Summer of the Gypsy Moths

by Sara Pennypacker

  People’s sleeping sounds are like fingerprints.

  Louise had been easy to keep track of. Her snoring was loud and steady, except for when she snorted herself awake every now and then. My grandmother had been a steady snorer, too, but it was a soft, easy whuffling. My mother—who was the reason I learned to listen in the first place—didn’t make any breathing sounds at all, but she whimpered all night, as if in her dreams someone was always being a little mean to her.

  Angel didn’t snore or whimper, but every once in a while I’d hear a small, quick rustling of the sheets. I somehow knew she was scissoring her feet around, like a dog with a dream. I’d sit up in my bed, straining to hear it over Louise’s snoring, and then when I did, I’d lie back again thinking, That girl’s here, but she wants to run.

  The night we buried Louise, I woke up around midnight as usual and lay still, listening for Angel’s rustle. What I heard instead was rain. It took a minute to remember what had happened earlier in the night. I lay in my bed for as long as I could, trying not to imagine the rain washing away the dirt we’d shoveled over Louise. That was crazy, that couldn’t happen. But then I gave up and went over to the window.

  A full moon lit the backyard silver, so bright the trees threw clear shadows on the ground. But I still heard rain—not a soft, gentle rain, but a sharp pattering that made me shiver. I lifted the screen and stuck my hand out to be sure: It was not raining. I listened harder; now the sound was more like chewing—the sound a million angry bees might make if they had sharp teeth. I looked over to the garden, to the fresh, dark mounds of dirt over Louise.

  I ran back to my bed and crushed a pillow to each ear.

  CHAPTER 10

  When Angel came downstairs Monday morning, ten minutes before the bus was due, she glared at me as though it was my fault school started at eight. “You know how to drive?” she asked, plunking herself down next to me at the kitchen table.

  “Of course not.” I slid the Cheerios over to her.

  Angel pitched the box of cereal over her shoulder and into the sink, pulled a Dum Dum out of her pocket, and stuck it in her mouth. She started talking around it. “We’re going to have to learn, then. We’ll start today.”

  “What?”

  “Well, how else are we going to get around?”

  “No! For one thing, it’s illegal. For another…Never mind, the bus is coming.”

  “I don’t even know why we’re bothering to go to school,” Angel muttered.

  “Yes, you do. So no one gets suspicious. We decided it last night. Both of us.” I got up to wash out my bowl and spoon—Heloise says cleanup’s easier when you attack it right away. I lifted the Cheerios box and was relieved that only a few Os were dissolving in the sink. I closed up the box and put it back in the cupboard, then leaned into the window. Louise’s garden was shining bright and green and innocent under the early sun, with its dark secret hidden deep underneath. “Are we really doing this?” I wasn’t sure if I’d said the words aloud.

  Angel made a scoffing sound and hoisted her backpack. “Don’t talk to anyone today.”

  Like I would. I picked up my stuff and followed her out, feeling a sick worry pool in my belly. As Bus Two came growling down Pine Lane, I remembered. “Angel, did you hear anything last night?”

  “Like what?”

  “Like a chewing sound. Like…something bad.”

  Angel shot me one of her looks. “I didn’t hear anything.” Then she snapped her earphones on and looked away. On the bus, she took a seat as far away from me as possible. As if I had something contagious.

  Wherever that girl was, I wasn’t. I could do that again.

  School, at least, was easy. Nobody seemed to notice the big sign I felt sure I wore, the one that flashed, ASK ME ABOUT MY WEEKEND! The teachers were preoccupied with collecting books and recording grades in their ledgers, their faces grim as they pressed their red pencils along to the finish line. The kids were pretty much on vacation already, and neither Angel nor I had made any friends—when you arrive at the end of a school year, the groups are already tied into hard knots. Angel and I ate lunch at opposite sides of the loners’ table without talking. Same as usual.

  I spent my afternoon study hall in the library, and I never even saw the librarian. This was a relief, because as soon as I’d arrived in April, Ms. Richardson had decided to make me a project of hers. She seemed to be able to read my mind. She’d suggest a story about a girl having trouble making friends in a new school just when I was feeling the loneliest, or a book about families getting back together when I was most worried about my mother not coming back. I know it sounds crazy, but I wouldn’t have been surprised if Ms. Richardson had handed me a book about kids burying people in their backyards.

  When I got off the bus, I remembered to collect the mail so the postman wouldn’t get suspicious. There was a lot, since it hadn’t been picked up since Thursday. Junk mostly. Coupons for gutter cleaning and picture framing, real estate flyers. I almost missed it: Stuck inside a Humane Society brochure was a postcard from my mother.

  The Grand Canyon.

  Hi, Stella. I’ll have to bring you here someday—it’s amazing! Off to California tomorrow! A theater director I used to know is looking for a costume designer…me! Hope you’re having fun with Louise…. How’s the beach? Love, Mom.

  Hope you’re having fun? How’s the beach? Like we were both just on some summer vacation? Part of me wanted to rip up the postcard and throw it away. But I reread the line about work and thought that a costume designer sounded more promising than a “possible” job with horses. Then I tucked the postcard back inside the brochure with the sad-faced puppies and wedged it into the bottom of the mail basket.

  When Angel came in, I showed her the bills—electric and phone. “Should we open them?”

  “What’s the point? We aren’t paying them.”

  “What if they shut off the service?”

  Angel dropped a couple of slices of bread in the toaster. “So we pay them. You know how?”

  I shrugged yes. Over the past two years, I’d had to learn. Still. “Forgery’s a crime, you know.”

  Angel smirked and rolled her eyes toward the garden.

  She had a point.

  I fished Louise’s checkbook out of the drawer and sat down with it. She was as neat with it as she was with her kitchen, so right away I could see that she’d paid all her bills about a week ago, on the fifteenth. I saw something else: There were no checks written that could have been rent, and there were none written to a bank that could have been mortgage payments. That meant she owned this house all right, free and clear. Then I ran down her deposits, to see how long the money might last. The amount marked “Foster Care” surprised me.

  “Angel,” I said, “how much did you say the state pays for having you?”

  “Like seventeen bucks a day. Why?”

  I did the math. Louise had been getting paid for me, too.

  I tossed the checkbook back in the drawer as if it had just bitten me and tore the bills in half. “They always send a second notice,” I said. Another thing I’d learned over the past year. “So we’re safe for a month at least.”

  “Good,” Angel said. She opened the refrigerator door. “We’re out of milk.”

  The last three days of school passed. As soon as I got off the bus each afternoon, I went straight out to the garden and got to work. I told Angel I was doing it so things would look normal. But the real reason was that I had promised those plants I would. And I figured I owed Louise that much. She had given us her home. She was still giving us her home. It came with some responsibilities.

  I found out I liked gardening. Plucking weeds from the even lines of vegetables soothed me the way cleaning did. When the weeds were out, I smoothed the dirt around each stem, just like you’d smooth a blanket around a sleeping baby. I planted the tray of seedlings Louise had bought back on Thursday, and watered them gently. After a couple of days, they straightened up and began to throw
out shiny new leaves. That made me proud.

  The blueberry bushes were another story, though. I raked in the fertilizer and spread the mulch, following directions in Louise’s gardening books. I ran buckets of water out to them, since the hose didn’t reach that far, and even brought out a spray bottle to mist them. Nothing helped—they got droopier each day.

  “I give up!” I yelled finally, kneeling in the middle of the patch, yanking weeds. “What do you want?” I glanced back at the house and saw Angel watching me from her open window. I jumped to my feet, embarrassed. But then I waved up at Angel. Because, so what? She wasn’t talking to me; so what if I talked to plants?

  The outside world didn’t bother us much that week, and we returned the favor. No one stopped by, and most of the phone calls came in while we were at school, so the machine caught them. The library letting Louise know her book was in. Some guy running for some office, hoping he could count on her vote. A bunch of people calling about the cottages. Except for Plover the first week, we were fully booked, so we didn’t call them back.

  The first time the phone rang at night, we jumped. Louise wouldn’t pay for caller ID—“Why would I pay good money to find out who’s calling me two seconds earlier than they’re gonna tell me themselves?” was her thought—so there was no way to know if it was safe to answer.

  “We should pick up,” Angel decided. “So no one gets suspicious.” Then she waved her arm toward the phone to let me know that “we” meant “me.”

  It was Anita, someone who went to bingo with Louise.

  I mouthed B-I-N-G-O to Angel. Angel pantomimed hanging up.

  I couldn’t. How could I have forgotten about bingo? It was the highlight of Louise’s month! My mouth went into its nervous blabbing spree. “She’s out shopping. She’s out shopping for us. For food. She likes to get us our favorite foods.”

  Angel sank to the kitchen table and made a face, as if I was the lamest liar she’d ever heard.

  “I’ve got company, so I won’t be there next time,” Anita said. “I’ll see her in August, though. I wonder if you could give her the message, dear.”

  “No junk food, though,” I assured Anita. “I want two healthy girls, that’s what she’s always saying.”

  Angel threw her hands up in the air, as if I was such a loser, she gave up.

  Even then I couldn’t stop. “We’re all really healthy here!”

  Angel jumped from the table and made a slashing motion across her neck.

  “Well, gotta go,” I said.

  Angel took the phone from me. “From now on, I answer it,” she said.

  So the days passed—school and then gardening and then scrounging up a meal with Angel. But the nights didn’t. I’d lie in bed and I’d hear things. Coyotes, howling in the distance about a kill; great blue herons screeching like strangled cats; mice in the eaves. Little shifts and creaks that I knew were only the normal house sounds, sounds I’d slept right through when Louise was here, but now they scared me so much, my heart knocked against the mattress.

  The worst sound of all was the chewing. The sound I couldn’t help imagining was Louise’s new night sound—her new fingerprint. I’d asked Angel again if she’d heard it, and she snapped at me that she didn’t know what I was talking about.

  One night in the middle of the week it hit me, so hard I jerked bolt upright, shaking. Crazy people heard sounds that weren’t there.

  Or people who felt guilty about things.

  CHAPTER 11

  Friday morning, no more school. As soon as I got up, I went into Louise’s room. I didn’t like it in there, surrounded by her things with their wilted-floweriness, but I’d searched everywhere else for links to my mother. And I found one as soon as I stepped inside: Holding the closet door open was an iron doorstop in the shape of a pug dog. It was identical to one that had been at my grandmother’s house—they must have been a pair once. I had loved that dog. He always sat at the kitchen door, looking over his shoulder as if to say, Come on in, I’m holding it open for you. I used to carry him all around with me when I was little, like he was a real dog, although he probably weighed almost as much as I did.

  My mother had hated that doorstop, though. She’d stub her toe on it and curse, time after time when she was pacing around. After my grandmother died, she’d gotten rid of it.

  I bent down and patted the pug’s head, and then I went into Louise’s closet. The first box I pulled down was full of Christmas ornaments. A memory sprang up.

  A New Year’s Day. My mother had been gone since Christmas this time. My grandmother and I were taking down the tree. Snow was falling outside, and inside it was too quiet, with my mother gone. All that silence sounded like blame to me—as if it was telling me I’d done something to make my mother leave. “Why didn’t you make her stay?” I asked my grandmother. “You’re her mother. Why don’t you tell her what to do?”

  My grandmother lifted an ornament from the tree—a glass ball, sheer as ice water, with gold threads shivering through it.

  “This is your mother, Stella,” my grandmother said, holding up the ornament. “You and I are rubber balls. You drop us, we bounce. But your mother needs to be handled carefully, packed in cotton. It’s my fault, I know that. When her father left us, I decided nothing should hurt her again. She was so young when she had you—just a child herself, really. I’m afraid I protected her too much, made excuses for her. I’m sorry about that now, but I can’t change it.”

  I burrowed into her soft shoulder, sorry for being such a baby. I’d understood what she was telling me. But I’d seen something else, too: That ornament was beautiful. A rubber ball was plain.

  I closed the box, and that was the end of my poking around Louise’s closet. I picked up the pug doorstop and carried him to my room and put him down gently. “Welcome to your new home.”

  Then I went downstairs. Angel was watching television. “Maybe I’ll go to the beach,” I said.

  I was really just trying out the idea, but Angel looked relieved. “Whatever,” she said. “Just don’t talk to anyone.”

  I made a couple of peanut butter sandwiches and filled a bottle with water, then hurried into my suit, grabbed a book and a towel, and headed out.

  The parking-lot asphalt was hot and sticky under my flip-flops. I hurried to the water and started to walk east. Every couple of hundred yards, a big rock jetty stuck out like a barnacled arm into the sea, dividing the shore into a dozen calm-water coves. I kept going, each cove getting less crowded, stopping now and then to pick up shells—broken ones only, to remind myself of what George had said.

  When I reached the last cove, I dumped my stuff, peeled off my T-shirt, and marched into the water. The cold was a shock, but a good one. I walked out until the water was waist high, and then I plunged in.

  I swam in the salty, face-slapping waves until my body was tired, then spread out my towel at the base of the far jetty and flopped down. And for the first time since burying Louise, there was no angry chewing sound when I closed my eyes.

  I woke up with a little headache and a stinging sunburn on my back, but calmer than I’d felt in a week. A group of high school girls had settled at the other end of my cove while I’d slept. Their laughter drifted over me with the breeze. I adjusted my book and sunglasses so I could watch them.

  Even without hearing their words, I knew they were talking about things like nail polish and boys and summer plans. None of them had buried someone in their backyard, none of them were living a big lie, like Angel and I were. But then it struck me: If those girls looked over at me, they’d just see a plain-looking eleven-year-old reading a book. They’d never suspect the secret I was hiding. I looked up and down the beach and wondered if maybe everyone could be hiding some big secret. I sank into the warm sand, smiling at the idea of a beach full of people, tied together by their secret-hiding.

  I took my time walking home, and when I climbed up the path and into the clearing before our backyard, I stopped to check on the bluebe
rry bushes. They looked even scruffier than before, the leaves crumpled and dull. The berries seemed to have stopped getting bigger.

  I had done everything the gardening books said to do. These bushes were watered and fed and weeded, and the weather had been perfect. And then I realized—if plants could grieve, this is how they would look. They were missing Louise, the same way I missed my grandmother when she died. What I’d missed most was her just sitting with me while I did my homework, or watched a show, or read. Just her being beside me.

  I flattened the witchgrass and plucked out some stones and then lay down among the bushes. I tried to imagine what Louise might say if she were out here beside them. Probably something about pies. Maybe something about bringing them down to the diner, or winning another blue ribbon. I tried to hear her voice in my head—it had seemed to me Louise was always grumbling—but when I finally did, she wasn’t talking about pies. “Puh. There’s nobody else?” I heard her ask. “All right, I’ll take her in. As long as it’s seventeen dollars a day.”

  Just then, a screen door banged open. Jolted, I rolled over and lifted my head.

  Angel stood on the back steps, holding a kitchen chair to her chest. She swung around as if she was checking to see if the coast was clear. I ducked back down. I didn’t hear anything for a while, so very carefully, I lifted my head.

  Angel carried the chair down the middle path of the garden. She stopped at the end and set it down right next to where Louise was buried, and settled the legs into the dirt. Then she sat down and looked all around again. I held still.

  “I watched your show for you,” I heard her say. “That Elaina is up to no good. She’s not really pregnant—did you know that? But here’s the real news: Yesterday ended with a stranger showing up out of the blue at Mrs. Hartford’s door, and all we saw was his back and how shocked Mrs. Hartford was when she saw him there, like she was seeing a ghost. Well, guess who he is? Her son! The one who’s been gone all these years and everybody thought was dead! Turns out he was in some secret spy operation and then he had amnesia. So now, look out, he’s back—and the worst part is, he thinks he’s still married.”