Building Blocks

by Cynthia Voigt

  “I don’t know.”

  “Could you find me and take me inside? As if you just found me?”

  “What’ll you tell them?”

  “Who? Your parents? Can we tell them I go to your school?”

  “They could find out it’s not true.”

  “Do they know everybody in your school?”

  “I don’t know. Brann? Maybe you should go somewhere else.”

  “But I can’t, not tonight. Where else could I go?” But in a dream, you went places without traveling. Brann sighed. He would get no help from this kid. “I’ll take care of it. I’ll think of something.”

  “I guess so,” the boy said reluctantly.

  It has to be a dream, Brann announced to himself. He stepped out confidently, without looking back, as he would in a dream.

  Kevin didn’t wait to see what happened. Brann heard him scuttering back toward the house.

  Brann walked up to the low, dark building and turned the knob on the door. It opened easily. A truck was parked inside, an old-fashioned pickup with slatted sides to its back section and a rounded hood. The one-car garage smelled of gas and oil. The truck had a running board.

  Brann gave himself extra credit for details in this dream and pulled down on the door handle. He climbed up onto the seat. Cloth, not plastic. He leaned against the door and shifted his body until it was comfortable.

  He concentrated, the way he often did when he wanted to fall asleep, on pretending he was the son of someone else, imagining what his life would be like. The sooner he got to sleep the sooner he would wake up in his own house.

  • • •

  When he opened his eyes, faint sunlight filtered into the garage. His neck was stiff, his T-shirt was drenched with sweat, and a boy was staring at him through the curved windshield of an old-fashioned truck.

  Brann couldn’t think. He couldn’t speak. He stared at the boy without seeing him. On television, in science fiction shows or “The Twilight Zone,” they showed people being whirled down dark tunnels—arms and legs spread out—down and away. They didn’t show people just . . . waking up.

  It wasn’t a dream. It had to be a dream but it wasn’t. He knew that now, for sure. He was somewhere out in time (which wasn’t possible), and he had no idea how he’d gotten there. So he had no idea how to get back. (But that was impossible, really impossible. Impossible things didn’t happen.) Dream or not—and it couldn’t be a dream, he had to go to the bathroom. It wasn’t a dream. He didn’t belong anywhere or to anyone, lost out here in time. He was absolutely alone.

  And free, with nobody to make claims or tell him what to do, or suck him into their unhappy quarrels. The only person who knew who he was was this kid with his dark-fringed gray eyes and his broad, scared, fish mouth. And even he didn’t know anything about Brann.

  It was scary, dark and windy scary. It was also exciting. An adventure, some adventure back in time. It was crazy. Brann grinned. The boy smiled tentatively back at him. Brann opened the door to the truck and climbed out.

  “I thought you might have gone,” Kevin said. He wore a pair of denim overalls without a shirt.

  “So did I,” Brann said. His brain felt dizzy. “But I guess I’m still here. Sorry about that. It’s fate I guess.”

  “What does that mean, it’s fate?”

  “Fate? It’s what has to happen and you can’t fight it. What time’s it? Where am I anyway?”

  “Nearly seven. You’re in our garage,” Kevin answered. He looked worried.

  “I know that about the garage,” Brann didn’t bother to keep the sarcasm out of his voice. “What’s the name of the town?”

  “Sewickley,” Kevin said. His eyes were on the floor. Brann knew that he had hurt the boy’s feelings, but he didn’t much care.

  “I’m hungry and I’ve gotta go to the bathroom,” Brann said. When somebody was this easy to boss, you couldn’t do anything but bully him. “What’s the name of a street where your parents wouldn’t know who moved in, or be likely to meet them.”

  “Second Street,” Kevin said.

  “Don’t worry, kid,” Brann clapped him on the shoulder. What was the matter with this kid anyway? “Nobody’ll get you in trouble.” If this kid thought he had problems, he should try on the situation Brann was in. “Lead me inside. If I don’t pee, I’ll bust.”

  They went around the truck, which was piled with copper pipes and coiled wires, and out of the smell of gasoline into the fresh air.

  Kevin’s house stood on a large lot, one among a row of houses that faced an asphalt road. They were all big, square, three-story houses, and they all had big lawns with tall trees growing around them. “What’s your father do?” Brann asked.

  “He’s a builder. He builds houses or kitchens or fixes roofs—whatever people want.”

  “Nice house,” Brann remarked. It was huge.

  “It’s my grandfather’s, we just live here,” Kevin said. “We came here after the Depression started. Before that, we lived on the other side of Pittsburgh, close to the mills. That’s where my father worked before he lost his job.” He was hesitating before the first step up to the back door.

  Brann gave him a little shove. “Let’s go. Buck up—I’ve got a plan. All you have to do is introduce me. After you show me the bathroom.”

  The bathroom was at the end of a narrow hallway, just a toilet and sink. Brann peed and then washed his hands and face. His stomach growled: he was hungry too, good and hungry. He looked at himself in the mirror. He slicked down his hair and met his own eyes. Little lights were dancing in his eyes. He looked like he was enjoying himself, he thought, and then realized that he was. He was eager to find out what the adventure that awaited him was going to be.

  Kevin had waited by the door. He led Brann into the kitchen.

  The big kitchen had a long table covered with a red-and-white checked oilcloth, a six-burner gas stove, and an old-fashioned refrigerator with one of those round cooling units sitting on top of it. The table was set for eight people, forks, knives, cloth napkins, two plates with butter on them, five glasses of milk and three empty cups. A woman stood with her back to them, working at the stove. She ladled batter from a big bowl onto a griddle that covered half the stove. She piled up the finished pancakes on a platter near the griddle. She wore a flowered dress and sneakers. Her body was square, thick. Her hair looked faded, grays and whites and yellows and maybe a shade of carrot color. She whipped up the batter with strong arms.

  “Mom?” Kevin said.

  “Get down the Karo and the honey,” she answered without turning around. Kevin hurried over to a cupboard.

  “I’ve got someone with me,” he said, reaching down two glass jars.

  “What? Speak up why don’t you?”

  “I’ve got someone here.”

  She turned around then and saw Brann. He saw that she was pregnant, and younger than he’d thought. Her body was all swollen out and heavy, her face above it was thing and gray looking, tired looking. She looked older than she was, Brann decided. Her eyes were bright blue, and her eyebrows were pale red.

  “Who are you?”

  “I came to see Kevin,” he answered. She put a hand on her hip and looked at him. “I know Kevin from school and I came by,” Brann said.

  “Have you eaten breakfast?” she asked.

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Set a place for him,” she told Kevin, “then call your sisters and brothers and your grandma.” She looked back at Brann. “My husband likes breakfast at seven sharp and everyone seated and ready. Go wash your hands.”

  “But—” Brann began, but she had turned her back to him, so he went back to the bathroom and washed his hands again. She was not the kind of woman you disobeyed, or talked back to. Kevin was at the table when he got back, and Brann slipped into a chair beside the younger boy. He put his napkin in his lap and waited.

  The chairs filled up with a tumbling of feet and bodies. Brann was introduced in turn to each person: an ugly lit
tle girl in overalls, Suzanne; twins, a boy and a girl, who looked like first graders, Billy and Hannah; the littlest, a boy named Stevie, still a toddler, who climbed up onto the telephone directory on his chair. Last, an old woman, her hair white and wispy, her blue eyes faded and fearful, shuffled in. She wore a cotton bathrobe, tied around her waist.

  Kevin’s mother put two large platters of pancakes on the table, then sat down heavily at one end. As soon as she did that, Kevin hopped up and poured coffee into his mother’s cup, into his grandmother’s, and into the cup by the empty place at the head of the table. The little kids squirmed and nudged one another to get more room. Stevie reached out for his milk glass, but his mother stopped his hand with a sharp glance.

  Nobody touched anything on the table. Brann looked around and wondered what was going on.

  “Quiet now.” Kevin’s mother spoke. All of the children sat straight and silent.

  Brann heard heavy footsteps on the stairs, across floors, and a man entered the kitchen, a big man. He wore an undershirt, the kind with shoulder straps, and cotton workpants. His unfastened belt hung down from the waist of his trousers. He had heavy laced boots on his feet. He stood at the table and said “Morning” into the air above the platters of pancakes. He was answered by a vague murmur of voices; nobody spoke out clearly, as if nobody wanted to be noticed. Certainly Brann felt uncomfortable, and the last thing he wanted was this man to notice him. He looked like the kind of man you hoped wouldn’t see you before you had time to get away.

  Kevin’s father was hairy. He had thick, dark hair on his head and thick hair growing all over his chest, his shoulders and arms, down to the backs of his hands and up over the first knuckles of his fingers. He was thickly built and muscular. His neck was thick. The flesh on his face was thick and leathery, like something formed roughly out of clay and left unfinished. His little gray eyes sat under heavy overhanging eyebrows.

  Without a word, without looking at anyone, he sat down and picked up his fork. He speared a stack of pancakes, buttered them, and poured Karo over them. As soon as he had started eating, everybody else began to grab for pancakes. Kevin cut Stevie’s into bit-sized pieces. Kevin’s mother put two pancakes on his grandmother’s plate, as if she couldn’t serve herself.

  Nobody spoke. The only sounds in the room were chewing and cutting and the slurping sound of milk. Hungry as he was, Brann ate carefully, using his best manners. He kept his eyes down, trying to be inconspicuous.

  When Kevin’s father had finished eating, he got up to pour himself another cup of coffee. He didn’t return to the table, but stood by the stove surveying the people sitting down, like a general looking over his armies. “Who’s this?” he asked, his voice suspicious and unfriendly.

  Somebody was going to have to answer him. Nobody wanted to because he wasn’t going to like the answer.

  Brann didn’t look up.

  “Polly?” Kevin’s father asked.

  “It’s a friend of Kevin’s,” she apologized. “He came by and I asked him to eat with us.”

  There was a silence. Brann couldn’t have raised his eyes if his life had depended on it. He sat there.

  “What’s your name, boy?”

  He didn’t have to look around to see who had to answer that question. “Brann. With two n’s.”

  “Funny name. That your last name?”

  “No, Smith is.” Smith was the safest name he’d been able to think of.

  “I’ve never seen you before.” The words held threats. “Nor heard about you, Brann Smith.”

  Brann heard the distrust, and his fear of being found out was greater than his fear of the man. He hoped his time-travel adventure wasn’t to do battle with him, he hoped the man wasn’t a dragon it was his job to slay. He flicked his eyes up and met the little, assessing gray eyes. He’s only a man, nothing special, Brann said to himself. “We’re new to Sewickley. We just moved in a couple of weeks ago.”

  “Say ‘sir’ when you speak to me.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What’s your father do?” Kevin’s father asked Brann.

  “He’s a draftsman, and he does carpenter work,” Brann said. “Sir.”

  “Who’s he with?”

  “Nobody, not right now,” Brann said, remembering his Social Studies lessons about the Great Depression, when it was likely that a boy’s father would be out of work. “He’s looking for a job.”

  “Making cabinets?”

  “Any kind of work,” Brann said, adding quickly, “sir.”

  “Where’s your family live?”

  “On Second Street.”

  The man nodded, his face showing no expression. He took a big swig of coffee. “If he’s good enough, and handy enough—tell him to come see me. But only if he’s good enough, mind. I’m easy to find. All you have to do is ask for Thomas Connell.”

  Brann nodded. The name sat like a lump halfway down his throat. He thought for a second his breakfast was going to come up.

  “I might have something for him. If he’ll work long and hard, I could use another man. I never missed a payroll, all these years. Tell him that too.”

  “Yes sir.” Brann managed to get the words past the lump.

  “You’ll do the books today,” Mr. Connell told his wife. She nodded, her hand rubbing at a spot on the tablecloth. “I’ll expect lunch around noon, I’ll come back to the office for it. Your brother-in-law’s dropping by this evening, remember, so the children better be fed early. Uncle Andrew’s just coming to talk,” Mr. Connell said to Kevin, “so don’t get your hopes up.” He turned and left the room. Brann heard the screen door slam behind him.

  Doors were opening in his mind. Thomas Connell. Suzanne and Hannah and Stevie—Billy was killed in the Korean War. And Kevin Connell.

  The boy sitting next to him, hunched over his plate, was his father.

  He was older than his father.

  And this was his grandmother, and that baby she was carrying was his Aunt Rebecca.

  Brann could recognize his father now, in the eyes and the wide mouth, and Kevin’s ears were long, too, just like his father’s ears were.

  Brann swallowed hard: it had to be true. And he realized it was something true that he’d been denying to himself since he’d arrived in this place—time.

  He was older than his father, and the father he’d just been talking about to his grandfather was the boy sitting next to him; and his grandfather that he’d talked about to Kevin the night before was this strong man who bullied his family but would end up not knowing who he was, never remembering the name of his son Kevin, who was the only one to come visit him, calling Kevin Stevie or Billy, but never by his own name.

  Brann was in his father’s house, the edge of the chair hard against the backs of his legs, real. He was older than his father, and this was crazier than anything he’d ever imagined.

  Three

  Brann sat at the table while Kevin and his mother cleared the plates, while Kevin’s grandmother made up a tray of coffee and pancakes to carry upstairs to his grandfather, and the children ran out of the room into another room where you could hear them quarreling. Kevin helped his mother wash the dishes, Brann noticed, and he thought to himself that he should get up and help his father and grandmother by drying . . .

  He couldn’t get it straight, that was the trouble. Brann shook his head, to clear it. Of all the impossible, unexpected—but he better be careful. Here, in this house, he was Brann Smith with a family on Second Street, and if he didn’t start thinking like Brann Smith he would get himself in trouble.

  He stood up and offered to help Mrs. Connell with the dishes. She gave him a towel and passed him a glass to dry. He stood and stared at her. He’d never seen his grandmother. She died when his father was twelve—in two years this woman would die, and that would be 1939, the year Hitler invaded Poland.

  “You going to dry or stare?” she demanded.

  Brann had to forget about the past that was still the future. “Dry, ma�
�am, Mrs. Connell.”

  Her hands were quick in the sink, and between them he and Kevin could barely keep up with her.

  “You’ll take Suzanne and the rest down to play by the river this morning,” Mrs. Connell said to Kevin. “Be back by half past eleven, no later. I’ll have lunch waiting.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Kevin said. He handled the plates carefully, as if he expected himself to drop them. He dried slowly, at half Brann’s speed.

  “Are you planning to spend the day?” she asked Brann. He said he was if it was all right with her. “Kevin’s got responsibilities this morning,” she said. “I’m doing the books this afternoon, and checking invoices. Stevie comes with me and the other three go next door, but if anything happens it’s all up to Kevin here, when I’m gone. He’s the eldest.”

  “That’s OK,” Brann said.

  She turned to Kevin. “Look in on your grandmother before you go out, to see if they need anything. It’s all need and no help, from both of them these days.”

  “I’ll take care of it, Mom.”

  “You’re going to have to.”

  “When is your baby due?” Brann asked. His Aunt Rebecca, a tiny baby, not even born yet.

  “Six weeks, in early August,” she said. “It can’t be soon enough for me. I need the hospital rest, I’ll tell you. From the heat, and the kicking all night long—if this one isn’t a boy I’ll eat this dishrag.”

  She swabbed out the sink, scoured it with cleanser, told them to put the dry dishes away, and lumbered out to the living room where the little children were.

  “What if it’s a girl?” Brann asked Kevin. He tried to keep himself from staring at the boy. His father.

  “It won’t be. My mom always knows.”

  • • •

  To get to the river, they had to walk down the street, across a boulevard, down two more blocks and then across railroad tracks. Kevin held Stevie by the hand and the twins ran ahead, waiting by the tracks. They had to stand there while a long freight train went by. Suzanne pitched pieces of cinder at the passing cars. Kevin told her to stop, but not as if he expected her to listen to him. She didn’t. What she needed, Brann thought, was a rap on the gums.