Northward to the Moon
Page 14
Ned moves Dorothy into the convalescent hospital and suddenly our house feels enormous to me. We have a steak dinner that night although no one says that it is to celebrate.
“I don’t care,” Ned has taken to saying enigmatically and out of context. “I’m no saint.”
Ginny comes home from camp finally and we take many sunrise walks on the beach to catch up. We go at sunrise because I love the fresh clean morning beach before anyone else gets to it and Ginny says she can’t sleep late after a summer at camp. “They made us get up at the crack of dawn!” she complains. “It’s horrible what some people put you through in the name of fun.”
I tell her everything that has happened this year, some of which she has heard before in letters, but the Nevada part is all new. Mostly she seems interested in Ben. She agrees that what Ned did was terrible.
“Oh my God, I would have simply died. I would have died!” she says.
“Exactly!” I say with satisfaction. “Although it did turn out he was of a criminally bent nature.”
“Never mind that,” says Ginny. “Tell me again what he looked like.”
I have already told Ginny this a dozen times, and also how he would vault right over the fence into the ring. She finds it fascinating. “I would have thought you would go for a more cerebral type. But I applaud your taste,” she says. “Tell me again about his shoulders.”
“Sometimes you really are shallow,” I say affectionately.
“Well, of course I am, darling, I’m in fashion,” says Ginny. This business of calling me darling is a new affectation that needs immediate squelching. She has sorely missed my influence in the year we’ve been apart.
“OH!” I say. “I can’t believe I forgot to tell you this—guess who is Maya’s father?”
“Who? Who? Mr. Fordyce!” says Ginny.
“NO! Worse! H.K.,” I say.
“How do you know? Did your mother tell you?”
“Not in so many words but she said that she was worried about insanity in Maya’s family history! That made it obvious. Crazy Caroline!”
“You know Crazy Caroline is out again?”
“Never mind that. Think! That also means he probably isn’t my father.”
“True, true,” says Ginny, but I can tell her mind is elsewhere. We walk a bit in silence and then she says, “Is that all your mother said, that there was mental illness in Maya’s family history?”
I think back. “Yes.”
“And from this you deduce that it must be H.K.?”
“You’re saying it’s not?”
“Well … think about it, Jane. The clothes hanger man wasn’t exactly the poster boy for normalcy. I mean, what do you call someone roaming all over the country with only the clothes on his back?”
“Oh,” I say. “I hadn’t thought of that.”
“And Mr. Fordyce lives in a trailer and reads books all day. Okay, that’s not so strange, but who knows what lurks in his family? You don’t know him well enough to say. We should go and ask a few questions, you know, in a roundabout way that won’t raise his suspicions. And then there’s Ned.”
“Ned?”
“Well, from the way you describe them, his whole family sounds crazy to me. I mean, the mother moves them all up to some remote outpost for no reason and his sister sees the Virgin Mary in her food.”
“Oh,” I say. “And I suppose spending the year pretending you can teach French is pretty loopy.”
“I kind of like that about him. There’s something so, sort of, free about Ned …,” says Ginny. “I mean, my mom and dad had normal upbringings and they never got schlepped up to Fort McMurray one night and they would never think of pretending to teach French.”
“Yeah,” I say, but now I am deflated. “I thought I had it all figured out.”
“People are nuts,” Ginny concludes, then she does a little twirl. “What do you think of this dress? I made it myself this spring.”
Ginny wants to be a dress designer. It is not her dress twirling in the wind that I see, though, it is the sun beginning its arduous luminous climb through the sky. A pair of gulls flies by, tilted sideways in the wind, cackling messages we cannot understand. But they can’t understand us either. It doesn’t mean, I think, that none of us are making sense.
“Come on, “ I say. “Let’s go to my house for breakfast. I’m starving.”
Maya and her new friend, Rachel, are sitting on the beach playing paper dolls when we get there.
“My mom and Maya ran into Rachel and her mother in the convalescent hospital visiting Dorothy,” I explain to Ginny. “Rachel’s grandmother is in there too. Rachel and Maya used to play in the block corner together in kindergarten and when they saw each other Maya asked her for a sleepover.”
“Good for Maya,” says Ginny.
I nod. Maya looks happy and absolutely fine, just like my mother predicted.
We head toward the porch. Ned is sitting on the steps.
“Hi, Ned,” says Ginny. “So my mom says Mrs. Bedlington says your mom is moving in there in a month.”
“I’m no saint,” says Ned, wearing the haunted hangdog expression he has had since his mother moved to town.
“Jeez, what’s with him?” whispers Ginny.
“Oh, he’s just not forgiving himself or anyone else since another highfalutin’ idea he had about how things ought to be never panned out,” I say.
“I thought his mother didn’t want to live here,” says Ginny.
“She didn’t! He didn’t want it either. I don’t think anyone did. But don’t worry, my mom is jollying him out of it,” I say as my mother comes out on the porch and hands Ned a plate.
“Oh, but, Ned, you must be a saint. Because, look! The Virgin Mary is appearing on your toast!” says my mother, and laughs uproariously.
“She’s spent the last twenty-four hours putting the Virgin Mary on all his food,” I say to Ginny.
“Your mother is jollying him along by putting sacred apparitions in his food?” says Ginny.
“Yes,” I say.
“Let’s go make toast,” says Ginny. “Without religious miracles. Just toast.”
“I think that can be arranged,” I say as Ginny heads into the kitchen.
I stay and watch the waves for a minute. Then I go inside, leaving my mother and Ned sitting on the porch steps, an arm around each other, watching Maya play.
The next day Ned is gone.
He left a note.
about the author
Polly Horvath is the highly acclaimed author of many books, including the National Book Award winner The Canning Season, the National Book Award nominee The Trolls, and the Newbery Honor Book Everything on a Waffle. Publishers Weekly has described her writing as “unruly, unpredictable, and utterly compelling,” adding that “Horvath’s descriptive powers are singular … her uncensored Mad Hatter wit simply delicious, her storytelling skills consummate.”
Polly Horvath lives in Metchosin, British Columbia.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2010 by Polly Horvath
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Schwartz & Wade Books, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
Schwartz & Wade Books and the colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Horvath, Polly.
Northward to the moon / Polly Horvath.—1st ed.
p. cm.
Sequel to: My one hundred adventures.
Summary: When her stepfather loses his job in Saskatchewan, Jane and the rest of the fam
ily set off on a car trip, ending up in Nevada after improbably being given a bag full of possibly stolen money.
eISBN: 978-0-375-89306-3
[1. Family life—Fiction. 2. Grandmothers—Fiction. 3. Automobile travel—Fiction. 4. Ranch life—Nevada—Fiction. 5. Canada—Fiction. 6. Nevada—Fiction. 7. Massachusetts—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.H79224Nor 2010
[Fic]—dc22
2009010133
Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.
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