Table of Contents
Title Page
Table of Contents
Copyright
Dedication
Preface: The Banshee of Brewster Falls
PART ONE
Begin at the Beginning
Circus
Gone
Portia
The Apple Tree
Broken Promise
Meeting Mister
Family Traditions
Night Voices
Bluebeard
Portia
Caroline at Night
Bluebeard Takes a Bride
Little Girl Lost
Solutions
Wicked Deeds, and a Plan
Wedding Eve
The Funeral
Scraps
One Last Chance
Escape
PART TWO
Welcome to the Wonder Show
The Pie Car
Practical Matters
The Chicken-Fried Steak Trial
Gideon
Jackal
The Woeful Tale of Lord Mountebank
Why She Was There
Inside
Brotherly Love
Girl on the Inside
Fortunetelling
Doula
Dining, Carnival Style
Angry
Jimmy
Jim
The Secret Lives of Ladies
Mrs. Collington
The Meaning of “I Don’t Know”
The Legend of Marie
Family Recipe
More Secrets
Mosco
Polly
Pippa
The Blowoff
Impressions
Trouble Inside
Violet
Joseph
Red Lipstick
Kites at Midnight
Silence Is Not Empty
What Was Left Behind
What (Else) Was Left Behind
The Size of an Empty Space
Gideon
Joseph
Punks
What Comes After
Joseph
Caught
Meanwhile
PART THREE
Return
Bluebeard’s Closet
The Big Idea
Mission of Mercy (and a Bit of Revenge)
Graveyard Girls
After All Is Said and Done
Portia
Author’s Note
Acknowledgments
Copyright © 2012 by Hannah Barnaby
All rights reserved. For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.
Houghton Mifflin Books for Children is an imprint of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
www.hmhbooks.com
The text of this book is set in Horley Old Style MT.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file.
ISBN 978-0-547-59980-9
Manufactured in the United States of America
DOC 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
4500343650
For the lost and the lonely, for the different and the same
Preface: The Banshee of Brewster Falls
Wayward can mean a lot of things. It can mean lost, misled, unfortunate, left behind. That is how the girls at The Home thought of themselves, despite their best efforts to live some other way.
For the inhabitants of Brewster Falls, wayward meant wicked. Dangerous. Trash. And that is how they treated the girls on the rare occasions they showed their faces in town.
Portia was the only one who went on a regular basis—she did the shopping and stopped at the post office for letters and telegrams. She rode the red bicycle and did not cover her long dark hair, and she sang old gypsy songs at the top of her lungs, and she seemed (to the residents of Brewster Falls) like a banshee coming to steal their souls. Mothers would hide their children indoors when Portia came whipping down the road.
They were a fearful group of folks.
Portia loved to torment them. And she loved the red bicycle.
Riding a bicycle was the only kind of freedom for Portia. It was something she thought she’d always known how to do, simply because she couldn’t remember learning, couldn’t place the first time she’d done it. Like laughing. Or eating an apple. It was so utterly normal that it didn’t even require thought. Settle onto the seat. Push off, pedal, right left right left right. Hold the handlebars steady. Watch the road ahead, to avoid cars and potholes and squirrels, but don’t look too hard at anything. She could almost get out of her body, almost pretend she was entirely somewhere else.
That was the freedom she loved. That was why she had worked so hard to convince Mister to let her take the trips to town, because it afforded her the luxury of time alone on her bicycle.
Only it wasn’t her bicycle—it was Mister’s. It had been his since a Christmas morning once upon a time, when a little boy who would grow up to be Mister had tumbled out of bed and found a string tied to his left big toe, a string that he untied and followed out of his room, through the upstairs hallway to the stairs, down the stairs (unwinding it carefully from the banister), through the dining room, into the kitchen (such a long string!), and through the side door, which he opened to find a shiny red Journeyman five-speed leaning against the porch rail.
Was he happy? Did he gasp with delight? Or did he stand there with a hand full of string and think, They don’t know me at all?
It hardly matters, now.
PART ONE
Begin at the Beginning
Stories came easily to Portia. Lies came even more easily, and more often. The difference was in the purpose. The stories taught her to imagine places beyond where she was, and the lies kept her out of trouble. Mostly.
Portia’s first audience, for lies and stories both, was her father. Her mother had never had the ear for tales of any kind, nor the patience to listen, and she was long gone by the time Portia could tell a tale. A lean, restless woman, Quintillia surprised no one with her departure, and the family quickly closed the space she had occupied like the ocean fills a hole in the sand. They did not speak of her. If they ever thought of her, it was in silence.
And so it was Max, her father, who listened to Portia talk, talk, talk. Out the door, around the house, all the way to the woodpile and back, the sound of Portia’s voice trailed Max like an echo. She had an uncanny way of matching her rhythms to his, tailoring her stories to his moods and whatever task he worked on while she talked. They were stream-of-consciousness ramblings at first, retellings of the fairy tales Portia heard from her gypsy tribe of relations, all of whom lived within spitting distance of her bedroom window and congregated nightly in Aunt Carmella’s kitchen on the other side of the vegetable garden. Portia did not have to leave her room to hear them speaking at night—they knew she was there and projected their voices accordingly. She made the stories her own, chopped them up and clapped them back together in new formations, putting the enchanted princess in the loving embrace of a villainous wolf, marrying the charming prince to the wicked witch and giving them a brood of dwarfs to raise as their own.
Sometimes Portia would have so many storied roads in her head that she would struggle to choose just one path. “Papa,” she said, “I can’t tell where this story begins.”
“Begin at the beginning,” he told her.
These were the earliest days Portia would remember later. Trying to think past them, to drill into her younger selves and mine them for memories, she could get only as far as the view from that bedroom window, the sound of her shadowed aunts and uncles laughing, telling tales, and singing songs about women Portia knew no
t to repeat in polite company.
These were the days before the money dried up and the dust took over, before the jobs and houses were lost, before her tribe disbanded and went away like seeds on the wind, hoping to find a place where they could land safely.
As her family trickled away, Portia replaced the stories they had told with stories of her own. She didn’t like the feeling of their words in her mouth anymore; besides, the details began to fade, and it seemed her father smiled only when she told her own tales.
“There are creatures that dance outside my window at night,” she told him, “and they are very fat. They have wings, but they cannot fly because their wings are too small.”
“What do they sound like?” asked Max.
“Like bees,” said Portia.
“What do they want?” asked Max.
“To fly,” said Portia. “They want to fly, more than anything.”
“What are their names?” asked Max.
The only names Portia knew were the names of her lost relatives. She had not been to school. She did not have friends or know anyone who was not her family. She was five years old.
“Their names are Carmella and Joseph and Anthony and Oscar and Elena and . . .” Then she stopped because a tear pushed itself out of Max’s eye, and the sight of it rolling down her father’s face made Portia feel that she had done something very wrong.
“Papa,” she whispered. “It’s not true.”
“I know,” said Max.
“Then why are you sad?”
“Because our family is gone,” he said. “I didn’t think they could fly, but they did.”
Portia put her hand into her father’s coat pocket, where his own hand rested like a nesting bird. “If they flew away, they can fly back,” she said.
Max shrugged. “Or we will fly away, too.”
Of course Portia thought we included her.
She was five years old.
Circus
A few weeks after Portia turned nine, Max and Aunt Sophia took her to the circus, to distract her from the empty houses and the dust and the quiet. It was Max’s idea, the circus, but it was Sophia’s money that got them in. She grumbled a bit as she handed it over to the beaming woman in the ticket wagon, but even Sophia wasn’t immune to the alluring smells of sawdust and pink sugar that hung all around them. Even she had been a child once.
They went through the menagerie at first, gaping at elephants and the one colossal hippo that bobbed calmly in a huge tank of water. Max moved quickly, wanting to see everything at once, turning occasionally to glance at his daughter behind him. Portia stood next to Sophia and resisted the urge to grab her hand when one of the elephants extended its trunk in her direction, the fleshy tip trembling as it searched the air.
“I think it’s looking for a kiss,” Sophia said. Her voice was high-pitched, full of forced excitement. It made Portia glad she had kept her hands at her sides.
When they exited the tent at the other end of the menagerie, they found themselves on the midway. There was a long row of booths on each side, selling popcorn and cotton candy and chances to throw things to win other things. Portia knew better than to ask if she could play one of the games—Max might have relented, but Aunt Sophia was against gambling of any kind and would have spent the rest of the day lecturing Portia on the subject. Though it would almost have been a relief to hear Sophia speaking in her normal voice instead of her false, cheery day-at-the-circus one.
Halfway down the east side of the midway, between the ring toss and the Beano booth, was a long stage with a squat tent behind it. There was a podium at one end, next to the tent entrance, and a huge sign above the stage that said STRANGE PEOPLE.
The crowd was dense. Portia couldn’t see the stage, but she could hear the tinny strains of accordion music over the murmuring voices that wove their way back to her.
“What’s that?” she asked. Max was silent, and Portia felt chastened. She had been asking too many questions lately, and Max no longer had any answers. Or had become, like her mother, unwilling to share them. Sophia—who was taller than most of the women in the crowd and a good number of the men, too—looked down at Portia disapprovingly. “Nothing that concerns you. Let’s go.”
“But what is it? I can’t see!”
A large man next to Sophia leaned down to Portia and said, “You can’t see? Well, that won’t do. Here, let me help.” She was small for her age—it took no effort at all for the man to reach down and lift Portia as if she were a bag of groceries and plunk her down onto his shoulders. Sophia sputtered a bit, but she lived by “good manners above all” and couldn’t bring herself to reprimand a total stranger.
Portia’s newfound height gave her a perfect view, but even though she could see the figure on the stage, she still wasn’t sure what she was looking at. It seemed to be a man, but he didn’t look like any man Portia had ever seen. His head was very small and bald and rather pointy at the back, and his face seemed too big. It was sloped as though someone had grabbed his nose and pulled everything down toward his nearly absent chin.
Accidentally out loud, Portia said, “What is it?”
“It’s The Pinhead,” the man told her.
“Is he . . . What’s wrong with him?”
“Don’t know,” said the man. “But he sure is funny-looking, ain’t he?”
The Pinhead smiled peacefully as he played his accordion and gazed down at the stage. He did not look into the audience, and everyone stared and whispered as if he were on a movie screen instead of right there in front of them. Finally, he finished his song with a little flourish and, still smiling, shuffled off the stage, slipping behind a hidden opening in the tent canvas.
Another man stepped up to the podium. He was wearing a white suit, so white in the early afternoon sun that Portia had to shield her eyes to look at him.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he called, “let’s hear a big round of applause for Gregor, last surviving member of the lost tribe of Montezuma.”
There was a smattering of hesitant applause, and the white-suit man went on.
“And now, ladies and gentlemen, our main event. This is what your friends and neighbors will be talking about long after our humble show is gone from your fine town. You will tell your grandchildren the story of this day, and they will scarcely believe you, it is so fantastic. Seeing is believing, but you will not believe your eyes.”
He paused and put his hand in the air.
“Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you: The Gallery of Human Oddities.”
Portia looked down at her father, to see what he was making of all this, but Max wasn’t looking at the stage. Instead, he was staring past one side of it, fixing his eyes on something far away.
Sophia tapped Portia’s benefactor on the shoulder. “Excuse me, sir, but I think I should take my niece to a more . . . suitable part of the show.”
“Of course,” he said. He lifted Portia from around his neck and set her carefully on the ground.
“But—”
“What do you say?” Sophia snapped.
“Thank you, sir,” Portia said to the man, and he tipped his hat.
Portia jogged to keep up with Sophia, who was striding swiftly toward the biggest tent on the lot. Max floated distractedly behind her. “Why couldn’t we stay and watch?”
“It’s not appropriate,” Sophia said.
“What’s not appropriate?” Portia’s mind was swimming with what it was she’d seen, what the white-suit man could have meant by “human oddities,” why Aunt Sophia was practically running away from the midway stage.
“The sideshow,” Sophia said. “No more questions.”
There was no better way to ensure Portia’s obsession with something than telling her to forget about it.
She was distracted a bit as the circus performance began. Portia had never seen such things outside of her imagination: girls hanging by their hair and turning somersaults, small stocky men throwing themselves into the air and catching
each other by the wrists, massive tigers obeying the whip-snap commands of the fearless woman who stood inside their cage. Girls riding horses standing up, bears on bicycles, elephants dancing like ballerinas. It was enchanting, like a fairy tale come to life.
But for all the whirling colors and motion and noise, all Portia could think about was what she had not been allowed to see. And that night her dreams were filled with new characters—a man with the head of a bear; a woman the size of a zeppelin, hovering overhead; an army of accordion-playing pinheads—as she tried to figure out what stories might have been hiding behind the curtain on the midway, waiting just for her.
It was barely another week before Max determined that it was time to go. In the years to come, Portia’s memories of the circus would become hopelessly tangled with the image of her father driving away, so that it eventually seemed clear to her that Max had gone to follow the circus. His distant silence during their outing became, in Portia’s mind, a symptom of deep fascination with the midway, the menagerie, and that mysterious tent she had not been allowed to enter. As actual memories faded, they were replaced by dreamlike pictures of Max as a lion tamer, a roustabout, a ringmaster.
Max and the circus were united for good.
And then they both vanished.
Gone
When he finally departed, her father said the same things her aunts and uncles and cousins all had said. “I will come back for you.” “This is not goodbye.” “This is our only chance.” And the last thing, always: “Be brave.” Someone always said that. This time it was Max.
“Don’t tell me that,” Portia whispered, and Max looked suitably ashamed. He should have known better, she thought. He should have given her something of his own to keep.
“It won’t be long,” he said softly. He said it into the air above Portia’s head, like a blessing over her. Like a prayer.
“As long as it takes,” Sophia told Max. “I’m not going anywhere.”
Max made himself believe her. He kissed Portia one more time and climbed into his truck. Portia angrily rubbed her cheek as the motor started, wiping Max’s kiss away, and then immediately regretted it when she saw his pained expression in the rearview mirror as he drove away.
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