Why hadn’t she said that to her dad that afternoon? Then maybe everything would be different. Maybe—
The moose interrupted her thoughts by lowering his head.
She moved carefully toward him. “It’s okay. I’m here.”
The moose pawed the ground with his hoof.
“Alice Dingwell,” Becky Clancy said.
Alice looked past her, at Izzy, who wrinkled her nose. Alice gave a tiny shrug as if to say, I have no choice. That’s the thing with friends—even former friends. You can talk to them with just the smallest of gestures and they understand. So Alice understood, too, when Izzy replied with a simple shake of her head. You must not do this. It was too weird, too Melanie-like.
But Alice kept walking. She held up her hands. “It’s okay. I’m here.”
Which meant things weren’t just temporarily over with Izzy. This wasn’t just another go-round on the carousel, up and down and up and down. Their friendship, if you could call it that, was well and truly over.
In the moment, Alice didn’t care. She only cared about the moose.
“Shh,” Alice told him. She was only a few inches away from him now. She held out her hand, palm-side down, the way you did when you met a new dog, to let him smell you. The moose snuffled at her hand. “Okay,” she said.
On the street, no one moved.
“We need to go, moose,” Alice told him.
She reached into her pocket and pulled out a piece of hard candy that Ms. Barton had given her that morning in the school office. “One second,” she whispered as she unwrapped the candy. Sour apple flavor. A moose ought to like that. He sniffed it and curled his lips, ready to bite. Alice walked around him while pressing one hand against his neck to get him to move with her. He followed her hand with the candy. Walking backward, she led him through the cars. He stayed right with her, never trying to take the candy from her hand, as docile as a pony at a fair.
They went down the alleyway alongside the Museum, and Becky Clancy again called Alice’s name, but neither Alice nor the moose paid any mind. They walked across the blacktop, and across a narrow field, and into the woods. Together they disappeared.
They stood still among the trees. The moose’s breath came in heavy snorts that made white puffs in the air. Alice exhaled herself, adding a thin trail of white to his clouds. He held his head high, looking deeper into the woods. It reminded Alice of when Lewis got a penalty called against him. When the ref explained the call, Lewis would just stare high into the stands, like it didn’t bother him. But Alice knew it did, and she was pretty sure the moose was feeling the same way: embarrassed, indignant, and maybe a little mad.
“You can’t come into town,” she told him. “People get scared, and when people get scared, they do foolish things.”
The moose punched his hoof into the dirt and pointed to the woods with his antlers.
With a trembling hand, Alice stroked his neck. The fur on his neck was matted at the top, like he had rolled in mud—and perhaps he had—but below it was soft, like an old teddy bear.
The moose breathed out between his lips, making them quiver back and forth. Alice smiled. “You’re a good moose,” she said. “I know you’re a good moose. But other people don’t understand you. They aren’t used to animals just coming into town. They aren’t used to wild animals at all anymore really. They think you’re the other kind of wild—the dangerous kind of wild, like mean and violent and unpredictable.” She stroked him again. “People will get all worked up.” Her voice hitched. “You don’t understand what happens when people think you’re dangerous. They send you away. They send you—” She stopped talking and rubbed at her runny nose.
Overhead, grackles and crows flew back and forth. There was even a brave little chipmunk that hopped toward them. Alice wanted so much to make the moose understand the danger he was in.
“They say it’s for your own good when they send you away. That you need to get better. But you’re just being you. You’re just being a wonderful, curious moose.”
Alice leaned her head against the moose’s neck. He let out a gentle sound, like a cow sighing. He rubbed his chin against the top of her head. She could practically hear her father’s voice in him. Be bold, be brave, be fierce.
“I’m trying,” she whispered.
She was crying now, freely. The tears slipped down her face. The moose sniffed them, and for a moment Alice thought he was going to lick the salt right off her cheeks. Instead he backed away, still staring right at her.
“Go,” she whispered.
He didn’t move.
“Go,” she whispered again.
He closed his eyes, slowly, then opened them again. He stared right at her with his chocolate brown eyes, so deep and soulful. She wondered if she could jump on his back. If they could ride off to someplace new, someplace wonderful and safe for both of them. The moose, though, turned and ran off into the woods without her.
When Moose left the forest, the other animals took notice. Moose left so rarely, and almost always in the twilight hours. Moose, you see, was rather shy.
Shy but curious.
And the people always did seem to react well when he did appear.
There was the time he got stuck with green pine and shining lights around his neck. The time he played with the children on the ice and brought them back their strange black food—what humans counted as food he could not understand. Each time he had been met with delight.
So, he lumbered out of the woods, to the road.
The cars stopped.
The birds stopped.
The boy stopped.
The girl did not stop until they stood nose to nose.
She smelled like salt licks and honey. He felt her heart aching or perhaps saw it in her eyes. Whatever the reason, he leaned forward and snuffed his snout against her shoulder.
Then there had been the shouting, the man with the loud killing stick, more shouting.
She held out her hand to him. Together they went into the woods. Her pain had nearly knocked him over. It was in her eyes and pulsed off her body. He had wished she could come with him, deep into the forest where the other humans couldn’t harm her.
But they needed her to act first. He knew she understood him. He had told her about the problem, how urgent it was.
It hadn’t been enough. The girl went back into town, and he went back into the woods, the state of the web just as precarious as it had been before.
Lewis’s bedroom was tucked at the top of the stairs. In summer it was hot, even with a fan running in the window. In the winter it was cold, and he stacked four blankets on top of himself. But it was his. His sisters had to share, two to a room a floor below him.
He had a small bedside table with a hockey-stick lamp. There was a shelf over his bed with trophies and Bruins bobblehead toys. His bureau was pressed right up against his bed, and sometimes he made blanket forts and hid under them and pretended he was an astronaut or an undersea explorer or an archaeologist in a mine. Even now at eleven years old he sometimes played the games, although he didn’t tell anyone.
That night he was waiting in his bed for his mother. It was a three-blanket night, and he was rubbing his fingers against the fleece of a University of Maine stadium blanket while he waited for her. She had promised to tell him a story.
He had asked for a story for the first time in months. Maybe it had even been a year. But that day had been . . . different. He still hadn’t found just the right word for it. Frightening and exhilarating and, in a weird way, beautiful. Watching Alice go off with that moose, he’d been proud of her but also a little jealous that it had been her to star in the story, not him. All this had swirled around his head, and he wanted some time with his mom, one-on-one. He couldn’t just ask her to come sit with him. What would his dad make of that? An eleven-year-old boy who still wanted his mommy? So he had said, “Hey, Mom, you think you could tell me a story tonight?” He had tried to sound casual. His dad raised his eyebrows, but h
is mom had said, “Sure, hon.”
He heard her feet before he saw her appear in the doorway. She wore an old sweatshirt of his father’s. Her long hair was pulled back in a ponytail, and her cheeks were red. “I’m here,” she announced. “What story do you want me to read to you?”
“Can you tell me a story?”
“Like make one up? I’m not very good at that. You really should ask your father if that’s what you want. Do you remember the stories he used to tell you all? You were so young, but—”
“I remember.” His father used to make up long and twisting tales to tell them all before bedtime. But the girls had outgrown it, and Lewis supposed his father didn’t have the time or energy to make up such stories for an audience of one now that he was commuting back and forth to Portland every day. And also, it seemed his father wasn’t interested in stories anymore. If it wasn’t about the governor’s race or college hockey, he didn’t seem to care.
“How about I tell you my moose story again? That’s a good one considering the events of the day.”
“I don’t know your moose story.”
“I never told you about the moose?”
Lewis shook his head. “No, I don’t think so.”
“Well, this is a great story!” she promised. She scooted her body over next to his. Both their legs stretched out side by side, and they were the exact same length. By the end of the school year, he’d be taller than her, and he wondered if that would change anything, if she would still come up to his bed to tell him a story when he asked.
Lewis’s mom cleared her throat. “It was a dark and stormy night,” she began.
“Are you kidding me?” he asked. “I thought this was a true story.”
“What? It was. Thunder. Lightning, all of it. Anyway, you asked me to tell a story, so I’m telling you a story.”
“Okay, go on,” he said.
“It was a dark and stormy night. It had been a ridiculously stormy fall and winter. Your aunt April and I were sleeping over at our nana and pop’s house. This was just a couple of weeks after our dad had died. It started snowing earlier that day and hadn’t stopped. Then there was the thunder. The windows in our room rattled with each boom. We were in the same bed, under an old quilt that smelled like mothballs. Aunt April said, ‘I think the world is ending, Shiloh. I think the monsters are here.’ You know there’s no such thing as monsters, right?”
“Yes, Mom, I know.”
“Good. I told April it was just the thunder and an old house during a bad winter, but she wouldn’t listen. She liked to spend time with Buzz Dingwell, and he was always telling tall tales, stuff he read in old books and comics. Anyway, she got out of bed and went right to the window, her nose pressed against the glass, and told me the earth was cracking. I didn’t believe her, but I still went up and stood next to her. We stood there shivering in our nightgowns. I didn’t see what she saw and was about to tell her to stop being so dramatic when a bolt of lightning flashed and there it was: a black crack stretching out from Nana and Pop’s front lawn all the way into the nothingness. It was darker than a cave at night and shimmery like oil.”
Lewis could picture the crack in his head. But what did it mean?
“We ran straight back into bed and had that quilt over us all night. We didn’t care how much it stank. In the morning, we got all bundled up in our snowsuits and went to investigate that crack in the earth. It was full of stuff: a sled, an old wheelbarrow, Lucy Price’s bicycle, a string of Christmas lights, a bunch of posters from the election just passed. And stuck deep in the crevasse was a moose. He had the most soulful brown eyes I’d ever seen. I hadn’t seen anything like them until you were born, Lew. That’s why we call you Moose sometimes.”
She tugged him a little closer to her, and he didn’t mind.
“Anyway, April about flipped her lid. She saw those antlers and started screaming, ‘A monster, a monster!’ That got that moose terrified. He backed up, but his antlers were too wide, and they got stuck along the edge of the ditch. April was screaming, and the moose was bellowing. Then Pop came out. He looked at us, and he looked at that moose, and he said, ‘Well, I guess I’m going to have to get my gun.’”
“What? Why?” Lewis asked
“I don’t think he thought the moose could be saved. He was going to put him out of his misery.”
Lewis could understand that. He would never want to see an animal suffer. “The moose in town wasn’t stuck, and Mr. Sykes wanted to shoot him anyway. He had a rifle and—”
“Right out there on Main Street? Swinging it around?”
Lewis nodded. “Alice got between him and the moose.”
“Oh, Alice,” Lewis’s mom said. “Of course she did that.”
Lewis wasn’t sure what she meant by that. “The moose wasn’t bothering anyone, Mom. He wasn’t dangerous. Why would Mr. Sykes want to shoot him?”
His mom thought on that for a moment. “People get scared, Lew. When people get scared, they think the best way to deal with the problem is to go on the attack.”
“I guess that makes sense,” he said. He thought of hockey games, where the other team was bigger, maybe got a few goals in. His team never retreated. They attacked, attacked, attacked.
“Well, unless the threat isn’t actually a threat,” she said.
“Like the moose,” Lewis said.
“Like the moose,” his mom agreed. “And other things. Mr. Sykes believed the moose was dangerous. Who knows why. Because he’s big, I suppose. Big and not usually on Main Street. So Mr. Sykes’s brain said, Danger, danger, danger!”
“I wasn’t scared of the moose,” Lewis said. “I was scared of Mr. Sykes.” He tucked his head closer to her and spoke into her shoulder. “It’s the most scared I’ve been in ages.”
She squeezed him tight. “Oh, Lew.”
“So what happened to your moose?” he asked.
“Oh, right! Nana called the police, and they sent Buck Hammersmith the animal resource officer—Piper Hammer-smith’s dad. Bet she’s been busy this week. Anyway, he came out and gave one look at the moose and was like, ‘Um, this is something I’ve never seen before. We need to call the wardens.’ We just sat out there and waited. April calmed down, and we sat on the edge of the ditch and talked to the moose in soothing voices until the wardens showed up. They gave him a tranquilizer, and he fell asleep, but he couldn’t lie down, because of the antlers being stuck in the ditch. Then the wardens went into the ditch and wrapped a sling around the moose. They brought in a little crane, and backhoes, and trailers. It took most of the day. April and I watched the whole thing while we ate sandwiches. Nana made coffee, and we brought it out to the men. Finally, they hauled him out of the ditch. They took the sling off him, and they gave him a shot to undo the effect of the tranquilizer. But here’s the strangest thing: he didn’t run off. He walked right up to us and stared at me and nuzzled the top of my head with his nose. It was the softest thing I had ever felt. It reminded me of my dad. He used to tousle my hair and call me sweet pea. Then he snatched an apple right out of April’s hand and ran off into the woods.”
“I think maybe that’s the same moose we saw.”
“Honey, that was ages ago.”
“How long do moose live? Because I swear Melanie and Alice and I saw him today. He came right up to Alice and nuzzled her, just like you said. Remember how her dad would always touch her shoulder before she went out on the ice? It was like that.”
Lewis’s mom pulled him closer to her. “I guess it’s possible. We could look it up.”
There was something else familiar about his mom’s story: that crack in the ground was just like in Melanie’s story: the earth cracking apart with ice and snow all around. Was that the Freezing? Had it almost come before?
They sat together for a while, him pressed up against her. Her shirt was soft and smelled familiar. Her hair tickled his cheek.
“What were you even doing on Main Street?” she asked him. “You were with Alice?”
“I was with Melanie,” he said.
“Who is this Melanie person anyway?”
“She’s just a girl.” Lewis looked at his lap.
“The one your sisters were teasing you about?” She rubbed her hand through his hair. “When you were a kid, a little kid, girls used to make you swoon. You couldn’t even look at a girl if you thought she was cute.” She let the statement hang in the air. When Lewis didn’t say anything, she kept going. “It’s perfectly normal; I mean, you’re just the right age to start having an interest in girls. Maybe a little earlier than your friends. I know I certainly had crushes when I was your age.”
“She’s just—She’s always been so quiet, and I’ve never really talked to her, but now I am and it turns out she’s really nice. She lives with her aunt up in—up in that old house off Minnow Lane.”
“The Bird House?” his mom asked.
“Yeah. She lives there with her aunt.”
“And she’s been hanging out with you? And Alice? You and Alice together?”
“Sort of.”
“It’s just that you and Alice, I mean, since her dad went away, you haven’t spent much time together.”
They still weren’t spending much time together, not as far as she could help it anyway, but it was all too complicated to explain to his mom.
“You can ask me about him,” she told him. “About Buzz. I’ll tell you what I can.”
He thought about it. But what could he ask her? He knew where Buzz was. At the psychiatric hospital down near Boston getting help. Maybe the rest of it wasn’t his business.
“I’m good,” he said.
His mom leaned over and kissed the top of his head. “Sleep well, my friend.”
She stood up and walked around the end of his bed to the door. She paused for a moment as if she wanted to say something else, but if she did, she kept it to herself and left Lewis alone to think about moose and missing parents and missing friends.
Uncle Donny burst through the door waving the local newspaper. “You’re famous, Alice!” he exclaimed and dropped the newspaper on the table in front of her. Her mom peered over her shoulder, and they both read the headline:
The Story Web Page 10