by Anne Nesbet
“Oh!” said Gusta. It made you want to spend an hour or two poking around in that collection, wondering at the variousness of them all. And then Gusta woke up another notch or two.
“Gramma Hoopes! Did that box . . .” she said, “did that box used to sit on a shelf?”
“Well, yes,” said Gramma Hoopes, gesturing rather gracefully. “Right over there. Why do you ask, Gusta?”
“You have a button box, and it used to sit on a shelf. Not in a cave at all, but right here on a shelf!”
“In a cave?” said Gramma Hoopes. “What has gotten into you, Augusta, I wonder?”
Gusta’s grandmother was already sifting through the sea of buttons with a sure hand, and suddenly there in her hands was the very button that Gusta’s sweater had just lost, with the little flower pattern stamped into it.
Gramma Hoopes held it up so Gusta could see.
“No need to look quite so surprised,” said her grandmother. “Who sent your mother those buttons, anyway, when she said she was knitting you that sweater? I always keep a few back, so I have some extras on hand in the button box. But this is the last one of that set, so no more fights for you.” A stern look.
Gusta shook her head, feeling like a shorn sheep without her sweater. No more fights for her. All right.
She felt trembly and cozy, both at once. The worst had happened, and she was still here, and was not, after all, going to be put back on the bus. She had been in such despair, and now hope was rising up in her — strange and irrational, impossible and sweet.
“Gramma, please — before you put them away, may I please, please, look at the buttons?”
Her grandmother gave her an almost-smile.
“You know, Augusta,” she said. “When your mother was very, very small, she used to dearly love this box of buttons. You make me remember those days all over again. I didn’t bring it out very often, because you never can be sure with buttons — a baby might swallow them, and there always seemed to be a baby about, back in the old days. But when Gladys — your mother — was feverish and fretful, nothing comforted her like sorting through the button box.”
Gramma Hoopes sighed. “And here you are now, so like her in these funny little ways. Well, I must say, life is full of surprises, and not all of them are bad. You go curl up in the big chair over there with the button box, Augusta, and I will get to work on this sweater of yours.”
She already had thread through a needle — the shiny button was already shimmying down that thread toward its new home — the torn sweater was already on its way to being set to rights.
“I can’t mend everything,” said her grandmother. “But I can mend this.”
Gusta found it hiding away in that astonishing sea of all kinds of buttons — plain white buttons, metal buttons with anchors on them, or a single blossom, a few buttons for a little child, with a blue bunny hopping across them, square buttons, shell buttons, buttons made of beads and buttons made of glass.
And yes: near the bottom of the button box was what looked at first like an ancient coin, with markings she couldn’t read on front and back and a small punched-out square where an ordinary button might have its four little holes. She knew what it must be right away, because it glittered in her hand, as if catching the rays of a light she couldn’t see. As if it were daydreaming about a sunny afternoon it remembered, from long ago and far away. The Wish.
“If you find one you particularly like, you may keep it for a gift,” said her grandmother without looking up from her mending.
When Gusta woke up the next morning, she was surprised at first by the strange feeling that filled her: as if her heart had been broken open, melted down, and then patched together by kind hands into some version of its old shape again, but not without a new network of cracks and fissures running through it.
“Are you well enough for school?” said Josie. “You’d darn well better be! Ron and Thomas are both burning up now, and Miss Marion’s just about frantic, but you! You’ve got to be absolutely perfectly well today, Gusta! It’s Thursday! It’s concert day!”
And then Gusta remembered everything all at once. She remembered facing Mr. Kendall, and she remembered what he had let slip about Josie — Josie!— and she remembered promising to sell the French horn to Miss Kendall — the horn!— and then crying in Gramma Hoopes’s room, and that she mustn’t say anything to Josie — Josie!— and what she had found in the button box — the Wish? Could it really be the Wish?— and that this evening was indeed the big spring concert at Springdale High School — oh, the horn!— and she and Josie — Josie!— both had their solos to think about — the horn!— and Miss Kendall! And Josie — Josie!— again!
“Don’t dawdle,” said Josie. “Don’t sit there gaping and gawping, and for heaven’s sake, don’t forget that French horn of yours.”
She kept chattering all the way to school, which was just as well, because Gusta was weighed down by this last round of secret carrying, and Bess looked so nervous and stricken when she came out from her house to join them that Josie thought she might be coming down with whatever the boys had.
“Stay away from me, you girls!” Josie laughed. “I am not getting sick until at least tomorrow! My solo tonight is going to go absolutely, perfectly well!”
Bess gave Gusta an agonized look, and Gusta frowned back.
“I was a little under the weather last night, too,” said Gusta, trying to stare at Bess so meaningfully that Bess would buck up and start at least trying to pretend it was a normal day. “But we have to pull ourselves together and act like nothing in the world is wrong.”
“You got that right!” sang out Josie.
As far as Gusta could tell, the only blot on Josie’s happiness was that Gramma Hoopes and Aunt Marion weren’t coming to the concert at all, on account of the boys being sick in bed.
“It’s only a bit of singing,” Gramma Hoopes had said, when Josie’s face had fallen. And of course, Josie’s face had fallen even farther in response to that. Gusta had seen it all, because it was amazing what faces turned out to be doing all the time, giving away everyone’s secrets without a stitch of remorse.
For Gusta it was actually a relief, however, that her grandmother and aunt wouldn’t be there.
From the moment she opened her eyes that morning, Gusta felt distant from herself, as if all the secrets were an iceberg, and she had floated on that iceberg out into a very cold sea. There was Mr. Kendall, and Josie, and the Wish, and the French horn. They were all tangled together now.
She wanted not to be at school. She wanted to be quiet and alone, so she could think it all over, especially the Wish. She had hidden the Wish in the toe of a sock last night, and she had stolen a glimpse of it this morning, and it was the strangest thing: contrary to everything else she had ever learned about the universe, the Wish really did glitter with a hidden, impossible, confident light. It seemed to know what it was, and to know that what it was, was magic. In comparison, all the fool’s gold on Holly Hill was merest imitation.
Of course, there aren’t such things as Wishes in this world of ours. They exist only in stories.
But this Wish, as it lay sparkling on Gusta’s palm that morning, seemed to be insisting that it existed nevertheless.
What should she do about that?
Just in case it was really as real as it thought it was, Gusta tucked the Wish back into the sock and hid it. She couldn’t be trusted with a Wish in her hand, not before she’d had some time to think over what to do with it.
“What happened when you got home? Oh, tell me, Gusta! What happened?” said Bess to Gusta in a strangled whisper as they went up the steps of Jefferson Elementary. “I was so frightened last night just thinking about it.”
“Josie doesn’t know anything yet,” said Gusta grimly. “We have to act like everything’s fine.”
Bess’s face did not look like the face of someone who thinks everything’s fine, but off they both went to their respective classrooms, because what else were
they going to do?
While the class solved more mathematics problems, of the complicated long-division sort (What, children, is 117.59 divided by 33.4?), Gusta found herself scribbling question marks with her pencil and trying out fragments of impossible sentences in her brain.
I wish . . . Uncle Charlie’s hand . . . and Josie, please . . . and oh, Papa! . . . but the horn, the horn, I still don’t want to lose the horn . . . But Uncle Charlie . . .
The necessary verbs kept escaping her; that was part of the problem.
And her thoughts kept being interrupted by the French horn. She set it aside firmly, trying to leave it out of her practice wishes and out of her mind, and instead, it kept rising up and singing out to her.
Miss Hatch had them write a paragraph about “The Virtue of Persistence,” and Gusta tried to write about anything else, but that horn of hers crawled into sentence after sentence and wouldn’t leave. How hard it was to make one note roll into the next on the horn — how you had to melt right into the music and how the horn had to be on your side and how many hours it took to learn to make the horn sing — and even then it could suddenly betray you, and make a note sound like a rude noise instead of music! But when it all flowed, smooth as a river of resonant air — well, that was the best gift persistence could ever give a person, wasn’t it?
Let go, Gusta told herself furiously. You have to let it go.
Otherwise, the horn would surely grab that Wish and make it be all about itself.
Miss Hatch handed back Gusta’s paper at the end of the day with a smile: “I’m coming to hear you at the high school tonight, you know!”
Gusta had to slip away fast, so that she wouldn’t crumple.
After school there was a last run-through at the high school. Miss Kendall was in her element, kind and enthusiastic and well prepared. She had even brought blouses for Gusta and Josie to wear. Probably she had also brought the money for the horn. Gusta didn’t have the courage to ask about that, not yet. First things first, she told herself. First, the concert. Then, everything else.
As the musicians gathered in the new high-school theater for the concert, at the end of that day, they were absolutely chock-full of —“What do we call it, students?”— anticipation.
Gusta had to endure that anticipation a long time, because she didn’t play until the end. That meant she had to sit through the other orchestra pieces and some singing by the choruses. She sat there feeling small and out of place and feeling her heart swell and crack. The horn was so comfortable in her hands. It seemed to be saying to her, with every valve and curve, You can’t really let go of me! You wouldn’t do that! She didn’t want time to move forward, because every moment brought her closer to having to do what she knew she needed to do, but she couldn’t help looking forward to those opening notes of hers anyway, because nothing is better than asking your French horn to give you the melody you want and having it respond.
But oh, it was a good thing she had left the actual Wish at home in its sock in the box under her bed. She saw so clearly that she might have accidentally wasted the Wish on something laughably small, on the concert (“Hope I play well!” “Hope it doesn’t go badly!”), for instance, when the logical part of her mind knew she didn’t actually need any wishes to get her through the concert, if she just stayed calm and did the things she knew perfectly well how to do. It’s a funny thing, though: nervousness — anticipation — can make even a sensible person grasp at wishes, if they’re lucky enough to have a Wish around to grasp.
And having found something as rare in ordinary, everyday life as a Wish, Gusta was determined to make the most of it: she would use this bit of magic she had found to make the most sensible, logical, effective, helpful, thorough, and loophole-free wish anybody in the history of wishing had ever wished. She was not going to let this Wish be wasted, not now when there was so much that needed fixing. Not on playing her horn. Not on anything to do with that horn. No.
Because there was a larger, less ridiculous danger: that she might fall right into selfishness, into thinking a wish might save her horn, instead of her horn saving Uncle Charlie. She knew from stories that wishes wriggle and cheat — if they even exist at all.
But unlike a wish, a hundred dollars is as real as real. That’s what she told herself while the horn trembled in her hands.
She herself would not try to wriggle out of having to do the right thing anymore. Ever since she had torn off that line from her mother’s letter — the horn to be sold, in case of need — Gusta had been in debt to what was right. You don’t get away with things like that, not really. So now she was going to face facts and do what must be done. Then maybe she would have paid the price, and the rest of her wishing would come out, right as rain. Maybe she could even wish her papa home. . . . Oh, she was holding on hard to that thought.
But first, the concert!
And now it was time. The stage crew pulled the big curtains shut and started rushing about to set up the stage for what the master of ceremonies (Mr. Jordan, director of the school band) announced would be “Miss Kendall’s ‘Russian Moon: A Number with Some Musical Surprises.’ ” They placed Gusta in front of the semicircle of string players, and an eager subset of the high-school band over on the left.
“Okay, kid, listen up,” said the lanky boy on the lighting team in the speediest, most energetic murmur. “As long as you don’t go moving your chair around, the spotlight will hit on you right here. Pretty great to have a real spotlight, huh? You sit tight, and it’s going to be like a ray of moonlight bangs down right onto your head. Naw, better than that. Break a leg!”
She had never heard anyone promise so many painful disasters with such enthusiasm. That must be something they taught you in high school. Anyway, there was no time for any of those thoughts now, because the lights had gone down, and the curtain was opening.
Here was what Miss Kendall, Springdale High School’s most melodious teacher and all-around musical genius, had thought up for this show: The opening was quiet chords played by the string orchestra. All Gusta had to do for the first forty seconds was sit still and hope her lips weren’t getting too dry from nervousness (anticipation). She couldn’t see the audience very well, thanks to the gloom, but she could tell from the way they rustled that there were hundreds and hundreds of them out there. And then someone — maybe the lanky boy — hit a switch, and a new light, the spotlight, poured down on Gusta, and nevertheless she had to think only of Tchaikovsky and music and keeping her lips just right — or better yet, not think at all, just play.
It was perhaps the “most famous horn solo ever,” her father had said, long ago. And then he had accepted the two-dollar bet that Gusta wouldn’t be able to play it. That bet had been a thorn festering in Gusta’s heart ever since, but tonight she felt like the thorn was melting into something else, like one of those off-by-a-half-step notes that just deepens the music in the end.
Because the music rolled out from her horn tonight like liquid moonlight. Oh, it was smooth and lovely, despite the dryness of her lips.
If Gusta admitted the inmost unsaid truths of her heart — and sometimes playing the horn felt like spilling those inmost truths, disguised as melody, out into the world — then what was leaking out now (if only the people listening knew how to hear the meaning underneath the music) was something like this: her father was gone, her mother was far away, children were so often orphans, there was so much sadness in the world — but maybe someday it could all work out, we could all get to all those high notes we dream of reaching. Maybe things, someday, could finally be otherwise.
Gusta knew from the stillness of the crowd that Miss Kendall’s brilliant idea was working perfectly so far, that all those people were thinking a combination of wondering thoughts:
Oh, isn’t that a pretty tune!
And also:
Is that little girl really playing that thing? Who is she?
(Miss Kendall had said it this way: “The audience won’t believe its own eyes
. It won’t be able to put together what its ears are hearing and what its eyes are seeing. Can you imagine that?” Gusta, of course, could imagine that. From long experience she could imagine that very, very well.)
And the third thought, beginning to buzz around in the audience’s heads:
Hey, haven’t I heard this somewhere before?
This is where Miss Kendall had had her stroke of genius. Gusta’s last note spilled out into the air, and then the orchestra’s chords cleverly climbed down the scale into a slightly different key, and suddenly the lights came up on the other half of the stage, and there was the Springdale High School Band (with the saxophones borrowed from the Kendall Mills Band) diving right into that top hit of 1939, “Moon Love,” as made famous by the Glenn Miller Orchestra.
The artificial moonlight was no longer blinding Gusta, and her lips no longer had to behave; she could sit back in her chair and watch the band, while all of her trembled a little from whatever anticipation becomes once the crisis or performance has passed.
The band might not have had the smooth, suave savvy of Glenn Miller, but they sure knew how to throw themselves into a tune. The audience cheered. Then they listened for a few more seconds, and they got the joke — It’s the same song! That’s why it sounded so familiar!— and they cheered again, twice as loud. And then Josie walked out on the stage while the band was playing, and the cheering quieted down so they could hear the next thing, which was Josie, wreathed in that magical, electrical moonlight, singing words that the crowd knew perfectly well — or had known a while ago, when this song had still been at the top of the charts. Gusta had listened a hundred times to Josie practicing this song, and as far as she could figure out, “moon love” was the kind of sneaky, awful love that steals into your heart, makes you do foolish things, and then leaves you all alone. Sounded pretty miserable to Gusta, but the members of that audience were on the edges of their seats, as if under some beautiful, melancholy spell.
