by Jenn Bishop
Please don’t end up in Avery’s yard. Please don’t end up in Avery’s yard. Please don’t end up in Avery’s yard.
Dad pulls out his phone.
“Have you heard from anybody about Hank?”
He shakes his head. “You’ll be the first to know, kiddo. Promise.”
I try to think of a plan as a silver SUV speeds up the hill. “Can we go for a quick drive up the street?”
“In what car, Mads?”
Dad has a point.
“If someone has Hank, they’ll call us. Pretty much everyone on our street knows Hank. They’ll stop by with him when they have a chance. For now, let’s focus on something else. I’m sure Mom could use your help.”
I wonder if Dad’s thinking what I’m thinking in the very back of my mind. Anyone who knows Hank would have him back here already. Hank would be sprawled out on the nicest patch of grass with his head resting on his paws, watching us dig through the mess. Hank always knew—no, Hank knows—how to take it easy.
Cameron runs up and tackles Dad. “Can I use the chain saw?” He looks at Dad with hopeful eyes.
“I don’t think so, buddy. Chain saws are only for us tough men.”
Mom clears her throat. “Ahem?”
“And super tough ladies,” Dad says, extra loud.
“Hey, Maddie, can you help me with something?” Mom yells over the buzz of the chain saw.
I stuff the wrapping from my sandwich into the bag of chips and look around for a trash can. Except, of course, there isn’t one. My whole yard looks like the inside of a trash can, so I end up leaving the trash behind and jog over to Mom.
There’s dirt smeared across her forehead from all the times she’s wiped the hair out of her face. “Hey, sweetie,” she says. “I’ve been looking for our photo albums all morning and I’m not having any luck at all. I think another set of eyes would help. Younger eyes.”
I don’t know how Mom’s able to think we could actually search for something specific in all of this. All morning, I’ve just been finding what was there and deciding if it was trash or not. Most of the time, it was. Everything I found was broken or something I stopped caring about years ago, like the clay elephant.
But looking into Mom’s eyes, I see something I didn’t catch earlier. Maybe she was really good at hiding how she felt, at saying everything was okay, but not believing it herself.
“Okay, Mom. Sure,” I say. “I’ll find ’em.” My voice comes out steady and clear. Like I believe it, too.
Two hours later, I haven’t found the photo albums. Actually, I haven’t found much of anything, not anything that counts. Nothing to make Mom happy. Side by side, we dig through the rubble: a broken dining room chair, chunks of wall, shingles from the roof. There are so many sharp things that Mom and Dad send Cammie back over to the Manoukians’ house with orders to stay inside.
I wish they felt the same way about me. Instead, I’m suddenly someone who’s strong enough to help them lift things. Who’s careful enough to not step on nails. Who knows when to stop asking questions. Who knows the right time to be quiet. It’s like I crossed over some imaginary line to the other side and became an adult.
But I want to cross back. I want to unsee the things I’m seeing.
When I lift a piece of a cabinet from the dining room, I spot the cover of a white photo album peeking out from beneath. I wipe off bits of dust and debris. It’s a wedding album. Mom and Dad’s? I carry it over to an empty stretch of grass and take the gardening gloves off. They’re too dirty and rough for something this delicate. With my bare hands, I open the book.
The pictures inside have this reddish-gold tinge to them, and the clothes the people are wearing look super old-school. The groom’s hair is crazy, all long and feathered. There’s a close-up of a little girl in a frilly white dress—a flower girl? I peer at her face, trying to see if she looks familiar, but she doesn’t. Her dark hair is divided into two pigtails and curled. She’s wearing white gloves embroidered with tiny flowers.
But who is she?
I turn the page and find a picture of the bride and groom, with their parents on either side. At least, I think that’s who they are. But I don’t really know those faces either. The mothers are both wearing fur wraps over their shoulders. I flip through the pages, examining the faces of these people, waiting for something to click before I tell Mom I found one of our albums.
But nothing clicks. I don’t know these people. Some stranger’s album must have been blown into our yard by the tornado. That’s what I’m thinking as I skim the last few pages, until I turn to the final page and find a wedding announcement. A yellowed piece of newspaper carefully cut out and glued into the album. “Announcement: Stephen Hamilton Weds Annika Johannson.”
I do know these people.
Grandpa and Grandma. Mom’s parents. It’s their wedding album.
“Mom!” I shout. She comes running over. “I found one.”
When she sees it in my hands, she starts sobbing. I’ve never seen Mom cry before. Not like this. Her hands shake as she takes it from me. “Oh, Maddie.”
“Mom, it’s okay,” I say. I look for Dad—it’s usually his job to make Mom feel better—but he’s not coming. I don’t see him anywhere and I’m not sure where he went.
Mom sits down next to me and takes her own gloves off. She rubs her bare hands over her face.
I scoot closer and wrap my arm around her. Her whole body is heaving. I rub her back, like she always does for me when I’m sick.
She finally lifts her head. “What if this is all I have of them?” Her lips quiver as she asks the question. “I should’ve scanned this stuff. I always said I would. All those boxes of pictures—all the photo albums in the attic. I always put things off.”
A scanner wouldn’t have saved them, though. Our computer is gone, too, everything except what’s in the cloud.
That’s when it really hits me: everything is gone. Today we’re going to find all that’s left, and that’s it. That’s all we have of everything we used to have. Only what we find today.
The stuffed giraffe I won at the carnival with Kiersten last year?
Gone.
All the letters I got from my pen pal in the Netherlands?
Gone.
Cammie’s and my lost teeth that I found in Mom’s sock drawer when she said I could borrow a pair of socks from her that one time?
Gone.
It’s all gone. The little things and the big things, the stuff with memories and the stuff we didn’t even remember we had—99.9999 percent of it is gone. Gone forever.
If it isn’t broken and here, it’s in someone else’s yard or in the woods. One mile or five miles or twenty miles away. Doesn’t matter. It’s not coming back to us.
The spine of the album creaks as Mom opens it. She rubs her finger against the picture of the little girl where the edge is starting to lift up. “That’s my cousin Stephanie,” Mom says.
“Really?”
Mom nods. “She was only three in this picture.” She turns the page.
“So little.”
Mom lingers on the page with Grandma and Grandpa walking down the aisle. They look so young.
“You want to know a secret?” Mom’s voice is soft.
I lean into her. “Yeah.”
“There was an unannounced guest at the wedding.”
“Who?”
Mom points at Grandma’s belly. “Me.”
“Whoa.” I look at the picture more closely. Grandma doesn’t look pregnant at all. “Did she know? Did Grandpa?”
“I don’t know,” Mom says. “I never asked them.”
“So, how did you know?”
“I did the math.” Mom smiles. She’s never told me stuff like this before.
“I found some reinforcements!” Dad shouts from across the yard. I can’t quite see him yet; there’s a pile of debris blocking the view.
“Cammie?” My brother undoes everything I do. Pretty much the opposite of a reinfor
cement. Plus, there’s still lots of broken stuff.
Dad laughs. “No, not Cammie.” Dad’s head peeks over the pile, and then another head joins him. The second head is wearing a dirty Red Sox hat that I know all too well. It belongs to Avery.
I stand up real fast and try to wipe the sweat off my palms and onto my shorts, but it doesn’t want to go away. In fact, I think it’s multiplying now that Avery’s here.
“I popped over to the Manoukians’ to check in on how other folks in the neighborhood were doing, and things at Avery’s house were under control for the moment, so he offered to come over and help. That’s pretty nice of him, huh?” Dad’s looking right at me, expecting me to say something to Avery.
“Th-th-thanks,” I stammer.
“I’m gonna get the chain saw going and break down some of these branches. You want to help Maddie and her mom?” Dad says to Avery.
“Sounds good,” Avery says.
“You guys want to tackle the back quadrant over there?” Mom points to the part of the house where the kitchen used to be.
“Sure thing, Mrs. E.”
Avery follows me over to the only area that’s been pretty much untouched all day. One look at it, and anybody could see why. Shingles and plaster and brick are all jumbled together in a big mess.
“I don’t even know where to start,” I say.
“Maybe with this?” Avery tugs at a big piece of a wall. It’s the kind of thing that before I would’ve left for Mom and Dad to work on, but now everything is fair game. He tries to lift it by himself, his arm muscles flexing as he pulls at it. “Can you give me a hand?”
I grab on to the other side and we both lift together, on the count of three. My legs shake from trying to lift so much weight. “Where should we put it?” I ask.
He tilts his head to the right. “Over there.”
Once we get that piece out of the way, the rest is easy, and soon we can see what was hiding underneath. An ottoman from the living room, broken dishes and glasses, a stainless steel pot in perfect condition. I grab the pot and place it on the blanket in the front yard. Anything intact gets laid out on the blanket, sort of like a yard sale.
We work in unison. Team Maddie and Avery. Lifting and moving and inspecting. It’s hard to talk over Dad’s chain saw, so we don’t. And that’s okay.
There’s comfort in the quiet. In the getting things done. I keep my eyes peeled for anything else that Mom might want, things passed down from Grandma and Grandpa. But I just keep finding things that would be so easy to replace. Like that pot.
After an hour, we’ve uncovered several more pots and pans. Everything glass has shattered, but everything metal has survived. I wish more things were made out of metal.
Everything Mom wants to find, though—the things that really matter—is on paper. So easy to break, rip, shred. To flutter away and be lost forever.
Finally, Dad takes a water break. The buzz of the chain saw is replaced by the ringing in our ears. You’re probably supposed to put in earplugs for listening to that much chain-saw buzzing, but it’s not like we’re going to be able to find our earplugs in all of this.
There are a million questions I want to ask Avery. Did his parents hide out in his basement? Did he have to sleep on the floor last night like us? And his stuff—is it gone just like mine?
But every time I try to open my mouth and ask him a question, all I can think about is how he held my hand last night on the car ride home. How it was the only thing that made me feel less afraid.
And then I remember how he asked Gabriella to dance. So what did that hand-holding even mean?
I know what Kiersten would say if she were here. That it is definitely not the kind of question you ask a boy to his face. Maybe over text message. And even then, only if you’re brave.
I pick up an armful of shingles. I’m about to place them over to the side when I see something. A glimpse of red. The shingles fall to the ground with a clatter, and I reach for the red thing. There’s still something else on top of it—part of a kitchen cabinet that’s been crushed by the weight of the roof. I have to move that stuff off first. I lift the last bit of wood out of the way. Can this be what I think it is?
Family Recipes, it says, embossed on the cover.
“What’d you find?” Avery stands next to me.
“A recipe book. My grandma made it.”
I hand it to him so he can see. My hand zings when it hits his. It’s not the same, with both of us wearing gloves. But still.
He turns the pages more carefully than I could with gloves. “Swedish meatballs, huh?”
“Her Swedish meatballs were the best,” I say. “Mom makes that recipe every year on Christmas Eve, ever since…” It still feels weird to talk about Grandma dying, even though it happened two years ago. “She knows the recipe by heart anyway, but I think…” I shake my head. Tears fill my eyes and I blink them away, fast. I can’t cry in front of Avery.
“I didn’t realize,” I finally say when I’m pretty sure I’m not going to lose it. “I didn’t realize how much these little things mattered. My mom”—I lower my voice—“she was so sad when she couldn’t find this stuff. There’s so much more, though. I know it’s lost. This could be all she has left. This and their wedding album.”
Avery closes the recipe book and hands it back to me.
Mom and Dad are both talking on their cell phones as I run the recipe book over to the blanket. I’ll tell Mom later.
When I return to Avery, he’s already back to work, picking up the pieces of our smashed dining room table.
“Did you lose anything important?” I grab a loose table leg.
“My bedroom is upstairs,” he says.
I didn’t know that. But I know what their upstairs looked like last night. Obliterated.
“You know why my parents sent me over?”
I shake my head.
“Even though my house is still standing, it’s not structurally sound. We can’t even go in there to get stuff from the first floor until someone comes by to inspect it. My dad said that could take weeks.”
“I’m sorry,” I say. Weeks. “When you do get to go in, what’s the first thing you’ll look for?”
Avery shakes his head.
What a stupid question, Maddie.
Dad starts up the chain saw again and we get back into our routine. Avery takes charge, telling me what to grab and where to move it, and I do. When he concentrates hard on lifting a heavy piece of wood, his tongue sneaks out the corner of his mouth. I don’t think he knows he does it. But I don’t tell him.
Sweat beads around my forehead, mixing with dirt. I take off my gloves to sip some water. It’s not nearly enough to quench my thirst, but there isn’t exactly a working sink nearby to refill it.
Avery says something to me, but I can’t hear him over the chain saw, and I’m terrible at reading lips. He motions for the water, and I hand him the bottle.
He’s drinking from my water bottle. If I had a room to save the water bottle in, a drawer, any place that was all mine, I would.
“Can I finish it off?”
“Sure.”
He puts the cap back on and hands the bottle back to me. He’s close enough now that we can hear each other if we both shout. “I think I know what the first thing would be,” he says. “My favorite baseball card. I know that sounds cheesy, but it was signed and everything.”
“Which player?” I ask.
“Big Papi.”
“Whoa.” That thing is probably worth a lot of money.
“What about you? If there’s one thing we can find today, what would it be?”
My whole body aches when I think about it. “It’s more like something I don’t want to find. Not here.”
“What do you mean?”
“If we found him here, it would mean he’s…dead.” My voice cracks on that word.
“Hank?”
I nod.
“I thought he was over at the Manoukians’ place, Maddie. I
’m so sorry.”
“It’s my fault.” I chew on my lip. “I was supposed to feed him his supper before I left for the dance, but I didn’t. I couldn’t find him. I didn’t try hard enough. I just left.” Avery is watching me so carefully as I tell him. He almost makes me lose my place in the story, the story that doesn’t have an ending—not yet, anyway. “I don’t know if he’s out there or if he’s hurt or if he’s gone or if someone else took him in.”
“Maybe someone nearby has him, you know? Maybe it’ll just take them a few days to get in touch.”
“Yeah. Maybe.” But his dog tag has Dad’s cell phone number on it. And Dad’s cell phone works just fine.
Avery stares at me real funny. Though maybe he’s not staring at me, but past me. “Whoa, Maddie. Check it out.” He gestures to something behind me.
I turn to see what he’s talking about. He’s pointing at one of the few trees that’re still standing: a pine tree, one that was about as tall as our house used to be. Tucked in between two large branches, about halfway up, is a guitar.
“Crazy,” I say.
“We’ve been here going through all this stuff for hours, and nobody notices a guitar in a tree.”
He climbs the tree to get to the guitar. Despite looking like it’s lodged in there pretty good, it comes out easily. “Catch!” he says, but he lowers it down carefully, not letting go until it’s securely in my hand.
“It doesn’t look that bad for being stuck in a tree.” I read the label on the guitar; it’s a Martin.
“Did it belong to your mom or dad?” Avery asks.
I shake my head. Nobody in our house knows how to play guitar. We’re not musical at all.
If some stranger’s guitar can be in our tree, what does that mean for Hank?
My dog—who’s such a baby that anytime we go under a bridge, he whines and ducks his head even though he’s inside the car—could be anywhere.
Dad takes a break from clearing the fallen trees and heads over to me and Avery. “You know the McLarens from down the street? Peg and Frank?”
I shake my head.
“They live in the big pink house near the bottom of the hill.” I guess I remember them a little. We used to visit all the houses on our street every time we had a school fund-raiser. The McLarens would always buy a lot of wrapping paper. “They called a few minutes ago to offer up some of their extra bedrooms.”
