by Luanne Rice
“I know,” Jane said, electrified. Could her sister see? Just these few minutes of talking about, or around, her daughter was like high-voltage current. Jane felt herself shimmering.
Sylvie took a deep breath and stuck out her hand. “Truce?” she asked.
“Détente.”
“You’re right about the stress around here,” Sylvie said. “It’s hard, seeing Mom go downhill. She’s gotten a lot worse since Christmas. That last fall took a lot out of her, and she gets confused so easily. But I don’t want her to wind up in a home, Jane. I want to keep her here.”
“Even though it’s too much for one person?”
“You’re here,” Sylvie said with a smile.
Jane nodded. “For now,” she said.
“How is it, being home?” Sylvie asked. And then, when Jane didn’t answer right away, added, “Or I suppose this isn’t your home anymore.”
Jane looked up at the ceiling again. “Wherever you and Mom are, that’s my home,” she said, knowing it was the truth. And Chloe.
Sylvie looked surprised. She arched her eyebrows, a world of expression in the space just above her eyes.
“What?” Jane asked.
“It’s just that, in so many ways, it’s seemed as if you couldn’t get far enough away from us,” Sylvie said.
And Jane just nodded, because she knew that was the truth, too.
On her way out the door for school that morning, Chloe found an envelope stuck in the door. It had her name on it, in Uncle Dylan’s handwriting. She saved it, to read on the bus. But then, once she climbed aboard, Teddy Lincoln began going “moo, moo,” and Jenny called out that Mr. Fontaine had given everyone a lecture after Chloe had left the store, saying that the police would be called if anyone ever tried such a stunt again, and Chloe just slipped her headphones on and started listening to Michelle Branch.
She’d had a trying day at school. The boy she liked, Gil Albert, seemed to have become surgically attached to Lena Allard over the weekend. Her best friend, Mona Shippen, was out sick. People teased her about the SaveRite incident. During biology class, they watched a movie about monkeys in the Amazon rain forest, and she started to well up when they showed footage of poachers grabbing monkeys out of the trees and sticking them into bamboo cages.
“Monkey lover,” Teddy said, seeing her tears.
“Heartless bastard,” she said, wiping her face.
During art period, she made Mona a card. She drew a picture of a dense jungle. Peering out of thick green foliage, she drew many yellow eyes. Inside the card, she drew a monkey swinging from one branch to another. She wrote:
“School is a fun jungle. Come back and swing on the branches with me.”
Later, she got off the bus two stops early, to deliver it to Mona herself. Mona answered the door in pink flannel pajamas and a flowing purple kimono with an intriguing tomato soup splotch on the lapel. She wore wire-rimmed glasses and had slightly greasy shoulder-length brown hair. Which was interesting, because before she got sick, her hair was down to her elbows.
“What did you do to your hair?” Chloe asked.
“I cut it. I’m bored,” Mona said. “You shouldn’t come in. I’m contagious.”
“What do you have?”
“Legionnaires’ disease. Mono. Who the hell knows?”
Chloe flung herself into Mona’s arms and took the deepest breaths possible. “God, I hope I catch it,” she said. “Then I can hopefully take a turn for the worse and get sent to a sanitarium in Chile.”
“I’d love to go to Chile. I plan to name my first daughter Tierra del Fuego.”
“What if you have a boy?”
“His name will be Gilbert Albert, after the man you love. Jesus, how could you fall in love with someone with such a dorky name?”
“I don’t love him. I hate him.”
“That’s just because since Friday, he’s been ‘as one’ with Lena. Right?”
“Who told you?”
“I have my spies. Did you bring me something?” Mona said, opening Chloe’s book bag. She rummaged through, coughing as she found a Baggie filled with dried apricots and raisins.
“Don’t eat those,” Chloe said. “I think they’ve been in there since last fall. I made you this card.”
Mona opened it. She looked proudly at the jungle drawing, admiring it as a mother might. Then she opened it and read the message. “‘School is a fun jungle’ . . .” she read, giving Chloe a fishy glance. “What are you trying to say?”
“Just trying to get you to come back soon,” Chloe said. “I miss you.”
“Well, I miss you, too, but lying in a greeting card will never get you anywhere. It reminds me of the card I bought for Rhianna for Mother’s Day last year. As you can imagine, the stepmother section is a little thin. And I found this card with a really sweet message, all about how well she fits into the family . . .”
Chloe chuckled. “I remember how much she loved that.”
“No kidding. She thinks the family fits into her, not the other way around. Hey—let’s start our own line of cards. The Passive-Aggressive line.”
“You’re spending too much time with your shrink,” Chloe said, laughing.
“Yeah, well, you could use one. Leaving anonymous notes at the meat counter, and getting fired for it. Oh! And here’s a good one—have you tried forging your parents’ signatures lately?”
Chloe’s smile vanished.
Coughing and laughing at the same time, Mona pretended to punch her arm. “Come on—that’s rich, wouldn’t you say? Taking the bus into Providence, to Family Court, no less, and slipping them a forged note . . . and when that didn’t work, going back with a hat on, and with your birthstone ring turned backward so they’d think it was a wedding ring and you were twenty-one and married . . .”
“Okay, okay—stop, Mone.”
“Who needs the shrink?”
“I know. It was a little crazy.”
Mona broke up, coughing again. Chloe, concerned, patted her on the back. She leaned around the corner, to see if Rhianna was in the kitchen.
“No one’s home,” Mona said. “She’s at the dermatologist. Want to hear something utterly mad?”
Chloe nodded, hoping to get away from the subject of mothers.
“She gets these injections between her eyebrows. Of . . . get this . . . botulism!”
“The poison?”
“Yes! And it paralyzes her face muscles! Just in that little spot, right between the eyes, where the frown lines go. So, no matter how much she frowns, the lines never stick.”
“Paralyzes her face? Botulism?” Chloe asked.
Mona nodded, pushing her glasses up her nose and hacking away.
“Botox . . . Botulism—toxin? Should I translate for her? That’s the role model I have to look up to. I think my mother would be very sad to know my father had married such a woman,” Mona said. Her eyes filled with tears, and Chloe knew they weren’t from her cough. The two girls had been friends since childhood. Mona’s mother had died when she was six. Chloe and she had gravitated together that year, and the bond had only strengthened since.
“Especially since she was your mother’s nurse,” Chloe said, taking Mona’s hand.
“It’s so unfair,” Mona said, sniffling. “I feel so crummy, and all I want is my mother.”
“Do you remember her?” Chloe asked.
Mona nodded, taking off her glasses. “I see her better with my glasses off. She used to feel my forehead, to tell if I had a fever or not. She’d crack ice into a bowl and let me eat it with a silver spoon. She had curly red hair and a funny space between her two front teeth.”
“At least you can see her . . .” Chloe said.
“With my glasses off.”
Chloe nodded. She put her hand on Mona’s forehead. It felt hot. So she dragged her best friend to the living room sofa and made her lie down. Then she went into the kitchen, opened the freezer, and took a handful of ice cubes from the automatic ice maker. They cli
nked as she dropped them into a cup, grabbed a spoon, and carried them to Mona.
“Thank you,” Mona said, looking up from the pillow. “You’d make a good mother.”
Chloe smiled. There was a pen lying on the table. She picked it up, then carefully drew a star on the back of Mona’s hand and on the back of her own. Hoisting her book bag, she noticed that Mona hadn’t put her glasses back on. As she let herself out the front door, she left her friend lying there with a cup of ice, with blurred eyesight and clear vision of the mother she still loved so much. The whole thing got under Chloe’s skin. How could people who supposedly loved you just die? Or, almost worse, just abandon you?
It was the same thing, really.
For the second day in a row, Dylan Chadwick was driving home with a load of seedlings and came upon his niece. Pulling over, he put out his cigarette and gestured for her to get into the truck.
“Did you miss the bus again?” he asked, lowering his window all the way to let the smoke escape.
“No, I got off early. Mona’s sick, and I took her a card.”
Dylan nodded, not showing any reaction. Mona Shippen. She, Chloe, and Isabel had been inseparable during the summers. He just drove. They didn’t have far to go. He glanced over, noticed the hole in the knee of Chloe’s jeans, the star she had drawn on the back of her hand. The small details were vivid reminders of Isabel, and he didn’t even know why—maybe his daughter wouldn’t have worn holey jeans or drawn on her own skin. Or maybe she would.
“I thought you were driving Granny to the school thing tonight,” Chloe said.
“That’s tomorrow night.”
Chloe nodded. “More trees?” she asked, gesturing toward the truck bed.
“Digging all those holes keeps me busy,” he said.
“Do you miss solving crimes?” she asked.
“Not a bit,” he said. “There are more interesting mysteries to solve here, anyway.”
“Yeah? Like what?”
“Like why Empires and Galas are possible cross-pollenizers for Jonagolds. And why the graft union has to be at least two inches above the soil line.”
“And why might that be?” Chloe asked in a professorial-sounding voice.
“So the roots don’t emerge from the scion.”
“The scion,” she said. “The father. Even apple trees have parents.”
Dylan turned slowly, to look at her. Was she getting started on her adoption again? Eli still couldn’t get over being called down to Family Court, to find that Chloe had bought a fake ID online, pretending to be twenty-one, the necessary age for tracking her birth mother.
“You have parents,” Dylan said steadily.
“I know,” she said, clutching her book bag and scowling. He knew that expression; he had worn it so long, it sometimes seemed frozen on his face. Angst, anguish, fury at the world.
“Then what’s wrong?”
“Monkeys are being kidnapped from the jungle, I got fired from my job and can’t feed the cats healthy food, I got made fun of at school, my best friend is home sick and has no one to take care of her, I deserve to know my identity, and I hate the world,” she said thinly, as if she considered him the enemy, and a dim enemy at that.
“Did you read my note?” he asked.
“Oh!” She slapped her book bag, then began rummaging through it. “I almost forgot.” She reached inside, pulled out the envelope. He watched as she extracted the paper, squinted at his printing. He remembered writing it last night, long after the lights in his brother’s house were turned off, when he couldn’t sleep.
“Should I read it out loud?” she asked.
“Just the quote,” he said.
“Okay,” she said, then read, “‘Violence merely increases hate . . . adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.’ Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Hmm. That’s what you meant last night, when you said ‘A night devoid of stars’?”
“Yep.”
She looked at him quizzically. “Why’d you write me this?” she asked.
“Because I thought you needed to know it.”
“But why?”
He drove along in silence. He couldn’t tell her the real reason, or at least the whole real reason. But he knew she was sensitive, and he knew she was smart, so he decided to tell her a little. “Because you remind me of me,” he said.
“How?”
“Let’s just say, you have a finely tuned sense of injustice,” he said.
She looked away, pressing her forehead against the side window. They turned off the main road onto the narrow and deeply rutted orchard road. Just before they reached their shared driveway, Dylan pointed at the ramshackle farm stand.
“Want an after-school job?” he asked.
“Doing what?” she asked.
“It’s rough work,” he warned.
“Yeah, well, not a problem. The cats have to eat. What is it?”
“How about getting the stand into shape?”
“The apple stand?” she asked.
Dylan nodded. “It’s pretty sorry looking. You’d have to clean it out, paint it. I’ll fix the shelves.”
“And the sign?”
“Yeah. I’ll fix the sign. I think it’s in the barn.”
“‘Chadwick Apple Orchards,’ ” she whispered. “Isabel and I used to work at the stand when we were little. Granddad used to give us maple sugar and honeycombs and apple tarts.”
“I know,” Dylan said. “I remember.”
“It hasn’t been open for so long.”
Dylan glanced across the seat at Chloe. Her skin was pale, her eyes were blue with shadows of sleeplessness beneath, her hair straight and dark and unlike anyone else in the Chadwick family. She had torn jeans and an ink star on the back of her hand, and Dylan could almost hear Isabel pleading with him to help her cousin.
“That’s why I need your help,” he said gruffly, stopping in front of her house.
“Okay, then,” she said. “You have it.”
“Good.”
“Can we sell more than just apples? Like maple sugar and honeycombs and apple tarts?”
Dylan gave her a long don’t-get-ahead-of-yourself look.
She laughed. “Just tell me when to start.”
“This weekend,” he said. “Saturday morning, bright and early.”
She nodded, grabbing her book bag and the note he’d left her, running across the yard to her house. He remembered watching the two girls picking dandelions one spring night, gathering handfuls, blowing the silver seeds into the wind, laughing with the sheer joy of being together.
Together.
What did that mean, anyway? Driving away, Dylan wasn’t sure he knew anymore.
CHAPTER 6
The Educators’ Potluck Dinner was held on the first Friday of every month, in the cafeterias of various schools. Last month it had been at Rogers High School in Newport, the month before at Hope High, in Providence. Tonight it was at Crofton Consolidated, and Sylvie was taking a cake, baked by Jane, that looked exactly like an old and somewhat tattered library edition of Webster’s Second Dictionary.
Sylvie had given herself a facial, put on her new outfit from Eileen Fisher, applied her new blush and lipstick, added a little teal eye shadow for drama, and was just pulling on her navy spring wool coat, when her mother called her.
“What is it?” Sylvie asked, going to the bedroom door.
“What about me?” her mother asked.
Sylvie froze. “What do you mean?”
“It’s first Friday,” her mother said. “And I feel so much better today. Can I go with you?”
Jane sat at her bedside, Great Expectations open on her knee, looking up with bemusement. “We were reading out loud, but then Mom heard you getting ready and asked me what day it was . . .”
“Mom, you’ve barely left the house in weeks . . .”
“Isn’t that the point,
dear?” Margaret asked. “I need to get out.”
Sylvie blinked. She thought of John Dufour, wondered whether he would be there. She could almost see him, in his maroon sweater vest, his sensitive brown eyes trained on the parking lot to see whether she would drive in. They got together sometimes to play Scrabble, and she always swooned when their knees touched under the table. They were the shy, middle-aged, academic embodiment of that song, “Working for the Weekend.” Sylvie supplied her own lyrics about John wondering whether she’d come out tonight . . .
Torn between desire for romance, for the chance to walk into the Crofton cafeteria and see John watching the door for her, and her well-entrenched daughterly duty, Sylvie nodded tersely.
“Sure, Mom. If you’re feeling up to it.”
“She assures me she is.” Jane grinned.
“Well, it’ll take both of us to get her in and out of the car,” Sylvie said, staring at her sister. “So I guess you’re coming, too.”
Jane sat in the back. Sylvie drove, and their mother occupied the front passenger seat, oohing and aahing as they passed through town, as if she had never seen houses or gardens before.
“Oh, my,” Margaret said. “Look at the Jensens’ lilac bushes. Aren’t they spectacular!” And, “Goodness—what have the Dunlaps done to their house? That’s an awful lot of deck for that little ranch.” She rolled down the side window, breathing the fragrant air and enjoying the sense of freedom.
Jane smiled.
Her mother seemed happy, Sylvie seemed distracted. She had gotten all dressed up, and at every stop light she’d look in the rearview mirror, adjusting her hair. Jane couldn’t wait to see who she was meeting. She relaxed in back, wearing black jeans and her leather jacket, knowing her mother would have been happier to have two daughters in nice blue wool coats, but oh, well . . .
No matter how far inland you went in Rhode Island, and Crofton was almost as inland as you could get, you could smell the sea. Narragansett Bay cut into the state, the most magnificent body of water—in Jane’s opinion—on earth. The tang of sea wind and salt marsh filled the air, mixing with the Crofton scents of lilacs and apple blossoms.