“So you think I’m mentally ill? So you think it’s my fault that Carly ran away? Who filled Carly’s head with nonsense about Inchland? Who made Carly think it was a real place she could go to? I’m asking you a question, Cooper! Answer me, Cooper!”
The next thing I knew she was in Carly’s room, where Carly, still wearing her pink jacket, was curled into a tight little pink ball on the bed. I leaped to get to the table ahead of Mom, but she was already striding across the room toward it.
Her frenzied fury fell on Inchitella and Parsley’s tiny stable.
With one outthrust arm, she knocked it off the table to the floor, then stomped on it with her heavy shoe, splintering the stable to pieces.
“Look at these!” She snatched up the eight precious deeds that had been hidden so carefully in Carly’s treasure box. “One square inch of the Yukon!” she shouted. “One square inch of nothing!”
She ripped the deeds in half, then in half again, and in half again, and tossed the torn pieces into the air.
Then, she caught herself with a shuddering sob, as if overcome by what she had just done, and fled from the room.
The ragged scraps of the deeds covered the floor, half burying the ruins of the stable: the final snowstorm fallen over Inchland.
19
She left the house. I heard the car gunning out of the driveway.
Carly lay utterly still—not crying, not speaking, not moving.
“Come on,” I said, getting up from the table. “We have to get out of here before she comes back.”
My sister didn’t reply. I took her hand and pulled her up, too. A few scraps of the Inchland deeds fell from her lap to the littered floor.
Carly stooped to retrieve them. “We can tape them back together.”
“No,” I said. “We can’t.”
It was dark at Jodie’s house, so Carly and I walked the five blocks to Spencer’s house. Spencer’s mother opened the door when we rang the bell.
“Why, Cooper, Carly, what is it?”
I had to say it out loud. I didn’t know if I could.
“My mother.”
“What’s happened? Is she hurt?”
I shook my head. “I think she’s mentally ill.”
Her face turned from puzzlement to pained understanding. “When I saw her at the cooking program, something didn’t seem right, but I thought it was just the stress of being up there onstage, and the accident. And then when I saw her at the grocery store a few days later, she seemed perfectly fine. Spencer hasn’t said anything—Oh, Cooper, I wish I had known.”
Safe now, with a normal, caring grownup in charge, Carly burst into tears and let Spencer’s mother fold her into a hug. I felt nothing. But I was thinking plenty.
“I need to call my grandfather. In New Jersey. But I don’t have his phone number.”
I had never called him; he always called us.
Spencer’s mom called information and got the number for me, writing it down on a scrap of paper. “Tell him you and Carly can stay here as long as you want,” she told me. She handed me the phone and led me to the privacy of Spencer’s room, beckoning Spencer to come out with her into the hall.
“Hey, dude—” Spencer began, his face lighting up at the unexpected sight of me in his doorway. “Good news: the doctor thinks my finger can be saved up to the knuckle.”
I tried to smile.
“Not now, Spencey,” Spencer’s mom said. “Cooper needs to use the phone.”
The two of them left me alone, shutting the door behind them as they went.
The phone rang so many times that I was afraid Gran-Dan wasn’t home, but finally he answered. “Hello?”
“Gran-Dan—” I stopped, unable to go on. It had been hard enough to say it to Spencer’s mom. How could I say it to Gran-Dan?
“Cooper? What is it?”
“Mom—”
“What happened? Is Carly all right?”
I knew he’d care most about Carly.
“Cooper, is everything okay?”
No, nothing was okay, and it wasn’t going to be okay ever again.
“Mom wrecked Inchland.”
“Inchland?”
“She smashed the stable and ripped up the deeds.”
I knew my grandfather had no idea what I was talking about. I tried to explain, but it all came out in a jumble.
“Remember how she was so sad last summer? Well, she went to a doctor, to a psychiatrist, and she started taking medication, and it made her better for a while, but then I think she stopped taking it. And instead of being depressed, she was all hyper, and it got worse and worse, and she was horrible up onstage during ‘Pasta Live,’ and she didn’t finish the set for Carly’s play on time, and she fell asleep in the car, and ruined the play, and then Carly tried to run away to Inchland, just like Princess Inchitella ran away, and Mom said it was all my fault, and she wrecked Inchland.”
“Where is she now?” Gran-Dan asked.
“Carly? She’s here with me. We went to Spencer’s.”
“No. Emily. Your mother.”
“I don’t know. She left the house. She was crying. And driving really fast.”
There was a long pause on the other end of the line. Then Gran-Dan said, “I can be there tomorrow. Let me speak to Spencer’s mom, okay?”
I went to find her and handed her the phone. Then I went back to Spencer’s room and climbed into Spencer’s unmade bed and pulled the covers up. Spencer had Spider-Man sheets, and a Superman pillow, and an Iron Man comforter. I had never thought of Spencer as having a smell, but the bed smelled like Spencer. I liked how it smelled.
I planned to stay just where I was for a long, long time.
I slept in Spencer’s room that night, in a borrowed sleeping bag on the floor. Carly slept on the couch in the family room. When Spencer and I woke up, around ten o’clock on Sunday morning, Carly was already awake and helping Spencer’s mother make pancakes for everybody.
“Did my mom call?” I asked her. “While we were sleeping?”
“No, but I left her a message last night on your home phone, and on her cell phone, telling her that you’re here.”
In the afternoon, Spencer and I played video games, while Carly and Spencer’s mom worked on a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle of Venice.
“It’s probably more like a nine hundred fifty–piece puzzle,” Spencer’s mom apologized to Carly in advance. “With four boys and three dogs, puzzle pieces tend to vanish around here. But nine hundred fifty pieces should keep us pretty busy, don’t you think?”
At five o’clock, just as Spencer and I were staggering up from the basement after four straight hours of playing Spencer’s latest video game, the doorbell rang. My heart raced—what if it was my mom? But it wasn’t my mom’s voice I heard asking, “Are there any grandchildren of mine anywhere around here?”
It was Gran-Dan.
Carly hurled herself into his arms, and he scooped her up into the air. I let Gran-Dan hug me, too.
“Let’s go,” Gran-Dan said. He thanked Spencer’s mom, and then we headed out to his rental car.
In the car, Carly asked, “Where’s Mom?”
“We’ll talk about everything when we get to your house,” Gran-Dan said. So we drove in silence.
Gran-Dan hadn’t been in the house yet; he didn’t have a key. When we opened the front door and turned on the first light, I heard his sharp intake of breath. Sometimes I would try to tell myself that it wasn’t so bad, that lots of people have messy houses, even Spencer has a messy house, but the way Gran-Dan caught his breath at the sight of it let me know I hadn’t been making it up, it really was as bad as I thought it was.
“How long has it been like this?” he asked me.
“I don’t know. A long time.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” He sounded angry now, whether angry at Mom or angry at me, I didn’t know. “Cooper, you’re—what? Twelve years old?”
Eleven.
“You’re old enough to k
now what’s normal and what’s not. Take a look at this place! Just look at it!”
I already knew what it looked like. I looked at it every day. I knew what the broken bowl at “Pasta Live” looked like, and the wooden chair–cage on the stage for Carly’s play, and the wreckage of Inchland lying on the floor of Carly’s room.
“I tried,” I began.
“You tried,” he said, his echo of my words obviously intended as a mockery.
“I did try!”
I wasn’t sure that was even true. There were so many words that I had spoken inside my own head.
“Don’t be mad at Cooper,” Carly pleaded.
Gran-Dan looked down at her. Abruptly, he turned away for a moment; when he looked again at us, the anger had drained from his face. Instead, his eyes glistened.
“Cooper, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to blame you. And I don’t blame your mother, either. This—It isn’t anybody’s fault.”
Gran-Dan shoved a pile of the mess covering the couch onto the floor, with somewhat more force than necessary. “Come here, Carly.” He pulled Carly onto his lap. I followed his example and shoved another pile of mess from the couch, so I could sit down next to the two of them.
“Okay,” Gran-Dan said. “Where should we start?”
“Where’s Mom?” Carly asked.
“I had to make some phone calls, but I found her. She’s at the hospital. She’s going to be there for a while.”
“Did she have a car accident?” Carly asked. I had thought the same thing.
“No. She just needs some help from the doctors to get her moods more stable. Have you two ever heard of bipolar disorder? It’s a mental illness where someone goes back and forth between a state of depression, like your mom was in last summer, and a state of mania, like she’s been in this fall.”
If that was what bipolar disorder was, it sure sounded like what Mom had.
“Your mom took medication for her depression, but then she went into a manic state, and she felt so good that she stopped taking the meds and never went back to the doctor for any more care.”
So that was why the bottle of pills had disappeared.
“There is medicine she can take so she’ll be more like her old self again,” Gran-Dan went on, “but it will take some time.”
“Will she die?” Carly asked.
“Nope. I think she’s going to be okay.” He sounded as if he was trying to convince himself as much as us.
“She tore up your deeds to Inchland,” Carly said in a small voice. “She ripped them up into little pieces.”
“That’s what Cooper told me.”
“We were going to try to go there, Cooper and me. For vacation, just the two of us. But then I couldn’t wait, so I tried to go there all by myself.”
Gran-Dan looked over at me. Was this another thing he was going to blame me for?
“It was Carly’s idea,” I said quickly. “I knew we couldn’t really go there. I mean, it’s so far, like a thousand miles away.”
Carly glared at me. “You didn’t say that, Cooper. You said you wanted to go.”
“I said I wished we could go,” I corrected her.
“Well, you know what?” Gran-Dan interrupted. “You two aren’t the only ones who have wished you could go there. The Canadian government has had hundreds of inquiries over the years—thousands—from folks who wanted to go up there and see their land, find out which inch was theirs. But here’s what they found out.”
“There isn’t any land?” I guessed.
“Oh, there’s a piece of land, all right. The Quaker oats advertising man bought it for a thousand dollars, I think it was, back in the 1950s, and had all those deeds printed up. But the deeds were never registered in court, and then finally the Canadian government took the land away for nonpayment of property taxes.”
“So it’s not real,” Carly said, as if checking to be sure she understood.
“Nope,” Gran-Dan said. “It was just a real good way for someone to make money selling Quaker oats.”
“It was real,” I burst out. Sudden, shameful tears stung my eyes. “It was real to Carly and me.”
Where were Inchitella and Parsley and Button going to live now that Mom had destroyed Inchland? Where could they go if there wasn’t any Inchland at all, anywhere, and never had been?
“Look, Cooper, Carly.” I could tell Gran-Dan was doing his best. “However you look at it, a square inch of land in Canada is awfully small and awfully far away. It wouldn’t be much of a place to run to, even if the taxes had been paid, even if your mother hadn’t ripped up the deeds.”
“Is she really going to be okay?” I asked. “You need to tell us. We need to know.”
There was a long silence. Then Gran-Dan said, “It depends.” After another long pause, he went on. “Your mom will probably still have mood swings, high and low. But if she takes her medication, she should be pretty much like she was before.”
I wasn’t going to let him off so easily. “What if she doesn’t? Take her medication?”
I have to give him credit: he looked straight into my eyes as he said, “I’m not going to lie to you, Cooper. If she doesn’t take her medication, it probably won’t be so good. So let’s hope she does. I’m going to stay with you here in Colorado until things stabilize. And I can sell the house in Montclair and move out here if I have to.”
Would it be a good or bad thing, having Gran-Dan live so close to us? Probably some of both. Either way, I was beginning to realize, there wasn’t anything I could do about it.
Carly had fallen quiet for the last few minutes. Now she asked, “Is it snowing right now? In the Yukon? Where our square inch would be if we had it?”
“We do have it,” I said. I waited for Gran-Dan to contradict me, tell me that a big kid like me should know better than to believe such foolishness, know better than to continue to lead a little kid like Carly astray. But he let me keep on talking.
“Carly, Inchland isn’t up in the Yukon, or in the stuff we built in your room. It’s inside you and inside me, and no one can rip it up or take it away.”
“And it’s snowing there right now?” she persisted. “With little diamond snowflakes?”
“Yes,” I said softly. “It is.”
One Square Inch Page 12
