Summer of the Gypsy Moths

by Sara Pennypacker

  “Not everything’s a big joke, Angel! And we can’t just go digging a grave at”—I glanced at the kitchen clock—“four in the afternoon. Someone would notice.”

  “Like who?” Angel cried, exasperated. “We’re at the end of a dirt road. No one goes by. Ever.”

  “Just slow down, Angel!” The thing was, I liked plenty of time to think things through, to imagine everything that could go wrong, before I did something I couldn’t undo. “Tonight,” I said. “When it gets dark. We’ll dig the grave tonight.”

  “It’s not dark until really late—it’s like the longest day of the year or something.” She looked at the calendar. “Perfect!” she cried. “It actually is the longest day of the year! Louise had great timing. But I’m not hanging around with a corpse until it gets dark. Let’s get digging now.”

  “No. Tonight! Remember, she’s my relative.” So lame. So, so lame.

  Angel picked up the phone and thrust it at me. “Call. Call the police now. I’m out of here.”

  “No! No, wait. You promised.” I felt the old Alice-tumbling-down-the-rabbit-hole panic rise. Don’t go. “You need money, remember?”

  “I’ll find another way to get it. I’m not going to be ordered around all summer and have to follow all your stupid rules.”

  “What rules? I do not have rules!”

  “Are you serious?” Angel cried. “Do you ever listen to yourself? ‘Never put daffodils in a vase with other flowers—they’ll kill them.’ ‘Never swim in an outgoing tide.’ Actually, you must have a hundred rules about swimming. ‘Always store a marshmallow in with the brown sugar so it won’t harden up.’ Want me to go on?”

  “Those aren’t rules, they’re hints. Helpful hints.”

  “Oh, and ‘No burying bodies at four in the afternoon!’ is just a helpful hint?” She swung her backpack off the chair and shouldered it.

  “Okay, okay! You’re right. From now on, we decide everything together. Okay?”

  There was silence then. For a long time. Angel’s fingers clenched and unclenched around the backpack straps.

  “How about this,” I tried. “We dig now. If anyone sees us, I guess it will just look like we’re working in the garden. But we don’t…you know…until it’s dark.”

  “Fine,” Angel growled after a minute. She stomped over to the door and I followed. Both of us just stood silenced then, looking out. While we had been arguing, it had begun to rain. The weather was on my side. I bit my cheek so my relief wouldn’t show, but Angel scowled at me anyway.

  “Fine,” she growled again. “We’ll do it tomorrow.” She stomped upstairs and stomped back down, pajamas and earphones trailing out of her backpack. She lifted the master key off the hook at the front door. “But I am not spending another night with a dead body.”

  I dashed through the rain after her, over the yard and into Plover. When she marched into the bedroom with the twin beds, I thought, Good, we can talk a little and I can apologize. She was right—sometimes I did get kind of bossy. Before I could follow her into the room, though, she slammed the door.

  Well, fine. Wherever that girl was, I wasn’t.

  The smell inside was a little musty, even with the lingering bleachy scent of our cleaning, so I raised the windows a little. Not enough to let the rain in, but enough to smell the fresh wet pines outside. As I knelt on the couch, I noticed something: Most of the pillows had tears, raggedly sewn back up. I remembered what George had said about kids on vacation, and wondered how many pillow fights they’d been through. I got up and wandered around then, and everywhere, I saw what he’d been talking about. It was kind of fun to make up the stories behind what was broken. The cookie jar was missing an ear—a hit-and-run cookie thief. The spaghetti pot lid was dented—probably used in battle with the chipped ladle. Two blades of the fan were fresh new wood—I couldn’t even imagine what had happened to the old ones.

  I went into the open bedroom and lifted the mattress. The slats were half-inch-thick boards—you’d have to jump pretty hard to crack one of those. The thought made me smile. I got into the clean blue sheets we’d put on this morning and thought, I like it in here.

  CHAPTER 7

  “Jesus querido!” Angel dropped the shovel.

  I clutched at my heart.

  “Sorry, didn’t mean to startle you. Back to mow and finish up what we didn’t get to yesterday.” George climbed over the wire fencing and picked the shovel up, handed it back. He bent the fencing down a little and Treb sailed over it, then dropped to give himself a dirt back rub. He scrambled to his feet and gave us a big dog smile, as if to say, Wasn’t I entertaining? Angel and I were still having heart attacks, though, and we ignored him. Treb flopped down and sighed as if he was exhausted from trying to get our attention.

  “Now, what she got you planting? A rowboat?” George laughed at his own joke, but we sure didn’t. “Something big, anyway.”

  I looked down at the ground. The three of us standing there threw three early-afternoon shadows that arrowed directly toward the house, as if sending a blaring sign to George. He didn’t notice, though. I looked out over the marsh, ordering myself to breathe in, breathe out.

  “Pumpkins,” Angel said firmly, and started digging again. “We’re planting a row of pumpkins. The really big kind. Giant.”

  That girl. It was terrible to lie, of course. But Angel was so good at it, I couldn’t help admiring her.

  “Kinda late for pumpkins,” George said thoughtfully. “Shoulda gone in Memorial Day. Still, I guess if the frost holds off this fall…” He poked around at the beans, their bright-green tendrils curling around the section of lattice Louise had leaned up there. “Louise has a green thumb, I’ll give her that. Tomatoes look good.”

  “Well, we have to get back to work,” Angel said. She stabbed the earth, dumping a shovelful right next to George’s work boot.

  George wasn’t too good at taking a hint, though. And he wasn’t in any hurry to leave. He leaned back against a fence post, then dug around in his pocket for a pipe and some tobacco. I turned my face away, suddenly certain that Your friend Louise is dead in the den! might as well have been written on my forehead. I heard the tiny pop of the match catching, heard the wet rattle of the pipe stem as he drew in to light it. I smelled the tobacco. Breathe in, breathe out. We were just two girls planting pumpkins.

  “Pumpkins go in mounds, not rows,” he said. “She should know that.”

  “Yep, she said that,” Angel said. “I just forgot.”

  “Pumpkins have big appetites. You got fertilizer?”

  I shot Angel a look, but it was no good, of course. Not with that girl.

  “Oh, yeah,” Angel said. “We’ve got a lot of fertilizer.”

  “Good. Well then, you want a thick layer of mulch to keep the weeds down. Seaweed’s the best. You tell her she can use my truck if she wants to go down to the beach and pick up a load right now. I’m going to be here awhile, mow the lawn and wash the decks. Never mind, I’ll tell her myself. You girls—”

  “No!” Angel and I yelled at the same time.

  George looked between us, eyes narrowed. “She still sick?”

  “Yes,” I said at the same time as Angel’s “No!”

  “I mean, yes,” Angel said. “She’s still sick, but now she broke her foot.”

  I whipped around to stare at her.

  “Yeah, she was so sick, she lost her balance and fell off the back steps. Actually, I think she might have been…you know…” Angel tipped back her head and cocked her thumb to her lips, pretending to glug from a bottle.

  I had to turn away then. George looked as stunned as I was.

  “What a night,” Angel went on. “She had to go to the emergency room, got a cast and crutches and everything.”

  “Drinking, Louise…” George shook his head as if the picture wouldn’t come into focus. He took a thoughtful pull on his pipe. “Well, that’s a lotta woman to have to haul around on crutches. I’d better go see what I can do—”
>
  Angel actually sprang in front of him, blocking his way. “No,” she said. “She’s asleep. She was up all night—you know, in the emergency room. She’ll be mad if anyone wakes her…mad at us!”

  George turned back to the house. “Something’s fishy here, girls,” he muttered. “I’ll go talk to her.” He clamped down on his pipe and started over to the house.

  “Hey, that’s a great idea about the seaweed,” I said. “Let’s go now and get some.”

  I climbed over the fence and headed for George’s pickup next door before he could answer. Angel was right behind me. We got into his truck, and I tapped the horn and waved.

  George turned on Louise’s kitchen step, his hand raised to knock, looking torn. There wasn’t much he could do, though, with two girls parked in his truck like eager puppies, ready to go for a ride. He shook his head and came back across the yard. The driver’s door opened with a creaky sigh, and Treb jumped onto the bench and wriggled himself in between Angel and me. Then George heaved himself in with his own creaky sigh and cranked up the engine.

  “How long she going to be laid up?” he asked, squinting up at the house as we backed past it. “Couldn’t be worse timing. I got a boat to run, codfish to chase, a crew to pay. They depend on me—Johnny Baker’s wife just delivered twins—and it’s a short season. Boat’s been hauled out a week, so we’re already behind. I miss a single day in summer—a single day—and we all suffer come February, let me tell you. She can’t be calling me every ten minutes to come replace a screen, pick up charcoal, that kinda thing.”

  “Don’t worry,” Angel said. “She won’t be calling you.”

  I kicked Angel’s ankle, and she kicked me back. “As long as she can’t walk, we’ll take care of things for her,” she assured George. She started messing around in the glove compartment, as if that was the end of that discussion. Suddenly she yelped and pulled her hand out with a wounded look.

  George reached over and closed the glove compartment. “Sorry. I throw my hooks in there. You all right?” he asked.

  “Oh, sure,” Angel said, sucking the tip of her finger. “Fine.”

  “You and Treb.” George chuckled. “That’s how he got his name, you know. Came up to me on the beach one day, just a puppy, a stray if I ever saw one.”

  “This dog?” I threw my arm around Treb. “This dog was a stray?”

  “This is a great dog,” Angel said—the first time we had agreed about anything.

  Treb lifted his head as though he knew we were admiring him. Angel scratched his ruff. “Who wouldn’t want him?”

  “Happens all the time on Cape Cod,” George said. “People get a puppy while they’re on vacation, seems like a good idea. Then by the time they leave for home, they realize they don’t want the responsibility. So they just leave it behind when they pack up. Terrible. The way I see it, whoever let this dog go didn’t deserve him.

  “Anyway, I was bluefishing, and he came up and sat down behind me, waiting for me to turn around. I finally did, and that’s when I saw: He had a big treble hook lure hanging from his lip. All three hooks, clean through. Don’t know how he managed that. But he sat still and let me snip off the barbs and then pull them through—musta hurt something awful—and he never flinched. This dog hasn’t left my side since.”

  The truck bounced, its engine a gentle growl. It was good riding up high—it made me feel like a little kid somehow. I grew excited: Maybe I’d ridden like this with my father, up high in a truck. I didn’t remember it, but that didn’t mean it hadn’t happened. I was only two when he left. Memories could be locked down deep with little kids. Sometimes you had to dig them out.

  Maybe my father had driven me around in a rumbling truck like this back in New Orleans, trombone behind the seat, radio on, singing along with it to his little girl. Maybe he’d pulled over to a club he used to play in, brought me in on his shoulders, introduced me around. I would have been shy, but he would have said, “This is my little girl, my little Stella by Starlight. She sweet or what?”

  “Hey.” Angel’s elbow jab interrupted my thoughts. “You just going to sit in here?”

  We were there, at the far end of the Mill River Beach parking lot. George was already dragging the barrels out of the truck bed. I slid out and joined him.

  He pulled a rake out. “Only got the one. You girls take a walk. I’ll just be a few minutes here.” He snapped a leash onto Treb’s collar and handed it to me. “Watch him, now. He finds a dead fish, a dead gull, out here, he’s gonna roll in it. Once he found a seal. Oh, boy, what a smell—took me a week to wash it out.”

  I took off toward the water and was surprised when Angel followed. She never went anywhere near the water—didn’t even want to look at the ocean from a distance, which was kind of hard to avoid if you lived on Cape Cod. Angel managed: She kept her bedroom shades down, ate her meals at the chair facing the refrigerator, and generally pretended we were living in Kansas.

  Angel parked herself on a flat boulder at the base of the first jetty, shoulders hunched as if it were cold, facing away from the sea with her long black hair hanging like drawn drapes. I walked along the edge of the water, Treb trotting beside me, stopping every few feet to nose up some seaweed or sniff at a crab. But then I turned around, feeling guilty. Here I might have just had a memory of my father, while Angel couldn’t even look at the ocean.

  Angel never once mentioned her father. Louise had told me how he’d died, though: When Angel was seven, he’d gone down with his scalloper in a freak squall. The boat took on water, went down fast. They had an extra hand on board that day, someone’s cousin. One more than the boat was fitted out for. As the captain, Angel’s father had handed out the survival suits, and because of the extra guy, there hadn’t been one for him. He drowned fifteen minutes before the coast guard got there.

  “Puh. Cutting corners” was Louise’s take. “And with that motherless little girl needing him.” She’d scowled into the dishwater as though she would have had extra lifesaving gear on board any boat of hers.

  I walked back and sat down beside Angel. She ignored me as if I were another rock on the jetty, but Treb worked his way between us and sat panting and wet with a satisfied dog smile. I practiced in my head what I might say about her father, about how heroic I thought he was. Before I could find the right words, though, Angel got up and walked away, down the beach. I stroked Treb’s ear and watched her.

  Angel walked the shoreline, not looking at the water, but not looking inland, either. She was focused on something ahead of her. She drew up behind a huge flock of gulls—maybe a hundred of them—resting on the line of seaweed left by the tide. The gulls were all facing offshore, into the breeze, away from us. They shifted, as if they were a little uneasy with a human so close behind them, then settled down again.

  Very deliberately, as though she were a conductor opening a symphony, Angel raised her arms. And all those gulls, all of them, at the very same instant, took flight! Those birds—they were Angel’s orchestra. Even from where I sat, a hundred yards behind, I could feel the powerful beating of their wings lifting my heart in my chest like hope.

  And through it, Angel just stood there, arms still swept up to the flock wheeling above her. I wished I could see her face.

  CHAPTER 8

  George dropped us off and went to start the lawn. The first thing I did was waft a fresh coating of Febreze over Louise, spraying extra long, since I didn’t think the manufacturers were considering decomposing bodies when they came up with the instructions. I pulled the door shut, hard.

  Angel was in the kitchen, staring into the open refrigerator. She took a sleeve of American cheese out and peeled off a couple of slices, then passed it to me. “We missed breakfast. And lunch.”

  I ate a piece, peering into the fridge next to Angel, and started calculating. “She shopped on Wednesdays. She cut her coupons in the morning, then headed out before the specials ran out. That means we should have three more days of food.”

 
; “More,” Angel figured. “Since she’s not going to be eating her share.”

  “It’s still not much. There’s not much here. Oh, wait. Her hurricane cupboard.”

  Angel gave me a blank look.

  “She used to say that anyone who lived on Cape Cod and didn’t stock up in case of a hurricane was a fool. Sometimes she went down there when she needed a can of something. It’s in the cellar, that’s all I know.”

  I found it: Next to the laundry, a cupboard with two shelves full of stuff: a tiny canned ham, a giant jar of peanut butter, crackers, maybe half a dozen cans each of tuna fish, beans, and tomatoes, and a five-pound tub of Crisco. There were candles and matches and batteries, too.

  I ran back up, bringing the peanut butter. You can eat peanut butter for three meals a day. “We’re not going to starve for a while,” I said. “Plus, there’s her garden.”

  Angel made a gagging face—she never ate anything green.

  “Scurvy is a real thing, you know. It’s not just sailors who get it.”

  Angel rolled her shoulders. She pulled one of her never-ending supply of Dum Dums from her shorts pocket and stuck it in her mouth. She opened the freezer and poked at a red-and-white box.

  “Not the coffee cake,” I said. “She keeps it there in case.”

  “In case what? In case she dies and we’re hungry?”

  “No, in case someone stops by unexpectedly. Didn’t you ever listen to her?”

  “I tried not to,” Angel said. “Blah, blah, blah.” She pulled the coffee cake out.

  “No,” I said, surprised at how strongly I felt. “We are not touching that. It was important to her. She liked to feel prepared.”

  “She’s dead,” Angel said, and ripped open the end of the box. “She probably wasn’t too prepared about that.”

  I reached for the box, but Angel yanked it back.

  “Don’t do it, Angel. I mean it.”

  Angel eyed me then, trying to decide how far to fight. I set my jaw and folded my arms to let her know.