Hearing Mom talk about Dad like everything is the same, like we are at home sneaking pepperonis off Dad’s slices of pizza and trying not to burst out laughing—it makes me feel light inside, like I am made of wings, flying up and up.
“Sometimes I go with Stick when she runs,” I continue, “but just part of the way.”
“I’m so glad you’re getting to spend time with your aunts. What about Dee?”
“Aunt Dee . . . I don’t know. She’s nice, but sometimes I think she’s afraid to talk to me. She looks at me like . . .”
“What is it? What do you mean?”
“Like she feels bad for me. Or she wants to say something but then she decides not to.”
“Ah. I see.”
I pause, drawing circles in the dirt with my toe. “She told me she loves Dad. That she always will.”
Mom goes quiet. “I’m sure that’s true.”
My wings slip away from me. I am losing her.
“Grandpa likes Beethoven,” I say quickly. I squeeze my eyes shut. Great. Beethoven. One more thing to remind Mom about Dad. Why can I not think of safer things to say?
But Mom just laughs and says, “Don’t you mean Beeth-oven?”
I relax against the swing. “Yeah. We listen to that a lot and talk about random stuff. There are a ton of cows out where we drive. He’s really funny, actually. He’s always making these comments, like he always has really good comebacks. But then he can get really serious, too. The other day he and Gretchen were playing chess, and I literally saw Gretchen sweating, she was so nervous. He’s intense.”
That makes Mom laugh again. “I’ve heard that your grandfather has always been a formidable man.”
“He wears nice pants and shirts every day. Even when he’s sitting around the house or whatever.”
“Your dad once told me that when he was growing up, they had to change for dinner,” Mom says. “You couldn’t wear sweats or pajamas. You had to put on nice, clean clothes. Dresses for the girls. Slacks for your father.”
I think of my typical dinner uniform at home—my pajamas. Curled up on the couch. A plate on my lap, and Dad behind me at his desk, and Mom to my left in the kitchen, and something deep in my chest shifts, aching.
I push myself back and forth on the swing. “That’s insane. I’m so glad they don’t still do that.”
“It was your grandmother’s thing, apparently.”
“She loves things to look nice.”
Mom pauses. “Yes, she certainly does.”
“I think . . . She kind of scares me.”
“Goodness, why is that?”
Because she almost fainted in the kitchen last week.
Because she does not like to talk about upsetting topics.
Because most of the time I cannot see past her smile—but when I do, I see someone who is angry and sad and tired. And I am afraid it is somehow because of me. I am afraid I remind her of Dad, and whatever he did.
“Because,” I say, “I don’t know. She wears these pearls all the time, and she’s constantly cleaning. She makes us clean too, every day. Not normal cleaning. Major cleaning. Like the president’s coming over or something. She cooks every meal, and she does all this volunteer stuff—this clinic and the library and backpacks for kids. And did you know she and Grandpa gave a bunch of money to the city? Like, to the library and the parks and all that.”
Another pause, longer this time.
“I did know that,” Mom says. “Yes, of course. They got to meet the mayor and everything. I didn’t know your dad yet, but . . . yes. I remember him telling me about that. Isn’t it great of them, Finley, to get involved in their community?”
Mom has started using her work voice—light and fake and professional, and not Mom at all.
I am tired of adults with secrets in their voices.
“Yeah,” I say. “It’s great.”
It is like someone has inserted a glass wall between us so we cannot touch each other, and I don’t know where it came from, and I hate it.
“So,” Mom says, after a minute, “Finley. There’s something I wanted to talk to you about, before we say good night.”
I twist the swing’s ropes; the rough fibers bite into my palms.
I bet I know what she wants to talk about.
Her. Dad. Her and Dad, and me, and our house, and our things, and our family, and what will happen next. The fake smiles. The future. I’m not an idiot.
I will not listen to one word of it.
Behind me a door slams. I turn and see someone running down the hill from the Bailey house to the cluster of trees hiding the Post Office.
Jack.
I wave at him. Mom is talking, but I am not listening. I hear words—your father, trying really hard, not working—but I am not listening. I will not, I cannot.
I wave and wave at Jack. Jack, Jack, please see me.
He whistles like a mourning dove, which is the signal we use when we can’t shout, to keep Grandma and Grandpa from hearing. He waves at me to come down, and I can see his smile even in the dark.
This late, the Everwood crawls with shapes and shadows, but I am not afraid of them. Those shadows belong to me. I know just how they feel on my skin and in my hair and under my bare feet.
My Everwood may have secrets, but it never lies. Not to me.
“Mom, I have to go,” I say, and hang up without waiting for an answer.
ATE ONE NIGHT THE ORPHAN girl awoke to find herself being blindfolded.
“Who’s there?” she demanded. “What are your intentions?”
“You’ll see,” came the voice of the lady knight.
As she was led through the Everwood, the orphan girl heard others—the champion, the young squires, the three Rotters.
“Are you scared?” asked the pirate captain, laughter in his voice.
“It will take much more than a blindfold to frighten me,” said the orphan girl boldly, and she felt pleased when the captain replied, “I know.”
When the blindfold was removed, the orphan girl found herself in the Wasteland, the Bone House a crooked shadow looming overhead.
The captain helped the orphan girl onto a large stump. The others gathered around her in a circle.
“Orphan girl,” the pirate said, “we have brought you here tonight to thank you for your bravery, your kindness, and your leadership. Without you, we would not have begun our adventures, and the Rotters would no doubt still be an object of scorn.”
“We have a crown!” cried the youngest pirate, who was immediately silenced by the young lady squire, who tackled him to the ground for talking out of turn. The champion, acting quickly, separated them, and then scolded the lady squire for acting so undignified on such an important occasion.
“We do indeed have a crown,” continued the captain, once the moment of chaos had passed. “For you, orphan girl, deserve a grander title. You are not simply an orphan girl. You are our queen.”
Overcome, the orphan girl knelt on her throne. The young squires and the youngest pirate adorned her in necklaces made of paper flowers.
The pirate captain gave her a crown. A circle of twigs tied together with vines, it was a perfect fit for the orphan girl’s head.
But she was an orphan girl no longer. She was a queen.
“I accept this crown,” the queen of the Everwood declared, “and pledge to you, my loyal subjects, that I will do everything in my power to protect you, and our Everwood, from whatever evil may lurk in the world.”
The knight blessed the queen’s shoulders with her sword. The Rotters crowed their jubilation to the skies. The champion led a dance around the queen’s throne.
Afterward the queen told them stories of the Everwood, from the lonely days when she still traveled on her own.
The dagger in her pocket shifted, sharpened. The queen felt the prick of its blade.
But she ignored it and what it might mean.
For the queen, as you can imagine, had never been happier than she was at this
moment.
She even began to think her great sadness would now, at long last, disappear.
22
NO.
No.
No.
It is happening again.
I wake up, unable to move, pinned to my bed by something I cannot name.
My sheets are wet with sweat, and so am I.
My heart is racing, and so is my mind.
I imagine a spool of thread falling from Mom’s hands as she sews a button back onto a tufted sofa cushion. The spool rolls away and away, down the stairs, its thread spinning loose faster and faster . . .
That is me right now.
I am so close to losing myself.
I cannot breathe very well; there is a giant clamp on my chest.
I lie still and try to think of what happened on Friday night:
My coronation.
My cousins surrounding me, dancing in my honor, and Jack, placing the crown on my head.
Think of that, Finley. Think of that.
Focus on those memories.
You were happy then, weren’t you? You were, you were.
So why not now? Why do you feel so heavy now?
You are not the Travers family, dead and buried. You are not the Bone House, broken and alone.
You live in a mansion, with rooms full of people who have declared you to be their queen.
BUT.
(My brain screams this.)
BUT . . .
You will never be as pretty as Avery, or as brave as Gretchen, or as kind as Kennedy, or as funny and wild as Jack.
You are small and strange.
You are far from home.
You can’t stop feeling sad. You are wrong. You are weak.
Your parents are getting a—
They are getting a—
A train horn howls in the distance. There are tracks near Hart House, somewhere through the woods. I keep hearing the horn, but I have not yet found the tracks. I imagine that I can hear the train’s wheels turning, churning, chugging, and then the train’s wheels are my heartbeat, and then . . .
I hurry toward the bathroom at the end of the hallway, the one I share with Avery.
I throw open the toilet-seat lid and kneel in front of it. Maybe I need to throw up.
But that’s not it.
I do not know what it is.
I know I should be happy, and sleeping, but instead I feel like I do not fit in my own body.
A door opens.
Avery.
“Finley?”
Oh, Avery, why did you have to wake up? I do not want you to see me right now.
You cannot know. You cannot understand.
I do not understand.
“Finley.” She sits beside me on the floor. “Are you sick?”
I shake my head.
“What’s wrong?”
I whisper, “I don’t know. I feel . . .”
How to finish that sentence?
I feel sad.
I feel heavy.
I feel itchy, and afraid, and out of breath, and like my brain is on fire, and nervous, and guilty for being nervous, and like I am about to cry.
Will I be like this forever?
I will, I will, I won’t, I can’t. Please.
Are you listening, whoever is in charge of such things? Please, do not do this to me.
I shake my head.
“What’s going on here? Avery?”
A new voice. Grandma’s voice.
Oh no. Grandma, in her peach silk robe, her hair clean and neat and white.
(So perfect, even at night? How?)
If Avery wouldn’t understand, then Grandma . . . she might hate me.
She might be afraid of me, if she knew.
If she knew what? What is this? What is wrong with me?
She might make me leave, separate me from my cousins. From Aunt Bridget, with a heartbeat like mine.
“Finley’s got a tummy ache,” says Avery. “Probably from all those cookies after dinner.”
Thank you, Avery. Thank you, thank you.
“Yeah.” I put a hand on my stomach. “I think I had, like, ten? At least.”
Grandma does not look convinced. She stares at me like I am a spot on her spotless white floor.
She is trying to hide it, but I can see. I am not a Hart, not to her, not ever.
Harts do not freak out for no reason in the middle of the night.
“Would you like some medicine?” asks Grandma. “Something to calm your stomach?”
“No, that’s okay. I’m fine. I’ll be fine.”
She fills a cup with water, gives it to me, feels my forehead, frowns, wipes her fingers on a hand towel, tries to hide the wiping, fails. I see, and I know what that means.
I do not blame her.
I would not want to be contaminated by me either.
“Drink up,” she says. “I’m sure you’ll feel better in the morning.”
No, I won’t.
“Okay.”
I never feel better.
(Not even now that I am queen.)
“Thanks, Grandma. Sorry to wake you up.”
“It isn’t any trouble. Wake me if you have trouble getting back to sleep, all right?”
(As if I would ever bother her like that.)
Once Grandma has gone back to bed, everything is quiet. I can feel Avery looking at me, but I ignore her because I am so humiliated, I want to melt into the floor.
And I still cannot breathe quite right. I am still sweating, and still shaking, and I know what I look like right now because I have often examined myself in the mirror during such moments.
I look pale. Sick. Hollowed out.
Avery does not seem to care that I am ignoring her.
She scoots closer and pulls me into her arms, and even though I am sweaty, even when I start to cry, she holds on tight.
23
WHAT DO YOU DO WHEN you wake up in the middle of the night, in a house that is not yours, and lose yourself to the strange sadness and fear inside you worse than you ever have before, and humiliate yourself in front of your most terrifying family members?
If you are me, you sleep.
A lot.
• • •
On Sunday, I think maybe around lunchtime, Gretchen tiptoes into my dark room.
“Finley?” She sits on the bed, where I lie under a mountain of blankets. “Are you okay? Grandma said you got sick last night.”
If only it were some kind of sickness. Maybe I could take medicine or undergo a radical, experimental surgery.
Something to cut the sickness out.
But it isn’t that.
It is sadness.
No reason to be sad. So many rational, listable reasons to not be sad.
(I know; I have listed them.)
And yet it remains inside me.
“Yeah,” I mumble. “Too many cookies.”
“Oh, I’ve totally done that before. Grandma’s cookies are so good and yet so very evil. I think the more of them you eat, the more of them you have to keep on eating. Like a curse. Maybe she got the recipe from one of the Everwood witches. That sounds like something they would do. Right? Or maybe Grandma is a witch.”
“She’s not a witch,” I say into my pillow. “She’s too clean.”
Gretchen scoots closer to me. “Hey. Really, are you okay? Do you need me to bring you something?”
More blankets? A sadness extractor, freshly sharpened?
“Do you ever have bad days?” I ask her.
“Sure. Mom says that’s when you get up on the wrong side of the bed.”
“So you feel sad?”
“Yeah, I guess. But I just go outside or run around or Mom does something doofy, and I feel better.”
Ah. I see.
Then our bad days are not the same.
On my bad days, running around or going outside or being doofy changes nothing.
My sadness still sticks in me like a sword.
Gretchen pokes me.
“You think you’ll be okay for the fireworks tomorrow?”
The Fourth of July. My summer here is half over. “Yeah. I’m just tired.”
“Jack left a note at the Post Office. Says he wants to go to the Bone House tonight. He says he likes cleaning. He’s incredibly weird.”
I know I should want to go too. After all, I am the queen. It was my idea to start cleaning up the Bone House, to make it back into a home. I found the photograph. I led myself and Gretchen into the Wasteland, that first day.
I have a responsibility to my forest, to my people.
And part of me does want to go, truly.
But the rest of me sinks lower into the mattress at the thought of having to get out from under these covers. The idea of even moving my hand to touch Gretchen is overwhelming.
It is much, much easier to stay still.
Until I have recovered from last night is all. Just until then.
As Mom would say after a particularly stressful day, I need more time to “recover my equilibrium.”
There isn’t anything wrong with that, is there?
“You’ll feel better by then, right?” asks Gretchen.
“Maybe,” I say. “I’ll try. I’m going to nap for a while.”
“Well, we’ll be outside. Dex wants to paint the walls inside the Tower, and I think we should let him so Kennedy doesn’t pull her hair out. That’s okay with you?”
“The painting, or Kennedy pulling her hair out?”
Gretchen snorts. “Now that’s funny. Feel better, okay?”
(I think that might not be an option for me.)
“I will.” I pretend to yawn. “Thanks, Gretchen.”
Then she is gone, and I am alone, which is what I wanted—but it doesn’t make me feel any better.
• • •
I wake up later and dig out my phone from underneath my pillows.
I find Dad in my recent contacts. My thumb hovers over the call button.
But what would I say?
Dad, I am freaking out for no reason.
Dad, I am pretending I am sick today so I don’t have to talk to anyone.
Dad, I hurt, and I don’t know why.
But then what? Then he would come and get me, and I would have to be at home, with him and Mom and their problems.
Some Kind of Happiness Page 13