by Anne Nesbet
Contents
1 What Happened in Portland
2 Almost as Good as Courage
3 The Wish from the Sea
4 Gusta, in the Light of Trouble
5 The Girl at the Door
6 The Shipwrecked Sailors
7 That First Night Was Hard, Though
8 Cousin Bess
9 Betrayed by a Bunch of Letters
10 Uncle Charlie in the Gloom
11 Boxes on Shelves
12 The Kingdom of the Hens
13 As Real as Jam
14 Aviation
15 The Need for a Horn
16 Oculist, with Pigeons
17 Pigeons
18 Accounts
19 The Horn Goes to School
20 Treasures in the Attic
21 The Budding Trees
22 Into the Woods
23 The Far Side of the Hill
24 Liberty with Glasses
25 Not Panama, but Hawaii
26 Music and Stone Lambs
27 The Airfield
28 Hard Times and Greek Myths
29 What Delphine Found
30 Woolen and Worsted
31 The Lighthouse
32 The Honorary Orphan Band
33 Molly and the Bad Dog
34 Courage and Disaster
35 Trying to Do One Right Thing
36 Telling the Truth
37 Moon Love
38 Paying the Price
39 A Bad Morning
40 A Worse Afternoon
41 Wishing
42 Lost and Found
43 A Vision from On High
44 Growing Underground
45 Josie Puts Her Foot Down
46 Aliens
47 Gramma Hoopes Speaks Up
48 Return
49 Fair-Well
50 The Sneakiness of Wishes
Author’s Note
Acknowledgments
Gusta Neubronner hadn’t expected to be on a bus in Maine when she lost her father. She hadn’t expected to be sitting alone scrunched up next to the dark blue coat of a woman she didn’t know, or to have her French horn case balanced between her ankles, or for the weight of a night’s worth of not sleeping to be pulling at her eyelids and making her mind slow and stupid just at the moment when she needed to be even more alert than her usual quick-brained self.
Things never happen the way we imagine them ahead of time.
“Sit here,” her father had said, hardly a moment ago. They hadn’t meant to come late to the Portland – Springdale bus, of course. But they had been riding buses all day and all night — New York to Boston, and then waiting in Boston, and then Boston to Portland, and then in the waiting room here in Portland — and the truth was they must have both nodded off, even her father. That must have been what had happened. So then there was a hurry to the bus, and other people already on board, and her father had pushed her scruffy suitcase onto the rack above her head and said, “Sit here,” so she had done so, next to this woman with the scratchy blue coat, and then he had said something else, something urgent and hard to hear, and dashed right back off the bus again — why?
He had said something, so it must have been an explanation. Had he gone to grab a cup of coffee? He was tired out — they were both so tired out — and he did like the bitter taste of coffee. But coffee wasn’t worth risking missing their bus, was it?
Gusta took a ragged breath and squinted toward the front of the bus, willing him to come bounding up the steps again. She would know him anywhere, just from the way he moved, with impatience like springs in the soles of his feet and his shoulders always tense, ready to push boulders aside if boulders appeared. Hurry up, Papa, she told him.
Two men did come swinging up the steps then, but neither one of them moved like her father. Their eyes looked like mysterious dark pools to Gusta. They stood at the front of the bus looking at all the tired people sitting there, waiting to be on their way to Springdale, and they said in terrible, hard voices, “August Neubronner!”— which was Gusta’s father’s name.
Then they started moving down the aisles, looking at all the men who might be August Neubronner, and as they brushed by Gusta, paying no attention to her because she was just a scrawny eleven-year-old girl tucked up next to a woman in a blue coat, she saw that the dark pools were actually dark glasses, and the men were in uniforms, and that was how she knew the thing they had been dreading and expecting all these months, even years, was actually really happening. Not in some shadowy future, but right now, for real, in 1941.
“When they come for me —” her father used to say at the dinner table in New York, and her mother would say, “Now, August,” and he would say, “We’ve got to have a plan, always. When they come for me —”
There were things to be hidden and things to be done, and if they were in a place with a back window, maybe Gusta’s mother could even talk to them to give Gusta’s father time to climb out and run, and in all of these plans, Gusta’s job was to not say anything.
But never in any of those imaginings of the terrible moment when they would come for her father had Gusta been alone at dawn on a bus in Portland.
Every part of her started to tremble, waves of trembling that rose up from the horn case between her feet and made her stomach tight and her arms shaky.
There were grumbles from the people on the bus as the men asked for identity papers here and there in the back.
There was no August Neubronner at the back of the bus. The men from the government retreated back down the aisle.
“Sorry, folks,” they said. “We’ve got us a fugitive to track down.”
Now Gusta’s teeth were beginning to tremble. In a moment they would be making some kind of chattering noise, and that would give her away.
The men left the bus.
Maybe her father had seen them coming? Maybe that was why he had left her so suddenly? Maybe while those men were checking papers on this bus, her own papa had been able to slip away?
Her heart shuddered like a small creature, hiding behind her ribs.
The bus driver made a discontented sort of noise, revved the engine, and closed the door behind them.
“Portland – Springdale line,” he announced with that booming, ceremonial voice all bus drivers seemed to use.
Gusta grabbed the handle of her horn case and half stood up. Suddenly she was flooded with the urge to run off the bus while there was still time, to run after her father, to call his name, to run, to not be left behind —
“What’s the trouble? Aren’t you going to Springdale, dear?” said the woman next to her. “Let me see that ticket of yours.”
It turned out that Gusta was holding her bus ticket. The woman took it from her to check. Her father must have put that ticket into her hand when he had said “Sit here” just those few minutes ago.
“No, you’re fine,” said the woman kindly, patting the ticket back into Gusta’s hand. “Portland – Springdale bus. What is that thing you have there?”
She meant the horn in its case.
Gusta leaned sideways instead of answering so she could peer out through the windows past the woman in her coat, but of course there was no way to make sense of anything: the smears of blue must be the terrible men in their uniforms, the smears of gray other people outside — beyond that she couldn’t see what was happening. She couldn’t see.
Did they have him by now? Had they caught him? Or had he seen them coming in time and escaped, running north, north, north toward Canada, where the Americans couldn’t touch him anymore, where he could join the Canadian Air Force and help fight the Nazis over in the European war?
She had no way of knowing. All she could do to hel
p him now was to not say anything, which meant acting like nothing in the world had just gone wrong — which meant going on by herself.
It was the hardest thing she had ever had to do, thus far in her life, to sit back quietly while inside her skin she was shouting after her father and wanting to jump off that bus and run, run, run to find him, wherever he was headed, off to Canada or off to prison in chains. Inside her skin, there was a great struggle going on. There was a war. That’s what her father said the whole world was: struggle. He liked to point at quiet things, at plants, at people sitting on a bench, and whisper to Gusta, “What’s going on, do you think, in their inside? Struggle and contradictions. Even in you, my calm little thingling.”
That’s how Gusta knew it must be true about plants and other people, because it was certainly true about herself, Gusta. She was very good at being calm on the outside, but inside her there was always a struggle raging. She was all secrets, struggles, and contradictions.
For now she kept those contradictions packed away inside. She pressed her lips tightly together, so that the sounds of doubt and fear could not possibly squeeze their way out, and as the bus shook itself and roared, she fell back against that not-very-friendly seat, the seat that was moving, every minute, farther from her father.
The seats of the bus seemed half-starved, they had so little padding on them. The woman next to Gusta, wrapped up in her sturdy body and thick blue coat, wasn’t so much bothered, or at least she didn’t let her botheration show, but Gusta kept finding herself shifting a little thisaway, and then a little thataway, trying to keep her poor bones comfortable. The winter must have been picking at the scabs of that road for months. Every time a wheel of the bus hit a missing bit of road, every person riding that bus rattled a little, and Gusta’s teeth clattered, and the French horn case between Gusta’s knees flung itself from one shin to the other one, as if it couldn’t decide which leg needed bruises most.
A plan, her father liked to say, is almost as good as courage. He believed in having plans for every possible disaster — for raids, for strikebreakers, for those bad moments when you’ve disguised yourself as an assembly-line worker to pass around leaflets and one of the bosses gets suspicious and starts walking over your way.
A plan was what would tell your feet where to go and your hands what to do when you got there.
But once the bus had lumbered into what must be Springdale, and the driver had helpfully handed down her ragged little suitcase from the upper rack, and the other passengers had hurried off so confidently toward their homes and destinations, Gusta found that for a moment her feet hardly knew how to move at all.
“Is no one coming for you, little girl?” said the woman in the blue coat, lingering for a moment. She clearly disapproved of Gusta’s being all on her own, which was a kindness on her part, maybe, or nosiness, or both.
Gusta tried to look like a person with a plan.
“I’m to go to Mrs. Hoopes’s home,” she said, and then she recited all she had of an address: “Mrs. Hoopes on Elm Street, Springdale, Maine.”
“Oh!” said the woman. “Bound for Mrs. Hoopes’s Home! Well, then! But I never heard of a state child showing up all on her own this way, and with such outlandish packages in hand.”
By “outlandish packages” she meant the French horn, apparently. Gusta bristled for a moment, out of love for that horn. Then she wondered what a state child was. It didn’t sound like a pleasant thing to be.
“And with the sky smearing in, too,” said the woman, with a click of the tongue that said she disapproved of bad weather. “Another storm coming, sure as sure.”
That made Gusta blink, because it was something her father said almost every day: the storm is surely coming.
But this woman meant an actual storm, not a war.
“Well, Elm Street’s across the Mousam River, over that way,” said the woman, waving forward with her hand. “Nobody with you and no instructions! Who ever heard of such a thing? Poor girl.”
“I’ve got a letter for Mrs. Hoopes,” said Gusta. “So I guess I’ll be fine.”
And to show that it had not (like some fathers) suddenly disappeared, Gusta fetched the letter right up out of the extra-deep pocket her mother had sewn specially into her skirt, the pocket that was lumpy with all the things that must not be lost, like that letter and handkerchiefs and mittens.
“Well, then,” said the woman doubtfully, and after squinting at the address spelled out on the envelope (since Gusta’s mother was a firm believer in spelling things out), she began to head off wherever she was heading to.
The air had gotten another notch or two colder. Gusta put the letter away and fished out her mittens.
Strange! There was something tucked right into her ordinary old right-hand mitten. Gusta felt a flush of love for her always-thinking-ahead mother, because of course her first thought was that this must be the emergency quarter. It was important, her mother believed, for a child on her own to have an emergency quarter.
But this object, although round like a quarter, was bulkier than any quarter Gusta had ever met.
She began to figure it out, to tell the truth, even as she brought the thing close to her eyes to see. Her fingers, cold as they were, recognized what it was — and then a second later, her brain finally caught up.
It was not any kind of money after all. No. It might look like an old-fashioned round pocket watch, but in fact what it was, as Gusta knew, was all that was left of a broken Wish.
Here’s what you need to know about Gusta’s mother, Gladys Hoopes Neubronner:
Gusta’s mama was another one of those quiet people with contradictions rattling around inside.
She had grown up on her parents’ farm in Maine. She could sew up a shirt, which is not the easiest kind of sewing, with blurry-fast hands. She could make a decent supper out of not much, and she knew all sorts of things about cows and pastures and planting and hay. She was the sort of person who liked to get things done without fussing.
She was also the fastest reader in Manhattan or maybe anywhere. She could read a whole book faster than most people could light the lamp and pick out a story. It could be a really hard book, too: all economics, maybe. She could whip through it and then tell it all to you in her own way, which was clearer than most books.
Reading like that had gotten her all the way to college, the first of the Hoopes family to go. She had won herself a scholarship. And then at some point in the city where her college was, she had met a fiery young union organizer from Germany named after the equally fiery month of August. She typed up flyers and pamphlets for him on a typewriting machine, and he fell in love with her quick way with words.
What he didn’t realize at first was that Gusta’s mother liked all sorts of words, not just the kind that would eventually change the world (as Gusta’s father saw things) by being so logical and true that the powers that be would hear them and tremble and fumble and eventually crumble.
Gusta’s mother was omnivorous when it came to words.
She could write a pamphlet or a letter asking the Working Man to think about whether he was really being paid his due. But that was not all: Gusta’s mother could tell a story — any story — like nobody’s business.
According to Gusta’s mother, she had learned about telling stories from her own grandfather, Captain William Griffiths, who had come far enough inland once to glimpse Gusta’s great-grandmother Prudence, to fall in love quick as a shipwreck, and then settle down in the surprising place that shipwreck had left him: Springdale, Maine, so far from the sea that it would take a very good telescope and good weather up on the highest hill for a person to see even the largest sail out Portland way. It was a different Maine than the one he’d been used to.
“Our corner of Maine,” said her mother. “A fine sort of place, but with cows instead of lobsters. Could be, he missed the salt in the air, but he loved my grandmother enough to keep coming back — and then, eventually, to stay. And he bounced us little o
nes on his knees and told us the adventures he’d had out on that ocean we mostly never saw but once a year, when we went all the way out to Old Orchard Beach.”
Gusta learned about Captain Griffith’s various shipwrecks from her mother, all the stories, true and more-than-true, that clung to a sea captain like barnacles to a boat, and that he could then pass down to his children and his children’s children, far as they might live from salt water.
The stories came to Gusta like gleaming pieces of eight, and she stowed them safely and secretly away — because her papa didn’t like them.
Some nights, Gusta’s mother would sit on the edge of Gusta’s cot and murmur the most incredible tales to her, fairy tales and adventures. Not just about ships and oceans, but about poor children who got lost in the woods and found gingerbread houses. Heroes hiding under the water in marshes and breathing through reeds. Kings who accidentally turned their own daughters into gold. Captain Griffiths sharing a tree with a real orangutan. Magic tablecloths that conjured up feasts for a poor man’s table. She had to whisper, of course, so that Gusta’s father wouldn’t get mad.
He was firmly against the passing on of that nonsense. He said it was all designed to keep the people living in ignorance and the dark.
“A magic table that covers itself with food!” he said, when he caught Gusta’s mother in the act of smuggling fairy tales. “You know why the rich people want you to tell that story? To keep the starving ones from asking for real wages so they can buy actual food, and not just dream food.”
Gusta’s contradictions inside pummeled each other when he said that, because some of her could see how right he was (real food was unquestionably important to have, no?), and yet the wicked rest of her could not help wanting to feed itself on dream food, too.
Some stories are realer than others, though.
“Mama,” she whispered. “Tell me again about my great-grandpa, the sea captain. Was he really truly shipwrecked?”
Her mother nodded. “More than once,” she said. “But the most important wreck was the one off the coast of Madagascar. . . .”
Gusta sighed happily. Madagascar! There was magic in that word, but it was the name of a place that was so real you could find it on the globe on the teacher’s desk at school.