Just Like Jackie

by Lindsey Stoddard

  “I did?” he asks. “I don’t remember—I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry, Grandpa. It was the most you ever told me about her.” I look down at the picture on the table and turn my hat around backward so he can look right at me. “What happened?” I ask. “Tell me before you forget.”

  Grandpa takes a deep breath and slides the picture back in front of him. “I don’t think I’ll ever forget. She lives here too,” he says and taps his chest. “Right next to you.”

  I pat his hand and say that it’s OK, he can tell me. He holds the picture between his thumb and forefinger and it shakes a little as he looks.

  “She came to Vermont to give birth and raise you here,” he starts. “Her mom, Lucy, had passed away from a heart attack. Eddie wanted you to have a relationship with me, a relationship that she didn’t really get since Lucy and I never lived together after she found out she was pregnant with your mom.”

  He puts the picture down and traces her belly with his finger. “I loved her so much,” he says. “I made her healthy food for the baby and built her a crib out in the shed from real Vermont wood.”

  I pictured Grandpa sanding the wood in the shed and hammering the pieces together tight.

  He’s still looking down at the picture. “It was a hard labor, but she was the happiest in her whole life when you were born. She hadn’t named you yet when we brought you home. We called you ‘little fighter’ because . . .”

  Grandpa is losing his words, but I don’t know the end to this sentence, so he needs to finish it.

  “Why’d you call me ‘little fighter’?” I ask.

  He nods and taps his finger on the table. “Little fighter . . . because you were small,” he continues, “and strong and you balled your fists up tight and made your voice heard all through the night right from the beginning.”

  I try to picture my mom walking around our house with me in her arms as I cried out at the top of my lungs, and even imagining it makes me feel good.

  “Your second and third day home from the hospital she ran a fever. Sweated through her sheets. The doctors had said it might take a few weeks for your mom to feel strong again, so I didn’t worry. I thought if the fever didn’t go down after another night I’d take her in to get checked the next morning.”

  Then this morning in the woods all makes sense. Grandpa shoving the pack deep in his coat like it was a little fighter baby he was trying to keep warm, and pulling me through the woods telling Eddie to hold on, not to leave him. He was reliving that moment, trying to get my mom back to the hospital in time.

  “The next day she was way worse, wasn’t she, Grandpa?” I pat his hand and take the picture from him.

  “It was too late,” he says. “An infection had dug too deep. And I didn’t even . . .”

  Grandpa puts his head in his hands and his shoulders are shaking and I know how he feels. Like it’s his fault.

  “It’s no one’s fault,” I tell him, and for the first time I believe that. It’s not my fault my mom died, and it’s not his either. It’s just plain old unfair bad luck, like Alex’s dad and Ms. Gloria’s son. Grandpa grabs my hand and squeezes it hard.

  “What happened after she died?” I asked.

  Grandpa’s looking up at the ceiling like he’s remembering. “We buried her in a field of sunflowers in New Hampshire. Next to her mom. Next to Lucy.”

  “I was there?”

  Grandpa nods. “I held you the whole time. You balled your fists and cried. Then I brought you home and gave you the strongest fighter name I knew.”

  “Robinson Hart,” I say.

  “Robinson Hart.”

  I’m thinking about the big question mark I have on my family tree. “Did she ever talk about my dad?”

  “Your dad?” Grandpa repeats. “Eddie never once talked about your dad, and I just let her be on that.” Then he kind of smiles a little while he’s remembering. “Eddie wanted a child more than anything.” He smiles a little more and I can picture my mom with her big smile and sticking-up boy-cut hair. “You were all Eddie’s,” he says.

  I laugh with him a little because it feels good to laugh. “Now I’m all yours,” I say, and he taps his big finger on his heart.

  “All mine.”

  Then I pick up my notebook from the floor and slide over the maple tree license plate. “I think I’m ready to finish the project.”

  chapter 27

  “Your project is so cool!” Derek shouts as if I’m not sitting right next to him, and I don’t try to shut him up or anything even though other kids are starting to look over.

  I shrug my shoulders like it’s no big deal, but I’m kind of happy he’s looking at it so close.

  “You put me on there?” he says as soon as he sees his name dangling from one of the maple branches. Then he full-on hugs me even though he knows I don’t do hugs or anything like that. I don’t hug him back, but I don’t shove him off either.

  He’s touching the bark of the sugar maple and running his fingers in the grooves of the Vermont license plate. “It’s perfect,” he says.

  Then he slides his project over to me. His board game idea came out cool too, with a stack of cards in the middle just like a real board game. “Pick the top card,” he tells me.

  I turn over the top card and there’s a picture of him and me holding a big jug of syrup from boiling last year. He’s lifting up the jug to his mouth, pretending to chug it, and I’m rolling my eyes. Under the picture it says Robinson Hart. Best friend I’ll ever have.

  I nudge his shoe with my shoe under the table and say thanks. “That reminds me,” I tell him. “We’re going to try boiling again this weekend. Tell your mom.”

  “Maple Day! Wouldn’t miss it.” He nudges my shoe back with his.

  Ms. Meg is telling everyone to take out their projects. She says we’re going to spend the next couple of periods practicing presenting before our families come this afternoon for the open house. I’m thinking that I don’t need to practice because Grandpa will be working at the garage. And I already know he likes my project. And I don’t really care what any other parents think.

  Candace sits down at the table with us. “Let me see!” She slides my project over to her. And before I know it Alex is huddling around and Oscar is too.

  “It looks so cool!” Oscar says. He touches all the names that dangle down from twine off the twigs.

  Oscar’s is really good too. The sketch of himself between the two trees looks just like him. One tree is for his mom’s side of the family and the other is for his dad’s. I remember everything he was saying in Group Guidance and I know why he made his project like that. He feels like he’s in the middle of his parents splitting up.

  Candace finished hers too. I tell her I like how all the happy pictures of Tessa and her are right in the middle of her tree.

  Oscar says, “I bet you’ll have lots more happy pictures with her too. It’ll all work out.”

  Candace nods and smiles and says she knows.

  I turn to Alex. “We had a pact,” I remind him.

  He unzips his book bag and pulls out a piece of folded white notebook paper. It’s small and sketched in black ink. “It’s not that good, but I don’t care,” he says. “At least it’s done.”

  It’s a simple drawing of a tree, but you can see the roots digging down below the ground. That’s where he labeled his dad.

  “It’s really good,” I tell him and I reach out like Harold does to me sometimes and give him a fist bump.

  “I made my Grandpa the trunk of my tree,” I say. “But he’s kind of like my roots too, I guess.”

  And it feels pretty OK having everyone look at my family tree project because it’s not so bad.

  Even Ms. Gloria and Mr. Danny come to the classroom to see our projects and Ms. Gloria puts her arm around my shoulders when she looks at the names dangling from the sugar maple twigs and sees hers. Her windshield-washer-blue eyes get all teary and she says she’s really proud of me.

&
nbsp; I tell her something that Grandpa told me last night, which is how I figured out how to finish my project. He said that you should hold close the people who push you to be the best version of yourself. “That’s what family does,” Grandpa said. “They push you to be your best and love you no matter what.”

  That sounds like Ms. Gloria to me, and everyone else I put on there, except maybe May because she’s just a baby. But I guess it’s my job to help her be her best version and love her no matter what. And that makes her family too.

  Before I know it Ms. Meg and Ms. Gloria are handing out after-school snacks and lining us all up to use the bathroom because parents are starting to come.

  Our job is to say “Welcome to our classroom” to all the parents who show up, but I just look down at my Nike Air Griffeys and let Candace talk to the adults.

  All the parents are sitting down at our tables and it looks funny to see them in our classroom. Then Candace pokes me and points. “My sister came!” she whispers. “I put the invitation on her bed last night, but I didn’t think she’d actually be here.” Her sister is sitting in the front row with a purple streak dyed through her hair, and she smiles big when Candace spots her. Then I see her mouth, Good luck.

  I give Candace a secret thumbs-up.

  Ms. Meg is in the front of the room welcoming the parents and telling them how hard we worked on these projects.

  “Now it’s time to hear a short explanation from the students about the choices they made on their family trees,” Ms. Meg announces.

  Brittany is the first to go. Then Chelsea. They pretty much have the same papier-mâché tree project, and they talk about how fun it was to paint it once it hardened. Then Ronald goes. He talks about how his brother is really important to him, so he put him at the top of his project. Then Derek presents his board game and his mom cheers from the front row. Alex shares next, and he’s looking right at me the whole time he’s talking about his tree drawing. He points to the roots that dig deep below the soil. His mom and brothers aren’t here, and I don’t want to think of what they’re doing, so I just look right back at him because I think it’s making us both feel OK.

  “Robinson?” Ms. Meg says. “Your turn.”

  My stomach feels like two outs bottom of the ninth, but I stand up and walk to the front of my room and all of a sudden I’m thinking that maybe my license plate tree is stupid and I don’t have anything to say about it.

  “This is mine,” I say and hold it up. I catch Ms. Gloria’s eye, which is enough to remind me to turn my hat around backward.

  Then before I know it the classroom door is creaking open and my grandpa pokes his head in. “Found it,” he says and Ms. Gloria waves him in and helps him to a seat. Behind him are Harold and Paul, and May is wrapped up and sleeping in Harold’s arms. Katie, Grandpa’s nurse, is here even though it’s way earlier than five thirty, and that’s when she’s supposed to start helping us. I’ve only known her one day, but she doesn’t seem half-bad because she doesn’t have to be here and she is and she didn’t make my grandpa feel stupid when she was helping him last night, even with the simple things, and she let me squeeze the cheese into the mac. She smiles big and pats my grandpa’s arm. Harold gives me an air fist bump over sleeping May.

  I point to the trunk of my tree and say, “My Grandpa is my trunk. He’s the one who takes care of me.” Then I point to Eddie’s branch. “My mom was just like me. A fighter with a boy name.” Then I point to the other branches. “These people aren’t actually related to me, but they’re still family. Ms. Gloria. Derek. Harold and Paul and May.” I don’t really have anything else to say, but it feels like everyone else talked way longer about their projects. Everyone’s watching me, expecting more, and it makes me feel weird. I’m looking at Grandpa’s nurse Katie and thinking that maybe I should have put her on the tree because she isn’t so bad and she’s going to be around for a while and she came all the way to school to see my project.

  Then I decide I could always add people as I go.

  I look at Harold again and I remember how I want to represent my family well, so I try to think about something else I can say.

  “I guess family is something you get like I got my Grandpa, but it’s also something you make.” And I’m looking at Derek, who’s nodding his head and giving me a thumbs-up, and then at Grandpa, whose eyes are all misty and proud. Then Grandpa stands up and claps and everyone else claps too and it feels just like sliding into home.

  chapter 28

  “Maple Day!” Derek’s yelling out the window of their Subaru Outback before they even pull into our driveway Saturday morning. “Maple Daaaaaaaaaay!”

  The fire’s burning hot already, and I’m showing Harold how we put the metal bars over the brick fire pit and fill the lobster pot with sap. I’m telling him how we wait for it to boil down before we can filter it into our empty maple syrup jugs we have stacked high in the shed. I can tell he’s paying attention too, because he’s nodding at each step.

  “While we’re waiting for it to boil down, is anyone hungry?” Harold asks. “I can take a quick trip to Dean and Walt’s and bring back some burgers.”

  “Wait! I know!” I say, and I run big strides back to the house and track slush and mud right through the living room and kitchen to the refrigerator because I’m so excited to show Harold how we boil eggs on Maple Day.

  “Can we?” I ask Grandpa when I get back outside, showing him the half-dozen egg carton I took from the refrigerator.

  He nods, and Derek and I each drop three eggs carefully in the boiling sap. “Seven minutes,” I say.

  “Brilliant,” Harold says. Then he’s asking me questions about Grade A Golden versus Amber and Dark, and I’m explaining about the time of year and how we’ll probably get Grade A Dark syrup this time because it’s late enough in the season that the snow is starting to melt and it’ll really feel like spring soon.

  Then I don’t even know why, but I start thinking about Alex and whether his dad will be alive when the snow melts and it’s the saddest thought, so I try to wipe it out of my head but I can’t.

  Grandpa uses the ladle to scoop the eggs out of the sap and drops them in the snow to cool the shells before he peels them.

  The eggs are perfect. I love when they come out not too hard-boiled so the yolks are still a little soft and they have the slightest maple taste and they’re still warm from the pot.

  “Heaven,” Harold sputters, his mouth full of egg.

  I’m glad Harold is learning about how to stoke the fire and boil the sap down and filter the syrup and seal it into jugs. I’m a good teacher and I know it better than anybody because Grandpa taught me.

  When the syrup is ready I take the first ladle of it and pour it on the clean snow near the sugar maple trees where there are new buds popping up through the snow. Derek goes headfirst right into it. “Yum!” he exclaims, but his mouth is so full of snow and sugar that you can hardly understand him.

  I scoop mine into a loose snowball and eat it out of my hands. The cold snow stings my teeth, but the maple is sweet and perfect and makes the sting go away.

  Harold and Grandpa and Derek’s mom scoop some up too. And before we know it we’re laughing and pouring out more maple for sugar on snow. And I remember when we were all laughing with Ms. Gloria in Group Guidance and how good it felt and I’m thinking that maybe when we boil next year I’ll invite Candace and Oscar and maybe even Alex. Little May will be walking and she’ll have her first sugar on snow and Grandpa will be here to see the new buds popping up through the snow by the maple trees.

  Grandpa puts his hand on my shoulder. “Time to pull out the taps, I’d say.” He points to the metal taps we hammered into the trees at the beginning of the season.

  “I got it.”

  As I’m pulling and wiggling the taps out of the trunks, I’m thinking about what Grandpa always says. Everything, even a tree, has sweetness at its core. And I’m thinking maybe that is true, even if it’s under a layer of tough bark an
d all mixed up with splinters and knots.

  acknowledgments

  Thank you first to my mom and dad. You got me a card to the Shelburne Library before I could even read, and then understood when I wanted to own all the books I loved anyway. I learned, in your laps, that books are comfort and adventure, and would have a forever-place in my life.

  And to my big brother, Tyler—you told me that Robinson was worthy and she needed to be sent out in the world. All my life I’ve been looking up to you and listening very carefully to what you say, and I’m so thankful you said this.

  I’m very lucky to be surrounded by great readers who took the time to live in Robbie’s world with me as I was creating it. Jess Rothenberg, Jennifer Ochoa, Stephanie Douglas, Gina Salerno, and Janine Stellacci, thank you for reading, listening, and encouraging.

  I’m forever grateful for the Vermont College of Fine Arts community and the magic that exists up on that hill in Montpelier. In particular, thank you to my advisors, Alan Cumyn, Tim Wynne-Jones, Coe Booth, and Shelley Tanaka. I still hear your wise voices in my head while I’m writing.

  Thank you to all the students and faculty of MS 324 in New York City. It was in that building, those classrooms, with you, that I realized I must write.

  And thank you to the teachers I have had along the way for encouraging creativity and kindness. You may notice bits of yourselves in Robinson’s story.

  I have the most incredible support and excitement from my agent, Stephen Barbara; editor, Erica Sussman; and the many people at HarperCollins who had a hand in Just Like Jackie. Thank you again and again for your vision, your collaboration, and your guidance. You are my dream team.

  And to my husband, Kamahnie, and son, Miles—you inspire and motivate me every day. I am most proud that I’m on your tree.

  about the author

  photo by peter stoddard

  LINDSEY STODDARD was born and raised in Vermont, where she loved to play in the snow and ski, learned to boil sap in her grandpa’s sugarhouse, and began her lifelong love of reading. She always wanted books to be a big part of her life, so when she graduated college she moved to New York City, where she taught middle school English for ten years. She loves reading and writing with middle schoolers, hiking on the Appalachian Trail, and Ben and Jerry’s ice cream.