“What is it?” Hillary said. She felt that she was standing in a spotlight. “Do you want me to do something?”
Sara-Kate looked at her. “My mother has been worse lately and she likes to have me stay near her,” she said. “Do you have any money?”
“I could get some,” Hillary said.
Sara-Kate stared at her.
“Without telling anyone,” Hillary added quickly.
“We are out of things,” Sara-Kate told her. “My mother likes coffee and milk. And sugar. We need bread and some kind of fruit. She likes fruit.”
A moment of silence rose between them. Hillary glanced up at the window over their heads, but she couldn’t see anything. She looked back at Sara-Kate.
“What else?” she asked the small, tense figure before her.
“Whatever.” Sara-Kate shrugged. “Anything. It doesn’t matter.”
“Should I go to the store?” Hillary asked.
“Yes.”
“Should I go right now?”
“Yes,” Sara-Kate said. “If you can get some money.”
Without another word, Hillary turned and began to go home. She walked steadily, in a dignified way, until she reached the hedge. Once through it, though, out of sight of Sara-Kate, she started to run.
Eleven
Not even in her wildest dreams would Hillary have done the things she now did if Sara-Kate had not asked her. Never would she have thought of doing them or, after planning, have carried them out with such a cold, clear mind.
In the next hour she would lie to her mother, she would steal twice, she would walk alone down forbidden streets, and transact business in a grocery store with the composure of an adult.
“It was no trouble at all,” she would tell Sara-Kate afterwards, handing over the bag of groceries in the Connollys’ kitchen. It was almost the truth. Hillary had never been so proud to be trusted with a mission in her life.
“What did you tell your mother?”
“I didn’t tell her anything. She was upstairs. I took a ten-dollar bill from her wallet on the counter. Then I called up to her and said you’d invited me for lunch.”
Sara-Kate grinned. “That must have surprised her.”
“It did.”
She’d run out the kitchen door before her mother could protest. She’d gone through the hedge into Sara-Kate’s yard, then around the house to the street in front. Most sidewalks weren’t shoveled yet so she’d walked on the slushy side of the road. She knew the way from her trips with Sara-Kate and she wasn’t afraid, not even when a car honked at her for being too far out from the curb.
In fact, she’d felt the opposite of fear: a slow-rising excitement. The day was so bright, the snow was so deep. There was a lawlessness in the air, a sense of regular rules not applying, of their being cancelled, like school. Cars nosed along the streets in a bumbling way, avoiding drifts and stranded vehicles. Children waded like penguins through gleaming white yards, or built snow forts, or sucked on porch icicles. Office workers who should have been at their desks hours ago shoveled their driveways lazily and talked to their neighbors. It was all so breathtaking, so free and easy, that Hillary wanted to kick up her heels and turn cartwheels in the street. But she kept herself on course, kept her face blank. She knew that she was more lawless than anything in that day and must not draw attention to herself.
“That will be $13.05 please.”
“$13.05!” Hillary looked into the unsmiling face of the man behind the cash register. “But I only have ten dollars.”
“Then you’ll have to put something back.”
“But, I can’t! I promised I’d ...”
The man sighed, rolled his eyes, and leaned toward her over the counter.
“I guess it’ll have to be the bologna,” Hillary said quickly.
She hated to give it up, though. The bologna was Hillary’s idea of something extra that Mrs. Connolly might like. Meat was good for you. It made you strong. She’d retraced her steps to the cold-cuts case to put the package back but in the end the place she put it was in her pocket.
“Lucky the pockets in this jacket are big,” she said to Sara-Kate in the kitchen, though she still quaked inside to think of what she had done.
Sara-Kate glanced at her. “You have to be careful of the mirrors,” she said. “They have mirrors high up in the corners that can show what you’re doing.”
It was her way of saying thank you, and Hillary answered with a nod. She knew they were speaking a special language now, and more than that, that she had passed a test and been ushered through a secret door. Next, Sara-Kate asked, rather formally because they were coming together so fast: “Please stay. I’ll be right back.”
She took the paper bag and went upstairs. The electric stove in the middle of the room had been turned on. Faint waves of heat came across the cold floor from the oven’s mouth. Hillary walked over and sat in one of the armchairs in the strange room-within-a-room. Now she could see why it was arranged as it was. The old stove wasn’t powerful enough to heat the whole room, but if you stayed near it, you could be warm. The fan on the stove was working. It blew the heat toward her in a soft, pleasant way, as it was intended to do, she guessed.
Hillary took off her boots. They were wet inside from her hike through the snow. She sat back in the chair. She leaned her head against the chair’s padded interior and thought how exciting it was to be here, on this most unusual island in the midst of the everyday world. All around the Connollys’ house, the town honked and bumped, clanked and thudded, without an inkling of the secrets held within. It gave Hillary a delicious feeling to be sitting in such a private place, to have come through the ordinary face of things into Sara-Kate’s hidden world. She stretched her hands out toward the oven’s warmth and waited for her friend to come back.
In a little while, she heard the tread of boots on the stairs. Then Sara-Kate appeared, still carrying the paper bag.
“Is your mother all right?” Hillary asked, jumping up.
Sara-Kate shrugged. “She’s okay. She says you really can stay for lunch, if you want to that is.” Her eyes skirted Hillary’s.
“Want to? I’d love to!” Hillary said. “Do you know that you’ve never invited me in before? Not once. I mean the last time I was here it wasn’t really... well, I just came by accident. I wasn’t spying on you, honest,” she ended quickly. Sara-Kate had given her a look.
“It’s all right,” the older girl replied. “I know you didn’t tell.”
“I wouldn’t have even gone upstairs except that I thought the elves were there,” Hillary explained.
“Elves in this house?” Sara-Kate produced an explosive hoot.
“Well, I was sure they were, and I still think—”
“Hey!” Sara-Kate cut in. “We’re wasting time. Let’s have a party. Come on! We’ve got everything.” Then, in one of her wild leaps of mood, she began to race around the inner room, snatching a knife from a drawer slot, tossing the bag in the air, dumping its contents on the stove top.
“Bologna sandwiches!” cried Sara-Kate. She trumpeted through her fists. “Toodle-tee-toot-tee-too. Charge! That’s what they do at the football games at the high school,” she said to Hillary. “I go over and watch on Saturdays when I feel like it. It’s neat. Do you want to come next time?”
“The high school is way across town!” Hillary protested.
Sara-Kate didn’t hear. She was blowing more blasts on her trumpet and charging into the making of the sandwiches. Two slices of bread down flat, slap, then a thick stack of bologna slices on top of each one, slap, slap, and more bread on top of that, slap, no mayonnaise, no lettuce, no mustard. So what?
“I’d like to go see a football game,” Hillary had to admit in the middle of the slappings and trumpetings. “In fact I guess I’d love to.”
They sat side by side on the ragged, falling-apart chairs. Sara-Kate devoured her sandwich like a lion. Hillary took polite bites and chewed thoroughly, as she’d been taught at home
.
“Want another one?” Sara-Kate was up and flying again before Hillary had finished her third bite. She grabbed two mugs from the shelves in the drawerless bureau and filled them to the very top with milk.
“Watch out!” cried Hillary. “They’re spilling.”
Sara-Kate giggled. “Would you like to see how Pierre the Package drinks out of a cup?”
“Who’s he?”
“He’s awful,” Sara-Kate whispered. She rolled her tiny eyes. “He’s horrible. I read about him in one of those newspapers they sell in the bus station. See, he’s got no arms or legs. Just a little stump for a body. It’s all wrapped up in cloth, like a package. Anyway, here he is drinking.”
She lowered her lips to the rim of a cup and, with her arms bent at a painful-looking angle behind her back, slurped at the milk.
“Want me to do your cup, too?” she asked, looking around.
“Ugh. Okay.”
“Pierre the Package had to learn to do everything with his mouth,” Sara-Kate went on, more seriously, when she had finished slurping Hillary’s milk.
“Don’t tell me,” said Hillary. “I don’t want to know.”
“He types letters to people by holding a stick in his mouth to hit the typewriter keys. He turns on lamps and faucets with his teeth. He makes sandwiches and feeds his dog. Yup, he has a dog, a cute little terrier that jumps up in his wheelchair and licks the mess off his face after dinner. And listen to this. The way Pierre reads a book is by flicking the pages over with his tongue.”
“Ugh! Ugh!” Hillary covered her own mouth with her hands, a thing Pierre the Package wouldn’t be able to do no matter how disgusted he felt, she thought suddenly.
“We should try reading that way sometime,” Sara-Kate was saying. “Who knows when it might come in handy. You know, you can learn to do practically anything if you really want to hard enough.”
“Sure, let’s try it,” Hillary murmured, while Sara-Kate tore into another bologna sandwich and poured herself another mug of milk.
“This is the greatest,” Sara-Kate said, leaning back with the mug in one hand. “Isn’t this the greatest party? Are you having a good time? See, it’s not as bad in this house as you probably thought it would be.”
“Bad?” Hillary said.
“I mean, I do okay here as long as they don’t switch off the electricity. I try to keep that bill paid up. I used to get heat from a furnace like everybody else, but it broke. It takes big bucks to fix something like that. Upstairs I’ve got three good electric heaters. Usually I move us up there in the worst weather. Nothing much works down here when it gets really cold.”
Hillary stared at the lean planes of Sara-Kate’s face and noticed for the first time the odd little dark marks under her eyes, like tired smudges in a grown-up face.
“One good thing is I’ve got two of these hot plates so I don’t have to haul them up and down stairs,” the elf-girl went on. “Wherever I happen to be when I want to cook, I can cook.” She smiled. “I bet you don’t have that in your house.”
“No, we don’t,” Hillary said.
“And you don’t have a big, friendly stove like this that you can lie back with and put your feet up on.”
“No. ”
Sara-Kate stuck her work boots up on the stove and stretched out luxuriously in her chair. “And you can’t have parties like this either, with just two people or whoever you want to invite, and whatever you want to eat. Are you still hungry? How about a cup of coffee? Whenever you’ve got a space left you can always fill it up with coffee.”
Hillary leaned toward her suddenly. She put her hand on Sara-Kate’s arm and said: “You do everything around here, don’t you? You run this whole house.”
Sara-Kate sat up. “What do you mean?” she asked, on guard in an instant.
“You keep pretending that your mother is the one telling you what to do, like everyone else’s mother. But that’s not right, is it? She doesn’t tell you anything. She’s too sick. You’re the one taking care of her.”
“That’s not true!” Sara-Kate replied. “My mother does tell me what to do. She tells me things all the time.”
“But you’re the one who does everything in the end,” Hillary went on. “You buy all the food and do all the cooking.”
“So what?”
“You pay the bills and wash the clothes and when something breaks, like the furnace, you decide what to do about it.”
“So what?” Sara-Kate spat at her. “I learned how. I can do it. I help my mother, that’s all. I bet even you have to help your stupid mother sometimes.”
Hillary didn’t get angry. She looked at Sara-Kate hard, as if she were trying to bring her into focus. “It’s all right,” she said. “I would never tell anybody. I was just imagining how it would be. What happens if there’s something only your mother can do, like sign something, or talk on the phone? What if she needs to go somewhere, to the doctor or the hairdresser?”
At that, Sara-Kate sagged in her chair. She sighed. She looked at Hillary as if she were two years old instead of nine, and folded her arms across her chest in that all-knowing, impatient attitude so characteristic of her.
“Look, whatever happens, I fix it,” she told Hillary. “I sign it if it needs to be signed. I write it if it needs to be written. I learned my mother’s writing. I talk on the phone, too, when it’s working. I tell people what to do and they do it. Or, if they don’t, I find some other way. I’m good at things like that. My mother used to get upset all the time. Her mind’s not always right, so then she gets sick. See, sometimes the envelope comes and sometimes it doesn’t come. I learned what to do when it doesn’t come.”
“What envelope?” Hillary asked.
“You know, with the check, the money,” Sara-Kate answered. “A lot of times, my father can’t send it. He’s not exactly rich. So then we run out.”
“Run out! But then what do you do?” Hillary said, appalled. “How do you buy things like food and...” Her hands were rising up to her mouth again. She was looking at Sara-Kate over the top of them. “Like food and...” She couldn’t think, suddenly, of all the things that Sara-Kate would need to buy. All the hundreds of things. “Like food and, you know,” she ended lamely.
Sara-Kate shrugged. “I know,” she said.
Twelve
The afternoon was passing. Through the torn shade of the window over the sink, Hillary detected the sun’s shifted position. It was no longer overhead, hot and bright, but lower in the sky, half-screened by trees and neighboring houses. She thought that she ought to be going home soon. Her mother would begin to wonder where she was. She might be looking out the Lenoxes’ dining-room window at this very minute, peering down at Sara-Kate’s shadowy house: Where is my child?
Well, I’m here. Don’t worry, Hillary answered her mother in her mind. I’m inside where I wanted to be, with Sara-Kate. And we’re having a party in the magic inner room. At least I think it’s a party.
Hillary gazed about herself and wondered suddenly if “magic” was quite the right word for this place, which now looked rather grim with the sun at its new angle. There was a hole in the floor near the sink, she noticed. Beside her, Sara-Kate was flipping her hair carelessly over her shoulder, preparing to answer the question about the envelope that didn’t come, the money that ran out.
“So what do you do?” Hillary asked her again. She was met by yet another of Sara-Kate’s weary shrugs.
“I get by. I know some ways.”
“What ways?”
“People are always leaving their stuff around in a town like this. There was a whole shopping cart of food in the supermarket parking lot one time. At school there’s lost and found. I could wear all designer clothes if I wanted. I don’t take that kind of stuff, though. Who wants to look like those dumb show-offs?”
Hillary nodded.
“Hey, I should show you how to get into the movies for free sometime!” Sara-Kate exclaimed. “It’s really easy. I’m not always b
roke, you know, but I never pay for the movies because it would be a waste. We should do it together. You’d see.”
“What happens if you get caught?” Hillary asked uneasily.
“Who gets caught?” Sara-Kate’s small eyes skimmed over her. “I bet you think I’m dumb because I got put back in school. That’s what a lot of people think, and it’s too bad for them. Just when they’ve decided how dumb I am and how smart they are, right then is when they happen to lose something. Something of theirs just disappears out the window.”
Perhaps the sun had settled another inch. A finger of cold air caught the back of Hillary’s neck and she shivered.
“You shouldn’t do that,” she said to Sara-Kate. “It’s not right at all. You should ask someone for help instead of stealing all the time. If people knew you were living here taking care of your mother by yourself, they’d have to do something about it. They’d have to—”
“Wreck everything! That’s right,” Sara-Kate interrupted with a flash of anger. “Nobody knows how to take care of my mother except me. They’ve tried to do it. Even my father tried, but he couldn’t so he left. Now I’m doing it. I’ve done it for a year so far and nobody even knows. People are stupid. They can’t see a thing. They don’t have a clue to what’s going on right under their noses, in their own backyards.”
Hillary stared at her.
“Do you know what would happen if I called somebody up on the phone and asked for help? Do you know what they would do?” Sara-Kate stood before Hillary with her hands on her hips and the whole rest of her body moving—twisting, jumping, quivering, kicking. It made Hillary think of the elf in her, the strange elf-ness that came at certain moments and then hid away again, came and went, so that Hillary could never finally decide who this small, fierce person was. She could never decide if she was cruel or warm-hearted, magic or ordinary, thick-skinned or fragile, a friend or a fraud.
“They would take my mother away,” Sara-Kate said, without waiting for Hillary to decide this time either. Her voice had dropped to a whisper.
“But why?” Hillary asked. “Where would they take her?”
Afternoon of the Elves Page 7
