by Dale Peck
It is a particular sort of child who finds the idea of hiking and swimming—and singalongs!—so unappealing that he or she wants to shriek in horror. As it happens, Susan and Charles were both that sort of child.
“No!” Susan exclaimed.
“Please!” Charles begged.
“We’re sorry. We promise to get along better.”
“Please please please let us go to Uncle Farley’s for the summer.”
“Children,” Mrs. Oakenfeld sighed. “I do not want you to be good to avoid being punished. I do not want you to be good so that you can receive rewards. I want you to be good,” she stressed, “because it is the right thing to do. You are very formidable adversaries. But don’t you see that when you work against each other, you just cancel each other out?”
Mrs. Oakenfeld let her words sink in for a moment, then put a hand on Murray’s shoulder. “Come along, dear, let’s see if we can’t do something about that rash. Don’t you want to take off that necklace Farley gave you?” she added. “It must be itching your neck awfully.”
But Murray, rubbing his locket with one hand and scratching his neck with the other, only said, “It’s all right, Mum. I’ll keep it on for a while longer.”
THREE
The Caretaker
Because Murray was ill and likely to sleep fitfully, and because Susan and Charles were leaving the following day, Mrs. Oakenfeld put Murray in Susan’s room and had Susan bunk with Charles. And because Susan and Charles had reached a stalemate, neither of them opened the book that had been delivered that afternoon—whenever either child approached the oilskin package, the other would glare over fearfully. The final hurdle was whose suitcase to put the book in. Susan finally agreed to let Charles stow it in his backpack, but after he had she took the small lock from her keepsake box and snapped it on the zipper. The key she put on a necklace, which she tucked inside her shirt as Murray did with his locket.
“Your bag, my lock. Now we’re even.”
The next day was filled with preparations and goodbyes, and before they knew it they were in a taxi. Mr. Ramirez had stowed their bags in the trunk, including Charles’s backpack, so Susan and Charles couldn’t even examine the mysterious book on the way to the airport.
“Mr. Ramirez,” Susan said before they left, “I wonder if the boy who delivered that package yesterday said anything about it.”
Mr. Ramirez looked at Susan blankly. “I was sleeping in the afternoon,” he said, “but I think you’re the one who’s dreaming. You didn’t have any deliveries yesterday.”
Susan peered at Mr. Ramirez’s face. He certainly didn’t look like he was lying. But before she could quiz him further, Mrs. Oakenfeld ushered Susan and Charles into the taxi. She gave Susan money to pay the driver—she was staying home with Murray, and Mr. Oakenfeld had left much earlier on business. She complimented her children on their improved behavior and kissed them both one last time.
“Murray will be along in a week or two, when he’s better. Now, you two keep up the good work, and give Farley a hug for me.”
Three hours later, as the children’s Air Canada flight banked left over Long Island Sound and the FASTEN SEAT-BELTS sign went off, Charles was finally able to pull his backpack from the overhead compartment. Now the black nylon bag sat on his lap. Charles could feel a warmth on his thighs, a tingling from the object concealed within. All of a sudden he was nervous, so he said,
“I can’t believe you made the taxi driver take that dumb detour.”
“It wasn’t dumb,” Susan protested. “A little superstitious, maybe—”
“It was a tree. Dumb.”
Susan had to bite her lip to keep her mouth shut, because she didn’t really know how to explain her odd sidetrack. Earlier in the spring, she had been shopping downtown with her friends Dehlia Mitchell and Courtney King when they happened upon a tiny garden on the corner of Houston and Bowery. The postage stamp–sized park was dominated by a single enormous tree with delicate needlelike leaves and reddish feathery bark that Susan (to the consternation of her shopping-minded friends) simply had to touch. Apparently she wasn’t the only person to be lured in by the great tree: an informational placard mounted on a stake told her that the object of her fascination was a young redwood. While Dehlia and Courtney chatted about what they wanted at Urban Outfitters, Susan read that the trees were both the world’s tallest and oldest living things, capable of reaching heights of more than 350 feet and ages exceeding three thousand years.
“Um, Earth to Susan,” Charles said. “Sister Susan? Get your head out of the trees.” He tapped on the window. “It’s already in the clouds.”
Susan sniffed. “You should care about that tree more than I do. Its very existence is a scientific phenomenon.”
“It’s a tree.”
“Redwoods couldn’t grow in the Northeast until very recently. The winters were too long and harsh. But global warming has made it possible for them to survive here. Don’t you think that’s interesting?”
“What ever,” Charles said. He pointed to the bag in his lap. “I’m much more interested in what’s in here. Give me the key.”
Susan returned Charles’s stare with a thin-lipped smile. “Maybe we should wait till after lunch. We don’t want to spill anything on Mario’s book.”
“I’m sure we can manage,” Charles said dryly. “I was up all night wondering about it, and I heard you tossing and turning too. Come on, let’s—”
Charles broke off. His eyes narrowed to slits.
“You…forgot…the…key.” He said the words very slowly, as if willing Susan to contradict him. “Didn’t … you?”
“I didn’t forget it. I took it off when I was showering and—”
“YOU! FORGOT! THE! KEY!”
“Charles! Keep your voice down!”
“I will NOT keep my voice down! I am so tired of this, Susan Oakenfeld. Everyone thinks you’re the responsible one, just because you’re three years older and speak in a phony-baloney English accent. Mum gives you the scissors to cut the string, Mum gives you the money to pay the cabdriver. But YOU! RUIN! EVERYTHING!”
Charles’s voice was so loud that a flight attendant abandoned her trolley and marched toward them.
“Young man, I’m going to have to ask you to keep it down.”
Charles was normally a quiet boy. Even in science, where he was the top student, he blushed and stammered if he was called to speak out loud. But now he seemed completely fearless. Clutching the bag in his lap, he exclaimed, “See! Susan messes up, and I get in trouble! Fine! I won’t say anything else for the Whole! ENTIRE! FLIGHT!”
He was as good as his word. But the moment the two Oakenfeld children stepped onto the jetway in Quebec, his mouth flew open.
“So what are you going to do about this?”
Susan glanced to her left and right as theatrically as possible.
“Is someone speaking? I thought I heard a voice. Excuse me, sir,” she said, tapping a man on the elbow. “Did you say something?”
“Be serious!” Charles said, even as the man murmured something about “les Americaines” and hurried away. “How do you plan on opening this lock?”
“I don’t know why I—”
“Why?” Charles held up his backpack. “Because you were the one who locked it, and you were the one who forgot to bring the key.”
“I wouldn’t have had to lock it,” Susan said, “if I could trust you not to sneak a look at it and—and break it or something!”
“How do you break a book?”
“Well, you broke the lock on the drawing room door in Drift House last fall!”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“I just thought that since you’re so good with breaking locks you could find a way to pick it or—”
Susan’s words—and her forward movement—were both halted abruptly when she ran into a pair of long, thin (and slightly smelly) legs. She looked up—and up, and up—to see a grizzled face glowering d
own at her.
“Picket what?” the incredibly distant face said. “Picket fences? Pick it up? Or pick-it a lock?”
“I’m s-s-sorry, sir. I didn’t see you.”
The man stared down at Susan for an uncomfortable moment, then nodded. He was bald on top but had long stringy gray hair fringing his ears and straggling past his shoulders.
“Yup. Too busy arguing with Charlie-o to see where you’re going. That’s Susan all right. Well, give it here.” And the man held out a dirty hand capped by the longest, sharpest nails either child had ever seen.
Susan and Charles looked at each other hesitantly. Charles was the first to recover his manners.
“Ch-Ch-Charles Oakenfeld, sir,” he said, shaking the man’s hand.
The tall stranger took firm hold of Charles’s right hand, and then, without letting go, bent over and snatched Charles’s backpack with his left. But instead of running off with it, the man held the bag up to his eyes and squinted at the lock on the zipper. And then he did the strangest thing either child had ever seen (and these children had seen their fair share of strangeness). There, in the Quebec airport, surrounded by dozens of perfectly normal-looking people heading home or away on vacation or business, the tall dirty smelly stranger pulled his hand from Charles’s and began biting his nails.
Just one nail, Charles realized after a moment: the one capping the longest finger on his right hand. He went at it intently, stopping to pull his finger from his mouth periodically to check his progress. Susan and Charles could only stare in fascinated horror.
“ ’At should do it,” the man said finally. And he spat a bit of nail onto the floor.
Susan and Charles looked at each other. Do what? they both wondered.
The answer wasn’t long in coming. The man brought the jagged end of his bitten nail to the lock Susan had put on Charles’s suitcase and deftly slipped it into the keyhole. He twisted his hand and the lock popped open with a thin snap. “There you go,” the man said, handing the open lock to Susan, the bag to Charles. “Problem solved.”
Susan and Charles continued to stare at the man, dumbfounded. Finally Susan managed to swallow the lump out of her throat.
“Please, sir. Who—well, who are you?”
“Who am I?” The man sounded hurt that the children didn’t know. “What, and after lighting your fires for three months you don’t remember me? And doing the grocery shopping so’s Applethwaite could fix you three squares a day plus snacks? Name’s Zenubian, of course.” And then, with a wink so tiny Charles thought he might have imagined it, the man—Mr. Zenubian—added, “What did you think, I was invisible or something?”
FOUR
The Charles Force
The drive from Quebec took the rest of the afternoon, and after staring out the window for a while first Charles and then Susan fell asleep. The sound of crunching gravel woke Charles from disturbing visions of deserts and forests. On the opposite seat, Susan was stretched out. Judging from the expression on her face, her dreams were as tumultuous as Charles’s. Her tongue filled up her cheek—a habit she had worked hard to break in the last nine months—and Charles smiled tenderly at this pre–Drift House innocence. He did love his older sister, even if she could be a bit bossy. He recalled all their recent quarrels with some anguish, as well as their promise to their mother to try to get along. If only older sisters didn’t have to make everything so hard.
When he sat up he realized instantly they were on the last stretch of road before Drift House. A low stone wall ran on the left side of the road. Beyond the wall a wild forest sprawled up the side of a steep hill beyond which nothing was visible—just the sort of natural screen to hide a house that occasionally went for a trip out to sea. The coniferous fir and pine trees were dark and thick, but the deciduous oaks and maples were still thin leaved and delicate looking, their pale spring foliage only lightly tinted by chlorophyll. Charles was more interested in electronics than botany, but still, they were good, specific words, and, without thinking, he whispered them aloud.
“Chlorophyll. Deciduous. Coniferous.”
On the other seat, Susan’s eyes fluttered open. She peered at Charles blearily.
“What did you call me?”
Charles frowned, and used his tongue to stick out the side of his cheek. But even as he did so he wondered where all this antagonism came from. It seemed to get worse and worse the closer they got to—
“Drift House!” Susan said, sitting up.
It wasn’t the house she’d seen, just the arched iron gate with its coat of arms at the crest. The crossed swords, and the Viking ship they now knew was the Captain Quoin and his Time Pirates’ Chronos, and the parrot on its sail: Xerxes, the great-grandfather of their very own parrot, President Wilson. A sense of boundless possibility fueled both children, but as they turned through the gates a harsh voice cut through their reverie.
“It’s a foolish mind that confuses a thing with the sign for it. Drift House is still a mile behind these gates.”
It seemed to Susan that Mr. Zenubian deliberately slowed to prolong the agony; on the other side of Charles’s glasses, the tangle of trees and vines grew blurry, and he took off his lenses and cleaned them on his shirt. Bits of blue flashed between the branches. Pebbles snapped beneath the tires. And then:
“I see it!” both children exclaimed.
As the car descended the hill, the ancient ivy-covered structure shimmered into view. To Charles, it was bits and pieces: the cannons poking through the balustrade, the parrot-shaped weathervane atop the solarium, the window through which he had watched Susan vanish beneath the sea in the mermaids’ golden bubble. To Susan, it was a hollow outline, flat decks, sharp prow, boat shaped. But to both children it felt magical: filled with mystery and adventure.
“Pshaw,” came the jarring voice in the front seat. “Not a thread of smoke in sight. Can’t the useless man even put a log on the grate?”
Well, that part didn’t feel so magical.
Susan was out first and dashing up the gravel path, Charles following quickly after. But halfway up the path he stopped. He’d suddenly remembered his backpack.
He’d remembered the book inside his backpack.
Mr. Zenubian had opened the trunk and the children’s several bags stood on the driveway. Charles didn’t want this unknown man to be handling a gift his time-traveling brother had gone to so much trouble to deliver. And so, glancing one more time at Drift House, he hurried back toward the driveway.
“I’ll help,” he said as he drew close to the tall, thin, smelly stranger.
“It’s more than the other one offered. But that’s girls for you, right, Charles?”
Just a few hours ago Charles had complained that Susan never let him do anything. But now he heard himself saying: “I hate girls!”
Mr. Zenubian handed Charles his backpack. “Older sisters is the worst kind of girls. Ain’t that right, Charles?”
In his eagerness to reclaim his backpack Charles didn’t notice that Mr. Zenubian had given Charles the one piece of luggage he wanted to carry. But as he did so, the caretaker looked Charles straight in the eye.
“Don’t let her take it from you, Charles.”
Charles stumbled backward a step. “Wh-what?”
“It’s yours, Charles. Don’t let her take it.”
Mr. Zenubian didn’t say what “it” was. He kept his eyes fixed on Charles, and even though Charles found him creepy and mysterious, there was also something trustworthy in the directness of his stare. But to trust him more than Susan?
Just then Susan’s voice echoed across the lawn.
“Uncle Farley!”
Charles turned and saw the figure of their uncle filling up the open doorway to Drift House. Miss Applethwaite’s cooking had obviously added a few pounds to his already stout figure.
He glanced back at Mr. Zenubian, but the caretaker ignored Charles, as if the previous conversation had not taken place. And in Charles’s head it already felt a little
dreamy. Something about Susan? Taking something? Had he dreamed it in the car?
Mr. Zenubian had hoisted all the bags and now pushed past Charles, nearly knocking him down.
“Well? Is it helping, or is it just going to stand there all day?” And he stalked toward the house, his scarecrow form wavering beneath so much weight.
Charles shook his head to clear it. He turned, and there was Uncle Farley, his arms still clasped around Susan.
“Uncle Farley, Uncle Farley!” Charles shouted. And, strapping his backpack on, he ran across the lawn.
There were hugs and handshakes and more hugs and hot tea and still more hugs, and in the background the heavy tread of Mr. Zenubian’s dirty boots as he carried the children’s bags—all except Charles’s backpack—up to the second floor. When he’d finished he appeared in the doorway to the music room, where the children and their uncle were enjoying fragrant pots of mint tea. The caretaker’s lanky dark frame filled up the doorway like a tattered curtain.
“If that’ll be all, I’ll be catching up on my regular duties.”
“Oh, ah, yes,” Uncle Farley said. “Thank you so much for volunteering to pick up Susan and Charles. I’m not sure I could’ve even found the airport.”
“Just follow the planes,” Mr. Zenubian said. He vanished from view, a faint “Volunteering—hah!” lingering behind him, along with the manure-y odor of his shoes.
No one said anything until his heavy footsteps gave way to the slam of the front door. Then:
“Uncle Farley!” Susan practically yelled. “Who is he?”
Uncle Farley smiled weakly. “Mr. Zenubian, of course.”
“We were here for more than three months last year,” Charles said, “and we never saw him once. I thought he was like Miss Applethwaite. Did he just … appear?”
“That about sums it up. I looked out my window and there he was. Planting tulip bulbs.”
