The Humming Room

by Ellen Potter

  Roo quickly dragged the side of the bucket on the bottom of the shallows, scooping up as much water as she could hold, then hauled the bucket back into the garden before the tour boat swung around the island into view.

  Back in the garden, she tipped the bucket and let the water spill out onto the soil, walking backward. By the time the bucket was empty, only a narrow swath of earth had been dampened. It would take hours and hours to water the entire garden this way. And the soil was so dry that it drank up the water quickly and still needed more. It was futile, she knew. Yet she kept at it, filling the bucket again and again and pouring it on the earth, until every part of her body ached and the daylight began to dim. Violet would bring supper soon and would be looking for her. She should go back upstairs. Dropping to her knees, she put her ear to the ground and listened. The silence lasted so long that she began to feel sick, worried that somehow she had done more harm than good. Then she heard it. The sound was as faint as before, but still there. She smiled with relief, but the very next moment she sat up in alarm. Something was in the garden with her. She had seen it move—just a quick flash in her peripheral vision, a shadow gliding up the slope toward the boulder. It had been too large and shaped all wrong to have been the black squirrel.

  Roo got to her feet and stared all around her. Nothing moved. The garden was perfectly still and so quiet she could hear her own breath. Yet, she felt something was there with her. Watching. The way she had watched others from her own hiding places.

  Chapter 13

  “It looks like the Burrows will have to live without you for a while longer,” Violet said when she brought in breakfast the next morning.

  “What do you mean?” Roo sat up in bed, squinting against the sunlight as Violet pulled back the curtains.

  “Phillip threw a fit when he heard you were leaving,” Violet said. “He’s threatened to have us both fired if you go. Ms. Valentine’s not too pleased about it, I can tell you.”

  “What does he want with me?” Roo asked, too baffled to feel the full impact of the reprieve.

  Violet shrugged. “Who knows? He’s the most changeable person I’ve ever met. In any case, he’s your ticket to stay here—though I can’t imagine why you’d want to. If I were you, though, I’d try and be nice to him. He’ll change his mind in a blink if you make him mad.”

  Violet stared hard at Roo for a moment, cocking her head to one side.

  “What?” Roo asked, frowning.

  “You have the greenest eyes, don’t you? I don’t know why I never noticed before. It seems like they’ve gone greener though. And you’ve filled out too. Do you know what my mother would say about you?”

  Roo shook her head.

  “She’d say, ‘That girl’s got a bloom on her.’ Bah, don’t look at me like that! It’s a good thing! It means you’re shaping up to be nice looking.”

  Roo scowled at this. “I know what I look like.”

  “Do you? Next time you pass a mirror, take a good long look in it. You might just surprise yourself. Now go on. Eat your breakfast and get dressed. Your cousin wants to see you this morning. Don’t ruffle his feathers if you can help it.”

  Phillip was still in bed when Roo came to his room, using the east wing hallway this time, rather than the secret passage. He looked paler than he had the day before, but he smiled when he saw her. It was a nice smile too, Roo couldn’t help but think.

  “Sit down,” he said, nodding toward the edge of his bed. They sat in silence for a while.

  “Do you to want to play canasta again?” Roo asked finally.

  “I’m not in the mood,” he said.

  “Fine,” Roo replied.

  She stuffed her hands beneath her legs and rolled her eyes. Let Phillip be difficult. It didn’t matter. She was going to stay at Cough Rock. She could tend her garden and maybe even see Jack again, and if Phillip wanted to act like a brat, she would simply ignore him.

  “What are you thinking about?” he demanded.

  Roo shifted on the bed. “I don’t know. Nothing.”

  Phillip frowned down at his thick blankets, then rearranged them fitfully.

  Roo sighed and decided it would be in her best interest to at least try not to upset him.

  “I was thinking about Jack,” she said, not wanting to mention the garden.

  “Who’s Jack?” He said the name in a contemptuous way that made Roo want to slap him. But she took a breath and tried to keep her voice even.

  “He lives on the water. Hasn’t Violet told you about him?”

  Phillip shook his head.

  So Roo told him all the stories that Violet had told her, and to her surprise Phillip seemed just as riveted as she had been when she first heard them.

  “Have you met him?” Phillip asked.

  “Once.”

  “Did you like him?”

  “Yes.”

  “More than you like me.” Phillip said this as a statement of fact, and of course it was true.

  She didn’t want to provoke him though, so she quickly changed the subject.

  “What’s that song I keep hearing you humming?” she asked.

  “I don’t hum songs,” he said testily.

  “Yes, you do,” Roo said, her patience failing.

  “They’re not songs.”

  “Well, I heard you humming something.”

  Phillip let out an exasperated breath, but Roo kept her eyes on him, waiting for an answer.

  “It’s just a thing my mother used to do, if you must know,” Phillip said.

  “Hum?”

  “It was a special sort of humming. I can’t do it the way she did. I try, but it’s all wrong. She said it was something the mothers in her village used to do. It was supposed to make the children grow up strong. She told me all kinds of stories about the jungle. About jaguars and macaws and spirits that live inside every tree and every plant. She told me about these vines that wrap themselves around trees, all the way to the top.”

  Roo nodded. She knew those vines. The garden was covered with them.

  “They’re called lianas,” he said. “She told me that they’re the tongues of jungle spirits, and if you want to summon someone, you hold the end of a liana on a treetop and call out the person’s name three times. They have to come if you do that, no matter where they are. She talked about the jungle all the time. My father built her a garden, here in the house, and he filled it with plants and flowers and trees from the rain forest. My mother and I used to spend hours there, playing and climbing trees and vines and splashing around in the water. You’ve never seen a more beautiful garden in your life.”

  While he spoke, Roo didn’t move; she hardly breathed, afraid she would do something that might give away her secret.

  “What happened to it?” Roo asked quietly.

  “My father destroyed it,” Phillip said, his voice turning dark. “After she died, he tore the whole garden out and walled it up.”

  He doesn’t know, Roo thought with relief.

  “Why did he do it?” Roo asked, remembering what Mrs. Wixton had said about people thinking Ana had been murdered.

  “I asked him once,” Phillip said. “He said something bad had happened there, and he hated to think about it. But that was all he’d say.”

  Phillip shifted in his bed, and suddenly looked at Roo intently. “If I tell you something,” he said, “will you keep it a secret?”

  “Okay.”

  “You promise?” he persisted.

  “I just said I would, didn’t I?”

  “The first time I heard you behind that door,” Phillip said, his eyes darting toward the door that led to the passageway, “I thought it was my mother.”

  “But she’s dead.”

  Phillip’s gaze returned to Roo. There was a damp, feverish look in his eyes that Roo found unsettling.

  “She’s still here,” he said. “She’s still in this house. I hear her.”

  The words, spoken with such gravity in the darkened room, spooked
Roo. But she quickly collected herself and replied tersely, “I don’t believe in ghosts.”

  “My mother said the jungle was full of them.”

  “She was just telling you stories,” Roo said.

  “No, she wasn’t,” he protested.

  “Then she was silly and superstitious.”

  “Shut up! What do you know anyway? You’re just a thief! I heard Ms. Valentine and Violet arguing about you this morning. Ms. Valentine said that you were a thief. She said your foster mother warned her that you stole things.”

  Roo felt her own anger rear up and she drew back to slap him; but at the very last second she thought about the garden. She took a breath. Her body shook with the effort to control herself, but she stood up.

  “Where are you going?” Phillip demanded.

  “I’ll be back,” she muttered, heading toward the doorway that led to the passageway.

  “No! You’re lying! Where are you going?” He began to shriek again, but she turned on him now, her face full of fury, and warned, “If you start shrieking again I won’t come back at all.”

  This stopped him, and he managed to keep his temper until Roo returned a few minutes later, holding something in her fist. She tossed it on the bed.

  “It’s yours,” she said.

  Phillip picked it up and turned it this way and that. “A metatarsal,” he said. “A coyote metatarsal.” He looked up at her. “But where did you get it?”

  “I stole it.”

  Phillip eyed her suspiciously. “Why are you giving it back?”

  “So that the coyote won’t limp.”

  Chapter 14

  After she left Phillip, Roo spent the rest of the morning in the garden. The black squirrel watched from his perch on the tree as Roo carried buckets of river water into the garden and spilled it out onto the earth. It was lovely to see the parched soil drink up the water, but it was never enough. It had gone thirsty for too long.

  As she worked, her mind kept wandering back to Phillip. He would want to see the garden again, she knew. He would want to know that it hadn’t been completely destroyed after all. But each time she had nearly convinced herself that she should tell him, another part of her argued vociferously against it. If she did tell him, no doubt he would go and tell Violet or Ms. Valentine or his father, and then the garden would be shut off forever and left to die.

  Roo had been thinking so deeply about this while filling her bucket by the river that she didn’t see the canoe until it was right in front of her, bouncing lightly in the shallows. In the daylight she saw that Jack’s hair was such a pale blond it was nearly silver where the sun hit it, but his skin was tan and his cheeks were ruddy. His clothes were strangely formal—black dress pants and an un-tucked button-down white dress shirt—but they were too big on him and tattered and dirty in places. His head was tilted to one side, watching Roo with quiet interest.

  “Why are you staring at me like that?” Roo asked finally, glowering with discomfort.

  “You look different,” he answered.

  Roo felt her gut pinch. She suddenly remembered that he’d seen her only from a distance and at night. Now that he saw her up close, in the light of day, he would realize how plain she was. It hurt her feelings, but still she answered defiantly, “This is what I look like.”

  He maneuvered the canoe close to the rocks, plunging his paddle into the shallow water to hold it still.

  “Do you want to come for a ride?” he asked.

  “I’m busy.”

  Jack glanced at her bucket, and then back at her. “The water will still be in the river when you get back.”

  Thoughts of the Faigne crept into Roo’s mind. What had Violet said? That the Faigne was a water creature, not human at all. That was silly, of course, she told herself. He was just a boy. But still, when she looked at him she found that his beauty was almost otherworldly.

  “I can’t swim,” Roo said.

  “You won’t have to,” he replied.

  Roo stared uncertainly at the little canoe. “Will it hold two people? What if I sink it?”

  He laughed. “You don’t weigh more than a rabbit.”

  He stretched out his hand and kept it there, waiting until she made her decision. After a few moments’ deliberation, she put the bucket down and stepped across the rocks. Leaning over, she took Jack’s hand. He steadied her as she stepped into the canoe.

  “Bend your legs,” he told her when the canoe began to rock. She shifted her body until the rocking settled, and then sat down opposite Jack. The sun had squeezed his pupils into pinpricks. His irises looked so unnaturally gray that Roo once again found herself thinking of the Faigne. But then the canoe slid away from the shore, putting the sun behind them, and his eyes looked more human again.

  At first, Roo gripped the edges of the canoe, her heart lurching every time they hit a wave. But it wasn’t long before she felt her body adjust to the motion. The little canoe rode the river lightly, rearing and dipping while Jack deftly maneuvered it. The water seemed to be grabbing the paddle at each stroke, passing the canoe hand to hand over its surface.

  There were other boats on the river, though Jack avoided coming too close to these. Once, though, a fisherman spotted them. He stood up in his boat and shielded his eyes against the sun to see them better.

  Tonight he’ll tell his friends that he had saw the Faigne, thought Roo, and that a strange girl was with him. Maybe they’ll think I’m a sea creature too. Roo smiled.

  Suddenly a long, loping shadow appeared above them. Roo looked up to see the white belly of a heron, its slender legs stretched behind it and its neck folded back against its shoulders. Roo expected the bird to pass on by, but instead it seemed to hover over them, keeping pace with the canoe. Now and then it would fly ahead of them and circle back, finally disappearing altogether when a large freighter trudged through the seaway.

  “It’s almost like that bird was following us,” Roo said.

  “He was. That’s Sir.”

  “He’s yours?” Roo asked, amazed.

  Jack laughed. “I’m his,” he said. “He’s adopted me. He stays with me through the winter, even though almost all the other herons go south. He knows everything that happens on this river. He even told me when you first arrived here.”

  Roo shot him a doubtful look. But then she remembered seeing the heron that flew over the Boston Whaler on her way to Cough Rock, and how Ms. Valentine had said it was odd to see the bird at that time of year.

  On and on they went, past stretches of polished shoal, peppered with cormorants; weaving around islands, some with homely cottages and others with gigantic mansions. The beauty of the St. Lawrence was staggering. Great green knolls rose up out of the water, like a relief map come to life, forming complicated labyrinths. The canoe skirted by a tremendous cliff made of red-veined rock. Jack pointed out a raven’s nest on the cliff, but even Roo’s sharp eyes could not make it out. Jack lifted his chin and let out a low, croaking sound and a shiny black bird emerged magically from one of the fissures. She croaked in response, staring down at them as they passed.

  Finally they came to a narrow channel between two of the larger islands. Jack rowed to the top of the channel, then lifted his paddle out of the water.

  “What are you doing?” Roo asked nervously.

  Jack didn’t answer. He just stretched out his legs and leaned back a little. The canoe bobbled in place for a moment. Then something seemed to seize it and the next second they were shooting down the channel. The little canoe vaulted over waves, then pitched down again at breathless speed. To Roo’s surprise, she wasn’t frightened at all. In fact, it made her laugh out loud, which seemed to delight Jack. The water sounded like it was laughing too—the muted, trilling sound of someone laughing in a rainstorm. Then suddenly it was over. The canoe slowed. Jack put out his paddle again and began to row.

  “What was that?” Roo asked, catching her breath and smiling.

  “Dumbfounder’s Current. It sucks you in a
nd spits you straight to the other side.”

  “The river sounded like it was laughing,” Roo said.

  “It was.” He looked at her thoughtfully for a moment, then said, “I think I know why you look so different.”

  Roo’s smile dissolved.

  “Why?” She eyed him warily.

  “You’re not fighting the wind anymore,” Jack said.

  Roo frowned. “I don’t know what you mean,” she said.

  Jack tucked his head down and hunched his shoulders slightly…and there it was. The same look she had always noticed in the mirror. The look of a thief. It bothered her that he had seen it too.

  “So what do I look like now?” she asked.

  “Like a girl who might capture a Faigne,” he replied, smiling lightly.

  She didn’t know how to respond, so she turned away and fixed her eyes on a shoal covered with birds. The birds were small with soft gray bodies that tapered to white around their bellies. Their black masks scooped over their skulls, and their slender bills were the deepest red, tipped with black.

  “What are they?” Roo asked, grateful to be able to change the subject.

  “Terns. They’re nesting.”

  Roo squinted against the sun and searched the shoal.

  “But I don’t see any nests,” Roo said.

  “That’s because terns are terrible parents,” Jack said, an unusual edge of irritation in his voice. “They put their nests any old place and don’t even bother to make them well. Just a few twigs and leaves. Then the gulls come along and bully them, and off the terns fly, leaving their eggs for the gulls to eat or smash. Or sometimes the terns stick it out long enough for the eggs to hatch, but then the gulls swoop down and carry the chicks off. The adult terns barely even put up a fight.” He turned his head suddenly and stared at a craggy section of the shoal.

  “I see you,” he whispered.

  “Who is it?” Roo asked.

  But Jack just held his finger to his lips. Spinning the canoe around, he began paddling close to the bank until he crept alongside a low outcropping by the shoal’s edge. He leapt out, then held the canoe steady for Roo. She stepped onto the shoal and looked around, trying to find whoever had caught Jack’s attention. All she saw were birds, though, scampering around in panic at the sight of them.