The Penderwicks at Point Mouette

by Jeanne Birdsall

  She began outside, scrubbing the chair he’d sat on, then ritually rinsing it with bucket after bucket of water. Next, naturally, she had to rinse the entire deck—Dexter had walked on it—which drove a protesting Jane inside. Where Skye soon followed, attacking the kitchen, surface by surface, just managing to keep herself from sweeping the ceiling. The living room came next, and after she’d asked Jane and Aunt Claire to lift their feet for the broom a half dozen times, Aunt Claire decided that it was an excellent time to practice driving the car with her sprained ankle. Glad for an excuse to escape Skye’s cleaning frenzy, Jane offered to go along, then fetched Mercedes from the beach so that she could go, too. Just in case Skye finished with Birches and attempted to scrub the beach.

  Being left alone in Birches was an invitation for Skye to go completely mad. With broom and bucket, sponge and scrub brush, she whirled around, straightening and scouring until the living room should have cried for mercy. Its windows hadn’t been so clear in years, nor had the rugs been laid out on the seawall and beaten, or the couch turned upside down and its cushions aired on the deck. Skye even polished the baseboards and this time let herself have a go at the ceiling.

  A lesser mortal, or a less tormented one, would have stopped there, but Skye was moving too quickly to stop. She wouldn’t invade Aunt Claire’s privacy, but she had no such compunction about small sisters. A Hannibal of housecleaning, she marched into Batty’s room, which didn’t look too awful on the surface. But underneath the bed was a revelation.

  There, crumpled into a ball, was Batty’s favorite T-shirt with the horse on the front, the one that had been handed down through all four sisters. Batty had sworn she’d left it on the beach at low tide and hadn’t remembered until it was swept away by high tide. And here was a stash of golf balls that Batty had kept out of the sale, a pile of beach rocks, and an even bigger pile of shells spilling their sand onto everything. Behind the shells were Hound’s treasures: a hard-boiled egg from two days earlier and an empty box of Cheerios. Then way in the back behind a damp towel and yet another pile of beach rocks, Skye discovered a big inflatable plastic duck, forlorn and forgotten. She remembered that Rosalind had packed it into Batty’s stuffed-animal box—but how it had ended up under the bed was a mystery, until Skye found some signs of chewing along the edge. Hound, of course. But because he’d managed to avoid actual puncture wounds, she decided to take a break from cleaning and inflate the duck. Because she was also remembering that Rosalind had specifically told her to blow it up when they reached Maine. Skye had even written it down on her list. Blow up—

  And suddenly she was whooping and laughing and bonking herself on the head like the fool she was. She snatched up the duck and rushed out into the living room, dying to tell everyone that she’d been wrong and they’d been right. Not now, not ever, was Batty going to explode in any possible situation.

  “It was just the duck,” she cried, but since she’d driven them all away, there was no one to hear her. She ran outside, looking for anyone—anyone at all—and found Dominic Orne sitting on the edge of the deck.

  “Look at this duck!” she yelped at him. “I have to blow it up!”

  “All right,” he answered.

  “You don’t understand how exciting—” But Skye stopped herself. Dominic didn’t have the imagination to grasp the significance of this most glorious duck. “Why are you here again?”

  “Jane said a lot of stuff earlier about empty shells and stealing.”

  “Did she call you an empty shell of a boy who cares only for his skateboard and stealing kisses?”

  “That sounds right. I was hoping she could explain what she meant in, you know, normal language.”

  It wasn’t an unreasonable request. Skye threw the duck at him. “Blow this up and I’ll tell you. Here’s why. Because you lured Jane into falling in love with you—”

  “What?”

  “You have to blow up the duck,” she said, and waited until he’d started. “After you lured Jane into falling in love, you rejected her love and, even worse, you rejected her poetry when you sent back that ode she wrote for you.”

  He stopped blowing. “I don’t even know what an ode is. Your sister is too smart for me. She writes books! I never knew what she was talking about.”

  This rang true. “Then why did you kiss her?”

  He lowered his voice as if telling a great secret. “My brothers dared me to kiss as many girls as I could in French Park this summer.”

  “This was all about a dare?” Skye was appalled. “Jane was right—you are an empty shell of a boy. And so are your brothers. Empty shells and pathetic ignoramuses.”

  Unfazed, Dominic went back to blowing and didn’t stop until he’d brought to life a fully inflated and rather goofy-looking duck.

  “All done,” he said.

  “Thank you.” She grudgingly accepted it from him. “I will concede that you don’t understand Jane. Almost no one does. Now please leave. I have important things to do.”

  Still, he lingered. “So Jane really liked me?”

  “Liked, as in the past tense, as in now she thinks you’re dirt.”

  “But if she liked me before—”

  Skye leaned toward him, wishing she had something more threatening to wield than the duck. “Dominic Orne, if you ever mess with my sister again, I will tear you limb from limb. I have no intention of getting another haircut for months.”

  “You know I don’t understand you either, right?”

  “Leave!” And he finally did.

  Now there were two things to celebrate—the duck and the fact that she’d managed not to murder Dominic on the spot—and Skye simply had to tell someone. She raced across the beach to Alec’s house and found Jeffrey and Batty at the piano, working on adding harmony to a song.

  “Batty, you’re not going to blow up!” she crowed, waving the duck. “And Dominic is an idiot!”

  “We know all that,” said Batty.

  Jeffrey looked up from the keyboard. “No one else has come for me, have they?”

  “No one else has come,” answered Skye. “And if someone does, we won’t tell them where you are, I promise. We’ll protect you.”

  “Good. Thanks.” He went back to his music.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Batty’s First Concert

  AND PROTECT HIM THEY DID. From discussing his past or answering questions about his future, from hearing the words stepfather, abandonment, secrets, or Arundel. They praised him and coddled him, and when he got tired of that, they teased him gently, and when he got tired of that, Skye punched him or Jane kicked soccer balls at him until everyone went back to praising and coddling.

  Then there were all the phone calls from Mrs. T-D. Two of them, a third, and after the fourth, everyone lost count. Because Jeffrey refused to talk to his mother, Aunt Claire took over—woman to woman, she said—and stayed on as long as she could stand it. Although she never once complained, after each call she had to stump outside on her crutches and swing herself around Birches several times before she was calm again.

  Because Jeffrey felt safest and most content when he was playing Alec’s piano, they made sure he was next door as much as possible. Batty always went along, too. There was still her concert to practice for, scheduled for the very last night of their stay in Maine. This was now only a few days away, and all the recent chaos had put them behind with practicing. So they worked on that, and sometimes they just goofed around, playing nonsense songs, and sometimes they looked through the box of old photographs that Alec had left out on the piano, in plain sight, where they’d be sure to see it.

  Since many of the photographs had names and dates penciled on the back, they were able to pick out Alec’s parents, and Alec and his brothers at different ages. While Batty liked seeing the pictures of Alec—since he looked so much like Jeffrey—she still didn’t quite understand how or why he and all the others suddenly belonged to Jeffrey, any more than she understood when Jeffrey explained pentatonic s
cales to her or, for that matter, why Skye was so thrilled about the plastic duck. Batty supposed it was nice that Jeffrey had found his father, since his father happened to be a person she liked very much, but the idea that parents could get lost in the first place bothered her. She discussed this with Hound when they were alone, and it bothered him, too. They kept their worries to themselves, but it made their longing for home grow and grow, until they even talked about walking back to Massachusetts, and might have tried to walk at least past the dock and a little way up the hill as an experiment, if it hadn’t been for the concert and if it hadn’t been for the moose. Jeffrey tried to find the moose for her—he took her into the pinewood a few times to look, but the golf course was always full of golfers, not moose, which each time was a sore disappointment.

  Very early one morning, not their last morning in Maine but the one before that, Jeffrey crept into Batty’s room and gently shook her shoulder.

  “Are we going home?” she asked sleepily.

  He found her little sweatshirt and pulled it on over her pajamas. “Not until tomorrow. We can’t go home before your concert.”

  “My concert’s tonight!” How could she have forgotten? And Jane had promised to help her dress up for it.

  He put on her sneakers. “We’re going moose hunting. Give those old moose a chance to show themselves.”

  “Just you and me?”

  “Just you and me. We’ll even leave Hound here, so he won’t bark at the moose.”

  Jeffrey wrote a note with Batty’s green marker—We have gone moose hunting, Love, Jeffrey and Batty—and left it on the kitchen counter; then off they went to the pinewood. Batty thought they’d dash right through the trees and onto the golf course but found that you couldn’t dash when the woods were so dark, and the pine needles were extra slithery because you couldn’t see where your sneakers were going. She wasn’t sure she liked it but soldiered on until she tripped over a rock hidden under the pine needles. The rock hurt her toe and Batty thought about crying, but Jeffrey stooped down and told her to climb on, and riding piggyback is too much fun to waste crying, especially when the sun came up and the woods weren’t as dark.

  Up and up they went, until they reached the big rock above the lake. Jeffrey let her slide off his back. Then they looked down, and the moose were there, all three of them, wading into the water.

  “You see them?” Jeffrey asked.

  “They don’t have antlers.” The big moose at Moose Market had antlers. Maybe Jeffrey was wrong and these weren’t moose at all.

  “Mothers and babies don’t have antlers.”

  Batty stored that away as something Ben would like to know. “Can we go down to say hello?”

  “No, they’re too big. They don’t look like it from up here, but the mother is bigger than a horse. Bigger than that bull you met last summer.”

  That bull had been terrifyingly big, which meant that moose had to be gigantic. Batty slipped her hand into Jeffrey’s, just to be safe, but kept watching. The cow moose was calmly plodding through the shallows, while the calves nibbled the tall grasses at the edge of the lake. Batty loved them already. She decided that these weren’t the moose that Skye had seen. These were different ones, special for Batty.

  “I wish I had my harmonica,” she said. “We could play them some music.”

  “We can sing songs to them instead.”

  “Like what?” She didn’t know any songs written for moose.

  Jeffrey wasn’t so literal, and he led her in a rendition of a song Turron had said was one of his favorites, “You’re the Top.” For the words he didn’t know, Jeffrey used anything that rhymed with moose, like goose, loose, juice, caboose, and Dr. Seuss. Batty enjoyed it so much that they sang it three times, each louder than the last, until it was a miracle the moose didn’t look up to find out what all the racket was about. Too soon, however, a riding mower appeared, making neat swipes through the grass. Back and forth it went, each time getting a little closer to the lake, until the mother moose decided to gather up her children and make for the shelter of the woods. Batty waved good-bye.

  “Will they be safe?” she asked Jeffrey.

  “Very safe.” He picked her up and set her on the rock, then sat beside her. “It’s time to have a serious talk about music, Batty. You know you don’t have enough money for a real piano yet from the golf sale. You might have to start with a little electric piano, and that’s only if your dad and Iantha say it’s okay.”

  “They will,” said Batty.

  “I hope so. But if they do, I won’t be there to help you anymore. You can mess around on your own, but if you’re going to keep going, you’ll need lessons from a real teacher in the next year or so. I didn’t start lessons until I was almost eight, and that was only because Churchie found a teacher and paid her. My mother refused to …” He shrugged off the memory. “Anyway, by then I’d picked up bad habits and had to break them and start all over, which made it harder. I’ll explain all that to your dad. He’s a good listener, your dad.”

  Batty picked at a tiny hole in her sweatshirt. “He promised me a stuffed animal from England. I hope it’s a tiger.”

  “You know that music is a lot of work, right? You’ll have to practice and practice and practice.”

  “Like Skye and soccer.”

  “Just like that. She doesn’t mind because she loves soccer, just like I don’t mind because I love music. But sometimes it gets hard and lonely, and I get scared that no matter how much I practice, I won’t be good enough, and then I have to keep going anyway. Do you understand?”

  “Yes,” she said, and wished she did.

  “No, you don’t, goofball.” Jeffrey got her down from the rock and brushed off the pine needles she’d managed to collect. “Let’s talk about your concert tonight. Aunt Claire will come, and Skye and Jane.”

  “And Hound and Mercedes.”

  “Do you want to invite anybody else? Dominic?”

  She looked up to see if he was teasing, and he was. But Batty did have somebody else she wanted at her concert. Two somebodies. She’d start with the easy one. “I want to invite Hoover.”

  “Hoover, huh.” Jeffrey took her hand and they started off down the hill. “Anybody else?”

  “You know who.”

  He crouched and looked her straight in the eye. “Did your sisters tell you to invite Alec? Tell me the truth, even if they made you promise to keep it a secret.”

  “They didn’t tell me, I swear. Penderwick Family Honor.”

  Satisfied, Jeffrey stood and they set off again. It wasn’t until they were nearly out of the woods that he spoke again. “I’ll ask Aunt Claire to invite Hoover and Alec for tonight. Okay?”

  “Okay!” Much pleased at this swelling of her audience, Batty skipped the rest of the way back to Birches.

  • • •

  After hours of packing, cleaning, and getting ready to leave Maine the next morning, Skye could feel OAP-dom slipping away from her. She tried to hold on to it, reminding herself that she had another whole day left of responsibility, but there it went, slipping further and further, because there wasn’t really a whole day left anymore—Skye looked at the kitchen clock—no, in only twenty hours they would be home and reunited with Rosalind, and several hours after that, the rest of the family would arrive from England, and Skye not only would no longer be in charge, she would be fourth in line for being in charge. The idea was exhilarating enough to make her jump and shout, and she would have if she weren’t so worried about the upcoming concert. Just two songs, Jeffrey had promised. Two Batty songs, from start to finish—to Skye it sounded like being locked in a closet with a screeching hyena.

  But she could make it through the songs—she’d already hidden cotton balls in her pocket if listening became too painful. No, her real concern was Jeffrey’s happiness and his future. He hadn’t talked about Alec since that day on the rocks, and Skye had no idea whether he would speak to him tonight at the concert—or ever. She kept having a nig
htmare that once Jeffrey got back to Arundel, Mrs. T-D and Dexter would never let him leave again, and though she knew the nightmare came out of one of Jane’s books, it scared her anyway, and Skye hated being scared.

  Another glance at the kitchen clock—only twenty minutes left until the concert. She was finishing cleaning up after dinner. Jeffrey and Batty were off getting dressed for the great occasion, with Aunt Claire helping Jeffrey and Jane helping Batty.

  “I could help you get dressed,” Skye said to Hound, who’d been kicked out of Batty’s room for the concert-preparation frenzy.

  He rolled over onto his back and looked pathetic and unloved. Skye wasn’t taken in, but she scratched his stomach anyway. It made both of them feel better, and she kept it up until Mercedes arrived a few minutes later.

  “Here,” she said, handing Skye a pile of envelopes, half of them addressed to Mercedes Orne at Mouette Inn and the other half to Mercedes Orne at her home in California. “Open one.”

  Inside was a handmade card with a splotchy flower on one side and Dear Mercedes, and nothing else, on the other.

  “I don’t get it,” said Skye.

  “These are so everyone will write to me. I’m going to miss you all so much.”

  “Cheer up, Mercedes. Maybe someone new will come to Point Mouette and you’ll forget about us.”

  Mercedes was wounded, accused of unimaginable treachery. “I’ll never forget you. Never!”

  Cursing herself for carelessness, and longing more than ever for the end to OAP-dom, Skye made it up to Mercedes by going through all the cards with their blotchily individual flowers. They’d reached the eleventh card and Skye was running out of nice things to say when Aunt Claire came in from the sleeping porch.