The Book of One Hundred Truths

by Julie Schumacher

  “Move,” I said. I pushed Jocelyn out of the way and threw off the covers. We tiptoed across the attic to the window.

  “Do you think it’s Nenna?” Jocelyn whispered.

  Something hit the screen just in front of us. I heard a rocking chair being dragged across the floor. I tried to look straight down at the porch, but all I saw was a dark rectangular shadow.

  “You’d better get out of here,” I said to the shadow, trying to make my voice low. “We’ve already called the police.”

  “No, you haven’t. You don’t have a phone up there.” It was Liam. “Just open the screen.”

  Carefully I loosened the latch on the screen and pushed it open. Jocelyn and I poked our heads through the gap and saw Liam and Austin on the porch below. “It’s the middle of the night,” I said. “What are you doing?”

  “It isn’t the middle of the night; it’s eleven-forty-five,” Austin said. “I just looked at my watch.”

  “We want to show you something,” Liam said. “Austin found it. We didn’t want to tramp through Nenna’s bedroom.” The only ways to get in and out of Liam and Austin’s room were by walking through Nenna and Granda’s, and by taking the outdoor stairs from the porch. Liam and Austin probably snuck in and out of the house that way all the time.

  “Can’t you show it to us tomorrow?” Jocelyn asked.

  “Nope. Surfing competition tomorrow,” Austin said. “We’re getting up early.” He took a step back, out of the shadows, and I saw his face and a slice of his T-shirt in the moonlight. I tried to imagine him babysitting for me, buckling me carefully into a stroller. “Are you ready?” he asked. “Move your big head out of the way.”

  I held the screen up and ducked. Something hit the clapboard.

  “Where’d you learn to throw like that?” Liam asked. “Why don’t you let an athlete try it?”

  “Give me two out of three,” Austin said.

  A light went on in Celia’s bedroom.

  “Hurry up,” I said.

  A few seconds later, something about the size of a walnut sailed through the window and past my head. Liam and Austin, underneath us, seemed to disappear.

  I latched the screen while Jocelyn crawled under her bed to retrieve what they’d thrown: a wad of paper with a stone inside it. She smoothed the paper with her hands.

  “What is it?” I whispered. Celia was probably prowling through the hall downstairs; we had to read by the light of the moon.

  It seemed to be an article from the daily paper: Miss Port Harbor Princess Wins College Scholarship.

  “Turn it over,” I said.

  On the other side was an ad for Port Harbor Realty. Someone had written available August 15 across the picture of a squat yellow building, then circled it in pen. Tired of yard work? the ad asked. Home maintenance a problem? We’ve got a new home for you in Port Harbor. Convenient, cozy, and comfortable: 21 Bay.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  I sat on the edge of my bed in the dark and tried to think. I felt like someone had lifted the top of my head off and inserted an ugly brand-new idea into my brain.

  Were Celia and Ellen selling the house? Was that why they’d cleaned out the attic? They were always talking about Granda’s doctor appointments, and about Nenna and Granda both getting old. Convenient, cozy, and comfortable, the clipping said. It was probably some kind of nursing home.

  “This doesn’t make sense,” I said. “There’s no ‘for sale’ sign on the house.” I tried not to imagine my Nenna and Granda in a place full of old people in wheelchairs, a double line of them in a cafeteria, wearing matching hospital gowns and eating soup.

  Jocelyn had folded the clipping and put it away, and now she was rearranging things on her dresser: the lamp, the purse, the clock, the brush and comb, the jewelry box.

  Where had Liam and Austin found the clipping? Did they know what it meant? How were we supposed to visit Nenna and Granda when we came to Port Harbor if they didn’t have a house? Where would we stay?

  Jocelyn nudged the jewelry box toward the lamp and wiped the clock on her nightgown.

  I told her to get back into bed, and she actually listened to me. I tucked in her covers. The wooden floor creaked beneath my feet.

  “Is everything all right up there?” It was Celia’s voice, coming from the landing.

  I froze and waited.

  A few minutes later the light went off downstairs. I lay down in bed and listened to the ocean and to the sound of my cousin scratching in her sleep.

  Liam and Austin were already gone when I got up the next morning. I checked their bedroom, which was empty, and remembered what Liam had told me about the approach of a tidal wave—the feeling of something steadily disappearing under your feet.

  Truth #42: Water freezes at thirty-two degrees Fahrenheit.

  Nenna was reading the paper at the kitchen counter, and Granda was watching TV. There was some kind of storm off the southern coast of Argentina. “Would you like some toast, Thea?” Nenna asked. “Or maybe some oatmeal?”

  “Toast would be good.” I took the butter and the jam out of the refrigerator and got a plate from the shelf.

  “The time has certainly gone fast, hasn’t it?” Nenna asked. “You two will both be leaving before I know it.”

  Jocelyn was eating her breakfast. I watched her place a dozen yellow raisins in a perfect circle in her bowl of oatmeal.

  “But we’ll be back,” I said. “Because you know I come back every summer.” I waited for Nenna’s reaction. “Since this is a great place to visit.”

  “That’s very sweet, and I’m glad to hear it.” Nenna put down her paper. “I hope you’ll come back every year.”

  “As long as you have room for me, I will.” I put two slices of bread in the toaster.

  Nenna laughed. “How would I not have room for my oldest granddaughter? Or my youngest granddaughter, for that matter?”

  We both looked at Jocelyn. She was stirring her oatmeal; the yellow raisins had been sucked into the mixture and had disappeared.

  “I have some money for the two of you,” Nenna said, taking a twenty-dollar bill from her bathrobe pocket. “For a haircut, with something left over. You don’t mind, Thea?”

  “No, that’s okay.” I studied the greenish portrait on the front of the bill; Andrew Jackson’s hair, I thought, and even his eyebrows could use a trim. The toaster dinged. I stuffed the twenty into my pocket. “Are you going to drive us there?” I asked.

  “I wasn’t planning to.” Nenna put my toast on a plate. “It’s only five or six blocks. Do you think you can get there on your own?”

  The trike was waiting in the garage. “Sure,” I said. “I guess we can do that.” I turned around and saw my Granda smile.

  “Are you mad at me or something?” I asked when Jocelyn and I were on our way to get her hair cut. “You’ve been kind of quiet.”

  We rode past the Breakers, where Liam and Austin spent most of their time, slapping sandwiches together behind the carryout window.

  “I have a headache.” Jocelyn adjusted her bungee.

  “Maybe a haircut will make it feel better.” I steered around a pothole and rode up onto the sidewalk. “This must be it,” I said, slowing down. “The Cut and Curl.”

  The women who worked in the beauty shop swiveled toward us when the little bells on the door jingled. They were all wearing smocks printed with pink and yellow scissors.

  “Well, take a look at our new customer,” said a woman at the desk. “That appears to me to be a home haircut.” Her mouth was bright red with lipstick and she was overweight, with upper arms the size of hams. She came out from behind the cash register and lifted Jocelyn’s chin with her fingers. “But I know she’ll look sweet when we’re finished with her, won’t she? What’s your name, honey?”

  “Jocelyn.”

  Truth #43: Gwen’s little sister’s name was Marie.

  I expected Jocelyn to charm the women with her perfect politeness and her queen-among-the-peasants smile
. But she picked at her glove.

  “And who is this?” the ham-armed woman asked.

  “My cousin Thea. She’s taking care of me right now.”

  “Well, isn’t that nice!” I knew what she was thinking: what kind of job was Cousin Thea doing if poor little Jocelyn had rashy skin and a prisoner’s haircut?

  “Scoot back in that chair, sweet pea.” The woman—her name tag said Lou—tied a plastic apron around Jocelyn’s neck and spritzed her hair with water.

  I sat in a chair in the waiting area. The smell of hair dye and strawberry shampoo drifted up my nose. The table in front of me held a dozen different copies of Spaniel. One of the beauticians must have owned a show dog.

  “There now! Doesn’t she look precious!” All the women in the shop oohed and aahed when the haircut was done. I stood up to see how things had worked out. Jocelyn’s hair was kind of cute. She had a fuzzy blond inch-long bubble around her head. It looked like a dandelion puff.

  Lou refused to charge us. “Not a single red cent,” she said when I asked what we owed her. “You just take care of your little cousin. And I mean good care of her,” she added.

  “Okay, thanks,” I mumbled. “I will.”

  Truth #44: At Three Mile Creek there’s a bend in the stream near a willow tree, and past the bend there’s a sort of drainpipe that funnels the rain and snowmelt from a nearby suburb. Everyone knows about the pipe.

  “Where are we going?” In the basket in front of me, Jocelyn opened her purse and put on a pair of pink sunglasses. She looked like a bug, I thought. Like a pink mosquito.

  Truth #45: When my mother asked me where I’d been that afternoon back in February, I told her I’d been working on a research paper. “I was at the library,” I said. Then I cupped my hands over my mouth because I thought I was going to be sick.

  “Thea?” Jocelyn asked.

  “Oh,” I said. “We’re going to the boardwalk.”

  We cruised past the post office and past DiCamillo’s Deep-Fried Donuts and the big old rooming houses (ROOMS TO LET) with the old women rocking in the shade of their second-floor porches.

  “I thought we weren’t supposed to be riding around town,” Jocelyn said.

  I looked at her back while I pedaled, at the bony vertebrae like a row of marbles at the top of her spine. “Nenna basically told us to,” I said. “She gave us money. We could get some pizza. And I thought we could stop by that realty office and ask for a map. Maybe we can find out where twenty-one Bay is.”

  Jocelyn didn’t answer. We had reached the ramp. I could tell that my legs had gotten stronger; instead of getting off the trike to push, I kept pedaling. Two women stepped out of the way when I rang the bell.

  It was a perfect beach day for midsummer: the sky was wide and flat and blue, dotted with parasailors who lifted off awkwardly from the water like enormous birds. Jocelyn and I rode past the house of mirrors, where a line of people clutching yellow tickets waited their turns to stumble toward each other’s reflections. We rode past a caricature artist—a man who turned ordinary-looking people into strange-looking creatures with eyebrows like forests and teeth the size of playing cards. We rode past the taffy-pulling machine, the thick loops of candy like smooth sweet yarn, and into the revolving shadow of the Ferris wheel.

  “There it is,” I said. I stopped and tied up the trike.

  “Port Harbor Realty.” I helped Jocelyn climb out of the basket (she was moving almost as slowly as Granda), then steered her through the human traffic on the boardwalk. The office was closed. A paper clock hanging in the window said, WILL RETURN AFTER LUNCH AT 1 P.M.

  “You’ve got to be kidding.” I shaded my eyes and peered into the office through the glass. “What time is it now? I think it’s just after eleven-thirty. How long can it take them to eat lunch?”

  Jocelyn ran a gloved finger along the window.

  “I guess we’ll have to come back later,” I said. “Do you want something to eat?”

  “No.”

  “Should we play Skee-Ball?”

  Jocelyn turned toward the booth where the turbaned man was painting rice. What was the point of having a grain of white rice with your name written on it? “I want to ask for something,” she said.

  I noticed the wrinkle on her smooth pale forehead and realized that she wasn’t looking at the name-on-rice man but at Madam Carla, whose tiny booth was next to his. “Let’s not waste Nenna’s money,” I said. “Wouldn’t you rather get a piece of pizza? Or ride the bumper cars?”

  “I’m not hungry.” The silver coins on Madam Carla’s sign were shivering their message: KNOW YOUR FUTURE. “I need to ask her something,” Jocelyn said.

  It was strange, I thought: from a distance, Madam Carla had seemed unusual and mysterious. But once we were seated at her table, she looked like an ordinary tired person, with a narrow face and plain dark hair in a ponytail. She wore a long-sleeved black T-shirt that was tattered at the wrists. Without the rings on her fingers and the heavy makeup around her eyes, she would have looked like my math teacher, Mrs. Sullivan. I almost expected her to ask me how to multiply fractions.

  “Five dollars each,” she said. “Ten for the two of you.” She didn’t talk like a fortune-teller. She talked like a person from New Jersey. My mother always said that almost everyone from the state of New Jersey had a personal hatred for the vowel.

  Jocelyn used her own money—her allowance—and insisted on buying a fortune for each of us. She counted out six wrinkled bills and four dollars in change, carefully stacking the coins on the table. Madam Carla didn’t count them; she swept the money into a metal coin box as if performing a magic trick. “You two are related.” She was looking at me. “But you aren’t sisters.”

  “We’re cousins,” I told her. My legs were sticking to the vinyl chair.

  “And you’re here on vacation.”

  Jocelyn gave a little jolt of surprise, but I wasn’t impressed. Ninety-nine percent of Port Harbor was in town on vacation.

  “I think there’s something you’d like to know,” Madam Carla said. “Who’s first?”

  Jocelyn kept her gloved hands in her lap. I nudged her, but she didn’t move, so I said, “I am,” and I put my hand palm up on the table, where it lay on the black wrinkled fabric like a fish on a plate.

  I thought again about Liam’s description of a tidal wave, all that water churning and dragging itself out to sea.

  “What’s your name?” Madam Carla flattened my fingers gently. She traced a circle near my thumb.

  “Thea,” I said.

  “Theodora,” she said, as if correcting me. “A long life.” Her breath smelled like cinnamon. “Good health—that’s very clear—and probably a number of children, eventually. Two or three boys, I would say, if I were guessing.” Her fingers moved lightly across my palm. “I see a successful marriage, as far as those things go. And a career in—what?” She looked up. Her eyes were gray, the color of stones at the bottom of a stream. “It could be advertising or journalism. Something that requires originality and imagination.” She was studying my hand, smoothing my fingers. “But over here, this is unusual.”

  A man with an obscene word on his T-shirt stopped beside the table.

  “It looks almost like grief,” Madam Carla said. “I’m seeing—”

  “How long does this take?” the T-shirt man asked.

  Madam Carla slowly lifted her head and glared at him. “There’s no rushing the future,” she said when he stalked away.

  I had already pulled my hand off the table. “Jocelyn can have her turn now,” I said.

  Madam Carla raised one eyebrow; she didn’t look like Mrs. Sullivan anymore. Jocelyn took off her gloves.

  It had been a while since I’d seen her hands. Her skin was thick and looked painful. Her right hand was worse; it was callused and stained, the rash like a rough pink continent. Jocelyn stared at her lap. She was so short that her feet didn’t touch the ground.

  “Here are difficulties,” Madam Carla
said. I wasn’t sure whether she was talking about Jocelyn’s future or about her rash. She touched Jocelyn’s fingers. She told her something about traveling to foreign lands and falling in love during some kind of harvest. It sounded like a fortune that anybody might have found in a fortune cookie.

  I was wondering if Jocelyn’s hand might be too hard to read. “You wanted to ask her something,” I said, nudging my cousin. “You should go ahead and ask.”

  Jocelyn mumbled.

  “I don’t think she can hear you,” I said.

  Jocelyn spoke up. “I said, I want you to wait for me over there.” She pointed to the custard booth.

  “Me? You don’t want me to sit here?”

  “I’ll come and get you,” Jocelyn said.

  I opened my mouth to object. Then I unstuck my legs from the vinyl chair and walked into the shade near the custard booth, where the man in the obscene T-shirt was complaining about the size of his waffle cone.

  Truth #46: If you’re going to drive a car across it, ice should be at least eight inches thick. If you’re going to walk on it, you need four inches.

  Jocelyn took a long time. I strained my ears. She and Madam Carla were talking and talking.

  Finally Jocelyn stood up and put on her gloves. Madam Carla seemed to close up shop. She picked up her coin box, tucked it into a backpack, and wandered off in the direction of the Ferris wheel.

  “How did it go?” I asked Jocelyn. “I guess you got your money’s worth.”

  She nodded.

  “Did you ask her where twenty-one Bay is?” I asked. “Or how we can find it?”

  “I didn’t need to ask her that,” Jocelyn said. “I already know where it is.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  “What do you mean, you know where it is?” I asked. “How long have you known?”

  Jocelyn walked away, in the direction of the realty office. The paper clock was still in the window.