The Wright 3

by Blue Balliett

  Although neither knew it at the time, Calder was also looking out his bedroom window. His parents wouldn’t be home from work for another hour, and today he made himself a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich and brought it upstairs while he waited. His grandma Ranjana had died two years before, and ever since then the house was horribly quiet in the afternoons. If he was downstairs alone, he found himself noticing her empty rocker by the front window, and that made him both sad and spooked.

  Like Petra and Tommy, Calder was an unusual mixture: His dad, Walter Pillay, was from India and planned city gardens, and his mom, Yvette Pillay, was Canadian and taught math. His dad did most of the cooking and all of the gardening, and his mom did most of the talking and lots of intricate knitting. The family lived in a tidy, red house nestled in an experimental assortment of plants. Each had its own yellow tag in spring, and the Latin names bobbed and spun cheerfully until they disappeared beneath leaves.

  As Petra waited that afternoon for a train story, Calder waited for a game of Blind Rectangles. He had made up the rules: First he dropped the set of pentomino pieces on his desk the moment a cargo train came into view, then he tried to form a rectangle while watching and counting the train cars, letting his fingers work as quickly as possible without his eyes. Just the other day he made an eight-piecer as seventy-two cars went by. Since 9 x 8 = 72, he decided that nine train cars equaled each pentomino piece in that particular rectangle. It was as tough as patting your head and rubbing your stomach at the same time, and Calder felt in the mood for something hard.

  Both Calder and Petra heard the rumble of an approaching train. The engine appeared, and almost immediately Petra saw a sight that brought her to her feet.

  A figure in a long, black cape stood in the window of what looked like an empty car. As the train flew by, he jerked the window open at the top and the cape billowed and swirled around him. His fingers dropped a small object, and Petra thought she saw a fluttering of pages as the train sped on. All of this happened in less than a second, and the tracks were suddenly empty, the roar receding in the late afternoon light.

  She was out her front door and running toward Calder’s house, three doors away, before she had stopped to think. She banged on the door, but there was no answer. She banged again, and soon she heard Calder’s feet thumping down the stairs from his room.

  In a breathless rush, Petra told him what she’d seen.

  Calder jammed his feet into his sneakers. Petra grinned, knowing this meant business, and suddenly the strangeness between them evaporated. As they scrambled up the train embankment behind Calder’s house, Petra couldn’t help feeling happy that Tommy wasn’t there, too.

  They weren’t allowed to go up on the train tracks, but if they waited and got a parent to go with them later, the object could be gone. Besides, their parents might not want to bother — sometimes parents could be unimaginative.

  Out of breath, Petra and Calder stood in the trees at the edge of the tracks. Another train was coming, but from the opposite direction. As it approached, the engineer sounded the whistle angrily.

  “He’s seen us. What if he calls the police?” Calder said.

  “Hurry!”

  Calder and Petra ran along the gravel at the top of the bank, heading north toward Petra’s house. They found potato chip bags, a bathing cap, a squashed shoe, cigarette butts — and then they saw it.

  A small book stood upright on its open pages, as if someone reading it had just put it down. Petra picked it up and wiped it gingerly on her shirt. “Whoa!”

  “What?” Calder asked.

  “It’s the same book I found at Powell’s two days ago.” Suddenly spooked, Petra looked around them.

  Calder nodded. “Coincidence?” He smiled at Petra, an oddly wistful look on his face. Both kids thought back to the previous fall, when a number of magical coincidences had led them to find and rescue the stolen painting. “Collaborative problem-solving,” that’s what Ms. Hussey called it — somehow, they’d been able to do things together that neither could have done on their own. As they slid back down the embankment to Calder’s yard, both were wondering the same thing: Could three collaborate?

  In front of Calder’s porch, Petra dumped the dirt out of one shoe. “Why don’t you keep the book? Maybe we’ll both read it.” As Petra said it, she heard the “both,” and realized it left out Tommy. She hadn’t really meant to.

  Calder flipped through the paperback, noticing tiny print and big words. “No, thanks,” he said. “You can tell me about it.” Calder stood in his front door as she walked away and wondered why he hadn’t asked her in.

  Moments later, as Petra looked out her front window, she wondered why she hadn’t invited Calder to come over. She gazed at the empty street and thought suddenly about someone watching, but knew that was ridiculous.

  Up in her bedroom she hunted through a pile of dirty clothes for the jeans she’d been wearing the day she picked up her copy of The Invisible Man.

  She found the book in a back pocket, opened it to page one, and looked again at the words highlighted in orange: an unheard-of piece of luck. Then she opened the book from the tracks and flipped through the pages.

  Orange marker leaped out at her from the middle of the second book: I remember myself as a gaunt black figure.

  The man on the train! Had he underlined the passage? Was he referring to himself? And had he also left behind the first copy, the one she’d found at Powell’s?

  Petra sank down on her bed and began to read.

  Back up in his room, Calder ran his fingers through the orange pentominoes on his desk. He loved this three-dimensional set. They were a gift from an elderly neighbor, Mrs. Sharpe. She had ordered them during the winter, but they were hard to get, and had only arrived last week.

  Carrying this set was like having twelve shapes from the real world in his pocket. When he stirred them around — something he did all the time — he found that certain pieces made him think of actual places. The W felt like a set of stairs, the P felt like the end of the arm on his grandmother’s rocker, the T felt like a small table, the N felt like a skyscraper stepping upward.

  As he lined up the pentominoes in a stiff parade along his windowsill, the letters L, I, F, E, A, R, T popped back into his mind. He jotted them down on a scrap of paper. He could hear Ms. Hussey’s outraged voice saying, “Plunder in the name of salvation,” and he wondered now if the Robie House was either a trifle or a filter. What an odd thought: Was it unimportant, or was it something to look at the world through? He hadn’t said anything about his Life & Art ideas to Petra in school today because Tommy had been around and it felt awkward, and then he’d forgotten to tell her on the way home.

  Four of the seven letters were pentominoes — L, I, F, and T — leaving EAR … Earlift? Calder pictured someone with ears moved several inches up the side of his head. Tommy would like the earlift, and Petra would like the trifle and filter equation…. Calder sighed, for probably the fiftieth time in the last three days. When would Tommy and Petra get to be friends?

  Suddenly a word in the middle of LIFEART popped out at him. FEAR … and on either side were I and T, spelling IT. FEAR IT, but that left out the L, he noticed with relief, so it must not mean anything. He looked again. FLARE IT … well, that was clearly nostrils, he thought. He smiled again, wanting to pull both Petra and Tommy into this.

  He heard heavy feet on the front porch, and the metallic slap of the mail slot in the door as someone opened it and then let go. Tommy always peeked in the slot before ringing the bell. The buzzer rang now, and Calder went back downstairs.

  “Hey, Tommy.”

  “Hey. I found something weird.” Tommy had one hand in his shorts pocket. His knees were black with dirt. Calder knew what this meant and waited with excitement, thinking it was odd that he and Petra had just found something, too.

  Tommy pulled out a small, carved piece of stone that looked like a question mark without the dot. It had a fish head — or was it a dragon?
— at one end, and tiny spirals all over the body. It looked old.

  “Awesome! What is it? Where’d you find it?”

  Tommy shrugged and grinned.

  The two of them had spent many years scrounging and digging and sorting — Tommy doing the spotting, and Calder the organizing. Tommy had kept most of the finds. Calder hadn’t minded. They were a team, and categorizing felt more interesting to him than keeping. When they’d both wanted something, Tommy was always generous.

  “Wait till Pe —” As the words left Calder’s mouth, Tommy’s face shut down. The piece of stone disappeared back into his pocket.

  “Come on, Tommy! She’s smart, she really is. Why don’t you like her?”

  Tommy looked at Calder with his eyes almost closed. “Maybe that’s why,” he muttered.

  “Not bad smart, she’s good smart,” Calder added, realizing how silly that sounded. “She’s a buddy.”

  Tommy shrugged. “Gotta go.” He slammed Calder’s door behind him when he left. “Oops,” he called out.

  Right, Calder fumed. How could he ever have thought Tommy and Petra would get along? Balancing the two of them stunk.

  Upstairs, Calder concentrated on his new pentominoes; thinking about shapes always worked better than thinking about people. Pentominoes had been exciting in two dimensions, but they were amazing in three. If he ever ran a school, he’d have one room filled with nothing but large, three-dimensional pentominoes. Kids would be able to pile them up, climb on them, even use them for spelling. And the playground equipment would be made out of solid combinations of the twelve pieces, designed by the kids themselves. Maybe even desks and chairs … Calder pictured himself sitting on an upside-down Y and writing on a T desk. The possibilities were endless.

  He hummed as he placed the Y on its long side, then stood the T on the end of the Y, and braced the edge of the T with the I. Then he placed the V on top of the T. This was reminding him of something. But what?

  Knocking the structure down, he played around again, this time closing his eyes and picking up three pentominoes. He opened his eyes and laid the L on its long side with its foot in the air. Then he put the F upside down on top of it, fitting them together in a sort of pyramid. The W went on top of the F, like a sideways M. Again, this felt familiar.

  He knocked them down and started over. The W was a W this time, and leaned on one side. The L fit into the back of it, creating a stair with four even steps. The F lay on its side on top. He’d constructed a different shape, but it still stirred something in his memory. He picked up the N and scratched his head vigorously with it.

  Determined to figure it out, this time he started with the F on its head. He built the W into the left side of it, and followed that with the L upside down on the right end. Again, he had a prickly sensation of recognition. Was it just that building with three-dimensional pentominoes would always remind him of something he’d seen before? Of course these shapes should feel familiar — after all, cities were filled with right angles and steps and overhangs.

  He knocked the threesome down again and stood the F up the right way. Then he slammed the table with one hand and jumped to his feet.

  How could he not have seen it?

  As Calder pounded down Harper Avenue toward Fifty-ninth Street, Petra stepped out on her porch. She listened for a moment to the slap-slap of his sandals on the sidewalk.

  Her mother had asked her to buy potatoes, but … where was Calder going in such a hurry? Petra jumped down her stairs in two steps and trotted after him. She wasn’t spying, she told herself, just curious. Plus, it was blissfully still outside and a perfect moment for a detour. Petra loved this time of day, when late afternoon tipped into early evening and shadows from gardens threw giant blossoms and leaves across the pavement. She stepped off the sidewalk, avoiding a shape that looked like a man falling. Were shadows just accidents? Sometimes they looked like more.

  Petra saw Calder pass the University School buildings, and head west toward the Robie House. She peeked down Fifty-eighth Street toward Woodlawn Avenue just as Calder stepped up to the low wall that surrounded the property. Pausing to catch her breath, she watched him pull a handful of pentominoes out of his pocket. She walked over.

  “Petra! What are you doing here?”

  “Out looking at shadows.”

  Calder nodded. He knew Petra was great at noticing what most people hardly saw. “Well, look: I reached for pentominoes, and I got these three, and they’re Frank Lloyd Wright’s initials! Not only that, I’m sure you can build sections of the Robie House with them. I ran over here to test it out.”

  “Awesome!” Petra loved the way Calder thought with his pentominoes, and she watched as he experimented with several combinations of the F, L, and W, standing them carefully on top of the wall. She could see that the shapes echoed parts of the south elevation of the building with an almost magical precision. Could the pentominoes somehow help to save the house?

  As she glanced back and forth between the house and the orange letter-shapes, she thought she saw something move in the first-floor windows. A delicate flicker of light darted through the crisscross of triangles and parallelograms, traveling west to east in a clean, zigzag line. It zipped down the three diamonds in the center of each window, making the group vibrate in Petra’s mind. She watched, transfixed, as the ripple came closer and closer, picking up speed, and suddenly — a puff of air knocked Calder’s pentominoes over. Just as suddenly, everything was still again. Petra looked at the trees and the sky: no breeze, no clouds. She looked at the street: no cars to flash a reflection.

  “Drat.” Calder’s voice was muffled as he bent to pick up the pieces, wiping each one carefully on his shirt. “Where did that come from?”

  Petra was still staring at the windows, now quiet and empty. “Those three diamonds in the middle of each window —” she began.

  “The rhombi, you mean?” Calder asked without looking up. “There’s no such thing as a diamond in geometry. A rhombus is a parallelogram with equal sides.”

  “Rhombi, whatever …,” Petra said, her voice trailing into silence.

  Busy with his own thoughts, Calder said excitedly, “If you had a collection of hundreds of these pentominoes, I’ll bet you could build the entire Robie House, all but the window designs. Maybe showing that it could be built from pentominoes would get some grown-ups interested in saving it. You know, as something like the idea behind an educational game.”

  “Maybe,” Petra added in a whisper.

  Calder looked over at her. “What’s wrong?”

  “The building just knocked over your pentominoes. I mean — well, a light rippled through the windows toward us, and then there was that poof. Out of nowhere.”

  “Weird,” Calder said. “You didn’t imagine it?”

  “I don’t think so,” Petra said.

  As they stood side by side looking at the house, an icy shiver ran down Petra’s spine. “This building doesn’t want us here,” she said.

  Suddenly Calder remembered the words “fear it,” made up of six of the seven letters in ART & LIFE. Fear what, though? This house?

  Behind them, a familiar voice barked, “Hey.” Both Calder and Petra jumped.

  Tommy stood with his legs apart, his arms hanging stiffly at his sides. Petra stepped away from Calder, and although no one noticed it, the three now formed a perfect equilateral triangle.

  Ignoring Tommy’s unfriendly look, Calder told him about the F-L-W pentomino possibilities. His old friend looked a little less wary.

  “That all you’re doing here?” Tommy asked. His eyes darted nervously toward the garden.

  Petra said coldly, “I thought Calder’s idea was pretty exciting. Plus, what is it to you if we’re looking at the Robie House?”

  Tommy growled something inaudible that sounded like “tell me,” and Petra backed away. She waved a hand and called out, “Getting potatoes for my mom,” quickly stretching then snapping the unseen triangle as she turned a corner.<
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  Henry Dare turned on his side, grunted with pain, and rolled back. He stared at the ceiling in his hospital room. Good thing he wasn’t an older man — that fall might have killed him.

  A fourth-generation mason, he’d been hired by the university to take apart the house his great-grandfather had helped to build. It was an honor to have gotten the Robie House contract; he was working on an important job, just like his great-grandfather, who had helped Frank Lloyd Wright. There was symmetry to the situation. One Dare had helped to put the place up, and another was helping to take it down. And now this.

  “Something against nature,” he muttered to himself. “I know what I know, and that house moved. No wet tiles, nothing, and it moved under me like —” He looked out the window, thinking. “Like a fish. As if I were standing on a big fish.”

  When an impossible experience happens to you and you know you’re not nuts, he thought, it changes how you see things.

  And the child’s voice, a voice that seemed to come from inside the house: Was it “Stay away!” or “Stay and play!”? There was a big difference between the two.

  Was the building trying to tell him that it didn’t like what was going on? Now that he thought about it, there had been a series of accidents since he and the rest of the crew had gone in last week to measure and plan. A restoration carpenter had fallen down some stairs; another worker had been hit on the head by a light fixture; windows had opened and closed by themselves; the worker who had found him on the balcony had broken a finger when a French door slammed on his hand.

  And what were those strange thoughts he’d had just before he’d fallen, those thoughts about being young and alive and invisible? It was almost as if the house, knowing its fate, had heard his carefree thinking and gotten angry. Or was it that he’d touched the chimney, knocked a chunk of brick off, and kind of woken the place up?