by Phoebe Stone
“Reni,” I say to her, “oh, Reni.” I want to throw my arms around her. I want to call up Justin Bieber and beg him to write to her. But I can’t and I won’t. “Oh, Reni,” I say. “Oh, Reni. Reni. Reni.”
Chapter
Twenty-four
In the next couple of days, lots of memories of my mom begin coming back to me. It’s so strange. Sometimes I’ll text Reni about one of them. I’ll go, “Reni, I remember ice-skating with my mom. It was so cool.”
And Reni will text back, “Sick. You know how to ice-skate?”
Other times I’ll even text my grandpa. He loves that. He’s a whiz at texting. I’ll go, “Grandpa, I remember my mom taking me to school on my very first day of kindergarten.”
And he’ll text back, “Luv you.”
I do remember that first day at school. I was afraid to get in line with the others. There were so many kids. Everyone was bigger than me. My mom cried in a quiet way and then she said, “Go on, little penguin. Little penguin. I’ll be here at two thirty to pick you up.” Those steps across the playground were scary. The school building was enormous. The other children were so strong and noisy. Halfway there, I turned around to wave good-bye and saw my mother standing far away in the distance across the field of grass by the school yard. She was waving to me.
I could never be mad at my mother for what she did on Cinnamon Street. When it first happened and I had forgotten everything, counselors at school used to say to me, “Aren’t you angry at your mother for what she did?” And I would not understand. Angry? Mad? All I have to do now is think of her at the edge of that blowing green grass, standing there all by herself, waving to me. How small and cloudy she became. I knew then that I would lose her. I always knew I would lose her.
My grandma has been saying, “Some people are just not meant to be in this world. It’s just too much for them. Your mother was one of those people.” Believe it or not, it feels better to remember, even though it hurts, and sometimes when I’m alone in my room, I cry. And more memories come back to me and in some funny way, I feel I carry them around with me, as if my mom is a part of me now. Would Reni think this is psychotic of me? Henderson would understand. He would. I know he would.
Suddenly, I decide to get dressed and go up on the roof. My grandma says, “Honey, if you get up too early, you can have a relapse. Be easy on yourself. You’re mending.”
I have this image suddenly of me as a rag doll with all these mends all over my body. There’s a mend even over my heart. I think about my mother again. I reach out and take her hand in my mine. Seriously, is this psychotic of me? I want my mom. I want her back. I need her now. She walks with me toward the door. I feel her hand in mine.
I turn around and look at my grandma. “Can we call up those four goons who carried off my balance beam and tell them to bring it back?” I say.
My grandma looks at me, and her face kind of melts into pure breathtaking, dazzling relief.
I climb the stairs to the sky. Stepping out into the sunlight, the whole world is in bloom. It’s like while I slept, everything was changing. I can see lilac bushes and apple trees all over South Pottsboro, and every one of them is covered in flowers. For some reason this makes my eyes tear up again.
Mr. Anderson is up here planting his vegetable roof garden with twelve watermelon plants under plastic bubbles. I sit down on a chair in the sun and I nod to Mr. Anderson. He’s wearing green Farmer Jones type overalls and a farmer’s straw hat. “Louise, he’s a retired banker who always wanted to be a farmer,” my grandma said to me earlier. “Isn’t it wonderful! And even better, we all get free watermelons in late summer. That wasn’t in the condo documents!”
The sun feels sooo nice on my legs. I’m kind of thinking again about that letter Coach Tull wrote. I’m also thinking about what Henderson said about Merit Madson and Janie Brevette. Henderson is pretty smart. I suppose he could be right. If he’s right and they’re just jealous, then that’s not so bad.
While I’ve been sitting here, Mr. Anderson has set out all these little green, tender new watermelon plants. They look so eager somehow, all lined up in a row in the soil, like it’s their time now finally after millions and billions of years. It’s their moment on the roof. Wow. I wish I could tell Henderson that. I think he’s the only person in the world who wouldn’t go, “Huh?” when I said that. But now he’s gone away to writer’s camp and I can’t tell him anything. I feel like I’ve been wandering around lost in the snowy woods, completely baffled about what I feel. It was all buried under snow. I think then about the book Henderson sent me. Thumbelina: A Fairy Tale. The person who sent me that book knows me all the way down to my toes. And it’s Henderson.
Suddenly, I want to have one of those T-shirts made. It will say across the front in big letters, HEN, CAN YOU EVER FORGIVE ME FOR BEING SUCH AN IDIOT? I MISS YOU SO MUCH.
Chapter
Twenty-five
Right now I’m headed for South Middle and I do feel a little bit weak. It happens when you stay in bed for more than a week. Good thing I’m not trying to learn English. Go explain weak and week to a foreign exchange student. The first thing I’m planning to do is see Coach Tull. I just want to talk to him quietly. No big deal. I’m running, so that’s why there are tears in my eyes, again. For someone who’s hardly ever cried before, this month has been a revisiting time for me and my tear ducts. They have become overactive.
I’m thinking too about my balance beam. In my mind I’m at that yard sale and I’m saying to those four high school dorks that are carrying it off, “Wait a freaking minute. Put my freaking balance beam down. Put it down. It’s not for sale. Back off. Don’t touch that beam. It’s mine. It’s me and I don’t want to sell it.” Since I was sick and got better, I’m like Miss Healthy from planet Get Out Of My Face. I’m like Miss Sure-Foot from planet Take No Flack. Hello, Merit Madson. I’m on my way. I’m coming back. Are you ready to be reported for your terrible deeds?
That balance beam was the last present from my mom and my dad. The last thing they ever did together was to go to that factory and look at small balance beams for me. They went together. I wasn’t there, but I can imagine how it must have been. My mom may have had her arm locked in my dad’s as they walked toward the factory. She was smiling at him. She loved him so much. And there was something unspoken and important between them, and that something was me. Me on the gymnastic mat, bounding into a string of front walkovers or aerial cartwheels or standing upside down in a quiet handstand, balancing on my palms and fingers while my legs did a careful, planned, and ordered dance above me.
When I came home that day, there were ribbons tied around both ends of the beam, and a helium balloon attached to the middle that said, Happy Birthday, Louise! A balance beam is one of the heaviest things in the world. Henderson says that when you are on certain planets in outer space, the gravity is so strong that most people while visiting there would weigh thousands of pounds. I wonder what my balance beam would weigh on Jupiter or Mars. Millions and trillions of pounds? I can’t believe my parents went to that huge effort to buy me an enormous heavy balance beam and then, after all that, my dad could walk away and marry somebody else and have some other little girl call him Daddy.
I walk past all the kids on the steps at school. They’re in their little cliques. I know those circles and how they seal over, leaving no room to beg, steal, or borrow for an entrance. I know. Believe it or not, I want no entrance. In my mind I’m on the balance beam, walking carefully among them, looking for my reference point, each measured step bringing me closer to the moment when I will throw my body up into the air and then curl down into a tight spinning tuck and land squarely back on my two steady, reliable feet.
I push through the double doors and walk downstairs toward Coach Tull’s office. When I get there, I knock once and open the door.
Coach Tull is sitting at his desk with all this sports equipment piled around him. He’s got a basketball next to his computer, a pile of red and gre
en heavy rings scattered across his desk, like a child in a playpen with his toys around him. “Louise Terrace!” he says, drinking coffee from a scratched-up old jar. Coach T always drinks coffee from the same glass canning jar, and he used to put on blues music really loud while we practiced. He loves the blues. And he used to cook us all Chinese food on Tuesday night at his house. Seeing him there with his canning-jar coffee cup, everything comes back to me. “Whoa, what a surprise, Louise. What a surprise!”
I sit down beside his desk for a minute and I just look at my hands in my lap and say absolutely nothing for a minute. I’m afraid if I say one word, I will cry. “Louise, I’m so glad to see you. You can’t know how glad I am. To what do we owe the pleasure after all this time?” he says. I don’t answer. Then he says, “The team has not been the same since you left. You know that.”
“Thank you,” I say. Then I hand him a large envelope full of Merit Madson’s notes. “You can have a look at this in your spare time.”
“Does this mean you’re thinking of coming back?” he says, taking the large envelope and putting it on his desk. “I’m going to say that I would be very happy about that.”
“Thank you for your letter,” I finally say. “It helped. I have some things to tell you about some of the team members. It’s in the envelope. But thanks again for that letter. It made all the difference.”
“What letter?” says Coach Tull.
“The letter you wrote asking me to come in and talk to you. That’s why I’m here.”
“Louise, that’s not our policy. We’re not allowed to pressure students into sticking with a sport. We’re not allowed to write letters like that. The wish to be part of a team sport has to come from within the individual student. Not that I didn’t want to urge you back. But I couldn’t. You said you were bored with it. I took you at your word. I’ll be honest; you’re a wonderful gymnast, and with a little work, you could be looking at All State next year. Easy.”
“Wait a minute,” I say, looking at Coach Tull, at his fingers locked around his jar of coffee. “Wait a minute.” The room is turning over like I’m in an aerial cartwheel with nowhere to land or some kind of miscalculated butterfly twist that has left me falling from the high beam into a net below that catches me in its soft, web-like grip.
“Wait a minute. You didn’t write me a letter?”
“No,” says Coach Tull again, “but I am so glad you’re here.”
Chapter
Twenty-six
I am back in school and two weeks have gone by since I was sick. Spring is in full bloom now. The lilacs have come and are almost gone. They are my grandma’s favorite, and Grandpa has been bringing her a bouquet every chance he gets. He holds each bouquet behind his back and every time he presents one to her, she squeals with delight and acts surprised and touched, and it has been a very mushy spring all the way around.
Reni has been coming over to my house a lot more, which I appreciate, because I have stopped going over to the Elliots’ house altogether. I just don’t need to be there anymore. In my mind when I say that, my mother squeezes my hand. I’m not a sicko or a psychopath; I don’t mean she really does. It’s like an inner something that I can feel all through me.
And something else happened recently. It involves yet another letter. One day we received a long white envelope from the public health department in East Pottsboro. Grandma was doing her yoga on the living room rug when Grandpa brought the letter up and opened it. Grandma happened to be upside down standing on her head at the time, which is why her face turned the darkest red and why she fell over with a soft thud as he read the letter.
Dear Mr. and Mrs. Terrace,
I am happy to inform you that the wrappings around your furnace pipes at 42 South Pottsboro Avenue have tested negative for asbestos. They are made of a certain wool fiber which looks similar but is not at all asbestos. I am pleased to be the bearer of good news.
Sincerely yours,
Bill Britton
Pottsboro Public Health Officer
Department of Public Health
“But it’s not possible. I know what asbestos looks like,” said Grandma.
Grandpa smiled. “Baby doll, stick with me. We’re going places.”
As a result of these findings, Grandpa has been saying, “I told you so,” to everything. He’s been strutting around like Mr. Big Mouth from planet All Ego. He’s been doing more Tai Chi, hogging the living room, and he’s not going to eat health food anymore. He’s been cooking nonorganic chicken right under Grandma’s nose and he’s very happy about it. My grandma has been a bit more sedate these days, like a rabbit with her ears pinned back. She’s never been wrong before.
If you hang out with my grandma, you discover soon enough she is seriously weird. I mean, she knows things that normal people don’t. She’ll go, “Honey, you are going to want this sweater later today. Take it with you to school. I know you’ll need it.” And I’ll go, “No, Grandma, I’m not taking that thing. I’m fine.” And then around two o’clock in the afternoon, I’m freezing my butt off, thinking, “Way to go, Grandma.” How many times this spring did she say, “You know who I’m voting for? The youngster who you spend all your time with, the one you tell everything to, the one who looks at you with so much brightness…. Henderson? Henderson!” But that was back when I was lost under snow.
As for me, there have been some good things and some bad things. I cannot stop missing Henderson. I agree, it’s totally weird but it’s true. Every day I’m just waiting for him to come home. I hate that writers’ camp and I hate that girl poet whose name turned out to be Agarina. I have to agree with Grandpa; some of these names are over the top. Agarina sounds like aggravate. I hope Henderson notices that.
Reni tells me that Henderson has been going on picnics with her after rap poetry class. She’s been helping him edit his novel. No. No. I’m the one he reads to, not her. I can’t explain anything to Reni. This she will not understand at all. She’ll think I’m a lunatic. I think I’m a lunatic.
It took me a while to figure out who had written the letter from Coach Tull, since Coach Tull didn’t write it. Whoever wrote it was brilliant and daring and stupid all at the same time. “Who could that possibly be?” I said to myself. Then I got out the brown wrapping paper that my Thumbelina book came in. I compared the handwriting of the address on the package with the signature of Coach Tull at the bottom of the letter. The T in Terrace and the T in Tull were identical and written by the same hand. My bestest best. My Henderson sent them both. He sent them both. The floor just fell out from under me.
I wish I could say that this incident helped ease these feelings that have been confusing me and baffling me lately. But it didn’t help at all and only made things worse. Where Reni is concerned, I have become totally annoying, pestering her to death with questions about a brother she secretly wants to kill. Of course I can’t tell her how I feel. She will have me arrested for insanity. She’ll go, “Oh my gosh, you have truly gone over the edge, Thumbelina, just like Thelma and Louise.”
It’s a normal ho-hum evening. Grandpa is playing Trivial Pursuit, the sixties version, all by himself. My grandpa is a baby boomer. He went to Woodstock but got stuck in traffic that stretched for miles and never actually got in. He’s an expert on the 1960s. He is asking the questions out loud now and then answering them himself, questions like How many rings did the Beatle Ringo Starr wear on May 15, 1965?
Then out of the blue, my grandma says, “Honey, we haven’t measured you in a while. Let’s see if you’ve grown.” So I stand up against the wall, my heart beating inside me like a sorrowful drum all alone in the cave of my being. Will I ever grow up? Will I ever be big and tall? When I go back to the gymnastics team next fall and we do a team photo, will I be the medium-height girl smiling in the second row? Will I walk out one day into the world and know it is mine?
I lean my head back against the markings on the doorjamb, and my grandma slides a book across the top of my head. She mark
s the spot with a pencil and I stand away as she measures the mark.
“My goodness. You are exactly four feet seven and one-eighth inches. You’ve grown one-eighth of an inch! It’s not much, but it’s an indication, a good indication. I told you growing starts from the inside first, honey, and in that way, you’ve been growing like wildfire,” my grandma says, beaming at me like a clear, bright star in a galaxy I am just discovering.
Chapter
Twenty-seven
To be honest, there have been more letters in my life this month than I ever thought possible. Just when it seems the letters have come to an end, another one appears. This latest one is in Reni’s hand when I open the condo door. There she is in the hall, bouncing off the walls. She smiles down at me like she’s carrying a hidden jar of jelly beans. She’s hopping on one foot and then on the other. “I got a letter, Thumbelina. I got a letter!” she says, waving her hands around. “A letter from Justin Bieber. It happened. It’s a miracle!!”
Reni blows into the apartment like a gust of pink wind. Her face is blooming and radiant. She flies toward the couch and holds out the letter. “It came from Montana.”
“Justin Bieber lives in Montana?” I say.
“Well,” says Reni, “he’s probably hiding out from overzealous fans there. He’s probably camping out somewhere in the Rockies with a fake name to get a little peace and quiet.”
“In the Rockies? That sounds spooky,” I say.
“Read it, Thumbelina. Read the letter.”
I take a deep breath and I look up at Reni. “Come on, Reni, I want to know. Which one are you, Abbott or Costello?” I ask her. She laughs and I hook my arm in hers and then I open her letter. I read: