“How unfair could life be?” Constance sizzled inside as she began to cough from the smoke and stink. “I always listen to what they say, I always do what they ask me to do, and I help, and I always try, so hard but the boys get away with murder!”
It was true; Constance could see what the other kids couldn’t see — how things around her worked and how much Mom and Dad needed her help and relied upon her. But why was it her fault that things had gone so terribly wrong that afternoon?
Just then, Mr. Grover Gooseman, the planned recipient of The Busy Birders’ Gold Medal Giver award, keeled over and passed out from inhaling the noxious fumes, only to awaken a few minutes later, splashed with lavender lemonade, splattered with bird poop from the freaked-out feathered friends above him in the branches, and surrounded by hysterical lady birders who were clucking and squawking like a flock of panicked poultry.
As Mr. Gooseman was regaining consciousness, Chance, holding part of a spent fuse, emerged from under the deck with Chief. Both of the boys stood in front of Faye and her guests, utterly disheveled, reeking like rotten eggs, and shouting with glee.
“Mom, we were there! We did it! We did it, Mom!”
This was terribly incriminating, to say the very least. Chance and Chief looked for all the world as if they were bragging about having maliciously sabotaged the party, when, in truth, they were exalting over their entrance into Wonder!
It was then that the smoldering suspicions Ms. Beasley had harbored about the dangerously unconventional Faultsom family were ignited into flame. With her eyes watering and her voice quivering with fury she sputtered at Faye:
“Mrs. Faultsom, I came here open-minded about your irregular family life and very odd educational choices in good faith, offering your children an opportunity to make up for their lack of social normalization. With open arms the members of The Busy Birders welcomed you into our community only to be terrorized by your out-of-control children. As the director of the Dumble Street Center for Child Development and Life Preparation, it is clear to me that your family is unstable, and your children are at risk.”
She took a breath and, with a sudden look of triumph, added, “You will be hearing from The Child Developmental Well-Being and Life Skills Assessment Committee, of which I am the head, as soon as we have fully investigated your family life and determined the state of your childrens’ welfare. We may very well need to intervene with a plan to ensure the social sensitivity and developmental stability of your children.”
Having risen to a dangerous high due to the catastrophic events that had just unfolded, Faye’s blood pressure suddenly dropped precipitously. She felt a cold chill run down her spine as she took in Ms. Beasley’s words. All at once she was faint and dizzy and her knees became rubbery under her. This was bad, very bad.
Faye did her best to apologize and offer assistance to Ms. Beasley and her dazed and disoriented guests, feeling the sting of each fiery look directed at her. By the time the last of the them had finally dispersed, a strange sense of impending doom was closing in on Faye and the kids.
Constance, Chance, Charleston, and Chief had never seen their mother like this before. Mom hadn’t even yelled at anyone — not even at Chance! She just wandered robotically around the yard in anxious silence.
“Why is this situation so unusually awful?” the kids asked each other. Hadn’t they gotten into worse scrapes on any number of their ill-fated family explorations?
“Remember a couple of years ago, when we visited that mortuary on the way home from the library?” Constance recalled.
“Oh yeah! We sneaked into that funeral home so we could examine an authentic cadaver. We were reading about anatomy and life cycles.” Charleston reflected.
“Yeah, when no one was in the room, we got up real close to the open casket and saw that corpse…and Chiefy pried the dead guy’s eyelid open! What a dope!” Chance carried the story forward with glee.
“Guyths, I juthst wanted to thee if he wath thleeping!” Chief quickly justified himself.
“Unfortunately, the dead gentleman’s wife came in right about then and became quite agitated when she saw what happened to his face.” Charleston continued.
“Yeah, when she bent down to look at him, she screamed ’cause he looked like he was winking at her,” Chance cheered himself with this memory.
“Man, we got in such big trouble! Mom and Dad were upset for days,” Constance added, recalling her lack of judgment that afternoon. It was not a good idea to take her brothers into the mortuary in the first place. “But things had somehow settled down even after that mess,” she reflected, thinking about how they had all gathered on their parents’ oversized and lumpy futon that night to debrief.
Sprawling across the bed and brawling over who owned how much of its real estate, things were in “full Faultsom swing” when Frank, with his sternest fatherly demeanor, issued his rulings to the guilty Faultsom gang. As was expected, the kids were sentenced to hard labor around the house for several weeks due to the funeral fiasco, but even those dire consequences were suddenly remediated by an outbreak of peeling laughter when Chief tearfully apologized for “winking the dead guy” in the coffin.
Surely the garden-party episode couldn’t have been as bad as the mortuary mess, the kids reasoned among themselves. After all, this time Chance and Chief had gotten all the way into Wonder! They had both actually been there! Wasn’t that what they had all been hoping for? How exciting!
The kids’ excitement, however, was quickly overwhelmed by a sense of growing apprehension. Without understanding why, none of them could shake the feeling that things would never be the same again and this was not a good thing — not a good thing at all.
“Ah haaa! We will have their sssspawn at lassst!”
“The Court hereby orders that decision-making authority over the education of Constance, Charleston, Chance, and Conrad (also known as Chief) be awarded to the State. They will be placed in separate temporary facilities until they can each complete the Social Realignment Program.”
The words were like a slab of granite slamming down on top of a cold dark hole inside of which Faye and Frank were trapped with no way to get out. They simply could not believe it was true, but it was true.
In the months that had followed the horrid Busy Birders’ garden-party debacle, investigators from The GUPF invaded the Faultsom home and uncovered the extent of the family’s “dangerous” beliefs and practices. The investigators reported back to the Developmental Well-Being and Life Skills Assessment Committee (The DoWLSAC) and the committee along with the factory facilitators determined that the free-flowing, curiosity-driven educational style of the family was wholly inadequate in preparing the Faultsom children for real-world workforce demands and relationships. Furthermore, the committee was horrified by the otherworldly and imaginative experiences that Faye and Frank Faultsom had fostered in their children.
The family’s commitment to their belief in Wonder was far worse than Ms. Beasley could have possibly guessed. She was so alarmed by it that she did everything in her considerable power to see to it that the authorities acted to remove Constance, Charleston, Chance, and Chief from their parents’ custody and their beloved Dumble Street oasis, for a process of realignment.
As the investigation unfolded through the weeks that ensued, the Faultsom family became increasingly paralyzed with worry, especially when they realized that no amount of common sense, evidence of the kids’ growing intellectual and creative abilities, legal representation, or heartfelt appeals seemed to make a difference. Even the string-pulling attempted by Frank’s influential father seemed to do no good. The facilitators of The GUPF were determined to make an example of the Faultsoms. Daring to teach children to think and act differently from that which the factory facilitators considered “developmentally desirable,” simply would not be tolerated. The Prescribed Order must be adhered to.
To make matters worse, the family’s portals into Wonder seemed to be shut up, barred, and
locked tight. After that fateful summer day, no one in the Faultsom family seemed willing or able to enter in.
Chance was totally guilt-ridden that his antics had been the cause of the upheaval. He had been the one who lit the fuse and everyone had gotten burnt because of it. Chance never wanted to go anywhere near Wonder — ever again.
Charleston had gone deep inside himself to ponder everything with an intensity that shocked even those closest to him. Who knew when he would come up for air? He and Chief still believed, but were deeply shaken and most disheartened to find that the doors into their beloved Wonder, which had once been available to them, seemed to have disappeared. They felt locked out and abandoned to their own threatening world.
For Constance this was just another example of how she didn’t “do enough.” Of course she was responsible for the fact that things had gotten out of hand. If only she wouldn’t have copped that attitude just when Mom needed her help at the party. If only she would have tried harder to help. Constance’s heart and imagination were hit hard and severely wounded. As things deteriorated for the family, her worst fears seemed to be realized. Because of their belief in Wonder, she really was going to be separated from the people she loved more than life itself. She grew angry and resentful.
It wasn’t long before Faye and Frank began to second-guess their parenting decisions and think that perhaps they had been totally unhinged to believe in Wonder. Perhaps they had simply been delusional all along. Now they were responsible for the fact that their kids were scrutinized and harassed for their beliefs. So it was that a cold, stony fear settled over the family and shut down their imaginations.
It was the darkest of dark days for the family when The State’s Well-Being Officers (The WBOs) arrived to take the children off to their separate locations for a period of social re-grounding and realignment. Frank and Faye stood by helplessly that afternoon as the kids’ belongings were loaded up and Constance, Charleston, Chance, and Chief were directed toward the waiting cars.
One by one the Faultsoms began to sob as they clung to each other in a final embrace. Their dreams had been crushed and their family was broken. All for the sake of their strange belief in a place no one could prove even existed at all. Faye and Frank felt a smothering shame and fear. They had made a terrible mistake. Their imaginings had ultimately caused their children nothing but heartache.
“Come along now, kids,” the head WBO interrupted, as his deputies began to peel the family from each other’s arms. “It’s time to go. We are taking you to a stable place where you will learn about how things work in the real world and you will be liberated from all of this ridiculous hocus-pocus you’ve been brainwashed to believe in…”
That was it for Chief.
Something broke loose and roared out of him. Just at the moment, when every one of them thought they could never dare to imagine anything Wonderful again, he screamed out:
“I – WILL – ALWAYTHS BELIEVE! I don’t care what anyone thays! You cannot take my imaginathon away from me! And ya’ know what? No matter what happenths, I AM THANKFUL! I am thankful for my mom and my dad who taught me to imagine. I am thankful for Wonder and I am even thankful for all of thith rotten thuff, becauth Wonder ith even more real than any of thith nonthenth…I know, because I’ve been there! AND I’ve met The Gate Keeper and he is the mothst realethst perthon there ith!”
The family reeled at this revelation. This was something he had never told them. Chief had actually met someone in Wonder! As it turned out, the littlest Faultsom had felt so ashamed that he was associated with the stink-bomb stunt that he had doubted his experiences and had chosen not to disclose his contact with this “Gate Keeper.” But now, Chief was shouting it from the rooftops and they were all in shock. Could Wonder really be real after all?
Each Faultsom froze to take this in as Chief burst out singing, at the top of his lungs:
Be Jolly, Jaunty Voy’gers!
And we’ll avoid a conflagrathion
Ath we find our happy hearths
And thing for joy with admirathon
For the many little marvelth
That detherve our cogitathon.
Then the Wonder door will open
And we’ll leave thith desolathon!
This final verse of “The Thong,” as Chief called it, suddenly rose up in each of them, and every family member began to sing it — over and over. And, as if that weren’t enough of a surprise, they all began to shout out what they were thankful for, even though they were in the middle of the most dreadful and distressing situation they had ever faced. A jumble of Faultsom voices created a chorus of thanksgiving.
“I’m thankful for all the love in our family!”
“I’m thankful for all of our crazy adventures!”
“Thank you, Mom and Dad, for helping us learn to imagine and believe in things that are so…so…amazing!”
“Hey, that makes us amazing — we are an amazing family…I’m thankful for that!”
“Thank you, Dad and Mom, for letting us be different!”
“I’m thankful for how weird and thilly we are!”
“I’m thankful that Chance hasn’t blown us all up yet!”
“Yeah, and I’m thankful that Chief isn’t really the boss, though he thinks he is!!”
“I even apprethiate Charlie’s mopey ole cello muthic!”
“Well, I’m thankful that I don’t have to be as perfect as Constance is — not!”
“I’m thankful that I have four outrageous and ingenious children and the most original, and adventurous wife on the planet!” Dad shouted out followed by Mom.
“And I’m thankful for you, Frank. If it weren’t for you, well, we’d be…lost…”
And so, there they were on Dumble Street, crying and laughing and singing and shouting together as if their lives depended upon it, for indeed they did depend on it. Meanwhile, as all this was going on, The WBOs were stunned and utterly unable to move.
Cornelius, the Faultsom hound dog, began barking wildly and running back and forth between the family members because something exceedingly weird was happening and all The WBO’s could do was just stand there and gape. For you see, as the Faultsoms continued to erupt with expressions of thanksgiving and song, they also began to fade from view as if they were changing substance! They were thinning out, while at the same time, they were becoming kind of glowy. Then all at once, they disappeared completely! Cornelius, the head WBO and his squad stood by utterly dumbfounded, staring at an empty sidewalk, with bits and pieces of The Thong echoing off in the distance.
“The Won-won-won-der doooor…o-pen — nnn…”
“Leave thissss…de- so- lay- shun — shun — shun-nnnnn…”
“Well, Welcome, Mr. and Mrs. Amazing. Welcome to you and your family of Amazelings!”
They had just been whooshed through a cool, refreshing mist and then plopped under a warm shower of sparkling…what was it? Apple cider? Was that what it was? It wasn’t sticky but, yes, they were drenched in a sweet, fragrance like that of ripe, just-picked apples. They stood there immersed in the aroma and bathed in “happy” — that’s the only word for it — happy light.
Standing in front of them was a portly little person dressed in a uniform that suggested a rank of high level and importance and yet he had a whimsical quality as well. It was decorated with strips of various widths and colors that reminded Frank of military ribbons. But on this man’s uniform, the stripes went up and down across the front of the jacket, rather than across his chest. The jacket also sported big, spiffy buttons and gained its regal air from very fine gold epaulets which rested on its the shoulders. It was further adorned with a wide black belt that circumnavigated the man’s sizeable tummy, fastening itself with an oversized and ornate golden belt-buckle. The ensemble was topped off by a most unusual helmet covered in a strange hodgepodge of shapes that fit together all over it like puzzle pieces. This, along with a marvelous, munificent white mustache, accentuated the little gentleman’s c
hubby, reddish face and merry eyes.
“Well, you’ve certainly gotten yourselves into quite a pelick…or kiclep,” he scratched his head…“Or did I mean “pickle? Oh,” he muttered to himself, “I can never quite keep track of all the silly little sayings and funny sounding words in your world. It’s so sendoriating, oh no, that’s not it…ahhh, dis—orient—ing…ah yes…that’s it! Any hoo, you folks really did make quite an entrance and just when I thought you’d NEVER get here. Transmissions from Lumbde Lane…or is it Dumble Street…Yes, that’s it, transmissions from Dumble Street have been shut down for some time.”
They were all breathing in the lovely cider fragrance and adjusting to the shock of their very “sendoriating” experience, when he wiggled his distinguished mustache, sniffed the air with his bulbous red nose, and declared:
“Glad we washed all of that nasty unbelieving and afraidness smell off of you. No one gets in here with the stench of that on them. My name is Mr. Keeze and I can pretty much unlock anything around here if you really want to get in — once you’ve actually gotten here, that is.”
“Thath’s him! Thath’s him,” Chief whispered breathlessly as he yanked on his parents’ clothing. “Thath’s the man I met when I wath here with Chanth before!”
“Well, sir, ah Mr. Keeze,” stuttered Frank as he brushed away Chief ’s pawing hands and struggled to gain composure. “I—I am Frank Faultsom and this is my wife, Faye, and our children.”
“Yes, of course you are! Helloooo, Mr. Chief! So good to see you here again. We said a brief how-do-you-do when you and your brother burst through our doorway once not so long ago…”
Chief ’s chest puffed out in sudden self-importance as Mr. Keeze grabbed his hand and vigorously shook it.
“Ah, sir, where exactly are we?” Frank ventured.
“Why Erdwon…of course!” replied Mr. Keeze, as he gazed incredulously at them.
“Erdwon?? Where is that??” Frank asked. The family was quite puzzled by this.
Mrs. Amazing and the Seed Page 5