Savvy

by Ingrid Law

  When Samson and I got back home that afternoon, a shiny gold minivan was parked in front of our house and Fish was angrily blasting it clean with the garden hose. With its smiling angel air freshener dangling in the front window, I recognized the van immediately. It belonged to Miss Rosemary, the preacher’s wife.

  Momma made the whole family go to church in Hebron every Sunday despite any fears of savvy catastrophes, and Miss Rosemary was well known to us all. She smelled like disinfectant and butterscotch and had her own matching set of rights and wrongs – like suitcases she made other people carry – and she took it upon herself to make everything and everyone as shipshape and apple-pie as she felt the Lord had intended them to be. Somehow, the news had already reached the preacher’s wife about Poppa’s accident and about the rest of us being on our own without a momma. Miss Rosemary had come to set things right.

  Water spun from the hose in Fish’s hand, swirling around the van like a cyclone in the winds churned up by his bad mood. The trees next to the house, bright yellow-green with leafy spring, bent and swayed. Fish lowered the hose when he saw us coming, his face stormy black.

  ‘If y’know what’s good for you, you’ll sneak in the back.’ He nodded his head towards the house. We all stood and looked sadly at our own lovely house as though we’d just found out that a grizzly bear had moved in and pulled all the stuffing from the furniture and torn all the pictures from the walls and eaten all the special-occasion mini-marshmallows from the high top shelf above the refrigerator while we were gone. Then, like a break in bad weather, Fish smiled his cockeyed smile and sprayed the hose my way teasingly. ‘Last day away to school, eh, Mibs?’

  ‘Last day,’ I said, dodging the water from the hose. Leaving Fish to finish his chore, Samson and I quietly let ourselves in through the back door – hoping to make it up the stairs before Miss Rosemary knew we were there.

  ‘Your grandfather looked tired, so I had him lie down in his room for a rest,’ Miss Rosemary said, the moment we entered the kitchen. She was perched up high, with a spray bottle cocked in one rubber-gloved hand and a rag held ready in the other. She was taking the jars from the tops of the cupboards and cleaning their dust with a wrinkle in her nose, squinting at the faded labels. I held my breath as I watched her, hoping that she hadn’t opened any of them. No one who wasn’t family should have been touching those jars – no one. ‘Gypsy is also down for a nap,’ Miss Rosemary continued. ‘So I expect you two to be quiet and not wake her.’

  ‘Yes, Miss Rosemary,’ Samson and I both said, but Samson mostly moved his lips.

  ‘Your mother should have called me the moment she found out about your poor father,’ Miss Rosemary said, dusting the last jar with a flourish. Satisfied with her work, she clasped both the spray bottle and the rag to her chest and closed her eyes as though she were praying for the strength to clean up the whole wide world. When she reopened her eyes, she gave us a stern and solemn look.

  ‘I ought to have been here sooner,’ she said. ‘Children need a mother in the house.’

  3

  I knew that Miss Rosemary was not a proper replacement for our perfect momma. I knew it down in the pit of my stomach and I knew it down to the tips of my toes. A sick feeling washed over me as Miss Rosemary pointed her spray bottle dismissively towards the hallway opposite the stairs and said, ‘I brought Roberta and Will Junior with me to keep you company this afternoon. Why don’t you two go find them? You can watch TV. Quietly.’

  ‘Yes, ma’am,’ I mumbled, even though we didn’t have any TV – with Rocket in the house, Momma and Poppa wouldn’t buy any fancy gadgets until they knew, sure as sure, that my brother could keep from destroying them all accidentally.

  Samson and I were eager to leave the kitchen, but not so eager to find Roberta and Will Junior, Miss Rosemary’s younger children. The pastor and his wife had three children, but their older son was already thirty and worked as a police officer in Topeka. No one talked about him much.

  Roberta – who everyone but her mother called Bobbi – was sixteen, and probably only came over that afternoon because she’d hoped to find Rocket at home. Rocket, I supposed, was the kind of seventeen-year-old boy that sixteen-year-old fizgiggly girls liked to act silly and stupid around, even if he did always look as though he’d stuck his finger in a light socket.

  ‘This is so lame,’ Bobbi was saying as we entered the room. ‘I can’t believe we had to come here.’ Bobbi and Will Junior had never been over to our house before and were making themselves busy poking and peeking and prying. Bobbi was shuffling through a stack of Momma’s half-finished paintings and Will Junior, holding one of Gypsy’s wooden blocks, was prodding Samson’s dead pet turtle where it lay pulled tight and unmoving into its shell inside a glass aquarium.

  ‘Shut up, Bobbi,’ said Will. ‘Their dad’s in the hospital. Show a little sympathy.’

  ‘We don’t need your sorries,’ I said flatly, startling Will and Bobbi, neither of whom had seen us come in. ‘We’re doing just fine,’ I added.

  Bobbi turned to look at me and Samson as though we were the trespassers in the room. With a heavy, well-practised teenage sigh, Bobbi rolled her eyes, popped a big pink gum bubble and threw herself down on the sofa with a disgusted grunt.

  ‘Isn’t there anything to do in this house?’ she grumped, reclining and closing her eyes, laying one hand across her forehead dramatically. I noticed that Bobbi had glitter eye shadow and that her right eyebrow was pierced. A little gold hoop glinted, almost unseen, from underneath her long fringe, and I wondered how Miss Rosemary had ever allowed that to happen.

  ‘Just ignore her,’ said Will, glaring at Bobbi, then looking kindly towards Samson and me. Will Junior was fourteen like Fish, though Will was taller and, unlike my brother, kept his curly brown hair neat. I’d always been curious about Will. I’d heard him say once that he wanted to grow up to be just like his daddy. But despite the way others at church shied away from us Beaumonts, Will always seemed to be walking on our heels or watching us when he was supposed to be praying. One time he even gave me his own cup of juice when the crowd around the punch table was too tight for me to squeeze past. But even though Will Junior and Fish were the same age and Fish didn’t have a friend to his name, my brother never did like Will, thinking him to be nothing more than a holier-than-thou preacher boy. For my part, I thought he seemed nice, even if he was laced up a bit tight.

  Will turned back to the aquarium. ‘So, is this turtle alive or – ?’ He caught himself before saying ‘dead’, grimacing apologetically.

  Samson let go of my hand and coasted like a shadow across the room to pull his turtle out of its aquarium and away from Will Junior’s curious inspection. After a long, unblinking stare at the older boy, Samson slipped from the room with his lifeless pet to go hide somewhere like a dusty grey moth. I knew my brother would turn up later behind a door or under his bed or beneath a pile of laundry.

  Setting down the wooden block and wiping his hands on his trousers, Will Junior turned to look at me, doing a good job at mimicking a preacher’s most pastorly concern.

  ‘I hope Mister Beaumont gets better,’ he said, as grave as a tombstone. ‘We’re all praying for your dad.’

  ‘Okay.’ I shrugged, uncomfortable. It’s not that I was against praying – I prayed every night for my savvy to come and be the best savvy ever. I prayed for the power to fly or to shoot lasers from my eyes. I also prayed for Grandpa Bomba and for Gypsy when she caught the croup. It’s just that it hadn’t yet crossed my mind to pray for Poppa, and again I felt selfish and shamed and bad enough to have a house come land PLOP down on me, leaving nothing but my feet sticking out; that’s just how wicked I felt.

  Crossing the room, Will Junior placed one hand on my shoulder in a weird, grown-up kind of way, leaning forward with a tilt to his head like he was checking my eyes for tears.

  ‘Mother brought you a meat loaf,’ he said, as if that fixed everything. I took a step back, none too sure how I felt abou
t having Will that close – even if he’d always been nice. And while I was sure meat loaf could be a powerful thing, especially if it had a lot of ketchup and the onions were chopped up really fine, I knew that tonight, for the Beaumont family, meat loaf couldn’t do squat.

  4

  ‘A little bird told me that tomorrow is someone’s birthday,’ Miss Rosemary said with a quick, corner-of-the-eye glance from Gypsy to me as she cut a slab of meat loaf and placed it on to Grandpa Bomba’s plate. The preacher’s wife smiled down at the meat loaf, with its big, unfortunate, wormy onions and thin, dry layer of ketchup. I watched the knife as she cut another slice, and pretended that I hadn’t heard her say anything.

  Sitting at that table just then was like sitting in a pressure cooker – thanks to Fish; the air in the room went hot and taut. Only Gypsy reacted, because she was three years old and didn’t know yet what the rest of us Beaumonts knew about secrets – needing them, having them or keeping them. Gypsy clapped her toddler hands together, eyes bright and eager in anticipation of balloons and sugar frosting.

  ‘I thought,’ Miss Rosemary continued, apparently unaware of the tension – and the breeze. ‘I thought that a birthday party might help cheer everyone up a bit.’ She looked around the table from one face to the next. Fish stared at the salt and pepper shakers in front of him, the good crystal ones that Momma never used but kept up high in the don’t-touch-or-else cupboard. I could see him trying to get a good tight grip on his savvy. It was straining him though and he was starting to sweat, looking pained and grey and miserable.

  ‘I don’t have to be there, do I, Mother?’ Bobbi said, jamming a forkful of meat loaf into her mouth and rolling her eyes like she was possessed or was having some kind of fit. Part of me hoped her eyes would get stuck that way, just as people always say could happen.

  ‘Yes, Roberta, we’ll all be there.’

  ‘Yes, Roberta, we’ll all be there,’ Bobbi mimicked around her mouthful of meat loaf in a frighteningly perfect imitation of her mother’s voice.

  ‘That’s enough, Roberta!’ Miss Rosemary shot Bobbi a look of sheer ice that thawed into an apologetic smile as she looked back at me. Bobbi slouched down in her chair.

  ‘We’ll have the party at the church, of course,’ the preacher’s wife continued, as though she’d not been interrupted. ‘It’s rather short notice, but we can still invite all your church friends, Mibs, as well as anyone from school you’d like to ask.’

  ‘I don’t have any friends, Miss Rosemary,’ I said, hoping that the truth might end the conversation.

  ‘I’m your friend, Mibs,’ Will Junior said in earnest. I looked across the table at him and his buttoned-up shirt. Will grinned at me then; smiling, he looked different somehow, more relaxed. None too sure about how I was feeling towards Will Junior just then, I didn’t smile back. But I didn’t scowl either.

  ‘Nonsense,’ Miss Rosemary continued, as though Will had said nothing. ‘I’ll show you. I’ll get on the phone this evening and cook you up a fine party for tomorrow. Don’t you worry, Mibs, I have connections.’ Miss Rosemary pointed one finger up to the ceiling, though I guessed she was really pointing up towards heaven. Apparently, she was going to get God to help her plan my party. I figured God had much, much better things to do, like keeping people from starving to death or from killing each other, or helping my poppa, and so I hoped He’d just stay out of it.

  I could feel Fish and Grandpa getting more and more nervous at all the talk of birthday parties. Thirteenth birthdays in the Beaumont family were strictly non-public affairs.

  I had only been eight years old back when Rocket turned thirteen, but I still remembered it as fresh and brisk as the crisp sea air. On that years-ago day at our home down south, when Grandma Dollop was still alive and Gypsy wasn’t yet, Rocket and Fish and I had spent the entire afternoon in the backyard helping Grandma with her canning while Momma got the house ready for Rocket’s birthday dinner.

  The top of the picnic table was covered in Grandma’s clear glass jars, each one with its own white label and metal lid. She’d given us kids the job of labelling the jars as she filled them. But it wasn’t peaches, tomatoes or pickles that our grandma canned, it was radio waves. Grandma only ever picked the best ones – her favourite songs or stories or speeches, all broadcast by the local stations – but, still, our basement was crowded with high shelves of dusty jars filled with years and years of radio programmes. How Grandma Dollop put the radio waves in those jars and got them to stay there was a mystery to me; she just had a way of reaching out and plucking them from the air like she was catching fireflies. Then she’d stuff the invisible things into the jars and tell us what to write on the labels. After that, all anyone had to do was crack the lid on any jar in her collection to hear what was inside. But you had to be careful not to take the lids off all the way, or the sounds and songs slipped out and away, lost for good unless Grandma was there and could catch them again in time.

  Sitting in the backyard that day, watching Grandma capture her radio waves, Rocket had been crankier than a bear in winter. The sun had almost set on his thirteenth birthday and, so far, nothing had happened; my brother was worried that nothing ever would. Since Rocket was Momma and Poppa’s first child, and Poppa came from an ordinary, everyday family with no special talents except that of losing all their hair before turning thirty, Rocket feared that he’d take after Poppa – and wind up with no savvy and no hair on his head either.

  Evening fell and the sun crept down. We had just begun to carry all the jars into the house when Rocket stopped short, standing still as still with his arms full of that day’s canned radio broadcasts. His skin looked pale in the early evening glow, and he hunched over his armful of glass jars, staggering like someone had just thrown them all at him.

  Grandma Dollop had stopped too, her head tilted like she was listening. I felt my hair stand up on end as an electric current ran through the air with a tingling itch.

  ‘That’s funny,’ said Grandma, still listening. ‘Something must have gone wrong at the radio station. I don’t hear anything but static’

  “You okay, Rocket?’ I’d asked my brother carefully, worried by the pinched look on his face and the way every muscle in his body seemed to tense and tighten.

  ‘I think I’m going to be sick,’ said Rocket. Then, in a blinding explosion of brilliant blue sparks, like the Fourth of July without the red or the white, my brother fell to his knees. As the jars he’d been carrying crashed to the ground and shattered, they let loose the noise of nine different radio shows at once, and a chorus of voices and sounds fluttered into the night air. At the same moment, every light inside and outside of the house went out. Streetlamps fizzled and burst in small showers of glass and the neighbours’ homes went dark all the way down the block. A blackout rolled out from our house and didn’t stop until it hit the next town over.

  Rocket had got his savvy and it was a shocker.

  Climbing into bed on the night before my very own most important birthday, after an evening of Miss Rosemary’s meat loaf and interference, I did not pray for a powerful savvy like Rocket’s. I did not pray for X-ray vision or for the ability to run super fast or to breathe underwater. I didn’t pray for Grandpa or for Gypsy. I didn’t even pray for Poppa to wake up.

  That night, I prayed that no one – no one – would come to my birthday party.

  5

  I woke up early on that Saturday morning of my thirteenth birthday and lay still and silent for a long, long while, just waiting. Nothing felt too different yet. I couldn’t see through the ceiling or turn on my lamp with a blink or a wink. I couldn’t float up off my mattress or make my pillows disappear.

  I sighed and drum, drum, drummed my fingers against the pattern of my sheets. Nothing was happening. At least, not yet.

  I decided it was safe to get up. Maybe my savvy would arrive at the church with my birthday party, bad timing and all. I rolled out of bed, glancing at Gypsy where she lay in a nest of stuffed
animals and pillows. Gypsy always surrounded herself with fluff and fuzz. She liked her toddler world to be soft and smooth, with no hard edges or rough seams. Once asleep, Gypsy was as difficult to wake as a slumbering sloth.

  There wasn’t a creak from the floorboards or a groan from the bedsprings, but the moment my bare feet touched the floor and I stood to untwist my nightgown, my sister sat up and rubbed her eyes, staring at me from her own small bed.

  ‘Go back to sleep, Gypsy,’ I said.

  ‘No-no-no,’ said Gypsy, using her most favourite word and rubbing her eyes stubbornly.

  ‘It’s too early to be awake. Close your eyes – it’s off to dreamland for you again.’ I crossed the room to nestle her back under her blankets, then left our bedroom quickly before Gypsy could make a fuss.

  Pink light filtered through the curtains of the house, filling the hallway between the bedrooms with the faint blush of morning. I was careful not to make too much noise as I stole past the other rooms and slipped downstairs, not wanting to wake anybody else up just yet, wanting more time to myself to see what I could see, feel what I could feel.

  In the kitchen, I made myself a bowl of cereal and took it with me into the next room to sit cross-legged on the sofa while I ate. No sooner had I got myself settled, balancing my bowl on my knee just right, than I heard a thump. Thump, thump, thump. I sat still as still, straining my eyes out across the dim room, the morning light shifting orange from pink, casting a pastel glow across Momma’s stacks of paintings and glinting off the glass aquarium of Samson’s dead pet turtle.

  Thump.

  Thump.

  I set my bowl down on the floor with a splish-splash of milk sloshing up over the side and followed the thumping sound until my nose was nearly pressed up against the aquarium. There in that tank, Samson’s turtle was not dead so much as living, trying its unsuccessful best to find a way up the side of the glass.