The House on the Gulf

by Margaret Peterson Haddix

  And then there was Bran. Everyone at the restaurant undoubtedly thought he was the most conscientious kid on the planet, not wanting to stop chopping lettuce even for a second to talk to his sister. Nobody knew he’d been lying all summer. No one knew he’d deceived his grandparents, stolen their key, broken into their house.

  And what about me? From one side I probably looked like a loyal kid sister, not tattling on Bran. From the other side—was I an accomplice to a crime?

  I wanted so badly to tell Mom everything, let her figure out for herself what to do, even if it meant she dropped out of school. But then I thought about how Bran had looked just before he’d answered my question “We don’t want to take any chances, do we?” At that moment he’d looked so vulnerable, so lost, that all I wanted to do was protect him.

  It was so backward, me protecting Bran, him protecting Mom.

  As soon as I stumbled out of that alley, I got my bike and rode straight to Mrs. Stuldy’s.

  “Can I ask you a question about your son without you thinking I’m like the women down at the senior center who talk mean about you behind your back?” I asked Mrs. Stuldy all in one breath, as soon as I’d settled in at her kitchen table.

  Mrs. Stuldy blinked a few times and poured me a glass of milk.

  “Of course,” she said. “I know you’re not like that.”

  I wanted to savor the feeling that gave me, the sense that she trusted me. But I pushed on with my question.

  “Before Sam was arrested,” I said, “but after he’d, you know, killed that man. . . if you’d have known what he did, would you have told on him? Would you have turned him in to the cops?”

  Mrs. Stuldy stared at me across her red-checked tablecloth, and for a minute I thought she hadn’t heard my question. Or hadn’t understood it. I was trying to think how to rephrase it a little more gently when she whispered, “Oh, honey, I am so glad I didn’t know. So glad I didn’t have to make that decision.”

  I wanted to keep asking, to keep peppering her with what ifs. But I already felt like I’d beaten her up just with that one question. I took a drink of milk.

  Mrs. Stuldy was squinting at me.

  “You don’t—you don’t think John Marcus was murdered, do you?” she asked.

  “Oh, no. It’s not that,” I said. “Not at all.”

  And then I felt a little better, because at least Bran’s secret wasn’t that bad. It wasn’t murder.

  Mrs. Stuldy chuckled a little.

  “Roy keeps telling me I watch too many police shows on TV,” she said. “Makes me morbid.” A shadow crossed her face, and I knew she was thinking she had reason to be. Then she shrugged. “It doesn’t do any good to sit around thinking about bad things. I tell you what. Why don’t you go down to Eckerd’s and pick out a nice sympathy card for me to send to Mary. I’ll mix us up some sweets. Maybe those chocolate-oatmeal no-bake cookies. That way I won’t have to turn on the oven. I just didn’t feel like baking early this morning after I found out about John. But there’s nothing like chocolate for cheering a body up.”

  “Oh, no!” I said, too loudly. I gulped. “I mean, you don’t have to make anything for me.”

  “But I want to,” Mrs. Stuldy said, and reached back to the kitchen counter to get her purse.

  I’d really wanted to say, “Oh, no, you can’t send a sympathy card.” I hadn’t known I’d have to worry about that, too. But of course Mrs. Stuldy would want to send a card. And Mrs. Marcus would want to know that Mrs. Stuldy was sorry about Mr. Marcus dying.

  “Here,” Mrs. Stuldy said, pulling a handful of dollar bills from her purse. “Three for the card, and four for you for running my errand.”

  “Can’t Mr. Stuldy do it for you?” I said. My voice came out sounding tortured. “Something like that’s awfully personal.”

  And then I was furious with myself, because if Mr. Stuldy picked out the card I wouldn’t be around to see if Mrs. Stuldy wrote anything about us in it.

  Mrs. Stuldy held the money back for a moment.

  “Oh, I forgot, you’ve never known anyone who died before. I can kind of remember being squeamish about death myself when I was your age. But really, picking out a sympathy card is no different than choosing any other kind of card. That’s why Roy can’t do it for me. You know, for my birthday last year he found something with orange and black elephants on it. I swear. Uglier than a mud fence. I figure he must have asked for it special. I didn’t mind, but for the Marcuses . . . Get something with flowers on it, and a nice verse. Something real pretty.”

  She held out the money to me, and I didn’t know what else to do but to take it.

  I stood in the greeting card aisle of Eckerd’s forever, rejecting one card after another. I’d think about how the card could be the end of us living in the Marcuses’ house, and I’d want to bolt out of Eckerd’s right then, no matter what Mrs. Stuldy wanted. But then I’d think about how bad Mrs. Stuldy felt for Mrs. Marcus, and how I’d want as many sympathy cards as possible if I were Mrs. Marcus.

  I felt like I deserved a sympathy card or two myself.

  In the end I picked out a card with a single rose on the front. On the inside it said, Thinking of you in your time of sorrow. I suspected Mrs. Stuldy would have preferred something with frillier words and a frillier picture, but she wasn’t doing the picking. I was.

  And then I stood there for a moment longer, and my hand reached out for a card I’d glanced at and put back once or twice already. It was much too plain for Mrs. Stuldy’s taste. It just said, In Sympathy in gold on the front, and then, You are in our prayers on the inside. And that was it—no pictures, no flowers, nothing else. I pulled out an envelope to go with it, and then I carried both cards up to the cash register.

  “Ring these up separately, please,” I told the cashier. I could send Mrs. Marcus a card too, I decided. Bran and Mom and I had never been very religious, but “you are in our prayers” seemed like the right message. I couldn’t figure out how the Marcuses could have been so horrible to Mom and look so kind and loving in their family pictures. I couldn’t figure out if I was doing the right thing by protecting Bran even though both of us knew it was wrong for us to live in the Marcuses’ house. I didn’t know how I could carry the rose card back to Mrs. Stuldy’s house, knowing it might be the end of Bran’s secret. But I thought maybe God could understand everything.

  It seemed like a good time for praying.

  I walked back to Mrs. Stuldy’s house and showed her the rose card. She gave a little grunt that was probably disappointment but said, “That’s real fine. Kind of classy. Now, can you open it up and write what I tell you to write?”

  She was handing me the pen. I looked up at her in surprise.

  She sighed.

  “My hands shake too bad,” she said. “Look.” She turned over the sales slip I’d given her, and painstakingly wrote something on the back. Then she held the paper out for me to see. It looked like a child had been scribbling with one of those vibrating pens. I couldn’t make out a single letter.

  “Uh, is that—”

  “It’s my signature,” Mrs. Stuldy said. “Couldn’t tell, could you? My son’s about the only person in the world who can read my writing. It’s funny—when I was a girl I had the best penmanship in the whole class. And, you know, I hated to cook back then. When Roy married me I didn’t feed him a decent meal for twenty years. But right after . . .after Sam went to jail, my hands started shaking, and the doctors could never give me enough medicine to stop it. Seemed like the only thing my hands were good for anymore was stirring. So that’s what I did. Cooking, baking . . .I even got so I liked it. Now. You gonna write in that card for me or am I going to have to send it out with Roy’s chicken scratchings on it? He was always the worst in penmanship, even seventy years ago.”

  “Uh, okay. I can write for you,” I said, reaching for the pen. I had the feeling Mrs. Stuldy was trying to tell me about more than her handwriting, but my thoughts were too jumbled to listen well.


  I gripped the pen and prepared to form my letters carefully.

  “‘Dear Mary,’” Mrs. Stuldy dictated. “‘We were real sorry to hear about John. We’ll be praying for you.’” She paused for a minute. “Do you want to say something about how you’re writing this for me, and you’re sorry too? Seeing as how you were so sad this morning—”

  “No, that’s okay,” I said, too quickly. “I got a card for Mom and Bran and me to send. See?” I pulled out the bag I’d tucked under my chair. “This rose card should just be from you and Mr. Stuldy.”

  My heart was pounding so loudly I was sure Mrs. Stuldy would hear it. But she just shrugged.

  “You’re right, I wasn’t thinking. Of course you got a card of your own,” she said. “You’re a good child, you know that? You can just sign it, now, ‘Sincerely, Roy and Early Stuldy.’ No point in writing a lot on a condolences card. People don’t want to have to read too much through their tears.”

  Slowly, slowly, I let out the breath I’d been holding. Bran and Mom and I were safe again after all.

  For now.

  I wrote out the Marcuses’ New York address on both envelopes, and then Mrs. Stuldy insisted on giving me a stamp for my card as well as hers.

  “Call it a tip,” she said cheerfully. “Now, are you ready for the cookies?”

  She did indeed have a plateful sitting on the counter. And the whole kitchen smelled warm and chocolaty. But my stomach churned at the thought of any food, and I was too antsy to sit there leisurely eating cookies and chatting with Mrs. Stuldy.

  “Thanks, but I think I’d better go ahead and mail these cards,” I said. “And I should check in with my other customers. I’ve been neglecting them lately.”

  “All right,” Mrs. Stuldy said wistfully. “I’ll just wrap up some cookies to send with you.”

  I dropped the cookies off at home, then I walked on up to the mailbox two blocks away. I still hadn’t written anything on my card for Mrs. Marcus. I took a pen with me, and then I stood at the mailbox with the card open on the top, the pen in my hand.

  I certainly didn’t plan to sign my name, but what did I want to say to my grandmother after all these years? What could I say?

  The heat pressed in on me. I was like some statue: Girl Who Can’t Decide by Mailbox. It seemed like hours passed before I finally folded the card into the envelope and sealed it and stuffed it into the mailbox without writing anything. The preprinted You are in our prayers was the best I could do.

  I just wondered. Were we ever in Mrs. Marcus’s prayers?

  Bran came home after work and didn’t say a word to me about Mr. Marcus dying or us moving or anything like that. He acted like nothing had changed. And I guess for him, it hadn’t.

  But I spent an hour that night staring at the “Goofy Pop-Pop” picture and crying. It was like my own private memorial service.

  The next day, after Mom and Bran left, I unlocked Bran’s closet and pulled out the box of pictures once again. This time I stared at all the pictures of Mrs. Marcus: her kissing Mr. Marcus under the mistletoe; her laughing as a young mother, a baby and a toddler in her arms; her proudly arranging her daughter Susan’s wedding veil; her walking on the beach with Mr. Marcus, each of them holding a grandchild’s hand. “I’m very sorry for your loss,” I whispered to each picture—a phrase I’d picked up from the Eckerd’s sympathy card aisle.

  For that short period of time I didn’t let myself think about what the pictures left out. About who they left out.

  But after that I was able to go back to my usual routine, my usual circuit between Winn-Dixie and Eckerd’s, carrying milk and bread and Turns and the National Enquirers for my neighbors. I bought sympathy cards for Mrs. Marcus on behalf of two other neighbors, and wrote their messages as well. Mr. Johnson said his eyes were too weak; Mrs. Zendt blamed her arthritis. Secretly I wondered if it was just that they each wanted to keep death as far away from themselves as they could.

  At least with me writing the cards for them, I knew they didn’t say anything about Bran house-sitting.

  And then somehow June melted into July and we were still living in the Marcuses’ house. Nobody caught us. No Realtors showed up, and neither did the police. I began to think that maybe Bran was right, that we could go the whole summer without being detected.

  I could still hear the voice inside me insisting, No, no, this is wrong. You’ve got to tell Mom! But I kept holding up that voice against images in my head: Bran’s look of panic and fear and dread on the Shrimp Shack loading dock when I’d asked, “We don’t want to take any chances, do we?”; Mom’s face just seconds away from dissolving into tears at dinner the night I’d asked, “Do you have any happy memories of your parents?”

  I carried around other voices in my head too: Bran saying, “Think about it all summer long, if you want”; Mrs. Stuldy telling me the first time I met her, “Life’s too short to take a long time making decisions.”

  I was still the Girl Who Can’t Decide statue. I was just a statue who moved around, looking like an ordinary twelve-year-old to all the rest of the world.

  Why couldn’t anyone see how upset and worried and terrified and troubled and sad and confused and lonely and grieving and guilty and longing and helpless and hopeful I was under my skin?

  I think Mrs. Stuldy came the closest to knowing that something was wrong. Sometimes she seemed to be watching me carefully, her eyes as sharp as a bird’s.

  “Are you all right?” she asked me out of the blue one morning as I sat in her kitchen eating apple crumb cake. “Walking around so much in all this heat—it can’t be healthy for you.”

  She’d never acted worried about the heat before.

  “I’m fine,” I said, as cheerfully as I could.

  She sighed.

  “That’s what Sam said the night before he was arrested.”

  “I’m not—I mean—” I was flustered then. What if Mrs. Stuldy somehow managed to guess everything?

  Mrs. Stuldy sighed again.

  “Oh, don’t worry. I know you haven’t murdered anybody. I’m just a foolish old woman who’s seen too many things go wrong. I know when I was a girl I’d brood for days over nothing—like whether Herman Hinkerman was making goo-goo eyes at me or at Mildred Stollins. And now Herman and Mildred have both been dead more than fifty years. Herman was in World War Two, you know, and . . .”

  I let her talk, though I wanted so badly to tell her I wasn’t just brooding over nothing.

  “What would you have done, about Sam, I mean, if you’d known that everything wasn’t fine?” I asked when she was done with her story. “Before he was arrested, I mean?”

  Mrs. Stuldy frowned thoughtfully.

  “I don’t reckon there was anything I could have done,” she said. “Except keep loving him. And maybe started trying even sooner to forgive him.”

  I thought maybe that was her answer, a few weeks late, to my question about whether she would have turned Sam in.

  “How long ago was that?” I asked, still curious. “How long has Sam been in prison?”

  She gazed off over my shoulder, and seemed to be counting in her head. I thought she was adding up days, tallying up months. But then she answered: “Twenty years.”

  “Twenty years?” I repeated in amazement. I wouldn’t have guessed even twenty months. I peered off into her crowded living room. “And you’ve been holding on to his furniture for him all that time?”

  “Yep,” Mrs. Stuldy said, sounding a little surprised herself.

  And then I thought that if I could tell her everything, Mrs. Stuldy would understand completely about me being the Girl Who Can’t Decide. Mrs. Stuldy was like that too.

  But of course I couldn’t tell her anything.

  July inched along, a blur of heat and worry and long, punishing trips between the neighborhood and Winn-Dixie and Eckerd’s. And then suddenly Mom’s exams were over and she had three days off as a break between summer sessions.

  “Let’s go to the beach,�
�� she proposed at breakfast the morning of her first day off. “Just the three of us.”

  “I can’t,” Bran said nervously, cutting his eyes toward me. “I have to work.”

  “Then it’s ladies only,” Mom said. “What about it, Britt? Sun and surf and sand, and nothing to do except apply suntan lotion, all day long.”

  “Um, sure,” I said. “Sounds like fun.”

  But I could tell my voice was a little off, like I was trying too hard to sound delighted. Bran frowned at me from across the table, sending silent messages: Act normal and Don’t tell her anything and Remember not to ask about her parents and Protect her, please protect her. . . .

  Then Bran left for work, and it felt surreal, Mom and me rushing around getting ready for the beach. I could tell Mom wanted to re-create the carefree day we’d had at the beginning of the summer, but I couldn’t quite get in the right mood. I realized I’d been relying on all those long, hot, punishing walks. I didn’t think I deserved any fun.

  “Noodle fight!” Mom yelled, springing out of the laundry room with two long foam beach toys that belonged to the Marcuses. “Want the yellow ‘sword’ or the blue one?”

  She stood in mock fighting stance, holding the noodles like weapons.

  “Uh, Mom, I don’t think we should do that indoors,” I said. “We might break something.”

  “You’ve turned into as big a spoilsport as Bran,” she said, dropping the noodles onto the table. She looked at me a little more closely. “You aren’t mad at me, are you, because I haven’t been able to spend much time with you lately?”

  “No, of course not,” I said stiffly.

  “Once this summer’s over, I won’t take such an intense load of classes,” she said. “So it’s not like you’re losing your mother permanently. I know . . . I know this summer’s been hard on you, and I do appreciate all the sacrifices you’ve made. Like having your own mother forget your name—let’s see, it’s Bridget, isn’t it?”

  She made a goofy face at me, like she was begging me to giggle and clown around with her. I forced myself to pick up a noodle and halfheartedly bop her on the shoulder with it.