“Come on,” she said as I stumbled along behind her like a toddler. “You’ve got to see this.”
An image popped into my head of the two boys speeding straight into the river, flailing and screaming as the water covered their legs, then their shoulders, and finally the tops of their heads. A few bubbles popped along the surface of the water, then stillness.
My stomach lurched.
A howl from behind the tangle of branches and blood-red berries burst the image. We stumbled through and nearly fell out the other side. The howl was joined by a violent whipping sound. It didn’t make any sense.
I spotted two pairs of wheel ruts dug deep in the dirt path. They ran parallel for a few feet, then veered left toward a tangle of stinging nettles and pricker bushes.
Several branches were bent and broken. Hanging off one was a thin strip of gray cloth—the same color as Gus’s T-shirt.
Antonia, with Hush-a-bye tucked under one arm, clapped her hands and whistled. “Hoo-boy! Hoo-boy!” Now and then she’d sniff and wipe her eyes with the back of her hand.
Careful not to poke ourselves, we pushed aside some pricker branches and peered into the tangle.
Two bikes lay in a heap of weeds. Nearby, the boys thrashed about like rats in a trap.
Thorny vines wrapped around their arms and legs and torsos, and blooms of stinging nettles poked out of holes in their shirts and jeans as if they’d sprouted from the boys’ bodies. Their clothes were torn to ribbons, and angry red blotches covered every patch of bare skin.
I couldn’t understand how they managed to get themselves wrapped up in the plants so quickly. Then I saw Gus tear off a vine from his leg. As he tossed it far away, another vine snaked along the ground and circled around the same leg. All by itself.
The two boys tore frantically at the nettles and thorns, but something else always reached up and took its place. Like something was trying to keep those boys caught.
“That’s impossible,” I said.
“Nothing’s impossible.” Antonia turned to me and smiled. “Not anymore.” She bent her head toward the bundled towel and whispered.
All at once, the thrashing stopped.
The branches and vines loosened from the boys’ arms and legs and necks and fell away. For a few seconds, they kept grabbing at their limbs like they were still being attacked. But then they stopped and stood staring with pale, blank faces at the piles of broken thorns and smashed nettles.
Antonia pursed her lips and shook her head. “What a mess,” she said. “Don’t you know not to play in that stuff? I guess you’re not so smart yourself, huh?”
Zoogie’s face colored a deep red, and his hands balled into tight fists. He started stomping his way toward us. A thorny vine shot out and wrapped itself around his waist. Zoogie was jerked back off his feet. He fell face-first into another bunch of stinging nettles.
“Not smart at all,” Antonia said.
Zoogie scrambled to his feet, but before he could try to charge us again, Gus slapped a hand on his chest.
“Get your bike,” he said in a low voice. “We’re going.”
“But—”
“We’re going,” Gus repeated. There was a definite edge in his words the second time.
Zoogie glared at us, then picked up his bike and pushed it out of the weeds and back up the path. Gus followed. Just before he passed through the winterberry bushes, he glanced back at Antonia with a hangdog look.
Antonia turned her head away. “Go already,” she said.
Gus sighed and pushed on through. We could hear the clack of bike pedals and the crunch of tires rolling away. Then nothing.
“Serves them right,” Antonia muttered. She unwrapped the doll’s head, stroked its curly yellow hair, and kissed its cheek. “Thank you, Hush-a-bye.” She kissed it once more and headed down the path toward the river.
I stood there for a long while, looking at the broken plants. Scraps of cloth still clung to thorns here and there, dotted with tiny specks of blood. The thorny vines and stinging nettles were silent and still. When a gray squirrel suddenly bolted up the side of tree, I waited for something to reach out and drag it back down. But nothing moved.
Nothing’s impossible.
That’s what Antonia had said. Nothing’s impossible. Not anymore. And I knew it was true.
By the time I reached the riverbank, Antonia was already sitting there with Hush-a-bye in her lap, the two of them facing the island. Antonia was singing in a quiet, choked voice.
Hush-a-bye and good night
Till the bright morning light
Takes the sleep from your eyes
Hush-a-bye, baby bright
I scrambled down, trying to make as much noise as possible so she’d know I was coming, but she never turned around.
I sat down next to her, trying to collect all my thoughts and my breath. Antonia’s eyes were still a little red around the edges, but they were dry. She stroked the doll’s hair with her fingertips. I thought about reaching out to touch her head, like I wanted to make sure it was real, but a small flutter of fear held me back.
“Did Hush-a-bye do all that up there?” I asked.
Antonia laughed. “She has the best ideas.”
“They might have gotten hurt.”
Antonia snatched up a handful of pebbles and threw them scattershot into the river. “They got what they deserved.” I tried to think of an argument against that, but I couldn’t. I had to admit, part of me was glad it happened. At least those boys wouldn’t be coming around here again anytime soon.
“And Hush-a-bye got what was coming to her,” Antonia continued.
“Huh?”
“I told you. The magic opens up when she can do something to help.”
“Right. Like a key,” I said, though I really didn’t understand. “So what did the key open up for her this time?”
Antonia cocked her head to one side, then held out her arm, extended all her fingers out toward the riverbank, and wiggled them back and forth. “Look,” she said.
At first, all I saw was the smooth face of the river, dull and dark under gray clouds that crisscrossed the sky. But then a movement near the grassy edge of the eastern edge of the island caught my eye. Something red with a rounded point was drifting across the water.
At first I thought it might be a big piece of trash someone tossed in the water, like an old tent or a plastic tub. But as it drew closer, I made out the shape of a small rowboat.
It looked empty, as if it hadn’t been secured right and had floated away. But something about the way it moved didn’t make any sense. The current should have caught that drifting boat and pulled it downstream. Except this boat was headed right for us, slicing through the current like a red-hot knife through a sheet of ice. That was impossible.
Nothing’s impossible. Not anymore.
11
THE BOAT GLIDED toward the bank. Antonia waded out to it with Hush-a-bye under one arm and grabbed the prow with her free hand.
“Help me,” she said, pulling it closer to the bank. I sloshed into the cold water and took hold of the other side of the boat, and together we pulled it in closer to the riverbank. Two white benches crossed the middle of the boat, and two small white oars lay poking out of the bottom.
“You want to row?” Antonia asked me.
“Row?” I said, blinking. “Row where?”
Antonia rolled her eyes. “To the island. It’s waiting for us there.”
I don’t remember agreeing to anything, yet somehow I found myself sitting in the boat and pulling at the oars, watching as the riverbank drew away. It felt like I was a character in someone else’s dream. I wondered if they would ever wake up so all the weirdness would vanish. It was making me a little dizzy.
We reached the big island in the middle of the river and dragged the boat onto
the sloped bank. It was thick with yellowing grass, and the pale gray birch trees above it stared down at us silently. Antonia romped up the bank with Hush-a-bye in tow, humming some tuneless song, and quickly disappeared behind the trees. As I watched her, I thought I heard a crowd of voices whispering somewhere deep within the trees. But once I stepped up onto the bank, the voices stopped. I shook my head and followed Antonia.
The ground was covered with dead leaves, ghost-white mushrooms, and small shards of light that somehow managed to get past the thick leaves overhead. Every step I took crackled, but it was the only sound I heard. No birds sang. No flies buzzed. Nothing seemed to live here.
“Come here, Lucy!” Antonia waved to me from behind a stunted tree. Except when I drew closer, I realized it wasn’t a dead tree at all. It was a thick, smooth pine post, but darkly discolored like it had been burned. And it wasn’t the only one. Several others stuck up from the ground nearby. They were neatly arranged in straight lines, but in various stages of rot and char.
“Someone built a house here?” I said. If they did, it would have been an enormous one, seeing how far along the posts poked up. I spotted a moldy flat pine board lying on the ground between two posts. I could barely make out the letters etched deep into the wood.
LOD
Before I could try to figure out what that could possibly mean, Antonia caught me by the elbow.
“Do you see it?” she squealed, shaking my arm. “Do you?”
I looked at where she was frantically waving her hand. At first, all I saw was a large forked tree. It was long dead, and its branches were curled over like claws. Then I saw what Antonia wanted me to see. She ran to it, and I ran after her.
Propped inside the crook of the tree was a doll-sized yellow dress. It had frills at the shoulders and bottom, and a thin red sash tied around the middle. The style was old-fashioned, like something out of Anne of Green Gables, but the dress was spotless and showed no signs of wear.
It also looked weirdly puffed out, like someone had blown it up full of air. Antonia snatched it out of the crook, and I noticed something stuffed inside the dress.
An armless and legless doll’s body.
Antonia held it up and gawked at it. “It’s beautiful.”
She squatted down in the dead leaves and took Hush-a-bye from under her arm. She examined the hole at the bottom of the doll’s head and the short knob at the top of the body. She positioned the two together, twisting and turning until there was a sharp snap.
Antonia beamed as she held the limbless doll, stroking the frills and the sash with her fingertips. She squeezed her tight to her chest and rocked her back and forth.
“Oh, Hush-a-bye, Hush-a-bye,” she said, kissing her on the nose. “You found your body. I’m so happy for you.” And then she turned away from me and headed back to the island slope without another word.
I shut my eyes and played back the scenes in my brain—the way the two boys were attacked by the stinging nettles and thorny vines, and how the strange little rowboat brought us to the island to find Hush-a-bye’s body. I also thought about the exploding milk in the school cafeteria and the bright green eye that somehow found its way to the ginkgo tree.
Nothing’s impossible. Not anymore. The words came back to me once again. Except now I really believed them. Like Dorothy in Oz, I sure couldn’t pretend we were still in Kansas.
Once were returned to our side of the river, I hid the rowboat in some thick undergrowth and covered it with branches. It seemed wrong to leave it there, like it was evidence of . . . I don’t what. Then I ran after Antonia.
When I finally caught up with her at the winterberry bushes, my chest burned like I’d swallowed a jar of pickled jalapeños. “Hold up for a second and let me catch my breath,” I said.
Antonia had plucked off a handful of the red berries. She rolled them around her palm, then picked them up one at a time and squished them between her fingers.
“I wasn’t making it up when I said Gus asked me if I was going to the dance,” she said as she pinched a particularly fat berry. “I remember what he said. I’m not stupid.”
I shuffled my feet. Something about the tone of her voice prickled my skin. “I believe you, Antonia.”
Antonia dropped the rest of the berries on the ground. “He lied to me.” She scowled at the berries scattered on the dirt path. “I hate it when people lie to me. So does Hush-a-bye. She says two-faced deceivers—that’s what she calls liars—she says those kind of people deserve everything bad that comes to them.” She lifted her boot and stomped the berries into a messy red pulp. She looked straight at me, and I felt my throat tighten. “You’d never lie to me, Lucy. Would you?” she asked.
I tried to smile. “Of course not,” I lied.
12
THE NEXT TIME we saw Gus and Zoogie, they were shuffling down the aisle of the school bus. They kept their eyes fixed on the back seats and never said a word to us.
As they passed by, Antonia pretended to suddenly find her fingernails extremely fascinating. But as Gus slumped his way past, I caught Antonia giving him a quick, sidelong glance.
The rest of the week drifted by like any other school week, no better or worse, although Mr. Capp did make an announcement during Wednesday’s class about an after-school art club.
“It’ll give a chance for those of you who want to flex their creative muscles”—he pumped his arms up like a bodybuilder while the class giggled—“to do stuff we don’t have time for in regular class. The first meeting will be in a few weeks. If you’re interested, you can let me know ahead of time. Or just show up. Everybody’s welcome.”
May turned to me, grinning so hard I thought she might break a few teeth. “I’m definitely going. How about you? It’ll be a lot of fun.”
All I offered back was a noncommittal shrug and a quiet “I’ll think about it.” But I’d already made up my mind. The idea of spending more time at school and taking an unfamiliar late bus home with God-knows-who was more than I could handle.
Antonia still had her nightly talks with Hush-a-bye. What they talked about, she never said. Then again, she wasn’t saying much to me at all anymore.
It wasn’t like she was rude or angry or giving me dirty looks. But it felt like the bond that held us together was stretching thinner and thinner every day. I was starting to worry one day it might snap and leave me alone on one side and her and Hush-a-bye on the other. When I thought back on all those wishes I’d made over the years to be an only child, and how those wishes were mocking me now—it scared me.
At our usual Friday-night family dinner, Mom announced that for the first time in ages, she had the weekend off. She explained the restaurant she worked at was going to be closed for fumigation. When Antonia asked what “fumigation” meant, Mom just shuddered and changed the subject, suggesting we talk about what we could do with the extra time. But before either me or Antonia could rattle off the hundred ideas that popped into both our heads, Mom declared we’d use the time to clean up the trailer, starting with what she referred to as the sorry state of our room.
Her biggest concern was the underside of Antonia’s bed, which Mom insisted would require a pickax and a couple of sticks of dynamite to clear out. Antonia protested and grumbled for a few minutes like she always did when the subject of any kind of cleaning came up, but like always, she knuckled under Mom’s unblinking glare.
By the time we were done cleaning, our bedroom looked like—well, it still looked like a dumpy little bedroom in a ratty old trailer, but at least it was cleaner. As a reward, Mom brought out a whole lemon meringue pie she’d gotten from work earlier in the week and hidden behind a head of lettuce. It was a little stale, but we ate the whole thing up, crumbs and all, and we went to bed with full, happy bellies.
That night, I wondered if I was worrying too much for my own good. Nothing weird had happened since the whole mess with Gus and Zoo
gie. Maybe that was the end of that, I told myself. Hush-a-bye had gotten her body and her dress back after all. Sure, she didn’t have arms or legs, but what did a doll really need them for anyway? And even though her best friend was a doll she talked to in the closet, Antonia seemed to be adjusting to regular school better than expected. Certainly better than I ever did.
Now I felt silly for worrying about her drifting away. So what if Antonia talked more to Hush-a-bye than me lately? It didn’t mean it would always be like that. She’d come around eventually and want to talk to someone who actually talks back, and everything would fall back into place. My life wouldn’t be better, but it wouldn’t be any worse. I could live with that.
But then Monday morning came, and the bottom fell out of everything.
* * *
—
It happened in social studies, in the last twenty minutes of class. Our teacher, Ms. Crozzetti, stood in front of us and removed her glasses. That got everyone’s attention. Usually, when those glasses came off, a stern lecture was sure to follow.
It wasn’t clear what the lecture would be about. The class had been pretty low-key for the most part—no one sneaking out cell phones, no boys making fart noises with their hands, no stupid time-wasting questions. Also, Ms. Crozzetti was actually smiling, a thing so rare there were rumors she wasn’t able to due to a freak accident during a triple root canal.
“I’ve got a surprise for you today,” Ms. Crozzetti said. “Actually, the surprise is one week from tomorrow, but I’m going to tell you about it today. It’s about a special field trip. How many of you have been to Old Hops Village?”
She stood there beaming at us for a few seconds. The wall of silence she ran into forced her glasses back on her face.
“For those of you who don’t know,” she said in a disgusted tone, as if not knowing was only slightly better than being a nose picker, “Old Hops Village is an authentic historical re-creation of a nineteenth-century village about thirty miles north of us. It also happens to align perfectly with our upcoming unit on postcolonial life in New York State.”
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