The Story Web

by Megan Frazer Blakemore

  Alice had never heard so many people be so quiet. She could hear the bobcat snoring, the rustle of bird wings.

  It was the moose, though, that had the last word. He tilted his head back and let out a long, low, cowlike call. The other animals stood at attention. The moose tipped his head to the children, then left, clomping through the open door at the back of the hall. The rest of the animals followed.

  After a moment, Alice, Melanie, and Lewis ran to the door.

  The sky, finally, was clear, and the moonlight rained down on the animals, casting them in silver like they were all in a black-and-white photograph. Beyond the animals at the edge of the woods stood the moose. He swung his antlers into the sky.

  Alice and her friends stepped out. Alice held up one hand. “Goodbye,” she whispered to the air. It was like breaking a spell. The animals all turned and dashed into the woods.

  An owl lingered behind. It let out its hoot and flew into the air. Up and up before it swooped toward the forest.

  “Look,” Alice whispered.

  “I see it,” Melanie said.

  It was the web, spreading out and over the trees, the strands so thin they wavered with each soft puff of air. If you weren’t quite sure, if you didn’t quite believe, you might not see those strands at all.

  But Lewis and Melanie and, most of all, Alice, they believed.

  They woke early to drive to Massachusetts. Alice’s mom and Uncle Donny sat up front. Alice rode in the back seat. On her lap was the bird, Dare, in the small cage that Donny had bought for her. In the trunk was the elaborate habitat Donny had built. Officer Hammersmith had looked the bird over and said that it might still be weeks before Dare could fly, and anyway, she had become too accustomed to people.

  Alice lifted the blanket and peered in at Dare. She sat quietly on the floor of the cage, silver-gray eyes staring right back at her. “My dad will like you because you have the same eyes,” she whispered. The goddess Athena had gray eyes, too, penetrating and pure. Athena, the goddess of war and literature and handicrafts and the protector of Odysseus, who only wanted to get home to his family.

  “Did you bring his stick?” Alice’s mom asked Donny, even though she had seen it placed into the trunk of her car.

  “Yes. And his jersey. The one all the kids signed for him after the championship last year.”

  Alice’s mom nodded. She checked her side mirrors and the rearview mirror, catching Alice’s eye. “He might seem different,” she said. “But he’s still your dad. He’ll always be your dad,” she said.

  “Is he taking lots of medicine?” Alice asked. “I heard that’s what they give people when they’re sick like Dad. Like antidepressants and things and they make them seem different. Like they aren’t really there?”

  “Who told you that?” Donny asked.

  It had been Izzy, back when Alice’s dad had first been sent away for treatment. Alice had heard Izzy whisper to Sadie that doctors would likely drug her father until he was zonked and then leave him in a room alone. “It doesn’t matter,” Alice said.

  “He is taking some,” Alice’s mom said. “I’ve been talking to his doctors the whole time, honey. They are being careful. It can be hard to get the dosage right, but what they have now seems good. It’s kind of a constant monitoring thing. I know that meds that work on your personality can seem weird and scary, but some people really need them. Like we wouldn’t look down on someone for taking acetaminophen for a headache, right? These meds are the same. They treat a problem that needs treating. They treat the symptoms, and your dad is doing the work to make himself healthy again. That’s all.”

  Donny reached across the center console and squeezed Alice’s mom’s shoulder.

  “I see,” Alice said, although she really didn’t know if she did.

  She wished she had a person in the back seat with her who could reach across and give her a hug, a person like Lewis or Melanie. Instead she had Dare, who seemed to think this moment was the perfect time to go all quiet. Or maybe the car ride just bothered her. Alice let the sheet drop and hoped the bird would fall asleep.

  They drove on down the highway. There were so many more cars here, and they were still in Maine. There were license plates from Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Connecticut, and New York. She saw one from Arkansas, which seemed impossibly far away, and another from Illinois. All driving south at speeds that made her dizzy.

  They passed over a huge bridge and into New Hampshire. From way up on the bridge she could see all the houses and cars and churches and cranes down below, small and perfect. They went under huge tolls that they didn’t even need to stop for, and then, as quickly as they’d arrived in the state, out they went again. Massachusetts Welcomes You a sign read, alongside a picture of a chickadee. If they were in Massachusetts, they couldn’t be far from her father.

  She stared out the window. There were even more cars here, going faster and faster down the three lanes of highway. Cars weaved from lane to lane, and Alice’s mom gripped the steering wheel more tightly. Uncle Donny fiddled with the radio until he got a classic rock station to come in. “Sweet Caroline.” Alice tried to relax. It was one of her dad’s favorite songs. He’d taken her to see the Portland Sea Dogs play a game one summer, and they played that song during the seventh-inning stretch. He promised he’d take her to Fenway to see the Red Sox play and hear that song in all its glory. He’d promised her, too, that he’d take her to see the Bruins play. They’d never gone.

  Uncle Donny sang along and said, “Come on, Alice! Let’s hear you, JoJo!” But Alice and her mom stayed silent.

  Alice’s mom moved into the right-hand lane and got off the highway, easing down the exit ramp. Alice felt her skin grow tight all over her body, tight and itchy. She thought her breath was coming too quickly, her heart beating too fast. “I have to pee,” she blurted.

  “We’re almost there,” her mom told her.

  “I can’t wait,” Alice said. “And I don’t want to run to the bathroom as soon as I see Dad. I need to go now. Please. I need to go now.” Tears welled in her eyes.

  “Okay,” her mom said. There was a gas station ahead. “I guess it can’t hurt to fill up now, anyway,” she said.

  “I’ll get some snacks. You know how your dad loves those Hostess fruit pies.”

  “Apple,” Alice’s mom said.

  “I know,” Uncle Donny replied.

  Her mom pulled up alongside the pump. Alice put Dare on the seat beside her, fumbled with her seat belt, then fled from the car.

  Never had she been so happy to be inside a gas station bathroom.

  She stood over the sink and let the water, cold, run over her hands as she looked at herself in the mirror. Would her father even recognize her? Her hair was longer, bone straight, and parted on the side, because that’s how Izzy had wanted it. She raked her fingers across her scalp and pulled her hair back at the base of her neck, then she nimbly braided it. She had a ponytail holder jammed into the pocket of her jeans and twisted it around the base of her braid. This her father would recognize. It was how she wore her hair under her hockey helmet. She could do nothing about the circles beneath her eyes or the sadness in them.

  Her hands turned cold from the water. She splashed some on her face then patted it dry with one of the brown paper towels.

  Donny and her mom were waiting for her in the car when she slipped into the back seat. After buckling, she put Dare back on her lap. “Okay,” she said. “I’m ready to go.”

  They drove the rest of the way in silence. It was a pretty enough town, she thought. Once you got past the convenience stores and fast-food restaurants right off the highway, there was a nice little downtown with a coffee shop and a library and a big field with a bright white gazebo. They took a left turn and drove along a winding road, past cow farms and apple orchards until they got to a driveway with a large stone at the end. Hemlock Center was engraved in the boulder. Her mother turned up the driveway.

  If it was possible to become more si
lent, they did.

  The driveway took them over a bridge that crossed a thin river, and then they were on her father’s island.

  The main building was old, large, and brick, but welcoming. The front door was painted a cheery blue, and the steps leading to it had white railings laced through with Christmas lights.

  Alice’s mom stopped the car.

  It was Alice who moved first. She unclipped her seat belt with a loud snap, and then opened her door. The damp air was heavy with the smell of pine trees, the cow farms, and maybe, Alice thought, maybe even a hint of the sea salt of the ocean. She hugged Dare’s cage tightly in her arms and listened hard. Birds called from tree to tree: warblers and sparrows and crows. She heard cars rushing by far away. She heard the wind. Then she heard the sound she hadn’t even realized she’d been waiting for: skates on ice.

  She moved toward the sound, around the main building along a path paved with gray stones and lined with hedges no higher than her knee. In her cage, Dare twittered excitedly. Behind her came the clunk of her mother’s clogs and the thud of Uncle Donny’s boots. They came around a bend and there, at the bottom of the hill, they saw the pond. It wasn’t much of a pond, not even twenty yards across, and there was a tree growing right out of the center of it. Alice’s dad skated around that tree, around and around and around. His body was straight and tall, and he glided without any effort. He was exactly as Alice remembered him.

  4

  Buzz Dingwell coasted to a stop. Alice, still holding the birdcage, scurried down the hill to him and nearly fell into his arms, cage and all. He sighed into her hair. “Alice.”

  “Dad,” she sobbed.

  He looked right into her eyes with his gray ones, made shiny by his own tears.

  “I have your bird,” she told him.

  “My what?”

  “Your bird,” she said. But by then her mother and Uncle Donny were down the hill, too. Buzz pulled Alice’s mom into the hug, too. Then he stepped over and hugged his brother.

  “I didn’t expect you for another half an hour,” he said.

  “She drove like a demon,” Uncle Donny said. “You should’ve seen her, weaving through traffic, laying on the horn, cursing like a sailor.”

  “None of that happened,” Alice’s mom said.

  “It really didn’t,” Alice agreed.

  “I know,” Buzz said, and he kissed Alice’s mom right on the lips. “Let’s go inside.”

  They waited for him to unlace his skates and slip on his boots before they walked back up the hill. “There was a moose in town and a bear and a bobcat came and we all went to a meeting,” Alice told him. “Izzy’s mom wanted to have the animals all trapped and killed and Alan Sykes wanted—”

  “Slow down, Alice,” her mom said.

  “You don’t have to tell him everything right away,” Donny added.

  Alice’s dad reached down and slipped his hand into Alice’s. It felt smaller than it used to. “Oh, but you do,” he said. He squinted against the sun. “I need to hear it all.”

  Her father opened the blue door for her, and she went into the building in front of him. It smelled of cinnamon and cleaning products, homey and antiseptic all at once. A woman hurried toward them. “They found me first, I swear, Carlie,” Buzz told her.

  “Welcome,” she said. “I’m Carlie Templeton, Buzz’s case manager. We just need to get you signed in.”

  “I’ll take care of this, Alice,” her mom said.

  Alice’s mom and Uncle Donny went with Carlie, the woman who had been holding her father captive all this time. She and her dad were left alone.

  They walked across a scuffed black-and-white tile floor. He brought her up a set of stairs that led to a narrow hallway lined with doors like a hotel. They walked to the very end of the hallway where her father turned the knob on one of the doors and led her into a small room. A single bed was neatly made, the pillow stiff in the center. There was a small desk with a neat stack of her father’s letter-writing paper, and, by the window, an armchair. “That window looks due north, right to Maine,” he told her. “Right to you.”

  Alice sunk onto the edge of the bed. She put the birdcage down in front of her. Her father hesitated but then came and sat next to her. “So,” he said. “Tell me everything.”

  Alice twisted her fingers together. She licked her lips, ready to tell him what she had done, how she was to blame. He looked down at her with those familiar eyes, and she couldn’t do it. Not yet. She couldn’t tell the truth and risk losing him. So she did her best to tell the story of the web. She told about the crow, the bear, and the moose. She told about Dare. She told about his letters and getting lost in the woods. The words spilled out of her like thread unwinding from a bobbin. Her father was so entranced that neither noticed the tiny house spider making a web in the corner of the room.

  “I always knew you were a special girl,” he said. “From the moment you were born. And the day you found the Story Web for the first time—you certainly were one of the chosen few.”

  Alice shook her head. “I’m not sure it works like that,” she told him. “Magical births and refusing the call and all that hero’s journey stuff. I mean, that makes for good stories, but I like teamwork better.”

  A smile spread across his lips. “You’ve been listening all these years.”

  Dare bzeeped in her cage. “There’s something else you said that is the most important thing. We have to pay attention to the kinds of stories we tell.”

  He nodded, but then his face went soft and sad again. He looked out the window. “There are lots of stories about me. Not everyone knows them all.”

  “But I told people, Dad. I told them so they would understand.”

  He wrapped his arm around her, warm and familiar. “There’s one I never told you. One I’m still embarrassed about.” He coughed. “It’s about Anastasia.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  “When Donny and I were kids, we’d always hear these stories about the witch in the woods. No one would go up there. Well, to me, that was a challenge. I wanted to show everyone how brave I was. So I told anyone who would listen that I was going to confront the witch.”

  Alice’s stomach flip-flopped.

  “I made Donny come with me,” he said. “I, the conquering hero, and my loyal sidekick—”

  “Dad,” Alice interrupted. “Tell it true.”

  He looked at her with his gray eyes, right into her. “Okay,” he said. “I will. We weren’t brave at all. We were terrified. We snuck up there, and we knocked on the door. No one answered. I thought I heard an owl hoot, but that was it.” He shifted on the bed. “So we went around back, and I saw a trellis. Donny dared me to climb it. Back then, I never turned down a dare. So up I went. I was peeking in the windows. It was a pretty amazing house, but nothing witchy.”

  Alice nodded.

  “Next thing I knew, I heard a yell and then a loud bang! It startled me, so I let go. I just—let go.” He opened his hands to show her. This wasn’t the way he normally told stories. His voice was flat, and there was no light in his eyes. “Fell flat on my back. I heard the snap. It was my leg.”

  “Oh no!” Alice said. At the same time, she was thinking about things people had said about her dad. Like Mr. Roberge saying something about the Dingwell brothers falling off a building.

  “She was there in an instant. Anastasia. She brought me to her car, drove us to the hospital. I got my leg set. I was out for the first two weeks of the season.”

  Alice put her hand on her dad’s. “Lewis and I did something like that, too,” she confessed. “We went up with milk to see if it would sour.”

  “I’m sure people brought all sorts of things up there. Said all manner of unkind things to her.” He looked at his hands. “I know they did. After I got hurt, people blamed her. Some said she’d shot at me with a real gun. Then there were others who said she was a real witch, and she cursed me.”

  “People make up terrible stories.”

 
“It’s just as bad letting the stories live,” her dad replied. “I knew the truth. I knew she had shot up a flare, like a warning. She didn’t know we were just some stupid kids. We could’ve been burglars or worse. And I knew she wasn’t a witch. But it served me to have people think she was. So I let it go. I let it grow wings and fly.” He took a deep breath and let it out.

  “How many times did I hear people calling her a witch and I could’ve told them—”

  “You told me now,” Alice said. “That’s a start.”

  Silence washed over them. Alice noticed a small vase on her father’s desk with a single red carnation. She thought of Henrietta’s beautiful flowers, of Anastasia’s birds, all beautiful and fragile. Like her dad.

  “When Melanie came, I brought Anastasia some of your old clothes. I guess I was trying to say sorry. But I never said sorry, so I never felt like I had made amends.”

  Amends. Alice had her own mistakes to amend for. The clock ticked. Someone in the hall coughed.

  Alice scuffed her foot on the rosy pink linoleum floor. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. She had to tell him. He had been honest with her; now she needed to be honest with him.

  “You’ve got nothing to be sorry for, kiddo.”

  “I do,” she insisted.

  He scooted closer to her. “So tell me.”

  He looked at her with his silver eyes not blinking once. She remembered sitting next to him, looking at the stars, learning about myths.

  “I put the batteries back in the smoke detectors,” she whispered. She rubbed her hands against the quilt on the bed as if she were trying to wipe away the guilt.

  He didn’t say anything, and all she heard was the sound of a heater blowing air between them.

  “I put them in and then I burned the cookies. I’m the reason you’re here.”

  His face crumpled, and he started to cry. Hard. Alice didn’t know what to do. She sat ramrod straight. She had never seen her father cry like this, not even in his worst moment. “Oh, Alice!” he cried. “Alice!”