“Can’t you play something I like?” he asks.
I stop playing and stare at a worn, metal emblem screwed above the keyboard. The label identifies the piano as a LESTER CABINET GRAND. I turn toward my father. “Lester wants Beethoven.”
“Lester doesn’t pay for your lessons.”
“Fine,” I say again. I improvise a bluesy, eight-to-the-bar number that, I have to admit, sounds great because Lester is more honky-tonk riffraff than concert hall diva. When I finish, I spin around on the bench and face the sofa. “Ta-da.”
“Thank you,” says Dad. “In exchange, I will now share something with you.” He lifts the shoe box off the floor.
“What’s in the box?” asks Daniel.
“Ellie’s mother,” Dad says simply.
Daniel scoots to the other end of the couch.
“Relax,” Dad says. “She’s not actually in the box.”
Daniel still looks nervous.
“She hasn’t been in this house for a very long time,” Dad adds.
“What are you talking about?” I ask.
Dad drums his fingers on the lid of the box. “There’s stuff in here for you.”
“What kind of stuff?” I ask.
“Photos, postcards, assorted junk.”
“From my mother?”
Dad leans forward and gives me the box.
Daniel slides back toward the middle of the sofa. “Did she leave all this for Ellie in her will or something?”
“I don’t know about any will,” says Dad. “The box arrived a little over a year ago. I assume that Korky sent it.”
I look up at my father. “You’ve had this for over a year?”
“She wasn’t supposed to send you anything,” Dad tells me. “She was supposed to come and talk to you herself. Your mother and I had a deal.”
“What kind of deal?”
Dad stands and paces the room. “When Korky left, I made her promise that she would not be sending you millions of little cards and presents and toys.”
“What’s wrong with cards and presents and toys?” Daniel asks.
“Ellie would have grown up thinking one of her parents was some kind of magic gift-giving angel, and the other one was me.” Dad shakes his head. “I wasn’t going to let that happen.”
“Congratulations,” I say. “Goal achieved.”
Dad stops pacing, then sits beside me on the piano bench. “If Korky wanted to say something, she was supposed to come back and say it in person.”
“That was the deal?” I say.
“Did she ever come back?” asks Daniel.
“Yes, that was the deal,” Dad says. “No, she never came back.”
I consider the shoe box. “Apparently, she still had something to say.”
“I think she wanted you to know about her band,” Dad tells me.
“What band?” I give the box a little shake. “What else is in here?”
“Compact discs,” says Dad. “A few cassettes.”
“You already opened it?” I ask.
“I didn’t trust her,” Dad confesses.
“What could she send in a shoe box?” I ask.
“Scorpions,” says Daniel. “Fire ants. Poison dart frogs.” He gives an involuntary shudder. “Naked mole rats.”
Dad says nothing, but he probably had similar thoughts, so I decide to let it go. “What did you say about a band?” I ask.
“Korky always dreamt of being in a rock and roll band,” Dad explains. “Apparently, her dream came true.”
“Ellie’s mom was a rock star?” Daniel’s eyes go wide.
Dad shakes his head. “That’s not what I said.”
Daniel points at the box in my hands. “Open it!”
I slide off the piano bench and onto the floor in front of the couch. Daniel sits with me on the carpet. Slowly, I lift the lid off the shoe box. Inside, a balled-up leopard-print scarf and a pair of dark, cat-eye sunglasses sit atop a bunch of plastic cassette tapes and shiny CDs.
“Except for a few souvenirs,” says Dad, “it’s mostly music.”
I grab the discs and tapes and hand them to Daniel. He reads the names of strange bands and unfamiliar singers out loud. “The Bangles. Cyndi Lauper. Martha and the Muffins.”
I look up at my dad. “Martha and the Muffins?”
He shrugs. “Cyndi Lauper was her favorite.”
“Kirsty MacColl,” Daniel continues. “Haysi Fantayzee, Curiosity Killed the Cat, Kajagoogoo, THE Jam.”
I pull another CD out of the box. “This one’s from a group called Men without Hats. What happened to their hats?”
Daniel holds up a tape labeled A FLOCK OF SEAGULLS. “Maybe a flock of seagulls took them?”
“That’s all music from the 1980s,” Dad explains. “Korky loved that stuff. She must have wanted to share it with you.”
“Why?” I ask.
“People like to share things with their kids, Ellie.”
“My mother has been gone for my whole life, and now I get a year-old shoe box two weeks after she’s dead. You call this sharing?”
“I didn’t force her to stay away,” Dad tells me. “She did that herself.”
I point at the music collection that Daniel and I have spread out on the floor. “It looks like she was trying to come back.”
“By sending Men without Hats?” Dad asks, clearly annoyed.
“Seriously,” says Daniel. “What happened to their hats?”
“Nobody cares about the hats!” Dad and I snap at the same time.
From the tone of Dad’s voice, I suddenly understand that my father might still have feelings for this woman I’ve never even met. I suppose I should feel some sympathy for his loss. Instead, I feel like I’ve stuck my hand on a live wire, and I can’t let go. “I think that my mother would have liked to meet me,” I inform my dad. “I think I would have liked to have known her. Thanks to you, that’s never going to happen.”
Dad stands and puts a hand on the piano top, which holds assorted photos and keepsakes, including a fat glass fish attached to a plaque that says BRUCE MAGARI AND ST. CORENTIN OF QUIMPER, OUR PATRON SAINTS OF SEAFOOD. It strikes me that none of this stuff suggests that I ever even had a mom. I could have been cloned.
“Ellie,” Dad says, “if it was up to me, she would have never left.”
“That’s nice, but it doesn’t make her any less gone.” I get to my feet and grab my sweatshirt. “Daniel and I have to go out,” I announce.
“We do?” says Daniel.
I kneel down to gather everything off the carpet and shove it back into the shoe box. “We’re going to see Anya Flowers.”
Daniel glances between Dad and me. “When?”
I stand, pull out my phone, and check the time. “At exactly nineteen minutes past six o’clock, and guess what.” I head for the door. “We’re right on time.”
Daniel catches up with me across the street. I’m sitting on the back bumper of his mother’s old hatchback with a shoe box in my lap and a sweatshirt over my arm. Daniel leans against a rusty fender. “It’s cold out,” he says. “Put your sweatshirt on.”
“It’s not my sweatshirt.” It’s true. My father gets shirts out of the lost-and-found box at Trinity College’s cafeteria. This one features the school’s mascot, a phoenix, which represents beauty, luck, resurrection, and Harry Potter.
“Just put it on,” Daniel tells me.
I pull the thing over my head. “Can we visit Anya Flowers now?”
“Do you even know where she lives?”
“No idea,” I admit.
Daniel sighs. “Follow me.” He stands, steadies himself against the side of the car, then walks up his driveway and toward the garage door that’s stuck halfway down.
Watching Daniel walk away, it appears that he’s favoring his leg more than usual. “Are you okay?” I ask.
“My ankle’s sore from falling down the bleachers,” he admits.
His leg must really hurt, because Daniel hates to let anything
slow him down. Seriously, if he impaled himself on a Viking sword, he’d go for a bike ride, shop for groceries, then help Dad dig a barbecue pit before he asked for a Band-Aid.
I remain at the end of the driveway and stare at Daniel until he finally turns around.
“Really,” he says before I can speak again. “I’m fine.” Daniel tries to duck beneath the half-open garage door. Rather than slip into the garage, he smacks his head on the door’s bottom rail. “I meant to do that.”
“Nice job, then.”
At school, our friends think Daniel and I get along like an old married couple. While it’s true that I love Daniel very much, it’s also true that I know exactly what it’s like to live with a stubborn mule. In other words, being married to Daniel would be like living with my father for the rest of my life. I don’t see that happening.
I tuck my shoe box under one arm and follow Daniel. Inside the garage, we maneuver past a couple of rusty lawn mowers, an old charcoal grill, and three or four snow shovels, including one that has a picture of Mickey Mouse on the blade. Daniel leads us to the garage’s back door, which opens into his yard covered in autumn-brown grass and papery, dry leaves.
“Where are we going?” I ask.
Daniel points across Rockhill Memorial Cemetery, which runs alongside all the backyards on this side of our street. “Anya lives on the other side of the graveyard.”
I consider the cemetery, currently bathed in a waist-high mist and an orange, ghostly glow from the fat, October moon rising in the east. “You seriously want me to hike across an ancient burial ground beneath a full moon just a few days before Halloween and a few days after I inherited a dead mom?”
“The moon’s not full, the cemetery’s not that old, and more people are attacked by squirrels than by dead people.” Daniel turns and heads toward the graveyard. “There’s no need to worry. Most of the squirrels are already hibernating.”
I lift the shoe box. “What about this?”
Daniel glances back over his shoulder. “Leave it in the garage.”
I duck back into the garage, shove my carton behind the Mickey Mouse shovel, then turn and catch up with Daniel.
Maybe Daniel’s leg really doesn’t hurt that badly because he and I practically sprint through the mist and across the cemetery. Soon, we’re walking past tall, fancy houses and redbrick mansions that have things like cupolas and porches and roofs made out of slate. It’s hard to believe that the only thing separating our neighborhood from this one is a small field filled with grave markers and dead people.
I glance at a gigantic home decked out with hundreds of tiny carved pumpkins, several well-dressed scarecrows, and a complicated Halloween lighting display that includes spooky music, orange lasers, and a fog machine. Those decorations probably cost more than Dad would need to buy his first pizza truck.
Daniel stops in front of a tidy, green cottage-style home with a couple of lit jack-o’-lanterns on either side of the front door. “I think this is it,” he tells me.
“You think? You’re not sure?”
Daniel takes out his phone and pokes at the screen for a moment. “I’m sure.”
“How do you know?”
“Pickler’s intuition.”
“What’s a pickler?” I ask.
“It’s what you call a piccolo player.”
“No,” I say. “It’s not.”
Daniel rolls his eyes. “As if a glockler would know.”
“Has anybody mentioned that you’re annoying?” I ask him.
He gives me a grin. “I don’t recall it ever coming up.”
Together, we approach the cottage’s front door, which is set beneath a wide, white archway. Long panes of beautiful stained glass featuring painted mermaids and tropical fish cover the top half of the door. A fat, silver doorknob shaped like a seashell completes the effect. I point at a bunch of tiny white stones set into the granite pavers at our feet. The stones spell out a phrase. Witamy w Cyrku. “What do you think that means?” I ask.
“It’s Tibetan,” Daniel says confidently.
I know he’s lying. “Really?”
He nods. “It says ‘Daniel is not annoying.’ ” He pushes the doorbell button, and a cascade of chimes and chords worthy of the London Symphony Orchestra echoes from inside the house.
“Do you think Anya is rich?” I ask.
“I’ve never really thought about it,” says Daniel.
“News flash,” I say. “She’s rich.”
Before Daniel can reply, Anya Flowers opens the door. She’s wearing an oversize, pink sweatshirt over a pair of black leggings. She’s even taller and prettier than I remember. “That was fast,” she says to Daniel.
“What was fast?” I ask.
Anya turns to me. “Daniel texted to say you were coming over.”
“When did he do that?” I ask.
“About five seconds ago.”
Daniel shrugs. “I don’t like to drop in unannounced.”
I point at the letters around our feet. “Is that Tibetan?”
Anya looks down and laughs. “It’s Polish. It means ‘Welcome to the Circus.’ ”
“It looks Tibetan,” says Daniel.
“I was born in the Sichuan province of China,” says Anya. “Sichuan borders Tibet, but my family is part Polish. I’m adopted.”
I don’t know if there is a correct response to this information. “Congratulations?”
Anya laughs again. “Come in.”
We follow her into a high-ceilinged living room where a baby grand piano sits in front of a fieldstone fireplace. Books and paintings and expensive-looking knickknacks fill built-in shelves that surround us. At the same time, photos and old magazines and framed preschool artwork make the room feel homey and comfortable. A finger painting propped in the center of the mantel shows a little girl holding hands with two stick-figure adults. “Is that you?” I ask.
Anya looks embarrassed. “I made that in kindergarten. My parents save everything.”
We continue to the kitchen, where a slender African American man and a round-faced white woman sit shoulder to shoulder staring at a million-piece puzzle spread across a large, wooden table. “These are my parents,” Anya says.
Daniel reaches out to shake hands with Anya’s father. “I’ve never met anybody from Poland before.”
Mrs. Flowers has a big laugh just like Anya’s.
“What’s so funny?” asks Anya’s dad. “It’s possible.”
“But not likely.” Mrs. Flowers has wide, round cheeks, a very light complexion, and a noticeable Eastern European accent. “Most Polish people look more like me than Dr. Flowers,” she explains.
“She means because he’s black,” says Anya.
“I bet they could figure that out,” suggests Dr. Flowers.
“This is Daniel and Ellie,” Anya tells her parents. “Can we hang out in my room?”
Her mom sighs. “That room is a disaster.”
“I’m sure it’s not that bad,” I say.
“It’s pretty bad,” says Anya.
“Enter at your own risk,” Dr. Flowers tells us.
A moment later, we’re in the middle of clothes and books and piles of papers. Several lamps, reading lights, assorted cables, and a laptop computer sit balanced on top of a desk near a dark green wall. Movie posters for The Life of Pi, Because of Winn-Dixie, and something called In the Realms of the Unreal hang above a bed that’s buried beneath magazines and notecards.
“This room really is a disaster,” Daniel observes.
Anya shoves stuff aside so Daniel and I can sit on the bed. “It only seems disorganized. I know where everything is.”
“Ellie wants to ask you about last night’s football game,” Daniel tells her.
Anya’s eyes go wide. “That was wild. But you were awesome,” she says to me. “I really thought Mr. DeGroot was going to kill Daniel. And then you threw that thing.”
“The glockenspiel,” I say.
“Did you get in troub
le?”
I nod. “Apparently, there’s a rule about throwing musical instruments at teachers.”
“It’s a sin to kill a glockenspiel,” says Daniel.
“I didn’t kill it,” I tell him.
Daniel raises an eyebrow. “It looked dead to me.”
“I caught the whole thing on video,” says Anya.
“That’s why we’re here,” I explain. “Sister Stephanie showed the video to my father and me this morning.”
Anya looks confused. “How did Sister Stephanie get my video?”
“She got the link somehow,” I say. “It caused a big commotion. Mr. DeGroot got fired.”
Anya takes a step back. “Wow.”
“He deserved it,” says Daniel.
“Sister Stephanie hopes you’ll take the video down,” I tell Anya.
“I can do that.” She grabs her laptop, sits on a pile of laundry, then punches a few keys. “There, it’s gone.”
“You deleted it?” I ask.
She shakes her head. “I just marked it private, so now I’m the only one who can get to the file.”
“Why were you taking video, anyway?”
Anya gestures at the computer on her lap and the equipment all around us. “I make movies.”
I look around, and Anya’s room starts to make a little more sense. It’s basically her own personal, Hollywood studio. Besides schoolwork, science fiction novels, a couple of American Girl dolls, plus a complete set of Wizard of Oz books, her shelves are filled with script-writing guides and filmmaking textbooks. Two spindly tripods, a long microphone stand, and several silver battery packs are strewn here and there. Pushpins hold index cards and long pieces of paper to the walls above the bed. Leaning closer, I see that the papers contain stick-figure drawings along with ideas for shots and scenes and dialogue.
“Those are my storyboards,” says Anya.
“What’s a storyboard?” I ask.
“They’re sort of like comic strips,” Anya explains. “Storyboards are how you turn words into pictures. Putting a set of pictures into the right order makes a scene, and organizing scenes is how you figure out your story. Once that’s done, the storyboard is your plan for shooting the movie.”
Daniel pulls a red high-top sneaker from beneath the pillow he’s leaning against. “Ellie’s trying to figure out a story,” he says.
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