The Astonishing Maybe

by Shaunta Grimes

  He said, “I have to go in to sign some papers at human resources this afternoon. Your whole room unpacked by the time I get home sounds great to me.”

  “I don’t know about my whole room,” I said.

  He held out his hands, like it wasn’t up to him, then pointed his forefingers at me. “It was your plan, Boss. Have fun with Roona this morning, then get to work.”

  Mom lifted her eyebrows and I said, “Okay, fine.”

  “Can I go?” Harper asked from the bedroom door. “I want to go.”

  “No way.”

  “Mommm! I want to go with Gideon.”

  “I need your help here, Harper.”

  Harper pouted and I left while I had the chance.

  * * *

  Roona answered her door and said, “Took you long enough.”

  “I had to wait until eight. What’s the big deal anyway?”

  “We have to get that pie back.”

  “But why?”

  “I really hope it’s not too late already.” She led me to her bedroom. It was a shocking mess. Piles of books, half-drawn pictures, what looked like every toy she’d ever owned from the time she was a baby. Clothes everywhere.

  “Roona, why do we have to get the pie back?”

  She got on her hands and knees and lifted her bed skirt, shoved her head underneath it, and rooted around. “Just trust me.”

  “I trust you,” I said. “But I still want to know.”

  Roona gave a little whoop and sat up, holding an orange swimsuit with a green flower. “Found it! Operation Blueberry Pie is a go.”

  “Roona.”

  Her legs were so long and skinny, she reminded me of a camel as she got back to her feet. Roona shoved one leg and then the other into the swimsuit and pulled the stretchy fabric right up over her cutoff jeans and T-shirt.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “This is going to take Wonder Roo.”

  I laughed, but she didn’t laugh with me, so I stopped. “Operation Blueberry Pie?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Why is it going to take Wonder Roo?”

  “Because blueberries are blue.”

  “I know,” I said. “It’s right there in the name.”

  “Blue is a sad color.” I waited for her to go on. Roona sighed and sat on the edge of her bed. “Mom baked Miss Oberman’s pie in the middle of the night, when she thought I was asleep. She only does that when she doesn’t want me to know how sad she is.”

  “You weren’t asleep?”

  “How could I sleep when the whole house was filling up with tears?”

  “What?”

  “They got into the pie, Gideon.”

  “The tears?”

  “Of course.”

  I watched her pull up her rainbow socks from her long toes to her scabbed knees. “I don’t get it.”

  She put her feet on the ground and looked at me. “Tears in a blueberry pie are extra bad.”

  I leaned forward, caught up in her words. “How?”

  She pulled her feet up and crossed them under her, settling in. “Last year Mom baked a cake for Fletcher Dorrance’s sixth birthday. Do you know him?”

  “No,” I said.

  “No. You don’t. How could you?” Roona looked out her bedroom window at the patch of desert across the street. “Fletcher’s mother hired my mom to bake a birthday cake, with fish and boats and a whale on top. It was the most beautiful cake she’d ever made.”

  “That doesn’t sound so bad,” I said.

  “Mom was sad the day she decorated Fletcher Dorrance’s birthday cake. So sad that she filled our house with her tears. Just like Alice in Wonderland. They splashed around her knees while she baked. They ruined my backpack. The cat floated into the laundry room.”

  I couldn’t bring myself to call her a liar, but it was close. “Not really, though.”

  “It’s true. She missed my dad” was all that Roona said about why her mother cried so much. “She always misses my dad, but some days she misses him harder than others. Her tears had mixed into the blue cake batter.”

  “Gross.”

  “It was a fantastic cake. There was a pirate ship made entirely of chocolate,” Roona said. “And a school of dolphins jumping from the waves around the edges. The whale was a work of art. Fletcher’s mother said she hated to cut into it.”

  I sat on the floor at her feet and leaned into Roona’s story. “What happened?”

  “First Fletcher’s little sister, Amanda, started to cry.”

  I leaned back a little. “Little sisters always cry. Harper cries all the time.”

  She held up one finger, then added a second to it. “Xavier Harris started to cry.”

  “Oh.” But still. Two kids crying at a six-year-old’s birthday party?

  “Then Lilliana. Then Mariana. Then Kariana. All the Anas started crying, one after the other.” The rest of her fingers popped up.

  “All of them?” I asked.

  “Every one of them.” She held up her other hand. “Then Marcus and his brother, Lucas, who was there to keep Amanda company. And Hillary and Margot. And by that time, Fletcher was so upset that everyone else was crying and getting all the attention on his birthday that he started to cry, too.”

  “Wow.”

  “So now Mrs. Dorrance is so flustered trying to make every six-year-old in the neighborhood stop crying that she starts crying. And Mr. Dorrance, who has no patience for crying—everyone knows that—storms in to find out what all the fuss was about.” Roona sat back and crossed her arms over her chest. “And he nearly drowned in all the tears.”

  I blinked. “That’s not true.”

  “Yes it is. They up and moved to Cleveland,” Roona said, “the very next week.”

  I sat up, released from her spell. “That’s not true, though.”

  “Of course it is.”

  “No one can cry enough to fill up a house with tears.”

  Her face clouded. “Yes they can.”

  My mouth opened to argue, but I closed it again. I couldn’t help it. I believed her. Or at least I didn’t not believe her. “Who is Miss Oberman anyway?”

  “She was my mom’s teacher in the second grade,” Roona said. “Mine, too. She must be a hundred and ten years old.”

  “No one is a hundred and ten years old,” I pointed out. “Why does Miss Oberman need a blueberry pie?”

  “She’s taking it to her mother, down to the old folks’ home.”

  “Is her mother a hundred and fifty?” I asked.

  “At least.” Roona unfolded her legs and reached for her roller skates. “We have to hurry. You can bring your bike and I’ll hitch a ride on the back.”

  “Uhh,” I said. “Where’s the old folks’ home?”

  Roona wrinkled her nose, thinking. “About a mile away.”

  I shook my head. “I’m not allowed to ride my bike that far. I’m not even allowed to cross the street.”

  “Are you serious?” Roona looked at me like she’d never heard of a kid with boundaries before. I felt my face burn. “You are. You’re not allowed to cross the street?”

  “Well, I wasn’t in New Jersey. It wasn’t like here.” I swept my arm toward the desert outside her window. “There were way more people and much more traffic.”

  “Okay. Are you coming or not? I have to get that pie.”

  “Um…”

  She smiled at me and went to her bedroom door. “It’s okay. I’ll just see you later.”

  She went out without even looking back at me, to make sure I left with her.

  “Wait,” I said, before I could stop myself. Forget butterflies. I had bats in my stomach, turning somersaults. “I’ll go.”

  * * *

  Roona held on to the rack on the back of my bike and crouched low, the wheels of her roller skates whizzing along the blacktop, while I pedaled so hard and fast, I thought we might take off in flight at any moment.

  I was terrified that she’d hit a rock and s
end us both crashing into the blacktop, but she didn’t seem worried at all. She had her blanket around her neck and when I looked over my shoulder, I saw it flapping behind her like a real superhero cape.

  The old folks’ home was more like two miles away, I guessed. Much farther than my mother, who was used to giving me city boundaries, would have allowed me to go if I’d bothered to ask.

  She would have told me not to cross any streets, limiting my world to just our block. But this was a state of emergency, or at least Roona was sure it was. That meant saying sorry if we were caught, instead of asking permission ahead of time.

  Bilbo Baggins from The Hobbit would agree. He would have gone on this Operation Blueberry Pie adventure, too. The blanket cracked in the wind as I tried to go a little faster.

  The old folks’ home wasn’t really a home. It looked like a school to me. A long, low building with a parking lot in front and an office smack in the middle.

  Roona pointed to an old pickup truck in a handicapped spot near the front and said, “Miss Oberman’s already here.”

  She sat on the curb and took off her skates, tied their laces together, flung them over one shoulder, and walked in her striped socks to the front door. I followed, mostly because after coming this far there was no way I was missing whatever was next.

  The front door had a little keypad lock. Roona pressed her freckled face to the glass, one hand on either side, and peered in.

  “Oh no,” she said, low, under her breath. “Oh no.”

  “What? What is it?”

  I stood beside her and looked through the dark glass, too.

  All I saw was a nurse standing beside a frail old man, her arm around him, their heads pressed close together.

  “It’s started already,” Roona said. “We’re too late.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Can’t you see? They’re crying.”

  “Are you sure? They look like they’re talking.”

  Roona shook her head and pulled her cape from around her neck. She folded it neatly and stuck it under her arm. “No way.”

  “’Scuse me,” someone said, and we both jumped.

  A man stood behind us. He kept his eyes on Roona, and I didn’t blame him. She looked ridiculous with her swimsuit worn over her clothes and those silly socks.

  He reached past me to punch some numbers into the keypad. Roona grabbed the door before it closed all the way and we walked into the old folks’ home.

  It smelled like the stuff Grandma Ellen used to clean her toilets and those mushy frozen peas, and under all of it, like Harper’s room when she still wore diapers.

  The floors were covered in white tiles and the walls were painted a slightly bluer white. The bright lights overhead made the whole place feel cold and harsh. Roona was right. The nurse and the old man were both crying.

  Roona walked right up to the high counter. The woman behind it didn’t notice us. She was crying, too, quietly, into a wad of tissues. I looked at my feet. So far the old folks’ home wasn’t filling up with tears, but I couldn’t deny it. The crying was an awful coincidence.

  “Pardon me,” Roona said.

  The woman finally looked at us. Then she glanced around, probably for a grown-up. “Roona? What are you doing here?”

  Roona said, “We need to see Miss Oberman.”

  “Miss Oberman?” The woman was distracted by the old man and his nurse. She blew her nose into her tissues.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Well, you can’t go back to the resident rooms without a parent, honey. Is Miranda here?”

  “But we have to,” Roona said. “It’s life or death.”

  That got the lady’s attention. “What do you mean, life or death?”

  Roona took a small step back. Inspiration struck and before I could think better of it, I made her my great-grandma and said, “She’s my nana.”

  “Mrs. Oberman is?” the woman asked.

  “Yes, ma’am. Someone’s already inside waiting for us.”

  “Who?”

  I almost said my grandma, but Roona kept calling Mrs. Oberman’s daughter Miss Oberman and I wasn’t sure if she had kids. The receptionist would probably know. She knew Roona, after all. “My aunt is already inside. My, um, great-aunt Oberman.”

  A big black book sat on the counter. The woman pulled it down to her desk and looked at it. “Why didn’t you come in with her?”

  “My mom just dropped us off.” I wondered if lying to the receptionist at an old folks’ home was a felony or a misdemeanor. Roona Louise Mulroney was definitely a bad influence.

  Roona’s dark eyes darted to me and I had to look away or I was going to do or say something to give away my lie.

  “Okay.” The woman wiped tears from her face with the back of her hand, then dried them with the same tissues she’d blown her nose into. “Next time, your mom needs to come in with you. Sign here and you can go see your nana.”

  She put the book back and turned it toward us. Roona scribbled her name, then gave me the pen and I did the same, even though I had a twinge of doubt about leaving a paper trail. Just above Roona’s name was Miss Oberman—the daughter—signed in to see Mrs. Oberman—the mother—in room 115.

  As we followed signs toward the right hallway, we saw two more crying nurses and three crying old folks.

  “She couldn’t have given them all pie,” I said.

  I was still pretty sure that a blueberry pie couldn’t make people cry so much that they flooded an old folks’ home—but panic built a small fire under my ribs.

  Room 99.

  Room 101.

  Room 103. Two women sat on the edge of one bed, both sobbing.

  Room 105.

  Room 107.

  Room 109. The door was closed, but we heard the wails and started to walk faster.

  Room 111.

  Room 113.

  Finally, room 115. The door was closed and I stopped walking, but Roona opened it and went right in. I followed, because the other option was staying alone in the cold, smelly hallway that might very well flood with tears at any moment.

  Inside, a very old woman stood near the window with tears streaming down her face. I would have thought she was the oldest woman I’d ever seen, with her perfectly white hair and soft, wrinkled skin, only the woman in the wheelchair beside her was even older. She was crying, too.

  “Roona?” the younger old woman said. “Roona Mulroney, what are you doing here?”

  “You already gave them the pie, didn’t you?” Roona said. Then she looked at the even older woman. “Happy birthday, Mrs. Oberman.”

  “Thank you, darling.”

  Miss Oberman’s bottom lip trembled. “We were eating it when we heard the news.”

  “What news?” I asked, then winced when both old ladies looked at me. “Sorry.”

  “Mrs. Franklin died this morning.” Miss Oberman sat on the edge of her mother’s bed. “It’s the saddest story I’ve ever heard.”

  “And the sweetest,” her mother said.

  “Yes. And the sweetest.”

  Roona put her roller skates on the floor. “Who is Mrs. Franklin?”

  “A lovely, lovely woman. She moved here with her husband a few months ago. Mr. Franklin wasn’t expected to live long and she couldn’t stand to let him come alone.”

  “But he got better,” the elder Mrs. Oberman said. “He’s healthy as a horse now.”

  “It’s remarkable that she should go first.” The younger Miss Oberman blew her nose with a mighty honk. “Just remarkable. And now he’s just lost.”

  Roona looked at me and I tried to tell her with my eyes that a blueberry pie didn’t have anything to do with Mr. and Mrs. Franklin, even if her mother had been crying when she made it.

  “Is there pie left?” Roona asked.

  Miss Oberman shook her head. “It was a nice breakfast surprise, though, wasn’t it, Mother?”

  “Yes,” Mrs. Oberman said. “Yes it was. Tell Miranda thank you for me, won’t yo
u?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Roona picked up her skates. “I’m sorry I didn’t get here in time.”

  “In time for pie? I’m sure your mother will bake you another one if you ask.” Roona looked horrified, but Miss Oberman didn’t seem to notice. She was looking at me. “Who is your friend?”

  Roona’s eyes brimmed with tears and she hadn’t even eaten pie. “This is Gideon. He moved in next door to us.”

  “Are you the same age as Roona?”

  I nodded.

  “You’ll be at the middle school in the fall, then?” Miss Oberman asked.

  I nodded again, but couldn’t find my voice. My mother would say it was rude not to answer, but I just couldn’t. My head was too busy trying to deal with the fact that Roona’s fears about her mother’s sad blueberry pie had maybe, possibly come true. I’d seen it with my own eyes, or I’d never believe it even as a maybe possibility.

  Mrs. Oberman made a noise and I was saved when her daughter went to her. She said, “You kids better get going now.”

  I wiped at my eyes.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Roona said again. And we left.

  Five

  I didn’t see Roona for the next three days, during which I actually did start to read The Hobbit for the seventh time. I got as far as Gandalf showing up for Bilbo.

  I am looking for someone to share in an adventure that I am arranging, and it’s very difficult to find anyone.

  I avoided her, because frankly between the movie with her mother and the crying at the old folks’ home, I was a little freaked out.

  I did watch her through my window, skating on her porch. If her father hadn’t shown up in twelve years, it didn’t seem like he’d show up on a random afternoon just because she was waiting. But she was out there, every day.

  For the first time, I had a secret I couldn’t tell my parents. Not a silly little secret. A real big whopper of a secret.

  They thought I’d been next door playing with Roona, when really we were miles away, chasing down a possibly magical blueberry pie. Every time I thought about it, my stomach hurt.

  “That’s it, Gideon,” Mom said after lunch on the third day. “Get dressed.”

  “Mom…” I held up my book. “I’m reading.”

  “You’re coming with us.”