The Secret of Zoom

by Lynne Jonell

  “You wouldn’t have to bring your daughter along, you know. I’d be happy to take care of her while you’re gone.” Lenny Loompski leaned his head out the window and stared up at his employee. “By the way, I hear she has perfect pitch.”

  Christina stopped breathing. Somewhere a cricket chirped loudly in the sudden stillness.

  “My spies are everywhere, you see.” Lenny smiled, his flat cheeks bunching.

  Dr. Adnoid made a strangled sort of sound. “She doesn’t have perfect pitch.”

  “You think not? We could use her in the children’s choir.”

  “She has nothing to do with you.” Dr. Adnoid leaned forward. “Keep away from her, do you hear?”

  “I’d like to, Wilfer, really I would. But if you’re going to call in an inspector, I think he would be impressed to see that the daughter of our head scientist was singing right along with the orphans . . . don’t you agree?” He pulled in his arm. The car engine started up.

  “Wait! I’ve changed my mind about the inspector!” cried Christina’s father, banging on the car door.

  Lenny Loompski put the car into gear. “I had a feeling you might, Wilfer.”

  Silently, Christina folded up the tripod and tucked her telescope under one arm. She followed Taft through the service door and back into the attic. He was talking—she heard words like “zoomstones” and “your father” and “Lenny”—but she wasn’t listening. She said good night and stepped down the ladder.

  She put on her pajamas in a sort of daze. She had the same numb, stupefied feeling she always got when staring at a math problem. There were too many pieces of information, and she couldn’t seem to put any of them together. She half expected to see a dancing chicken come into the room with a sign in its beak that said PRETTY GOOD WORK! or EXTRA CREDIT FOR TRYING!, leaving her unsure if she’d gotten the problem right or wrong.

  She brushed her teeth mechanically and got into bed. There was a lump under the covers—the blankets she had rolled up to imitate the bulk of a sleeping person. There was another lump, too, with hard, square edges. Christina flicked on her bedside lamp and looked at the green scrapbook in her hands.

  She had seen it many times before and had felt absolutely no interest at all. She knew the kind of thing her father wrote in it.

  But tonight he’d said that her mother had made the first few entries. Christina turned to the first pages and saw her mother’s handwriting.

  It was elegant and flowing, unlike Dr. Adnoid’s squared printing, and for a moment Christina laid her cheek against the page. Then she lifted her head and began to read.

  “Today Christina took her first steps. Such chubby little legs!” There was a picture with that one of a laughing baby in a white bonnet.

  “Today she brought me her first flower—the head of a dandelion, crumpled and flat in her moist fist. A dozen roses couldn’t be more beautiful!” A brownish bit of fluff was taped next to this entry. It might have been a dandelion, once. And next to that was another picture, this time of a smiling woman with honey-colored hair holding a squirming toddler on a green hill studded with small yellow flowers.

  Christina studied it as if it were a photo of a strange new species. There was no house in the picture and no iron palings. The mother and child were outside, on a hill somewhere in the world, and there were no fences at all.

  Christina felt an odd, deep pull within her, as if she wanted something very much but didn’t know quite what it was. She wasn’t sure that she missed her mother, exactly—could you miss someone you barely remembered?—but she did wish that her mother hadn’t been blown up.

  Christina turned the page with a careful hand. Another photo showed her parents and a group of friends picnicking on the same hill, with children playing together in the foreground. One of the children—somewhat blurry, she was in motion—had wispy pale hair. The caption below read “Christina with Peter, Celia, and Tommy.” She couldn’t remember any of them, but it was nice to think that she might have had friends, once.

  Christina read every entry, but when she came to the fall after her fourth birthday, the elegant script stopped. One year later, there was her father’s dry, careful printing, scratching in statistics: weight, height, eye exam results, shoe size. One time he had apparently tried to record clothing sizes but had given up in confusion. There were no more entries about chubby legs or crumpled flowers.

  Christina looked at the page for her sixth year. She had learned to roller-skate that spring, going back and forth on the driveway inside the gate, and she had fallen and scraped her knee. That night, her knee had throbbed and bled through the bandage Nanny had put on, and in the morning it had been stuck to the sheets.

  Her father, appalled that she had hurt herself, had taken the skates away, but Christina thought it was the kind of thing her mother would have wanted in the book, so she put it in. She drew a picture of herself on the skates, and another of herself falling down, and used a red marker for the drops of blood.

  She looked at her work with satisfaction. Her father had tried, but he didn’t know what was important to put in a scrapbook. She would remember everything, and she would finish it the way her mother would have wanted it done.

  Christina was deep into a drawing of the time she had made snow ice cream when she heard a muffled sound from the floor beneath. She padded softly down the steps and paused by her father’s study door. She pushed it open slightly.

  Dr. Adnoid was sitting at his desk with his head in his hands. Before him was a picture of his wife.

  “Oh, Bethie,” he said, and Christina could hear that he had been crying. “What now?”

  Christina stepped back. She did not like seeing her father this way. Grown-ups were always supposed to know what to do.

  But what if they didn’t? Were the kids just supposed to wait around until the adults figured things out? Christina frowned. Taft and the orphans had waited a long time already.

  She tiptoed back up the stairs. There must be something she could do. For starters, she could refuse to sing even one note for Lenny Loompski. That would show him.

  And tomorrow she would go down the tunnel again and begin to find things out.

  AT breakfast Christina’s father made a pronouncement.

  “No going out in the yard today,” he said. “Or tomorrow. Or the next day.”

  “What?” Nanny was shocked. “Christina needs sunshine for vitamin D!”

  All eyes turned toward Nanny. Christina took advantage of the moment and slid a piece of buttered toast into the pocket of her sweatshirt, which she had worn especially for this purpose.

  “It’s for her own protection,” said Dr. Adnoid, gazing down at his plate of scrambled eggs. He put a hand over his forehead and sighed.

  Cook and Nanny exchanged glances. Christina spooned scrambled eggs on another piece of toast, topped it with a third, and jammed the whole thing into her sweatshirt’s front pouch while everyone was busy looking at one another. There, that ought to be enough for Taft. He could get water from the bathroom faucet if he was thirsty. She wasn’t about to bring orange juice or milk upstairs in her pocket.

  “I’m sorry, Christina.” Dr. Adnoid blinked miserably at his daughter. “But it’s safest this way.”

  Christina was just thinking that it was a very good thing she had discovered the tunnel, otherwise she didn’t know how she could have stood it. Being kept safe was too much like being in jail.

  She was relieved, too, that he had said no going out in the yard; she could obey him perfectly and still have a wonderful time in the forest, once Nanny went down for her afternoon nap. But she had better change the subject before he said “no going out at all.”

  “You forgot the scrapbook in my room last night,” she said. “I read it.”

  Dr. Adnoid tried to smile. “Did you find it interesting? I can’t say I’m very clever at thinking what to write.”

  Christina considered this. “You write facts,” she said, “because that’s what you’re
good at. But I was mostly reading what Mom—Mother—wrote.” She hesitated over what to call her mother. Christina couldn’t remember calling her anything at all.

  “Do you miss your mother very much?” Her father toyed with his fork.

  Christina knew she should miss her mother. But when the only things she could recall were a soft lap, a rocking motion, and a fragment of a song, it was hard to express exactly what it was that she longed for.

  She tried to shrug. “I can barely remember her, Dad. I don’t even have anything to remember her by.” She frowned. “Last night was the first time I saw any pictures of her besides the one on your desk.”

  Her father pushed back his chair. “Wait here. I have something I’ve been saving for you.”

  He disappeared into his bedroom. There was a scuffing sound, and then a tumbling noise of boxes falling, and a muffled oath. At last Dr. Adnoid reappeared, carrying a polished wooden box. He blew the dust off the top. “I think you’re old enough to have this now.”

  Christina lifted the lid. Three tiers swung up, lined with green velvet. There was a shimmer of gold chains, silver earrings, and an assortment of brooches set with semiprecious stones. There was a locket with a green stone and a slender wristwatch, and in the bottom compartment was a jumble of things—ribbon, spools of thread, old keys, a nail clipper, and even a pocketknife.

  “She didn’t keep just jewelry in there, I guess,” said Dr. Adnoid. “A few odds and ends of nothing.”

  “It’s nice.” Christina opened up the locket to see a picture on either side—one of a smiling baby, and the other of a much younger Dr. Adnoid. She set it down and picked up a ring, turning it in the light.

  It looked like an ordinary wedding ring—a plain gold band—but set within it was a small oblong of gray rock. As Christina looked closely, she could see streaks of pink and green. “What’s this?”

  Dr. Adnoid straightened. “I forgot that was there. That was her wedding band. Give it to me, please.”

  The ring felt strangely warm in Christina’s hand. She passed it over with reluctance. “But, Dad—”

  “How did math go yesterday?” Dr. Adnoid asked abruptly, shuffling through the sections of the morning paper. “Did you finish your review?”

  “Uh . . . sort of . . .”

  “I’ll look in tonight and see if you need any extra help. Do today’s assignment and have it ready for me to check.”

  Christina swallowed hard. She couldn’t remember what she was supposed to be working on, though it probably involved chickens. Taft could do her assignment, of course—but if she had to answer her father’s questions, she’d be lost.

  Dr. Adnoid folded the paper. “Now, remember what I told you. No going out—”

  “In the yard,” Christina finished, and hurriedly changed the subject before he could say anything more. “Dad, would you tell me—what is perfect pitch?”

  Dr. Adnoid looked down at Christina, his face worried. “It’s rather complex. First, you have to understand that pitch is the ear’s response to sound frequencies. A frequency is a vibration in the air. But pitch also includes overtones and harmonics—see, a frequency is harmonic if it’s an integer multiple of the fundamental frequency, and a harmonic series is a mathematical definition, so to speak. Would you like me to describe the arithmetic series for you?” He laid down the paper and dug in his briefcase for a pencil. “Or perhaps the octave series? It’s a geometric progression, and might be more interesting.”

  Christina shook her head, appalled. If perfect pitch had anything to do with math, she wanted no part of it.

  Her father reached for his car keys. “Well, another time perhaps. But remember—whatever you do, don’t sing.”

  Christina listened for the sound of the front door closing. She shut her mother’s jewelry box with care and looked up at Nanny. Something had occurred to her, but she didn’t know quite how to say it.

  “That ring,” she said at last. “Don’t they usually bury wedding rings with the—” She stopped, unable to say the word. She fiddled nervously with the edge of the newspaper her father had left on the table. There was a slight scraping sound, as if something hard beneath it slid against the tabletop.

  “But there was no body, dear.” Nanny laid a plump hand on Christina’s shoulder. “There was nothing left to bury. Your mother’s lab was completely blown to bits; later, in the rubble, the ring was found.”

  “Oh.” Christina lifted a corner of the paper and peeked beneath. Her heart gave a sudden flip; her free hand darted under the sports section and closed on the small round object her father had forgotten.

  Nanny plucked the newspaper from the table. “Oh, good—no one’s done the crossword puzzle yet!”

  Christina slid her hand carefully off the table and into her pocket. She poked a forefinger through the circle of her mother’s ring, feeling its strange warmth. “Who found it?”

  Nanny picked up a pencil. “The ring? Everyone was searching, of course. But I believe—yes, I’m almost sure that it was Lenny Loompski.”

  “IT’S stupid!” said Taft. He was staring at Christina’s computer, with its screen full of line-dancing poultry. “Stupid, stupid, stupid!”

  The back of his thin neck was turning red. Christina set down her mother’s jewelry box and dug into her sweatshirt pocket for the egg-and-toast sandwich. “Math is pretty stupid,” she agreed.

  “Not the math.” Taft scowled. “What’s stupid is the way they teach it.”

  “What? The dancing chickens?” Christina laid his breakfast on the desk.

  Taft picked lint off the toast, looking moody. “More than that. See, instead of teaching you one way to solve a problem, this program shows you about ten. Pretty soon all the methods are mixed up in your head, and you use a bit of one and a piece of another and get everything wrong, and then those chickens come beaking around with signs that say ‘almost right!’ and ‘points for trying!’ ”

  “It’s supposed to build up your self-esteem,” said Christina, trying not to laugh. She cleared a space on one of her bookshelves for the jewelry box and stood back to admire. It would have looked better if it wasn’t surrounded by math books—her father supervised the book-buying in the house and kept hoping to get her interested in numbers—but still it was wonderful to have something of her mother’s.

  Taft made an exasperated noise and swallowed a mouthful of scrambled egg. “What would build up my self-esteem,” he said through his teeth, “is to know how to do a problem and then get it right. I figured it out after a while—this level isn’t that hard, I’m still doing review—but it’s going to be tough to learn anything new. No wonder you hate it so much. They’ve taken all the true fun out of math.”

  “Yeah, right,” said Christina, “and it was so much fun to begin with.” She slumped to the floor, her back against the desk, and pulled at the frayed edge of her sweatshirt sleeve.

  “Well, it is fun,” said Taft stubbornly, finishing off the toast.

  “You can do my assignment for today, then.” Christina curled up her knees and laid her head on her arms. “I just wish you could talk to my dad for me, too. He’s going to check my work and ask how I got my answers, and of course I won’t know. And then he’s going to explain and explain, and I won’t understand a word.”

  “It’s not that hard,” said Taft earnestly. “Really, math is fun, if you—”

  “Listen!” said Christina fiercely. “Math is not fun. It’s horrible. You can talk all you want, but I’m never going to get it. There’s no right answer, and the rules always keep changing, and I’m sick of it.”

  “But don’t you see?” Taft leaned over the back of his chair. “That’s the beauty of math—there is a right answer, the rules never change, and you always know exactly where you are. You do the problem step by step, and it comes out the same every time. And if you make a mistake, you just go back step by step, and you can find out exactly where you went wrong.”

  “It doesn’t work that way for
me,” said Christina. “I’m stupid at math.” She put a hand in her pocket and rubbed the edge of her mother’s ring. Her mother was a scientist. Her mother must have loved math. Would her mother be ashamed of her? she wondered.

  Taft snapped off the monitor. “I always thought the orphanage school was bad,” he said, walking over to her wall of bookshelves, “because we only had one computer for the whole place, and the math books were old and beat-up. But maybe it wasn’t as bad as I thought.”

  He ran his finger over a series of dusty books under a label that said Mathematics. “Aha!” He pounced on a book with battered corners, covered in a dull, water-stained maroon. He scanned several pages and nodded with satisfaction. “This is what you need.”

  Christina backed away. “Oh, no.”

  Taft blew off the dust and banged the book on her desk. “Sit down,” he said. “You can do math if you take it one step at a time.”

  Christina frowned. She couldn’t do math. She had proven that over and over again; even the happy dancing chickens never told her she’d done it right. “I’m stupid with numbers,” she insisted. “Don’t even bother, because I can’t—”

  “You are not stupid.” Taft looked at her, his dark eyes serious. “Some people are, you know. They can’t get things no matter how hard they try. That’s not your problem.”

  “But we’ve got to make plans,” said Christina. “We’re going through the tunnel after lunch, right? What do you want to do first? Climb trees? Run?”

  Taft opened the book to the first page. “You’re stalling. Sharpen your pencil.”

  Christina looked at the computer keyboard. “Pencil?”

  “Yes. We’re going to do this the old-fashioned way.”

  Taft was right, Christina had to admit an hour later. He had made her repeat her multiplication tables until she had them down cold, he had shown her a trick for remembering the nine-times table, and he had shown her one—and only one—way to multiply on paper. Now she was doing a whole page of multiplication problems, one after the other, and finding that what Taft had said was true—it wasn’t that hard.