The Great Upending

by Beth Kephart

  “Them,” he says, calling the words out, over his shoulder. “Mom and Dad with The Mister driving. And Mrs. Kalin in the backseat.”

  “Can’t be!” I yell, but of course it can be, of course I know that our leaving was no secret—that Isaiah knew and Mrs. Kalin knew and Amber Green knew, and when there are only a handful of people in the place where you live, word gets out fast, if your mom starts making calls, and so I guess she had to be making calls, and I know one clue could be connected to another and that by the time my mom got to Mrs. Kalin, it had to be clear as day where half the Scholls had gone.

  I turn my head to see what I can see.

  Hawk turns and hurries me.

  “I thought that whale was stuck,” I say, walking faster and faster.

  “Dad must have dug it out.”

  “I thought—”

  “Driving’s faster than a train and a wait and a bus,” Hawk says. “But now they’re in a car and we’re on a sidewalk, and they are stuck in traffic, and we are not, so hurry, Sara, hurry. We’re doing what we came to do.”

  “I can’t go any faster,” I say.

  “You are going to go faster,” Hawk says, taking the pouch from me, taking anything he can to make this easier, and now he’s holding my hand, and he’s walking my speed, and we hug the shadows where we can. We zag through the crowds. The taxis and the cars and the buses honk. Across 25th. Across 24th. The triangle of the Flatiron is not far from here, not far.

  The Flatiron is here.

  Hawk holds the door.

  We’re in.

  However and Notwithstanding

  We have a meeting with Ilke Vanderveer,” Hawk says to the lobby man.

  The man looks up from his narrow stone desk and his flat computer screen. He squints.

  “Three o’clock,” Hawk says, taking little sips of air at a time. “We’re a smidgeon early.”

  I’m way out of breath, now smoothing my hair, now taking my pouch back and moving it from one shoulder to the other, wondering how Hawk knows how to talk like this. Which Scribner did he read this in? Which quote is he borrowing? The lobby man gives us a funny look. He picks up his phone. He asks who he might say is asking.

  “Hawk Scholl,” Hawk says, then leans up, like he’s conspiring with the guy. “It’s about the reward.”

  “The reward,” the lobby man repeats, turning his face to one angle, lifting his chin. “I’ll be sure to mention the reward.”

  The phone rings through. The man waits. I look around at the lobby. The arch overhead. The stone on the walls. The lonely American flag drooping off its brass stand. There’s a bank of elevators held between marble walls. That’s where we want to be. We’re waiting.

  “That’s right,” the man is saying now into the phone. “Boy and a young woman. Claiming a three o’clock and a reward.

  “Yes,” he says. “I’ll wait.”

  So he waits.

  So we wait.

  So Hawk paces and I watch the street for taxis, cars, and one long Silver Whale.

  “Uh-huh,” the lobby man says now.

  “That’s what she says?” he says, listening.

  “Roger that. Not a problem. I’ll relay the message.

  “Ilke Vanderveer is in a meeting,” he says now, hanging up.

  Hawk stops in his back-and-forth tracks. I feel my hopes fall. I think of everything we’ve done and the trouble we’re in and the promise I made to Hawk that we could do this, that Ilke would see us, that we would—

  “However and notwithstanding,” the lobby man continues now, “Ms. Vanderveer’s assistant asks that you come on up. You’ll be seen when the meeting is done.”

  Hawk shoots up so straight he’s just a head shorter than me. He polishes the Spyglass around his neck with a touch of his finger.

  “Sir,” he says, on his way to the elevator banks.

  “Sara,” he calls.

  I’m coming.

  Do Your Best

  It’s not as glamorous up here on the sixth floor of the Flatiron as it is in the lobby down below. Cardboard boxes in the narrow hallways and stains on the nubby gray carpet and places on the wall where posters must have been, because the paint is different shades of olive. Shelves and shelves and shelves of books, the covers facing out, gold stars pasted on their covers. There’s a vase of new flowers on the reception desk. There’s a big clock with golden hands ticking out the hour.

  Past a crush of desks behind half-there walls, there’s a room with a smudgy door. A skinny girl who doesn’t look much older than me and is maybe half as tall leads us through the maze, past the olive walls, and opens the door, her big beautiful curly hair arranged around her head like a halo. She asks if we’d like water.

  “Please,” Hawk says.

  “Make that two,” I say. I’m desperate thirsty. Hungry, too. Feels like a whole other year ago when we were eating hot dogs and kraut.

  The girl leaves. She comes back. She puts two glasses on the round table, the two charms on her long necklace ringing.

  We can see the streets from the room’s one window, the traffic still in a craze, and that’s where we stand, by the window. Hawk twists toward 23rd Street to see what he can see. “No whale in sight,” he says.

  Like that will last. It won’t. I hear that golden-handed clock out there ticking. Who knows how long Ilke will keep us waiting, how long before we’re found out, here, by Mom and Dad, by The Mister, by Mrs. Kalin.

  I am sorry, very sorry, I can already hear myself.

  I am sorry, but I had to.

  I am sorry, please don’t be mad.

  I am sorry, but please, just listen.

  I try to imagine that Silver Whale swimming off the farm, Dad shoving his weight into it, Mom, too. I try to imagine The Mister in the front seat, revving the engine—his cycle, his suitcase, his drawings, his stuff, some of his drawings missing. I try to imagine their whole drive here, and before that: Mom looking for me in the barn with the goats. Dad looking for Hawk by the pigs. Mom finding my note and running outside to find Dad, past the cats, past Phooey and the peahens, past Figgis.

  The Mister came to us for peace.

  And now look at what has happened.

  Hawk and I stand at the window, just looking down, just waiting. We stand here and the world can splinter in two for all the tension we are feeling.

  The doorknob rattles. The door opens wide. Ilke Vanderveer is here. In a pale pink dress with pale pink shoes whose toes look sharp as weapons. She’s got her eyelashes on and her eyes look heavy.

  “Hawk Scholl,” she says, her lips sticking to her teeth when she talks.

  “Ms. Vanderveer,” he answers. Like a pro.

  “I understand that you have news for me.”

  “Indeed,” Hawk says. “We do. This is Sara.”

  “I thought I said—”

  “Brother,” Hawk says, pointing to himself. “Sister. We keep no secrets from each other.”

  I extend my arm to shake Ilke’s hand. She gives me a quick grip and a long up and down, stopping at my polka-dotted toenails. She pulls out a chair.

  “Please,” she says. Suggesting we join her.

  Hawk and I each take our seats.

  I get my pouch prepared.

  Ilke raps her pink nails on the table.

  “What did Martin say,” she asks now, “when you gave him the package?”

  “Well,” Hawk says.

  “As you recall,” Ilke says, after Hawk does not continue, “the only reward here is for a job completed. Proof of my letter, delivered. A verifiable response.”

  “We are in possession of your letter,” I say, pulling out her own special delivery and trying to sound like Hawk.

  Her heavy eyes open as much as they can, which isn’t very much.

  “We also have this,” I say, pulling out the sketch of Jolly’s face. “And this.” Digging in for the other pictures I stole, but really more like borrowed.

  “Do you have a copy of Roundabouts: Book Two?”
Hawk says, leaning toward Ilke, over the table.

  Ilke sits there, not answering. There’s a sleek white phone on the table. She thinks for a while, then punches the 0. Tells the person on the other end to bring her Two this very minute.

  The skinny girl opens the door. Delivers the book. Leaves us.

  “So,” Hawk says. “As you can see,” he says, opening the book, thumbing through pages, starting this, all business-ish, like he hasn’t spent his whole life on a farm, fixing tractors and watering pigs and climbing the limbs of the Hispaniola. Like we have all the time in the world, here, on the sixth floor of the Flatiron, the Silver Whale floating through Manhattan.

  “As you can see, we have here, at the end of Book Two, a pair of red shoes perched on a cliff. Behind the shoes is where the shoes have been. All the beautiful red shoe places.”

  “I’m familiar with the book,” Ilke says, her lips sticking.

  “Now, on the other side of the cliff,” Hawk continues, “is a stretch of farm, a humble working place, with humble people. You can see it here.” He points. “Tiny dots. Tiny, but it’s clear.”

  Ilke’s eyes dart back over to the special delivery, exposed on the table as Hawk talks. They flicker back to try to get a better view of what we’ve brought with us.

  “Very familiar,” she repeats.

  “Turns out The Mister has a plan for Book Three,” Hawk continues. “Turns out he’s taking his red shoes to this old run-down farm, where there are cows and pigs and shadows. Turns out he wants his red shoes to live. He does not want his red shoes to vanish.”

  I lay the sketches out now, one beside the other, the sketches turned to face Ilke so that she can better see them. She leans in, lowers her head. She reaches for them. Gently. Holds them up to the light. Holds them closer to her eyes. Then puts them down and folds one hand into the other.

  “Well, that’s some trick,” she says. We can barely hear her.

  “No trick at all,” Hawk says.

  “What kind of game does he think we’re playing? Sending you back here with these. These sketches and my note. A confidential note. Special delivery.”

  “The Mister’s not playing any game,” Hawk says, sitting even straighter.

  “I beg to differ,” Ilke answers. She pushes back into her chair. She crosses her arms.

  “He didn’t send us here,” I say. “He doesn’t know we’re here. I mean, he wasn’t supposed to know. We didn’t tell him. He never read your letter.”

  “I beg your pardon?” She crosses her arms even tighter.

  “We read it,” I say. “We read your letter.”

  She pushes back her chair to stand.

  “There are laws—” she starts.

  “I took the sketches out of the back of his car,” I talk over her. I talk over her, but nicely.

  “You took them.” Ilke narrows her eyes and I can see us as she sees us—two kid thieves from a pig and chicken farm way out in the middle of Mountain Dale nowhere.

  “There were plenty more. A whole book’s worth. Except that some of them aren’t finished.”

  “Is that a fact?”

  “We tell the truth,” Hawk says.

  Most of the time, I think. In regular circumstances.

  Ilke uncrosses her arms. She puts her elbows on the table. She fits her chin into her palms. She studies us and I can see how her eyes are small beneath her lids, her eyes are coal bits, burning. “Why have you come?” she says. “There’s no reward in this. Surely you must know that. Surely you must see that I’m a very busy woman. Surely it must occur to you—”

  “We came because The Mister has packed to leave and he can’t leave,” I say, my words real fast, my heart real urgent. “We came because he has to finish Book Three the way he wants to finish Book Three. We came because he doesn’t want those shoes to vanish. Because he wants to write his own ending, and in his ending, the shoes keep walking. We can see them walking.”

  “We came”—Hawk clears his throat—“on his behalf.”

  “We came,” I say, “because we like him.” And we do, I think, we really do. We like his imagination.

  “You have no right,” Ilke says, her cheeks red, her voice gravel. “To interfere. This is none of your business. The audacity of it. The nerve! You”—she looks for a word, she tries to find it—“interlopers!”

  She squints.

  She stares.

  I am not afraid.

  “You came to us,” I say.

  “You gave me the letter,” Hawk says.

  “I gave you instructions,” she says, “and you—”

  “We’re two of M. B. Banks’s half a million readers,” Hawk says calmly. “We’re focus group material. We’re statistics.” I look at him. I smile at him. I will never, in my life, however long it is, forget this.

  “We believe in the shoes,” I say. “We’ve come to tell you that in person.”

  “Because you’re in charge,” Hawk says.

  “Because you can change things,” I say, leaning across the table now, sliding the pictures back toward her, laying them out, the start or the middle or the end of his story.

  The look in Ilke’s eyes is something between ashamed and furious. She sputters out the start of words but doesn’t finish them. Now she pushes back and stands and crosses the room. She fixes herself at the window, looking down into the street.

  “Do you know what it is,” she says, “to walk around each day with my responsibilities? To satisfy our readers? We need big hits. Bestsellers. Revenues bigger than advances. Do you know what that’s like?”

  “No,” Hawk admits. “We don’t.”

  “Do you know how the trends insist? How we need to tell the stories we think the readers want to read? We do our math on this. We watch our Ps, we watch our Ls. Profits,” she explains now. “And losses.”

  “But what’s the matter with The Mister’s story?” I ask. “What’s the matter with the red shoes finding their way back home to this farm after they’ve been all around the world?”

  I say it, and when I say it, I suddenly know. I say it and I look at Hawk and his eyes are big because he knows it too.

  The Mister’s red shoes are coming home.

  Our farm is The Mister’s home.

  Or his idea of home.

  Or it could be.

  He’s drawn his red shoes home.

  “He’s got a contract,” Ilke says. “A contract is a promise. He’s already a full year late with his story.”

  “Not every promise can be kept,” I say. I think of my seeds in the museum by that wall. Some will sprout and some will not. Some will yield and some won’t.

  Ilke touches her forehead to the window glass, and she’s thinner, I realize, than I thought she was. She’s thin, and she could break. Like any one of us.

  “We’ve come to ask you to give his story a chance,” I say. “We come because we hope you will. But now we should be going.”

  I stand and Hawk does. I pack up my pouch. Mom and Dad will be here soon.

  We’ll have a ton of explaining to do.

  We Need a Better Explanation

  They’re rushing through the lobby entry when we’re trying to rush out. Mom and Dad, and The Mister, and Mrs. Kalin. Mom’s face has every picture in it, every drop of color and every kind of line. Dad is rubbing his head. Mrs. Kalin is in her flowered dress, and The Mister—he’s standing there without his stick. He’s looking at us, he’s looking around, he’s looking: snow on snow on snow, his blue vest and his red shoes on.

  He calls the lobby man by his first name, Tony.

  He catches my eye, smiles. Maybe he nods a little bit. Maybe he touches his hands together, those long fingers. Maybe he says thank you. Maybe I hear him.

  “Sweetie,” Mom keeps saying. “Sweetie.” Her name for Hawk and me, for both of us, the only name she has right now.

  “We thought—” Dad says.

  “You should have—” Dad tries to start again, but it doesn’t matter, because nobo
dy needs words right now. Sometimes life is just about the pictures.

  “Martin.”

  I hear Ilke’s voice and I turn. I see her standing there, in that stone lobby, on her wobbling shoes. “Martin, may I talk to you?” she says, and I know she’s trying for her in-charge voice, but it doesn’t sound in charge at all.

  It sounds more like a question.

  The Mister walks toward her, leaving us behind. They disappear around the corner, toward the alcove where the elevators are. I can’t hear what they’re saying because Hawk is trying to explain—about the train, about the bus, about the things that we discovered. Hawk is the only one who’s talking.

  “We had to,” Hawk is saying. “We didn’t have a choice.” He stands near Mom and Dad, looking up, pleading with his moon eyes, his pale face, his summer freckles. He’ll talk for us. I’ll let him.

  Mom’s got her hand on Hawk’s shoulder. Dad’s got his hand around Mom’s waist. Mrs. Kalin is smoothing the flowers on her skirt, and I look at her. She smiles.

  “I understand.” I hear Ilke’s voice now. “Yes. Yes. Your prerogative.” I hear The Mister’s voice, from around the same corner. It’s softer than hers is, but it sounds like thank you, and now I hear Ilke say, in a different tone, that she always loved those shoes, that she’ll always be proud of editing Book One and Book Two.

  And right this moment, nobody else is talking. Right this moment we’re all trying to hear, to be sure, and when The Mister appears, we see his red shoes first. And then we see him smiling.

  Inside the Silver Whale

  Inside the Silver Whale it bumps and rattles.

  Inside the Silver Whale it smells like color.

  Inside the Silver Whale the one wheel of the unicycle spins and goes nowhere, and Mom and Dad sit with The Mister up front, and Hawk and I sit with each other in the back with the brushes and the box, the pictures that were drawn, the pictures that were not. We sit with the suitcase, and we sit with the other stuff that we can’t explain, and Mrs. Kalin isn’t here beside us because she had some New York City places she said she hoped to go.