by Phoebe Stone
He would peek out from the covers and say, “Bring it over here, please.”
Then I would say, “No.”
And he would say, “Yes.”
And I would say, “No.”
And he would say, “Yes.”
And then Uncle Gideon would pop his head in the door and say, “Oh, Derek, there you are! I was wondering where you were. Fliss was too, weren’t you, Flissy? We were sure you’d be outside on the beach by now, looking for old bottle caps like you used to do. Remember all those wonderful green ones you found last year?”
After Uncle Gideon had left, I would look over at Derek and whisper, “Uncle Gideon got another letter from my Danny. I know it, but he never lets me see them and he never admits who the letters are from. Do you think that strange? And do you know anything about the piano downstairs with those dreadful nails locking it shut?”
Derek would shake his head against the pillow and say, “I’ve never seen or heard Gideon play that piano. Flissy, you are stirring up the soup around here.”
“Am I?” I said.
I often thought Derek’s face looked rather dashing as he stared at the ceiling. He didn’t have to do anything all day. He just lay there listening to music. He told me at least twice that he could never go and ask a girl for a spin on the dance floor. I said it was rubbish. And then he said, “You mean garbage.” And I decided all Americans were natural-born teasers and I told Wink so too.
And then one day, another letter arrived from Portugal. I had my hands on it and, as usual, Uncle Gideon grabbed it. And when he went hurrying off into the locked room with it and closed the door behind him, a great idea came into my head.
Danny always said that I was his little bright-idea girl. I’d be sitting on the sofa with him in our lovely flat in London, lying against him, feeling happy and safe with Winnie on the other side of me, embroidering. Danny would pat my head and say, “My little think tank. What are you up to now? What’s going on in there?”
And I had to admit that sometimes my ideas could get me into situations. Like the time in London when Winnie and Danny were gone for two days. I wasn’t to leave the flat and I wasn’t to tell anyone that I was staying there alone. One day, I decided to dry all my blue woolen knickers (underpants) on the railing of the little balcony outside my bedroom. I had them all washed and laid out nicely, when a big wind came up the way it does sometimes in London and it blew all my knickers off the railing and down into the neighbors’ walled-in garden next door. And there’s no way to get into a walled-in garden like that unless you go down and knock on the neighbor’s door, which I did. I said, “Excuse me, my knickers are in your rosebushes. May I go and fetch them?”
My idea involved Derek. And so I went directly to him. I started in by knocking on his door and saying that I had finally finished reading A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett and I wondered if he would like a go at it. He didn’t answer and so I opened the door and went into his room and stood there in the dark.
“Derek,” I said, speaking right into the shadows. He was lying in bed with his back to me, staring at the wall.
“Captain Derek,” he said.
“Captain Derek,” I said. “Actually, I was rather hoping the captain part was optional.”
“Possibly,” he said.
“Anyway, another letter has come from Portugal.” And now I started whispering. “And Uncle Gideon has got it in that locked room. And oh, Derek, I want so much to see one of the letters. Won’t you help me?”
Now Derek was listening. He even rolled over and looked at me. “What do you mean?” he said.
“I need to go in that room,” I said. Through the slightly parted curtains, I could see Auntie and The Gram way down the beach, digging for clams. “Now will be a perfect time. I hope you will not think me rude, but I need you to fall out of bed and scream and cry as if you are hurt.”
Derek looked pleased. He even sat up.
“And then Uncle Gideon will come rushing in to help you and he’ll forget to lock the door.”
“Hmmm,” Derek said. “You’re smart, I see.”
“I’m not,” I said. “I can’t do long division, and Lily Jones says it’s ever so simple. Never mind about that. Will you scream and yell? Yes or no.”
“Maybe,” he said, “but you have to promise to let me see the letters too.”
“I won’t steal them,” I said. “I’ll only copy them over. I have a pencil in my pocket and some paper.”
“Oh yes, you are clever,” said Derek, smiling at me. It was the first time that I was to see Derek’s smile. And it was a lovely, big, beaming one that went nicely with his grainy, brown-sugar eyes and the sweet music playing in the background. And his smile gave me a British coal fire feeling. I had to close my eyes for a minute because it went through me like British smoke, that delicious smell you breathe in when you are running along the pathways between all the little coal sheds and walled-in gardens behind the row houses in England.
“Thank you ever so much, Derek. Once I see these letters, I promise I won’t bother anyone about them again,” I said. And I went out into the hall and stood quietly behind a door. I had become quite good at sneaking about this large, dark house full of rifts and lies.
Soon enough, I heard Derek thump out of bed and then begin crying out and calling for help. Just as I hoped, Uncle Gideon came rushing from the locked room, only closing the door behind him, calling out, “Derek, my God, are you all right?”
“Ohhh, I must have broken something,” I heard Derek say as I slipped into the unlocked locked room.
British children are not normally nosy or clever or snoopy at all, but I just had to know. I had to see those letters.
Once inside, I could see the room was a study, with a globe on a small table and maps on the wall.
Bright, colored thumbtacks on the map of Europe. Books on the desk. Even a copy of Romeo and Juliet lying there open.
I quickly searched the drawers and found a small stack of letters, all of them from Portugal and with the blue rectangle in the corner saying BY AIRPLANE. I reached for the first one. The envelope had been carefully slit open. I pulled the letter out and held it up to the light. Then my ears started ringing as if the ocean were roaring inside me. I looked down at the contents. It was all numbers. It read 12-5 21-2-10 64-35 17-7-41-47-110-14. 52-47-46-77-72-16 23-1 80-53-20 70-71-15-5-72-31-53-82 and went on and on. It was quite long and I quickly copied all the numbers over carefully. At the bottom of the page in small letters, it said, a favorite in Miami.
My head felt like it was spinning round and round like a boat caught in a whirlpool in the mid Atlantic. I stuffed the paper in my pocket and waited by the door, listening.
I could hear Derek saying, “But I can’t move my leg. It really hurts too much.”
“Please, Derek,” said Gideon, “let’s see if I can get you back up in bed and then I will go and call the doctor.”
“No, no. No doctor,” shouted Derek. But it was too late. Soon I heard Uncle Gideon down on the landing, ringing someone up.
Then I slipped quietly out of the study. I went and stood in a somber way by Derek’s bed. He was looking up at me from his pillow. I didn’t exactly feel like smiling. I felt confused and shaky. Uncle Gideon was on the phone saying, “Derek, has fallen out of bed. Can you stop over this afternoon?”
“Now you owe me one,” said Derek. “I’m going to have to have that doctor poking me again.”
“Dreadfully sorry,” I said and then I pulled the piece of paper out of my pocket and showed it to Derek.
“Oh, Flissy,” he whispered, “oh my goodness. Do you know what this is? The letter is written in code. It’s in code!”
That summer, there were days when the sea was beautiful and calm and green. I could sit on the porch alone in the quiet heat and just stare at the water all afternoon. Oceans can look lovely sometimes, but that loveliness can be deceiving. After all, there were sharks lurking in the water, and German submarin
es could have easily been prowling about the coast. Why would someone write in code? Why would someone send a letter full of numbers?
That very next evening, I brought up Derek’s dinner tray. I opened the door and looked at his bed. It was empty. My eyes rolled round in the dim light. “Derek?” I said. “Have you gone lost on me?”
“No,” he said, “not really.” There he was, sitting at his desk across the room, no longer wearing pajamas. He was dressed in summer trousers and a striped pullover, looking up the word code in his encyclopedia. He was tall and thin and it was nice to be able to see all of him for a change. He kept his one useless arm in his lap.
“People use code when they have a secret. When they don’t want anyone to know or see what they have written,” he said.
“Because they are hiding something,” I said, putting the tray down. “I thought so.” My heart sank then like a ship shot full of holes. My Winnie and Danny had lied to me. They were in Portugal, not in London at all. Why did they lie? What were they doing?
“If we want to know what these messages say, we will have to try to figure out how to break the code,” Derek said. “And that’s going to be very hard because there are as many different codes created as there are birds in the sky or birthdays on the calendar.”
We sat there quietly for a long time listening to the wind ruffling and whistling under the shingles on the house, the shutters banging back and forth. We were both thinking about all those strange numbers on that page. If I had been a little starfish caught in a tangle of sea lettuce and kelp, I couldn’t have been more discouraged than I felt just now.
Then, to cheer things up and especially because I was rather pleased to see Derek out of bed, I said, “Speaking of birthdays, did you know that the president of the United States, Franklin Roosevelt, has his birthday one day after mine? His birthday is January thirtieth.”
“I have an assigned birthday,” said Derek.
“An assigned birthday?” I said. “And whatever is that?”
“Well,” said Derek, “I was assigned a day. It was kind of picked out of a hat for me.”
“But doesn’t everyone get a birthday naturally when they are born?”
“Yes, but I didn’t come with paperwork,” he said.
“Well, what day were you assigned, then?” I asked.
“I was assigned January twenty-ninth.”
“Oh, but that’s my birthday,” I said. “How very strange. I wonder why. It’s not a particularly marvelous sort of day to have for a birthday, is it?”
“Not really,” Derek said. “It’s just an ordinary day in the middle of winter. Usually very cold outside and sometimes it snows.”
“It’s not like having a birthday on February twenty-ninth, a leap year,” I said. “Then for three years your birthday completely disappears, which could be rather interesting.”
“It’s because I did not come with paperwork,” he said again.
“No paperwork? What do you mean by that?”
“Never mind,” said Derek. “I don’t like talking about this.”
“Oh, nobody likes talking about anything here. I do want to go home,” I said. “But I don’t know where my passport is or even where my home is because home is where your parents are, and I have misplaced my parents.” I had never cried in all my life in front of a handsome, lanky, freckle-faced boy and I wasn’t going to start now. So I began trying to count all the bottle caps collected in jars on Derek’s desk. I got to 178 and then got all mixed up and was about to start over.
Then Derek said, “Well, look, I’d rather not say this.”
“Fine,” I said.
“But I’m not actually officially a real Bathburn,” he said.
“You’re not?” I said, looking up. “You’re not Gideon and Miami’s little brother?”
“Well, yes I am, and no I’m not. What I mean is, I was adopted and I came with no paperwork. Officially, my real name is Derek Blakely.”
“Oh, Derek,” I said and I sank to the floor at his feet near the desk, where he was sitting. I felt foggy and glum and sad for him and surprised. I put my hands up to my eyes just in case I might be going to cry this time. “But, Derek, don’t you know your real mother and your real father?”
“No,” said Derek, “I don’t know anything. I can’t remember back that far. I’ve been here since I was one.”
“That’s very awful,” I said. “I do hope you have lots of friends.”
“Well, I do, or I did,” he said, “but no one wants anyone coming out to the house now.”
“Because you had polio,” I said.
“Yes,” he said. “But it seems like there are other reasons too. I’m not sure.”
Then we sat in the dark room without saying one more word. The house felt suddenly even more somber and gloomy, and my beautiful Winnie and Danny had somehow become lost in the darkness of it.
I had always been good at cheering up quickly. I always was good at thinking of something pleasant or odd, like the way the guards outside of Buckingham Palace never smiled or spoke. They always looked straight ahead as if they were statues, even if you jumped up and down in front of them or touched their hand or asked them where to find the Tower of London.
I squeezed my eyes tight now and hoped something cheeky would come to me in a bright moment. Then I opened them and looked up at Derek. He seemed so tall and clever sitting there with all his code-breaking ideas on paper in front of him.
“Anyway, it doesn’t matter about anything. What matters is this,” he said and he flung his one useless arm up high. It dropped heavily back to his lap. “I can’t help my country and I can’t ever ask a girl to dance. And so I’ll be staying here in this room. Good-bye.” And then he went over to the record player and put on the Bathburns’ favorite song again: “I Think of You.”
Yes, I am quite good at turning cheerful suddenly, and I can also be rather bold. Winnie said my peculiar boldness always came out of nowhere just when she least expected it. Like one time in London when we were hurrying to the air-raid shelter down in the tube (the subway). We passed a small child on the street all by himself, trudging along slowly. I felt sorry for him, all alone as he was, so I rushed up to him and I grabbed his little hand and pulled him along with us to the shelter.
Now I could feel that strange British boldness coming over me again and there was nothing I could do to stop it. I went over to Derek face-to-face and I said, “You see, you can ask a girl for a spin on the dance floor. I’ll dance with you. Pick up your left arm and prop it on my shoulder.” And I took him by the right hand. He seemed kind of surprised and suddenly we started to do a slow dance, a waltz I think it’s called, in the darkened room with “I Think of You” playing.
It felt lovely to dance with Derek. I was thinking, for a boy with no paperwork and an assigned birthday, he was quite nice, really. And then in spite of the letters and the code and the piano and the rift, and even in spite of the war, I rather loved him just then.
Yes, the ocean in Maine was very loud and the wind was wheezy and wild, but of course, London could be much noisier on the nights when the bombers struck. I would be sleeping in my bed and then we would hear the terrible whine of the air-raid sirens warning us to take cover, to go to the tube for shelter. Sometimes it was too late and we didn’t go at all. One night during an air raid, Winnie and Danny and I stood under the staircase in our hall. We were told that the stairwell was the strongest part of the building. Danny was in his slippers. I was barefoot and my feet were cold. So under that stairwell Danny gave me his slippers. I stood there listening to the airplanes droning above us, wearing my Danny’s huge, blue, felt slippers. That night, a building down the street was bombed. It was the loudest noise I’d ever heard. We seemed to feel that building collapsing all around us. We smelled dust and smoke. The paintings on the walls in our flat shook and yet, they didn’t fall. We lost our electricity for good, but our building was safe.
Later that night when I was in bed aga
in, I heard Winnie and Danny talking. They talked and talked and Winnie cried. When I peeked through my door, I saw my parents sitting together, mostly in the dark except for a small candle flickering on the table. They were talking about something I couldn’t understand. It seemed important. Because of that and the bombs, they couldn’t keep me in London anymore.
Winnie said, “There’s no other choice. We have to take her to your mother’s in Maine, darling. You know we must. There’s no other alternative.”
“I know you’re right,” said Danny, “but I don’t want to and I don’t know how to approach Gideon after all this time. He’s so terribly upset with us. And how would we get there anyway? It’s almost impossible to catch a boat to America.”
Danny went to the office the next day. It was on Baker Street, the same street where Sherlock Holmes lived in all his books. Winnie seemed very nervous, pacing about while he was gone, embroidering late into the night by candlelight. A few days later, Danny came back from Baker Street looking very sad and cheerful, which was Danny’s way, really. He said, “Okay, it’s all been figured out. We have a new plan and it’s rather extraordinary. A new approach entirely.”
And so it was decided. We would be leaving London. I went to Lily Jones’s flat to have tea and say good-bye. The whole time I was there, her little brother, Albert, held Wink. He was terribly fond of him and almost cried when I had to take Wink back. Lily Jones put her yellow canary in its pretty cage next to us by the table and for our special good-bye, we ate a whole tin of jam. Then Lily let her canary out of the cage and it was the loveliest thing to see it flying round the room in its brilliant yellow coat, darting this way and that, singing all the while.
The very next day, Winnie and Danny and I took a train. We got the seats with a table in front of us, and Winnie and Danny were drinking ginger beer the whole way. The train was going to Southampton, where the huge boat the HMS Queen Anne was leaving the port that night in secret.
