Love, Aubrey

by Suzanne LaFleur

  When our next train finally came, I was ready to get on. I settled down in the seat and watched out the window. We passed towns and woods and farms. The day was sunny, so everything looked bright and leafy green. The ride took almost the rest of the day.

  As we got closer to Gram’s house, I thought more about what it would be like there.

  We used to fly to Montpelier to visit Gram, but I had never been there on my own before. I remembered Gram’s house crowded with aunts, uncles, and cousins. In the summer there would be cookouts, with as many hot dogs and burgers as you wanted, and watermelon and softball and sprinklers. In the winter it snowed, and we used to make snow angels and snowmen. If all my cousins were there, there would be a whole heaven of snow angels on the ground. There were always so many people it was hard to find a place to sleep inside the house. Savannah and I used to have to squish on the couch.

  As we pulled into the station near Gram’s house, I began to feel sick to my stomach again.

  I clung tightly to Sammy’s bag as we stepped off the train.

  “We’ll get you some fresh water soon, Sammy, and set your bowl up, and then you’ll feel at home,” I whispered.

  I knew this fact about fish, though: they don’t like being tossed from one pot of water into the next.

  Vermont smelled like cows.

  Virginia had smelled like cows, too, sometimes, but not like this. Vermont had those dairy cows, black and white. For some reason their odor hung in the air, and all I could smell was cows. I didn’t remember the smell from visiting Gram before. It made me nauseous as we drove from the train station to her house.

  “Vermont stinks,” I said.

  Gram had nothing to say to that. I looked down at my shoes.

  I held on to Sammy’s bowl. That would be awful, for his bowl to spill in the car. He would flop around on the mat, and probably die there.

  I almost asked Gram to pull over.

  Soon we reached her yard. Her driveway was gravel under the trees. Her house, from the outside, was what I remembered: three stories, gray, with a wraparound porch.

  “We’ll get your stuff out of the car later. For now, let’s just get inside.”

  We’d always left our stuff in the car when we first got to Gram’s. Savannah and I would dash across the yard, fly up the front steps, and meet Gram on the porch. She would hug us both, one on each arm. “Oof! My girls!” she would say as we knocked her over. We would giggle, Savannah and I. Mom would come up next, stooping to kiss Gram on the cheek. Dad came last. He would wrench us out of Gram’s arms and help her up, giving her a hug on the way.

  I walked up to the porch with Gram beside me. I looked sideways. Gram’s face was wet. I stood in her doorway, and threw up.

  “I’m sorry, Gram,” I said. I was in bed, in one of the upstairs rooms, the one where Aunt Melissa and Uncle Steve usually stayed when we were all at Gram’s.

  “Now, now, duckling,” she said. “Don’t be sorry at all. I took care of your fish. See.” I saw Sammy’s bowl on the night table next to the bed. “I set his old bag of water in the fresh water so the temperatures would balance out and it won’t be so hard for him to change.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “You’re tired from your trip. You don’t realize how achy a night and a day spent on the train can make you.”

  I wanted to close my eyes and sleep and sleep and sleep. Was that really from the train ride?

  Grown-up people complain a lot more about aches than kids do. I wondered if Gram was very tired from her trip on the train overnight.

  “I’m sorry,” I said again. Gram must have heard the shakies in my voice.

  “No more tears. For either of us,” she said. “Go to sleep. I’m going to. I made you a snack tray in case you get hungry.” I noticed the tray on the night table held a glass of grape juice and a plate of crackers and cheese.

  I woke to bright sunlight and the sound of luggage being dragged into my room.

  “Gram?”

  “You have important things to do today! I made you a list,” Gram said.

  “What?” I couldn’t remember the last time someone asked me to do something. Well, I guess Gram had told me to pack, but before that… in April, it must have been … “Make sure Savannah is ready for the car ride … shoes tied, sweatshirt on, that she went to the bathroom …”

  Gram left the list on my night table. I read it after she left the room.

  Unpack.

  Talk to your grandmother.

  Spend time outside.

  I looked around the room. It was really plain. The furniture—bed, dresser, night table—was all wood. The bare floor had a red Oriental rug on it. There was one window, which showed the yard below with its yellow grass, empty picnic table, and ashy charcoal grill. Gram had a garden with tomato plants, but they looked dry. I could see through the yard to the neighbors’ house. They had one of those toddler climbers, some bikes, a swing set, and a tire swing in a tree. I didn’t remember kids living next door.

  The crackers and cheese still sat on the night table, the cheese limp and sweaty. I figured it was still good because people ate cheese in the Middle Ages and they didn’t have refrigerators, so I ate some and drank all the warm juice.

  I opened the top drawer of the dresser to find it stuffed full of pictures and papers. I opened the middle drawers, which were empty. The bottom drawer had three small white dresses in it.

  “Gram! There’s already stuff in the dresser!” I yelled. She didn’t hear me.

  I shut the lower drawers and went back to the top drawer. I scooped up a handful of photos. I knew they had been rummaged through before, because there seemed to be no order to them.

  Gram had four children: Aunt Melissa, Uncle David, Aunt Linda, and my mom, Elizabeth. The photos were all of them.

  Four rusty-haired children sit under a Christmas tree. A boy—Uncle David—plays a clarinet. Two girls hurtle down a metal slide. A girl plays in leaves. A girl blows out birthday candles. A baby grins without teeth.

  It was harder for me to tell the girls apart when they were alone in the photos, but when they were together I knew Mom was the smallest. I looked back at the Christmas photo. The smallest girl was smiling, her grin showing gaps in her teeth. For someone so little, her hair seemed heavy, straight, and dark.

  My own hair was a faded blond color. It was always thin and limp. Not shiny. Savannah’s hair had been like that, too. It was Dad’s family who were blond and feather-haired.

  I shoved the photos back in the drawer and shut it. I crossed my arms and sat on the bed. I didn’t live at Gram’s. I wasn’t unpacking. I took my three bags and pushed them under the bed. I realized I had been wearing the same clothes for days, so I unzipped one bag just enough to pull out fresh shorts and a clean T-shirt. I changed into them. Then I sat on the bed, waiting, staring at the ceiling, thumping my feet on the floor. I thumped them one hundred and two times.

  “Aubrey!” Gram called. “Are you ready to come down?”

  “Yes,” I said. She probably hadn’t heard my reply. I went downstairs anyway.

  The kitchen smelled really good. I even forgot about the smell of cows. Gram had made ham and scrambled eggs and toast and cantaloupe.

  “Sit,” Gram said, and she fixed a plate for me. I sat at the table, and noticed the rooster clock on the wall.

  “It’s two in the afternoon?” I asked.

  “Isn’t that amazing?” Gram said. “Who knows where the day went? You slept through the entire morning.” She slid a second plate onto the table for herself and sat down.

  I started to eat slowly, picking at things, cutting things that didn’t really need cutting, respreading the butter on my toast….

  “What’s next on your list?” she asked me.

  “Talk to your grandmother,” I recited.

  “Right,” she said. “I just wanted to let you know what’s going on. Uncle David went down from Boston to take over looking for your mom. The police will be looking
into whether she’s used her credit cards or been to an ATM, or checked into a hotel. That should give us some hints as to where she might be. And your aunts are putting together lists of friends that she might stop to see.”

  “Super,” I said. “Is that all?” I set my fork down and pushed away my plate.

  “I was wondering if you’d like to see your aunts. They’d like to see you. They both live within a couple of hours’ drive. We could have a summer get-together, like we used to.”

  “No thanks,” I said. I didn’t want to see anybody.

  Gram looked like she was trying to think of something to say. I turned away from her.

  “Back to your list?” Gram asked.

  “Number three: spend time outside,” I said.

  “Right. You need some sun and air.”

  Air that smelled like cows.

  There was a door in the kitchen, but I walked to the front door instead. I sat on the porch swing. A black and white cat circled some empty food dishes on the porch, then hopped up on the swing next to me. Gram hadn’t had a cat last time I was here.

  “Hi, kitty,” I said. I reached to pet her, and she stretched lazily along the bench. “What are you called, cat?”

  The cat didn’t know, it seemed, or she decided not to tell me. She batted at my shoelace, decided she couldn’t get it after all, and gave up.

  The back door of the neighbor’s house opened and a girl came out. She looked about my age. She had thick orangey-blond hair pulled into a high ponytail that hung down her back. She went over to the tire swing and hung through it on her stomach for a while. Then she got some sidewalk chalk and started drawing on the gray stones behind her house. I don’t know how long I watched her. Then she looked up, saw me, and waved. I went back inside.

  I could hear Gram on the phone. She was describing my mother.

  I thumped up the stairs loudly as I went to my new room.

  Dear Jilly,

  You know, I sort of thought to look for you when I was all by myself. But I didn’t really know where you would be. You were always more Savannah’s friend than mine.

  I know Savannah was always talking about going on fun trips with you. She used to pack backpacks for them. You probably would have liked the train ride I just took. It was two trains, actually. Gram came to Virginia and picked me up, and then we took the train up to her house in Vermont. We saw just about everything there is to see—ocean, forest, farms, and cities. We ate dinner and breakfast on the train and even slept there.

  I got a fish named Sammy. He’s blue but when he wiggles his fins you can see they have a little bit of purple on the edges. There is a cat here at Gram’s. There is also a girl next door, but I haven’t met her yet.

  I’ll tell you more later.

  Love,

  Aubrey

  PS I’m sorry I left without telling you.

  For someone who had brought me to live with her, Gram really seemed to want to keep me out of the house.

  “It’s good for you,” she explained.

  Every morning Gram handed me another list.

  “Summer’s not about having a list of things to do every day!” I groaned.

  I looked at the new list.

  Feed the pets.

  Hang up laundry on the line to dry.

  Tend the tomatoes.

  Water the flowers.

  Sweep the porch.

  I dressed, had a bowl of wheat flakes and bananas, and checked the list again.

  Feeding the pets was easy.

  I dropped a food pellet into Sammy’s bowl and wiggled my fingers at him. He wiggled his fins back at me. “Sammy, you’re my bestest fish friend,” I whispered to him. He wiggled back that I was his bestest people friend, which made sense, because I fed him and talked to him, and no one else ever did.

  Downstairs, I put a scoop of dry food and a spoonful of canned food in a little cat dish and carried it to the porch. Gram told me she calls the cat Martha. Martha didn’t spend all her time on the porch, but she did wait there every morning for her food. She rubbed against my legs when she saw me with the food dish. I took the dirty bowls back inside, then cleaned the water bowl, refilled it, and brought it back out.

  Gram had already washed the laundry. I didn’t understand why she didn’t get a dryer, but she said she never really needed one. I hauled the heavy basket of wet clothes to the clothesline in the yard. I didn’t like hanging up our underwear for everyone to see. Not that there were that many people around, but still.

  The girl next door was around. I looked past my underwear to her, and gave her an embarrassed half-smile apology. She smiled back, and then returned to the jump-rope lesson she was giving her little sister. Her sister must have been about four. She still had baby curls. I knew a baby-baby lived in the house, too, because I had heard one crying.

  I took the empty laundry basket into the kitchen. Gram was sitting at the table, head in her hands.

  “Hey, Gram,” I said. I didn’t want her to know I had caught her like that, upset.

  “Hey.”

  I put the laundry basket on the washing machine in the pantry and poured myself a glass of raspberry lemonade from the pitcher in the fridge. I sat down at the table with her.

  “Who’s the girl who lives in the other house?”

  Gram looked as if she was coming back from far away, but then she seemed excited. “Bridget? Oh, have you met Bridget? She’s a nice girl. I was hoping you would meet her.”

  “I haven’t met her, just seen her.”

  “Yes, that’s Bridget. Bridget and Mabel, and Danny, I think, is the baby. They moved here during the winter.”

  I finished my lemonade. I headed back outside to finish the list. Number three, tend the tomatoes, was my least favorite of the jobs Gram liked to give me. I had to pull out any weeds that grew in the rows between the plants, straighten their cages, mix the plant food in the watering can, and water them. The whole thing probably took about an hour. My knees got dirty and my ponytail fell out, and when I went to fix it, I got dirt in my hair and on my face. Gram said it would be worth it, though, when we had great tomatoes to eat at the end of the summer. The plants seemed healthier now. They were green and full, with hard tomatoes the color of lime juice budding under hairy leaves. As I worked, I glanced up every now and then to see if Bridget was still outside. Sometimes I caught her looking at me.

  Watering the flowers was more fun. I got to hook up the hose and spray all the flowers along the house and throughout the yard.

  The last job was easy. I got the broom from the kitchen pantry and swept all the dirt off the porch into the bushes and grass beneath. That only took a minute.

  When all my chores were done, I got another glass of lemonade and flopped onto the porch swing to rest.

  When I had finished my drink, I looked across the yard. Bridget was still there, by herself now, sitting in the tire swing. I told my legs to stand up, to walk, but they seemed to take a long time to listen. Finally, I managed to walk myself off the porch, past the tomatoes, through the trees, and into Bridget’s yard. By then she was on her stomach, spinning slowly with her feet on the ground.

  “Hi,” I said.

  She looked up. “You have a scar on your head,” she said.

  Usually, people stare, or they ask, “How did you get that awful scar?” Bridget made it sound normal.

  “I know,” I said.

  “I have one on my knee.” She pushed up her legging capris to show me. She had a big scar, pink and raised, across her kneecap. “I got it falling out of a tree over there.”

  I looked, but with the woods right behind us, there were hundreds of trees. “I’ll show you,” she said. “It’s a cool old tree.”

  We left her yard for the woods. The tree felt very far away. It was a neat tree, gnarled, crooked, perfect for climbing. Bridget hoisted herself onto a lower branch and said, “See, I started off just here, and climbed there, and then there …” She pointed at higher branches. “And see that one?
That’s the one I fell from.” Bridget dropped back to the ground.

  “Cool,” I said. She looked at my scar again, but didn’t ask about it. I guess she was giving me a little room to tell her, if I wanted to.

  When I didn’t, she said, “Come on.” We walked back to her house. “I just turned eleven last week,” she said. “How old are you?”

  “I’m eleven, too,” I answered.

  “I’m Bridget,” she said.

  “I know,” I said. “I’m Aubrey.”

  “I know,” Bridget said.

  When we got back to her yard, Mabel was there.

  “Bridgie, you left!” she said.

  “I came back,” Bridget said. “But I can’t play with you. I’m going to play with Aubrey.”

  Mabel pouted to the point of tears. It was clear she was going to start wailing soon.

  “Aubrey, can I play with y’all? Please? Please?”

  “Go away, Savannah! You’re too little!”

  “Aubrey!” Bridget hollered at me. “Are you okay?”

  “Can Mabel play?” I choked out.

  “What?”

  “Can Mabel play with us?” I asked again.

  At first, I thought Bridget was going to get mad and say to forget the whole thing, that she didn’t want to play with either of us. But instead, she said, “Okay.”

  She took one of Mabel’s small hands, and then reached for one of mine, squeezed it, and repeated, “Okay.”

  Dear Jilly,

  I said I would write to tell you some more. You always liked animals—remember when you had the pet giraffe?—so I will start with them. The cat’s name is Martha. I am in charge of taking care of her now. I feed her every day. Sammy is still good. Sometimes he swims, sometimes he just floats with his fins resting and waving a tiny bit. He seems to be okay here after the move.