something else. And that's what it was? You thought—”
“I messed up the family.” “Wait till he hears this,” Steven said. “Just wait.”
I watched the snow drifting off the trees. Old Man, I love you. Steven rubbed my shoulders; he must have seen that I was shivering. “I put the fishing pole away for you in the shed, and looped the sweater over the knob.”
“The fishing pole?” My hand went to my mouth. “I forgot about the fishing pole. All this time.”
“Ha, Hollis Woods, there's hope for you, I told you that. I'm going to spend next summer fixing up the old truck. What do you say? Want to help? Want to come home?”
I didn't say anything. I didn't have to. I climbed up on the back of the snowmobile. “Take me to the telephone booth down at the grocery,” I said.
He gunned the motor and the snow spewed out behind us as we flew up the highway to call Beatrice.
Steven stood next to me in that freezing phone booth, his eyeglasses steamy and small puffs of smoke coming out of his mouth. He talked the whole time. “I told Izzy not to worry, that you'd be home by Christmas.” He waggled his eyebrows. “Of course I knew where you were.”
“Wait,” I said, dialing the number I'd memorized all those weeks ago. “I can't hear.”
“And the day after Christmas is pretty close.” He grinned at me.
Then Beatrice's sweet voice was in my ear, soft and a little breathless.
“It's me,” I said. “Hollis Woods.”
For a moment she didn't answer. When she began to speak, it seemed as if she couldn't stop. “I've been calling for days, Hollis,” she said. “Where are you? Is Josie all right? Do you know where Josie is? Please know. I've been so worried.” She paused, really out of breath now.
I closed my eyes: Beatrice worried, Josie unhappy, the Old Man looking for me. What had I done?
“She's with me,” I said.
Steven's voice was still in my head even though he was standing right next to me. If you hadn't made that mess, you might never have come home.
“Josie wants to come home. She remembers home, but she forgets so much else,” I told Beatrice. “The agency isn't going to let her stay there alone. And they want me to go somewhere else.”
“I'm coming home, Hollis. I'm coming home right now. Don't worry. I'll move right in with Josie.” Her voice sounded excited. “I'm already sick of painting the desert. I need some snow in my life. I need to see Josie and Henry.”
Steven clapped his hands together for warmth. “By the way, we started on your room anyway,” he said. “I told the Old Man we'd paint it green, green for holly.”
“Beatrice, she'll be so glad to see you,” I said, looking at Steven, listening to them both at once.
“But the Old Man wanted your room blue,” Steven said. “ ‘Hollis loves blue,' he kept telling us. What does he know? French Blue, he calls it.”
I grinned. The Old Man knew a lot. But maybe I wouldn't tell Steven that either.
I talked for another minute, telling Beatrice we'd go home soon, telling her we were all right, we were fine, and then I hung up the phone.
Steven yanked off his gloves with his teeth, reached for more change, and laid it out on the shelf. “I bet you don't even know our phone number,” he said as he began to dial.
I could hear Izzy's larger-than-life voice. “Is that you, Steven?”
He handed the phone to me, then let himself out of the phone booth to stand outside, stamping his feet.
“It's me, Izzy,” I said. “Do you think I could come home?”
The Old Man framed this picture and hung it over the bed in my French Blue room in our winter house in Hancock. The mirror on the opposite wall reflects the picture so it's the first thing I see when I open my eyes in the morning … that and my tree figure from Josie.
The tree figure wears the crystal beads Izzy gave me. “They're too small for you now, Hollis,” Izzy said as she looped them carefully over the sea-grass head. “They're from my sixth birthday. But I always wanted my oldest daughter to have them.”
I tried to match the picture to the Wone in my backpack, but I couldn't do it exactly. First, there's a flag in the background of this one because it's Memorial Day, the day we open the house in Branches for the summer each year. It's early in the morning and we're standing on the porch steps with the sun sending beams of light across the river in front of us.
But there are five of us in the picture instead of four. The Old Man, looking a little grim: He's just discovered that Steven left his bedroom window open so the snow drifted in all winter, ruining the wall and buckling parts of the wood floor.
Steven tries to look serious, but you can see the laughter in his eyes. “Holly will paint it up,” he said, needling the Old Man. “She'll paint it green. That's her favorite color.”
They still argue, sometimes so loudly I put my hands over my ears. When they see me they smile. “It's all her fault,” Steven says, and the Old Man leans over to pat my shoulder.
In the picture, Izzy stands in the center, a little taller than the Old Man. She's wearing a loose shirt in that blue I love. “Are you happy?” she asked me as I sketched us all later that day. “Be happy, Hollis, because I am. I've never been happier.”
I didn't answer. Instead, I drew smiles on both our faces. I'm the fourth one in the picture, by the way, smiling just a bit. I know I'm thinking of Josie, thinking of running here with her a year and a half ago. If I hadn't done that, I wouldn't have this picture, wouldn't have any of it. I'd still be running.
Every month we go to Long Island to see her in her kitchen with Henry, and the pelican, and the tree figures she still carves, while Beatrice patters around fixing tea for all of us.
Josie doesn't remember exactly who I am anymore. She loves me, though, I know that, and always reaches up to touch my cheek. Sometimes I wear her brown hat with the veil, and then I see the recognition in her eyes. “Hollis,” she says. “You saved my life.” Maybe she doesn't know why, but still she says it, and I always tell her it was the other way around.
And Henry? Ancient, but still feisty. “That cat's as tough as you are,” Steven says to me.
Henry looks at me, and it's almost as if he winks before he closes both eyes above a wide yawn. We speak the same language, that cat and I.
I have a new last name now. It's Regan. I love the sound of it. I haven't forgotten Hollis Woods, who wanted and wished, fresh as paint, a mountain of trouble, so I sign my drawings using the three names. They all belong to me. Emmy and the mustard woman both like the idea of that. They show up regularly to say hello, nodding and smiling as if they were the ones who changed my whole life. I don't say anything. I know they're relieved to have me off their hands and settled. And I have to say I can't blame them for that. I have to say, too, that I even smile back at them once in a while.
But the picture, and why it doesn't match the first one, the W picture: It's because I'm holding my sister, Christina, six weeks old, in my arms.
She looks quiet in the picture, contented, sucking on her thumb. But she's not always like that. And when she cries, we run to her from wherever we are. We stand over her bassinet smiling at her, cooing. And Izzy always puts her arms around me. “You brought us luck,” she says.
So there are five of us now: a mother, a father, a brother, and two sisters.
A family.
About The Author
PATRICIA REILLY GIFF is the author of many beloved books for children, including the Kids of the Polk Street School books, the Friends and Amigos books, and the Polka Dot Private Eye books. Her novels for middle-grade readers include The Gift of the Pirate Queen; Lily's Crossing, a Newbery Honor Book and a Boston Globe–Horn Book Honor Book;
and Nory Ryan's Song, an ALA Notable Book, an ALA Best Book for Young Adults, a School Library Journal Best Book of the Year, and a Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators Golden Kite Honor Book for Fiction. Her most recent Random House book was All the Way Home, published by Delacorte Press.
Patricia Reilly Giff lives in Weston, Connecticut.
Published by
Dell Yearling
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Random House Children's Books
a division of Random House, Inc.
New York
Copyright © 2002 by Patricia Reilly Giff
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eISBN: 978-0-307-54228-1
May 2004
v3.0
Table of Contents
Other Books By This Author
Title Page
Dedication
First Picture
Chapter 1
Second Picture
Chapter 2
Third Picture
Chapter 3
Fourth Picture
Chapter 4
Fifth Picture
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Sixth Picture
Chapter 7
Seventh Picture
Chapter 8
Eighth Picture
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Ninth Picture
Chapter 11
Tenth Picture
Chapter 12
Eleventh Picture
Chapter 13
Twelfth Picture
Chapter 14
Thirteenth Picture
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Fourteenth Picture
About The Author
Copyright
Pictures of Hollis Woods Page 10
