(It sort of feels like I am noticing this about someone else’s parents. I’m like a doctor observing something strange about my patients, who are nice, but I don’t have to be friends with them or anything.)
“Arrrrrrr you okay?” Jack asks, his finger crooked into a pirate’s hook. “You look kind of intense.”
Jack absolutely cannot know I have been thinking about love and crushes and other delicate subjects. Instead I say the first thing that comes into my head:
“So, what’s up with your dad?”
Right. Because Geoffrey Bailey, the drunk driver, is not a delicate subject at all.
Jack freezes for a second. “What? What do you mean?”
(Do not say you have been secretly researching his family, Finley. Whatever you do.)
“Just wondering. You never talk about him. Or your mom.”
Jack starts walking again, his hands in his pockets. His arms are so skinny, they are mostly elbow. “Well, my parents are being held captive too, of course.”
“By the troll.”
“Right.”
I take a deep breath and concentrate on the sensation of my legs taking a step, a step, another step.
“You’re weird tonight, Finley,” Jack informs me. “What’s going on in that orphan-girl brain of yours?”
(Grandma missing Dad. Does he miss her?)
(Geoffrey Bailey being arrested for drunk driving.)
(The dying Everwood trees, and newspaper articles, and blond heroines, and a dead child named Cynthia Travers.)
(How Jack smells like dirt and sweat, which is not as disgusting a smell as you might think.)
But I do not want to scare Jack away. I will not tolerate another pizza-delivery-boy disaster.
“I don’t know,” I say. “Random stuff.”
“Super random,” Jack agrees. “But it’s okay. I like random.”
We have reached the Bone House. The dry grass of the Wasteland makes strange, scratchy noises, and the open air makes me feel lonely, although I am surrounded by people.
It is a feeling I am used to.
Kennedy figures we can be away from Hart House for an hour without the adults getting suspicious. Currently, as is their custom, they are gathered at the dining room table playing dominos and drinking after-dinner cocktails and probably not thinking about us at all, but you cannot be too careful.
So we move fast.
We pull on thick gardening gloves from Grandpa’s workbench and take pieces of rotting wood and scraps of ruined furniture outside.
Jack and Gretchen sweep dirt and leaves out of the kitchen, into the living room, and out the open side of the house into the field.
Kennedy and Cole scrub the countertops. I gather trash into big garbage bags. Dex, Ruth, and Bennett work on the floor, although it is so badly damaged that I am not sure it will ever be clean. It will take us many trips to make a noticeable difference here.
But we will make this house look something like a home again, little by little.
We owe it to the Travers family.
I take a garbage bag outside and, with Gretchen’s help, lift it into the bed of the old pickup truck. Everything stinks; I almost gag at the smell. But Gretchen looks completely unaffected, so I try to look that way too.
WHAT IT MEANS TO BE A HART
• You look pretty even after sprinting across a forest.
• You look completely unaffected even when you are up to your eyeballs in garbage that smells like feet and rotten eggs.
Back inside the kitchen, Gretchen stops and makes a horrible face.
“Oh, gross. Do you think they’re, like, into each other?”
I follow Gretchen’s glare to the sink, where Kennedy and Cole are having a dirty paper towel fight.
The more Kennedy giggles, the darker Gretchen’s expression becomes.
“So what if they are?” I say. “Once I had a huge crush on this pizza delivery boy—”
“That’s different,” Gretchen whispers. “She can like all the pizza delivery boys she wants. But Cole is a Bailey.”
“Gretchen, you don’t know anything about them.”
“I know Grandma and Grandpa hate their guts. That’s enough for me.”
“What does that matter? We’ve been hanging out with them for days now.”
Gretchen blows hair out of her face. “I have my eye on him, is all I’m saying.”
Jack shows up out of nowhere and grabs another bag of trash to take outside.
Gretchen scowls and stalks away, and I follow Jack into the backyard. We are quiet for a few minutes, going back and forth between the kitchen and the truck with whatever trash we can carry.
I start to worry that I should be saying something. Most of the time I think I could be perfectly content without saying a single word, but no one else seems to function that way. There is so much talking in the world, and so much expectation to talk, even if you do not feel like talking.
I find it overwhelming.
“Sorry about Gretchen,” I say.
“Whatever. I’m not worried about her.” Jack squints one eye shut and jumps onto the truck’s open tailgate. “Arrr, I am wise in the ways of the world, orphan girl. I have sailed across many seas, and made port in many lands. One knight is not enough to scare me!”
I laugh, and Jack jumps down beside me, grinning. “Come on,” he says, “let’s go visit them.”
I do not have to ask who he is talking about. How wonderful a thing that is, to understand someone else without even trying to.
We crawl through the big oak tree’s branches and sit on the dirt by the Travers family’s gravestones. Jack’s knee bumps against mine.
My thoughts are a whirl of . . . well, to be honest, I am not quite sure, so I take a second to organize a list in my mind.
ABOUT JACK BAILEY
• Jack does a great pirate accent.
• When he says my name, it sounds beautiful.
• When he smiles at me, I cannot help smiling back.
• Jack is a Bailey.
The evening is still and hot around us, but under this tree we are in a cocoon of cool mud and night noises and shifting leaves with a thousand different voices. My shirt is sticky from all the cleaning, and when the wind trickles past us, I shiver.
“Do you think it hurt them?” Jack asks quietly. “You know, when they died?”
“Yes.”
Jack looks at me. “That doesn’t freak you out?”
“What doesn’t?”
“Dying.”
“I guess. Other things freak me out more.” I hesitate, but Jack seems interested.
“Like what?” he asks.
I should not have said anything. “I don’t know. Stupid stuff.”
“I’ll tell you what I’m scared of.”
“Yeah?”
“Totally. Let’s see.” Jack settles back on his arms and watches the leaves move overhead. “Tornados. Comets, like, flying off course and crashing into Earth. Dolls.”
I crack up. “Dolls?”
“Yep. Dolls. Hey, don’t laugh! They have these tiny little demon faces. Like if you look away, they’ll jump on you and suck out your soul. You know?”
“I think that might just be you.”
“Fine, fine, believe what you want. But when the dolls rise up, you’ll think about this moment and wish you’d listened to me.”
I lean back against a branch. The tree sways ever so slightly in the wind, and I let it rock me.
“So what are you afraid of, Finley?” Jack asks. “I told you mine.”
WHAT I AM AFRAID OF
• What Mom and Dad are talking about while I am gone.
• That I will never be a real Hart.
• My blue days, when I feel like I am stuck underwater, where everything is slow and cold.
• When I lose myself, and my brain speeds up, and my heartbeat speeds up, and everything inside me comes crashing down until I can hardly remember what it feels like to breathe without
a hundred stones stacked on my chest.
• That I will feel this way for the rest of my life.
“Jack?”
“Yeah?”
Looking at the gravestone of Frank Travers, I think about how the Bone House must have looked when they were all alive—two solid stories, maybe three solid bedrooms; whole and breathing and warm with light. Strong, like a house should be.
(Like I am not.)
“Can I tell you later?” I ask Jack.
“When?”
“Sometime. I promise.”
Jack yawns. “Okay. Deal.”
ABOUT JACK BAILEY
• When you promise him something, he’ll believe you. No questions asked.
• • •
Before we leave, we construct a tiny shrine to the Travers family under the stairs that lead up to the second floor.
We find this chair with a stained, frayed cushion and wobbly legs, and on the chair we arrange the framed picture of the Travers family, along with one of the coffee cups we found in the kitchen, a couple of books from the living room, and one of Cynthia Travers’s stuffed animals—a purple dog with one ear and one eye. But it is still smiling hopefully.
Even Ruth is quiet while we stand by the shrine, listening to the wind move through the house. A train horn sounds, and the spell is broken.
“Good night,” Kennedy says, waving at the Travers family photo. “See you soon.”
Everyone files out after her and does the same thing, saying good-bye to the Travers family like they are real people instead of ghosts. I am the last one out, and as I step onto the porch, I notice Cole giving Kennedy our stolen box of dues. I had forgotten all about it.
I search for the proper word to describe the expression on his face: Adoring. Soft. Bashful. Nervous.
None of those quite work; his expression is all of those things at once, and more.
The best way to describe it is this:
Mom and Dad used to look at each other like that.
21
MY AUNTS HAVE TO DRAG my cousins out of the house on Tuesday morning—literally, in Dex and Ruth’s case. Not even Kennedy’s sweet-talking can console them.
I help Aunt Bridget get Dex and Ruth settled in the car. They will not sit still until I remind them of their impending knighthood, at which point they turn into statues.
Once they are buckled in, Aunt Bridget closes the door and lets out a huge sigh. “Thank you, Finley.”
“You’re welcome.”
“I tell you, I’ve never seen them like this. Coming over here for days and days at a time. That’s certainly never happened before. They usually think Grandma’s house is so boring. ‘There’s nothing to do here.’ ‘She’ll make us clean.’ ‘Can we go home yet?’ But now? You’d think taking them for two short days is the end of the world.”
Aunt Bridget looks like she cannot decide if she wants to smile. She brushes hair out of my eyes, and her fingers are warm against my skin, like Mom’s. I try not to lean in to her, but I think I might a little bit.
“You’re working some kind of magic on them, Finley.”
Avery passes by on her way to the garage, wearing her orange paint shorts, a Led Zeppelin T-shirt, and a crooked smile. “Black magic, you mean.”
Aunt Bridget rolls her eyes. “Don’t mind Avery. She’s a teenager. She can’t help being obnoxious.”
I laugh, which feels strange; this is sharp and shiny Aunt Bridget, after all. I know she is angry at Dad. I always wonder if she is angry at me, too.
But then Aunt Bridget holds me close and kisses the top of my head. I hear her heartbeat, and I wonder, since we are Harts, if mine sounds just like hers.
“I’m glad you’re here,” she whispers, and instead of answering, I press my cheek harder against her chest.
When they leave, I run after their car down the long driveway, waving back at Dex and Ruth, until I can no longer keep up.
• • •
Mom calls at 7:57 on Thursday. She has not called in a few days, and I was not expecting her to tonight, but I guess she felt brave enough to conquer her phone fear today. When her picture pops up on the screen—her freckled face kissing my freckled face—I smile. It’s impossible to look at that picture without smiling. Our faces are so squashed and happy in it.
If someone found my notebook and read what I have written about my mother, they might think I don’t like her very much:
Mom snapped at me tonight when I messed up her stack of papers. Then Dad snapped at her for snapping at me, and now they are downstairs yelling at each other. I hate her.
Mom’s yelling again. I hate it when she’s like this. She gets so stressed. I don’t know how to talk to her.
Mom didn’t let me take my notebook with me when we ran errands today. She doesn’t get me at all, and I don’t get her, and I don’t want to.
I wonder if Mom is where I get my blue days from. They have to come from somewhere, don’t they?
I am not sure which idea is more terrifying: that my blue days come from my mother, or that they don’t come from anywhere in particular. That they are these toxic clouds floating through the universe, and they thought I was worth latching on to.
But when I am with Mom, and she is happy, I feel like I am not simply myself but a piece of something bigger and stronger.
“Finley!” Even through the phone connection Mom’s voice is a clear, crisp bell. “Oh, sweetie. I’m sorry it’s been days, I really am. I’ve been so busy.”
I sneak downstairs and out onto the Green. Grandma has the kitchen windows open while she bakes, and a Jimmy Reed song drifts across the yard with the dragonflies. The freshly cut grass is warm and scratchy on my bare feet.
“I really feel rotten, baby. But you know how crazy this time of year gets.”
With Mom, every time of year is a crazy time of year. How are she and Dad possibly talking about anything important if all they do is work?
I curl my toes into the grass. It’s almost like I can feel the green color seep up through the bottoms of my feet, sleepy and slow, like drinking a glass of water on a hot day. “I know, Mom. It’s okay.”
“So, tell me everything. How’s it going?”
Mom asks me this whenever we talk, but this time I am not sure how to answer her. My summer has, over the past week, become much more complicated than I anticipated.
“Fine,” I say.
(But there was a fire, and no one talks about it. No big deal.)
I hear Mom typing on her computer. “And how is everyone?” she asks.
How best to describe the mood at Hart House tonight?
From here I can see inside the big living room windows. Dex and Ruth are galloping around on their hands and knees, probably pretending to be unicorns, which is Dex’s favorite game. Gretchen is running back and forth between the kitchen and the living room; each time she comes back, she holds a fresh cookie. Kennedy is braiding Avery’s hair, who is braiding Aunt Dee’s hair. Stick and Aunt Bridget are dancing to Grandma’s music. Aunt Bridget holds a drink; Stick is wearing a glittery paper pirate hat that Ruth made.
Uncle Nelson and Grandpa sit in the big leather chairs, trying to watch TV, but I can’t imagine they can actually hear it.
I grin, watching them. “Same as always. Loud.”
Mom laughs—her real laugh. It is this great big guffaw she tries to hide when she speaks with clients because she thinks it sounds unprofessional.
Whenever I make her laugh her real laugh, I feel like I will never have a blue day again.
“Your dad said Hart House was always a bit of a zoo,” she says. “I guess that hasn’t changed, huh? What else? I feel like . . . What else?”
“You feel like what?”
“I just . . . I miss you so much. I feel like I haven’t seen you in months, and it’s only been, what? Five weeks?”
I sit down in one of the swings and push myself back and forth, trying not to think of what the past month has been like for my parents. Did th
ey send me to Grandma’s to protect me from whatever is happening at home?
Or did they send me away because I was making things worse?
“Four weeks. Ish.”
“Well. Feels longer to me. How are you? Really.”
“I’m okay. Really.”
“You would tell me, right? If you were miserable?”
“Yes,” I lie. I don’t lie about many things, but I always lie about that. There is enough going on in my parents’ lives. They don’t need to worry about me.
(I am fine.)
(I should be happy, so I will be.)
Mom sighs. “I’m just checking, is all.”
“I’m having fun. Mostly.”
“Oh, honey. You’re not still scared of Avery, are you?”
“Mom. I’m not scared of her, but she’s seventeen. We have nothing to talk about. And she’s so pretty.”
“So are you, Finley.”
I roll my eyes. “You’re my mom. That doesn’t count.”
“It does too. It counts double.”
“You sound like Ruth. She thinks she and Dex should get double votes, double ice cream, double everything. She says since they’re twins, they have special powers, so we have to keep them happy or else they’ll turn to the dark side. She’s . . . a little nuts.”
Mom chuckles. “Remind me again. That’s Bridget’s daughter, right?”
It still feels strange to hear Mom say Aunt Bridget’s name. “Yeah.”
I wonder: If we had been a normal family all this time, would Mom and Bridget be friends?
“Are you still going on drives with your grandfather?”
“Sometimes.” And then I am thinking about the article, and Grandpa’s face as he read it—like it was an article not about a fire but about the end of the world.
Does Mom know about the Travers fire?
The question begs to be let out, but I don’t allow myself to ask it. Not tonight. Who knows when Mom will call again?
I dig my toes into the ground so hard, I feel dirt wedge beneath my nails.
(Act normal, Finley.)
(Nothing is wrong here. Nothing at all.)
“Did you know Grandpa does crossword puzzles too?” I ask her. “And Uncle Nelson, but he’s not as good at them as Dad is.”
“No one’s as good at crossword puzzles as your dad. Except for maybe you. But don’t tell him I said that.”
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