by Beth Kephart
“Lunch at the house when you’re done with the pigs,” I call.
“Yeah,” he says. “Better be delish.”
What I Would Say If I Could
I place the slices of bread in a line across the kitchen counter—seven white squares. I spread the peanut butter first and after that Charlotte and Jane’s preserves, then lay another seven white squares down on top, even things up, make things nice. I halve the sandwiches on the diagonal. I take a frozen can of lemonade out, reach for a pitcher, slice an orange, add some ice cubes, and lunch will be served, soon as Mom and Dad get home.
Lunch will be served, middle of the afternoon now, whenever they get home from asking people with broken fences and ornery cows and drought conditions for more of what they don’t have. Whenever they get done asking for their own best or better ending. I’ve got a plan, a plan’s coming. Mom and Dad are still gone and Hawk is out with the pigs and I’ve checked on the goats and Phooey and Old Moe. I’ve sat on the porch, watching the low pond to one side and the hayfield to the other and the silo over there, across the way. I’ve carried Roundabouts from each place to place, and I’ve thought of all the things that I might say if a shadow came around and showed itself and started talking like a man.
Those are some beautiful drawings, I’d say.
That’s some pair of red shoes.
That’s some imagination.
That’s some kind of beautiful.
That’s some adventure to go on.
Nobody Talks About It
Mom and Dad say luscious about the sandwiches and great about the orange slices, and they sit here chewing. Passing the pitcher back and forth. Spooning the orange out of the bottom and breaking the rinds with their teeth. The juice is running down Dad’s hands and Mom just lets it. She doesn’t say, How about a napkin? like she always says, and it’s three in the afternoon, and “luscious” is not a word you use for a PB&J, fancy sliced or not.
Nobody talks. Nobody says anything about where they’ve been, what step or what steps have been taken. The house is as quiet as a house can be when four people are chewing and drinking.
“How are you feeling?” Mom finally asks me.
“Fine,” I say.
“You need to rest,” she says. “You were up early.”
“I’ll take some of that rest myself,” Hawk says. “If you’re giving rest out.”
Mom and Dad exchange looks. Dad wipes his sticky hands. “I’ll pick up your chores,” he says. “You both have the afternoon off.”
Nobody around here gets the whole afternoon off, except for me sometimes. It’s a very negative sign. Hawk doesn’t fight it.
I finish my sandwich and the last of the lemonade and head upstairs. Hawk follows.
“The Hispaniola,” I say, when we’ve gone past where they can hear. “Thirty minutes.”
“This your plan?” He has a wink in his voice.
“Thirty minutes,” I say. Then I shut my door and lie down on my bed, digging Roundabouts: Book One, out from beneath my pillow, where I thought to hide it before I went all luscious with the lunch. I close my eyes so I can think. I go round and around, like a mental unicycle, until I land inside a memory that might also be a dream. I am very small and my feet are tiny. I have red shoes on. I am running. Nobody knows that I’ve got this Marfan thing yet. Nobody knows, and that is why it’s such a great beginning.
“Sara!”
A knock at my door. Hawk’s whisper.
“I don’t think—” he starts to say.
“You’re not doing the thinking,” I say, rolling up off the bed, opening the door.
“Sara—” He looks at me hard, good and plenty.
“We’ll need some stuff,” I say.
He’s listening.
Stealth Operation
We leave our bedroom doors closed so Mom and Dad will think we’re sleeping and we tiptoe out soon as Hawk gives the all clear. Mom’s working that broken fence again. Dad is out with the pigs. They’re ignoring the fire scorch. They can’t see us because they’re not looking.
Walk.
Hurry.
Half run.
Up the hill, past the cistern, down the path to the Hispaniola, me with Book One in my hands, Hawk with his Spyglass and the special delivery, a whistle around his neck, won it at the county fair, four years ago. Quickest corn shucker in the under-tens.
I’d told him to bring it, plus the delivery. He’d asked me what for. Now I’m telling him the plan and his eyes are bigger than the biggest planets, and it doesn’t hurt so much in my heart.
“Soon as we spy The Mister heading out for a walk, you go running,” I tell Hawk, who has climbed high into the tree. “You’ll get to where he is and stop. You’ll walk by like it’s just coincidence. You’ll offer him up a tour of the farm. ‘Hey, you want to meet my pigs?’ you’ll say.”
“I’m saying that?” Hawk says. “Just like you said it?” He sticks his head between the leaves of the tree and looks at me like I’m crazy. And also like he likes it when I’m crazy. And also like lately I’ve not been crazy enough. A lot of things are blurry. But I see my brother, Hawk.
“Soon as you and The Mister are out of sight,” I say, “I’ll head down the hill myself, through the field, to the lighthouse. I’ll see what I can see. I’ll be the clue collector.”
“Clue collector.” Hawk snorts.
“I’m an excellent clue collector,” I say, to shut him up, but he’s almost laughing.
“What’s so funny?” I say.
“You,” he says. “Like this.”
“Just go down there,” I tell him. “And distract him.”
“Got it.”
“You’ll have the special delivery with you. If you need to, you can talk about that.”
“I don’t need props for talking,” Hawk says.
“Just in case,” I say, “you can say, ‘That lady, Ilke—she was around. That lady, she brought this.’ You can say that you didn’t like the lady much, that straight off you didn’t trust her, you were just minding your own business, and she gave you something, and you just wanted him to know, in case it mattered.”
“Man,” Hawk says. “You should be writing books.”
“Point is: we’re not helping Ilke. Point is: your job is distraction. Point is: we’re doing this for him, not her, which is basically like we’re doing it for us.”
“Minus the reward.”
“Yeah. Right.”
“I get your points.”
“Good. Once I’ve got the all clear, I’ll go down and look around,” I continue. “When you’re on your way back, blow that whistle around your neck. If The Mister asks why, just say, easy enough, that the whistle is bird talk, a necessary aid in herding the birds, including our own Phooey. ‘Remember Phooey?’ you’ll say.”
“Sara.”
“What?”
“I’m not saying, ‘Remember Phooey.’ I do know how to talk.”
“True, you do. As soon as you blow the whistle, I’ll run.”
“Fast as you can,” Hawk says, giving me the look.
“I can run,” I say. “When I have to.”
“Not too fast,” Hawk says, like he’s Mom or Dad or the doctor. Like I’m not in charge.
I’m in charge.
“We’re doing what we have to. Both of us.”
“I distract,” Hawk repeats the plan. “You look around. Then run.”
“Right.”
It’s hot but there’s a swell of breeze. I watch the lighthouse, the blur of it, and think of the day Dad came to dinner with his grand scheme—the silo conversion scheme plan, he called it.
Proud.
“All we need is a little ingenuity,” Dad said that day.
“You’re going to need more than that,” Mom said, not so sure and passing the butter, filling our glasses, offering us seconds, but this time Dad was right. This time Dad didn’t need much of a loan and the lighthouse opened for business, and anyone driving down Mountain Dale
Road might see a farm in the fix of a drought, but not Hawk and me, not anymore. We see a story.
Beginnings. Endings.
Hawk’s bootlaces tick. I’m turning the pages of Book One, slow and nice, following that pair of red shoes through the watercolor drips and shadows. Star of this book is these red shiny shoes that are trekking and stopping and finding and hiding, going all around The Mister’s made-up world, which is the prettiest world I’ve ever seen, a happy place, a place where no one worries.
The shoes are riding the wings of a hawk. The shoes are hiding in a water drop. The shoes are the stool that a toad sits on. And now a bee. And now a butterfly. And now forever sky.
It’s not that the shoes are everywhere. It’s that they take me everywhere. It’s that I want to go with them, and they make me feel as if I can.
“What are you thinking you’re going to find,” Hawk interrupts my thoughts, “with your snoops?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “That’s why I’m snooping.”
“You think they’re just lying around? Clues for the clue collector?”
“Hoping so.”
“And what if they’re not?”
“The plan is still the plan.”
It’s getting late. Mom’ll call dinner at six and the sun will go down at half past seven. Waiting is hard. I feel the fist of my heart, the stretch of time, the shallow breaths in my shallow lungs, and now I hear Hawk above me, pushing himself forward on the branch. The leaves on the Hispaniola rustle.
“Well, hello, there, Mister,” Hawk says.
Hawk pushes the Spyglass at me; I don’t even have to grab for it. “Look.”
I do. I see. It’s The Mister tapping away from his lighthouse with his crooked walking stick, the door of the lighthouse shut tight. His white hair puffs, cotton-cloud-like. He heads in the direction of Mountain Dale, which is the direction of the pigs, which is where Dad, in all likelihood, still is. Hawk’ll have to be quick. The Hispaniola tilts and heaves. Hawk jumps to the ground. Special delivery under his arm. Whistle at his neck. Little brother courage.
My body prickles with the heat, the anticipation. I bury Book One in the hollow of the Hispaniola. I watch through the Spyglass pressed to my glasses—dial back in on The Mister, who walks too slow for a guy who rides a unicycle in his house at night.
I can hear Hawk running down the hill. Now I don’t. Now I see him by the pond, his mop of hair bumping up and down on his head. He cuts left through the fields toward the lighthouse, scattering a gang of peahens and scaring off a fox that runs in its hunchbacked way in one direction, before the peahens scare it back the other way. Hawk is growing cautious now, and he’s slowing down to catch his breath. He’s walking on the tiptoe part of his boots into the soft dust of the road, and The Mister hasn’t turned, it seems The Mister hasn’t heard him yet.
Stealth operation. Step by step.
Hawk’s practically beside the man before The Mister turns. Just a quick turn, a half peek, and then he turns back, keeps walking in the same direction, toward Mountain Dale, pretending, I would guess, that Hawk is not right there, full of hot-day heat and equipped with a special delivery. Ignoring Hawk is The Mister’s plan, that’s growing clear enough. But being ignored isn’t Hawk’s.
Hawk walks beside The Mister steady. Slow as The Mister goes, Hawk goes. All the way down the dusty road until, at last, it’s my turn.
The one big chance for the clue collector.
All I Want to Know but Don’t
Past the pond, across the field, I follow the hunched fox. Hawk and The Mister are farther down and farther down the road, their backs to me. Mom and Dad are nowhere close. I hurry carefully.
Reach the lighthouse.
Fit my hand onto the brass knob that Dad borrowed from the back door to Old Moe’s barn. The door is locked like I knew it’d be, but I had to try, so I did.
There’s no key on the hook by the door. No peephole for staring through. No windows until you are three floors up. I head around to the side, to where the chair is folded up and the circle of burned stones and ashes still smells like smoke, and where the crisscross of rope runs from the yard tree and back to the house, empty now, and where the grass is the color of sawdust.
Nothing.
Useless.
I’ve still got time.
I circle the lighthouse round to the dusty road, the locked front door, the parked whale of the Cadillac limo. I take a slow, studying walk around, catching snapshots of myself in the shadow-colored limo glass—my long face, my big eyes, the square, black frames of my glasses, my dark hair, which could use a drought-free sudsing.
Once I stop seeing me, I see into the heart of the car. Leather steering wheel. White dials. Black knobs. Long, white stitches on the black seat seams, a couple of watercolor brushes dropped to the floor, a jar of something dark, might be a jar of ink, on the dashboard, a ring of old-fashioned keys hanging from the rearview—other-century keys with rusty teeth.
I don’t see much that could count as clues until my third time around, when I look to the backseat of the car, where, spun to a stop, is the rubber wheel of the unicycle and the cushion of the thing. Next to that, stuffed in on its side, is a fat suitcase all bound up by a brown leather strap and silver buckle, and sprinkled in the spaces in between are more jars of ink, a bundle of brushes, a pair of suspenders, one very tiny bright red shoe, and a book or a couple of books about shoes, and books about other things like landscapes and oceans and clouds. There’s an old Polaroid camera, like the kind they sell at the county fair. A stash of Farmers’ Almanacs. A ledger. One mixing bowl. One mixing spoon. A tin can of beans.
But the biggest thing, taking nearly half the seat, is a crate like the one Ilke Vanderveer’d dropped off, almost fell off her shoes dropping that thing off, but this isn’t Ilke’s crate. It’s a different color and a different shape, and it’s thick with paper, so much paper that it doesn’t all fit. The paper’s spilled to the side. It’s dropped to the floor—and most of the pages seem blank, but some of them aren’t. Some of them are doodled up with what looks (to me) like dreams. There’s pencil in some places and color in others, color that smears or has been brushed away, then drawn, but drawn different. Again.
Some of the paper is folded and unfolded, some of it is wrinkled, then unwrinkled, some of it is x-ed over and crossed out and I know what this is, I know without a doubt: this is the start of Roundabouts: Book Three.
The missing book.
The story that half a million kids are waiting for—and now I see, pressing my face against the windowpane, the jewel eyes of Jolly, and the curl tails of the pigs and the dust hooves of the cows, and the skirts on trees, and the house where I live that was once an old barn and the hay shed that was a hay shed.
I can see us in The Mister’s touch.
Roundabouts: Book Three.
What the world wants.
What Ilke’s come for.
What isn’t finished.
What I’ve found.
I feel my glasses smoosh to the high part of my nose. I feel my heart beating hard through the fist of the messed-up valve.
I feel crazy.
I feel mishmash.
I feel like hoping and I feel like being sad.
I feel like here, past the glass, is a whole beautiful thing, an ending that feels like a beginning.
But The Mister’s packed.
The Mister’s leaving.
I hear Hawk’s whistle blow.
I jiggle the limo door with my hand, and the door is locked. I jiggle the next door, then walk around to the other side and try each door and walk around again, and there’s another warning blow from Hawk’s brass whistle.
“I need more time, Hawk,” I say to myself, only a whisper. I need more time. I look up at the road and see a doubling blur.
My brother with that special delivery in his hand.
The Mister with two legs and a stick.
If I leave right now, I will be seen.
&
nbsp; If I stay, there could be trouble.
If I leave…
The Operation Is at Risk
Putting the whole operation at risk,” Hawk says. Back in the tree, both of us breathless.
He’d dropped the envelope to make a distraction to buy me time. He’d stopped on the road and The Mister had stopped. He’d blown the whistle again and then another time, not the smartest thing, he says, made him out to be a bumpkin, he says, but what were his choices? I had messed with my own plan. I had not left in time. Hawk blew the whistle, he picked up the envelope, he dusted the dust, and he stood, kept on walking down the road, The Mister beside him, walking as slow as he could, trying to talk to the man.
“And—” I say, practically falling out of the tree. “And? What did The Mister say?”
“Nothing,” Hawk says. “The Mister said nothing. He looked at me like he was sad. Worse than sad. Disappointed.”
“In you?”
“Probably.”
“But you weren’t going for Ilke’s reward. You were just on a distraction mission.”
“What’s he supposed to guess?” Hawk says.
“Nothing,” I say. “He shouldn’t have to.”
I knew what happened next, ’cause I was there. I was, by then, hiding behind that Silver Whale, putting the whole operation at risk. The Mister dug out his keys to the lighthouse door. He opened that door. He shut it hard behind him and turned the lock, leaving the special delivery with Hawk, leaving Hawk undone and breathless.
Hawk had played at casual after that, walking away slow, pretending there was nothing to it, just an August meander, a regular letter, no pressure here, just thought he’d ask, have a pleasant evening. Leaving me in my tall crouch on the hiding side of the Silver Whale. Hawk was not doubling back, not looking over his shoulder. He was walking away like he had no care in the world, and all that time I was thinking about Jolly and the cows and our house that used to be a barn and all the parts of Book Three in the Cadillac.