“That makes sense. In between is a tricky place to be.”
I tried to remember the word Dad had used. It was a word I didn’t really understand.
“Limbo,” I finally said.
“In a way, yes.”
“Like shimmying backward under a broomstick?”
“That’s one meaning of the word. There are others too.”
“Junie and I used to do that. It hurt my back, but not Junie’s. She’s bendy as a willow branch and she never even took gymnastics lessons. Mostly because Dad said we couldn’t afford them. Which is basically his response to anything fun,” I said sheepishly. “Which is why we were stuck entertaining ourselves with brooms.” I was suddenly embarrassed by how much I had spilled. I wished words were water so I could mop them all back up.
“People with creative intelligence can make just about anything fun. It’s a special talent. You and Junie are lucky to have it.”
I’m pretty sure she was just being nice. Still, it felt good to get a compliment.
The lunch bell rang. For once, it didn’t send a wave of panic down my spine.
“I’d better go.”
“Isabel, if you ever need to talk . . .”
“About amphibians?”
“About anything.”
I picked up my books and turned toward the door. I could feel the secret warming up again. Getting ready to ignite, like that Bunsen burner, with a will of its own. “Ms. Perdilla?” I spoke with my back to her, afraid the secret might be visible, blazing in my eyes.
“Yes, Isabel?”
“I do have one question . . .” I moved the words around in my head, like a puzzle. Trying to fit the right ones together, without giving too much away. “Do you think there’s a scientific explanation for everything?”
“Of course not.”
That surprised me. I turned to meet her eyes. I knew I wasn’t just a paper doll-girl in her doorway. I had edges and depth. She saw it all. Maybe she even saw my secret.
“You’re a science teacher. Isn’t that your job? To find the answer to everything?”
She laughed softly, not at me. “Even if I could, I’m not sure I’d want to.”
“Why?”
“Life would be awfully boring if we knew the answer to everything. There are many unexplainable things in this world.”
“Like apples that taste like ham?”
“Precisely. Like miracles and great mysteries. Good and bad.”
Magic trees and sick sisters.
“Can I ask you one more thing?”
“Of course.”
I scratched my nose. “It’s kind of a dumb question.”
“Isabel, there are no dumb questions in my classroom.”
“Are you sure?”
“Absolutely positive.”
“Posolutely?” I made my very own Frankensteined word. Maybe I really did have a little creative intelligence.
She nodded.
“Do freckles hibernate?”
It was pretty clear from the expression on her face that Ms. Perdilla had not seen that one coming. The serious, caring crease that had been deepening between her brows melted. Her lips tugged up, up, up. She studied me like maybe I was one of life’s great mysteries.
“I’ll have to research that for you,” she answered.
Chapter 9
The rain stopped just before lunch, but the sun hid bashfully behind soot-colored clouds, trying to decide if it might shine. Apparently even the weather was feeling like an unfittian. Kira and I sat at a table in the cafeteria and discussed my plans for the afternoon.
“Are you sure you don’t want me to come with you?” she asked as she unwrapped her sandwich. She might as well have asked if I’d like to cartwheel across the cafeteria in nothing but my underpants.
“No way!” I blurted rudely. “I mean . . . no, thanks.” I wasn’t ready to share so much, so fast. I was still warming up to the idea of being bus buddies, for goodness’ sake. “I have to go by myself. Junie might not be feeling well. And it’s tough to have visitors when she’s sick.” I couldn’t believe I was repeating Mom’s excuse.
Kira looked a little bummed, but said only, “I understand.” I was grateful she didn’t keep bugging me about it. She took a bite of her sandwich. “What about softball practice?”
“I’ll skip it.” I didn’t want to, especially with our first game just around the corner. It was my chance to impress Dad. Or, at the very least, remind him of my existence. But I didn’t have a choice. Junie trumped pretty much everything.
“Won’t Coach Naron be upset?”
“How do you know Coach Naron?”
“Isa! I’m on the team too.” Kira nearly dropped her sandwich. “Thanks for noticing,” she huffed, stuffing loose lettuce leaves back between the slices of pumpernickel.
My stomach twisted. I understood how she felt. I was Isabel-Invisible, after all. I hated making someone else feel that way. “Right. Of course. I knew that.” She might have believed me, if I just stopped there. But like a total moron, I didn’t. “You play . . . shortstop?”
“Isa!” This time her entire sandwich launched into the air. She let out a flusterated groan. Maybe because the bread landed mustard-side down. But probably not.
I handed her a slice of cheese that had flown in my direction. “Left field?”
Kira shook her head, loosening her bun and sending hair cascading down her shoulders and across the table. I brushed it away before it swiped a blob of mustard.
“First base?” I said.
“Nice try.”
Except I hadn’t really tried. That was the problem. Until recently, I’d counted on time instead of people. I looked across the table at Kira, who was wearing an uncharacteristic frown. Ignoring other kids was supposed to protect me, but I hadn’t realized it might hurt them. “I’m sorry,” I said, apologizing to Kira for the second time that day. “What position do you play?”
“No,” she replied calmly.
“What do you mean, no?”
“I mean I’m not going to tell you. You’ll have to wait until our next practice to find out.”
She gave up on the scattered sandwich and pulled a bag of potato chips and a juice box from her lunch box. There was a long pause filled with chewing and stewing. I couldn’t blame Kira for being annoyed at me. Heck. I was annoyed at me.
“It takes sixty-two muscles to frown,” I said sheepishly. “Only twenty-six to smile . . .”
She shot me an uncertain look.
“Someone very wise told me that just yesterday,” I said.
“Hmmm.” Kira fiddled with her juice box’s bendy straw. The corners of her lips twitched up a little. I was thankful she didn’t hold a grudge for long.
“Is she very sick?” she said eventually.
I blinked. “Junie?”
“Yeah. She’s been in the hospital for a while, right?”
“Too long.”
Kira waited, giving me space to talk, just like Ms. Perdilla.
Don’t be scared, my heart urged.
“She had surgery in November to remove a tumor on her kidney. We thought there was just one tumor, but it turned out to be two. Junie named them Willie and Pablo.”
Kira raised an eyebrow. Not in a judgy way, just out of curiosity.
“Naming tumors is totally weird, I know.” Surprisingly, the words bubbled up easily, like soda in a shaken bottle. “Along the way, she’s had about a billion tests and scans, a port placed in her chest, not to mention several rounds of chemotherapy, which is really strong medicine that’s supposed to kill the bad cells. But it also harms the good cells and makes her feel awful.” I tried not to think about all the nasty side effects. “She usually stays home between treatments, but lately she’s only been able to come back for a few days at a time.”
“Why?”
“Complications.” I used my parents’ standard catchall answer for confusing medical stuff.
“She’ll be okay though, right? Even
tually?”
My chest tightened. “The doctors keep telling us she has a really good shot at getting better. Ninety percent of kids with Nephew Blast-o-Rama survive.”
“Wait, what?”
“It’s a name Junie uses for her sickness. The real word is hard to pronounce. It’s also called Wilms tumor.”
“Oh.” Kira took a sip of juice. “Ninety percent is good, isn’t it? If I get ninety percent on a quiz, I’m super happy.”
I started to get irritated. A stupid quiz at school was nothing like a person’s life. Especially a person that you loved and needed more than anything in the world. Part of me wanted to clam up, run away, and never utter another word to Kira. But the other part of me knew she’d never understand unless I helped her. I took a deep breath. “Listen, if you had a basket of ten Melwick apples, but you knew that one of them was poisonous, would you take a chance and bite into one?”
Kira eyed the green apple in her lunch box skeptically. “Melwick apples disappeared years ago. Long before I moved here. But hypothetically speaking,” she emphasized the vocabulary word we’d learned earlier that day, “if one in ten could actually kill me, I wouldn’t take those odds and eat one. No matter how magically delicious they might taste.”
“Exactly.” I looked directly at her. “That’s why anything less than one hundred percent isn’t good enough.”
“I think I get it now.” She crunched a potato chip and mulled over the idea. “What’s it like?” she asked shyly.
A glob of jam stuck in my throat. “Cancer?” I spat out the word.
“No, no!” She blushed, then quickly gathered her hair and twisted it into a bun. Her fingers were nervous and twitchy. “What’s it like having a sibling? A sister?”
I stared at her, dumbfounded. That was like asking what it was like to have an ear, or a nostril, or a beating heart. “My sister is . . . a part of me. We’re inseparable.” Shortly after Junie’s diagnosis, one of the child life specialists at the hospital explained that the human body is designed with two kidneys. She told me that if one kidney fails, or gets removed due to a tumor, like with Junie, the other kidney will take over and continue working. But I knew I wasn’t anything like a kidney. If I lost Junie, there was no way I could function normally.
“I always kind of wished I had one,” Kira said softly. “Not a sick one, I mean . . . Oh. That sounded terrible.”
My cheeks flushed deep red. Tinfoil balled up tightly in my hand.
“Isa, wait. Please don’t disappear, like yesterday. Stay,” Kira pleaded.
Stay. Twice today, that word. Tugging. Our family had uprooted so many times, it was hard to trust that word.
“I just meant being an only child is lonely sometimes.” Kira slid a bundle of cookies in my direction. A peace offering.
My heart whispered, Stay. I relaxed my fingers. The tinfoil ball rolled across the table. Kira caught it before it fell.
One moment passed, then two. When I finally felt ready, I said, simply, “Thanks.”
“For what?” Kira looked surprised.
“For listening.” I knew it sounded cheesy, but I meant it.
Kira nodded. “Anytime.” She pushed the cookies closer.
I reached out and accepted them. The secret began tingling just below the surface of my skin. I smiled at Kira across the table. If my tree bloomed again, maybe I could return the favor.
Chapter 10
I felt like a criminal, ditching softball practice and sneaking off to the bus stop after school. But it had to be done. For Junie. For me. I stood in front of the post office and waited for the 83, just like Kira instructed.
I glanced at the bus schedule mounted to a tall pole. Old me would have studied the routes and calculated the exact number of minutes between stops. Old me would’ve shut out everything else and focused on numbers instead of names or faces. But after lunch with Kira, I was determined to make some changes.
People moved in and out of the post office, dropping off and picking up mail. Maybe a few miracles and mysteries were hidden in those packages sealed with tape and stamps. My mind drifted back to Kira. What did she send to her father each week? Where did he live? Why had he left? How long had he been gone? Would he come back? I made a mental note to ask her, then give her plenty of space to talk, the way she had done for me.
The bus approached and several people jostled me, lining up to get on. I shuffled my feet in the new sneakers to keep my nerves at bay. I’d ridden plenty of buses and trains with my family in cities before, but for some reason traveling to the hospital alone felt daunting.
When the 83 opened its doors, I boarded with shaky steps. Thankfully, the bus driver didn’t yell at me to sit and zip! Instead, he gestured kindly to a box next to his steering wheel. He reminded me of a scarecrow, with tufts of straw-colored hair sticking out from under a denim hat.
“Where to, darlin’?” His voice had a honey-dipped twang that I recognized from one of our previous moves. Was it Louisville?
“Um, the hospital,” I said.
“This isn’t an ambulance,” he replied with a wink. “Thank goodness your condition doesn’t look too serious.” His mustache twitched when he smiled. His accent was like a souvenir. Definitely from somewhere in Kentucky. We’d lived there for almost two years (okay, one year, three hundred days, six hours). A long stint for us Fitzwilkens.
“What do you mean, my condition?” I asked, my face turning its signature shade of mortified tomato.
“A case of the jitters! I didn’t go to medical school, but I’m pretty good at diagnosing folks. Isn’t that right, Miss Muriel?”
The woman standing in front of me nodded. Her hair was so white it was almost blue. Muriel. I repeated the name in my head, committing it to memory.
The bus driver, whose name was Reggie according to his name tag, took a long look at me. Just like Ms. Perdilla, I sensed he could see more than my paper-doll silhouette. “Don’t you fret. Just put your money right here.” He patted the box. “Make yourself comfortable. The trip will go by lickety-split. I’ll holler when we’re at the hospital. Though you won’t be needing a doctor. Your condition’s improving as we speak.”
He was right. My feet stopped shuffling. My face was returning to a normal color. “I’m not going for myself,” I said. “I’m visiting someone there. Someone special.”
“Isn’t everybody special?” Reggie replied with a question that didn’t ask for an answer.
“Mmhmm,” Muriel murmured as she took a seat, a bright pink smile hoisting up the lines of her face in a hammock of happy.
My coins made a pleasant clinking sound and the box spit out a small slip of paper. I stuffed the ticket into my pocket. Reggie nodded and I scooted down the aisle. Rather than sit alone in an empty row (something old me would have done), I planted myself next to blue-haired, bright-lipped Muriel. She smelled awfully nice, like rosewater, hand cream, and some kind of spice. What was it?
Cinnamon? Yes. Just like I’d smelled a few days ago by the sapling with the squirrel. Just like Mom used when she made her famous sticky buns, a recipe reserved for special occasions. I closed my eyes as the bus sped out of town, letting a cinnamon-scented memory carry me away.
We were celebrating our arrival in Bridgebury. All four of us overjoyed by the possibility of a place to finally grow roots. The real estate agent told us the orchard on our property was defunct, but when Junie and I went outside to explore for the first time, the land felt alive, as curious about us as we were about it.
When we came back inside, the sweet perfume of freshly baked sticky buns greeted us. Mom was in the kitchen, humming as she pulled a tray of warm, gooey, knotted dough from the oven. We sniffed the air and yipped excitedly like a pair of puppies. Dad joined us at the table for a bite. He told Mom she looked more beautiful than ever, even though she had flour smudged across her cheeks.
The bus bumped over some potholes. I opened my eyes. I wanted to ask Muriel what she’d been baking and for whom. But bef
ore I knew it, the bus pulled up in front of the hospital. I glanced at my watch in disbelief. The trip had gone by in the fastest forty-seven minutes and thirty-two seconds on record.
I thanked Reggie as I hopped down the steps. He waved and seemed pleased that I knew his name.
“You were right,” I said, tapping my wrist. “Lickety-split.”
“As promised, darlin’.”
“Mmhmm,” Muriel nodded from her seat, releasing another dash of cinnamon into the air.
“Go on inside,” Reggie urged. “Something tells me a visit from you will help more than any medicine for your special somebody.”
I hoped he was right. I walked toward the hospital feeling fuller, or taller, or maybe both. Taking the bus by myself hadn’t been so bad after all. The fear of doing something new was worse than actually doing it. I just had to try.
***
When the automatic glass doors opened, the smell was the first thing I noticed. Not delicious spices, but bitter lemon and bleach, mixed with Band-Aids, cotton balls, and worry. An unwelcome sucker punch that made my eyes water. Every time I entered the hospital, I fought the urge to sprint in the opposite direction, even though I wasn’t the one about to be poked or scanned.
I pushed a button on the wall and waited for the elevator. Glass, metal, and serious grayish-blue paint washed the main floor lobby, but Junie’s wing was totally different. As soon as I stepped off the elevator, bright colors and smiling faces welcomed me. A giant mobile dangled above the front desk, with airplanes and rocket ships spinning above the receptionist’s head. Orange and yellow tiles danced across the floor, while murals of animals adorned the hallways. There was even an aquarium full of fish, and an activity room with craft supplies, computers, books, and comfy stools shaped like jellybeans. If Junie had to be stuck somewhere until she got stronger, at least this part of the hospital was cheerful and sunny.
I walked down the hall, stopping at a hand sanitizing station to get rid of any germs that could make Junie sick. The door to Room 612 was open. I peeked inside, feeling that lima-beans-and-ice-cream-mash-up of emotions. Anxious, happy, excited, scared.
Junie was propped up in her bed, surrounded by pillows and stuffed animals. Her favorite patchwork blanket was draped across her legs. Photographs and drawings were taped to the wall. Coloring books and crayons lay on a table nearby. If I ignored the lemony bleach smell and the countless machines ticking and blinking behind the bed, I could almost pretend she was in her room at home.
The Magic of Melwick Orchard Page 7
