Summer of the Gypsy Moths

by Sara Pennypacker

  “Louise,” my mother sighed. “Too much water under that bridge, Stella.”

  “What does that even mean? What’s wrong between you?”

  “Oh, Stella.” Without seeing her, I knew my mother was pinching the bridge of her nose, as if my question was hurting her head. “Louise and I…well, she just doesn’t approve of me. She never has.”

  “Well, not anymore. Louise doesn’t feel that way anymore,” I replied, which at least was true. “Come now. There’s a home for us here.”

  There was a long pause. “What do you mean, you have money?”

  I looked at the Earl Gray tin again and redid Angel’s math. “I could send you three hundred dollars Monday. That’d be enough to get back, right? Come back.”

  “Okay,” she said after another long pause. “Okay.”

  At quarter of ten, Angel and I went over to the cottages. I sat down near her under the LINGER LONGER sign, but I didn’t look at her. Not that I was feeling guilty. Just…confused.

  All the families were outside, stuffing luggage and coolers and rafts into cars that didn’t seem big enough anymore. One by one, they came over to return their keys.

  Mrs. Sandpiper gave me a hug and thanked me again for Thursday. Katie jumped into my lap and wrapped her arms around my neck until her father came over and peeled her off. “We’ll be back next summer,” he told her, picking her up. “You’ll see her again.” He turned to me. “Can we do that? Will you book us for the same two weeks next summer?”

  “I’ll tell Louise,” I said.

  Katie peered at me over her father’s shoulder. “You be here next summer.”

  “You be good now.”

  “No, promise,” Katie said. She pointed to the ground I was sitting on, next to the sign. “You be right here.”

  “Sure. Right here,” I said, shaken by how much I wanted it to be true. I pointed over to Sandpiper. “And you’ll be right there. And you’ll be so much bigger then!”

  Katie nodded. “And you won’t be worried.”

  Angel shot me a triumphant look at that, but I just got up and said, “Let’s get to work.”

  There was plenty of food in the refrigerators, but I wasn’t hungry. I stashed it back at the house, along with the seventy dollars in tips. I snapped the Earl Grey tin down hard and pushed it way back on the shelf.

  If I gave it to my mother, it wouldn’t really be stealing, I told myself. It was half mine anyway. And I’d pay it back by the end of summer.

  This time, there wasn’t much difference between Angel’s cottages and mine, that’s how good Angel had gotten at things. This time, though, as I stood in Sandpiper’s doorway to give it a final look, the sight didn’t fill me with pride.

  I went back into the bathroom and took down the pieces of the sand dollar George had broken that first day and carried them over to Angel. “George told me a story about this shell one time,” I started. “About it being broken.”

  Angel shrugged. She pointed to an SUV crunching up the driveway. “Here we go again,” she said.

  I put the sand dollar halves back into my pocket. “Yep. Here we go again.”

  The check-in went as smoothly as the changeovers. There was another Katie, and the people in Gull brought a cat, which Angel and I pretended not to notice. Once again, four sets of parents said how sorry they were to hear Louise had broken her ankle and where was the grocery store and the beach? We told them, and everybody took off.

  I went up to my room with a book. I didn’t read, though. I just tried to figure out what I would say to George when he got here.

  “I’m going to eat again,” Angel called up after an hour. “You want some?”

  “Nope.”

  “Are you sick?”

  “Um…maybe.”

  Angel left me alone after that, and finally George showed up around seven. I heard him emptying the trash bins and then knock at our front door.

  I went downstairs to let him in and handed him the envelope with the zoning petition. “It’s all set now.”

  George didn’t even open the envelope. Somehow, I felt a little let down by that. Maybe a little irritated, even.

  Angel walked out then, eating a bowl of ravioli. “Leftovers,” she said. “Louise is a good cook.”

  And George didn’t ask where Louise was, as though he trusted us now. That irritated me even more, which was crazy.

  “I brought the pane for that window. You did the right thing with it, Stella,” he said. Which, again, made me a little mad. Maybe I was sick.

  “My mother called today,” I said. “She’s coming back, and as soon as she has a job, I can live with her. She just needs a job.”

  George smiled at me. “That’s great news. You must be really happy. I know Louise will miss you, though. Well, I’d better get to that window. It’s not going to repair itself, you know.” Then something caught his eye over my shoulder. He walked over and leaned into the den. “Hey, where’s the rug?” he asked. “Room looks empty without it.”

  “She’s having it cleaned,” I said right away. Angel pointed her fork at me in warning, but she didn’t need to—I wasn’t going into idiot blabber mode. I had become a smooth liar.

  And that irritated me, too.

  I wished George hadn’t mentioned that braided rug. Truth was, I was glad it was buried with Louise—I’d never liked it, because it reminded me of home. Not home in a good way, but “home”—the word I used to use when I was little to mean the space under the kitchen table in my grandmother’s house.

  I’d go there when my mother got that look that meant she was getting ready to leave. I’d sit under the table, safe between the four wooden legs that never moved, watching my mother’s legs, which never stopped moving. She paced the kitchen, back and forth, and it made me think of the lion at the Franklin Park Zoo, where my grandmother used to take me for a treat. That lion circled his cage over and over and over again—he never stopped. It was as if he thought that if he paced enough times, an opening would suddenly appear. I never liked to watch that lion. I would always run to the penguins or the monkeys, because I knew someday that lion was going to realize there was never going to be a way out. And I didn’t want to be there when he did.

  There had been a braided rug a lot like Louise’s under our kitchen table. I would weave my fingers into the loops and hold on, watching my mother’s cigarette ashes drift down. I’d hold my breath and dig my fingers deeper into the braids when a cinder would glow on the floor, wondering if the house was going to catch fire. My grandmother’s kitchen floor was speckled all over with tiny black pinholes.

  Sometimes my mother would give a little yelp of surprise when the cigarette burned down to her fingertips, as if she’d forgotten she was holding it. Or sometimes the phone would ring, or sometimes I’d get brave and come out and touch her arm, or sometimes my grandmother would come home from work. There’d be a second when my mother didn’t seem to know where she was. Then a worse moment—when it came back to her.

  I always figured that lion at the zoo would wear that look one day, when he figured out he was stuck in that cage forever.

  I went to my room and got into bed. Over and over, I tried to play my movie, the one where my mother walks into Louise’s kitchen and is peaceful, and thinks how lucky she is to have me for a daughter. But a different scene kept playing on my screen: my mother, pacing across my grandmother’s kitchen floor like the lion in the Franklin Park Zoo. I dozed and woke, dozed and woke. And every time, there was my mother, pacing.

  The clock beside my bed said five fifteen. I knew what I had to do. I’d known it for four weeks.

  CHAPTER 28

  Angel lay sprawled across the bed in a jumble of sheets and strewn clothes. I was going to miss her so much. A few weeks ago I would never have believed I could feel that way, but a few weeks ago was a different lifetime.

  I touched her shoulder.

  Angel groaned and twisted around to squint at me through her tangle of hair.

 
I held out her backpack and the money from the Earl Grey tin. “I called.”

  Angel stared at me, not understanding. And then understanding. She fished yesterday’s cutoffs and T-shirt from the end of the bed and yanked them on over her pajamas, slid into her flip-flops. She grabbed her backpack and the money and then she hugged me. I closed my eyes, but I heard her clattering down the stairs, and the door banging shut, and then the house was silent.

  I sank to her bed and I thought about sirens.

  I’d asked the 911 dispatcher to tell the police not to use them, because everyone in the cottages was still asleep. But I didn’t want to hear them either. Sirens sound different when you know they are coming for you. Three months ago, on that cold afternoon in April, I had crouched under the table in our little apartment while sirens came closer and closer. Like a little kid again.

  I knew they were coming for me, because I was the one who had called.

  Now, even though all the Heloise in me ached to make the bed and fold up Angel’s clothes, I sat perfectly still on the tangle of her sheets and thought about sirens, and I finally realized what they sound like: They wail like my father’s trombone. Which is the sound of someone getting ready to leave you for good. My chest tightened until it hurt to breathe.

  I went downstairs and let them in.

  I used to watch a lot of cop shows. Before that time in April. I loved that no matter how big a mess there was at the start of the show, an hour later the police had sorted everything out, so you could see what was what, nice and tidy. On television, you always knew who was in charge, and things went along smoothly in order. Now I realized that whoever wrote those shows had never actually been at a police investigation.

  The first people in the door were two patrol officers with squawking radios. One was a woman with short red hair who said, “Officer Meg. Are you okay?” The second was a guy with a shaved head who didn’t look old enough to be wearing a uniform that serious. He asked me if I was all right, too, and he scanned the room with his hand on his gun as if he expected it to be full of dangerous criminals.

  We didn’t get very far because another policeman in another cruiser with another squawking radio came in. He said he would be the detective in charge and announced that he’d informed the state police and the Department of Children and Families, and they’d be along pretty soon, too.

  Through it all, I kept saying “I’m sorry,” and everybody kept ignoring me.

  “Now, what have we got here?” the detective asked.

  Before we could start, the front door swung open and in marched Angel. “I confess,” she said, her arms raised in surrender. “Everything Stella did, I did, too. If you’re arresting her, you’d better take me, too. É o meu destino agora. Do you want to handcuff me?”

  The detective told Angel he didn’t think that would be necessary, and then he took out a roll of yellow crime scene tape and asked us, “Where’s the…?”

  I pointed to the back door. “Just past the zucchini.”

  The lady police officer asked Angel and me if there were any adults we wanted notified. “Someone you could have a meaningful conversation about this with,” she explained. “Family? Someone you trust.”

  Angel asked if they could get her aunt in New Bedford. Before I could answer, there was another commotion in the driveway. I looked out the window. “Never mind,” I told her. “He’s here.”

  Just watching George get out of his green pickup eased the tightness in my chest. The officer with the shaved head met him.

  “Now let me get this straight,” I heard him say as they neared the house. “She’s been dead for how long?”

  Inside, George came straight over and gave me a big hug, as if he knew that was exactly what I needed him to do.

  “I called you before the police,” I told him. “I wanted you to know first.”

  “No reception at sea. I just got in. Now, you’ve been alone here for weeks? Is that true?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I know we should have told you.”

  “You’ve been running this place all by yourselves since—Oh, Lord. The pumpkins?”

  I nodded.

  “Unbelievable,” George muttered.

  And just then another person arrived. He wore a regular suit, but you could tell he was in charge, or he expected to be. He lifted his badge to the patrol officers. “State Trooper Ellison. Crime Prevention and Control. What do you have so far?”

  Officer Meg started to tell him, and the trooper took out a notebook. “Has the victim been identified?” he asked. “Do you have a suspect?”

  Even though it was July, I shivered like January when I heard the words “victim” and “suspect.” George put his hand on my back. Warm, heavy, and safe.

  “Hold on now.” George stepped up to the trooper, his hand still steady on my back. “Let’s just hold on. These are young girls here. They’ve been running this place like grown-ups—I couldn’t have done a better job myself—but they are just young girls. Let’s remember that. They’ve got to be scared half to death. And they’re good kids—really good kids—I can vouch for that. If anyone’s to blame here, it’s me. I shoulda known something was wrong. Shoulda known when I didn’t see Louise that first weekend. Well, I did know, I guess. I knew in my gut that something was wrong. But no, I didn’t want to lose a day fishing. Heck, even Treb knew, didn’t he?” He turned to me. “I apologize for that. I shoulda known and I shoulda seen to things. I’m sorry.”

  Believe it or not, another car pulled in then. Three people got out, loaded down with briefcases and cameras and lights. In all the commotion, I felt like a bear coming out of his cave after a long hibernation—everything was suddenly too bright and too loud, and there was way too much stuff going on.

  Officer Meg seemed to be feeling the same way. She turned to Angel and me. “Let’s take this down to the station,” she said. “These people have work to do.”

  She led us out to the cruisers. George followed. The sun was just starting to come up, and I suddenly thought of what he had said that first day after Louise had died: “Pretty day.” It was going to be a pretty day.

  “Are you going to be okay?” he asked.

  “I’m going to be okay,” I said.

  “I have to stay here until…” He motioned toward the garden with his shoulder. “I’ll be along when I can.”

  The officers put us in the backseat, then got in and started up the cruiser. Angel immediately stuck her fingers through the wire partition between us and the front seat.

  I leaned over and caught Angel’s hand—just to stop her, because we didn’t need to make things worse by committing some police cruiser crime, too. But Angel squeezed my hand and held it, looking relieved. I felt relieved, too.

  “Why did you come back?” I whispered.

  Angel threw up her free palm as if it had been a total shock to her, too. “I got a ride right away. Nice lady, on her way to work at a coffee shop in Dennis. She asked me if I was running away from home. And when she said it, I thought, yeah, I am. But that was so crazy—I mean, I was supposed to be running toward a home, right? I figured: My aunt has gone through so much to have me. She’s sold her house, come to another country, learned how to speak English. I didn’t want to mess it all up by doing something as crazy as running away from a home. So I asked the lady to take me back.”

  I turned around to look at the little Lucky Charms cottages, shining in the dawn’s pink light like a postcard. As we drove down the road, the cottages grew smaller and smaller.

  CHAPTER 29

  We were separated in the police station.

  I was sorry I couldn’t be in two places at one time, because I would have liked to hear Angel’s version. When Angel told about something, even a boring soap opera, it turned into a Something. She would probably have that police officer’s mouth hanging open at how exciting our lives had been the past four weeks. She’d leave him begging to know, “And then what happened?”

  Officer Meg led
me down a hall to a small room. “This is Officer Massey, the youth officer,” she introduced us. While he and Officer Meg exchanged notes, I studied the room. It was small and cluttered and had windows on only one wall. A counter ran along that wall, with a sink and a coffeemaker and a litter of cups and spoons.

  And a box of doughnuts.

  Now, if I were a policeman and I wanted a doughnut, I wouldn’t advertise the fact—too many jokes about cops and doughnuts. I’d hide the box. But I have to say I was really glad Officer Massey hadn’t. Just looking at those doughnuts made my mouth water, and I couldn’t look away. Officer Massey must have noticed. He brought the Dunkin’ Donuts box over to the table and nodded that I should take one. Which I did. Boston Kreme. Three bites later, it was gone. “They’re nothing but air these days,” he said. “Better have another.” Which I did. Chocolate glazed.

  Officer Massey poured himself a cup of coffee and one for Officer Meg, and then he picked up a third cup. For a second I could tell he thought about pouring me one, too, but he remembered I was just a kid. “Terrible anyway,” he mumbled. “Tastes like mud.”

  “You should keep your coffee in the freezer,” I said, with a nod to the bag on the counter. “It stays fresher that way. And your carafe has lime scale on it, on account of the minerals in the water. You should run vinegar through your machine every once in a while to take care of that.”

  Officer Massey stared at me as if I’d just given him the formula for nuclear fission. “Who are you?” he asked.

  I almost laughed, but then I told him my full name—after all, I was in a police station, hauled in for questioning. “Am I a suspect?” I asked. “Or just a ‘person of interest’?”

  “You’re definitely a person of interest to me, Stella,” Officer Massey said. “But right now, why don’t you just tell me what happened.” He slid the doughnut box over, and I took a cinnamon cruller. “From the beginning.”

  I told the story my way, the way I’d been practicing with those Reader’s Digest books, which meant spending lots of time on the cleaning-up parts, and the people-getting-to-know-each-other parts.