We Walked the Sky

by Lisa Fiedler

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, New York

  First published in the United States of America by Razorbill, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, 2019

  Copyright © 2019 Penguin Random House LLC

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  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA IS AVAILABLE

  Ebook ISBN 9780451480811

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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  To my new little cousins, Graham Hayes and Mae Mealey—Welcome to the loudest, craziest, and most wonderful circus in the world . . . our family!

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  “The noblest art is that of making others happy.”

  —P. T. Barnum

  PROLOGUE

  Massachusetts, 1965

  SHE SHOULD HAVE NEVER asked to go.

  It had been an innocent enough request, and there was always a chance things might have gone differently—because that was how he was. She always had just as much chance of being surprised as she did of being thrown halfway across the room. (All the way across when she was younger, but she was sixteen now and almost as tall as him.) Had it been last Thursday or next Tuesday, or if she’d been wearing yellow not blue, perhaps he would have simply smoothed the pages of his Sunday Globe and huffed a brusque, “You may.” But it was today and he was him, and his fists had a way of coming out of nowhere before she could even duck.

  She had discovered recently that a whimper of pain from her mother was a guaranteed trigger for his trademark unpredictable violence. He loathed the sound of weakness, hated that she was frail, as though somehow it reflected poorly on him—on Davis Winston Hastings—to have a sickly wife. Early on, she’d tried to suppress the noise of her misery, but things were worse now and she could no longer manage it; the malignant thing had become all that there was of her, nestled there between her ribs.

  And although Catherine was smart enough to know better, she could never quite shake the feeling that he had somehow placed it there, that he had conjured the tumor just to be cruel, just to exert his unyielding authority over them. “I can make you sick, then punish you for not being well.” Because he was the one in charge, make no mistake about that. He was the one with the name and the money and the manhood, and so he held their whole world in his eager fists.

  He made the rules and the rules were everything. Unwritten, unspoken, undeniably understood: remain at the dinner table until given permission to leave; earn excellent grades, but never appear smarter than the boys; appreciate what is given to you and ask for nothing more.

  She should have never asked to go.

  But sometimes the smack did not come; sometimes the insult went unspoken; sometimes her meals would not be withheld in the wake of some perceived misbehavior or shortcoming. On some days he could be utterly indifferent. Some days he’d return home from work, his trademark pocket square still folded flawlessly even after a long day at the office, acting as if he were surprised to find Catherine and Meredith there in his house—like two forgotten knickknacks, or things caught in a cobweb. He was never gentle, never kind, never good, but praise the Lord in heaven for indifference. Catherine’s best days were the ones when he just ignored her.

  Today, as it turned out, would not be one of those days.

  “I was invited to stay at Emily Davenport’s tonight,” she said. “I was hoping I could—”

  His hand had lashed toward her like lightning, his fingers wrapping around her long dark ponytail, yanking it hard. “You don’t tell me what you’re hoping for. You ask if I will allow it.”

  Swallowing the degradation, she quickly rephrased the question. “Please, Father, may I stay at Emily’s house tonight?”

  His answer was lost to the sound of a sudden commotion outside. Not an ugly din, like the kind generated by the riots she’d heard about in Harlem last year and Birmingham the year before. No—this was a beautiful upset, a ruckus of unadulterated joy.

  “What in holy hell is that?” he demanded, as if it were her job to know, as if the noisy interruption could somehow be blamed on her.

  “The circus,” she muttered in disgust, because she was sure that was how he would want her to feel about such a garish display. She’d heard that it was in town, but had forgotten until just now, as the parade came unfurling along the perfect Brooksvale avenue on which their perfect brick house stood among other perfect brick houses (though theirs was the most perfect by far—because it was his).

  Perhaps it was the gleeful intrusion of the circus parade that compelled him to increase the duration of his torment. He was usually appeased (or perhaps bored) sooner. But today he held tight until her scalp stung and her face was streaked with tears.

  Without releasing his hold on her hair, he dragged her toward the open front door. Squinting through the spring shadows that fell across the covered porch, Catherine saw her mother, hardly more than a shadow herself, bundled under woolen blankets on a wicker chaise. She was watching the circus performers file past in the late-day sunshine—a roaring, dancing, tumbling rainbow.

  The music was as irresistible as if they’d hired the Pied Piper himself to lead the band. Catherine wished it would stop. She wished it would never stop. It was at once too lovely and too strange, and it did not belong here, dancing and cartwheeling through her humiliation.

  “Be back in this house by ten o’clock tomorrow morning, or I will come after you,” he said, punctuating his consent with a shove that sent Catherine stumbling through the front
door. She went skidding across the porch on her hands and knees to land at her mother’s feet. “Have I made myself understood?”

  Her knees throbbed; her palms burned. Damn right she understood. Eyes on the porch floor, she nodded.

  He hovered there long enough to remove his pocket square and use it to mop his brow. It wasn’t until his footsteps had clomped up the stairs and faded to silence that her mother spoke.

  “Go, Catherine.”

  It was a wisp of a voice at best, words almost without sound, but they had Catherine snapping her gaze up to meet her mother’s pale eyes in disbelief. Because while the suggestion seemed innocuous enough, there was something chilling in the delivery that made her heart race.

  “Mother?”

  “I’m dying, my love, my darling girl. We both know it. I’ll be surprised if I live out the week.”

  “Mother, no—”

  “Catherine.” Meredith Quinn Hastings held up a shaky hand to silence her child; the exertion of even that showed in her gaunt face, but she did not let her trembling fingertips fall back into her lap. Instead they went to the satin lapel of her bathrobe, to the Cartier brooch her sadistic son-of-a-bitch husband insisted she wear, despite the fact that the weight of it was now too much for her to carry. “There’s always a chance a friend or neighbor might stop in to ask after your health,” he’d snarled more than once, so if she couldn’t honor him by looking healthy, she could at least look wealthy—she owed him that much, didn’t she? The jewel-encrusted brooch had been weighing her down for months.

  Until now.

  With the fire-eaters crackling past and the plumed horses trotting like something from a dream, Meredith fumbled with the clasp, then held the pin out to her daughter. Because another thing they both knew was that this brooch was virtually priceless.

  “Go. Now.”

  “To Emily’s, you mean?” Catherine’s throat was tight.

  Meredith’s chin trembled, but she lifted it defiantly and lied, “Where else?”

  For the space of a heartbeat her eyes shone with determination, with hope. Over the vanishing strains of circus music, she used what little strength she had to jerk her chin in the direction of the last grinning clown as he skipped out of sight. Then came the last words she would ever speak to her child.

  “Go, Catherine,” she urged.

  So Catherine did.

  ONE

  CALLIE STOPPED AT THE end of the buckling brick walk and frowned. “What is this place?”

  “It’s a carriage house,” Quinn pronounced brightly.

  “It’s a garage.”

  “Oh, come on—it’s adorable. Look at that tile roof. And those arched windows! I think it’s charming.”

  “I think it’s a garage.”

  Quinn cocked her hip. “Guest suite?”

  “Servants’ quarters.”

  “Fine, Calliope.” Quinn sighed and yanked a jangling keychain from her jeans pocket. “It’s a miserable little garage apartment. But you know what else it is? It’s where we live now. The Sanctuary is home.”

  Well, that was wrong. Dead wrong. Home was not this crumbling, peeling outbuilding on the grounds of an animal rescue facility in Lake St. Julian, Florida. Home was everywhere else—a train speeding through a twilight filled with promise, a field on the outskirts of some small town Callie had never heard of, a sprawling meadow in the European countryside, or an arena in any bustling American city. Home was motion, change, adventure.

  Home was the circus.

  Or at least it was, until Mom decided to destroy my life.

  Callie eyed the second floor of the so-called charming carriage house, where two curved balconies stuck out from the façade like a pair of buckteeth. Their iron railings were rusted and broken, giving the impression of braces applied by a substandard orthodontist. “I’d say it’s a pretty fair gauge of how much a place sucks when the banisters commit suicide.”

  “Mr. Marston’s already promised to have them repaired,” said Quinn, battling with the ancient lock. “In a few weeks those railings will be back to their original splendor and dripping with bougainvillea.” Jerking the door open, she leaned against it, holding it wide for Callie to enter.

  “Just so you know, Mom, people run away to the circus. It’s, like, a thing. Nobody runs away from the circus.” Brushing past her mother, Callie climbed the stairs to the apartment, where several packing boxes, suitcases, and duffel bags lined the walls. CALLIE BEDROOM STUFF; SUMMER CLOTHES/TOASTER; QUINN MISC. OFFICE SUPPLIES.

  Three days ago, the boxes had been loaded into a moving van and sent ahead from Providence, where Callie still had one show left to perform. Her final walk across the high wire—billed dramatically on posters and in online advertising as “Calliope’s Crescendo”—had dazzled the Rhode Island crowds. Callie had signed autographs for hours afterward, and the next morning she and her mother had said their goodbyes. Quinn’s were lengthy and emotional, but Callie’s hadn’t taken long at all. The farewells she’d received were cordial, of course—she was the star attraction of VanDrexel’s Family Circus, so naturally her fellow performers were disappointed to see her go. But it had occurred to her as she was accepting a perfunctory group hug from the Bertière triplets (who’d interrupted their trapeze rehearsal just to see her off) that although she’d spent years in the same schoolroom with these girls, she’d never really managed to learn which one was Bianca, which was Beatrice, and which was Brittany. She did vaguely recall some rumors about Brittany dating one of the Chinese acrobats—Liang, she thought his name was. Brittany always seemed to be talking about him, but Callie had a way of tuning things out. She was never overly interested in gossip, which was probably why people rarely bothered to share it with her.

  Returning her attention to the boxes, Callie felt a surge of panic. “This can’t be all of it. Where are my costumes? Where’s the practice wire?”

  “Your costumes are downstairs,” said Quinn, tearing into a carton marked BEDDING. “We’ve got use of this whole carriage-house-slash-servants’-quarters, so I figured there was no point cluttering up the closets with stuff you aren’t going to need.”

  “And the wire?”

  Quinn looked up from the box to her glowering daughter, hesitated, then tossed her head toward a bay window overlooking the back lawn.

  Callie went to the window, wiped away a layer of grime, and looked out. There in the small shady patch that constituted the backyard was a three-foot-high tightrope, all set up and ready to go.

  “I called ahead,” said Quinn, taking a quilt out of the box.

  Callie stared down at the line and said nothing. She knew some expression of gratitude was in order, but the only sensation stronger than the ache to feel that tightrope beneath her feet was the anger she was harboring toward her mother. Quinn could have had three rings and a Big Top set up out there, and Callie still wouldn’t have given her the satisfaction of saying thank you.

  And why should she? Callie was never supposed to leave. The plan was always for her mother to resign from VanDrexel’s Family Circus as soon as Callie turned fifteen and was old enough to travel under the guardianship of her grandmother. In fact, Quinn had been on the verge of leaving a little over a year ago, when the circus’s parent company made the dramatic decision to stop using most of its exotic animals in the show. This had left Quinn—the show’s animal specialist—essentially without a function to perform, so she’d promptly arranged a Skype interview with Brad Marston, the owner of the same rescue facility to which her beloved elephants and big cats would be retiring. It was a newly established preserve called the Sanctuary, whose philosophy and mission had been enthusiastically heralded by all the proper animal welfare federations and authorities. Knowing that many American circuses were on the verge of making similar changes to their performing animal policies, Marston had listened to Quinn’s qualifications and personal beliefs and
offered her the executive director position on the spot. The job came with what he’d called “a full relocation package,” including transportation costs and moving expenses, as well as a rent-free home right on the Sanctuary grounds.

  Quinn, of course, had accepted.

  Then, a week later, out of absolutely nowhere and to Callie’s complete astonishment, Quinn had called her new boss back to say she’d changed her mind.

  At the time, Callie couldn’t understand why. Though Quinn had been born and raised in VanDrexel’s Circus (indeed, she was a VanDrexel) running an animal sanctuary had always been her dream.

  Callie hadn’t learned her mother’s real reason for staying until three weeks ago. And she’d learned it the hard way.

  Spinning away from the window, Callie bolted back across the room.

  “Where are you going?”

  “To make sure my costumes aren’t being devoured by cockroaches,” Callie said, as she made her way down the stairs.

  * * *

  • • •

  More boxes: TAX INFO/BANK RECORDS; WINTER COATS (DONATE); TUPPERWARE (MISSING LIDS). The one marked CALLIE’S COSTUMES was the largest by far, bulging at the sides.

  Dragging the box to the center of the garage, she ripped off the clear packing tape, revealing the perfect plum-colored sheen of her first performance dress. A shaft of sunlight made gray by the dusty garage windows caught one of the five hundred Swarovski crystals that dotted the purple bodice. She’d been only seven when she first walked the wire for a crowd, and she’d begged for a purple dress with cascades of pink ruffles and a tutu that could only be described as an exercise in hyperbole.

  Was I ever really this tiny? she wondered, holding the dress up to the meager light. Or this gauche? Apparently yes, and there was a matching purple parasol to prove it.

  Laying the dress aside, Callie gingerly removed the next costume—a svelte unitard she’d worn the year she turned twelve. Because it had been designed during her Harry Potter fangirl phase, the fabric was a deep shade of scarlet, accented with shimmering gold stripes. It was in this costume that she’d learned to do a backward somersault while lying on the wire, and she smiled now, remembering how she’d secretly imagined that if she were to fall while executing it, it wouldn’t have been into the bouncy embrace of the safety net her grandmother insisted on, but into the waiting arms of a young Daniel Radcliffe.