by Anne Nesbet
Then she realized she wasn’t in any room. Her head was spinning, and all of her body ached, and she was outside, where the air was much cooler than it had been, and around her everything was dark except for a bright star of lantern light swinging in someone’s hand. Actually, she realized a whole domino-row’s worth of things at once: that her hip bones were sore because she had been asleep on the platform of the sea captain’s lighthouse, that her head felt approximately like an overheated balloon, and that Josie was right now swinging herself up the lighthouse ladder with the lantern.
“Honestly,” said Josie. “Augusta Hoopes N.! Haven’t you caused enough trouble? Whatever possessed you to run away like that?”
It all came back to Gusta then, all the reasons she was out here in the dark, and why she was tucked up next to a vase filled with stones (and one used Wish) in a lighthouse from which you couldn’t, even in daylight, actually see the sea.
“I fell asleep,” she said. “I feel very strange.”
Josie put a hand on Gusta’s forehead and then pulled it back again with a frown.
“Yup,” she said. “Burning up with fever. Mrs. Hoopes was worried you might be out here sick somewhere. Guess only a person burning up with fever would be able to fall asleep here. Well, let’s see if we can get you back down this hill, sick though you may be.”
Gusta rubbed her eyes. Nothing seemed quite real, but she was so glad Josie was there.
“How did you find me?”
“Seemed like the sort of place you might go in a pinch. You were so excited about finding it! Anyway, everyone’s out looking for you, the ones who aren’t sick in bed. There are folks looking for you in all sorts of places, I guess. Why not here? Oh, that reminds me —”
She brought a chunk of shiny stone out of some pocket and tipped it into the vase.
“Gotta add a little mica to the lamp every time you come,” she said. “That’s what Mrs. Hoopes always told me. It’s tradition. Calls you home, some folks think. Not that fool’s gold calls anyone in any direction, of course, not for real. But let’s get you on home, now, Gusta.”
Josie helped Gusta back down the ladder. She had to leave the lantern behind for a moment, because Gusta was all wobble. Then Josie went back up and grabbed the lantern again while Gusta swayed in the shifting light.
“I know you’re sick and all — hang on to me here!— but I still can’t believe you were foolish enough to run away. No, not just that: foolish enough to get us all into hot water, and then foolish enough to run away afterward.”
Gusta’s legs were stiff and awkward, but somehow, with Josie’s help, they managed to move her along the path, spattered with the unsteady swinging blobs of lantern light. Josie was holding the lantern, and she went slightly ahead, with Gusta hanging on to her arm and trying to put the words together that might say what she needed to say.
“I’m so sorry, Josie,” she said. That was all she could think to say. “I’m really, really sorry. I didn’t mean to cause so much trouble. Especially not for you.”
“Of course you didn’t mean it,” said Josie. “Watch that rock there! No point in your being so ridiculous.”
Gusta didn’t feel ridiculous: she felt plain bad.
Josie stopped and turned, the lantern shining in her hand and lighting her face from the bottom up, which made her look mysterious and full of fire.
“All the same, Gusta. It was ridiculous to go bother that awful Mr. Kendall,” she said. “That’s like pitching stones at a hornet’s nest.”
“I’m sorry,” said Gusta again. Her head was aching.
“Want to know something?” said Josie. “That’s what everyone’s saying. Miss Marion said that. She’s sorry. And even Mrs. Hoopes. Mrs. Hoopes, saying she’s sorry! Everyone’s sorry, I guess, about their big old secret leaking out this way, unexpected like.”
“How,” said Gusta. “How? How’d they stand it, all that time?”
After all, she, Gusta, had only had to carry that particular secret for a day or two, and it had been almost too heavy to bear. So how Aunt Marion and Gramma Hoopes could have kept that weight on their shoulders, all those years . . .
“Don’t know,” said Josie. “It was what they thought they had to do; that’s what they keep telling me. I guess because they wanted to keep me, is the thing.”
“Of course they wanted to keep you!” said Gusta, and for a moment she had to stop and rest, while the night woods spun all around her in the lantern light. Josie gave her a moment and then prodded her forward.
“There’s no ‘of course’ about it, though, is there?” said Josie, back to her practical self. “Look at the state kids who come to live with Mrs. Hoopes. That little Delphine is plenty cute, right? Why do you think she’s not with her own family, somewhere else? Well, I know why, because I remember the day some girl came to our door in tears, and she had a belly about as big as a blue-ribbon pumpkin. She was ‘in trouble,’ that’s what she kept saying. So of course I said out loud, stupidly, ‘Why? What kind of trouble?’ And they hushed me right up, Miss Marion and Mrs. Hoopes did. But think what they must have been thinking! And they were kind to that girl. They were. She had her baby, who turned out to be Delphine, in one of the spare bedrooms, and she didn’t take her away with her when she left. Maybe that girl wished she could, but she couldn’t. She couldn’t go home with a baby. She had to leave her. And I thought”— she kicked a rock away in the dark —“I thought: oh, I see, that’s how it was with me, too. Some poor woman came here and left me behind. Maybe she was sad to leave me, but I’ll never ever know. And then it turns out, she didn’t leave.”
Josie swung the lantern.
“She didn’t leave!” she said, and her face in the lantern light was the oddest combination of angry and glad. “She just hid the truth away, and she and Mrs. Hoopes brought in all the other children, the state kids, the boarders, the real orphans, and that was the story — all so’s I wouldn’t have to go away.”
“They don’t put their own on a bus, the Hoopeses,” said Gusta. “Gramma Hoopes said that to me.”
“A bitty baby on a bus?” said Josie. “I don’t think so! Well, anyway, the truth’s out now, and it’ll take some getting used to. I don’t know how I even feel anymore. Whether I’m happy or sad or mad as hornets about it or what!”
But being Josie, she actually laughed aloud about this.
After a moment, Josie added, “But Mrs. Hoopes — I mean, I guess, Gramma Hoopes, golly — said, ‘Doesn’t change anything, not really,’ and in a way of course she’s right.”
Except of course it did change things. Both Gusta and Josie knew that. It changed everything. It changed “Mrs. Hoopes” into “Gramma Hoopes,” didn’t it? It changed the names of everyone. It changed who they were. It made Miss Kendall angry, and Miss Kendall was never angry. But most of all, it turned Aunt Marion — golly!— into somebody’s mama.
“Oh!” said Gusta.
A new thought had risen up in her mind all of a sudden.
“Josie,” said Gusta, leaning heavily against her. “Think about it. You and me and Bess — we’re not random people to each other at all anymore — we’re all cousins!”
Even unsentimental Josie made a surprised sound then as she chewed on that thought. “How about that?” she said. “Look at your feverish head, coming up with these ideas! You got that about right, I guess. Cousins. Well, ha!”
And then soon, despite everything, they were hobbling down the last part of the road to the house, where there were lights in so many of the windows that Gusta’s heart quailed a little: all the people who were out looking for her! All the trouble she had caused!
“I don’t want to go in,” said Gusta. “They’re all going to be so upset and mad.”
“Don’t be extra foolish,” said Josie, making a dismissive swoosh with the lantern in the general direction of the front porch. “You’re burning up with fever, and you need your bed. And nothing here is going to be as hard as school on Monday. Eve
ryone will know everything by then — you know they will. Once a secret’s a little bit out, it’s all over town. The talk will be all about why I’m out of the chorus and whose child I am and whose child you are — yep, I heard about that article in the newspaper, too.”
“They said today I can’t read my essay at the Patriotic Pageant, because of that thing in the paper.” Suddenly that little bit of memory had popped back into her head. It made her teeth chatter a little.
“Oh, really? So it’s already started. Are you cut out of being the Statue of Liberty, too?”
Josie had taken an interest in the Statue of Liberty thing, since it required organizing a costume.
“N-n-no, I don’t know. Statues don’t say anything, right? So I don’t think the principal cares.”
“Oh, well, all right, then. Up the stairs now. One at a time. We’ll have to talk Mrs. Hoopes into letting us have a sheet, that’s all.” Josie squared her shoulders, readying herself for that battle as well as all the thousand other battles that were surely coming their way. “Listen up, Gusta,” she said. “You and me, we’ve got to walk around like we’re a mile above all this nonsense. That’s the only way. Stand tall and walk proud.”
Gusta took a moment to stand tall, right there on the porch stairs in the dark. There was a lump in her throat — a lump about the size of that wasted Wish.
“You sound like my papa,” she said to Josie.
“Do I? Well. Then he and I agree on something, even if he is running from the law. And going into this house of ours right now is a chance to practice. You hear me, Gusta? In we go. Practicing for school on Monday and for that pageant next week and for all of it. Onward. Sick, but proud. Stand tall, cousin!”
“Solidarity forever,” said Gusta, with half her fever-shattered voice but the whole of her heart.
And, standing tall, in they went.
Time and fever passed. It took some days before Gusta was well enough to go back to school, and even then she felt less than herself: thin, somehow, and watered down.
But almost as soon as she got back, it was time to worry about the pageant.
Josie and Bess were adamant: there was only one necessary and appropriate costume for the Statue of Liberty — a sheet, cleverly draped. A sheet that would not, as they all assured their grandmother, be damaged at all. Not cut with scissors or sewn up recklessly or anything — just draped and pinned.
Gramma Hoopes held to her “no” until the very last night, when Josie promised she would personally come over from the high school for the pageant and do all the necessary draping and pinning herself.
“Too bad it’s that Molly Gowen who’s going to be up there speaking!” said Bess. “I guess it’s going to be all about milk, milk, milk the whole time.”
The Dairy Wars were famous even outside the bounds of the fifth grade.
“And then the Thibodeau boy will have to remind us all about the virtues of Springdale Dairy,” said Josie.
“When he’s on his own he doesn’t always talk about the dairy,” said Gusta. “He’s much more interesting than that, believe it or not.”
Bess and Josie shared a meaningful look. “Oh, is that so?” they said.
In fact, good old Georges Thibodeau, who carried the principle of “just say what you need to say, whenever and however you feel you need to say it” right over into the writing of contest essays, had confessed to Gusta that he had written “an actual poem” as his entry. Now, Georges was not what Gusta would ordinarily have considered poetic-looking, but it turns out that looking poetic, or not, does not determine the kind of composition one produces.
On the day of the pageant, Georges was cool as a cucumber, up there in front of everyone. Gusta was very impressed. Miss Hatch had decided he should go first in the fifth-grade part of the program, while the rest of the class stood quietly clustered under — yes — the Statue of Liberty. The class as a whole would recite the Liberty sonnet, and then Molly Gowen would recite her composition, and then it would all be done. That was the plan, anyway.
Because she was up on her pedestal being the Statue of Liberty, and because she was a Statue of Liberty who wore eyeglasses, Gusta had an excellent view of the audience, both the children seated in neat lines in their chairs, class by class (some of them in costumes because they had already performed their pieces for the pageant — but the fifth grade went last), and the parents in the rows behind, and the late-arriving parents standing against the walls. Gusta also had an excellent view of the top and back of Georges Thibodeau’s head.
“Away! Away!” said Georges now, in his ever-so-slightly foghorn voice to that room full of intently listening people.
“Away! Away! Above the clouds,
The silver airplanes fly away!
They will defend
Until day’s end.
They waste no time. They cannot stay . . .”
He was doing a fantastic job. He mentioned Amelia Earhart and the brave crew of another lost plane, L’Oiseau Blanc, and he managed to squeeze those names into lines that rhymed. Miss Hatch was standing to the side of the stage with her hands clasped, smiling. The Patriotic Pageant was turning out to be an enormous success.
Here, however, is where odd things began to happen.
Gusta, who was carefully being the Statue of Liberty, started thinking, by accident, about people who fly airplanes, and then slipped from that thought to thinking about her father, who might even this very minute be flying an airplane for Canada or headed across the sea to help fight the Nazis in Europe. He hadn’t written a single letter, of course, so she did not know where he actually was. He was far away. He had left them. He was beyond the call even of the French horn’s clearest, truest note, or of the sea captain’s beacon, or of any wish.
And now there was no more horn, and no more Wish, and even the one hundred dollars, which had seemed so much like something solid and real, had come and gone.
Like her father, gone.
Tears built up in her eyes all at once, without warning, and a few of them spilled down her face. She could feel them spilling, and it was awful, because she was the Statue of Liberty, and could not put down her torch or wipe her eyes.
The crowd cheered for Georges Thibodeau! That meant his poem must be over.
Even now she couldn’t move, of course, because now began the actual Statue of Liberty part of the program.
The whole fifth grade was on the stage, reciting the Emma Lazarus poem together.
Stand tall, stand tall, keep, oh keep standing tall! Gusta told herself. She blinked fiercely. She tried to think about other things. She looked at the adults standing in the far back of the room, lined up against the walls. She could see their faces looking up at the students onstage, some of those faces filled with particular love, because perhaps their own child was a fifth-grader.
And then it turned out that one of those faces belonged to her mother.
There was not the slightest doubt in the world. Her own mother (!!!) had turned up for the end-of-year Patriotic Pageant, all the way from New York. She must have arrived a little late, because there she was, slipping into place against the back wall by the doors. Gusta would never have spotted her in the old days, before the eyeglasses. But now she could see it was her mother, even from way up here, and at the end of the last line of the Liberty sonnet, in the momentary pause before the applause broke out, she saw and heard her mother put her hand to her mouth and, looking up at Gusta, way up there, give a smiling, gasping, heartbroken, proud little sob that traveled right up to Gusta as fast as a pigeon and as bright as the brightest note of any horn.
“Oh!” said the Statue of Liberty aloud — and she dropped her torch.
Some people didn’t notice, probably, because it was time for applause, and nobody was hurt, thank goodness, because, fortunately for them, torches that are actually pieces of painted cardboard don’t do as much damage as the metallic, flaming kind.
Gusta hardly heard Molly Gowen’s name being announced. She
was too busy trying to figure out what had happened to her torch and trying to spot her mother again, at the back of the crowd — all while not moving an inch.
She saw (without much paying attention to the details) that Molly was walking to the front of the stage. Gusta just wanted the pageant to be over by this point. So Gusta wasn’t paying very much attention to Molly taking a deep breath, tossing her curls back, kneading her fingers together nervously, beginning to speak.
And then Gusta heard her own name, and felt the crowd out there shift in their seats, and as distracted as she was at that moment, Gusta understood that something peculiar was happening.
“Actually, it shouldn’t be me standing here right now; it should be Augusta Neubronner,” Molly Gowen had just said. That was really what she was saying! “I’m telling you this now because we all know how important it is to be honest. That’s part of being American, or at least it should be. Our presidents are supposed to be honest. Our senators and our town leaders and also our captains of industry are supposed to be honest. For instance, I know for a fact that Sharp’s Ridge Farm has been producing completely honest, American milk for more than ten years. And I think even people in the fifth grade in America should be honest, too. So: the honest truth about this aviation essay contest is that the two best compositions in our class were written by Georges Thibodeau, whom you just heard, and by Augusta Hoopes Neubronner. And not by me. That’s the truth. So I think Augusta should come up to the front here now and recite her composition for us. And you can come up to Sharp’s Ridge Farm and read mine if you want, because I’m proud of it, and it’s about the importance of milk to the American aviation industry, and it will be tacked up on the wall at Sharp’s Ridge next to the ice-cream freezer. And that’s all I’m going to say. Let’s be honest, true-blue Americans now: let’s listen to Augusta.”
And Molly stepped to the side, turned around so that all the amazed students onstage could catch a glimpse of her flushed face and her very determined, Molly Gowen eyes, and she beckoned with a grand gesture to the Statue of Liberty — Gusta — who was at that moment so stricken with surprise that she was almost as unable to move or think as a real, genuine statue.