The Great Upending

by Beth Kephart

  Oh.

  Hawk.

  I dig my elbow into his ribs. Dig harder. He won’t turn to look at me. He looks straight ahead, like he can’t feel me, like I’m not sitting right beside him, asking with the hard point of my long elbow, Did you really? Isaiah keeps talking about the start of Treasure Island, the bold N. C. Wyeth pictures, the captions that make him want to read fast, and now he wants to know where are we heading to, our final destination, and I don’t answer that, I just say, we’re headed to the train depot in Lionsberg. There’s an 8:05 express.

  “Express to where?” Isaiah asks, his face full of sudden interest.

  “Express to Philadelphia,” I say. Then, don’t know why, it isn’t necessary, it wasn’t part of my plan to announce it: “Then from Philadelphia to New York by way of bus.”

  “New York?”

  “New York City.”

  Isaiah whistles, a long, low, you-telling-the-truth-on-me-now? sound. Spots’s ears pull back. Isaiah hitches us up to a trot, and the world rolls past. The red cows at Charlotte and Jane’s. Grencik sheep, all nose to nose. The silver silos and the red barns and the hex signs and the rust. Hawk sold his Scribners, without telling me. His whole entire Scribners. Sold. And I borrowed money from Mom’s pie tin, not telling Hawk, even though it is her extra money, her save-it-until-Christmas stash.

  Please don’t worry, I wrote in the note that I left behind on my bed. We’ll be back. Important business to do, and we’re doing it.

  Trust us, I said.

  Wondering if they suspect. If they’ve seen us spying, lying, breaking the rules, but desperate times call for desperate measures, isn’t there some quote like that? Something Dad said? Something framed? And wouldn’t they do it too, if they knew what we knew, if they’d seen Ilke for themselves, if they’d read the special delivery, if they’d paid close attention, like we’ve paid attention, to The Mister walking our roads, hiding in our shadows?

  Wouldn’t they?

  Shouldn’t we have told them?

  We should have told them, but what had Mom said? Leave The Mister alone.

  And we had promised.

  I don’t know how they’ll ever fix my heart or who will pay for the David or what is going to happen now, because there’ll be no fix, no David. I don’t know when the banks will forgive Dad’s loans or when insurance will forgive the fire or when my body will stop stretching. I don’t know when Mom will get to bake her pies on the days she wants to bake her pies, and not on a by-demand schedule. I don’t know when the cistern water will rise so high that Dad will finally stop checking.

  I don’t know most anything, but today, right now, I know this: sometimes when it seems that you’re losing it all, you have to quit thinking about how you’re losing.

  Hurry, Spots, I think. Hurry, Isaiah, who owns the Scribner Classics now. I’m sorry, Hawk. I’m sorry.

  It’s a ten-mile ride to the depot. It’s like sitting inside a hiccup in the carriage.

  When we reach the light at the top of the long hill, we stop. When the light turns green we start again, down the hill now, around another curve, toward the stub of Main Street. We pass the small brick houses, the tall white church, and now—I lean forward, then quickly back—there’s Mrs. Kalin out in her library garden, deadheading flowers, straightening the stakes that hold up the dahlias. She stands up straight just as we go past. She fits one hand above her eyes and stares into the rising sun and thinks that maybe she sees me. She tries to wave us down, but we keep going. She turns now, she hurries from the garden.

  “I think she saw us,” I say to Hawk.

  “Maybe,” he says. “Maybe not.”

  “But what if—”

  “Shhhh,” he says. “The plan is already in motion. Your plan,” he says, and maybe it’s true, what Dad sometimes says. You just keep living forward, for as long as you possibly can.

  The Stories Are All Right Here

  It smells like old newspapers at the train depot. There are crows by the tracks pecking for crumbs, a few pennies smashed on the rails, put there for luck, I guess, and left there.

  I pick one up and slip it into the pouch with the map and Ilke’s card, the special delivery and the pictures.

  Two men in gray look-alike suits and a woman in dark jeans wait on the cracked platform not far from Hawk and me, staring down the tracks, wishing on the train, but they must have come from a few towns over because I don’t know them, and they don’t know me, and so far, our plan is working.

  Luck.

  So far Amber Green has sold us the tickets easy, no questions asked, just took our cash and handed us what we told her we needed and went straight back to watching her little TV, and now the train is actually coming. The shake of it starting in my feet and bringing a breeze with it, the winds of Chicago, which is where this train started its chug. Chicago to Lionsberg to Harrisburg to Philadelphia.

  The 8:05 express.

  All aboard.

  We’re in.

  Plenty of seats. Plenty of people, too, who are fast asleep, their faces pressed against the scratched train glass, or their heads thrown back against the cushions, their crossword puzzles stuffed inside the train’s seat pockets. Hawk and I find our place and slide in. I put the leather pouch between us. I press my hand against my heart, hold its pieces in place, its big swell of too muchness, and we’re doing this, we’re on the way. The conductor comes by for our tickets.

  “Hawk,” I say, when the conductor goes past, when it’s just Hawk listening, when we’re safely pulled away and nobody’s come to stop us. “You sold your Scribners.”

  Hawk lifts one hand. Points to his head. “The stories are all right here,” he says.

  And what am I supposed to do but sit here and believe him.

  The train rolls on. The world pulls past. The farms and the barns and the cows and the roads and the river out there, the churches and the houses and the cars driving parallel to the tracks, then just the land again, a rocky hill, another stretch of the river. Hawk puts his Spyglass up and reports on it, quiet, so the sleepers won’t hear. I close my eyes. I listen. I see it the way Hawk calls it, the way I remember it from all the times in the pickup truck, heading from home to Philadelphia, to the elevators like refrigerators, to the doctors and their machines, their ruining numbers.

  They call it an aortic rupture. They say that when it happens, you may feel yourself ripping in half. You feel it and you know that there isn’t much time left, that even if you lived next door to the best hospital ever, the smartest surgeons on the planet, the greatest and most mighty machines, even if your health insurance was good enough, even if the banks said a big easy yes to everything you’d need, even if the banks believed you—the clock is ticking, and besides, there’s a hardly-there percent of Marfan people who get out of that situation alive. There’s too much blood now, in the wrong places. There’s too much of everything wrong with you, and you should have fixed this when you could, before you broke.

  Rich people would fix the bulge and they’d live on.

  Rich people with good insurance, with money to spend on the extra things that that insurance will not pay for. Rich people, whose machines, and lives, do not go bust.

  Nothing love can do to save you once the bulge gives out.

  I know that.

  I think about that.

  I won’t think about that anymore.

  Not today.

  Not tomorrow.

  I’m done with worrying. For now.

  We pull into Harrisburg and stop. More people get in, more men in mostly gray suits, women with phones up to their heads, briefcases hanging from straps, tickets in hands, more polystyrene tea, and still the people from Chicago sleep, the train smells like forest berries and sleep, the train pulls away from Harrisburg, keeps going.

  Hawk keeps a lookout on.

  I listen to him and his whisper reports.

  I see it like he tells it.

  I Could Be Anyone

  Eleven fifteen. The g
lass faces of Philadelphia’s towers are catching all the sky and sun. I watch over Hawk’s shoulders and I see it—the diamond cuts of building tops, the old redbrick and the fresh white—until the bright outside goes dark as the train pulls into a tunnel. We stop. This is 30th Street Station, final stop. Everybody’s standing and reaching and straightening, dumping their trash. Hawk and I wait, Hawk’s Spyglass hanging loose around his neck and the soft pouch strapped to my shoulder.

  Behind us, the kid who got on at Harrisburg, the only kid in this car, starts shouting in what he must think is a whisper. “Look,” he’s saying. “Look.” He sees a giant, he says, a real live giant, right here on this train, does his mom see it? Look. He says it again, and his voice dials up. “Mom,” he says. “Look. Do you see it?”

  It.

  I don’t turn around, but I stare. I stare at that kid through the back of my head.

  “The real BFG!” the kid calls out. “The actual one!” His mother shhhhs, but it’s done: my face turns red, my heart bangs hard, I will not turn around. Hawk leans close and says, “Just a kid, Sara. Just a kid.” I straighten the strap on my shoulder, breathe in and exhale, say nothing, not even to Hawk, and we stand there, caught in the crowd of passengers who have started turning their heads, looking for the giant that I am.

  My hair’s rainwater clean. I’ve got my best dress on, blue from the neck to the waist and green from the waist to the knees. I’m wearing my own best pair of flip-flops. Last night, when I couldn’t sleep, after we’d grabbed the map, I stole downstairs again, Hawk’s flashlight in my fist, and opened the door to the pantry. I shined the light on the shelf where Mom keeps what she calls her accessories, including the basket of paint for her toes. She calls the shelf Mom’s Shelf, and we know, because she always says, that it is hers and only hers, don’t touch, but I touched. I snagged a bottle of blue polish and a bottle of green and I followed the flashlight light back up the stairs and sat on the edge of my bed, painting my toenails, Mom-style. Maybe my arms are blushing now, my legs, my feet, but my toenails are not, and now the train doors open, and the passengers file forward, and we’re out.

  Out with the crowd, up the escalator into a station room so big and tall I could stand on my own shoulders a dozen times and still not touch the ceiling. We stand there, Hawk and me, looking in one direction, then in the other, trying to remember which set of far doors to the east or west leads to the buses that we always see on our way to the hospital of Dr. G.

  The station signs read 29th Street on one side and 30th Street on the other. We decide on 30th Street, past the information booth and its sign, past the police dogs on their leashes, through the doors, and into the sun. The buses are here. There’s a vendor selling hot dogs with steaming sauerkraut.

  “Breakfast,” Hawk says.

  We buy ourselves some.

  We join the New York City line, eating our hot dogs out of their paper trays, sharing a Coke to wash it all down.

  Nobody’s worried about us two kids out where we are, because we don’t look like two kids, exactly. I pass for sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, maybe. I’m so tall I’m Hawk’s much older sister, or maybe his young aunt, or maybe a family friend—doesn’t matter. Out here, where people judge you for how you look, I am plenty old enough.

  They open the luggage doors of the New York City bus and the passengers toss their suitcases in. They tell us boarding will start in just a few, and we’re watching the crowd—the tattoos on the muscles of a girl near us, the cigarette smoke of a really old man, a toddler bouncing on a father’s shoulders, a woman in a head scarf who stands perfectly still, a book cracked open in her hand. Hawk asks if I remember that part in Treasure Island.

  “Which part?”

  “ ‘We were met and saluted, as we stepped aboard,’ ” Hawk recites.

  “All aboard,” the bus guy says.

  They’re reading the tickets, they’re nodding people in. They’re helping the lady with the cane, and now the little kid, and the woman with the tattoos takes a pink unicorn out of her bag and makes it talk until the kid stops howling.

  We’re next.

  We find some seats, and there’s no stopping us, there’s no turning back.

  Signs Ahead for Lincoln Tunnel

  After we ramp up to the highway, it’s all the same. Bunch of lanes going in our direction and bunch of lanes going in the other, and the cars and the cars and the trucks and the signs that Hawk and I start counting: Exit 7, Exit 7A, Exit 8, Exit 8A, all the way up the New Jersey Turnpike, which I have never seen, Hawk either.

  The sky is blue, but most of the land’s not green.

  Hawk watches it go by, telling me some of what he sees, growing quieter and more quiet. I move the bag from my shoulder to my lap and snap it open. I arrange the loose parts of The Mister’s Roundabouts: Book Three. The jewel eyes of a goat. The summer snow inside a barn. Two blue eggs on a torn truck seat. A tall shadow falling beneath the green of trees.

  My shadow.

  Like he’s built each picture out of drops of rain.

  Like I could ever understand, but I can’t. Like I could ever know how he came to us and how Ilke found him. I slip the special delivery out of the pouch and read it again, stopping in between the words to study The Mister’s drawings. Our lives through his eyes through his colors.

  “What are you doing?” Hawk asks, his eyes finding my eyes through the reflection of the bus glass.

  “Practicing,” I say, “for Ilke.”

  He picks the drawings up and shuffles through one by one. He reads the special delivery.

  “So she knows we’re coming,” Hawk says.

  “Not really exactly,” I say.

  Hawk’s brow wrinkles up. “I thought you said—”

  “What I did was I asked the receptionist if Ilke would be in,” I say.

  “You’re kidding, right? That’s all you asked? I thought—” His cheeks have gone pink. His nose freckles scrunch.

  “If Ilke is in, she’ll have to see us, right? Can’t not see us, if we’ve come this far. And besides, she promised you a reward. Who’s to say that you’re not there for the collecting?”

  “All this,” Hawk says, still not believing. “All this and we don’t have an appointment? An actual appointment?” He slams his head back against the seat.

  He snorts like Old Moe.

  Rubs one eye with a fist.

  Doesn’t say anything else, turns to the window. I watch his face in the glass, the way he’s watching the road, the way he’s looking for something, always looking, and suddenly I remember the first time Hawk ever heard the word Marfan, and what he did about it.

  Mom served out extra-wide slices of pie that night. She was trying to explain, to both of us, the word and what it meant. “ ‘Marfan syndrome is caused by a defect (or mutation) in the gene that tells the body how to make fibrillin-1,’ ” she was reading, from a brochure the doctor had given her. “ ‘This mutation results in an increase in a protein called transforming growth factor beta, or TGF-B. The increase in TGF-B causes problems in connective tissues throughout the body, which in turn create the features and medical problems associated with Marfan syndrome and some related disorders.’ ”

  Mom looked up at us, to see if we were following. Dad was beside her, holding her hand. I could tell that she was trying hard, but even she couldn’t understand the words that she had read off the brochure. That maybe Mom would never understand. That maybe it would always sound wrong and would never make sense, no matter how many times she read it.

  “So basically,” Hawk said, because nobody else was talking by then, because the pie was sitting there leaking its sweet strawberry juice, because no one was eating, not even Figgis, who had jumped onto the table. “Basically what you’re saying is that Sara’s sort-of-but-not-really one of a kind.”

  “Yeah,” Mom said, putting the brochure down, looking at Hawk across the table, her eyes like his eyes, astronomical and liquid. “That’s exactly what I’m sa
ying.”

  We’re at Exit 14.

  Signs ahead for Lincoln Tunnel.

  They Weren’t Supposed to Know, They Know

  New York City is not Philadelphia is not the farm. It’s crowded and tight and shadowy, even now, two thirty in the afternoon. Hawk draws his fingers down the streets on the map. Calls out the instructions so I’ll remember. Just past this. Just past that. Cross the street and walk and cross and at one point we will see it: The Flatiron Building, which looks like a slice of pie as tall as twenty-two stories.

  There’s no stopping because the crowds push on, because once we get onto one street, we’re jostled toward another by people and briefcases and leashed dogs. When the lights turn red we stop to catch our breath, but when there’s a gap in the buses and the taxis and the cars, the bikes, we’re running.

  Hawk always arriving to the opposite curb first.

  Hawk waiting for me while the crowd rushes.

  The sun falls in patches. The cars and the taxis honk like geese. We’re onto Broadway now, which cuts an angle. We’re still walking, and past the car lots and the shops and the towers, the buildings that look like all walls and no doors, and the restaurants that open out onto the walks. The birds are chubby here, white and gray. They peck around, sit on the signs, dig into the trash. Hawk stops to study the map again. Looks up to read street signs. Five blocks, he says, and we keep going, and there’s so much pressure, and this better work.

  Has to work.

  We get a red light and we stop, all the force of the crowd against us. My hands on my pouch, Hawk’s Spyglass at his neck, Hawk looking around, and now he grabs my hand and shouts.

  “It’s them!” he says. “They’re here! Sara!”

  I don’t know what he’s talking about. I can’t see what he sees. The crowd is pressing and Hawk has stopped and now he yanks my arm and we’re running again, and I’m not supposed to run, so we stop running. We just walk. We walk. We weave. Hawk ahead, me yelling, “Who?”