by Anne Nesbet
“My grandfather’s strangest story,” said her mother. “And it starts with him finding a little chest full of things he had thought at first were coins, in some harbor market, very far away —”
“Treasure!” said Gusta, imagining a pirate’s chest, the kind that hides under a nice dark X on old maps. If they had a chest filled with treasure, they could surely pay the landlord the rent they owed. (They were always having to move to new places, the Neubronners, when the rent came due.)
“So you’d think,” said her mother. “But listen: he bought them for the price of a parrot, twelve lemons, and a really good pipe from some trader on the other side of the world who claimed they weren’t actually coins, they were wishes.”
Wishes!
Gusta snuggled closer to her mother. She hadn’t known that wishes were actual things you could keep in a chest.
“Mama, were they? Real wishes?”
“Well, as you can imagine, I asked him that myself. And my grandfather laughed and said sure enough, he wasted a bunch of them the first day, just convincing himself of what they were. He wished for this and that — for sugar in his tea! For a really good sardine! All such foolish little cravings — and each time the wishes came true, one way or another: someone turned out to have some secret lump of sugar stashed away, and then felt moved to share it with my grandfather, for no particular reason. That sort of thing. He said that after a day or two, he suddenly realized the seriousness of the situation. These were actual wishes, and he was wasting them. He would pick up one of those odd little coin things and wish for his sardines (for example), and after that, he said, he could tell that Wish was all used up. It didn’t sparkle anymore, he said. It just looked empty.”
“How can a coin be empty?”
“I don’t know. That’s how he described it. And of course that made him realize he couldn’t keep wasting those Wishes; he needed to think it all through more carefully, make wishes that counted. And then — right that very day — something really terrible happened: the ship he was on hit a reef and sank.”
“The shipwreck!”
“One of his several shipwrecks, yes. One of the worst. It sank, but my grandfather clung to a mast and lived. Only the chest with the Wishes in it was gone.”
“Oh!” said Gusta. “But Mama, he should have wished for the boat to be unshipwreckable.”
“Maybe he should have,” said her mother. “But he didn’t know ahead of time that he would be shipwrecked, did he? It’s so hard to know ahead of time what danger you should be warding off. And then there was the problem of making the right sort of wish. In fairy tales, magic things are very clever. You have to be cleverer even than they are. Imagine: What if he had wished for his ship to be ‘entirely safe from shipwrecks’? What if — oh, I don’t know — what if lightning then struck it, and it burned to ashes right there, bobbing on the sea. That might be worse than a shipwreck, mightn’t it?”
“There might be no mast left to hang on to,” said Gusta. She thought it over. “So you’d have to wish for no bad thing to happen to that boat — make the boat always absolutely safe and disaster-proof.”
“And then the sailors might all get a case of fever and die, even if their boat’s absolutely safe. That wish might not be the right one, either.”
“So you have to wish for the boat to be safe and sound, and all the people in it to stay well, and — oh, but they could still break their legs, if they fell from up where the sails are. So no broken bones. No accidents. And then . . .”
Gusta started thinking of other things that could go wrong. Pirates, for instance. Sea monsters. And her words petered out after a moment.
“See?” said her mother. “It takes a great deal of care to make wishes properly. And anyway, it was too late for him. He washed up on a shore with his arms around that mast and only the clothes on his back. The little casket filled with Wishes? It must have sunk right to the bottom of the sea.”
“Oh, no!” said Gusta. All that magic, drowned!
“Except!” said her mother. “When he reached into his trouser pocket, guess what he found?”
“A Wish?” breathed Gusta.
“A single Wish,” said her mother. “One last Wish left. He kept that Wish safe, and he brought it back home with him. And you know what? He never used it, his whole life long. That’s what he told me, anyway, and I knew him when he was very, very old.”
“So why didn’t he use his Wish, Mama?”
It seemed to Gusta like a clear case of wasting. And usually her mama was firmly opposed to all wasting of things.
But now her mother made a funny sort of face — as if her inside contradictions were bumping against the edges so hard they were nearly beginning to show.
“Well, now, I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe making wishes gets harder the older you are. You know too much about how tangled up things are. You worry about what the right wish might be. And anyway, it’s just a story. He told such wild stories!”
“But what happened to the one last Wish in the end?” said Gusta. “What happened, what happened, what happened?”
“Settle down, Gusta. You don’t want to be bothering your papa. Anyway, I remember my grandfather calling me over to where he was sitting in his big chair one day — oh, he was immensely old by then — and I could tell he was anxious about something. He had his old sailor’s pocket watch in his hands, the one that eventually he left to me. You know: this one.”
It was a funny old half-broken thing with two small dials that used to tell two kinds of time at once, captain’s time and “home time,” which was the time in his home port of Castine, on the rocky coast of Maine.
Gusta and her mother admired the captain’s watch for a moment together.
“He was so proud of this watch, even if half its little mechanisms no longer ticked along as they were supposed to. But that day he called me to him, he was looking at it and saying, ‘It’s gone, it’s gone, I put it away.’ I was confused, of course. The watch itself wasn’t gone; that’s why I didn’t understand at first. Then I saw he was showing me the other end of the watch chain, where a link was broken right off — see it here? It looks as if there used to be something there. So when he pointed that out to me, back then, of course I was trying to remember whether I’d seen something there in the past. I thought maybe there had been, sometime in the past, a medallion or something. In any case, now he wanted it back, whatever it was. It was in a box, he said. He had put it away in a box. A box about so big.”
Gusta’s mother sketched out a little box in the air, as long ago her grandfather’s hands must have also done.
“A box on a shelf. ‘Go find it, Gladdy,’ he said. ‘Bring it here.’ So of course I looked and looked, in all possible boxes on all possible shelves. Oh, I brought him spoons and thimbles and nails and plenty of other roundish things, and every time he just shook his head and pushed it away and said, ‘No, Gladdy, in the box, on the shelf!’ But he couldn’t tell me what box on what shelf.”
“So you didn’t find it?” said Gusta.
“No,” said her mother.
“Oh!” said Gusta. “But you think it’s still there somewhere?”
She was sitting straight up in her cot now. The tips of her ears were tingling. The tips of her fingers were alert, too. New ideas were spilling through her blood vessels and changing her view of the world.
Her mother must have seen how trembly she had gotten, because she laughed.
“Oof. Now I’ve gone and riled you up, when what I meant to do was settle you down. Lie back and shut your eyes now. It’s time to sleep tight, Gusta.”
But it gave Gusta the shivers, thinking about that unused Wish, still loose in the world somewhere. And then her thoughts turned a sharp corner, just as her mother was slipping out past the blanket wall that separated Gusta’s cot from the rest of that room.
“Does Papa know? About the Wish hiding away in your family?”
Because she was thinking about all the thing
s that were so important to her father — all the ways a Wish might come in handy. The times when workers went out on strike; the rent getting paid; the war that, like a storm, was surely coming. Couldn’t a Wish fix all of that once and for all?
“Goodness, Gusta,” said her mother, all the laughter in her vanishing at once. “You know your papa isn’t the kind of foolish person who believes in wishes.”
But maybe, thought Gusta secretly and guiltily and with the hint of a tingle in the tips of her ears, maybe my mother and I — or at least part of me and part of Mama — maybe we’re secretly foolish in that wish-believing way. . . .
A watch that was maybe all that was left of a broken Wish turned out to be no use at all to a girl trying to get herself more than a mile down Elm Street in chill weather.
Gusta had to walk with care — gingerly (which was a word her mother liked to use) — because her poor shins were already so bruised from the horn case. It turns out that when you’re carrying a raggedy old suitcase in one hand, you can’t do much to defend your legs from awkward horn case – shaped edges dangling from the other hand. Eventually her shins kind of gave up complaining, and then it was easier.
She crossed the bridge over a dark, cold smear that must have been the mill river. Vague buildings loomed along the road, holding secrets.
She counted her steps to jolly herself along: fifty more! Good! Fifty again!
And now and again, when she really couldn’t stand it anymore, she put her suitcase down on one side and her horn on the other, to rest her arms, and pretended she needed to check the address on the letter her mother had sent along with her, the one she had shown to that woman in the blue coat. It still said exactly what it had said half an hour before: Mrs. Clementine Hoopes, Elm Street, Springdale, Maine.
Gusta rolled the envelope thoughtfully in her cold fingers a little.
It wasn’t entirely Gusta’s fault, what happened next. It was partly the fault of the weather: the glue had weakened, and the envelope was beginning to gape.
Her hands couldn’t help themselves; they finished what the weather had begun. Gusta was staring at an open envelope, and inside, right there, was a letter.
Gusta had to hold it close to her eyes to see what that handwriting was saying.
Dear Mother, said the slightly frantic handwriting of Gusta’s own mother. We are all so grateful to you for taking in Augusta at this time. You will find her to be a faithful scholar, now in the fifth grade, and a good worker. My hours right now are long, to get us onto solid footing, but I have a promising job helping a professor with his books, and I have found a room in a good boardinghouse, very clean and economical, but alas they do not allow children. August will fill in the details, I am sure.
Well, now, no, he wouldn’t.
Oh, where was her papa now? In a cell? On a different bus? Closing in on the Canadian border? Sitting behind bars with his head in his hands?
The world swam in Gusta’s eyes for a moment. She stared at the letter blindly and only a minute later realized she was actually staring at her mother’s note at the bottom of the letter: P.S. If need arises, the horn can serve as her room and board. I guess you might find a good price for it.
It was like the letter had turned out to be some kind of poisonous insect and had stung her.
And then she did not think. She did not plan. She simply tore off the line at the bottom of the page (surprised by her boldness even as she did it) and wadded it into a paper pill.
She stood there for a shocked moment, with that little pill’s worth of paper rolling back and forth between her thumb and her fingers.
It was a wicked thing she had just done, tearing off that tiny strip of paper, but here’s the thing: Gusta loved that horn.
August, her father, had gotten that horn from his father, also named August, who had played it in an orchestra in Germany.
The August who was her father hadn’t brought much with him across the wide ocean apart from that horn. But he was so busy with his work that Gusta played it more than he did these days. At first he had been amused she could get any sound out of it, despite being so young and scrawny, and then he started showing her some of the horn’s secrets: how your left hand pressed the keys that remade the maze your breath ran through, and how the way you shaped your lips could change the note that came out of the bell.
Gusta loved the golden sound of the horn, the way the notes could make you ring like a bell, from your hair bow to your toes. Its music was so large and grand. Every scrap of teaching her father gave her she hoarded in her mind and her heart and her breath and her hands.
She had practiced and practiced. She was quiet by nature, but the horn was the bravest part of her — her sweet, large, secret, brassy voice.
And besides, her heart was sore: her father had disappeared. She couldn’t let the horn disappear, too, no matter what.
The air was colder now than it had been, the sky a much darker gray, especially over there, ahead. She had better move along fast if she wanted to get to where she was going before the weather got worse.
And then the sun did that thing the sun sometimes does, before the storm actually arrives. It peeked through a low gap in the clouds and made Gusta’s hands and the rest of the near world glitter, a sudden and unexpected brilliance against the black backdrop of the rest of the sky.
Oh, Papa, thought Gusta. Her father had a phrase for the way the sun catches things out against the darkness of a coming storm: the clear light of trouble, he called it. He always smiled when he said that, too, as if it were a good thing.
“What do we do, little thingling, when the storm is coming?” he said once, when Gusta had been much younger than she was today.
“Borrow umbrellas! Button up our coats! Run inside and close the door!”
But it turned out he was being serious, despite that smile.
“Ah, yes, coats!” he said. “But that’s not all. When the storm is coming, we must quickly find out who we are: who we are in the light of trouble.”
“We already know who we are,” she said. “You are Papa, and I am Gusta.”
“Yes, certainly, true. But can you be sure you will stay yourself, Gusta, once the wind is howling?”
He liked to talk that way.
Even in very strong wind, I will try very hard to still be Gusta, thought Gusta, standing taller in that last burst of sunlight before the storm.
And she set off, up what she hoped must be the last piece of road, with her little suitcase in one hand and, in the other, the awkward big horn case, bumping against the bruises it had already sprinkled over her shin.
Gusta walked along a stretch of field that looked as cold and sullen as the sky above. From time to time, she had to stop and listen for a moment to how quiet everything was. In all her life she had never been somewhere so quiet. New York, for example, rumbled and crashed and beeped at you all the time, a cozy sort of din if that’s what you were used to. And Boston had been plenty noisy, too.
The horn case’s handle was firm in her hand, a narrow but well-sewn loop of leather. It had held itself together for thousands of miles and would hold itself together a little farther. This dirt road turning off to the right here was Hoopes Road. That’s what the sign said, when you got close enough to read it. That meant that this big yellow house on the corner — once upon a time yellow, when the paint was younger — this house with the screened-in porch all down the left side and around the corner: this was it.
A snowflake settled on Gusta’s mitten, just to remind her that the weather was on its way to worse.
Gusta took a deep breath and told herself to be brave and to keep her secrets secret, no matter what they asked her here.
All right, then! Gusta knew that if she stood there even four more seconds, she would lose her gumption and start being afraid, so she went up the steps quickly, racing to get ahead of her doubts, through the screen door and right up to the actual front door, which she knocked on several times.
The
porch spreading around her was shadowy and filled with lumpy bits of furniture, some covered up against the winter weather. Wisps and scraps of sound came from inside the house. As usual, Gusta was listening more than looking. She could hear so many voices from inside — young voices shouting to each other, older voices telling younger people what to do — her grandmother’s house sounded like a human beehive, an anthill, a — what did rabbits live in, out in the wild? There must be a word for that —
And then the front door flew open, and a girl was standing there, staring at her. She looked a few years older than Gusta. She was thin and wiry, had hints of red in her tidy brown hair, and her hands were blurry with what looked like flour.
“Hello! Who are you? And what in the name of biscuits are you carrying there?”
Gusta instantly felt the way anyone feels at a strange door: foolish and out of place and almost too dry-mouthed to speak.
“I’m looking for Mrs. Hoopes?” she said finally. She had wanted to sound brave, but it didn’t work out that way. Her sentences kept adding question marks to themselves.
“Is this — Mrs. Hoopes’s house?”
“Surely is,” said the girl, and she turned to shout back down the dim hall: “A new one at the door!”
Then she whipped back around and asked, “And what’s your name, new one?”
“I’m Augusta,” said Gusta.
The older girl’s eyes went wide. She craned her head around to look past Gusta, out toward the road.
“Augusta!” she said. “You mean, the Augusta we’ve been waiting for? The Augusta who’s a Hoopes? But then, where’s that foreign — ohnevermind —”
The girl bit her words back and slapped her floury hand right onto her mouth for a moment, as extra precaution.
Before Gusta could do so much as squeak, a voice from the hall — a very rapidly approaching voice, small and light on its feet — said sharply, “JOSIE!”