by Beth Kephart
There’s year after year of paper hats hanging in that air—the Robin Hood hat, the Madeline hat, the Quangle Wangle hat, the Thing One hat.
There’s a circulator fan on the windowsill. When it blows its air at the hanging hats, they do a little waltz.
She follows us in. Wipes sweat from her brow. Asks what she can do for us. Hawk stands square on his Doc Martens boots. He says we have a research project. We are in need of facts.
“You’ve come to the right place,” Mrs. Kalin says. “Specifically which facts?” she asks. She knows about the fire, too. She knows the protocol. She doesn’t ask.
She cleans her hands with sanitizer. She fixes the belt on her dress. Beneath the dangling paper hats, the books sit on shelves arranged like a backward capital E. There’s a long table between the first two arms of the E and two side-by-side computers. There are carts of periodicals you can push around on wheels.
“We have a situation,” Hawk finally says.
“We have to keep it confidential,” I chime in.
“A confidential situation,” Mrs. Kalin says. Her forehead frowns. Her mouth smiles. She fits her clean hands on her hips.
Hawk pulls the card with the blue type from the pocket of his pants. He sets it square on the long table. Mrs. Kalin pulls glasses from the top of her head down to the bridge of her nose.
“Ilke Vanderveer,” she continues. “Bright Star Publishing. Flatiron Building.
“Where in the world,” she continues, with her quiet voice, a voice that whispers most of the time because it lives next door to books, “did you get this?”
Looking from Hawk to me and back to Hawk. Hawk shrugs. I answer. I wish we had rehearsed this.
“She gave it to Hawk.”
“Ilke herself?” Mrs. Kalin asks me. She shakes her head.
“I’d lost my pig,” Hawk offers. “Black Dog.”
“You lost your pig,” Mrs. Kalin repeats. “So you got this.” She tries to follow, but she’s lost. I start the story closer to its start. “We’ve got a renter,” I say. “In the old corn silo. Dad turned it into a house. A three-room house. One room on top of the other. With windows on top. And a spiral stairs in the middle, and—”
Hawk interrupts. “Guy showed up a few weeks ago. Moved in. Old man. Then she showed up. Ilke Vanderveer. And she gave me her card.”
Mrs. Kalin’s eyes go from one of us to the other.
We haven’t mentioned the crate or the special delivery with its plastic wrap. We’ve been good on the step by step. We’ve been careful, watching ourselves, and Mrs. Kalin is watching us, reading us, it feels like to me, like we were some of her books.
Raise no suspicions.
Cast no doubts.
“Who is Ilke Vanderveer?” I ask, because something’s up; Mrs. Kalin knows. The name has hit her like a thud.
“Well, I’ve never met her myself,” Mrs. Kalin says. “I can’t imagine that many small-town librarians have.” She pulls out a chair at the table and sits. Hawk and I sit. It smells like books in here. Mrs. Kalin folds and unfolds the hem of her flower skirt. She decides what she should tell us.
“Ilke Vanderveer is an editor,” she says now. “She’s launched some of the world’s most famous books.”
“Launched,” Hawk repeats, liking the ship shape of the word, I can tell. Treasure Island stuff.
“Makes books happen,” Mrs. Kalin explains. “Sends them out into the world.” When she says it, I see the Elven-birds at work, stitching pages together with their golden beaks and dropping them onto doorsteps with their golden feet.
“So who is M.B.?” Hawk asks.
Mrs. Kalin gives us a blank, then a startled stare. Like she didn’t know and now she does and now she can’t believe it.
“What do you know about M.B.?” she asks.
“That he’s renting from us,” I say. “That he’s ancient.” Snow snow snow, I think, don’t say it. Red-shine shoes and splatter. I don’t say about the shadows he makes. I don’t say about his unicycle rides. I don’t say that the only time we’ve good-and-proper met him, he was the gentlest old guy I’ve ever seen, holding Phooey in his hands, shy. Handing Phooey over and not wanting dinner.
Mrs. Kalin closes her eyes to think. I see her eyeballs fluttering beneath her lids and now the flutter stops. She pushes back in her plastic chair, stands up, pushes a cart to one side, goes behind her desk, powers on her computer. It hums. She taps. Waits. Takes two steps to where the printer is and waits some more for something to roll through.
All this time, Hawk and I are sitting.
Waiting.
My dizziness returns.
We’re telling secrets we shouldn’t have told.
We’ve left the farm with no one in charge.
Leaving the farm like this is a kind of sin.
Telling secrets is a kind of sin, too.
“Just as I thought,” Mrs. Kalin says now, walking to us with the pages in hand, reading them out loud. “M.B. Martin Bruce Banks. Author/illustrator of the Roundabouts series. A Bright Star superstar. Gone missing.”
“Author!” Hawk says.
“Superstar!” I say.
“Gone missing,” Mrs. Kalin repeats herself. And now we stay quiet so she can explain. She lays the pages down before us. We lean in close to read. “Here it is,” she says. “A bit of a mess, if you ask me.”
Five different headlines. Each one says practically the exact same thing, except for the parts that are different:
M. B. BANKS, MAGICAL MIND BEHIND
THE ROUNDABOUTS, FAILS TO DELIVER
LAST BOOK IN TRILOGY
(Publishers Weekly)
WHERE IS M. B. BANKS?
HALF A MILLION READERS EAGER
TO FINISH THE STORY
(The Horn Book Magazine)
ILKE VANDERVEER PRESSED TO
EXPLAIN THE DISAPPEARANCE OF
FAMED ILLUSTRATOR M. B. BANKS
(Shelf Awareness)
SCHOOL CHILDREN CAMPAIGN TO
RETURN M. B. BANKS TO HIS TRILOGY
(Booklist)
RED SHOES CREATOR LEAVES HIS
READERS ON A CLIFF
(The New York Times)
“You’ve never read the Roundabouts, have you?” Mrs. Kalin says.
Hawk and I shake our heads no.
“Half a million copies in print,” she says. “Half a million waiting for the end of a story. Modern classics,” Mrs. Kalin says, as if it just occurs to her now why we kids are so in the dark.
She walks to the other side of the backward E. She returns at once, the paper hats waltzing when the fan rotates and blows. She hands a book to Hawk and a book to me.
“Roundabouts: Book Two,” she says. “Roundabouts: Book One.”
I open my book. Hawk opens his. It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. Mountains in a float of clouds. Daffodils for teacups. Grass grown tall as fences. Dogs asleep on four-poster beds. Every picture like it was drawn underwater, with a leaking pen and a multicolor brush, and in every picture there’s a pair of red shoes. It’s just a book of pictures, no words.
Don’t need those words.
“How long has it been, Sara, since you visited me here?” Mrs. Kalin asks.
“Three years?”
“Sounds about right. Three years. Book One of the Roundabouts came out four years ago, and we got our copy here a year after that; pending the county auction, pending our new-book fund. Book Two debuted the year after that; showed up here six months ago. Book Three has been promised again and again. And then M. B. Banks went missing. And when he went missing, Ilke Vanderveer was put into a bad spot.”
“Bad spot?” Hawk asks.
“A manner of speaking,” Mrs. Kalin said. “She’s the most powerful editor in all of New York. Kids and teachers and librarians and parents are waiting on her to deliver.”
“How can she deliver what somebody else is supposed to make?” I ask.
“Precisely,” Mrs. Kalin says. “She can’t. Onl
y thing she can do is ask and hope and wait.”
“And ask him again,” I say. “I guess.”
“She can ask him,” Mrs. Kalin says. “But he’ll have to cooperate. He’s the only one with the imagination. The only one with the story.”
“And if he doesn’t?” Hawk says. “Cooperate?”
“From the sound of the story you’ve just told, that’s the situation we’re in.”
“A confidential situation,” I say, for emphasis.
“Confidential,” Mrs. Kalin says, but she doesn’t look so sure now. She looks a little sick, to be honest. A little sick, and a little excited, both things at the same time. She doesn’t push us to say more than we already have. She doesn’t say anything herself, and then she does.
“You don’t rush art,” she says. “You cannot demand it. Mountain Dale is a pretty enough place, a small enough place, for a story maker to take a break.”
“But the thing is,” Hawk says, the worry in his eyebrows now, “the thing is Ilke Vanderveer has found him.” And now he talks, flushed and fast, about all the stories that he loves and how each one is its own best thing and each one was made by a hero of his and that the people who write should be the heroes. “The people who write”—and now he’s searching for a word—“should be protected,” he says. “The people who write—the people who could tell stories without words—shouldn’t be forced to cooperate.”
Especially by him, he doesn’t say. Especially by Hawk himself, who for a little while there was on Ilke Vanderveer’s side, all for the sake of—me. All because of—Marfan.
“And for some reason,” Mrs. Kalin says, fishing, “Ilke Vanderveer has given you her card.”
“A just-in-case scenario,” Hawk says, trying to back out of the truth now, I see it.
“Just in case what?” Mrs. Kalin asks.
“Just in case… I don’t know,” Hawk stumbles.
He looks at me.
I look at him.
I check the clock.
I stand up quick, like all of a sudden I remember some appointment.
“Wow,” I say. “It’s getting late. We promised Mom and Dad—”
“Yeah,” Hawk says. “Mom and Dad.”
“Promised them we’d be back.”
“I think there’s more to this story,” Mrs. Kalin says.
Hawk nods. Then he shakes his head. The opposite of any kind of answer.
“You’ll keep in touch?”
“We’ll keep in touch.”
“You sure you can’t stay?”
“Can’t.”
“How are you getting back?”
“Good day for a walk,” Hawk says.
“No,” Mrs. Kalin says. “I’ll drive you.”
“No thank you,” Hawk says, quick, his voice like a hiccup.
“No point in it,” I double up.
“Here,” Mrs. Kalin says. She takes the Roundabouts: Books One and Two, out of our hands, slips the due-date cards from their backs, walks to her desk, and stamps them. “Three weeks,” she says, “and then you two bring those books back. Library fines,” she warns, “if you don’t.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Kalin.”
“Three weeks,” she says. “And you’ll come back.”
“Three weeks,” I say. “We promise.”
She follows us to the door. She heads outside behind us. She picks up her watering can to finish off the flowers and stands there watching us.
The day is hotter than it was.
There’s not a ripple in the flag.
It’s a long trek back.
“You sure you don’t want a ride?” she says.
“Sure,” Hawk says.
I feel Mrs. Kalin’s eyes on us.
I feel the weight of Roundabouts in my hand.
The beauty of a story that doesn’t have a single single word.
The strangeness of the man who won’t give up the ending. A famous man. Who lives with us. Who swirls around on his unicycle in a lighthouse room and follows me like he’s my shadow and won’t answer the door when my brother knocks and who burns things, but not all things, and who is, still, except for when you minus out the parts we know, a total mystery.
Retreat.
Relinquish.
Surrender.
And Hawk is thinking: Don’t.
Nobody Should Be Forced into an Ending
This long walk on this long day is the thump, is the thump of my heart. It is the sun, it is the sun, it is the sun. It is the hills that go down and the hills that go up and the rounding of the road with the low side ditch that you have to jump into when the cars and the trucks go zoom, and then, after they zoom, you climb back out, you catch your breath, you have to keep on walking.
My brother is only walking, he’s not talking. My brother is completely silent.
It’s so hot out here.
The farm is far.
“Could you talk?” I finally ask.
“Not talking,” Hawk says. He kicks a loose stone with the toe of his boot.
“Could you tell me what you’re thinking?”
He doesn’t say no. He doesn’t say yes. He just keeps walking.
“Hawk?”
“Okay,” he says.
I wait.
“Hawk?” I have to remind him.
“Cooperate.” He chews the word.
“Cooperate.” When I say it, I spit it.
“I’m an idiot,” he says. “I’d thought it all through—I thought The Mister could help us—but he’s in a pickle too.”
“You didn’t have time to think.”
“You knew.”
“ ’Cause I’m older, Hawk.”
“Shut up. You’re not that much older.”
“ ’Cause I know some things that you don’t know.”
“Yeah. Well. You don’t know everything.”
He turns and walks backward so I can’t see his face. I can still see his arm, his fist, that reaches up to blot his crying.
“Hawk—”
He turns and walks the right way again. He gets quieter and quieter, a super-sad kind of quiet, and I feel sick inside, like I swallowed a cloud. A heavy rain cloud. A black one.
We walk and we don’t talk. We walk and we walk and we walk.
He kicks another stone. He kicks another one. He shifts his book from hand to hand. We walk, completely silent. If I could, I would find a patch of corn or a patch of hay or a row of hairy asparagus and crawl inside. If I could, I would take a long lie-down in the shade and open my borrowed Book One and turn and keep turning the pages and forget everything except for those red, red shoes. I would tell the bugs and bees and the crows and hawks and the snakes and mice that in this very place someone very famous lives, someone who is looking for an ending, and then I would turn this book into a pillow for my head and close my eyes and sleep through the dusk and the stars and the moon and when I woke up, everyone who is wishing for a best or better ending would have found their best or better ending. Everyone would have a pair of red shoes that takes them just precisely where they most want to go.
“Hawk?” I say, but he doesn’t look up.
Chickens and Eggs
Jerry Saunders of Chickens and Eggs slows on the road in his lemon-colored pickup with its one wood-paneled door. “Need a lift?” he asks.
Hawk and I nod.
“Good day?” Jerry asks, as we climb into the back.
Hawk nods again. I say, “Yes, sir,” like a Scholl should, or would, if she weren’t all caught up in an endings mystery.
We ride the rest of the way home in the pickup crib, Hawk’s nose deep in Book Two and me holding Book One against my chest. We bump over the carriage-wheel ruts and slide on the turns and brace ourselves on the downhill slopes, and the cows and the horses and the dogs out there never notice us, don’t look up.
At the edge of our drive, Jerry pulls up hard and we jolt back. We stand, we jump, we thank Jerry for the ride and he strokes his beard, clicks his dirty thumbnail on h
is overall strap.
“Offering my condolences,” he says. “About the fire.”
“Sir.”
“Was downtown myself when the thing started. Would have come,” he says. “You tell your parents.”
“Sir,” Hawk repeats.
“You have a good day,” I say.
Hawk and I walk. Him holding his book. Me holding mine.
“M. B. Banks,” Hawk says, looking toward the lighthouse.
“Who’d have guessed it?” I say, because who would have?
Hawk thumbs through the book in his hand. I see the colors going by, pages that look wet, like they were just drawn.
“This is so much bigger than we thought,” Hawk says, quiet, like the pigs might hear.
He keeps thumbing his book. He stops at a page of saturated color, touches a finger to it. I think about all the times I’ve seen him reading his Scribners, how much he loves his stories, how much he appreciates the people who make them, the people who should be perfectly free to come up with their own endings.
“Maybe we’re looking at this all wrong,” I say.
Hawk glances up.
“Maybe we could actually help The Mister.” It’s a small part of an idea, just a beginning.
“I don’t see how.”
“We’d need more information,” I say, “before we can know for sure.”
“Mrs. Kalin already told us everything,” Hawk says. “We can’t help Ilke, so we can’t help you, and that is the end of the story.”
“That doesn’t have to be the end,” I insist. “It actually and truly doesn’t.”
Hawk looks up at me, my shadow throwing a skinny long line past his feet. I see the start of a smile on his lips. “So,” he says, “what’s the end?”
“I’m thinking.”
“Thinking what?”
“I’m not done thinking yet.”
“Sara?”
“Pigs need you,” I say. He looks from me to the pigs. He looks back again.
“Sara?”
“Time for chores,” I say.
He stares for a good long time. His face changes, it keeps changing. He looks this side of proud of me, and I let him be proud, even though and actually, I don’t have a verified plan. He tucks Book Two under his arm and shrugs a shrug and leaves the road and heads for the pigs. They squeal for him, don’t quit squealing.