by Lois Ruby
“It’s my birthday. Can’t I go for a walk without being interrogated like a criminal?” Doesn’t that sound familiar! And a tad too snappish, so I grab up a few plates to put in the cupboard. Best way to distract a parent—offer to help.
Mom backs off. “Sure, baby. Newly minted twelve-year-olds are entitled to disappear for a while. Uh-oh, brace yourself, here comes the gang.”
The boys burst through the door. Patrick, alias Trick, is fourteen and has his phone blasting the Atlanta Braves game. Baseball is his life, though our older sister Franny says he couldn’t hit a ball with a bat the size of a tree trunk.
“Yo,” he says, ear pressed to his phone.
“Turn it down, Trick.” Mom tells him that every time he walks into a room during baseball season.
“Ooh, yeah, pie!” Scooter yelps, licking his lips gecko-like. Scooter’s amazing. He has a really tough time with asthma and we never know when he’s going to be hit with an attack. The doctor says he’ll outgrow it eventually, but while he’s waiting for that to happen, he never complains. We all try not to fuss over him, which is why Trick now holds Scooter off with a fork aimed at his heart.
“Me first, I’m older,” Trick says. Raspberry goo oozes out as he digs his fork into the uncut part of the pie.
“Patrick, manners!” Mom yells. “And turn that phone down a decibel or two.”
I send a message toward Scooter in pantomime and eye flares: need to talk to you. He nods. Message received. He’s a year younger than I am, and my favorite in the family, although we’re not supposed to have favorites.
Franny swirls into the kitchen with Gracie on her hip. “Ugh, that awful bloody-looking pie again?”
Mom says, “Be nice, Frances, it’s your sister’s birthday.”
“Just sayin’.” Franny is seventeen, so everything annoys her. Gracie hangs off Franny’s left arm, stretching her grubby index finger dangerously close to the pie.
“Don’t you dare, baby,” Mom warns, offering her the dripping chocolate ice cream scoop, which she licks like a lollipop. Then Gracie crawls under the table where she’ll probably untie everyone’s shoelaces. Her idea of a giggle riot.
Last in is Dad, who tosses his car keys on the counter. He won’t be able to find them tomorrow because the counter is cluttered with sticky juice glasses and sippy cups, a ripped Cheerios box, guppy food, two avocado plants, and Trick’s mitt. If I had to describe our house in one word, it would be stuffed.
Dad beams at us, his lips wide and pink between his mustache and his beard. He’s Mr. Major Family Man, happy with all the chaos of a tribe of kids, from seventeen to two. Which sounds like the score of one of Trick’s baseball games.
When Franny’s in a good mood, she calls me Hannah-in-the-Middle, like Jack-in-the-Box, which I hate. (And how did Cady actually hear that?)
“Do you feel like the middle button?” Franny once asked me, and I knew just what she meant. I’m the middle button on the back of a sundress that you can’t quite reach from the top down, or from the waist up. I couldn’t see the back of that awful dress Cady was wearing, but I’ll bet it had about fifteen buttons all the way down her back.
Wait, did I truly see a girl in the forest? I think so. Otherwise, how could I picture her so clearly now, with those old-lady lace-up shoes that seemed so odd for a girl my age? And once again her loneliness sweeps through me like a chilly breeze. If anybody ever needed a friend …
I’m lucky. I have Luisa and Sara, but I know them so well that I can predict what they’re going to say, like when you see a time-delay on TV and lip-read the words before you hear them. Boring. I’ve gone to schools with the same kids forever, in preschool, elementary, and now middle school. Boring. I’ve lived here in Dalton all my life. I have been exactly nowhere. Oh, yeah, across the border into Tennessee to visit Ruby Falls, which is forty miles away. Boring. My family’s okay, I love them all, but they’re so themselves. Nothing new ever happens, especially when you’re the Middle Button and practically invisible in your own family. I’m feeling … What am I feeling? Sorry for myself, on my own birthday. Super bored and, let’s face it, a little bit lonely. Like Cady.
Her words echo in my mind, as though she’s whispering them over my shoulder: I have been waiting for you … waiting for you … waiting for you.
But maybe it’s the other way around. Have I been waiting for her?
“Hannah? You tuned out there for a minute,” Dad says, and Mom automatically puts her palm to my forehead to check for fever. That is so predictably mother.
Franny scans the whole crew around our huge oak table as she jams her pie plate into the dishwasher. “Only seventy-two more days until I. AM. OUT. OF. HERE. I could die of boredom before I get to college.”
Trick shouts, “Ouch! Quit biting my foot, Gracie. You think you’re a cocker spaniel?”
Dad reaches under the table and swoops Gracie up onto his lap. She’s cute with her little tufts of straight black hair scrunched into two ponytail horns, but she’s as spoiled as last month’s milk.
Mom wipes her soapy hands down her sides and shouts to Dad over all the voices, “Our middle girl is twelve now, honey. Remember the day she was born? What a scorcher it was, and our AC had just gone out.” She glances over at me. “Hannah went for a long walk by herself tonight. After dark.” She’s worried because there’s nowhere to walk around here for an hour except in the woods.
Dad says, “Hannah, you weren’t tramping around in the forest, were you? I’ve warned you and Scooter about that.”
“Who, me?” Scooter says, striking an innocent pose.
Franny groans. “Don’t tell me it’s time for the Forest Primeval warning.”
She fakes a vampirey voice: “You chickadees shall wander forever in the woods, on a night as black as tar, with grapefruit-sized hail pounding through the trees … ”
“Wouldn’t that hail turn the black night white?” Trick asks.
“Details. And hooting owls and swooping hawks … ”
“Caw! Caw!” Scooter hollers.
I’m thinking of the “Tyger Tyger” poem. “And suddenly the tiger leaps out … ”
“Alfonso, that’s the tiger’s name,” Scooter declares.
“He’s a Bengal tiger from India, you moron,” says Trick.
Gracie asks, “Is he a girl?”
“Sure, why not?” Franny continues, “So, Lakshmee, the Bengal she-tiger, leaps out from behind a towering pine tree … ”
Trick jumps in, “And bares her teeth, those razor-sharp fangs … ”
Gracie’s searching Dad’s face for reassurance. They’re all thinking forest and tiger, and fangs, but they’re not thinking Cady, like I am.
I flash Scooter a signal. He swipes his finger through the pie plate and sucks off raspberry goo. “Okay if I go upstairs? I’m on the last chapter of a Percy Jackson book.”
“Sure, kid,” Mom says. She calls us baby and kid a lot because otherwise she runs through all our names until she gets to the right one.
“I’m going up for a shower before Franny hogs the bathroom,” I quickly add, and I follow Scooter out of the kitchen. The noise behind us, with everybody talking at once, is like a badly tuned school orchestra.
Scooter and I aren’t halfway up the winding stairs to our third-floor rooms when I say, “You’ll never in a zillion years guess what happened in the forest tonight.”
“Uh, a gigantic cigar-shaped space capsule landed in Pukey Pond?”
“Not even close. I met this girl about my age. I didn’t see her or hear her, she just suddenly appeared. Scared me so much my heart skipped about eighty beats. She said her name’s Cady, and then she just … vanished!”
Scooter stops in the middle of the stairs. “Sure, I’m gonna believe that.” He’s a doubter, but he’s a nice one. He sits on the top step, catching his breath. “Okay, go ahead. Describe this mysterious Cady person.”
“Old-fashioned, with shoes that you’d see on a covered-wagon girl who’s pick
ing wild onions out on the prairie. And she’s chalky-pale, like she doesn’t get out much.”
“You saying she lives in the forest like a wild animal?”
“Maybe.” Though she mentioned school. Hmm. The saying raised by wolves crosses my mind. I describe the long dress, the tree twigs in her hair, her eyes that change from dim to burning-bright. Like the tiger.
Scooter’s eyes are closed, as if he’s letting me paint a picture in his head. He has a great imagination. He spends a lot of time reading because his asthma acts up when he runs around too much, and then he doubles over, gasping for breath.
“I’m starting to see her.” He’s scanning the image in his mind.
“Then maybe you’re ready for this. She knew my name.”
“Wow, that’s creepy!”
“That’s not all.”
His blue eyes pop open expectantly.
I hesitate, because once the next words are out of my mouth, Scooter and I are in this together up to our nostrils. “She told me, ‘I’ve been waiting for you, Hannah-in-the-Middle.’ ”
“Whoa!”
“Whoa for sure. So, you have to come with me and see her for yourself.”
“Tomorrow after lunch. Because p.m. is better than a.m. for my stupid lungs.”
“Okay, but you can’t tell the family.”
He laughs. “You kidding? They’ll think I’m crazy like you.”
Scooter and I can’t go to the woods after lunch on Friday because it’s Mom and Dad’s weekly date for lunch and a movie, so I’m stuck babysitting Gracie. But at least it’s for actual money. No way I’m passing that up. My piggy bank needs dollars to buy this purse in the shape of a blue dolphin. Blue is so my color, and dolphins are awesome, super-intelligent creatures. If I weren’t a human, I’d want to be a dolphin—except I’m not a great swimmer.
So it isn’t until Saturday that we can head out. We plan to leave early. I love getting up at six a.m., when the whole day spreads out in front of me full of possibilities—or it does when I have friends around. Sigh. Anyway, this is the hour when normal people turn over in bed and hit the snooze button to catch a few more snores, but I’m ready to conquer a beautiful summer day. If we’re lucky, the temperature won’t climb higher than ninety in the shade. Scooter’s feeling great this morning. Whatever was growing yesterday was washed out by the heavy rain, so his allergies haven’t kicked up. We’re dressed in shorts and tees, spritzed with bug spray, smeared with sunblock, and we’re tiptoeing out the back door to find Cady.
“Bet she won’t be there,” he says, hustling to keep up with me. “Bet you made her up just to freak me out.”
“Would I do such a thing?”
“Yeah!”
We’ve reached the fallen log that blocks easy access to the forest, and we practically leap over it. “A little farther,” I say. “Just keep walking. Here, this is where I saw her sitting on that stone bench right in front of—”
“Nobody’s on the bench.”
“Let’s keep going, maybe she’s doing some exploring,” I tell Scooter. “Cady?” I call loud enough to knock a bird out of a tree. “Caa-dee! My brother Scooter’s here to meet you.” We look behind thick tree trunks and bushes in case she’s hiding from us as a joke to pop out and yell boo! I hate when someone sneaks up on me. Shading my eyes, I gaze off beyond Moonlight Lake, hoping for some movement in the brush that isn’t a wild animal. I’m sure she’ll be running toward us in those old-lady shoes. I’m determined to prove to Scooter, and myself, that I’m not a lunatic, and Cady actually exists.
“It’s bear cub season,” Scooter says. “If a mama bear spots us, she’ll go wild to protect her babies, like our fierce mom does. Say a brown bear smells bacon on us and we’re the first fresh meat she sees smack out of three months of hibernation, and she weighs, like, a thousand pounds. We’re just peanuts and Cracker Jacks to her and her cubs.”
“You are such a pessimist, Scooter. Why did I even bring you here?”
“To meet the imaginary Cady,” he reminds me, arching his skinny eyebrows.
Cady, who is nowhere in sight. I call her name again, north, south, east, and west, but there’s no response except for two round eyes peering out at us from inside a tree burrow. Cady? Stuffed in a tree? No! It’s a raccoon, curious about us giant creatures tramping around in his forest.
My shoulders sag. “We might as well go home,” I say in defeat.
“Guess that bear’s gonna have to find some other junk food,” says Scooter. “Cady might be a tasty snack.”
Scooter’s the only one who can tease me this way without my getting mad.
“Come on, Hannah, let’s go home and have breakfast,” Scooter says, and he leads me, a little too eagerly, out of the forest. We’ve been here so many times. This time? Scooter won’t admit it, but I think he senses something creepy in the forest this morning, like I do.
I just wish Cady had shown up so I could introduce her to Scooter. He and I are really close, which doesn’t stop me from playing tricks on him, so no wonder he thinks I made Cady up. The clouds have rolled in, and we’re fixin’ for a big old summer storm. Second time this week. We make it into the mudroom of Nightshade just as the sky cracks open.
If you like a clashing, crashing thunderstorm, which I do, the best place to watch it happen is from Dad’s studio. I love the sound of the rain pinging the roof and pattering on the windows on all three sides. Dad’s deep in concentration working on elevation details for a public library he’s designing in Polk County. I’m tracing the rain streaking down the window, my finger guessing which direction it’s going to jump to.
There’s a knock on Dad’s door. “Joe? Sally sent me right up to have a look at that balcony.” It’s Mac Mosely, a contractor whose carpentry crew does a lot of building for Dad. “Couldn’t have picked a worse day, all that cloudburst out there, but at least I can eye the structure and come back when it’s dried up.”
Mr. Mosely makes me think of a flagpole. He’s more than six and a half feet tall, with a thick mop of gray hair that’s waving in the breeze of the air conditioner. Looking out through the glass door while sucking on a toothpick, he says with a hearty chuckle, “That platform sure is leanin’ south. All that water’s not helpin’.”
Mr. Mosely inspects the glass door leading to the balcony and pries a fat blade between the wall and the doorframe. “Painted shut, mebbe six layers deep, some of ’em going back years.” He keeps prying and chipping. Paint slivers dot the floor. “Somebody meant for this door to be shut up for good, Joe. Under all that paint, there’s nails about every two inches. Gonna have to get my guys out here to rip the door out and rebuild the whole dang balcony, else it could snap off like a dead twig and mash anything below it. A kid playing in the yard, worst case.”
Dad and Mr. Mosely work out the details of when and how much—busy summer, can’t get to it for a couple of weeks, it’ll cost lots of money—while I’m left wondering why the people who lived in Nightshade before us were so determined that no one would ever go out that door. Was that after the balcony started leanin’ south, or before?
Later, when Mr. Mosely’s gone, it’s still pouring out there and the house is unusually quiet. Trick went to a movie—some gross thing I wouldn’t be caught dead at—and Gracie’s riding her wooden tricycle up and down the second floor hallway. Mom believes in projects during the summer—no daytime TV and no hanging out on the computer, even on rainy days. She’s got Scooter and me set up with a dorky art activity involving colored kaleidoscopic stencils and multicolored tapes, so I know we’ll be bored to death in ten minutes, max.
If I can’t go back to the forest, I’m itching to stir up some ruckus. “I have a diabolical idea, Scooter!”
“Oh, great,” he mutters, but I know he’s game for anything I toss his way.
“You know how we’re always saying that Nightshade is haunted?” Not that I believe in ghosts, but it’s a great way to put some chill into a day muggy enough for steam to form
inside our windows. I stash Mom’s art project stencils in a box and lead Scooter to the broom closet on the second floor. “Scooter Flynn, put this day down in history. I’m telling you, this is where the Ghost of Nightshade lives.”
He looks at me as if I’ve grown a second nose on my chin. “Give it up, Hannah. You’ve already tried to fool me with that Cady thing.”
“I wasn’t tricking you. And this is way different.” I throw open the closet door. “Ta-da!”
He peers into the dark mess of mops and buckets, smelling like a sickly mixture of dust and ammonia. “I don’t see any ghosts.”
“You don’t see them because they’re invisible. They’re out to lunch now, but I know where they hide.”
“No way.”
“Oh, yeah? Come in here.” I shove aside the sweeper and oily rags and lead Scooter into the murky cave of the closet. “Watch this.” I mash a tiny button, and the inside wall slides open. “Told you!”
“Holy cow, Hannah.” Scooter sticks his head into the space behind the wall. “How did you find this?” his echoey voice asks. “But it doesn’t prove anything about ghosts or ghouls.”
“Maybe not, but I sure had you going there, didn’t I?”
He backs out of the secret space, and scrunches up his lips as if he’s about to kiss a tarantula. “Nah, not even for a second.”
Then I hear the whistly sound in his chest. “Lotta dust or mold in there,” he says shallowly.
We back out of the closet, tripping over Gracie on her tricycle.
She grins. “Gracie hide there, too!”
“No, Gracie, too spooky,” I warn her, slamming and re-locking the closet door. Scooter knocks toys to the floor and drops into the rocking chair. Most people breathe without thinking about it, in and out, quiet and smooth. For Scooter, it’s different. His shoulders rise and fall as he struggles for air.
“You okay? I’ll get Mom.” Her office door is open a little. The clattering of her printer says she’s working on her “Dear Bettina” column, which means Do Not Disturb Unless the House is Engulfed in Flames.