The Story Web

by Megan Frazer Blakemore

  “Can you clear off the table?” her mom asked.

  More than half the table was covered in papers. Old mail, newspapers, magazines her mom intended to read someday, and all of Alice’s school papers. Alice straightened the stacks of magazines, recycled the old newspapers. Then she took her pile of old schoolwork. None of it was important—math tests from September and worksheets she had completed ages ago. She was about to recycle that, too, when something slipped out of the pile. It was a project they had done during the first week of school. There was a smiling photograph of her at the top. Her eyes were bright, and every tooth seemed to show in her grin. You could still see her summer freckles across her pink cheeks. Her hair was smooth and pretty; her shirt was a bright orange.

  My name is Alice Dingwell. I am ten years old. This year in fifth grade I want to learn how to do double-digit multiplication. I want to read at least thirty books, and I am going to try to read more nonfiction, since I mostly read fiction. My goal for outside school is that our team will win the state hockey tournament again and I will be named as one of the top players. My favorite color is green. My favorite food is quesadillas. My favorite sports team is the Bruins. My best friends are Izzy and Sadie and Lewis. I hope that fifth grade will be my best year ever!!

  She remembered creating this poster. Mrs. Zee had given them a form to fill out. Then they’d typed their paragraphs on the school laptops. Mrs. Zee had printed out their paragraphs and taken their pictures, and they’d glued them onto construction paper. Mrs. Zee hung them in the room, and they’d stayed up all September. The memory of creating the poster was clear, but she could not remember that girl.

  Her mom walked by and brushed Alice’s hair over her shoulder. “I love that picture of you,” she said, and put a tub of sour cream onto the table.

  Alice nodded. She left the poster on the table and brought the rest to the bin by the kitchen door.

  “How was school?” her mom asked.

  Alice didn’t answer. Her gaze landed on the mail and a single pale blue envelope in the pile. “I’ll be right back,” she said. She grabbed the envelope. Her mom saw it in Alice’s hand, and she pressed a smile onto her lips and said, “Go on and read your letter. I’ll get dinner put together.”

  Alice opened the door just enough to slide in without Jewel following her.

  In her room, Alice sat on her bed. It was better to read the letters sitting down. Dare scratched and tweeted from her dollhouse, so Alice moved the bird onto the bed beside her. She fed her dried blueberries.

  The envelope was bent in the lower corner. She tried to straighten it out but realized she was only putting off the inevitable. She opened the letter.

  DEAR ALICE,

  I HAVE COME TO THE LAND OF THE LOTUS EATERS. THE FOOD HERE IS SO DELICIOUS, I CANNOT STOP EATING. IT MAKES ME HAPPY AND FULL. DAZED, EVEN, BY THE WONDER OF IT ALL. THIS MORNING I HAD FRENCH TOAST WITH FRESH BERRIES. FOR LUNCH, IT WAS CLAM CHOWDER AND AN ARUGULA SALAD. BUT DINNER—­DINNER!—THAT WAS THE MOST MAGICAL. IT WAS CHICKEN. CHICKEN? YOU MIGHT ASK. CHICKEN IS JUST CHICKEN. BUT NOT HERE. HERE CHICKEN IS A MELODY, A SYMPHONY, A WHOLE OPERA. IT IS ANOTHER REASON I FIND IT HARD TO LEAVE THIS PLACE. IF YOU WERE TO COME TO VISIT AND TASTE THE FOOD, THEN YOU MIGHT UNDERSTAND.

  Alice wondered if that was an invitation. It was worded so strangely: If you were to come to visit. She wasn’t sure if she wanted to visit.

  AFTER, THERE WAS PUMPKIN PIE, WHICH I KNOW IS NOT YOUR FAVORITE, BUT MAYBE EVEN THIS YOU WOULD HAVE LOVED.

  THE ICE IS STILL NOT READY FOR SKATING, WHICH IS PROBABLY GOOD. AFTER THE FOOD I’VE EATEN, I FEEL LETHARGIC. THAT MEANS SLOW AND LAZY, LIKE MOLASSES. NO WHIPPING DOWN THE LINE FOR ME. PLUS I HAVE NOT YET FOUND A TEAM TO SKATE WITH. ONE MAN SKATING IS LONELINESS DEFINED, I SHOULD THINK, AND COMPLETELY LACKING IN POWER.

  IN TRUTH, I STILL HAVE SOME TRIALS TO COMPLETE BEFORE I COME HOME. I AM WORKING ON IT, THOUGH, AS FAST AS I CAN.

  PLEASE GIVE YOUR MOTHER A HUG FROM ME AND ANOTHER ONE FROM YOU.

  CHECK THE STARS. WHEN THE CLOUDS CLEAR, WE MAY BE ABLE TO SEE CASSIOPEIA.

  BE BOLD, BE BRAVE, BE FIERCE. IT IS WHAT I AM TRYING TO DO.

  MUCH LOVE,

  DAD

  The letter felt heavy in her hands, like it had much more weight than a simple piece of notebook paper.

  She rubbed at her eyes. Crying. She was crying. Alice Dingwell never cried. Her whole face grew hot, although the only one watching her was the little bird. Dare hopped into the crook of her elbow. When Alice looked down at her, a big fat tear fell and landed on the bird’s head. Dare didn’t even flinch.

  “It’s just—” Alice began. But there were no words.

  She tossed the letter aside. “He should just be here!” she cried.

  She flopped back on the bed and held the envelope to her chest. Dare, startled by the sudden movement, fell onto the bed beside her. After a moment, Alice reached under her bed and pulled out her letter box. The old shoebox had thirty-seven letters in it. This new one made thirty-eight. Thirty-one were from his deployments. Three were from different week-long trainings he’d gone to over his years in the Army Reserves. Three more—now four—were from his days at the hospital. She didn’t like to read those.

  She took the thirty-one letters and spread them out over her bed, closed her eyes, and picked one. This was her little ritual. To reread all of them in one go was too much. To ignore them, too difficult.

  The one she pulled out was in a stained blue envelope. She knew this letter before she even removed it from its envelope, practically had it memorized. The frills from the notebook were still intact but ragged from the paper being removed over and over again. The creases where the letter had been folded were beginning to tear.

  MARCH 19

  DEAR ALICE,

  HAPPY BIRTHDAY! NINE YEARS OLD TODAY! NINE IS A VERY GOOD AGE TO BE. TO MARK THE OCCASION, PLEASE BE SURE TO DO THE FOLLOWING:

  1.HAVE MOM MARK YOUR HEIGHT ON THE WALL. REPORT BACK TO ME HOW MUCH YOU HAVE GROWN IN INCHES AND CENTIMETERS. A DIAGRAM MIGHT BE USEFUL.

  2.RACE UNCLE DONNY, GOAL LINE TO GOAL LINE AND BACK. I THINK THIS MIGHT BE YOUR YEAR. REMEMBER, HE’S SLOW OFF THE WHISTLE, BUT MAN, THAT GLIDE . . . ​

  3.SMASH YOUR CAKE INTO YOUR FACE. YOU REALLY ENJOYED THAT WHEN YOU WERE A BABY, AND THERE’S ONLY SO MANY DAYS IN YOUR LIFE YOU CAN GET AWAY WITH SMASHING CAKE INTO YOUR FACE. BONUS POINTS IF YOU CAN ALSO SMASH A BIT INTO MOM’S. PICTURES PLEASE. AS FOR ME, MY JOURNEY CONTINUES APACE. YOU ASK WHEN

  I WILL BE HOME, AND I MUST REPORT THAT IS STILL UNCLEAR. THE WINDS NEVER SEEM TO BLOW WITH STEADY SPEED OR DIRECTION. I’VE CONSIDERED TRAVELING TO DELPHI TO CONSULT WITH THE ORACLES, BUT ACCESS IS SEVERELY LIMITED, I HEAR, AND WELL ABOVE MY RANK. THERE IS A CASSANDRA HERE, BUT SHE SEEMS DISINCLINED TO PROGNOSTICATION. THIS MAY BE FOR THE BEST. DID CASSANDRA EVER PREDICT ANY GOOD FORTUNES?

  I WANTED TO GIVE YOU AN UPDATE ON THE WILD DOG CERBERUS. HE HAS CONTINUED TO TERRORIZE THE CAMP FOR WEEKS, COMING AROUND AND BARKING WITH ALL THREE OF HIS HEADS. BUT TODAY MY FRIEND H WENT OUT WITH SOME LEFTOVERS FROM THE MESS HALL—SOMETHING LIKE A SLOPPY JOE. HE BROUGHT OUT THREE BOWLS AND PLACED THEM IN FRONT OF THE BEAST. IT WAS LIKE THE CREATURE WAS COMPLETELY TRANSFORMED. HE ATE THE FOOD, THEN CURLED UP RIGHT AT H’S FEET AND FELL ASLEEP. WHEN OUR SERGEANT SAW IT, HE SAID H DESERVED A MEDAL OF VALOR. NOT SURE THAT WILL REALLY HAPPEN, BUT THAT’S ONE CREATURE TAMED AND ONE MORE TRIAL COMPLETED BY OUR UNIT.

  DON’T FORGET TO CHECK THE STARS EACH NIGHT, ALICE. SOON YOU’LL SEE ME UP THERE, RACING BACK TO YOU. UNTIL THEN, BE BOLD, BE BRAVE, BE FIERCE. AS ALWAYS.

  LOVE,

  DAD

  When she finished reading, Alice refolded the letter and, with care, placed it back in the envelope. She restacked the old letters and placed them in the box, then curled up, hugging her pillow to her face. Alice felt her tears sink into the pillowcase. She wished it would just suck them all out of her, and then she’d be done with it. But tears don’t work that way.

  “Alic
e!” her mom called. “You okay?”

  Alice sat up. She swiped hard at her face. “I’m fine!” she yelled back, trying to make her voice sound normal.

  Be-zeep.

  Even the bird could see she was lying.

  “Dinner’s ready!”

  Alice looked at herself in the mirror. Her cheeks were pink and her eyes a little red, but she looked more or less okay, she thought. She untucked her dark hair from behind her ears and shook out her bangs so that they fell into her eyes a little more, hiding the traces.

  She folded the letter and put it back into its envelope.

  “Alice!” her mom called again.

  Alice stood straight, breathed in. “Do I look okay?” she asked Dare. The bird nodded. Alice lifted her carefully and placed her back into the dollhouse. “I’ll be back after dinner.” She left her more berries.

  Alice trotted down the hall. Her mom watched her carefully and kept her eyes trained on Alice as she made herself two tacos, then sat at the dining room table.

  “So,” her mom said. “How’s your dad?”

  “Fine,” Alice replied. Her stomach flip-flopped. She racked her brain for something else—anything else—that she could talk to her mother about. The Story Web? She could ask about that. But no, that was foolish. Just a story. Just Melanie being weird. She cleared her throat. “There was a crow at school yesterday.”

  “What do you mean? In the school?”

  “Yes. Inside the cafeteria. It landed right on my table.” Alice smiled. The story felt a lot funnier now that she was telling it to her mother. “It was marching around crowing at everyone. Then the janitor put a trash can on top of it. I wonder what he did with it.”

  “Probably set it free to terrorize some other cafeteria.”

  Alice pictured the crow flying away from their school, maybe down toward Portland or to the mountains. “Like a carrier pigeon,” she said. “It’s bringing messages from school to school.”

  “What kind of messages?” her mom asked, leaning closer. “Secret messages?”

  “It wasn’t a very good secret keeper. It brought a lot of attention to itself.”

  “Maybe the crow was a distraction. While you were all paying attention to it, the carrier pigeon went in and delivered the message.”

  “To Mr. Gringles.” Alice laughed. Mr. Gringles was the old music teacher who hummed “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” while he tap-danced down the hallway. No matter how awfully they played, he’d say, “Good, good.”

  “It’s a love letter from the music teacher at another school.”

  “Or a plan to pied-piper all you kids to some foreign land,” Mom added.

  That sounded a lot more plausible to Alice.

  They ate in silence for a few minutes. “And your dad’s letter? He says he’s doing well?”

  “Yes,” Alice replied.

  “Okay. It’s just that—I mean, I imagine you may have some questions for me.”

  “No,” Alice replied.

  “Because it’s okay. It’s normal. It’s okay.” Alice could feel her mother trying to think of the right thing to say to her. Ever since her dad had gone, this strange tension was building between them, like storm clouds stacking up. Sometimes Alice wished her mother would explode thunder and lightning all over her. She deserved it. It was Alice’s fault that her dad was in the hospital, and her mom should be angry with her. More than angry. Livid. Outraged.

  But Alice’s mom was not, or, at least, did not let the anger out. She was quiet. So, before the silence grew into a wall, Alice cleared her plate and started on the dishes. She glanced out the window as she washed, back toward the woods. The trees sloped up a gentle hill away from their house—back toward Lewis’s home and, beyond that, the Bird House. She thought of Melanie living up in that house. It must be strange and scary there. She’d never really considered what it must be like to be Melanie, sharing the house with crows and ravens and vultures. Was she sad up there? Alice wondered. Did she feel very much alone?

  Mother Bear watched from a knoll in the forest while Baby Bear cavorted across the field, still wet with morning dew. Her heart lodged itself in her throat. Children, bears or otherwise, may never know what it is like for their parents to watch them set out on Very Important Business. She sat back on her haunches and chewed on a twig.

  When the animal council had suggested Baby Bear go, of course Mother Bear’s chest had swelled with pride. But now her paws fairly quaked. She was nervous for his safety, nervous for his success, nervous for the whole world.

  He got tangled in his own feet, rolled over, then popped back up.

  It seemed a lot to ask of such a young cub. The others thought he would be able to reach the girl. He would be more unusual than a bird but not frightening, or so they hoped.

  Mother Bear would have preferred to go herself, but this is something that parents, bears or otherwise, must do: sit back and chew nervously while their children venture out into the wide world.

  Mrs. Zee’s handwriting was neat and straight. Sometimes Alice wondered if teachers took special classes in how to write so neatly. Today on the board she had written the words “THE HERO’S JOURNEY.”

  Underneath she had drawn a circle. There were different points along the circle, almost like a clock face, where Mrs. Zee had written more details. The journey started in the Ordinary World, whatever that meant. Alice had thought her life was ordinary before. She had her friends, Izzy and Sadie. She had her hockey team. She had her dad. Now the absence of those things had become ordinary.

  Next came the Magical Birth. Then Call to Adventure. Her dad had talked about that, especially when he talked about going into the military. “You can’t refuse the call,” he’d always said, which was funny because one of the next things on the circle was the refusal of the call. She was tilting her head to read more when the intercom beeped. The principal’s voice crackled: “Attention, friends, we are instituting a safe-in-place action. Please go to your safe-in-place stations. I repeat, we are instituting a safe-in-place action.”

  Action. Not drill. Action.

  Lewis took Melanie by the hand. It was a bold gesture, and a brave one, too. He just grabbed her hand and tugged her over to the back corner of the room next to the sink. The whole class sat and tilted their heads up to look at the star map that Mrs. Zee had hung there. They murmured constellations as they waited for the lockdown to end.

  Lewis hated the drills. He had always hated them. Maybe that’s why he had grabbed Melanie’s hand, Alice thought. Maybe he was still just looking for a hand to hold until it was over. In first grade, they all had to crowd into the bathroom. Mrs. Snell, who was about a million years old they had been sure, would put down the lid on the toilet seat, and she would sit there and read them stories as though she were sitting on her rocking chair in the story corner. Story after story until the drill was complete. Lewis would cling onto Alice’s arm and sniffle and try to keep the tears inside his eyes.

  Alice watched him now. No tears. He had learned to hold them in, she supposed. She wondered what it meant that she remembered those moments with such fondness. Did that make her a good friend or a bad friend?

  Alice thought of her father. How fire alarms made him jump and shake and usually led to a night alone in her parents’ bedroom or out in his truck. Her mom had taken the batteries out of the smoke detector in the kitchen because it went off so many times. Alice had put them back in, and then—She clenched her hands into fists and peered at the star map. This was something else her father had taught her. The constellations were set in the sky by the Greek gods whose stories he loved to tell. There was Orion, the hunter, placed in the sky by Zeus. Ursa Major and Ursa Minor, the bears, they were sent to the stars by Zeus, too, to protect them from the jealousy of his wife, Hera. How many nights had they sat outside in the quiet and stared at the sky together? She could practically feel the warmth of his body, the smell of him and of the pine trees around their yard. “Look up at the stars every night. I
f you know your stars, Alice, you’ll always know your home.” He used to tell her this, and she thought he’d meant that she could use the stars to navigate home, like ancient mariners used to do. But now she wondered if he meant that the stars were a true way to know your place. The world changes—houses and people and towns—but the stars never do.

  The loudspeakers whistled, and the principal spoke again: “Friends, it seems we have a visitor in our playground. A baby bear has found its way down from the woods. Animal control has been called, but . . .”

  Her words were lost as all the students rushed to the windows. Even Mrs. Zee came to see. A small bear, not much bigger than a good-size dog, danced and rolled around their playground. It batted at a swing and jumped back when the seat nearly hit it in the nose. “Ohhhh!” the kids cooed.

  “I don’t get it. Why can’t we go outside and see it? It’s just a cute little baby,” Sofie Green said.

  “Where there is a baby bear, there’s a mama bear,” Mrs. Zee said, and all her students nodded.

  “My dad was out hunting once, and they saw a bear,” Brady announced. “One of his friends decided to go right up to it.”

  “What kind of idiot would do that?” Liam asked.

  “I’m pretty sure it was your dad’s cousin,” Brady said. “Anyway, this bear swiped right at my uncle’s friend, knocked him flat on his back. There was blood and guts everywhere.”

  “Gross!” Emma replied.

  “The bear was probably just startled,” Melanie said, but her voice was quiet, and Alice wasn’t sure if anyone else had heard.

  “Yeah,” Lewis said. “It was probably just trying to get away. It didn’t mean to hurt anyone or anything.”

  “All right, softy,” Brady said.

  “Lewis is right,” Mrs. Zee said. “Most animals don’t want to hurt people, but if they get scared, they may attack. That’s why we need to stay inside.”

  The bear started bounding toward the school, right toward their first-floor classroom. It fell forward into a somersault and slid along the wet grass. The class giggled. When it popped up, it looked right at Alice. A smile spread across its face.