Falling into Place

by Stephanie Greene

  After that, everything that was normal in her life had started to fall. Like dominoes when they’re set up on one end and spaced the perfect distance apart, so that when the first one is pushed, the rest follow in a constant ripple until the last one is knocked over.

  First, Wendy came to dinner with “three surprises”—Claire, Emily, and Sarah.

  Then Gran called to say Tad was sick.

  Then Wendy and Dad got married.

  Then Gran and Tad had to sell the house on Blackberry Lane and move to Carol Woods so nurses could take care of Tad.

  Then Dad said Wendy was having a baby.

  Then Tad died.

  Plinkplinkplinkplinkplinkplink.

  Margaret had thought all the dominoes in her life that could be knocked over had been. Until yesterday. Yesterday, when Wendy called to her from upstairs, and Margaret went running up to find her standing in the doorway to Margaret’s room with her arms outstretched and a smile on her face, saying, “What do you think? Isn’t it beautiful?”

  And there was Claire’s bed, pushed up against the wall where Margaret’s desk had been, and a pink rug on the floor. All night long, she’d had to listen to loud crinkling noises every time Claire turned over. She was sharing her room with a six-year-old bed wetter, and Dad hadn’t even talked to her about it first.

  “Come on.” The weight of his hand on her head made her look up. For the first time, she saw that his face was drawn and tired, and that the nerve under his right eye that twitched when he was getting a headache was pulsing rhythmically. “Is it really as bad as all that?” he said.

  The answer was on the tip of her tongue, but she didn’t say it. He didn’t really want to know. They had had this discussion a million times. He wanted her to be on his side. He wanted to her to cope. To grow up, and act eleven. Even if the only difference between being ten and being eleven was one tiny second.

  When the screen door under her bedroom window slammed, they both started. There was the sound of running footsteps, then wheels spinning furiously on the gravel driveway.

  A shrill tricycle bell rang.

  “I’m sick of them,” Margaret said. “Everything they wear is pink. Their shoes are pink, their pajamas are pink, even their underwear is pink. I’m sick of it.”

  “Pink?” He sat back, amazed. “That’s what this is all about? The color pink?” He laughed a kind of giddy, relieved laugh. “Would it make you feel any better if I made them wear brown?”

  “It’s not funny, Dad.”

  He was immediately somber again. “I know it’s not. Listen.” He clamped his hand around her knee and held it there, as if steadying a nervous colt. “You know what I think? I think you need a break. How would you like to go to Gran’s?”

  Gran. The moment Margaret heard the word, a feeling of relief surged up in her so strong that she rose onto her knees without realizing she had moved. “Could I, Dad? Could I really? By myself?”

  “She called last week to invite you, but I told her I thought you wanted to be here when the baby was born.”

  “Oh, I don’t care… . I mean, I do care, I do.” She backtracked quickly to wipe away the hurt look on his face. “It’s just that I haven’t stayed with Gran since Tad died. I miss her so much. You don’t need me around here. Wendy’s had lots of babies without my help.”

  “We weren’t exactly expecting you to deliver it,” said her father.

  “Oh, I know. I didn’t mean it that way.” Margaret clasped her hands together and willed herself to slow down. He had to say yes. If he didn’t let her go to Gran’s, she would die.

  “Gran needs me,” she said carefully. “You said you thought she was lonely. She wouldn’t be if I was there. She’s never lonely with me around. I could help her dig a garden, and we could take long walks, and watch old movies… . Oh, please, Dad?”

  He looked at her for what felt like a very long time. His expression was serious, as if he was looking for a way to tell her no so she wouldn’t be disappointed. And then his face changed, and she knew he had made up his mind.

  “Okay.” He smiled. “I’ll go call her now.”

  “Oh, thank you, thank you!” Margaret cried. She leapt up off her bed and started to twirl deliriously around the room. Gran! Someone to talk to. Someone who would understand. She would tell Gran everything. About the dominoes, about Claire, about Dad … Margaret crashed into her dresser and yanked open the top drawer, pulling out socks and underwear like a thief ransacking a house.

  Her dad watched her from the doorway with an amused expression on his face. “We’ll call you the minute the baby’s born,” he said.

  “Not if it’s after nine o’clock—you know Gran.” Margaret flopped down on her stomach and felt around under her bed for her shoes. “Can I take the train like I did when I was nine?” she said with her cheek pressed against the rug. When her hand settled on the familiar shape of her sneaker, she pulled it out and sat up. “I remember everything,” she recited. “I get off at Chester—it’s the eighth stop. My grandparents are Mr. and Mrs. David Mack. Well, it’s only Mrs. Mack now. Their telephone number is 555—” She stopped. “Does Gran have the same number?”

  “Yep.”

  “Good. Then it’s 555-9244. See?”

  “I’m impressed,” said her dad. “It’s been a while.”

  “Almost two years,” said Margaret. Her first train trip alone to stay with her grandparents had been their ninth birthday present to her. It was only a short ride, but she could still remember how it felt sitting next to the huge window on the slippery leather seat, gently rocking from side to side as the train raced down the tracks. The backs of houses and stores and factories rushed by, and the air was filled with the faint smell of metal. She’d had a flutter in her stomach every time the train slowed down to pull into a station, wondering if it was her stop. What if she got off too early? Or what if she realized it was the right one only as the train was pulling out?

  The minute the train pulled into Chester, she had relaxed. There was no mistaking it. Gran and Tad were standing on the platform with a white sign that said MISS MACK in huge red letters, like limousine drivers waiting for someone important. They had promised they would meet her that way every year. Even though Tad was gone, Margaret knew Gran would remember.

  She could hardly wait.

  She opened her closet door to look for her suitcase. “Don’t get your hopes too high,” her dad cautioned. “Gran doesn’t seem to be fitting into Carol Woods the way we hoped. I think Tad’s dying so soon after they got there was very hard on her. She doesn’t seem to have made any friends. The rules and regulations are getting her down a bit, too. She sounded kind of flat the last time I talked to her.” “Gran doesn’t care about rules,” said Margaret. “I’m afraid that when you live in a retirement community, you have to.”

  “Not Gran.”

  “Just don’t get her all worked up over them, all right?”

  “Don’t worry.” Margaret spotted the orange handle of her suitcase under a pile of junk at the bottom of her closet and knelt down. “I’ll cheer her up. Gran’s always happy when I’m around.”

  Her dad didn’t say anything for a minute. Then, “What about that hug?”

  Margaret paused with her hand on the handle. She knew that she should get up and run across the room and throw her arms around his waist, that she wouldn’t get to hug him again until she got back from Gran’s. But for the first time in her life, she didn’t feel like it. Anyway, he’d have plenty of hugs while she was gone.

  And she’d have Gran.

  There was a sudden wail from outside, followed by a second, angrier, wail. Margaret yanked at the handle and fell back against her bed as the suitcase shot out onto her lap.

  “Emily probably took Sarah’s bike,” she said without turning around. “You’d better get out there. Remember what happened the last time?”

  “Oh, great, and Wendy’s taking a nap.” Her dad was halfway down the stairs by the time Margaret stood
up and laid her suitcase on her bed. She heard the back door slam, then his deep voice from outside.

  Plink.

  It didn’t feel good, having another domino fall. But at least this time she’d been the one who’d done the pushing.

  Chapter 2

  “Oh, stop sniveling,” said Margaret. “It’s just a little blood and gravel.”

  “I’m not sniveling. My nose is running and I have to breathe it back in.” Roy cupped his hand around the bloody patch that was his knee. “I think I can see bone.”

  “You should have taken a running jump, like I told you.” Margaret licked at the trail of cherry Popsicle that was running from her wrist to her elbow. She stared down at him from the top of the stone wall.

  She still couldn’t get over the shock she’d felt yesterday when she saw Roy as the train pulled into the station. There was Gran, standing where Margaret had known she would be. Margaret’s heart had started to soar, but then, just as quickly, it had stopped. Gran wasn’t alone. A little boy with round tortoiseshell glasses and an expectant look on his face was standing next to her. Her cousin Roy, who wasn’t even supposed to be there. The way his hand was tucked so comfortably into Gran’s as he leaned against her had given Margaret the strangest feeling. As if she was the visitor and he was the one who belonged there.

  Margaret was so surprised, it had taken her a few minutes to notice the change in Gran. She seemed frail, somehow, not just small, and anxious. She gave Margaret a hurried hug instead of her usual warm embrace, and then grabbed Margaret’s hand. “Sign? What sign? Hold on to my hand, Margaret.” Her voice was loud and querulous. “Roy, where are you? Stay close to me now, both of you.”

  She clutched Margaret to her on one side and Roy on the other as she pulled them down the platform. The way she kept them clutched so insistently to her side, it was as if there was a huge crowd on the platform and she was afraid they were going to be swept onto the tracks. But there wasn’t any crowd. Other than the two people hurrying to their cars at the other end of the platform, they were the only people there.

  It wasn’t like Gran at all to be so nervous. And it had given Margaret a fluttery feeling in the pit of her stomach. How could she talk to Gran about her problems when Gran seemed so worried herself? And even if Gran was all right, how was she ever going to get her to herself?

  She would never forgive Roy if he ruined her visit with Gran. Never.

  Not only was he almost as big a baby as Claire, but he was uncoordinated. He couldn’t play the simplest game of follow-the-leader without hurting himself. Claire followed orders much better than he did, too. When Margaret told him to close his eyes and take a running jump to get over the gap in the stone wall where the walkway ran through, he refused. And now look at him, she thought disgustedly. Another baby, crying.

  She jumped down off the wall and walked over to where he sat huddled on the grass. “I never cry,” she said, taking another lick of her Popsicle. “I didn’t even cry when I broke my collarbone, and that hurt a lot more than your dumb old knee.”

  “How do you know?” said Roy. He squeezed his wound gently. “See that white thing?”

  “That’s just the inside of your skin,” said Margaret. She made a disgusted clicking noise. “You’re a bigger baby than Claire.”

  “It stings like crazy.”

  “Oh, for Pete’s sake, hold still.” She squatted down next to him, grabbed his knee, and started rubbing the tip of her Popsicle back and forth vigorously over his wound.

  “Keep it down, would you?” she said, ducking to avoid his flailing arms. “You make it sound like you’re being murdered. Hey!” Margaret jumped to her feet and rubbed the side of her head where he’d struck her. “What’d you do that for?”

  “You can’t put Popsicle on an open wound!” Roy’s round face was screwed up into a furious knot. “It’s full of sugar!”

  “So? Look at that—a perfectly good Popsicle, wasted,” she said disgustedly. See if she ever tried to help him out again! She broke off the top, tossed it back over her shoulder, and put what was left of it back in her mouth. “You could have given me a concussion,” she said.

  “That’s better than gangrene,” said Roy. He pushed himself up off the ground with his injured leg held stiffly out in front of him, and started moving along the wall with jerky, birdlike hops.

  Margaret followed along behind him, swinging a stiff leg out to the side in an exaggerated arc, and moaning.

  “It’s not funny, Margaret,” said Roy. He hobbled faster to put a greater distance between them, and stopped. Like a swimmer testing the water with a fearful toe, he rested his foot on the ground and put his full weight on it. As she came up to him, Margaret heard the sharp intake of his breath.

  “It feels better, doesn’t it?” she said.

  “No.”

  “Yes, it does, I can tell. Go on, try walking.”

  “I don’t know what you’re in such a bad mood about,” Roy said to her. “But you’d better stop being mean to me, Margaret, or I’m telling Gran.”

  Margaret felt a moment of panic. If Roy went running back to Gran, upset, she didn’t know what Gran would do. Not after the way she had acted last night, when all Roy did was call the stew she put in front of them “Tad’s favorite.” Without warning, Gran’s mouth had gone slack and her eyes had gotten a bewildered, lost look. She’d said something vague about having to get the salad, and then turned and made her way back into the kitchen, holding on to the backs of the chairs as if she needed to be shown the way. Margaret and Roy had sat there in shocked silence.

  When Gran finally came back into the room, she acted as if nothing had happened. But Margaret couldn’t forget the look on her face. She couldn’t bear to think of Gran looking that way again.

  “We were sent to try and cheer her up, remember?” she said, in a voice far more confident than she felt. “How do you think she’s going to feel, knowing her grandson’s a tattletale?”

  “Then you better stop telling me what to do,” said Roy.

  “Okay, okay.” Margaret bit off the last piece of her Popsicle and held the stick up in front of her face. “Want to hear a joke?”

  “What?”

  “What gets colder as it warms up?”

  “I don’t know,” said Roy. He started to limp again.

  “An air conditioner.” She stuck the stick behind one ear and fell in next to him.

  “What’d you do that for?” Roy said.

  “I’m thinking about making a Popsicle-stick joke book. If I don’t save the sticks, I’ll forget the jokes.”

  “Your ear’s going to get infected, putting that thing back there.”

  “All you do is talk about things getting infected all the time,” Margaret said, glad to be on a safer topic.

  “I can’t help it. My father’s a doctor.”

  They walked slowly, moving in and out of the shadows of the trees that fell across the road in stripes. There was a row of small white cottages on either side of the street. Each one had a small front yard hemmed in by a picket fence. The shutters and doors were black.

  Gran didn’t like the houses at Carol Woods, Margaret could tell. She said she got lost every time she went out, they all looked so much alike. But they didn’t, really. Each one had something different about it if you looked carefully. The one Margaret and Roy were passing had bright red geraniums in green window boxes on the front. The one next to it had sunflowers that reached to the top of the door.

  Margaret thought they were pretty. She thought Carol Woods looked like a little village, and the houses reminded her of the cozy houses in picture books, where neighbors leaned over their picket fences and borrowed a cup of sugar. It would be nice to have neighbors so close in the middle of a thunderstorm, she thought, especially if you were alone. But when she had said this to Gran on the way home from the station yesterday, Gran had said she didn’t know any of her neighbors yet and wasn’t sure she wanted to.

  “All anyone talks ab
out in a place like this is their aches and pains and what medicines they take.” Gran’s voice was full of scorn. “It doesn’t make for very interesting conversation.”

  Margaret had frowned. It wasn’t like Gran to be so mean. Especially about people she didn’t even know. She was always telling Margaret not to judge people before she got to know them. And on Blackberry Lane Gran had been friends with all the neighbors.

  “How do you know if you don’t even know them?” Margaret had said insistently. But Gran didn’t answer.

  That wasn’t like her, either.

  Margaret gave a nervous little side hop as if trying to get away from herself. Here she was, thinking about Gran again. She whirled around to face Roy. “Want to get some sheets and build a fort when we get back?”

  “Maybe. But you can’t make all the rules from now on,” he said. “You’re only twenty-eight months older than me. You’re not the boss of me. We both are. Gran said so.”

  “But I have more experience than you,” said Margaret. “I boss the girls around all the time. You don’t have anyone to boss.”

  “Girls are different. Boys don’t like being bossed.”

  “Neither do girls,” she said breezily, and then threw her hands over her head, hopped up on one foot, and kicked over slowly from a handstand into a back bend. “The thing about bossing is,” she said, with her dark hair falling to the ground like a beard, “you’re not supposed to ask the person whether they like it or not.”

  Roy stared at her disapprovingly. “You’re going to hurt your backbone, staying like that,” he said. “You could get curvature of the spine.”

  “Go on,” she grunted. “Time me.”

  He pressed a button on his watch and kept his eye on it until Margaret let out a burst of air and collapsed onto the grass with her legs doubled back beneath her. “Fifty-six seconds,” he said.

  “You didn’t start on time.” She pulled a strand of hair out of the corner of her mouth and jumped to her feet. “I usually go longer than that.”

  They started walking again.