The Romeo and Juliet Code

by Phoebe Stone

  A great idea should always be left to steep like loose tea leaves in a teapot for a while, to make sure that the tea will be strong enough and that the idea truly is a great one. And so I let my idea rest for a day or two before telling Derek anything.

  The next day, I was sitting on the sofa with Auntie Miami. I was watching her stitches as she hemmed a skirt. I had to look very closely so I could see how long each stitch was.

  Finally, Aunt Miami said, “Whatever are you looking at?”

  “I’m studying your stitches and I am trying to measure how long they are,” I said. “Because in England, we have to sew in school, and the smaller the stitches, the higher the points you get. I’m looking to see if you should get a star.”

  “Oh, Flissy, you are a funny duck,” said Auntie Miami.

  “And I’m not a duck. I don’t have a bill and I don’t go around quacking.” I leaned my head on her shoulder and looked at her stitches even more carefully. And then I said, “Auntie, what is it that Uncle Gideon and my Danny fought over? It must have been a terrible fight for Danny to stay away twelve long years. And to cause such a rift.”

  “Yes, it was,” said Auntie Miami. “It was a terrible fight.”

  “And what did they fight about?” I said.

  “Oh, Flissy, why aren’t you off playing with dolls like other girls at your age?”

  “Well, I had a few dolls in England, but I never really fancied them. I chose Wink when I packed my suitcases before we left. Of course I would always be faithful to Wink. I’d have stayed in London and let bombs fall on my head if Wink had to be left behind, even if I am too old now for a bear.”

  “Flissy, you are a card. Did you know that?”

  “What did they fight about?” I said again.

  “I should not tell you any of this, but it was about love, of course,” Auntie Miami whispered. “It’s always about love.”

  “Is it?” I said.

  “Yes, Gideon and Danny were in college in England, at Oxford, and they both loved the same girl.”

  “Oh,” I said, “how sad.”

  “In fact, Gideon knew her first and she was his girlfriend. Then Danny met her and fell deeply in love with her, and she with him.”

  “Oh, how terrible,” I said. “Poor Uncle Gideon.”

  “Yes, it was very sad. He took it very hard. He left school, came back to America, wouldn’t come out of his room for almost a month.”

  “Poor Uncle Gideon,” I said again. “And who was the girl they both loved?”

  Auntie Miami put down her sewing. She looked at me for a long time. She seemed to have an answer all over her face, but it was an answer without words. Finally, she said, “Don’t you know who it was?”

  And I said, “No.”

  And then she looked at me very hard again and waited.

  “Oh,” I said, “was it my mum, Winnie?”

  “Yes,” said Auntie, “yes, it was.”

  I looked up at the ceiling then, following the cracks to see if they made any pictures. I could almost see a big, lopsided, sorrowful heart up there, or else it was a dog’s head without ears. I wondered what kind of dog wouldn’t have ears. And then I said, “Uncle Gideon hasn’t married anyone yet?”

  And Auntie Miami said, “No, he hasn’t even gone on a date since then. He still keeps her in his heart. He still loves her.”

  “Very much?” I said.

  “Very, very much,” she said.

  “And you said in your diary, ‘Oh, will I ever meet anyone in this wretched lonely place?’” I said.

  “Felicity Budwig Bathburn. How did you read that?”

  “I didn’t mean to, honestly,” I said. “I didn’t want to. It just fell open when I was helping The Gram clean your room.”

  “Flissy B. Bathburn, why aren’t you off playing with dolls?” she said again.

  “I told you, I don’t have any and besides I’m faithful to Wink. I’m steadfast and true to Wink forever.”

  And then I started thinking about Uncle Gideon and my mum, Winnie, and my dad, Danny, and I listened to the ocean crashing against the rocks and the wind pushing sand through the cracks in the windows, and from upstairs in Derek’s room, I could hear a record playing. It was one of those sad little jazzy songs.

  I always tried to avoid Life magazine when it came in on Wednesdays. The photographs always bothered me. Today, there were pictures on the cover of Nazi airplanes barreling across the sky in Europe and formations below of soldiers marching with those terrible red and black swastikas on their armbands. I looked away. I was thinking about what Aunt Miami had told me about the fight between the Bathburn brothers. I understood now why Uncle Gideon had pushed Danny away when we first got here and why he wouldn’t speak to Winnie. And in that way I did feel bad for Uncle Gideon. In that way. Still, because of the letters and that package, all these foggy images were swimming past me now like silent U-boats. Life magazine said that groups of Nazi submarines traveled in what they called Wolf Packs. The very name made me shiver.

  All day after talking with Aunt Miami, I tried, really and truly tried, not to think about that fight. But now that I knew more, the envelope Winnie had given me in great trust that day on the porch seemed to float before my eyes. Every time I turned round, it felt like the envelope was almost hovering over my head. I looked in the hall mirror to see if it was really there. But it wasn’t. Then I ended up making faces at myself in the mirror just for fun.

  Uncle Gideon walked by and said, “What ho, Fliss!” He put two rabbit ears behind my head with his two fingers and then he said, “Still British, are you? Haven’t lost the accent, have you?” I tried to smile at him. Honestly I did.

  I went out on the porch to fetch Wink, who was lying on the floor in the sunlight. Uncle Gideon followed me out there and leaned down and put his sunglasses on Wink and then he went to get a towel and set him on it. “Look, Flissy, he’s sunbathing!” he said. “What do you think? Miami, come out and see what has become of Wink. He’s a movie star now!” Then Uncle Gideon got out his Brownie box camera and took pictures of Wink. He thought it was the funniest thing in the world, Wink in sunglasses, sunbathing.

  I just didn’t know what to think about anything. I leaned against the porch railing, waiting until he was finished. I kept thinking as I watched him that he loved my Winnie. He still loved her very much.

  Derek was nearby on the porch swing, reading again. I too had a book under my arm, The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett, and I was planning to become an authority on her. Finally, when Uncle Gideon went into the house and started chasing Miami about with his camera, I sat down with my book on the floor near Wink. I was singing “Once in Royal David’s City” to myself.

  “A Christmas song on a beautiful summer day, Flissy?” Derek said, looking right at me. “You’ve got a good voice, though.”

  “Did you hate the bouquet I brought you? Awfully, terribly, horribly?” I said, trying to count Derek’s freckles on the bridge of his nose as I talked. When I got to eight, I decided, with freckles, it was better to just guess.

  “Flissy,” he said, smiling, “while you’ve been singing, have you thought up any new ways to crack a code?”

  “Hmm,” I said, “perhaps. Maybe.” I had been waiting to tell him my great idea. I had been hoping Winnie would ring me up and explain, so we wouldn’t have to continue guessing. It would often be like that in London. Danny and Winnie would be gone when I came home from school. They’d be gone hours into the night, and I would sit at the window without moving at all, waiting in the darkness, worrying and wondering.

  Then the telephone would ring and it would be Winnie.

  “All I can think of,” said Derek, “is if Gideon is getting these letters and they are addressed to him, he must understand the code. So the way to crack the code is through him.”

  “Yes, Derek,” I said spinning round and round until everything seemed upside down and all mixed up. “And I’ve been wanting to say that I do have an id
ea.”

  I went over to Derek. He was leaning his head back on the porch swing, thinking. I went up close and whispered to him, “Uncle Gideon often goes on a long walk and he carries a folder with him. Sometimes he doesn’t bring the folder back. I honestly think we ought to follow him.”

  The sun seemed to drop just a tiny bit lower on the horizon so that a shaft of light now fell directly across Derek’s face. Or perhaps I was wrong; perhaps his face just lit up because he was very pleased with my idea.

  I didn’t imagine that I could get Derek to leave the house actually. I mean he was on the porch swing all the time, but so far he hadn’t even been down the long steps to stick his toes in the ocean. He was awfully self-conscious about his arm. Even though recently, Auntie Miami had made him a sling to cover it up. And Derek didn’t want to go back to school. I heard him having a row with The Gram the night before. He was saying he was not going back, no matter what, and The Gram was saying he had to.

  And I was going to have to go to school as well. The strangest part of all was that I was going to have Uncle Gideon as my sixth-grade teacher. Which made me ever so nervous because I didn’t want anyone at school to know about Wink. I wasn’t at all sure that Uncle Gideon wouldn’t tease me about him. All the girls might be talking about nail varnish and new hairdos and Uncle Gideon might mention Wink and then I would have to be transferred to another school in another country altogether, like Portugal perhaps. And immediately.

  I got out some paper to write again to Winnie. I was feeling almost like shouting out extremely loudly, “Why is there no proper mailing address for you, Winnie?” I’m sorry to say that I hit my pillow. Then I threw the pillow across the room.

  Dear Winnie,

  I am not at all angry at you for leaving me here and not explaining what you are doing. Honestly. I don’t mind feeling terribly lost and alone and worried. Truly. And I do like writing letters and not mailing them. Honestly.

  Love, love, love,

  Your Felicity

  I went across my little tower room to pick up the pillow. I punched it and threw it again. Then I took a couple of books and stomped on their spines, ripping the pages. Wink sat there staring at me. “Oh, Wink I am sorry,” I said. “I shouldn’t have done that.”

  Then I looked out my window and saw Mr. Henley coming down the hill with his big fat mail pouch. I looked at his hopeful face, and most of my anger just sort of cracked apart like waves when they hit the rocky shore. Each piece of jagged anger sank away into nothingness.

  The mail pouch looked fatter than usual and the postman was smiling and I could just tell he had a real letter for us again. So I opened my window and shouted, “Hello, Mr. Henley. Are you pleased about something?”

  He smiled and waved and I shot down the stairs like Derek’s toy cannon. I think I broke a world record getting down the stairs, trying to beat Uncle Gideon. But Gideon wasn’t even nearby and neither was The Gram. Perhaps they had gone off in the Packard for supplies in town.

  I got down on the beach and just about threw myself in front of Mr. Henley. He really looked very topping and he had a letter for us and it was one of the ones in code. I could tell. The envelope was ever so light and delicate with a red-and-blue airmail design round the border. I took the letter in my hand like it was spun sugar, like one of Winnie’s elaborate cake decorations that she used to make sometimes on her days off before the war. I tried somehow to hold the letter without touching it, if that was possible.

  Suddenly, my pillow-punching mood disappeared entirely and I looked at Mr. Henley and I said, “Have you been married very long, Mr. Henley?”

  “I’m not married at all,” he said, and he slapped the side of his mail pouch. “Too busy, I suppose.”

  “What a pity,” I said and I tried to look very sorrowful. “Well, thank you ever so much for the letter.”

  I tore back up the steps as if I were a cannonball being propelled by a rubber band in one of Derek’s battles, which made me think of one of Derek’s soldiers, the broken one that reminded me of the sad little tin soldier in the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale.

  When I got back up the long stairs, I went into the dining room, where Derek was sitting with a deck of cards. He loved to play hearts. All the Bathburns did. I slipped the thin letter up my sleeve and I sat at the other side of the table and looked at Derek. I tried to be very ho-hum and not act excited at all about the letter. I put my elbows on the table and leaned my chin in my hands and I just sat there watching Derek. He had such lovely posture. He would have made a tremendous knight, I thought just then, if he had lived long ago in England near, say, Goodrich Castle in Herefordshire.

  Derek and I played a round of hearts. You can play with two people, but you have to make a dummy hand. And the whole time we played, I had the letter inside my sleeve. It felt very itchy and I was sure that’s why I lost the game. The day before, I lost because there was a fly buzzing round my head and I couldn’t think properly, and the day before that, I lost because I was hungry. In fact, I’d never won at hearts since I’d been in Bottlebay, Maine. I almost beat The Gram on Saturday. She appeared to be losing, but then at the very last, she had all the best cards. That’s when I had decided to lie down on the floor and pretend I was floating in the ocean. The Gram had said, “Oh, Flissy, don’t pout. You’ll get the hang of it. The Bathburns always win at hearts. The card game, that is.”

  Derek was trying to prop several cards in his one miserable paralyzed hand now, but the cards just fell from his fingers and scattered about. Then Derek dropped his head and shoulders down so that his cheek was lying now on the tabletop. “It’s not fair,” he said. “How am I supposed to discard and draw when I am already holding a handful of cards? And I’m not going to go back to school either.”

  “I should think you’d be feeling rather smug right now, having just won at hearts again,” I said. And while Derek was moaning and groaning, I pulled the letter slowly out of my sleeve and I set it on the table right near Derek’s nose.

  Derek sat up. “Where did you get this, Flissy?” he asked.

  “It came today in the mail,” I said. “Uncle Gideon must have gone to town with The Gram for groceries and missed it.”

  “We’d better not open it,” said Derek, “but there’s no harm in holding it up to the light.” With his good arm, Derek held the envelope up to the window. But we couldn’t see through it. It seemed to stare back at us in silence. I traced my fingers over the address and Danny’s handwriting. It felt quite nice, really, to be so close to something Danny had written not long before. And then my heart got heavy again because he hadn’t written to me. It sank just as if it weighed six stones five, the very weight of Jillian Osgood before she even entered the fifth form.

  “Let’s try leaving the letter here on the table and see what Uncle Gideon does about it. See if he goes anywhere, so we can follow him,” I said and I put my hands on my hips and I scrunched up my nose to show that I was quite serious.

  And Derek said, “Flissy, if they had horses and cattle and cowboy boots and lassos and campfires and Wyoming in England, you’d be a true British cowgirl.”

  We went into the hall and got into the closet to hide. I had said, “Shall we get in the cupboard?”

  And Derek had said, “That’s not a cupboard, it’s a closet, and yes, let’s.” Quite cleverly, we left the door open just a crack. Through that crack we could see the dining room table and the letter lying there. Derek said, “At school, Roland Rupert shut himself in his locker once because he didn’t want to take a math test. Those lockers lock by themselves when you shut the door, you know. And Roland was in there all afternoon.”

  “But how did he ever get out?” I asked.

  “When he didn’t come home at two thirty, his mother had them search the school, and when they opened his locker, Roland Rupert rolled out. That’s what I’ll do if they make me go back to school,” said Derek.

  “I wonder if there’s room for two in your American loc
kers,” I said.

  We were all stuffed under a row of wool coats and I was sitting on some old rubber boots, with a fuzzy cape draped over my shoulders. Derek put on a big wool hat with fur-lined earflaps, the one he said Uncle Gideon always wore in the winter when he went to the Shriners Club. Then Derek buckled his feet into some enormous snowshoes, which caused me to get a bit of a laughing attack, which then caused us both to fall into the back of the closet. When we got straightened out, I ended up quite close to Derek, looking at his nice, soft, land-of-counterpane eyes, and even in the semidarkness, it felt as if I were in a little airplane hovering over the surface of Derek’s face, roaming over his brown eyelashes, skimming lightly across his handsome forehead.

  Just then, we heard voices on the steps outside, and Derek tried to get up, but he kept falling back into the depths of the stuffed closet, laughing. Finally, it was me who got to my feet and watched The Gram and Uncle Gideon carry bags into the kitchen. It was me who saw Uncle Gideon notice the envelope on the table in the dining room. It was me who heard Uncle Gideon call out, “What did you say, Mother? You unpack the canned goods. I think I’ll go up to my room and then I’ll take a walk while the sun’s high.” He picked up the letter, went upstairs, unlocked the study, and went in, clicking the door shut behind him.

  Uncle Gideon seemed to be taking his time in the study. Looking out through the crack and waiting for him to come back, I felt a bit like a jar full of crickets. My hands were jumping about on their own. I tried to glare at them in a fierce sort of way to get them to stop, but they kept on going. Derek was lying on a pile of sweaters, snoring. He was faking, of course. As he lay there, I thought he looked so much like that little tin soldier with the missing arm and the sad smile, the one who wanted to be just like the others and tried so hard and had such a lovely heart.