He moved aside and then another firefighter stepped through the smoke-and-flames—something big and lumpy heaped over his shoulder.
“GRANDPA!”
Beanbag Hands
Maybe if I’d stopped to make a wish on one of those dandelions at the school, this wouldn’t have happened. Maybe this, maybe that. My mind spun crazily, sickeningly.
I pulled my new baseball cap practically down over my face and squeezed my eyes shut tight. I had snuck away to Boston, and Grandpa could have died! Chief Costello was patting my head, and it was making me cringe.
“It’s only a house,” Chief Costello said. “Only walls and a roof. Your grandpa’s okay. Everyone is safe. No firefighters were hurt. Maybe the house can be restored. My wife’s sister runs the show over there at Disaster Blasters. You’ll see. Good as new.”
Just then, the roof caved in.
“Nonsense, Chief Costello,” said Mrs. Blyth-Barrow. “That house is a goner.” She put a hand on my shoulder. It felt gentle and firm at the same time, like a beanbag. I felt my hunched-up shoulders release a little. My forehead, and my jaw. I breathed in, I breathed out. Nice, comforting beanbag. I closed my eyes and shut out everything going on around me: the dying fire, gray smoke lit by all the headlights, the shift and boom of the ruins, the ambulance, the noise of the firefighters and EMTs, the sound of Grandpa coughing, someone saying, “There you go, Martin, that’s good, you’re all right now, you’re gonna be all right,” and underneath it all, a low, soft, three-tone humming. Hm-mm-mmm. Hm-mm-mmm.
But then a stab of pure mean shot through me and my eyes snapped open—from smoke, from tears, they stung: All I did was go to Boston to do something good and nice for my friend, and Grandpa up and—Grandpa—and this happens!
I looked at Grandpa, where he sat in the back of the ambulance, breathing into an oxygen mask. Oh, Grandpa! Chief Costello said Grandpa was okay, but was he? Was he really?
The humming went away. Mrs. Blyth-Barrow lifted her beanbag hand from my shoulder, and before I knew what I was doing, I reached up and grabbed it. I needed that steady, gentle weight on my shoulder. I needed it, or else I might tip over and fall right down. I turned into her, and she put her arms around me. That three-note humming started again; it was Mrs. B-B humming to me, like someone would hum to a baby in the night.
Standing there with Mrs. B-B’s arms around me tight, rocking back, forth, my cheek against her soft sweater, I felt a lot of things—guilty, and angry, and sorry and scared… Everything rolled through me and over me sort of like when you know you’re going to throw up, and then you do throw up, and then you feel weak, but better. Like that. Then I felt calm. Even peaceful.
There’s nothing I can do, is what I was thinking. The cat is out of the bag. It’s all gone up in smoke. I can’t take care of it. It isn’t possible to take care of it. Someone is going to have to take over now. I didn’t know what to think about that, except that it was true.
And Mrs. B-B just kept on holding me, and holding me, and she didn’t say one word, not one, about me getting gunk on her special sweater.
Mrs. B-B Takes Us In
Here’s what happened. With me off in Boston, Grandpa had tried out a new recipe for dinner:
Step 1. Put water in pot on stove.
Step 2. Forget it till firefighters appear.
* * *
Mrs. Blyth-Barrow took us in.
* * *
It was late—close to midnight—when we climbed the stairs to Mrs. Blyth-Barrow’s apartment over Kenerson’s that night. The first thing I noticed was a large statue of an angel in her living room. It was about three feet tall, with the wings, and her arms reached in front of her like someone had stolen a bouquet she’d been holding. I was as tired as I’ve ever been in my life. I rubbed my eyes and looked at that angel again in case I was seeing things.
“Lovely, isn’t she?” said Mrs. B-B. “She will eventually go on my grave. Death is part of life. It’s another change. A big one, I grant you.”
The biggest.
“I operated a bed-and-breakfast for three glorious years in Glastonbury,” Mrs. B-B said, moving on, “and I still maintain a tidy guest room, though it be humble.” She dipped her chin, very humble. Then she threw open the door on a room blooming with chintz and ruffles and needlepointed pillows. On the coffee table sat a vase of fresh flowers on a doily and a floral-printed hardcover boxed set titled Jane Austen: The Complete Works (also on a doily). She swept her hand toward twin beds with matching bedspreads.
“Popcorn!” said Grandpa.
“Yes, that’s right,” said Mrs. B-B. She patted one of the bedspreads. “Popcorn-chenille. Such a discerning eye,” she said. “Sleep, now, and try not to dream. They’re sure to be nightmares.”
* * *
It smelled just like a bakery when we woke up the next morning. And when Grandpa and I came out of the guest room, there was Mrs. B-B in the kitchenette, wearing a ruffly apron and pulling a sheet of scones from the oven. “The secret is a bit of orange zest,” she said to Grandpa. He held his chin and hmm-ed like it was an interesting tip that he would definitely try out as soon as possible.
After breakfast, Grandpa sat down in the overstuffed chair by the living room window, and spent some time admiring the upholstery, an explosive pink print featuring what Mrs. B-B said were cabbage roses. He plucked at the protective cloth on the rolled arms.
“Antimacassar!” he blurted. Several of Mrs. B-B’s cats padded over and surrounded Grandpa, where he sat looking not quite like himself in the chair that wasn’t his recliner. He scratched one cat behind the ear while another cat took up a spot at his shoulder, on top of the chair. Loud purring came from all around. I don’t like to see so many cats in one place, but it was a step up from squirrels.
I curled up on the chair’s matching loveseat and spent a long time staring at the first page of the first volume of the Jane Austen boxed set. At one point in the afternoon the doorbell rang, and when I went downstairs to answer the door, Becky Schenck handed over a paper bag full of clothes.
I was surprised. “That was really nice of you,” I said. I didn’t want to wear her castoff clothes. Still, it was a surprise to see Becky here at the door being friendly. For the first time ever, I smiled at Becky Schenck. “Thanks, Becky. This really means—”
“It wasn’t my idea,” said Becky. “My grandmother died around Christmas and we still have all her crap. The granny-panties are actually my grandmother’s underwear. And the blue smock will look good with your frizzy hair and blotchy complexion. Because it’s ugly.”
There’s the Becky Schenck I know! I smiled again, or I should say I stretched my lips to show my teeth. “Thank you so very much, Becky!” I said, and closed the door right in her face. It felt really good. If only I hadn’t needed the clothes, I would have shoved her granny’s panties in the dumpster out back.
* * *
The doorbell rang again, and this time it was Bubba Davis at the door.
“Did anybody die in the fire?” he wanted to know. He had a bag of Lay’s potato chips and he was eating from it and staring at me with big eyes like he was at the movies and I was on the screen.
“No,” I said.
“Anybody end up in the burn ward?”
“No.”
“Anybody faint?”
“No.”
“Hospital?”
“No.”
He reached into the bag of Lay’s and ate a handful of chips.
“Disappointing,” he said.
“ ’Bye, Bubba,” I said.
* * *
Winky came over to keep me company awhile, but said he didn’t want to come into our teacher’s apartment. “I really don’t. That would just be wrong,” he said. “I might see things I could never unsee, and I’m blind.”
* * *
The day passed in slow motion. “The day after excitement or tragedy often does,” said Mrs. B-B. What questions I thought of to ask, I didn’t know if I wanted the
answers to. What I wanted to tell Grandpa—about me and Joe Viola and Mom and Mandy Mandolin—I couldn’t, because I was afraid of how he’d take it, being so worn-out from being rescued from a burning building, and all. So I poked around the bookshelves and listened to Grandpa talk to the cats (I finally got an accurate count—eight—and filed the number away to report to Winky), and the three of us played a board game called Aggravation that really lives up to its name. At four thirty I set the little dinette table for dinner (old people like to eat early), and we had just sat down to find out what cottage pie and wedge salad are, when the doorbell rang again.
Prize Winnings Are Determined
Mr. Mee looked different outside the school library. He looked like a Sears mannequin in his off-duty clothes: tan Bermuda shorts, navy-blue Keds, and a yellow polo shirt.
“You don’t look so persnickety in that outfit,” I said when I answered the door. “Respectfully.”
“I am precisely as persnickety as ever,” he said. “I went by your house.”
Rainbows, butterflies, soup. Every time I thought of the house—the flames, the smoke, and Grandpa on the firefighter’s shoulder—I tried to think of something else.
Mr. Mee was staring at me over his glasses. “Sometimes,” he said, “I like to look at a thing and ask the Universe: Why?”
For such a tiny word, “why” is a big, huge question. It should be spelled with about twenty y’s on the end. Whyyyyyyyyyyyy. My knees suddenly felt rubbery, maybe because I’d been going up and down the stairs so many times. I kind of collapsed on the stoop, and Mr. Mee sat beside me. He set down by his feet a paper bag from the Pay ’n Takit.
“Did you get any answer?” I asked him. “When you asked the Universe?”
“No. I never do. But sometimes it’s enough to ask. It’s a way of paying my respects to Chance, who cares nothing for winning and yet is always the victor. I accept that.”
I thought about what he’d said for maybe a full minute. “Is that sort of another way of saying nothing really matters because everything goes up in smoke in the end?”
“More or less,” said Mr. Mee. “But you make it sound so pessimistic. It’s realistic.”
“Right.” I saw the flames again in my head.
“But then, there’s this.” He reached into the paper bag and pulled out a ruler-length of charred wood. It was one of Grandpa’s plaques. Plenty of extra wood-burning on it now, I thought. “Maybe this explains why we can face uncaring Chance, again and again, with a brave face,” said Mr. Mee.
I took the plaque from him and read it. “ ‘Hope Is the Thing with Feathers.’ I never really got this one.”
Mr. Mee nodded. “It’s the first line of a poem by Emily Dickinson.” He took a breath.
“You’re going to recite it, aren’t you,” I said.
He laughed. “You know me well,” he said, and adjusted his glasses. “Hope is the thing with feathers—that perches in the soul—and sings the tune without the words—and never stops—at all.”
“That’s nice,” I said.
“And sweetest—in the gale—is heard—and sore must be the storm—that could abash the little bird that kept so many warm.”
“Okey dokey—”
“I’ve heard it in the chillest land—and on the strangest sea—yet—never—in extremity, it asked a crumb—of me.”
Mr. Mee stopped talking. From somewhere near came the call of an actual thing with feathers, which was kind of wicked, considering.
“Is that the end?”
“Yes, that’s the end,” said Mr. Mee. “I thought you might like to have it,” he said, and pointed at the plaque.
“What I’d really like to have are those prize winnings we never determined, for finding a fact you didn’t already know.” Not that it really mattered anymore. “About the Beep Baseball.” He didn’t say anything.
“Don’t tell me this plaque is my prize,” I said.
I waited.
“Do not tell me that,” I said.
“Okay, I won’t tell you.”
* * *
I sat there on the stoop of the Five and Ten after Mr. Mee left, with the plaque in my hands. The plaque smelled of smoke and ashes. I know I should have been full of hope and everything. But I wasn’t. And then that bird called again, and it was loud and sharp and not a bit sweet, a blue jay probably, the bully of the backyard bird set. It sounded just like Becky Schenck.
I Make Like Amanda Mandolin
When I got back upstairs, Mrs. Blyth-Barrow was just hanging up the phone. The cord was long enough that she could walk all over the apartment while talking on the horn, and she had wound the whole length of it around her wrist. It took about a minute for her to free herself.
“That was a Mr. Lincoln of Child Protective Services,” she said. “He would like to set up an appointment to talk to you both—to all of us, in fact—as soon as possible.” She looked at me in a stern way. “To help, Josephine. He wants to help.”
Yeah, right. Foster care? The System? I didn’t want to live with strangers. What if they made me move away from Hamburg? Ooh, that Leonard, I thought. I could wring his neck, if I could reach my hands around it.
If that phone call wasn’t enough, right after that I spotted a pamphlet on the telephone table. It was just like the one I found that time in Grandpa’s secretary, the one with the pictures of the old people clinking their wineglasses, the vegetables and so forth. I guessed Grandpa and Mrs. B-B had been talking about the Home. I guessed she was taking steps.
“What do you have there, Jo-Jo?” Grandpa said. He was looking at the plaque with the burn marks.
“Nothing,” I said.
I went into my flowery room and plopped down on the popcorn-chenille. From there I chucked that plaque across the room in the neighborhood of the little yellow trash can. It missed, and made a racket.
“What’s going on in there?” said Mrs. B-B.
“Nothing!” I hollered. Leave me alone! is what I wanted to holler.
That plaque might as well have burned up in the fire, for all I believed it. There was nothing hopeful here. Grandpa was going to the Downeast Best Rest, and I was going into Child Protective Services.
I stared at the ceiling. What would Amanda Mandolin do? Mandy Mandolin was brave and adventurous. She sure as heck wouldn’t sit around in Becky’s granny’s underwear, waiting to be hauled off to live with strangers.
I sat up. I knew exactly what Mandy Mandolin would do. She had done it before.
* * *
The ticket agent at the bus station had no problem taking my money. Grandpa’s money, I mean.
I’d written out a check and forged Grandpa’s signature like old times, only I made the check out to me. I’d seen Mr. Miller cash a check for Grandpa before at the Pay ’n Takit, so I figured it could be done. Sure enough, a man with a toothpick in his teeth and a plastic nametag on his chest cashed the check at the Plaid Pantry.
“Thank you, Billy Bob,” I said, wicked polite. I tried not to sound like I was getting away with something.
“Aw, that ain’t my real name,” Billy Bob said, tapping the nametag. He switched the toothpick to the other corner of his mouth. “I just made it up.”
If that wasn’t a sign, I don’t know what is. “Interesting,” I said. I left that store with a spring in my step. If I had a nametag on, it would say: AMANDA.
I went straight to the bus station. I knew the drill by now, after buying tickets to Boston—was it just yesterday? The day before that? The station agent took one look at me and said, “Boston?”
I shook my head and looked up at the board with all the destinations on it. Boston, Wabash, Nashua, New York. If Joe Viola refused to believe he was my father, then fine. I would go and look for more evidence to prove it. A marriage license, a kind stranger who might have been the witness to the wedding… something.
Grandpa was going to the Home, and it was just like Winky had asked me that night we found Grandpa at the Chickadee Club.
If Grandpa went to the Home, then what would happen to me? I didn’t want to have to go and live with a bunch of strangers. I wanted a family. My family.
“Atlantic City, please,” I said, and handed over the money.
“Doesn’t head that way till tomorrow, sweetie,” said the lady.
“Oh.” I looked again at the board. Nashua, New Hampshire, was the next bus departing Hamburg. Nashua, New Hampshire, was not the destination I had in mind. Nashua, New Hampshire, was not helpful.
What-to-do where-to-go how-to-prove-it. Questions chased each other around-around-around like a cop-car light in my head—and then, for the second time in a week, I heard the siren.
I Go to the Pokey
The next thing I knew, I was sitting in the back of Asa Pike’s police cruiser. There was a barrier between the front seat and the back seat, made of wire mesh. I felt like I was already in prison.
When I’d heard the siren blare, I’d turned quick and there was Officer Pike in his police car. He did a “cheers” with his Dippin’ Donuts cup, but it wasn’t a friendly one, I could tell. His eyes were narrowed. Sure it was a sunny morning and he might have been squinting. But the squint, and the way he smiled at me—too wide to be really friendly—and how he sort of pointed at me with his coffee cup… obviously he was suspicious. I could only hope he’d drive on by.
He rolled down the window. “You going somewhere?”
Had Mrs. Blyth-Barrow called in a miss-per? Had the police put out an APB? These are terms I knew from TV and never thought would apply to any situation I was in. It was the end of the line already. I had watched enough police shows to know.
Josie Bloom and the Emergency of Life Page 12