“Nothing,” he said.
“I’m getting tired of ‘nothing,’” I said. “I’ve heard ‘nothing’ for half a week now. You want to be like Gran? Is that it?”
He shrugged, still looking away from me.
“I’m not like Gran,” he said, his voice husky. “I’m what she said all along. I’m like him.”
He dipped his head in the direction of the kitchen.
“Like Andrew Snow?” I said, taken aback. “Like him?”
Rew nodded. He looked down into his palms and swallowed, as if to keep the words back. But at last he said, “I hurt Gran, didn’t I?”
“You didn’t!” I protested.
“I did,” he answered back, fast this time. “I opened the door. I was angry, and I ran out, though I know better. I forgot. That’s how mad I was.”
“You didn’t hurt her,” I said again. “The branch did. The lightning.”
“Yes,” Rew said, and he was himself again, that reasonable, thoughtful kid who always won at chess. “But I opened the door. I knew better.”
“Not then,” I said.
“No,” he agreed. “Not right then.”
He was quiet once more, thinking, and I didn’t interrupt him. It struck me that Rew might be like Andrew Snow, but at least he wasn’t anything like our mother. He didn’t run away from things.
“One thing’s different,” he said after a while.
“What’s that?”
“You don’t go to jail for opening doors,” he said.
I didn’t have an answer for that.
After a long time, Rew got to his feet. He walked out into the yard and kept walking, all the way to the edge of the Zebra Forest, to the first blanched tree. He leaned against it, looking out into the shadows. I didn’t follow him. After a while, he came back toward the house. When we turned to go in together, we saw our father, watching from the back window.
Two days later, Andrew Snow announced that he was going back. Gran wasn’t there. He’d told her earlier and she’d disappeared upstairs, behind a barricade of magazines, to think about it, maybe, or to forget it. But he was waiting for us at the table for breakfast late in the morning, and he’d put on his washed prisoner’s uniform and looked pressed and ready to go.
Rew looked at him but didn’t say a word.
“Why?” I asked. “Why not Mexico? Or Canada?”
He shrugged. “I’m done running away,” he said. “If I go back, I’ll be done eventually.”
“But you didn’t mean to do it!” I protested. “You said so yourself! You’ve been there long enough!”
My father shook his head, but he didn’t answer. He looked away from us for a time. Finally, he said, “I didn’t mean to, but the fact is, I did do it. And I’ll pay for it. And then I’ll come back.”
He had a hard time looking at us. He studied the grain of the table and spaces in the kitchen he’d cleaned.
“Five years is a long time,” he said. “Will you . . . will you keep up here?”
I thought he must mean the kitchen. And the rest of the house. “I’ll try,” I said. “Gran likes to hold on to things, you know, but I’ll try.”
“I’d like to hear about it,” he said. “If you decide to visit.”
This hadn’t occurred to me. I looked at Rew, who was also studying the table grain. He made no move to answer. “I’ll visit,” I said. “I promise.”
“I’d like that,” he said. Then he stood. He shook my hand. Rew didn’t look at him, and he stood there a moment longer, waiting. Then he went to the door. At the last minute, Rew looked up.
“Thank you for carrying her back,” he said quietly. “Gran.”
Our father nodded. He looked at us both a minute longer, and then he sighed, opened the door, and was gone. We didn’t move from the table. We didn’t rush to the window to see him walk out across the yard, past the rusty glider, to the Zebra Forest. I don’t know what Rew was thinking, but I knew that I didn’t want to see him disappear between the trees.
Still, after a while we got up. We cleared the breakfast dishes. We washed them. We put them away. And Rew even swept the floor.
When school began again, we both went. And I found that it wasn’t so bad to get up and go each morning. Beth came back from camp, and we had a good English teacher, Miss Penn, who seemed interesting. I wasn’t ready to tell anyone about my summer just yet. So when Miss Penn asked for the traditional end-of-summer essay, I wrote instead about my grandfather, the shoe-store owner who knew all about Vespasian.
I brought that essay home to Gran, and she read it on the couch, leaning over it, with her eyes close to the words. When she was done, she looked up at the stairs like she might run to them. I felt my shoulders pinch tight as I wondered what she’d do. But then she smiled at me, even though her eyes looked like they might cry.
“This is a good story, Annie B.,” she said. “Your grandfather was such a good, good man.” I let her keep my paper, and later I saw her put it in the drawer by her bed. Then we had lunch together and played cards.
Rew began reading Treasure Island again, and once I knew he wasn’t going to rip it, I let him have it back, to keep in his room. He still liked Long John Silver lots, but he got interested in other characters, too, ones he’d never paid attention to, like Captain Smollett.
“The squire Trelawney’s just an idiot,” he said to me one afternoon in the Zebra. “He talks too much, and he hasn’t got sense enough to keep even a treasure map secret. But the captain — he smells a rat from the first. Plus he knows how to run a ship.”
I continued to make my case for the doctor, but I conceded the point. It was good, anyway, to get back to talking pirate slang. “Yup,” I said. “That squire, what does the captain tell him?”
Rew grabbed the book and flipped to the place. “‘Treasure is ticklish work,’” he read. “‘I don’t like treasure voyages on any account, and I don’t like them, above all, when they are secret, and when (begging your pardon, Mr. Trelawney) the secret has been told to the parrot.’”
I laughed out loud at that. “Blabbed, he means!”
“And by the squire!” Rew shouted. “See? An idiot!”
That fall, on Sundays, I started going round to see my father. Gran wouldn’t go. She couldn’t. But she let me talk about Andrew Snow. Sometimes she’d even ask about him. And after I told her, she didn’t go upstairs, but she’d give me a smile and say, “You want to hear the story of Princess Margaret, Annie B.? I have that magazine here somewhere.”
As for Rew, he didn’t talk about Andrew Snow for a long time. But one day in January, Rew and I went to Beth’s house together, to watch Walter Cronkite on her TV, showing the hostages come home after 444 days in captivity. They were skinny men, with big glasses, dressed in regular clothes and looking hungry. On our way home, I decided to ask Rew if he’d walk with me the next Sunday to see Andrew Snow. And he surprised me and said yes.
We walked through the Zebra Forest. In January, without the leaves, it’s wide open there, the snow sky pouring light down on everything, even the brown, sleeping plants. I told Rew about moss that dies away and comes back in summer. I even showed him some, or at least I think that’s what it was, soft brown smudges on the base of trees. He didn’t say much, but he listened.
To get to Enderfield, you have to come out of the Zebra onto the road, then circle most of the wall and go in through a high mesh gate. At the edge of the Zebra, Rew just stood for a while, arm round an oak tree, picking at the bark.
That bark doesn’t peel. I reminded him of that. He stopped.
“You don’t have to come if you don’t want to,” I said. “You can wait here.”
So he did, standing in that spot under the bare trees until I came back, so we could walk home together. On the way, I told him how Indian scouts could read direction from the sun.
The next week, he was the one who did the talking. He told me a joke, and it was actually a good one.
“Two muffins were bak
ing in an oven,” he said. “And one said to the other, ‘Boy, it’s hot in here!’ And you know what the other one said?”
“Nope.”
“It said, ‘Eek! A talking muffin!’”
I don’t know which one of us was more startled when I laughed.
Above us, the bare branches crisscrossed the sky, the white ones nearly disappearing against the clouds. I thought how much I liked winter in the Zebra, when you can see the intricate pattern of all those twigs and branches, and fat old crows sit at the very tops of the trees like dark winter buds. But then, I like all the seasons, and I like that they’ll come round next year, too. It’s nice to know, though, that some things really do change. Sometimes jokes can get funnier.
“Back there,” Rew said, “does anyone ever say anything funny? Anyone tell jokes?”
“I don’t know,” I said to him. “I never tried.”
He squinted up into a nearby tree, where a couple of withered leaves still hung on, fluttering like flags. “Well, you can tell him the one about the muffins if you want,” he said. “That’s my new favorite.”
And so the next week, I did. Andrew Snow laughed even harder than I had. I didn’t know you could laugh in prison.
But actually, you can.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or, if real, are used fictitiously.
Copyright © 2013 by Adina Rishe Gewirtz
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in an information retrieval system in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, taping, and recording, without prior written permission from the publisher.
First electronic edition 2013
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 2012947251
ISBN 978-0-7636-6041-3 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-0-7636-6568-5 (electronic)
Candlewick Press
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Somerville, Massachusetts 02144
visit us at www.candlewick.com
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