Georgina sniffed. “He probably has lice.”
From the foot of Poco’s bed came a heave of cat fur. Old Juliette had come in with them last night and crept upstairs to her usual sleeping spot. Now she roused herself, padded over, and gazed with her powerful blue eyes out the window. Whatever she saw seemed to interest her, because a minute later she eased her big body off the bed and made for the door with a stiff-legged gait.
Juliette was not as quick as when she had first come to live with Poco. That was last fall, when Angela Harrall, Poco and Georgina’s friend, had moved to Mexico with her father for a year. Unfortunately, Angela’s parents had decided to get divorced, and then had gone off in very different directions.
Her mother was accepted at a famous law school in California. Her father bought into a South American business. There was no room in these plans for an aging cat, so Juliette was left behind with the Lambert family—where, shortly after, she was run down by a car in the street and then had disappeared for several mysterious weeks.
Juliette was quieter when she returned, and she had slept a great deal. Last summer, she’d collapsed twice from the heat, causing everyone to worry that her time was near.
“I hope Angela comes back soon, or she’ll miss saying good-bye,” Poco’s mother was always murmuring sadly.
To which Poco would answer, “Not good-bye. Farewell. Juliette has a lot more lives to go on to.” It was one of those notions she insisted on.
From under the covers, Georgina watched as the cat struggled by.
“Whatever life Juliette has coming up next, she’s certainly turned into a wreck in this one. Angela will hardly recognize her,” she said in a rather mean tone to Poco.
Juliette had always made Georgina nervous. The cat possessed a queer hypnotic stare that seemed at times to take control of people. And what was one to make of the tiny silver box that had appeared around her neck last winter? Georgina glimpsed it now as Juliette passed by. The box contained catnip, a strong-scented herb associated with ancient, vanished worlds.
“And she’s so skinny,” Georgina went on, sitting up more boldly as Juliette’s tail disappeared into the hall. “Her shoulders stick out like two chicken wings. Angela will think she isn’t being fed.”
Angela this, Angela that. Lately, Georgina kept bringing her up. She had missed Angela during her year away, and felt increasingly impatient to see her again.
“Poco is nice, but she’s not scientific,” Georgina told her mother. “She’s in love with a robin. What does that say?”
“That she has imagination?” Mrs. Rusk ventured.
Perhaps Poco felt Georgina’s quiet shift away. She looked angry whenever Angela’s name was mentioned.
“Of course Juliette is being fed! Anyway, why would Angela care? She wrote me exactly once to ask how her cat was.”
“Well, I guess she’s been a little busy. She had to learn a whole new language. In Mexico, everyone speaks Spanish, you know. Also, she had to make new friends.”
“That,” said Poco hotly, “is no excuse. You can’t just go off and forget your old ones.”
Georgina felt a pang. The truth was, Angela hadn’t written to her, either. She hadn’t telephoned after the first month. There had been one Happy New Year card. “From Angela,” it said. That was all.
“So why does Juliette look so thin?” Georgina went on, trying to cover her feelings.
“She doesn’t! She looks old. She still goes hunting. Remember last night, how she caught that chipmunk?”
Last night! With these words, Georgina was invaded by a frightening image: seven glass marbles glowing in the dark. She rubbed her eyes to make them go away.
“Well, it’s sad to see a cat falling apart. Remember how you used to think Juliette could talk? She must be losing her special powers.”
“No she isn’t. We still talk if we want. But when people get to know each other, words are less important. They have other ways of saying what they mean. Have you ever seen Juliette with my robin? They are such dear old friends, they’ve given up words completely.”
Georgina shook her head in a helpless way.
“If you don’t believe me, come watch. My mother just let Juliette out the back door.”
Georgina moved over to the window, where she witnessed the unremarkable sight of a cat and a bird staring at each other.
Poco sighed. “If you want to know, Juliette is the only reason my robin comes back at all. He likes her ten times more than me. And Juliette adores him, though she’s too proud to show it. Neither of them would ever admit it, but anyone can see how they need each other. That, of course, is the true test.”
“Of what?”
“Of being friends forever.” She didn’t have to add, “Unlike Angela.” Georgina leapt up and began to get dressed.
Breakfast was under way in the Lambert kitchen when the two girls arrived downstairs. Mr. Lambert was cooking banana pancakes, a Sunday family tradition, while Mrs. Lambert sat at the kitchen table in her bathrobe, giving him advice. Mr. and Mrs. Lambert had clearly not reached the state of friendliness beyond which words are no longer needed, because the whole proceeding was making a lot of noise.
“Well, girls!” Mr. Lambert said, cutting Mrs. Lambert off in midsentence. “A great day for you; I hear the Harralls are home from Mexico.”
Georgina’s eyes flew open. “Angela is back? But she hasn’t called.”
“I think it’s only since last night. They came in on a late flight from Houston. Not Mr. Harrall, of course. He’ll stay on in Mexico with his business. But Mrs. Harrall and Angela are here. And the older brother. What’s his name?”
“Martin,” Georgina said. “He’s going to college.”
“I guess that’s why they’ve come tearing home. He has to leave Monday to get to school,” Poco’s mother said. “You girls are lucky. You have another week.” She leaned forward and advised Mr. Lambert to flip his pancakes—unless he planned to serve banana buffalo hide.
“Would you like to take over?” he snapped back.
Meanwhile, Georgina had risen to her feet. “Poco, come on, let’s go see her. I can’t believe Angela’s here after all this time.”
Poco didn’t answer. She looked at the floor.
“Come on! She’ll be desperate to see us.”
A scritch of claws sounded against the back screen door.
Poco got up and went to open it. “Will Juliette have to go back to the Harralls’ right away?” she asked her mother in a low voice as the cat passed through.
“I suppose they’ll want her.”
“Could they at least wait till this afternoon?”
“I’m sure they can. They’re probably still asleep. We’ll wait for them to call us, okay?”
Poco nodded. She reached out and gathered the big gray Siamese in her arms and carried her to her seat. Mr. Lambert brought over their plates of pancakes. Poco looked dismally at hers. “It’s not just Juliette,” she murmured.
Georgina had sat back down and was helping herself to a vast sea of maple syrup. The thought of seeing Angela again had suddenly made her very hungry. She could hardly wait to tell Angela about everything that had happened and to laugh and joke around the way they always did.
“There’s also my robin.” Poco’s voice sounded faint. “When Juliette moves to Angela’s, he’ll want to go, too.”
Georgina was in the middle of an enormous bite. “So what?” she asked in a muffled way that came out sounding like “S-wumph?”
After some more chewing, she added, “You can whawph—I mean, walk—over anytime and seepim—I mean, see him. Besides, he’s such a mefferpain, he might not go.”
“Such a what?” asked Mrs. Lambert with a concerned look.
“A mefferpain!” Georgina said louder. She paused and swallowed. “Such a featherbrain, I meant. He’ll probably forget about Juliette as soon as she leaves.”
“Oh no he won’t. He’ll go with her. The person he’ll start to forget is me
.” Poco raised angry eyes. “I knew this was coming. I’ve been praying every night that something would happen and Angela wouldn’t come home.”
“That’s awful!” Georgina stopped eating and stared.
“Well, don’t tell her, since I guess it didn’t work.”
“Poor Angela. What will you do now?”
Poco gazed fiercely across the table. “Keep praying, I guess, for something else to happen.”
A Personal History by Janet Taylor Lisle
I was born in 1947 to young parents starting a life together in a tiny New York City apartment, just after the Second World War. My father had been a bomber pilot flying out of England during the war, a shattering experience for him. Returning from Europe, he took a job at the New York Herald Tribune. City living worsened his anxieties, however, and so my family and I moved to a rented house on a quiet road near the Rhode Island seacoast.
My first memories are of this place: the woods and fields around my home and the rocky shore nearby, where my father fished and gradually regained his emotional balance. By the 1950s, he had found a job at an insurance company in Hartford, Connecticut. I was the first of five children, and my four brothers and I grew up in outlying Farmington, walking to local schools and later attending private school in West Hartford. But every summer, my family returned to Little Compton on the Rhode Island coast. The place, a natural haven for sea birds and wildlife, was more home to us than any other. It would become the imaginative setting for many of the stories I later wrote, including Forest, The Lampfish of Twill, and The Great Dimpole Oak.
My father revered fiction. At one time, he had contemplated becoming a fiction writer himself. From our earliest school years, my brothers and I internalized this aspiration. We were a reading and writing family, familiar with overflowing bookshelves and tables stacked with books. We were accustomed to seeing our parents reading in the evenings, and to being read to ourselves. By third grade, I was writing stories and feeling magical about it. My pencil was a wand. I waved it and my imagination fell open onto the page. It was all so easy.
By high school, though, I had lost this wild and fearless sense of writing. In my classes, I began to read the novels of the great writers, Henry James, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and Virginia Woolf, among many others. I compared my work with theirs and saw my own ineptitude.
At fourteen, I left my family to attend a girl’s boarding school. It was a completely different world. I missed my brothers and parents, but among my teachers was Miss Arthur, who taught me how to write a tight, well-constructed sentence. Three years later, I entered Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. I majored in English and learned the art of writing a pleasing term paper. But I kept my head down when it came to more imaginative forms of writing. I was self-conscious, thin-skinned, and mortally afraid of criticism. In a way, my education had silenced me.
The war in Vietnam was raging when I graduated in 1969. Like many young people at that time I opposed American intervention there, including the killing of civilians and the US draft that threatened to put my friends in harm’s way. My new husband was among those at risk. Together, we joined VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America) to shield him from service. For the next two years I lived in Atlanta, Georgia, organizing food-buying cooperatives in the city’s public housing projects and teaching in an early childcare center. The work opened my eyes to a world of poverty I’d barely glimpsed before. My old yearning to write flared up. I went back to school—journalism classes this time—at Georgia State University. It was the beginning of a reporting career that extended over the next ten years.
Journalism, with its deadlines and demand for clear, straightforward text, has often been a precedent profession for authors. So it was for me. I learned to write all over again, and lost some of the self-consciousness that had dragged me down before. A decade later, when my daughter’s birth kept me at home, I was ready to test a voice of my own, through fiction. “Voice,” in fact, was suddenly my greatest strength. After years of newspaper interviewing, my ear was attuned to catching intonations that can underlie an ordinary remark and reveal unspoken meaning. I could write these kinds of sentences in my stories to bring my characters to life.
In 1984, my first book, The Dancing Cats of Applesap, was accepted for publication by Richard Jackson, editor of Bradbury Press. “I love your cats! Call me!” he wrote in a letter I’ve kept to remind myself of the moment when I “became a writer.” I had lucked into a talented editor. Jackson’s belief in the power of voice in fiction, and his uncanny sense of narrative timing would soon make him famous in the children’s book world. We worked together over the next fifteen years, publishing some of my strongest titles, including Sirens and Spies, Afternoon of the Elves, Forest, and The Lampfish of Twill.
Today, I live full-time in Little Compton, Rhode Island, in a gray shingled house near the same rocky beaches I tramped as a child. The area’s storms and tangled woodlands, open pastures and salt water ponds, still make an appearance in almost everything I write. Like my father, I’ve found my balance there.
Lisle and her mother in Rhode Island in 1948.
Lisle’s mother reading to her children at their Farmington, Connecticut, house. From left to right: Geoff, age six; Crane, age two; Lisle’s mother; Lisle, age eight; and Hugh, age six. All the cards in the background indicate that this photo was taken around Christmastime, and they are “probably reading ’Twas the Night Before Christmas.”
Lisle at age eleven, in Farmington.
Lisle with her husband, Richard, and her daughter, Elizabeth, at their Little Compton house in 1978.
In 1983, Lisle received her first acceptance letter for fiction when Richard Jackson, editor of Bradbury Press, made an offer for The Dancing Cats of Applesap.
Lisle’s first book signing (for The Dancing Cats of Applesap), at Davoll’s General Store in Dartmouth, Massachusetts, in 1984.
This photo was taken in Petworth, England in 1986. The tree behind Lisle was her inspiration for The Great Dimpole Oak, published in 1987.
Lisle and her brothers in a photo taken in the early 1990s at their Warren’s Point house, in Little Compton.
An elf village built by third graders at East School in New Canaan, Connecticut. The village, which the kids named “Elf Canaan,” was a school project connected to Afternoon of the Elves, inspired by Lisle’s visit to the school.
Lisle circa 2001 at Warren’s Point in Little Compton, Rhode Island—the setting for the coast of Twill in her novel The Lampfish of Twill.
Kayla, Lisle’s Siamese cat, at seventeen years old. She often sleeps on Lisle’s writing desk when Lisle works, and she is the model for Juliette in Lisle’s Investigators of the Unknown series. When Lisle does school presentations, she tells children that Kayla is her muse. Perhaps she is.
Lisle hard at work in her writing room, in 2001.
Lisle with her husband, Richard, and her daughter, Elizabeth, in Little Compton in 2005.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
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, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1995 by Janet Taylor Lisle
cover design by Connie Gabbert
978-1-4532-7186-5
This edition published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media
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