by Meg McKinlay
Instead, the door to the studio swung open, and Dad elbowed his way into the hall like a surgeon going into an operation, his hands slick with clay.
“Howard!” he said. “Come in, come in.”
I stared down the hall. Finkle? What was he doing here?
That man really was everywhere.
There was a photo of him right there on the screen, one that looked like it had been taken about twenty years ago, when he still had hair. He was resting his chin on one balled-up fist, evidently trying to appear thoughtful. There was a caption underneath: “Howard Finkle, Centenary Mayor.”
“Hello, girls!” he called down the hall. Then he clapped Dad on the back and followed him into the studio, the door slamming shut behind them.
That was when I realized.
Finkle’s oddly crooked nose — not unlike a random blob of mashed clay that could possibly be something someone had left there by accident.
I turned to Hannah. She was grinning.
“Commemorative sculpture,” she said. “Also my idea. Howard loves it. Dad loves it. Everybody wins.”
Mom sighed. “Not if Dad doesn’t get all his pots finished in time for the tourist season. I can’t believe you’ve got him making a free head right before the busy season, Hannah.”
Hannah clicked the mouse impatiently, making the screen blur. “I told you, Mom — it’s not really free. It’ll be great publicity. We’ve got big plans for the centenary. There’ll be people coming down from the city — newspapers, TV, the whole thing. And Elijah will be back soon. He can help with the pots.”
As she stopped talking, Hannah stopped clicking. The screen snapped back into focus, and I leaned down toward it. The book was in thumbnail view now, showing everything at once. My page was in the middle somewhere, surrounded by pictures of the pool and Country Crafts and the newly sealed Main Street. Somewhere near the top of the screen was a photo of Finkle with a lever in his hand.
And off to one side, something else.
I drew in a quick breath.
It was another newspaper clipping, dated a few months earlier than mine. There was another grainy photo — another tired couple, two more small bundles. Underneath were paragraphs of closely typed text. I leaned across Hannah and clicked on the magnifying-glass icon to blow them up: “newborn tragedy,” “local man in hospital,” “possible brain damage,” “cause unclear,” “fatigue may be a factor,” “driver error likely, say police.” Above them, the headline read: “Miracle Baby Survives Crash.”
Hannah followed my gaze. “He’s in your class, isn’t he?”
I nodded, peering forward. “Is this going in, too?”
Hannah shook her head. “No, that’s just something I found when I was going through some other stuff.” She tapped a finger repeatedly on the keyboard, enlarging Liam’s miracle-baby face until it filled the screen, huge and pixelated. “No point dredging all that up again. Not now that everyone’s moved on.”
I glared at her. Moved on? I couldn’t help but picture Liam’s curious gait, his too-long shorts; could almost feel, suddenly, the tightening grip of his father’s hand on my wrist.
I reached for the mouse. “It’s time for dinner.”
“Wait!” Panic flashed across Hannah’s face. “I haven’t saved it!”
“It’s okay,” I said. “I’m only putting it on sleep.”
She nodded. “What a surprise.”
Elijah always used to tell me off for never shutting down the computer completely. He said it wasn’t good for it, that things need the chance to switch right off and then start again clean. But I couldn’t help myself. There was something about sleep mode that I found irresistible. I loved the way it suspended everything just the way it was. How everything went dark and quiet and still, but when you opened it up, it snapped back into life, all of it right there, just waiting for the light.
I stared down at the computer. Then I clicked the button once, twice, and watched Liam’s face disappear as the screen faded to black.
Thunkity-thunk. Thunkity-thunk.
I didn’t look up from the mosaic. This was a tricky bit, snipping the blue tiles just right so they would fit into the outline I’d traced for Tucker’s Supermarket. We each had a section to work on, and when they were done, we were going to piece them all together like a giant floor puzzle. It was important to get the edges right, to follow the template so it all worked, so everything would fit the way it was supposed to.
But even without looking, I knew what the familiar thunkity-thunk was. For me, this was the sound track to every school day — Liam’s feet kicking rhythmically at my chair from the desk behind.
It had annoyed me at first. I used to turn around and tell him to stop. He would for a while, but then it would start up once more, and when I turned around again, he would look surprised, like he hadn’t realized, like his legs had simply taken on a life of their own.
After a while, I stopped saying anything. A while later, I stopped minding.
After a longer while, I kind of started liking it.
It got so that if he was away, I missed it. It was like a background hum you don’t even realize is there until it’s gone and the air around you feels empty all of a sudden.
In some ways, that was true about Liam, too.
It wasn’t that we were friends or anything — at least not particularly. It was just that he had always been around. We used to run into him at the hospital when I was little and still going in for my checkups. I remember sitting with him in the corner of the waiting room, building unsteady worlds out of blocks while our mothers sat straight-backed along the wall, leafing through old magazines to pass the time. Later, at school, we sat out of PE together, shredding leaf after leaf in the shade of the spreading eucalyptus while other kids ran and jumped and hurled themselves at things.
Every now and then, a ball would come our way, or a bored boundary fielder would take a few extra steps backward to strike up a conversation.
Liam would always look up. He’d grab the ball and throw it back in a long, swooping arc. He’d say, How’s it going? and What’s the score? and Heads up! Here comes a long one.
But I would keep my head down, the way I always did, keep my eyes on my leaf, concentrating on shearing a clean, smooth line right down the center of the spine.
Now, though, I looked up. I stopped my pliers mid-snip and stared over at the door to the classroom. Because someone was coming in. Someone familiar. Someone with an oddly crooked nose.
“Good morning, children!” Finkle was holding a wooden box. A display case with something inside it, nestled snugly between velvet pillows.
He smiled, a broad, Cheshire cat grin as if all our wildest dreams had suddenly come true and he was the dazzling messenger of them. “Yes, that’s right,” he said. “It is what you think it is. Can you believe it?”
I couldn’t.
It was the lever. The actual lever.
From her desk, Mrs. Barber nodded. “From the archives.” She said the last word in a whisper, as if it was a secret.
Finkle nodded solemnly. Then he passed the lever around the room so we could take turns holding it, so we could feel the solid weight of history in the very palms of our hands.
As we did, he told us all about his artistic vision, which involved our mosaic, his lever, and a whole lot of weirdness.
The lever wasn’t only here for inspiration. It was also so we could make sure it fit. So we could mold our hundreds of tiles around it.
It was coming out of the archives and going into our mosaic. Mosaics plural, in fact. There were two of them.
One for Old Lower Grange. One for New.
They were going to lie side by side in the city square, with the lever in between, surrounded by a decorative border.
“A sundial!” Finkle boomed, as if he was announcing the most important announcement in the entire history of announcements. Then he picked up a marker and drew a sketch on the board.
New Lower Grange wa
s going to be a sundial, with compass points directing tourists to places of vibrant and /or laid-back interest.
Old Lower Grange was going to be a water feature, with a drinking fountain on one end.
The town would sit underwater, and when the level dropped too low, you could flip the lever, releasing more water into the well, drowning the old town over and over again.
I told myself not to think about whether it was morbid or festive.
After Finkle left, I studied my growing pile of blue. That should be enough for now. It was only the new Tucker’s that was blue. For the old one, I needed some orange and yellow from the pile up front.
I pushed my chair back and stood up.
“Ow!”
Behind me, Liam had one foot tangled in my chair leg.
“Sorry.” I looked down at his desk. He was snipping tiles for the fire tree — green and brown, green and brown. The fire tree was an enormous, ancient eucalyptus tree that used to act as a fire lookout for the area. It had metal spikes running all the way up it like a kind of spiral ladder, and a platform at the top where someone would sit, looking out over the bush for telltale curls of smoke. It was one of the easiest sections of the mosaic — first, because it was pretty much just a tall, straight stick, and second, because there was no “after.” They couldn’t exactly rebuild a tree, and it would take hundreds of years to grow one even close to tall enough.
Liam hardly had anything to do, really, but Mrs. Barber said it didn’t matter. She said he should just take his time and do a really good job of the fire tree.
She said that because she had accidentally almost given him the clock tower. It was the only other section left by the time she got to Liam, and I saw panic flood her face when she realized.
Mrs. Barber shoved the photograph onto her clipboard and took it back to her desk, where I saw her studying it later.
She was working on it herself. It was easier that way.
That way she didn’t have to look Liam in the eye and say the words “clock tower,” and we could all get on with piecing New Lower Grange together and pretending none of it had ever happened.
All of us except me.
Maybe it was seeing his dad the other day. Maybe it was passing the pool every day on my way back from the lake and seeing those familiar shorts flapping on the other side of the fence. Maybe it was going back through my box and finding all those old clippings —“Tragic Accident” and “Local Man in Coma” and “Crash Case Continues” — all those articles that couldn’t possibly be used because the centenary was a time for celebration and moving forward, and no one wanted to think about that.
I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
I couldn’t stop seeing the clear night, the clock tower, the car crashing and rolling and burning.
It was probably all wrong, what I was imagining. No one could say for sure what happened. There hadn’t exactly been anyone there who was able to describe it later.
Only Liam’s dad in a coma.
Liam, two doors down the hall from him, mending his bones and his burns.
And his brother, farther down again, under a thin white sheet, a wall of expensive machines fallen quiet by his side.
Liam untangled his leg. “What?”
I realized I was staring. “Nothing.”
I began to turn back around, but then he spoke softly. “Hey, where’ve you been, anyway?”
“What do you mean? Here.” I pointed at my chair. “There.”
I knew that wasn’t what he meant. He had seen me a couple of times. He might have called out to me once as I was passing the pool, but it was hard to be sure with all the yelling and squealing and announcements about hot fries.
He peered up at me through his bangs, with a little smile that said, You know and I know that’s not what I’m talking about.
“The pool,” he said. “You haven’t been going.”
“Yes, I have,” I began. “I —”
“No, you haven’t. I looked.”
It was so unexpected that at first I didn’t know what to say. My mind raced, hunting for ways to explain. “Oh, you mean the laps,” I said finally, as lightly as I could manage. “I don’t have to do them anymore. I’m . . . I’m better now.”
Liam stared at me. “Really?” he said. “That’s great.”
I nodded. “Yeah. So . . .” I began to turn back around, then stopped.
Because this was a small town and there was a good chance Liam’s mother had a friend whose cousin’s sister worked with Mom. All it would take was for Liam to casually say something like “Cassie Romano’s finally stopped doing those laps,” and within twenty-four hours the hairline cracks in my story would have spread and spread until they split everything wide open.
I glanced back over my shoulder and kept my voice light, as if it was an afterthought. “Could you . . . could you not tell anyone? About the laps.”
“About you being better?” Liam raised his eyebrows.
“Yeah.”
He hesitated a second, then nodded.
“Thanks,” I said quietly, but his head was already bent over the desk. I headed for the front, picking my way in between the tile fragments scattered here and there so as not to grind them into the carpet.
I gathered orange and yellow tiles from the box, looking across all the while toward my desk, toward Liam, his head bent low over his pieces.
As I watched, he brought his hammer down hard into the center of a light-brown tile, shattering it into a pile of uneven pieces.
Beneath my hands, I felt the cool, slick surface of the tiles. It was a strange idea when you thought about it — smashing something so you could piece it back together.
I didn’t miss an afternoon at the lake.
When the bell rang at the end of the school day, the town kids veered left toward Main Street and the farm kids went right toward the bus stop. And I doubled back along the fence, heading for the break in the trees. From there I could cut across the hills, zigging and zagging until I met up with the path I’d begun to etch back into the hillside, with the warning signs I barely saw anymore, with the hole in the fence I’d learned to knit back up so it couldn’t be found by anyone who didn’t already know it was there.
I never thought about skipping my swim, the way I used to with the pool. Not even when the temperature soared and the hill seemed steeper than ever and the bush around me felt so dry it might ignite at any moment out of sheer desperation.
It wasn’t just the absence of Band-Aids. It wasn’t just the quiet. It was the way swimming up there made me want to go farther and faster and harder, the way it didn’t feel like doing my six or digging in, but just like cruising across the surface.
And maybe it was also something else, something I wasn’t quite letting myself think about, something I had shoved years ago into a box under my bed.
Something that lay far below, something I didn’t realize was about to come rising up to meet me.
On the last day of school, we finished our essays. I crumpled up the one that began “My Lower Grange is two hundred feet underwater” and tossed it in the trash.
We finished our handprints. I chipped jagged bits of clay from the edges of my fingers, then smoothed over the rough bits with a slick layer of spit.
And we finished our mosaics. I closed the doors on Tucker’s. Liam pegged all the way to the top of the fire tree. Amber added the last square of blue to the lake.
It looked nothing like the lake, that color. As I stood in the shallows that afternoon, it wasn’t blue I saw. It was a hundred mixed-up shades of brown and blue and green, all of them blending into something you could never reproduce with a bunch of smashed-up tiles. And none of what was visible on the surface told you anything about what was underneath, about the bands of warm and cool, light and dark, that led you down to where the chill lay at the bottom, settled over the mud and the silt like a heavy blanket.
I pushed off across the water and began my swim. I was trying to practic
e breathing on the left as well as the right. Mr. Henshall always said we should, but I always got muddled on the left and ended up with a mouthful of water.
Breathe right, stroke-stroke, breathe left, stroke-stroke, breathe right, stroke-stroke. Slowly, I settled into an awkward rhythm, following the line of the shore as it curved away to the east.
Breathe right, stroke-stroke, breathe left, stro . . . what?
As I turned, there was a flash of something, something cutting through the glare of light slicing off the water.
It was nothing, probably. A spot on my goggles.
Breathe right, stroke-stroke . . .
Funny, though. The spot wasn’t there when I breathed right.
Which made it not a spot.
I breathed left slowly this time. Just to be sure that there was nothing. That it had been, if not a randomly appearing goggle-spot, then some kind of trick of the light, a reflection off the surface of the water.
But there it was again, that flash.
I gulped a mouthful of lake water, brackish and dark, and stopped, treading water. Leaned forward and squinted.
There was definitely something.
Something that hadn’t been there yesterday.
Not a fish. Or a bird. It wasn’t moving.
It was long and kind of straight. It looked . . . sticky.
I snickered to myself. It was my favorite joke when I was little. What’s brown and sticky? A stick! Ha.
It did look like a stick. But it was deep out there. Too deep for it to be a stick all on its own. There would have to be something holding it up.
A hand! I couldn’t help imagining it — a long arm beneath the surface, a pale white hand rising up to offer me this stick.
That would be just my luck, to land in the middle of a mythical adventure, and instead of a magic unbreakable sword that will give me dominion over many lands and make me a figure of legend for generations to come, I get a stick.
