The Second Life of Abigail Walker

by Frances O'Roark Dowell

  “You’re supposed to stay married for better or worse,” Anders said. “That’s the promise.”

  Her grandmother nodded, stared blankly ahead. “Yes, I suppose it is.”

  “Did you know that Lewis and Clark discovered over a hundred twenty mammal specimens?” Abby said after the quiet had been stretched thin and she was starting to feel awkward, like she had stumbled into a private family conversation she really shouldn’t be listening to. “I’ve been sort of reading this book my mom gave me.”

  Mrs. Benton nodded toward the door. “That’s what he’s in there writing about. All the zoological specimens they found along the way. He’s making a list, describing everything. His poem, he calls it. That’s what’s all over the walls—his notes, the charts he’s drawn up. He got interested after I told him about a book I was reading about the expedition.”

  “‘It was an undiscovered world,’ he keeps saying,” Anders reported. “‘Everything was new.’”

  “He says if he finishes the poem, then maybe he’ll be okay, so we’re all working on it together.” Mrs. Benton pushed herself up out of the swing with a groan. “At least it gives him something to focus on. I’m going to get him to take his pills.”

  The screen door slammed behind her. Anders looked at Abby and shook his head. “I keep thinking about that prairie dog. I still can’t believe he made it east alive,” he said. And then he added, “It almost gives you hope.”

  When Mrs. Benton came back, she handed Abby a piece of paper. “This is a partial list of animals we still need to do research on. Why don’t you take it with you? Look a few things up, if you’ve got the time.”

  “You want me to help?” she asked Mrs. Benton after she’d read the list. “With the research? But you don’t even know if I’m good at stuff like that.”

  “Oh, I can tell. You went home last night and started reading, didn’t you? You’ve got curiosity, and you know how to get your hands on a book. And”—Mrs. Benton paused and looked Abby straight in the eye—“you came back.”

  “I told you she would,” Anders said. “I knew it.”

  “The fact is, we need you,” Mrs. Benton continued. She nodded toward Anders. “Right now, there’s only two of us. And Matt, of course, but he has his good days and his bad days and can’t always concentrate.”

  “Couldn’t a doctor help him?” Abby asked. “I mean, help him with his feelings?”

  “A doctor is helping him,” Mrs. Benton said. “And we’re trying to get him a place at the Veterans Administration hospital, but with all the budget cuts, they’re short on space.”

  “It would be great if you could help,” Anders said. “I mean, anything you could do. It would be great.”

  So Abby agreed.

  On Tuesday, Anoop gave Abby one of his dosas for lunch and Jafar gave her half of a chicken salad sandwich. Her lunch had disappeared, and though she was sure Kristen was responsible, Abby couldn’t figure out how she’d done it. She remembered putting her lunch bag in her locker when she’d gotten to school that morning, and she didn’t think anyone else knew her combination.

  “Maybe you gave your combination to a friend, but forgot?” Jafar suggested.

  “But even if that were so,” Anoop countered, “why would her friend take her lunch?”

  Jafar thought for a moment. “She was hungry. Or maybe she needed to take a pill. When I take my allergy medicine, I always have to eat something, or else I get dizzy.”

  “Then why didn’t she eat her own lunch?” Anoop asked.

  “Maybe her locker is on the other side of the building.”

  “Well, if this is the case, Abby’s friend should have come forward and offered to buy Abby another lunch. I don’t think her friend is much of a friend.”

  While Anoop and Jafar argued across the table from her, Abby observed them, as if she were going to draw their pictures next to the birds in her notebook. Anoop was neat. He parted his dark hair on the side, so you could see the thin, pale line of his scalp. His white shirt was buttoned at the collar, and he had folded his sleeves twice so that they rested mid-forearm. His fingernails were very clean, his posture impressively straight. If he were a bird, he would be a shiny black raven.

  Jafar reminded Abby of her little brother, Gabe. His hair was shaggy, his smile lopsided and friendly, and his Atlanta Braves T-shirt had food stains on it. When she showed up at lunch on Friday, he’d exclaimed, “Excellent! Finally someone who will listen to my jokes without making old-lady faces.”

  Jafar, she was pretty sure, would be a hummingbird, filled with happiness.

  She was amazed how easy it was to sit with them. For one thing, she wasn’t always trying to figure out the right thing to say. With girls, you had to be careful; if you said something wrong, it could set off a chain reaction that would leave you sitting by yourself while everyone else hung out by the monkey bars and laughed louder than normal, just so you’d be sure to hear how much fun they were having without you. But while Anoop was irritable, he wasn’t mean, and Jafar reminded her of a puppy who was just happy to be with people.

  Is this how it is with boys? Abby wondered as she bit into her dosa. You just talk about stuff?

  She peered across the cafeteria, wondering if there were girls she could be friends with as easily as she’d become friends with Anoop and Jafar. After all, Claudia had been an amazing friend, nothing at all like Kristen or Georgia.

  She could still remember the day after Claudia moved, in the very middle of fifth grade. Abby had gotten on the school bus and hadn’t had a single, solitary person to sit with. She’d spent the bumpy ride to school thinking about how lonely she was going to be for the rest of her life without Claudia. No friends. No one to write notes to or have sleepovers with. No one to build shoe-box apartments with.

  As Abby looked around the cafeteria, her eye fell on Marlys Barry, who was sitting by herself, writing in a spiral notebook. She remembered with a twinge how Marlys—poor Marlys with the name no one could say, who had to explain at the beginning of every school year that it was pronounced Mar-liss, and still the teachers forgot—had invited her to eat lunch with her a few days after Claudia had moved, and Abby was going to, only Kristen had overheard their conversation and took Abby aside.

  “Listen, you really don’t want to eat lunch with her,” Kristen had whispered, holding tight to Abby’s arm, squeezing it a little bit. “You should eat at my table. And why don’t you sit with me on the bus home?”

  Abby had found Kristen’s offer impossible to refuse. Kristen lived in her neighborhood, but they’d never been friends, not really. Kristen had had too many sharp edges for Abby to feel comfortable around her. She was the sort of girl who was always leaning over and whispering in somebody’s ear while giving someone else the evil eye. In their neighborhood, she’d been powerful and best avoided, though at school she wasn’t that important.

  But Abby had been flattered that Kristen seemed to be looking out for her. So she told Marlys she’d forgotten she’d promised to eat lunch with Kristen, but maybe they could eat lunch together another time. Marlys had said sure, fine, but she’d never gone out of her way again to be friendly.

  Of course, now Abby knew she’d picked the wrong person to have lunch with. What if she’d eaten with Marlys that day? Would they have liked each other? Abby saw Marlys hanging out in the computer lab a lot—maybe she was some sort of computer geek, like John’s friend Travis, who was obsessed with creating role-playing games and making animated videos. Abby didn’t think she’d want someone who spent all her time on the computer for a best friend. That would get boring fast.

  Still, Marlys was probably great at doing computer research, Abby thought, reaching over and taking a handful of grapes from Jafar’s lunch box. Abby was terrible at doing research on the computer—there was always too much information to choose from when she was writing a report. How was she supposed to know what was important and what wasn’t? She hated doing research, period. She liked stories bett
er than facts, and research was all about facts.

  So why, oh why, had she told Mrs. Benton she would help with the Benton family’s project? Abby munched irritably on a grape and tried to figure out how she’d gotten into this mess, wondering if there was any way out.

  There were fifteen minutes left in the lunch period, and Abby supposed she’d better get started with her research, as much as she really didn’t want to. When she got to the computer lab, she noticed that Marlys was already there. Much to her surprise, when Marlys saw Abby in the doorway, she waved her over to her desk. “Georgia took your lunch, in case you’re interested,” Marlys said in a low voice. “I heard her talking about it in art. She called your mom last night and got your locker combination. She told your mom that she was planning a surprise for you. She threw your lunch box away in the girls’ room near the front office.”

  Abby sat down at the desk across the aisle from Marlys. Why did Georgia hate her so much? Because she’d stopped eating lunch with the medium girls? You’d think Georgia would be glad she was gone. “I guess that shouldn’t really surprise me,” Abby said, dropping her backpack on the chair next to her.

  “No, it probably shouldn’t,” Marlys agreed, and turned back to her screen.

  Abby entered her password into the computer, then peeked at Marlys while she waited for the school’s home page to come up. She never would have thought Marlys was the sort of person who eavesdropped on other people’s conversations. For one thing, she didn’t act like she was all that interested in other people. Thinking about it, Abby realized she only ever saw Marlys by herself, either tapping away on a computer here in the lab or else sitting in the cafeteria taking notes in a notebook—but about what? Was she writing down what people were saying? Was she a spy?

  Abby nodded to herself. She bet Marlys was a great spy. Quiet people paid the best attention. And great spies probably made great researchers. Oh, if only Abby had accepted Marlys’s lunch invitation that day! Then maybe they’d be friends, and right now Marlys could be helping her figure out the best way to find information on the bushy-tailed woodrat.

  Abby sighed. She typed “bushy-tailed woodrat” into the search engine box. 15,904 results popped up on her screen. Great, she thought, just great. She pushed her hand through her bangs and twisted some of the hair around her fingers. It was going to take her ten million years to get this done. She wasn’t going to be any help to the Bentons at all.

  riding the bus home that afternoon, Abby smoothed out the sheet of paper Mrs. Benton had given her on Sunday and started reading it again. Bushy-tailed woodrat, mule deer, pronghorn, white-tailed jack-rabbit, Columbian ground squirrel . . .

  Leaning back in her seat, Abby tried to imagine what some of the animals might look like. What in the world could a pronghorn be? She pictured a deer with a plug on top of its head. But Lewis and Clark wouldn’t have named something based on electrical appliances. They didn’t even have electrical appliances in 1804. Hmm. Something else, then. A horse with antlers?

  She thought of the horses she’d met on Sunday when Anders had taken her on a tour of the stables. There were eight in all, although only three belonged to the Bentons; the others were horses they stabled for other people. Two of the horses were jet-black, and another one was a beautiful golden brown, like the color of fall leaves. All the horses had whinnied at Anders and Abby as they’d walked through the stables, poking their noses over their stalls and snorting.

  They had all been absolutely huge. How in the world could anybody sit on top of one of those things? It would be like riding on top of a school bus.

  Abby told herself to just imagine them with prongs growing out of their heads, and giggled a little. She still hadn’t decided whether to go watch Mrs. Benton’s riding lesson at four o’clock. Even with the silly picture of pronghorned horses in her head, she couldn’t help feel a little nervous thinking about the humongous animals in the Bentons’ stable.

  What if she went and Mrs. Benton tried to get her to ride one? She’d feel silly standing in front of the other students and saying no thanks, not today, maybe some other time. They’d probably look at her and think she was too fat to get on a horse anyway.

  I could just go watch, Abby thought. I wouldn’t even have to get near the horses.

  She thought about the swishing sound the horses’ tails made as they flicked flies off their haunches. Like a straw broom sweeping out a cabin. Like Snow White making the little house nice and neat before the seven dwarves got home from work. Swish, swish. It was one of the nicest sounds Abby had ever heard.

  She could just watch. She could watch from some place Mrs. Benton couldn’t see her.

  There were six riders in the ring when Abby reached the Bentons’ farm. They all wore hard black hats, and five of them had on cream-colored jodhpurs and high leather riding boots. The sixth one, who was riding the golden-brown horse Abby thought was so beautiful, had on jeans and sneakers.

  “That’s Louise,” Anders informed Abby when he and Wallace came to stand beside her at the far side of the barn, where Abby felt she was at a safe distance from any suggestions that she get on a horse. “She’s Grandma’s best rider, but she can’t afford a horse or any of the gear. So Grandma lets her muck the stalls for lessons. And she lets her ride Ruckus whenever she wants.”

  “That’s really nice of your grandmother.”

  Anders shrugged. “It’s a win-win for everybody.”

  Abby caught the laugh coming out of her throat before it had a chance to escape. Some of the things that Anders said cracked her up, but she could tell he wasn’t like Gabe, who didn’t mind being laughed at. Maybe Anders was trying to sound like a grown-up because he had to act like a grown-up when it came to his dad. That thought sobered Abby up.

  “Do you ride?” she asked, wondering what it would be like to live surrounded by horses. Maybe if you saw horses every day, the idea of riding one wouldn’t be so frightening.

  “No, not really. I mean I used to, when we visited in the summers. But now my dad—” Anders paused, like he was embarrassed to continue. “Well, my dad worries about me getting thrown, or trampled. It’s stupid! I mean, I know how to ride a horse already, and I never got thrown off, not even when I was six! It makes Grandma really mad. She gets mad at my dad for worrying about everything. For being afraid of everything. He didn’t used to be, but now a lot of things scare him. Like if you accidentally drop a book on the floor? My dad jumps sky-high.”

  “My mom’s a nervous person too,” Abby said. “Not like your dad or anything, but she’s always worried about people being unhappy or mad at each other. She’s always trying to smooth things over. She hates it when anybody yells. That makes her super nervous.”

  Anders nodded. “Matt doesn’t like yelling either. But the funny thing is, he yells all the time. Mostly at night, in his dreams. But sometimes during the day, too. Stuff just gets to him more than it does other people.”

  Abby glanced toward the house. She wondered where Matt was. Was it okay to leave him alone? She sort of wanted to see him—was he really as handsome as she remembered?—but at the same time she didn’t. What if he came outside right now and started yelling at her and Anders? What if he had a gun? He’d been a soldier, so he might have a gun. Suddenly Abby shivered. What was she doing here? She might not even be safe.

  Abby looked at Anders. They wouldn’t let him live in the same house as Matt if Matt were dangerous, right?

  “Suck in your gut!” Mrs. Benton yelled, and Abby sucked in her gut before she realized that Mrs. Benton was yelling at her students, not her.

  “Come on,” Anders said, tugging on Abby’s arm. “I’ll show you where we have our pick-your-own patches. There’s a strawberry patch and blueberry bushes. In May, when the strawberries come in, we get about a hundred people a day. Oh, and I can show you the beehives, too. They’re way on the other end of the farm, away from the horses.”

  Beehives? Great, Abby thought as she followed Anders around the side
of the barn. Something even scarier than horses. “So you guys keep bees?”

  “Yeah, Grandma set up these hives a few years ago, and now it’s Matt’s big project, raising honeybees and selling their honey. He used to have hives when he was growing up.”

  “Don’t the bees make him nervous?” Abby asked. “Isn’t he scared of them?”

  “You’d think he would be,” Anders agreed. “But bees don’t bother him at all. Most animals don’t, except for horses. He spends a lot of the day outside, if the weather’s good. And when he’s inside, he’s writing stuff down about animals.”

  Matt was pruning blueberry bushes when Abby and Anders reached the other side of the farm. “Hey, guys!” he called when he saw them, waving his pruning shears in their direction. “You didn’t happen to bring any water with you, did you?”

  “Sorry!” Anders called out. “We’re dry. We came over to look at the hives.”

  Matt laid down his shears. “Great idea. I’ll come with you. I haven’t checked on my guys since Friday.”

  They walked into a brushy area that reminded Abby of the field across from her house, the weeds shedding their seeds, the leaves on the bushes turning scarlet.

  Anders pointed ahead. “The hives are just about fifty yards that way. We keep them back here so they can have a little privacy.”

  “And to protect them from the wind,” Matt explained. “They need some space, but they need protection from the elements, too.”

  Abby studied Matt from the corner of her eye. He looked better today, like he’d gotten a good night’s sleep since the last time she’d seen him. Still, being near him made her nervous. What if somebody stepped on a stick and it made a loud crack? Would Matt start screaming? Would he come after Abby like she was the enemy?

  Matt caught her looking at him. “Okay, don’t kill me,” he said, grinning. “But what was your name again? Anders told me, but my short-term memory is on the fritz these days. It’s the pills the doc makes me take.”