The Girl with More Than One Heart

by Geringer Bass, Laura;

  “You okay?” Peter asked.

  “No,” I said, not looking at him. I stared at the tall metal trash can by the sink. Lunging forward, I grabbed it and lifted it high above my head. I smashed it down on the floor, just in front of the blue slippers. Aaron and Rebecca froze. The crash wasn’t loud enough. I needed an explosion. I lifted it again and smashed it down as hard as I could.

  “Briana?” said Peter, stepping toward me. I knelt down by my mother’s door. Peter touched my shoulder. The edge of his work boot pressed down on the trash can pedal, springing the lid open. I picked up Mom’s slippers. Still kneeling and holding my arms straight out in front of me, I balanced them on the palms of my hands. My Dad heart made a racket so loud I was sure Peter could hear it.

  “What?” he asked, searching my face.

  “Just keep your foot there,” I said. He obeyed.

  I flipped one blue slipper into the air, where it somersaulted like one of Dad’s perfect Sunday morning pancakes before falling into the trash. “Not bad,” I said. “Don’t move, Peter. Please.”

  “You’ll get in trouble,” said Aaron.

  “What’re you doing?” asked Peter. I launched the second slipper. It spun, then landed on top of the first in the trash.

  I wanted to light them both on fire and watch them burn.

  Aaron pointed to the garbage and forced a laugh. He clutched at his middle, bent double, and laughed some more. Rebecca watched Aaron laughing. She tiptoed over and peered at the bedroom slippers in the bin. Ceremoniously, she crumbled a cookie over them.

  “Rebecca, don’t,” said Peter.

  Aaron came over and stared at Mom’s slippers in the garbage, sprinkled with crumbs. “You shouldn’t have done that,” he whispered.

  Peter stepped back. The lid dropped shut. I put my arms around the trash can, resting my head on it. I would leave it right where it was all night. That way, Mom would find it first thing.

  “Be right back,” said Peter. He shepherded Aaron and Rebecca past me down the hallway to Aaron’s room. I could hear him negotiating. They settled on The Stinky and Dirty Show, Aaron’s favorite cartoon. I didn’t move. Peter returned and knelt down beside me. He touched my hair.

  “Remember how Bergman told us about the Blue Sea?” he said. “It used to be a big blue shape on the map. The fourth-largest lake in the world.”

  “What about it?” I asked. He took his hand away and tapped his fingers on the floor.

  “It shrank,” he said. “It disappeared. On maps now, there’s only the Aral Desert. When it’s there at all.”

  “What’s your point?” I asked. Why was he giving me a geography lesson?

  “I looked it up. The biggest island in the Blue Sea used to be a nature reserve with eagles and deer and wolves. That’s all gone now. Nobody lives there. All that’s left is a few donkeys and this one crazy guy who won’t move because his mom’s buried there.”

  “So I’m the crazy guy? I won’t move because my dad lived here?”

  Peter shook his head. “My mother’s that guy,” he said. “She won’t move. She’s stuck. She’s been stuck since my dad left.”

  “Your mom’s not crazy like mine,” I said. “She works.”

  Peter rocked back on his heels. “Yeah, she works all the time. But she’s crazy, crazier than yours.” He paused. I didn’t know what to say.

  “When my father lived with us, we were on the map,” Peter went on. “We were the Blue Sea. We’re the Aral Desert now.”

  Peter didn’t like to talk about his mother. He never complained. It was as if a curtain had blown sideways to show me a part of a familiar landscape I hadn’t seen before. It was like when my Dad heart took me back to something I didn’t remember. Like when Dad said, “These tantrums are killing me.” My eyes filled with tears.

  “You’re not dried up,” I said, touching Peter’s shoulder. He surprised me by putting his hand over mine. I slipped my hand out from under his and tried to decide what to do with it. I touched his hair. My Dad heart raced.

  “I’ve been meaning to tell you, but I didn’t know how,” I whispered.

  “Tell me what?” he asked.

  I took a deep breath. He had trusted me with his secret.

  “I have more than one heart,” I said. “The extra one talks to me. It sounds . . . kind of like my dad.”

  He pulled away and looked at me with scientific interest, his blue eyes unclouded.

  “Where is it?”

  “I’ll show you,” I said, taking his hand. We rose and stood.

  He followed me past Aaron’s room, where Aaron and Rebecca were still glued to cartoons. In the living room, I cleared Mom’s messy magazines from the couch, piling them on the floor. We sat down side by side. I hesitated, feeling awkward.

  “Is it here?” asked Peter, pointing to my knees. I shook my head.

  “Are you sure?” he asked. He brought his hand to the back of my left knee, then the right. He bent lower and listened to each. On the left, a beauty mark flagged the spot he decided was the one. He touched his ear to it. His hair flopped into his eyes. “I think I hear something,” he whispered.

  “It’s not there,” I said. I turned my back to him slightly, blushing. I didn’t trust my face. I felt like I might start to laugh and not be able to stop, or, worse, start to cry and that would scare him and ruin it.

  “Here then?” he asked, tracing my shoulder blade wings. I could feel his fingertips through my shirt. I shivered. Peter put his ear on my left shoulder, then on my right. He nuzzled me in the back with his nose.

  “Not there,” I said. “That tickles.”

  “Where then?” he asked.

  “It’s here,” I said, “in my belly.” I put his hand on it. “It’s not talking right now.”

  Peter lowered his head again like a human stethoscope and listened. I waited. “I think I hear it,” he said. Then closing his eyes, he listened some more. He took his time.

  My Dad heart was quiet. There was no sound in the room except Peter’s breathing and my own, featherlight. I touched his hair. It was soft. I blew on it.

  “What does it say when it talks to you?” he asked.

  “It bosses me around and gets me into trouble.”

  “Like what?” Peter asked.

  “Like telling me to leave school and go to my grandpa’s house,” I said. “Sometimes it sings to me. Old stuff my dad used to like,” I added.

  Peter rubbed his chin against my belly, listening. My Dad heart stayed quiet. “Do you hear it beat anywhere else?” he asked, raising his head and one dark eyebrow.

  “You think it’s just my pulse,” I said, pulling away. “That’s what my mom thinks.”

  Peter wrapped his arm snugly around me. I nestled into him.

  He kissed me.

  My Dad heart fluttered but didn’t say a word.

  Peter put both arms around me and kissed me again. It was different from the first kiss, a surprise, like floating in the ocean and watching the sky.

  “We’re the Blue Sea,” I whispered.

  “The beautiful Blue Sea,” said Peter.

  Had he called me beautiful?

  He kissed me a third time. I thought, Kissing Peter might just be the best thing I’ve ever done. Then I didn’t think at all.

  That night, tucked into bed, I imitated Aaron by wrapping myself tightly in my blankets like a mummy. Once in the safety pod, I reviewed the day, pausing at the part when I had told Peter my secret, playing his kisses over and over again. Now he was bending over me, listening, his eyes closed. Now he was looking into my eyes, his own eyes blue and clear. Now he was kissing me. Now he was calling me beautiful.

  “Briana?” Mom was standing outside my door, knocking.

  “Go away!” I cried.

  Mom stopped knocking. She stood in the hall. My Dad heart beat fast. My breath came in shallow wheezes. “Slow down,” I told it. “Please.”

  Mom’s knocking started again. Two sharp taps, then two more, louder st
ill, then a final one, loudest of all. Tap, tap. Tap, tap. Tap. The door creaked open, letting in a crack of light. “Briana?” said Mom, poking her head in and throwing a shadow silhouette onto the wall. “Who are you talking to?” She opened the door a little wider. She was holding one of the slippers in her hand. “What happened here?” she asked, holding it up.

  I raised my arms in front of my face. “Leave me alone!” I shouted. “Can’t you just leave me alone? Do you want to know what happened? You embarrassed me in front of everyone. Aaron was so upset he kicked Grandpa Ben. You think if you bake cookies everything’s okay? I hate your cookies. I hate you. You’re not my real mom. Go away!”

  Like a portal into a dark dimension, anger radiated from Mom. It sucked up the beautiful Blue Sea. She hovered in the doorway, staring at me.

  “Is Grandpa okay?” she asked.

  “Yes!” I screamed. “Just go!”

  “I’m going, Briana,” she said, “before I say something I regret.” Turning, she retreated down the hall. I heard her door slam.

  I wrapped my cocoon of blankets tighter. Blocking Mom out, I guided my mind back to Peter, back to when he had listened for my Dad heart. Now he was bending over me, his eyes closed. Now he was looking into my eyes, his own eyes blue and clear. Now he was kissing me. Again. And again. The kisses quieted my Dad heart, but the original took flight with a thrilling flutter into a wide-open sky of pure blue.

  Bat DAD

  It was Mom’s longest silent treatment on record. It had lasted a week and was going into its second. She had spoken to me only to announce that we were moving. She had decided on our new apartment without showing it to me or to Aaron. At least we wouldn’t have to change schools. She had kept that promise. And we weren’t moving to the blood bank block.

  The good thing about the silent war was that whenever I brought Peter home after school, we were alone without the danger of Mom walking in. She stayed locked in her room. There were no more trays of cookies waiting on the kitchen counter. Peter and I stopped at Freddy’s Pizza on the way home now. Freddy wiped his stubby hands on a spotted apron and gave Aaron a little ball of dough to play with while we waited for our slices. Before Aaron settled into his games with Rebecca in his room, before Peter and I settled into our kissing on the living-room couch, we all sat around the kitchen table and gobbled up Freddy’s greasy pizza, slice by slice.

  Peter was good at kissing. I had known him forever, but I had never known that about him. It was like suddenly seeing the hidden frogs with Dad when they had been there all along. Only better.

  Daisy noticed the way Peter looked at me in school, or stood closer than he had to or brushed up against me. “Are you and Peter . . . going out?” she asked.

  “No,” I said.

  “Is he your boyfriend?” she persisted. I wasn’t sure how to answer. He was still my best friend.

  “Kind of,” I said. “Not really. Do you ever kiss Neil?” She shook her head.

  “No way,” she said.

  “Al?” I asked.

  “Well, yeah,” she said.

  “I knew it,” I said, but I hadn’t.

  On the day of the move, there was a lightning storm. High winds rattled the windows. Mom took one look outside and called Grandpa Ben. He offered to take care of Aaron for the day. “Send him up here with Briana,” he said.

  “Don’t I have to stick around to help you?” I asked. She didn’t answer. “Mom?” I watched her wrap our dinner plates in newspaper. She had left the dishes and silverware for last.

  “The moving men will help me,” she said, wedging the last plate tightly into the carton. “You’d just be in the way.”

  She started wrapping the coffee cups. “You packed everything up in boxes like I showed you, right?” she asked.

  “Yes, everything.”

  “And labeled it?”

  “Yes.”

  I had made a trip to Oz, the “Wizard of Moving,” to find a special box that would fit Dad’s yellow baseball bats, but the bats stuck out of the box like a plant that had grown too big for its pot. Mom had asked me to give the bats away to the neighbors’ little boy who had just joined Little League. I couldn’t. I needed Bat Dad. Mom would never understand. If I wasn’t there when the movers came, Mom might leave the bats in front of our neighbors’ door or just tell the movers to leave Bat Dad behind.

  “It’s up to you,” Mom added. “You can stay uptown with Grandpa Ben, or you can come back here as soon as you drop Aaron off.”

  Aaron was disappointed with the plan. He wanted to see the giant truck. He wanted to witness the muscle men bear the weight of our whole world on their shoulders and plant us in another. “I love my old room,” he said.

  “You’ll love your new room, too,” I said, helping him put on his wool hat and mittens.

  “The new one will be too small,” said Aaron. “There won’t be enough space for my cows.”

  “Wait just a minute,” I said, grabbing my coat. I had to see my room one last time.

  A bulky carton propped the door to my bedroom wide open. I leaned up against the blue wall. Clothespin Angel Mom and I had painted it together. There were cracks in the paint now. I chipped away at one with my fingernail until a jagged piece came loose. I wanted my new room to be the exact same color. I put the chip in my pocket and looked around.

  Everything I had collected from my thirteen years on this planet had been stacked in a few boxes in the middle of the scuffed-up floor, dwarfed by Bat Dad, the tallest box. The room was minus what made it mine. It was just a room. I touched the tip of one of the yellow bats. “Hey, Dad,” I said. “It’s moving day. Hang in there.”

  Mom walked in, holding a list. I searched her face. “The movers will take all the boxes, right?” I asked her. “You won’t let them leave anything behind?”

  Mom nodded impatiently. “I still have a lot to do before they get here, Briana,” she said, waving the list in the air. “I said I would take care of it. Go on up to Grandpa Ben’s. I have this under control.” She turned to go.

  “Are you sad to leave?” I asked. She turned back to me. There were dark circles under her eyes.

  “I know you’re sad,” she said, “but you’ll see. You’ll like your new room, I promise.”

  “Aren’t you sad?” I persisted. “It’s for the best,” she said. For the best? How could she say that? I could tell she was only half listening. Wait, what had Mom said before that? “I have this under control.” That was good. If it was true, that was very good.

  NOWHERE at ALL

  Aaron and I stared out the window in Grandpa Ben’s bedroom into the courtyard below. Sheets of rain had turned to sleet. Thunder boomed. The wind was so furious it flattened the trees against the fence. Broken branches littered the ground. I wondered how my willow tree back home was doing in the storm.

  I tried to interest Aaron in counting cats. Even in winter, Grandpa Ben’s yard was usually full of strays. Aaron agreed to take a tally, but the storm had driven the cats into hiding. Leaning his head on one hand, Aaron drew pictures with his fingernail on the streaky windowpane. He drew the same figure over and over again—a box with a triangle balanced on the top left- hand corner.

  “What are you drawing, Aaron?” asked Grandpa Ben.

  “A house with its roof blown off,” said Aaron. He drew two more.

  I wandered into the living room to look out on Broadway. The wind had torn a street sign down and punched a hole in the grocer’s awning. The red cloth flapped wildly. Pedestrians inched along, heads down. Their clothes whipped and billowed like the giant balloons in the Thanksgiving Day Parade. Aaron slipped into the room and sidled over to me. He perched on the windowsill and traced a new line of boxes and triangles with his finger. A volley of hailstones hammered the glass. It was only November. The weather was freaky.

  Aaron continued to trace his new sign for disaster on the windowpane: a box house with windows, a triangle roof blown off. He added three stick figures, running. “Where
are they running?” asked Grandpa Ben.

  “To NAA,” said Aaron.

  I hid a smile. “Nah?” I asked.

  Aaron nodded, still watching the hailstones. “NAA,” he repeated, unsmiling. “Where we live now. Nowhere At All.”

  “Should I make you some soup?” asked Grandpa Ben. “Are you hungry?”

  “No,” said Aaron. “I don’t like soup.”

  “No thanks, Grandpa,” I said.

  “How about some juice? I have pear or apple—or peach.”

  Aaron shook his head glumly, not taking his eyes off his fingernail drawings.

  “Moving sucks,” I said. “Did you ever move when you were a kid, Grandpa?”

  “Many times,” said Grandpa Ben. “My mother said it was better to move than to paint.”

  I looked around the living room at the peeling green wallpaper, the patches of plaster, the jagged cracks in the walls, and the brown stains on the ceiling. Grandpa Ben hadn’t moved in a long time, but he hadn’t painted either.

  “Sometimes we moved when we couldn’t pay the rent,” he said.

  “That’s why we have to move,” I said.

  Aaron’s shoulders hunched up. His face had turned a sickly color. He kept drawing.

  House. Roof blown off. His finger shook. It had turned red with cold, dripping jagged drops onto the family of three stick figures, running, running.

  “Do you know about the silkworms in China?” asked Grandpa Ben. I shook my head. Aaron continued to draw, his lips pressed together in a straight line. “Before a storm, the farmers worry that the thunder will be so loud, it’ll scare the silkworms,” said Grandpa Ben. “If the silkworms are scared, they won’t spin. And if they don’t spin, there’ll be no silk. If there’s no silk, everyone starves. So, before each storm, do you know what they do?”

  Aaron didn’t reply.

  “No,” I said. Grandpa Ben was trying too hard.

  “They make noise,” said Grandpa Ben. “They ring bells—goat bells, sheep bells, all kinds of bells. And the silkworms keep spinning . . .” Aaron looked miserable. “They gather frying pans and soup pots and big tureens and cauldrons and spoons and ladles and shovels,” Grandpa Ben went on, “and they beat all those things together, making a bigger and bigger racket. Finally, on the last day before the storm, the clatter is as loud as thunder, but do the silkworms stop spinning?”