Summer of the Gypsy Moths

by Sara Pennypacker

  “A little off track? Louise said someone called the cops on her for abandoning you.” Angel fished a Dum Dum from her pocket and stuck it into the corner of her mouth.

  “That person should have minded her own business,” I said, forming the words carefully because it felt like my face had suddenly turned to glass. I studied the gray-shingled houses passing by. My mother hadn’t abandoned me. I just hadn’t gotten in the car before she left that last time. I should have seen she was getting ready to veer off, and gotten in the car.

  I turned back to Angel. “My mom would have come back on her own. She was never gone more than a few days. She’d be fine if she lived here. Just fine. And besides, it would be better for Louise. To have her niece around. I think she’s really starting to like having us live with her. Like maybe she wants to make a family—”

  Angel yanked the Dum Dum out of her mouth and stabbed it toward me, about an inch from my face. “You are pathetic, Stella, you know that? She had to take you in, and the only thing she likes about having me is the check the state sends her.”

  “She wouldn’t be a foster parent for that. Nobody would,” I said.

  More jabbing with the lollipop. “Seventeen dollars a day. It adds up. Helps her buy all that junk from the Home Shopping Channel.”

  I closed my eyes and filled my head with icebergs, until I could practically smell the salty fog of their breath. I opened my eyes. “Angel, please. I’m just saying, if Louise mentions about my mom coming, maybe you could—”

  “Stella, whatever Brady Bunch fantasy you’re dreaming up, leave me out of it. I don’t care. Besides, I’m not sticking around long enough to be part of it anyway.”

  That caught me completely by surprise. “You’re leaving? When?”

  Angel plugged the Dum Dum back in and slid down the window, pulling her hair between us. She thumbed her music on. Disgust waves practically smoked off her.

  At the next stop, I got up and moved across the aisle. Angel didn’t even turn around, but so what? All through the bus ride, I smiled to myself about the news of that freed-up bedroom. Now maybe my mom really could come to live here. I smiled all through school, too—with only a week left, the teachers had pretty much given up. I smiled and daydreamed about a new life.

  In the mornings, after I’d done some chores, I’d head out—to school, or to the beach if it was summer—so my mom could spend the days scrapbooking or sculpting, or whatever her new thing was. She went through phases pretty fast. Anyway, I’d make sure she didn’t get stressed out. She’d be so happy, I could stop waking up in the middle of the night to make sure she was still here.

  Louise would be happy to have us around, too. In the afternoons, we’d help her with those blueberry bushes, and then maybe we’d watch her soap with her—who knew? Afterward we might get cones at Dairy Queen, or go to a movie or something. We’d do everything that normal families do. By the time I climbed onto the bus home that afternoon, I practically had us picking a puppy from the shelter.

  Angel was wrong. It wasn’t pathetic to imagine a brand-new life. It was important to stay positive. That was one of the things I admired most about Heloise—no matter what life throws at Heloise, she just cleans it up and looks on the bright side.

  Angel missed the bus home as usual, so I knew I had fifteen minutes before she got there. I dumped my backpack inside the front door and then cut around to the backyard. The ground there was sandy and rough, clumped with scratchy-looking bushes. I examined one of them. Sure enough, the twigs were knobbed with tiny berries—hard and green, but still, you could tell they’d be blueberries when they ripened.

  I ran into the kitchen. “Hey, want me to weed around those blueberry bushes?” I called out. “Or give them some of that fertilizer?”

  And then I stopped. The counter was littered and the cream was still out. Louise was sloppy about herself, but never about her kitchen. The smell of scorched coffee filled the air—the coffee in the carafe had boiled down to a burnt skin. I flipped off the Mr. Coffee. “Louise?” Her name sounded lost in the room, as if it was hanging in the air, looking for something to attach to. “Hey, Louise?”

  No answer.

  “Don’t be a baby, Stella,” I told myself out loud. “She just had to go somewhere. People go places all the time.” But the back of my neck felt the way alarm bells sound, as if my skin were ringing. It was the feeling I got whenever my mother left me.

  I glanced at the clock—in five minutes, Louise’s soap would be on. She never missed it. She’d be right back.

  I pushed aside the curtains, which she always opened after the Today show—always, like it was a rule. I liked that about her—she knew how important it was to keep to a schedule. The Escort was sitting in the driveway. My great-aunt wasn’t what you’d call the take-a-walk-for-the-pleasure-of-it type. Even on a beautiful day like today, it would take a flat tire to get her to walk somewhere, and the tires looked okay to me. The bags from Agway were still stacked where we’d left them. Beside the garden gate, a tray of seedlings looked wilted.

  I walked into the living room and called louder. “Hey, Louise?”

  The alarm bells were drilling up to my scalp now. I’ve gotten this feeling a lot—if the past two years had been a movie, alarm bells would have been the sound track.

  I’m never wrong about this feeling, about what it means. It’s the one skill I’ve got. Except I had to be wrong now.

  I went back into the kitchen, stacked the dishes in the dishwasher, put the cream away, and wiped the counter. Louise’s pill dispenser was open, seven compartments full of vitamins that were supposed to keep her looking young. Friday’s pills were still there. I snapped the cover down and glanced up at the clock. Nearly three.

  I ran water to rinse the coffee carafe. The hot glass tightened with a sharp creak and I jumped. Three o’clock. She should have been stretched out in her recliner by now, a Diet Coke and a stack of Fig Newtons beside her, back-talking the characters.

  And that’s when I finally heard it: The television was on. I had a second of relief. But what I heard was a woman with a rocks-in-a-bucket voice snarling at someone to “Suck it up, Cupcake.” Judge Geraldine.

  Not Louise’s soap.

  I headed for the den to turn it off.

  She was there. But she was gone. My knees crashed to the floor.

  CHAPTER 3

  “Oh, crap!”

  I looked up and saw Angel. She dropped her backpack. It thudded with a heaviness it couldn’t possibly have carried, like a cinder block.

  “Oh, crap,” Angel whispered again, staring over me. “Ô Jesus querido….”

  I followed her gaze. And saw it again.

  “Dead person. She’s dead. Oh, my God, oh, crap…oh, crap…dead person.”

  “Stop saying that,” I said. “Something’s wrong with her, and—”

  “Something’s wrong? She’s dead! Look at her. That’s a dead person. Oh, crap…”

  I reached for the doorway and pulled myself up. My legs felt like they were stuffed with cotton, as if all the bones and muscles had just powdered away. I swayed and gripped the doorway, but my arms were pretty cottony, too. Angel had hold of the wall in the hallway behind me, and she didn’t look any better.

  “We have to check for a pulse or something,” I said. “Call the ambulance.”

  “A pulse? Look at her tongue, look at her eyes! I’m not touching her. She’s dead!”

  “Stop saying that! What if she’s having a fit and she just needs to snap out of it? Or in a coma? What if it’s like her soap opera person who went into a coma, then boom, she was back, fine.”

  “Oh, no, she’s not going to snap out of this. She’s not coming back,” Angel said firmly, as though she’d just had a hotline call from the future. “Boom or no boom. She is dead.”

  “She can’t be. A mirror. That’s how you tell.” I backed into the hallway and pulled the shell-framed mirror off its hook. It rattled in my hands.

  I took a long bre
ath. Walking those few steps into that room was worse than any nightmare I’d ever had. “Hey, Louise?” I whispered. “Please wake up.” I kept my eyes away from her face, but I saw it anyway, and I knew right then I was going to remember it the rest of my life: her skin beige, as if it were carved from chalk, her tongue swollen, a strand of bleached hair caught in her teeth. Two flies on her bottom lip. It looked like they were wobbling around, but it might have been that tears had filled my eyes.

  I locked my gaze on her slippers, hanging off her purple feet, and leaned in with the mirror. The flies lifted. My knee brushed something cool and stiff and I flinched. Her fingers were sticking out, as if reaching for her coffee. I screamed and dropped the mirror and leaped back to the doorway, my heart pounding so hard, my chest actually hurt.

  “Okay, she’s dead,” I said, when I could speak. I turned my head to the kitchen and forced myself to breathe in and out. The air coming through the screen door was so clean, carrying the scent of the pink roses that swayed by the steps as if nothing in the world could be wrong. I filled my lungs with that clean, nothing-could-be-wrong air.

  Angel grabbed my arm. “What are you going to do about”—she waved her hand into the den—“about that…?”

  “She’s a person, Angel. That’s Louise.”

  “Fine. What are you going to do about Louise?”

  “Why is it my job to do something about it? About her.” The instant the question was out of my mouth, though, I knew the answer: I barely knew her, but Louise was my family.

  Angel shrugged. “Finders keepers.”

  “We have to call nine one one.”

  Angel stared at me. “Be-cause…?”

  I stared back at her.

  “Nine one one’s for an emergency, Stella. As in something’s going to happen if they don’t get here fast. She’s dead. She’s not going to get any deader.”

  “We have to call the police. We found a dead person.”

  “You found a dead person.” Angel looked like she was thinking hard. “But what if we didn’t? What if we hadn’t come home till the nighttime? What if we played sports or something? What if we never checked in this room, and she just sat there, croaked—”

  “Angel, we have to call the police. It’s a law or something!”

  Angel turned back to look at Louise again and shuddered. “I know.”

  My heart sank when she agreed—as if her words had cut the only string it hung from in my chest. I backed into the kitchen and picked up the phone. For a minute, though, I couldn’t do anything but look at my hand holding that phone. Someone had called 911 on a cold afternoon two months ago, and the police had come, and the Family Services people had taken me away, and then they tracked down my mother and all that stuff had happened in court. A 911 call had wrecked my whole life.

  Angel’s hand, slapping over mine on the phone, thumbing the end-call button, brought me back. One look at her face, and I knew she had her own bad memories. “Ten minutes,” she said. “Give me ten minutes. Come on. Please,” she begged.

  I followed her up to her room. She’d snatched her backpack from the hall, and now she dumped it out, strewing books and papers and lunch wrappings everywhere. She bunched a fistful of T-shirts from a drawer and stuffed them into the backpack. Then she crouched to drag some cutoffs from under her bed, then a pair of pink flip-flops.

  A sudden memory sprang up. The night of my mother’s birthday. I’d followed her up to her bedroom and found her packing in a frenzy, just like this. Her throat wore an inky chain from the necklace I’d made her. She’d tossed it on the bed, the crushed berries staining the white quilt like bruises. It wasn’t the first time she’d left, but it was the first time I’d recognized what was happening. The skin on the back of my neck began to prickle. “Don’t go!”

  My mother swept an armload of clothes from their hangers. When she bent to stuff them into her suitcase, I grabbed the necklace and crammed it under the mattress, my seven-year-old heart pounding. She wouldn’t leave without it, I thought. It made her feel enchanted. She didn’t even look for it, though. She just zipped the bag.

  I remembered feeling the sudden panic of not having the earth beneath me anymore. The sense that my skin was ringing in alarm. I grabbed her wrist. “Don’t go!”

  She’d shaken me off, then given me a glancing hug on the way out the door. “Go find your grandmother.”

  “You’re just going to leave me?” I’d said the same words then, too.

  “Six homes,” Angel said, shoving the flip-flops into the backpack without turning around. She sprang back to her bureau and swept in her hairbrush and a couple of elastics, overturned the cigar box she kept her jewelry in. “Six homes. That’s enough.”

  She turned around then. Tears streamed down her cheeks. It looked all wrong, and I realized I’d never seen Angel cry before. But then, she had never seen me cry either. Nobody had. I’d stopped doing it after my grandmother had died. After there was no one left to wrap her arms around me when I did it.

  I sank to Angel’s bed and watched her in the mirror. Angel dropped the backpack after a minute and sank to the other side of the bed. It struck me that if the two girls in the mirror had really just found a dead body, they should look different somehow.

  “Where are you going?”

  Angel wiped her face with the backs of her hands, then reached under her mattress and pulled out an envelope. “New York. My aunt just got there. She came over from Portugal. For me. She’s learning English, and when she gets us a place, Family Services says I can live with her.” She drew the letter out of the envelope and smoothed it. “She says, ‘É o meu destino agora.’ ‘It is my destiny now.’”

  She folded the letter and slid it into her backpack. “I’m her destiny, see? I’ll just arrive a little early, that’s all.”

  “She’s really dead,” I said, the words a complete surprise to me.

  “She’s really dead. And they’re really going to take us away.” Angel stood and zipped up the backpack.

  “Us?”

  “Well, they won’t let you stay here. They’ll dump you with another relative.”

  “I don’t think I have any others.”

  “A foster home, then. Like me.” Angel slung her backpack over one shoulder. “Except not me.”

  I got up, too, feeling the alarm bells stinging on my neck. Don’t go. “Do you have money, Angel? It’s going to be night….” Don’t go.

  “You could run, too,” Angel said. “Someone will find her soon enough.”

  Run? Where? My mother was somewhere between here and California.

  Angel shook her head and left, clattering down the stairs.

  I followed her. “It’ll be night,” I repeated, stupidly.

  Angel picked up her jacket from the kitchen chair and tied it around her waist. She looked around the room, and I could tell she was thinking about how it was the last time she’d see it. The expression on her face was hard to read, except that it made me feel sick with loneliness. The alarm bells were shrilling now.

  She grabbed the doorknob. “Just don’t call for a little while. Ten minutes, okay?”

  I looked over at the phone, remembered that other 911 call. How the alarm bells had mixed with police sirens until I couldn’t tell them apart.

  “Stella! Give me a head start. Okay?” she asked.

  I felt the words gathering and knew what they meant, how wrong it was. But I reached out and grabbed her sleeve anyway. “Don’t go! I won’t call tonight. Tomorrow is Saturday, Angel. Go then.”

  CHAPTER 4

  It’s hard to sleep with a dead person sprawled out in the room below you. I didn’t remember falling asleep at all, but I must have, because how else could I have awakened all those times…and remembered, again and again. Each time, I’d lie in the dark praying hard that I would hear a sigh from the den, and then the heavy creak of Louise hauling herself out of her chair and plodding up the stairs to bed.

  Angel was stuffing a half-empty pa
ckage of Fig Newtons into her backpack when I came downstairs the next morning. She looked the way I felt. She shouldered her backpack, then blew some hair away to look back at me. She started to say something, but I raised my hand. “I remember. I’ll wait fifteen minutes and then I’m going to call. Go.”

  “And you’ll tell them I stayed over at a friend’s, but you don’t know which one. Right?”

  “Right. I came home late last night, after something at school—”

  “After a rehearsal. For the play. Like we said,” Angel insisted.

  “I know. I’ll remember. And I just found her now. Go, Angel. Get out of here.”

  There was a knock at the front door. Angel and I both jumped, and she dropped her backpack. We froze, gaping at the door. I was sure it was the police, come to arrest us. My stomach started to heave, as though everything inside me had just been cut loose. The door swung open before either one of us could move.

  It was an old guy, dressed in regular work clothes, not a police uniform. He poked his head into the living room. “Louise, you ready?” he called. Then he saw us. He waved into the kitchen. “Morning, girls,” he said. “Pretty day.”

  I risked a glance at the closed den door and gulped back a hysterical giggle—it was so not a pretty day.

  A dog barked. The old guy leaned back out to yell, “Hold on, Treb.” Then he turned back to us. “Is Louise ready?”

  Angel walked into the living room. “Who are you?”

  “George Nickerson.” He stuck out his hand. Angel crossed her arms and glared at him until he dropped it. “I own the cottages next door? Didn’t Louise tell you I’d be here this morning?”

  “She did,” I said. When I have to lie, I get really nervous, and my mouth goes into blabbing mode. “Oh, yeah, she’s been talking about it for days. ‘Oh, by the way,’ she said, ‘George Nickerson will be over on Saturday. He owns the cottages next door.’”