The Humming Room

by Ellen Potter

  Violet nodded, her eyes still on Jack.

  “You look real enough,” she mused.

  “You can squeeze me if you want,” he said.

  “Well then, I think I will.” And she gave him a hug. When she let him go, she said, “Mind you, that was for my mother’s sake. She thinks you’re nothing but a boy who needs a home, and she’d plunk me on the head if I didn’t say, Patty McPhail, Donkey Island, first house on the left on Quarry Street. Done.”

  With that, she walked up the garden’s incline to fetch Phillip. But as she bent to wake him, she paused, her head tipped to one side as she stared at the boulder.

  “How pretty,” she said.

  “What is?” Roo asked, hurrying over with Jack behind her.

  “That little red flower,” Violet said. “I didn’t know flowers could grow on rocks like that.”

  Indeed, growing out of a narrow crack in the boulder, by Phillip’s foot, was a spiky red flower where, Roo was quite sure, there hadn’t been one before.

  Chapter 18

  Every morning, Roo and Phillip did schoolwork in Phillip’s room, with Violet watching over. In her own way, she was as stern a teacher as Mrs. Wixton; but when the sound of Ms. Valentine’s boat motor started up to make its mail run to Choke Cherry, Violet set them free. They hurried into the passageway and slid down the chute to the garden, though Violet said it was bad luck for live children to go down it.

  The garden was changing slowly. One morning Roo noticed a patch of pale green near one of the walls of the atrium. To her delight she found several tiny new shoots, filament thin, pushing out of the earth.

  “Look!” She called Jack and Phillip over to show them.

  As they kneeled by the young shoots, marveling, Roo stretched herself out against the ground and put her ear to the earth.

  “What are you doing?” Phillip asked.

  “Shhh,” she told him.

  The boys waited in silence as Roo listened.

  “I can hear it,” she said. “It’s louder now.”

  “What is?” asked Phillip.

  “The earth.”

  “You can hear the earth?” Jack asked.

  “Of course. Can’t you?”

  Jack and Phillip shook their heads.

  “That’s funny,” Roo said. “I thought everyone could.”

  “What does it sound like?” Phillip asked.

  No one had ever asked her that before. She listened again. It was like a long fluttering sigh made between closed lips. It rose and fell in pitch, and there seemed to be a song woven through it that never repeated itself. Roo took a breath and tested out a sound. She stopped and shook her head.

  “It’s not exactly right,” she said.

  “Do that again,” Phillip told her.

  Roo gave it another try. She struggled to mimic the lilting rhythm, the way it snaked under and over itself.

  When she stopped, Phillip was staring at her, his dark eyes so wide and bewildered that Roo sat up, alarmed.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  “That was how it sounded,” he said. “Exactly how it sounded.”

  “What?”

  “My mother’s humming.”

  Day by day, the garden’s ashy haze became interspersed with patches of fresh green. The first plants to bloom were the fragile shoots by the wall—with the most delicate yet complicated flowers Roo had ever seen. They had a slender bell-shaped center, ringed yellow on the inside, and lavender petals with gently fluted edges, like the sleeves of a small girl’s nightgown.

  Every day they found new things pushing out of the soil. It felt as if each new flower had convinced yet another one to bloom. Tall spikes of red flowers that looked like Aladdin’s slippers attached to each other at the heel. Slender red-and-yellow flowers that flared out like torches and great papery white flowers with long necks that bent as elegantly as Sir’s; and all around the boulder, forming a crooked wreath, spiked flowers of purple, blue, and yellow grew within the cracks. Bromeliads, Phillip called them. He knew what all the flowers were called, and as they bloomed he greeted them by name, like old friends—blue passion flower, goat’s milk, parrot’s tongue.

  Other living things began to find their way into the garden too. Bees hovered over the flowers and ladybugs examined new leaves. Once they found a green snake—exactly like Roo’s glass one—sunning itself on a rock.

  “Yesterday, after you left, I noticed a little shoot growing up by the stump of one of the banana trees,” Roo said one morning, as they were waiting for Jack to arrive. “Jack thinks it might be a new tree beginning to grow.”

  “Maybe the whole garden will be full of live trees one day, years and years from now,” Phillip said.

  Roo had never heard her cousin talk about the future before. She looked at him, noticing that he had lost that withered, pinched look. There was a new quickness in his eyes and the purple smudges beneath them had faded.

  “It might,” Roo said.

  “How does it sound now?” Phillip asked.

  “What?”

  “The earth.”

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  She got down on her belly and pressed her ear to the ground. She had never listened to a garden in full bloom before. There were layers of sound threading out in all directions.

  “The whole garden is humming!” Roo cried. “The earth is humming to the seeds and the seeds are humming to the roots and the roots are humming to the leaves and each part is telling another part to stay alive.”

  One afternoon, after they had put it in a morning’s work on the garden and Phillip was back in his room, Jack and Roo took the canoe out to see the terns’ shoal. The snowy terns shrieked in protest as Roo and Jack approached the shoal, and others flew into the air and circled above them. Some of the nests had been plundered, with bits of shell littering the dried grass, but a few had clutches of beautiful brown-speckled eggs lying in the patchy nests.

  “Who knows? Maybe some of them might make it,” Jack said.

  They checked the shoal for the mink, and when they were satisfied that she was not there, they hopped back into the canoe and headed for Cough Rock.

  The day had been warm and clear, with thin-skinned clouds raking across the sky. But as they entered the seaway, the air suddenly cooled.

  Jack tipped his head back and looked up at the sky.

  “Storm’s coming,” he said.

  Not a moment later a dark purple cloud swept in above them, low in the sky, and as it unfurled the rain began to fall. It was a hard, furious rain. It whipped the river into confusion. Jack began to paddle hard, though Roo could not imagine how he could see where he was going. A tricky vapor hovered just over the river’s surface, and they sailed blindly into it. Each time the canoe pitched up, Roo sucked in her breath and held it until they crashed down again. She felt a rush of panic, certain that even if the frenzied water didn’t flip the canoe, they would certainly ram it into an island or shoal. The canoe’s bottom was filling—the tops of Roo’s sneakers were underwater. Squinting to keep the driving rain out of her eyes, she looked at Jack. His expression was grim but focused on a shadowy mass a few yards in front of them. It might have been land but it was impossible to be sure. Still, Jack tried to paddle toward it, fighting the currents. Each time the canoe was thrust aside by a wave, Jack maneuvered it back into line with the shadow, closer and closer until Roo was certain that it was an island. A wave sideswiped them and the canoe tilted so sharply that Roo let out a sharp yelp and a second later she felt the canoe’s bottom rubbing against land. Quickly Jack leapt out and held the canoe while Roo scrambled out after him, her legs shaking so badly that she stumbled.

  “You all right?” Jack called to her over the sound of the thrashing rain.

  Roo nodded.

  “Do you know where we are?” she asked as they carried the canoe onto the island and set it down on the bank.

  “I have an idea. I’ll tell you for sure in a minute,” he said.
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br />   They headed into a thicket of woods that flanked the shore and rose high above the river on a sharp incline. The canopy of leaves helped shield them from the rain and muffled its roar. Bit by bit, Roo could feel her muscles unravel as they hiked up the hill, the smell of pine growing sharper as they went. Quite suddenly the trees gave way and they stepped out into a grassy clearing, in the center of which was a large red boat. It was such an unexpected sight—a boat roosting on top of a hill in the middle of the woods—that Roo stood in the rain, just staring at it.

  “Come on!” Jack said, and they both ran toward the boat’s set of makeshift stairs onto its deck and through a metal door that led inside.

  “What is this place?” Roo asked, looking around at the paneled walls painted bright yellow, the rows of slatted wood benches, and the wide windows with the arched tops. A hammock hung from the ceiling in the front of the ship, just behind the captain’s wheel.

  “It’s an old tour boat,” Jack said, collapsing into one of the bench seats. “No one’s lived in it since forever.”

  “Do you stay here?” she asked, eyeing the hammock as she sat down on the bench in front of his.

  “Sometimes. I’m careful though. Other people know about it too.” He lay down on one of the benches, his head below the window, and put his hands behind his head. “Want to know my favorite thing about this place?”

  “Okay.”

  “Lie down.”

  She lay down on her seat and turned her head to look at Jack. Between the slats she could see the top of his flaxen head, then his eyes, then his mouth with its scrolled upper lip.

  “Now what?” she asked.

  “Now look out the window,” he said.

  She twisted her head back a little to see out the arched window. The view was of the smoke-colored sky and, around the edges, the tops of the trees rocking in the wind. The dark clouds slowly slid past, making Roo feel like the boat was sailing in the opposite direction. Not sailing, really, but flying in the sky, just above the treetops.

  Roo laughed.

  “You see it?” he said, one delighted gray eye staring at her through the slat.

  “Yes!” But she stopped laughing suddenly and sat up. “Pendragon.”

  “What’s Pendragon?” Jack sat up too.

  “A flying boat. It’s a story my father told me. The boat was red and yellow and it flew above the treetops….” She stared at Jack.

  “Do you think he was here?” he asked.

  Roo imagined her father winding through the river in his skiff, restless, fearless. His pale eyes always searching for something new. He would have found this place somehow. In his own way he was as wild as Jack.

  “I’m sure he was.”

  They both lay back down. Jack slipped his hand between a slat and held it out for her. She slid her hand out and took his, then turned back to the sky. The darkness was lifting. Bands of distilled sunlight were touching down on the wet pine needles, making them gleam silver.

  “The rain’s stopping,” Roo said, turning back to Jack. He had been watching her, and now, caught, he blinked and his cheeks turned a deeper red. He looked upward at the thinning clouds.

  “Not yet,” he said. But it was unclear if he was talking to Roo or to the sky.

  The wind shifted and a purple-gray cloud, thick and mottled, moved across the sky. The light inside the boat dimmed, and Roo and Jack watched as Pendragon flew back into the storm, its hull just clearing the tops of the trees.

  Chapter 19

  Late in the afternoon, the clouds began to thin, finally vanishing altogether. In their place was a placid blue sky. Heavy with rainwater, the river was dark and thick, and it moved so slowly that the little canoe had a quiet trip back. But as they approached Cough Rock, Roo lifted her chin and stared at the island with a quizzical look on her face.

  The great house seemed to stand out awkwardly against the sky, and when the canoe angled around the island toward the cove she noticed that the Whaler was missing.

  Something’s happened, she thought.

  Jack stopped paddling and tipped his head to the side, watching her carefully.

  “Are you okay?” he asked.

  At the sound of his voice, the dark feeling left. She smiled at him and nodded. But once she was inside the house, the apprehensive mood returned. She paused in the lobby, listening. The house was quiet, but that was not unusual. She sniffed the air, the way she used to when she found herself in uncertain situations. She smelled the scent of wood polish and damp air and beneath that something else too—a frenzied whipped-up residue.

  She rushed across the lobby to the east wing and hurried up the stairs, then down the hall to Phillip’s room, where she burst through the open door. The room was in chaos. The floor was strewn with books and games that appeared to have been flung from all the shelves, and in the center of it all was Violet kneeling on the ground. Her back was to Roo, though she turned at the sound of Roo’s entrance. Roo thought that her eyes looked odd—pink and swollen. But Violet quickly looked away again and resumed picking up the pieces of a chess game. Roo watched in confusion as Violet carefully nestled each piece in the velvet-lined wooden box, twisting them so they faced outward.

  “Where’s Phillip?” Roo asked, her voice rigid.

  Violet said nothing at first. Then, “I swear that man washes in with the storms.”

  “Who?” Roo asked. “Where’s Phillip?”

  “He’s gone,” she said. She put the last chess piece in the box, then shut the lid and snapped the latch. “Dr. Oulette’s taken him.”

  Violet turned now and looked at Roo. Her eyes were raw-lidded and bloodshot and she was clearly struggling to keep from crying again.

  “Took him? Where?”

  “To his clinic. In Rochester.”

  “And Ms. Valentine let him?” Roo cried, appalled.

  “She had no choice, Roo.”

  “But Phillip was getting better,” Roo protested.

  “That’s what Ms. Valentine told Mr. Fanshaw on the phone—even she saw it.”

  “Then why would he have sent Phillip away?” Roo asked.

  “It was Dr. Oulette’s doing. He’s been pressuring Mr. Fanshaw to send Phillip to his clinic for months now. The biting incident nearly sealed it, but your uncle kept putting off the decision. Then Dr. Oulette showed up this afternoon. He checks in on Phillip every few weeks. I don’t know what was said, but Phillip went into a rage. It was awful—as you can see.” She waved her arm around the room. “So the doctor called Mr. Fanshaw, and Mr. Fanshaw told us to pack Phillip’s bags, that he’d made his decision. He wouldn’t budge on it, no matter what Ms. Valentine said. I even took the phone myself, snatched it right out of Ms. Valentine’s hand, and I told him Phillip’s change was nothing short of a miracle. He said miracles were nothing short of hogwash. And that was that. Well, you know how willful Phillip is, and where do you think he gets it from?”

  “But if my uncle just came back, if he just saw Phillip—”

  Violet shook her head. “He told Ms. Valentine that he won’t be back in the States for another few months at least.”

  “But Phillip will be a wreck by then! He’ll start wasting away just like before, worse than before because he’ll be away from the garden!” Roo felt her throat clench. “I didn’t even get to say good-bye to him.”

  “It’s better that way, Roo. Really. It would have been worse for him if you were there, and it would have broken your heart. I nearly scooped him up and ran away with him myself, I felt so bad for him. My only consolation was that he scratched some lovely stripes into the doctor’s face.” Violet’s brown eyes narrowed. “I hope they leave a scar.”

  The next morning the overcast sky turned the garden’s ceiling panes into dusky gray diamonds. Jack would not come for another hour. He would be crushed too when he heard the news.

  Roo watched as the black squirrel climbed up the garden’s tallest tree, running along the ropy liana that coiled around it. He stopped, fli
pped himself around and stared down at her. It was just the same way he had looked on those stairs up to the trapdoor the first time she found the garden.

  “I can’t follow you up there,” Roo said.

  The squirrel turned and continued up the tree, higher and higher until he reached the very top. The uppermost tip of the liana hung off the highest limb. It was slender and tapered, bent like the tongue in the mask that hung in the east wing’s lobby. It was right then that Roo remembered what Phillip’s mother had told him about the liana. That they are the tongues of jungle spirits. And that if you want to summon someone, you hold the tip of a liana on a treetop and called the person’s name three times and they have to come.

  Roo walked up to the tree and looked at it speculatively. She was not afraid of heights, but she had never scaled a tree before; she had spent so much time finding places that were small and hidden, it never occurred to her to try it. This was a straight-up climb with few branches along the way, but the liana was so thick it formed a sort of rough ladder.

  She put her hand on one of the coils and tested it. It was dry and hard, rough against her skin. She pulled herself up and wedged her foot on the edge of the vine. It held her weight easily, so she took another step upward. Bit by bit she climbed as the black squirrel watched her from above. When she was up high enough she found that she was able to see the river through the glass-dome roof, stretching out in all directions. It made her dizzy so she looked up again and focused on the tip of the liana.

  The tree’s trunk began to narrow, the branches growing precariously thin as she approached the top. The squirrel was perched on the branch just to her left, his eyes on her.

  Almost there, almost there, she thought.

  She grabbed the slender branch above her head. The liana coiled around it like a snake, narrowing. The tongue-like tip quivered as she pulled herself up. Leaning her body across the branch, barely breathing, she stretched farther and farther until her fingers touched the end of the liana. She closed her hand around it and shut her eyes.