Even if Mo’s head had been clear, she was pretty sure she wouldn’t have known what that meant. She edged toward the step.
“I’m far from the best role model,” Da said. “But try to be kind. You never know what you have in common with another person.”
Mercedes gaped. “The only thing she and I have in common is we both suck in oxygen. Unless she runs on poison gas, which wouldn’t surprise me.”
Da sat back, looking worn-out. Over her head, Mercedes rolled her eyes at Mo.
“Um, I better go,” Mo said.
Poof!
THE SPARROWS, enjoying their morning dust bath beneath the old lilac, whirled up in an indignant cloud as Mo ran down the steps. The letter was soft and squishy in her sweaty hand. As she ran down the street, Mo tried to imagine her father shouting with outrage, ripping it into a hundred shreds, and flushing it down the toilet.
But as excellent as her imagination was, it failed.
At the end of the street, the Green Kingdom rustled in the late-morning breeze, as if trying to shake off the dust that coated its leaves. On a normal summer afternoon, you could hear the head-over-heels rush of the stream all the way from up here, but today the only sound was the hiss of those leaves.
Mrs. Steinbott with a dead son! Could that be who she was knitting for, like a crazy old lady in a horror movie? So many people on Fox Street were missing things, permanent and otherwise.
Mrs. Steinbott: her son.
Da: her husband and daughter. Not to mention her toes.
Mercedes: her hair.
Mo: _________.
Mo, too.
The grass around the beat-up, boarded-up A.O.L. House grew so high, it covered the FOR SALE sign—wait a minute. The FOR SALE sign was gone! The Baggotts must have stolen it. The sign had been there nearly a year, ever since the last people had moved away. A family with two little girls. The older one would ride her bike up and down the street no-handed, grinning. One day they were there, and the next gone. Vanished in the night, skipping out on their rent. Poof! As if they’d never existed.
That was how fast a life could change. The blink of an eye. The turn of a head. Change could come barreling down on you, out of nowhere, without warning, humongous and stupid and unstoppable. While you were just stepping off the curb of a street called Paradise, humming maybe, thinking about your daughter waiting for you back home, beneath the plum tree. Thinking ice cream. Thinking strawberry, your daughter’s favorite? Or pistachio, your husband’s? How about some of both?
Poof! Just like that. The beat of a heart. She unsquished the letter and looked it over once more. She imagined her father getting a beer, sitting down, reading it through once, then again. Tugging on his cap, rubbing his jaw. Home Plate. The words appeared in cartoon bubbles over his head. Good Food, Good Friends, Good Times.
A down payment on my own place, he’d think. At last! He could make his longtime dream come true. Leave this street behind, start over, just like Monette.
Before her brain could manufacture one more troublesome thought, she ripped the letter in half. That felt so good, she ripped and ripped till a pile of confetti lay at her feet. She scooped that up, climbed over the guardrail, and, balanced on the edge of the world, scattered the pieces far and wide.
The first time in her life Mo Wren had ever littered. Not to mention destroyed someone else’s property.
Necessary evil, whispered a voice inside her.
“What you doing?”
Mo whirled around. Dottie spied out from the tall grass.
“What…what are you doing? You absolutely know that place is Absolutely Off Limits!”
“Playing foxes.” She patted down the tall grass, and Mo saw the two beer bottles nestled in her lap. “See our nest?”
“Foxes live in dens!”
“The house is so lonesome. It thinks nobody likes it.”
Which made Mo think of Mrs. Steinbott, sitting on her porch all alone, husband and son gone, which somehow made hot tears spurt up into her eyes. She wiped her eyes with the palm of her hand.
Being a thinker was a various thing. Sometimes you felt like a turtle, with a nice, private built-in place to shelter. Other times it was like having a bucket stuck on your head, making the world clang and echo and never stop.
Magic Feather
A MONSTER BOILER, a million times bigger than the one in the basement of Mo’s school—that’s what the world had turned into. Mo’s T-shirt plastered itself to her back. Her curls clenched like fists. Still no rain—not in the sky, not in the forecast, not anywhere. This week, the city had declared an unnecessary-use ban. Watering your grass or washing your car earned you a citation, and every night Mr. Wren came home more disgusted. People were furious! All day long they phoned the water department, complaining. They opened hydrants, wasting thousands of gallons. Was it his fault the blankety-blank sky refused to open? Was it his fault it was taking so long to repair and replace downtown’s decrepit, century-old pipes? Yesterday, on his lunch hour, he had stopped for a beer, just minding his own thirsty business after working outside all morning in ninety-degree heat, and some guy had started haranguing him about how municipal employees were lazy and overpaid.
If only Mo had been there! She’d have told that guy a thing or two.
She wished she could water the plum tree again. Its leaves were droopy, the unripe plums falling plunk plunk in the dry grass. But how could the daughter of a water department employee violate the ban? Would that qualify as a necessary evil?
Sipping warm, syrupy Tahitian Treat, which somehow only made them thirstier, she and Mercedes languished in the Den, watching Dottie fasten a piece of string to a broken branch with approximately a hundred knots.
“I’m going to go fix a nutritious dinner. Da needs to eat better.” But Mercedes didn’t move. In the two weeks she’d been here, her bald head had grown a little cap of cinnamon-colored moss. Every day she wore a new outfit, as if she’d brought a magic, bottomless suitcase. Sometimes when Mo turned up in her standard baggy shorts and another Tortilla Feliz team T-shirt, Mercedes rabbited her nose. Mo pretended not to notice.
“Last night I baked corn bread, but the house got so hot I thought the furniture would melt. That old air conditioner doesn’t do squat!”
Breathing heavily with her effort, Dottie began to fasten the string to the other end of the branch.
“Three-C called this morning. Somebody needs to explain to him that he’s never going to be my real dad, not to mention being a dad doesn’t require knowing every single minuscule fact about your child’s life.” Mercedes slid Mo a sideways look. “Your dad’s living proof, right?”
Mercedes knew that Mo had destroyed the Letter. She also knew Mo did not exactly feel great about it, so did she have to bring it up?
“He would just have torn it up himself,” Mo said. “I saved him the trouble.”
Dottie gnawed the end of a green twig. For someone who ate so much candy, her teeth were surprisingly strong.
“Right,” Mercedes agreed. “I’m just saying—”
“Watch this!” Dottie positioned her contraption at arm’s length. Fitting the tip of the chewed-up twig to the string, she arched her back, aimed at the sky, and let fly. The twig made a graceful loop-the-loop and landed at her feet. Dottie scowled, picked up the stick, and tried again. And again.
“Dottie, if you don’t mind my asking, what do you think you’re doing?”
“Bringing the rain!”
Mercedes’s face softened. “Did Da read you that book? That was one of my favorites. Kapiti Plain, where it hasn’t rained so long, all the crops are shriveling up and the animals are dying, so this guy finds an eagle feather and makes an arrow and—”
“And he shoots the clouds and the rain comes pouring down!” Dottie slapped her forehead. “I forgot the feather—no wonder.” She charged off, dry brush crackling beneath her feet.
“At least I don’t have a little sister.” Mercedes stood up. “Things could be
much, much worse.” She dusted off her beautiful black jeans. “Da still gets tired by afternoon. I have to make sure she takes her rest. Not to mention takes her pills and rubs the ointment on her feet.” Mercedes counted off her duties on her long fingers. “Three-C says she should have recovered from the surgery by now. He says if she lived with us, she’d be seriously healthier.” She heaved a sigh. “I’m going.”
When Mercedes was gone, Mo tidied up the Den. Every summer till now, Da had fussed over Mercedes as if she were Queen of the Nile. Now it was Mercedes’s turn to be the caretaker. No wonder she was a little grumpy and thoughtless. Not to say coldhearted.
Mo set off to fetch Dottie.
Scat
NOT THAT SHE CALLED her little sister’s name. Not yet.
Clumsy human that she was, Mo struggled to keep upright as she made her way down toward the stream. Vulpes vulpes had exquisite balance! When a fox ran—and it could run very, very fast—its tracks traced a single true line. Light and swift, a red fox barely dented the ground with its tracks.
Mo tripped over a sticking-up root, tilted backward, landed on her butt, and slid downhill, digging in her heels just in time to prevent scraping her shin against a rusty fender. Flat on her back, dumb as a turkey on a platter.
But then, as she lay there, something began to happen. Slowly, gently, as if she were dreaming with her eyes open, Mo sensed she was no longer alone. The air turned beamy, the rays of the sun weaving themselves into a beautiful quilt. It floated over her, tucked itself in around her. Aah. How safe she felt. Something was watching over her.
The fox, her fox, was nearby. Mo just knew it.
She held as still as she could.
Still as a stone.
Waiting.
Still as a root.
Waiting.
Till at last, with a sigh, she stood back up. She brushed off her backside and broke the woods’ stubborn silence.
“Dottie!”
The only answer was the squawk of a jay. The wild-flowers drooped. The leaves curled in limp cylinders. As Mo made her way downhill, the angle of the slope sharpened, turning stony and treacherous just before it gave way to the pebbled banks of the stream. Dottie was not allowed down here, period, but she was triple not allowed near the water.
“I know you hear me!”
What if she didn’t? How long since Dottie had left the Den? How long had Mo lain there, waiting? She couldn’t be sure.
The lip of the ravine was all shale, stacked neatly as a high stone wall. The only way down was to jump, and Mo did, landing in slick mud. Most summers the stream brimmed from bank to bank, from here to where the land sloped up again, then flattened out to become the Metropark. Normally it was wide enough for a stone to take three or four skips across it, but this year it had dwindled down to a measly trickle.
If it didn’t rain soon, what would the fox find to drink? By now she probably had kits, who’d be thirsty and depending on her.
“Dorothea Wren!” Mo scanned the edges of the water, and sure enough, a trail of small footprints led straight in. “You’re really going to get it now!”
The Metropark was vast, acres and acres of dark woods. Beyond that lay the ball fields, where on week-days the kinds of strangers anybody would have the sense to avoid—anybody but Dottie—hung out and smoked and sold stuff. And then there were the parking lots where teenagers loved to drink beer and squeal their tires and not look where they were going at fifty miles per hour.
Mo splashed across the stream. She staggered through a patch of wild raspberries, the prickers catching at her shorts and scratching her legs. She had one more fleeting thought of the fox, who’d enjoy those juicy berries. But then thoughts of everything except Dottie fell away. Spruce and hemlock grew here, tall dark trees that blocked the sky and made her shiver. Imagine if you were barely bigger than a fire hydrant. Imagine how confusing it would all be then.
Why hadn’t she gone after Dottie right away, instead of lying there so long, waiting for something that never came? Stupid, stupid!
“Dottie!” The two syllables echoed as if flung off the edge of a cliff or against the walls of a cavern. “Dot…teeee!”
If anything ever happened to that child…
It won’t. I swear on a mountain of Bibles.
The trees began to thin out, and now Mo glimpsed pavement. She ran forward, coming out on a sparkling asphalt desert. No cars. No people. Nothing moved. Two large Dumpsters hulked side by side, like the last things left on Earth.
Mo cupped her hands over her mouth, drew her breath up from her belly, and shouted. “DOTTIE WREN! WHERE ARE YOU?”
A mirage. A hallucination. A rust-colored animal poked up from inside the far Dumpster. Mo froze, her heart beating up in her ears.
“It’s a mama! Her name’s Georgene.” Dottie waved a brown bottle.
“I will kill you,” cried Mo. “I will decapitate you and use your head for a bowling ball! I will…How the heck did you get in there?”
However she’d managed, it must have been easier than getting out. That entailed Mo catching her when she scrambled over the side, odoriferous and soaking—she’d managed to fall into the stream after all. Mo wasn’t even a quarter through her lecture when a car tore into the parking lot, made a few wild circles, ejected a stream of empty beer cans, laid down rubber, and sped back out, music up so loud it thumped in her own chest like a second, demented heart.
“Don’t you see how dangerous…you’re so…so…” Mo slumped against the repugnant Dumpster. “What were you thinking? Never mind. I know you don’t think.”
Dottie rummaged in her thicket of hair, as if the answer hid in there. Cheer suffused her grimy little face, and she plucked out a brilliant blue feather.
“I found it! Now I can make it rain, and Daddy won’t have to work so hard.”
Mo plucked a slimy potato peel from her sister’s shoulder. “That’s nice of you, all right, but magic…it doesn’t always work.”
Dottie was quiet for a long moment. “I wish he was happy. I wish he wasn’t always so doomy.”
“Gloomy.”
“Yeah.” Dottie leaned her revolting self into Mo’s stomach and yawned. “Can we go home now?”
Mo was far from sure of the way back, but Dottie followed at her heels, trusting as a puppy.
“Dot, don’t tell Daddy you got lost.”
“Okay.” She yawned again. “Did I get lost?”
They must be headed the right direction, because here was the same raspberry patch. Setting down Georgene, Dottie picked with both hands, smearing her mouth and chin rosy.
“You’ll get a bellyache.” Mo’s warning was only halfhearted. Dottie never got bellyaches.
Mo sat down, and something partly hidden beneath the matted, dead leaves caught her eye. At first glance it was a mess of crushed berries. Leaning closer, she realized it was a ruby-colored pile of droppings, the size of a small dog’s. But what dog would eat raspberries?
Not a dog. But a Vulpes vulpes.
“Poor Mo.” Dottie patted her shoulder with a juicy hand. “She’s smiling at a poop pile.”
“Not poop,” whispered Mo. “Scat.”
“Scat cat!” Dottie shoved in more berries.
Was this the sign she’d been waiting for? The sign that, if you were patient, if you believed hard enough and held on tight, good things would come? The world would right itself, and all, all would be well?
Mo put a berry on her tongue and crushed it against the roof of her mouth. Sweet, sharp, warm juice shot out. Deliciousness spurted all through her.
The Letter, Part 2
BACK HOME, Mr. Wren sprawled in front of the TV, where Mo saw at a glance that the Indians were down by five runs. The scent of earthworms drifted off him, and his fingernails were earth caked.
“Where you girl-illas been? What’d I tell you about being home here by five?” Without waiting for an answer, he hoisted himself off the couch. They could hear the refrigerator opening, the to
p popping on a can. “Don’t listen to me,” he said, coming back into the room. “I was underground eight hours today. My brain’s clogged with dirt.” He pointed at Georgene. “Nice score.” Mr. Wren only drank beer from cans, but still he took an interest.
“I brought you a feather,” Dottie said, holding it out. But Mr. Wren turned away to snap off the TV.
“Bunch of losers!” He trudged into the hallway and wrestled with the front door, which always stuck in the humidity. “This bleepin’ hole!”
“Hey, it’s the world’s best house! You always said so.”
“Yeah, well. Every frog praises his own pond.” Mr. Wren yanked the door open and stepped outside.
Dottie hung her head. “That feather’s not no magic.”
“Don’t worry.” Mo stroked her hair. “We don’t need magic. Everything’s going to be okay.”
Mo woke the next morning to hear her father on the phone, calling in sick. He made his voice weak and hoarse, claiming fever. By the time she came downstairs, he and Dottie were busy in the kitchen. Dottie was in charge of toast, and the stack was already about a foot high. His hair, still wet from his shower, curled in shiny black parentheses all over his head. Mr. Wren, who could not carry a tune in a bucket yet loved to sing, was belting out “Please Please Me” when a knock sounded at the side door.
“Bernard!” Mr. Wren opened the door wide. “You smell the bacon or what?”
“I know that front door of yours sticks in this kind of weather, so I moseyed myself up the side.” Bernard stepped into the kitchen, swinging his mail sack off his shoulder and onto a chair. Mr. Wren was getting an extra plate, but Bernard shook his head. “I gotta say, this is the eatingest street on my route! Already had some of Da’s biscuits and a killer cup of espresso at Mrs. Petrone’s. It’s a shame, but I can’t eat me one more bite. Day off?”
Mr. Wren tapped his temple. “Mental health.”
What Happened on Fox Street Page 4
