“Don’t!” she said. “Don’t even talk to me.”
She looked past her brother to Loah, and Loah nearly said, Hop on my bike. Come home with me.
What? She must have lost her mind. She didn’t know this girl at all, and even if she did, she could hardly bring her home. Miss Rinker would have a conniption. Plus, the girl’s family, which included a man who sounded both dangerous and demented, would come after her, and then what? Plus plus, why should this girl, who’d never laid eyes on Loah before, expect anything from her? Either she was extremely desperate or she, too, was demented.
She didn’t look demented, though.
Which left desperate.
Her brother began to whine and beg. By now, he actually looked scared. Loah almost felt sorry for him.
“Don’t go,” he said.
Did he mean the girl? Or Loah?
Before she could find out, Loah pushed off on her bike.
“I’m sorry,” she said, and pedaled away.
CHAPTER SIX
The ride back is always shorter than the ride there. Usually this is just a matter of perception, but today it was a matter of Loah riding faster than ever before.
All her life, the sight of home had filled her with relief. The rest of the world was so often baffling or hurtful, but at home she could be herself. She could stop wondering what people thought of her, what unexpected thing might happen next, what she would fail at. At home she could feel safe.
Yet today when she saw the pointy roof of the turret poking through the trees, the usual happiness didn’t lift her. Instead, she remembered what she’d forgotten while she was away: Mama was not coming home. Re-remembering was even more painful, like bumping a bad bruise.
As Loah wheeled her bike into the garage, a blue jay landed on the edge of the sagging gutter. It fixed her with a bright, beady eye, then gave an ear-splitting screech. Jays are crabby birds, always complaining about something, but this one seemed especially put out.
In the kitchen, Miss Rinker reclined in her recliner, listening to opera, which she adored. In opera someone is always suffering from a wasting disease, being run through by a sword, getting trampled by a wild bull, or dying of a broken heart. Loah hung her helmet and backpack on the hooks by the door. She was hoping to make it upstairs to her room without an interrogation, but no luck. Miss Rinker jolted her recliner upright. She wore her THIS IS WHAT FABULOUS LOOKS LIKE! apron, another Bargain Blaster find.
“You got overheated.” Her eyes went to the backpack. “Where’s your water bottle?”
How could Loah admit that a boy who, even counting his spiky monk-parakeet hair, barely reached her shoulder, had stolen it? Miss Rinker would order her to go back and get it.
“I… I gave it to a boy in need.”
This wasn’t a lie, really. (Loah never lied, not if she could possibly help it.) That boy and his sister were in need… of something. Miss Rinker’s thick, curly eyebrows (the opposite of her thin, straight hair, as if two different hair-factories were at work inside her) went vertical. Loah felt a stab of guilt. Partly because she’d lost the new water bottle, but mostly because she’d failed to help that girl. Though what could she have done?
Frowning, Miss Rinker got up and slapped together a liverwurst sandwich. She poured a glass of milk.
“Eat your lunch.”
The bread was slightly moldy and the glass not exactly clean—Miss Rinker, who did not believe in doctors, really needed a visit with the ophthalmologist—but Loah discovered she was starving. Discreetly, she cut away the mold and began to eat.
When Theo shambled into the kitchen, Miss Rinker made him a sandwich, too. Usually Theo’s appetite was as good as Loah’s, but now he only picked at the food. He looked paler than usual, but he told Loah a joke about a donkey and a rooster that cracked them both up. No one enjoyed Theo’s jokes more than Theo himself. The gentle chuckling sound pebbles make when you cup them and shake them—that was what his laugh was like. Now he pushed his sandwich aside, cocked his head, and looked at Loah.
“What’s different about you?”
“Different?” said Loah, mouth squishy with liverwurst. “Me? Nothing.”
“Something.” He pretended to examine her head, making her laugh.
“She’s taken to charitable acts,” said Miss Rinker. “Eat your lunch, Theo. You’re looking peaked.”
It was true. Even laughing hadn’t put the color back in his cheeks.
“Miss Rinker?” Loah asked. “Did my mother happen to call while I was gone?”
Miss Rinker’s look might have been sympathetic, had Miss Rinker believed in sympathy.
“Dr. Londonderry’s got a one-track mind. Bird bird bird bird. If I were you, I wouldn’t expect to hear from her anytime soon.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
When Loah was little, she’d invented a game she called Egg. She’d curl up and pretend to be inside a shell. She’d close her eyes and imagine she was in a nest, tucked beneath the downy feathers of her parent bird. She’d do this in bed or in Theo’s E-Z Boy or in any other place that was warm, cozy, and snug. Often she fell asleep.
Not much of a game, you may be thinking, and who could argue?
The only person she’d ever told about Egg was Theo. One day when she was six or so, he’d found her in his lounger, hugging her knees, chin to chest. If he’d been Dr. Londonderry, he’d have asked what was wrong. If he’d been Miss Rinker, he’d have marched her outside for fresh air and exercise.
But he was Theo, gentle, dovelike Theo, so he’d buttered a stack of saltines—buttered saltines were the Rinkers’ idea of a big treat—and settled himself beside her. As they ate, Loah explained about Egg.
“Ah,” he’d said, as if he knew just what she was talking about. As if he’d played that very game himself. The two of them sat quietly until, to Loah’s surprise, he said, “When my sister was your age and I could barely walk, our mother gave us away to the orphanage.”
Loah could not have been more shocked. Theo and his sister never talked about their past.
“I can’t remember her. Our mother. But I remember the orphanage.” He swept saltine crumbs into his palm. “Did you ever notice that, though it’s cheap as can be, my thrifty sister never makes cabbage? That’s because the orphanage served it to us every single day. It’s a wonder we didn’t turn into cabbages.” He sighed. “We each got one blanket, so thin you could poke your finger through. Still, it wasn’t so bad, because we were together, and she looked out for me night and day. Except for that time I came down with the fever. She couldn’t protect me from that. Oof. I shivered and sweated and itched all over. My tongue swelled up like a sausage and I—”
Loah must have looked horrified, because Theo quickly took her hand in his, scattering cracker crumbs everywhere.
“I got better, as you can see,” he said.
Loah had heard fairy tales about children abandoned in dark forests or sent to live with evil stepmothers, but she’d never imagined this could happen in real life, certainly not to anyone she knew, and especially not to Theo and Miss Rinker. She’d never even imagined them as children, let alone small, helpless orphans. Tears stung her eyes.
“It was mean of your mother to leave you,” she whispered. “Very, very mean.”
His face fell and he turned away. Loah bit her tongue, afraid she’d made him sad, but then he said, “There’s no good in thinking that way. She did the best she could, as all mothers do.”
Patience and kindness, that was Theo’s motto.
He gave Loah another saltine and explained that nobody had adopted them, maybe because Miss Rinker vowed to murder anyone who tried to separate them. As soon as she was old enough to make her own way in the world, she and Theo said good riddance to the orphanage. They lived here and there, and did this and that.
His voice kept growing smaller, like a piece of paper being folded into a tiny square.
“It wasn’t till we came here, and your mother—”
“
She had no idea what she was doing,” interrupted Miss Rinker. Who, they were startled to discover, had snuck up behind the lounger and now came around to face them. She clutched a dustpan and broom, her knobby knuckles white. “Your father had died, and she was alone in the world. Alone with you. She advertised for a caretaker. When we came for the interview, she opened the door with you in her arms. Bawling! Red as a beefsteak and tight as a fist! I never saw a child who could cry as fiercely as you, before or since. Your poor mother was ready to drop.”
Miss Rinker attacked the floor with her broom.
“She didn’t know the first thing about babies. A feeling of security—that’s what you wanted. I had to show her how to wrap your blanket neat and snug, and how to hold you with authority.”
(It was the same baby blanket Loah still kept under her pillow.)
“You stopped crying, though you had the hiccups for the next hour.” She swept ferociously, as if the floor had done something she could never forgive. “Then it was your mother’s turn to bawl. With gratitude.”
“My sister,” Theo whispered in Loah’s ear, “was pretty happy, too.”
Miss Rinker set her hand in the small of her back. Some old people’s eyes are always watery, but not Miss Rinker’s. At that moment, though, they grew misty.
“So,” Loah prompted, “you moved in here.”
Miss Rinker dabbed her eyes with her apron, and for a second she seemed to wobble in her sturdy lace-up shoes. Loah could still, even now, years later, remember what Theo did next. He stood and took his sister’s hand. He pressed it to his chest, making a second heart on top of his.
“We’d never lived anywhere that felt like a real, true home, before this.” He smiled down at Loah, and then he winked. “We were eggs without a nest.”
Loah jumped up and took his other hand. The lines in Miss Rinker’s face softened. Someone younger and gentler stood there, someone capable of fear and sorrow.
“I’m so glad you came here,” Loah blurted. “And I’m really sorry your mother abandoned you!”
Snap! The impenetrable Miss Rinker returned. She stepped backward, separating herself from Loah and Theo. It was then she said a horrendous, unforgettable thing.
“All mothers fail their children, some in small ways and others spectacularly.”
Now and then, a person says something that sets you vibrating, as if their words are the wind, and you are a windchime.
Loah trembled.
“I’m sorry,” said Miss Rinker, and for once in her life she did, truly, look sorry. “But it is the truth.”
Miss Rinker was a firm believer in truth. Even if it hurt.
Especially if it hurt.
Though Theo took Loah outside, where she sat on the swing he’d hung from the sturdiest oak, and though he pushed her just the way she liked, medium-high and not crooked, and though he sang her a song about a man who had the sillies, and later took a drop of nectar from the hummingbird feeder and touched it to her lips—though Theo tried his best to comfort her, nothing could erase what Miss Rinker had said. Like a stain on her heart, Loah carried it around with her for days to come. Though eventually she stopped thinking about it, it never completely went away.
CHAPTER EIGHT
For the next few days, Loah spent most of her time in the library, sitting at her mother’s desk. She knitted. She watched YouTube videos about reglazing cracked windows (dangerous) and repairing dry rot (inadvisable). She straightened the teetering piles of mail, and binge-watched One and Only Family, even though she knew most episodes by heart (actually, because she knew most episodes by heart—what is more comforting than the predictable?).
All the while, she kept one eye on the landline phone in the center of the desk. Watched pots don’t boil, and watched phones don’t ring. But no news was good news, right? She told herself that if something had gone wrong, her mother would have called. She definitely would have called.
One day, hungry, Loah left the library and went down the long corridor to the kitchen, where Miss Rinker’s indignant voice made her stop outside the door.
“It’s not just herself she’s putting in danger. It’s her child, too! Her one and only child.”
“You can’t blame a person for who she is,” said Theo.
“I do blame her! I blame her completely and utterly! If something should happen to her, Loah would be an orphan!”
“She’s always got us,” said Theo quietly, which made his sister sputter something incomprehensible.
Loah stumbled back to the library.
You are probably thinking, Why didn’t Loah just pick up the phone and call her mother? You would, wouldn’t you? But the rule was No phoning except in case of emergency, and Loah respected rules. She’d found that sticking to the rules made life easier. The parts of life with no rules, or rules she couldn’t understand—such as how to fit in and make friends at school—were confusing enough. When a straight, sure path was laid out for you, why not follow it?
But speaking of straight, sure paths: When she sat back down at her mother’s desk, she found herself thinking again about the girl she’d met on that twisty back road. If the girl were a bird, she’d be an egret. Tall, narrow, watchful. What did her little brother mean when he said she’d make their mother cry? Making your mother cry was serious. Loah never had and hoped she never would.
The girl had been on the brink of something. When Loah came along, she’d been ready to step out into the dusty road. Where was she going, wearing that bulging backpack? Why was her little brother so upset? The more Loah thought about it, the more she became convinced that the girl was running away from home, and he was trying to stop her. Running away from home was unimaginable to Loah, who usually was running toward home, but when she remembered the menacing KEEP OUT signs, the slobbering dog, and the shouting man, she wondered if the girl had ended up running away after all, or if she’d turned around and trudged back over that hill.
Either choice was awful.
Loah had wanted to help her.
She still did.
Across the rubble of her mother’s desk, Loah’s school photos frowned at her. Why had Mama bought them? They were terrible pictures. One by one, Loah laid them facedown on the desk, then got up, clumped down the hall, crossed the entry hall beneath the stag-head chandelier, and picked up the mail that had fallen through the slot in the door. Sitting on the staircase, she was sorting through it when Theo came to tell her that he and Miss Rinker were going to town on errands. Did she want to come?
Loah traced a cabbage rose on the staircase carpet. She knew Theo wanted her to join them, but she just didn’t have the heart for the Bargain Blaster today. As gently as she could, she said no thank you. Theo promised they wouldn’t be long.
The mail was all junk except for one official-looking envelope from the city. She set it on the teetering pile on Mama’s desk, then gathered her cell, receiver for the landline, and her laptop, and went outside. Sitting in the swing Theo had hung for her in the big oak, she clicked on One and Only Family. The show had gone off the air so long ago it was essentially prehistoric, the kind of show where mothers were forever icing cakes and fathers wore ties at the dinner table. No one was ever lonely or frightened for more than five minutes. Not even the family dog. She was deciding between the Great-Aunt Rosie surprise party episode and the one where the twins are born, when two girls turned into the driveway. They dropped their scooters in the gravel. Loah recognized them from school. They were good at sports and had long, flowy hair. Neither had ever paid any attention to Loah, and they didn’t see her now as they crept giggling toward the house.
“Sooooooo spooky!”
“Haunted much?”
“Feel that chill in the air? That means paranormal activity!”
Loah, as you know, was accustomed to being teased. But these girls were making fun of her home, the place she loved best in the world. They were invading her territory.
“Look at that tower!” one of them said. “Yo
u just know it’s full of bats and bones and—”
“It’s a turret, not a tower!” The words leaped out of Loah, surprising her. “And you feel a chill because the trees cool the air, not because of ghosts.”
The girls spun around, clutching each other.
“Eek!” squealed the blond one.
“You scared us silly!” squealed the other blond one.
“You already are silly,” Loah said, surprising herself even further.
“Don’t worry—we are so out of here!” Giggling like lunatics, tripping over each other, the girls grabbed their scooters and raced away.
Loah closed her laptop. Her heart was beating too fast. Those girls would undoubtedly tell all their friends how she’d scared them half to death. This would definitely add to her weirdo reputation. Yet she couldn’t have stopped herself if she wanted to. Some other, unknown Loah had rushed forth, defending what she loved.
Then, just as her heart began to slow, with no warning whatsoever, as if an invisible hand had given it a shove, a roof slate broke loose. It slid down, clanged against the gutter, and plummeted to the ground. Those slates were heavy. Their edges were keen as ax blades. Miss Rinker said that if one struck you on the head or neck, it was curtains for you. (This was the kind of grisly fact Miss Rinker adored.)
If that slate had fallen moments earlier, the Scooter Girls might have been goners.
Loah could see the gap, just beside the turret, where the slate had broken off. The roof already leaked, so this was worrisome. Was the turret a little more crooked? And look at that broken windowpane! For a moment, she saw her home through the eyes of the Scooter Girls.
Spooky. Creepy. Haunted much.
The blank eyes of the turret windows stared back at her. She remembered the eerie hissing she’d heard when she’d sat at the foot of its winding steps. She’d tried to convince herself she’d imagined the sound, but now a spine-prickling chill made her jump off the swing. She wound her way among the trees to peer up the road toward town. Where were the Rinkers? Theo drove at the approximate speed of a Galápagos tortoise, but errands never took them this long. What if they’d had an accident? What if they were in an ambulance on the way to the hospital right now? Loah saw them on stretchers, eyes shut, heads turbaned in bloody bandages. What if they were hurt so badly that they… never returned?
The Most Perfect Thing in the Universe Page 3