“Mom’s just scared,” Cliff answered simply. “She’s scared of open spaces and doing stuff on her own.”
“Why?” It made Rock angry, thinking of their mother as a big scaredy-cat, too frightened of the outdoors to take a little walk by herself. “What’s she got to be scared of? And how come it takes you parading around like you guys are in the circus or something, especially if she doesn’t want to?”
Cliff stared at Rock for a moment, his chin tilted and lifted as if he were trying to make up his mind about something. He finally drew a patient breath and said evenly, “Because sometimes when you don’t feel good about yourself, like you feel sick or whatever, you figure out a way to put your brain to sleep. You click off from feelings about being happy or interested in what’s going on around you. And sometimes it takes another person to wake you up. So it’s like, Mom’s been in that kind of a doze for a while, but she knows she has to get better. She’s working real hard now.”
“That’s dumb,” Rock said. “I know if I wasn’t happy or if I was feeling sick, I’d get help right away.”
“Would you?” Cliff gave Rock a searching look. “If every day you felt one millionth of a degree worse than the day before, which day would you know you were sick?”
“I don’t know,” Rock answered stubbornly. “Since I can take just about anything.”
“Well, Mom and I aren’t as lucky as you that way,” Cliff said.
That night Brontie wet the bed again. Rock hadn’t even been sleeping; he’d been under the covers finishing up an American Revolution book, Johnny Tremain. It had mysteriously appeared in his desk that morning, but he knew it was a gift from Ms. Manzuli.
It was an excellent story, about a silversmith’s apprentice who wanted to fight in the Revolution, only he couldn’t because his hand was deformed, so he went to work for the Boston Observer instead.
Rock had just gotten to the part where Johnny was about to meet General Gage, so his heart was pounding already, when he heard the noises from below. He held his breath to better catch the distant sounds of his father talking and stomping and flipping on light switches downstairs. Cliff must have been listening, too, since Rock heard him jump out of his bed. Rock slid the book under his pillow, breathing slow.
“This is the absolute last time. Do you hear me?”
Rock could barely make out his father’s words. He crept from his bed and out to the landing where Cliff stood shivering in his doorway. Cliff’s hands rested on his hips and his head was bowed and tilted, straining to hear. There was no sound from Brontie, and their mother’s voice was thin as the chime of a music box.
“Stop it, George. George, please.”
“I’m going down,” Cliff said, and he cautiously dipped a foot over the first stair as though he were testing the water temperature in a swimming pool. He looked at Rock. “Listen to him.”
All Rock could hear were threads of speech too soft to understand.
“I’ll come with you,” Rock said. But he followed his brother down the stairs with the sound of his own blood beating in his ears. Rock knew that their father would become even more enraged when he caught sight of the two of them.
Every downstairs light had been turned on. Their mother and Brontie stood hunched in the cold hallway, squinting at their father, who looked like he’d been awake and lecturing for hours. Spying the boys, he raised a hand from his Mr. Clean pose to a traffic-cop stance.
“Get back upstairs, boys. Same old story. Brontie doesn’t know how to sleep in a big-girl bed, and we’re just trying to do some damage control.”
Rock looked down at Brontie, who was gripping Wynona in front of her body like a plate of armor to protect herself. He looked at his mother, who shrugged helplessly, then took a balled tissue from her bathrobe pocket and blew her nose.
“Let me just clean her up, George,” she ventured. Her nose was bright red with cold. “We can talk about this tomorrow. We’re all very tired. Boys, you go on up to bed. Isn’t everyone tired? I am. Go on, guys.”
But then their father suddenly twisted Wynona out of Brontie’s arms, dangling the doll high in his fingers.
“See how sad Wynona is, Brontie? You know why she’s so sad? Because you don’t take good care of her. You’re a bad girl, and Wynona doesn’t love you anymore.”
“She does so love me.” Brontie’s face drained to white as she watched her doll swinging from her father’s hand.
“No she doesn’t.”
“Dad, you’re gonna make her—”
“Excuse me, Cliff, but I don’t think I asked for your advice. Brontie, I’m going to have to find a new home for Wynona, until you learn how to be a big, grown-up girl. So from now on, Wynona is going to live in the mudroom.”
“No thank you, Dad,” Brontie said. Her eyes challenged him, but she spoke without confidence. “I don’t think Wynona wants to live there. It’s too cold.”
“Well, maybe she can come back when you know how to behave.” Their father shook the doll in her face. “Do you want to kiss her good night?” he asked. “No? All right then.” He strode into the kitchen, opened the mudroom door, and tossed Wynona facedown on the woodpile. The rest of them watched as he locked the door and brushed his hands together.
“Brontie, I hope you turn into a big girl soon. Katherine, you’ve got a handle on the cleanup? Because I’m going to bed. I’ve got a long day ahead. And no moving that doll.” He wagged a finger at Cliff. “Upstairs, ship out, show’s over.”
But Brontie ran to the mudroom door and stood on tiptoe, pressing her face against the door. “Wynona,” she called softly. “Wynona.”
“You need help?” Cliff asked their mother. She shook her head.
Brontie didn’t look so good, in Rock’s opinion. She’d turned away from the mudroom, and her eyes, flat with grief, stared into space. Their mother walked to her and took her hand.
“It’ll be okay,” she said.
Rock wondered how his mother could manage to tell this lie when not even Brontie believed her anymore. He stared at his mother now, daring her to speak to him, to try to tell him that everything was okay. She moved to touch him, and he stepped away from her.
He followed Cliff up the stairs and then slipped into his room. He took another pair of socks from his top drawer and rolled them over the first pair before climbing into bed. His fingers were shaking, and not just because of the cold.
He closed his eyes and let himself slip away into one of his favorite pictures, of himself and Liza at his home in California, a house Cliff had designed. They were out by the pool and he was on the high dive, about to do a perfect jackknife into the water. He could feel that Liza was watching, but he wasn’t nervous at all. There was no room for anything less than total confidence. His toes curled over the sun-glittering edge of the diving board …
“Hey.”
Rock opened his eyes. Cliff was standing at the foot of his bed.
“What?” Rock sat up.
“I gotta tell you something, so listen up.” Cliff began rubbing his hands together. “Man, is it cold in here. So, I called Aunt Louisa. Thanked her for that vase. It’s colder in here than my room.”
“Because your room’s over the fireplace,” Rock reminded him. “And gee, thanks for letting me in on the big news.”
“Actually, the big news is that I asked her if you and me and Mom and Bront could come out to Arizona for a while,” Cliff said. He stopped rubbing his hands and became very still, watching Rock. “Anyway, Aunt Louisa and I’ve been talking. About Dad, mostly. Matter of fact, she called me today at school.”
“At school? Aunt Louisa?” Rock’s mind tried to picture the scene, the crackling voice on the intercom, Cliff Kindle, please come down to the secretaries’ station, you have a phone call. Then Cliff, turned away from a secretary’s desk with the phone receiver clamped to one ear and his fingers pressed against the other, whispering and nodding.
“I don’t get it. What did you tell her, Cliff?”
“You told her all that?” Rock’s voice ended in a squeak. “When you said you’d break my arm if I even talked about that with anyone, then you just go ahead and blab everything to Aunt Louisa? Why?”
“Rock, you need to get this straight. Aunt Louisa can help us, she’s family. She knows that Dad’s a little extreme. That’s her word to describe him, by the way, not mine. I’ve got plenty better words. But anyway, I think Mom’s ready to do the trip. You know we walked all the way to the milk store today? I just wish we had another car for her to practice her driving. She says driving isn’t such big a jump, though. It’s mainly just the being-outside part that kind of gets to—”
“Dad won’t let us take a trip out to Arizona without him.” Rock started to laugh at the absurdity of the idea. Cliff’s plan was completely stupid. Get Mom able to drive out to see Aunt Louisa in Arizona on a trip that didn’t include Dad. “It’s nuts. We’ve never done a trip without him before. He’ll flip out. He won’t do it. He won’t—”
“He won’t know.” Cliff spoke gently, the way he sometimes made his voice for Brontie. “Because we’re not going to tell him.”
“That’s …” Rock started to wag his head back and forth, turning the idea over and over. Everything about it seemed wrong, but he couldn’t figure out the exact reason why. “That’s weird,” he said weakly. “Not to tell.”
“It’s not weird, Rock. Weird—I say weird is telling Brontie that her doll doesn’t love her anymore and then chucking it in the mudroom. Besides, this is just temporary, okay? It’s a visit, but it’s a good way to say, ‘See, Dad, we can go ahead on another plan of our own. We don’t have to keep freezing away in this place, bending under all your rides and power trips.’ ” Cliff’s eyes were vicious, and he wagged an accusing finger at Rock. “Like Liza, how she had to show Arlene—‘Look, Mom, I got another plan.’ And Liza got away. Why can’t we?”
“But …” Rock was still shaking his head. “No, no, you can’t compare. I mean, we’re a whole family. She was just one person, but we’re almost the whole entire family leaving our home.”
“Which is why it’s gonna work even better. Because we can stick together. Liza didn’t have anyone to stick to, so she had to leave on her own.”
“Hey, since you brought it up.” Rock drew his legs against his chest and rested his chin in the cleft between his closed knees. It would hurt to hear, he knew, but he had to ask. “About Liza. You think she’s okay, Cliff? Honest? You think it’s weird she hasn’t called? Or sent a postcard, or anything?”
“I don’t want to get into this now.”
“It’s like she went up in smoke.”
“We just gotta worry about ourselves, Rock. That’s what she’d’ve wanted.”
“You think she’s dead?” Rock asked. “I don’t think Liza’d do that. Just die like that. Go and get herself killed by some drug addict.”
“I hate to think something like that,” Cliff said. “I like to think she was smarter than that, and she got far away, and she’s putting it all behind her. Timmy, Arlene, Sheffield—and you and me, too. This place is all part of bad memories for her.”
“I’d never do that,” Rock mused. “Turn my back on my home.”
“Listen, Rock, you don’t have to come with us,” Cliff said, his hand cutting a dismissive slice through the air. “But even Mom thinks we need the time away. I have maps, Mom and I did a budget. The car can get us there if we’re careful, and Aunt Louisa says she’d even meet us—”
“Shut up, okay? I don’t want to listen to this dumb, stupid, bad plan anymore.” Rock tipped his chin toward the ceiling and closed his eyes on the conversation. What a lame plan. A plan to run away from their father just because Cliff didn’t have enough discipline, because Cliff was lazy and thought that their father was too strict, bossed them around too much. “Get out of here,” he added.
“It just goes to show how thick you are,” Cliff said. “I mean, you’re the one who can’t shut up about the patriots, and how they fought to the bloody death just so they could live in a free country. But you know what? I personally think all those patriots would have been embarrassed if they ever met you. You’re no rebel, Rock. You’re totally spineless.”
“You’re totally jealous,” Rock snapped back. “Because Dad gets along better with me.”
“That’s not it at all, dummy. Don’t you get it? You’re a lackey. Just like in the wars, the king always had—”
“Shut up.” Rock reached behind his head and threw his pillow as hard as he could. Cliff ducked and the pillow flopped onto the bookshelf, knocking over a couple of soccer trophies with a clatter. “No one in the Revolution fought against his own father,” he hissed. He lay back, his body trembling in frustration. He and Dad were practically in the same boat, both of them skimming on the surface of their day, never pulled into the secret undercurrent of what was really happening in the heart of this family. He was no lackey. He had spine. He could start a revolution, if he really wanted to.
“Think about it,” Cliff said stiffly. He cleared his throat, waiting for a response, and when none came, he walked to Rock’s door and touched a hand to the doorknob. “Good night, then,” he said over his shoulder. “All you need to do is pack some stuff. It’s better this way, Rock. I promise. If Liza were here, she’d tell you that, too. I only wish you could see it.”
CHAPTER NINE
MINUTEMEN
THEY WERE CALLED MINUTEMEN because they were ready to fight in a minute’s notice. As soon as a colonist spy galloped down the road, his lantern flickering its signal through the trees, the minutemen had their coats buttoned, their guns oiled, and their reflexes triggered for the general’s next command. Rock always thought he’d have made a good minuteman, since he was quick to wake up and alert in a flash.
But now Cliff had appointed himself the general of a battle Rock wasn’t sure he understood. Cliff had made their father the enemy. Cliff had ordered Rock to pack. Cliff had told him be ready to leave at any minute of the day or night. No matter how much Rock thought about it, though—no matter how many times he looked at the plan and tried to understand it—he couldn’t feel prepared. He felt dazed with indecision and frightened by the consequences. They were leaving his father. They were leaving him without telling.
Rock had always thought that he’d know immediately which side to choose if he were asked to fight. But how could he know where he belonged when the battle lines were being drawn inside his own family?
His mother wasn’t to speaking to Rock about Aunt Louisa. She made delicious school lunches for him instead, with napkins folded over little notes that read, “Thinking of you, Rochester. I hope your day is a happy one.” Rock knew it was the best his mother would be able to do. She only trusted Cliff.
Rock also began to notice that things were disappearing from his room. His cable-knit sweater, a couple pairs of socks, and definitely some underwear all went missing one day. Cliff was packing for him, he figured. Packing and stashing. Rock tried not to think about it.
His paper was almost finished. He had recopied everything his father had destroyed, and he had long stopped caring about the ten-page maximum. His paper now was twenty-six and a half pages long. Rock included everything he thought was important, and then typed out his final draft on the library’s one puttering old computer after school while Ms. Manzuli stood over his shoulder, helping him find the right words and the smartest ways to explain the battles and treaties.
He included passages about the loyalists and the mercenaries. He described the battles of Bunker Hill and Saratoga. He mentioned George Washington’s speech about hearing the bullets whistle. He wrote three paragraphs about the winter at Valley Forge, describing the blistering cold and even including a few gruesome details about how the soldiers’ toes froze off. All weekend he was in a
finger-aching fever, and he knew his spelling was off and his sentences weren’t so perfect; fuzzy grammar, Mrs. Lewin would say. But when he read back through it, Rock thought he could hear a fearsome shout in his paper, a voice that held the same fury of the Revolution, the excitement and description and important characters whose hearts pounded and blood boiled for freedom. He stashed the floppy disk in his sock drawer next to his pen, both of them hidden inside the black-walnut cigar box that had belonged to his grandfather Kindle.
His paper was due on Friday. There was also a test, with a multiple choice and fill-in-the-blank section and a pick-three-out-of-five essay section. It would take up the whole period, Mrs. Lewin explained. She would pass out extra paper if you needed it. Rock knew he would need it.
It would have been dorky to admit, but just thinking about that test made Rock sweaty with wishing for Friday. He would crush every kid in his class, even brainiac Brooke Allister. Cliff was always the machine mind, the one who brought home the A papers. But this time would be different; it would be Rock’s one hundred percent, a perfect score to present to his parents. And then his father wouldn’t be able to talk about Cliff’s natural intelligence the way he always did.
“Photographic mind,” Rock practiced saying, for when anyone asked him how he knew so much. He even rehearsed giving a modest little twitch in the corner of his mouth as he spoke. “Yeah, I just decided to take a quick look at the book the night before. But history kind of comes naturally to me.”
Ms. Manzuli had asked him for an extra copy of his paper to keep and to show her husband, and so Rock worked out a deal with the secretaries at the front office. They would make him an extra Xerox if he arrived early enough to school on Friday morning, and he got special permission to ride the early-bird transit bus that picked up kids on the junior-high and high-school diving teams.
He walked home from school on Thursday feeling content. His book bag was weighted with a huge volume about the Federalist papers that Ms. Manzuli had taken from her own house to lend to him. It wasn’t even a kid book; it was dense and pictureless.
Sons of Liberty Page 11
