Emma Moves In

by Clare Hutton

  “And Alison will, too,” her mom added. “She’s always been good at making places seem welcoming.”

  Emma thought of the big, noisy kitchen at Aunt Alison and Uncle Luis’s house, and how things were a little hectic there, with so many people running in and out, but always cheerful. “Yeah,” she agreed. “Their house feels really friendly.”

  Her mom got up and came over to crouch down by where Emma was painting. “Are you having a good time there?” she asked softly, resting her hand on Emma’s back. “I haven’t gotten to spend enough time with you lately. I miss you.”

  Emma’s eyes stung. “I miss you, too,” she said. “I am having a good time at Zoe and Natalia’s. Mostly.” She thought for a moment of telling her mom all about the tension between Natalia and Zoe, but there was something proud and determined in her that made her stop—she wanted to figure this out with them, rather than asking her mom for help.

  Her mom grinned and tangled her fingers in Emma’s hair. “I guess mostly is the best we can hope for,” she said. “What about this friend of Natalia’s whom you don’t like? Do you need to talk about that?”

  “No,” Emma said. “I can handle it.” It would be nice to get along with Caitlin, but Caitlin didn’t really matter to her, not the way Zoe and Natalia did. “It’s weird, though, because Zoe and Natalia don’t hang out at school much. And Natalia wants me to sit with her and eat lunch with her and stuff. So I end up not spending a lot of time with Zoe at school.”

  Her mom frowned. “Are Natalia and Zoe fighting a lot?”

  “No,” Emma said slowly. “They just say they have different friends. But it’s not the way I pictured that going to school with them would be.”

  Emma’s mom gave a little laugh and pulled her fingers out of Emma’s hair, smoothing it down. “Even people who love each other don’t want to spend all their time together,” she said. “Sometimes some space is good. Alison and I were always friends as well as twins, and we had different friends at school, too. And if you want to be with Zoe more, go sit with Zoe. Natalia doesn’t own you.”

  Emma made a face but didn’t say anything. Natalia was always saying “Sit here with me” or pulling Emma down the hall beside her. It would feel weird to get up and leave her to go with Zoe.

  “If there’s one thing I learned growing up as a twin,” her mother said, leaning back, “it’s that even when you love somebody, sometimes you just need to get away from them for a while. I know you worry, but sometimes you have to trust that people will work their own problems out.”

  Emma looked at her paintbrush instead of her mom, carefully focusing on covering the round sides of a carved apple with yellow paint. “Is that true even of you and Dad? Do you have to get away from him sometimes?”

  Her mom flopped back in the grass and stared up at the sky. “Honestly, Emma, at this point it’s the opposite. It’s been so long since I’ve seen your dad, I just really miss him.”

  “I do, too,” Emma said. She and her dad had a regular Sunday morning call before the brunch rush, but it wasn’t the same as seeing him every day. I hope it’s not too long until we can all be together again.

  Painting was much harder work than Emma had expected it to be. Her shoulders ached and the smell of the paint gave her a headache after a while. Leaving her mom still painting, Emma went upstairs to call Amelia back in Seattle.

  “This house is crazy,” Amelia said, as Emma gave her a tour, holding up her phone to show Amelia the old ballroom that they were going to use as an event space, the big kitchen where the professional stove had just been installed, and the secret staircase.

  “Look,” Emma said, opening a little waist-high door in the kitchen and pointing the phone toward it. “It’s a dumbwaiter. It’s like a little elevator for food; you put it in and send it upstairs.”

  “Are you guys going to use it to give the guests breakfast in bed?” Amelia asked. “Because that would be really luxurious. You could just lie there and open a door and, poof, pancakes.”

  “I’m not sure it works anymore,” Emma said. There was a rope to pull near the top of the dumbwaiter, and when Emma hesitantly touched it, it squealed alarmingly.

  “Yikes,” Emma said, yanking her hand back as Amelia laughed. “Sounds like a ghost lives in there!”

  As Amelia told Emma about her sixth-grade homeroom teacher and the new soccer team lineup—another girl on the team had taken Emma’s starting spot, and they’d won their first game—Emma felt as if the place she’d left in Seattle had already been filled before she’d even found her place in Waverly. It had only been a few weeks, but everything had changed.

  “I miss you,” she told Amelia, feeling an ache in her chest.

  There wasn’t a whole lot more to say. Already, Seattle seemed really far away—well, it was far away—and it was almost like Emma didn’t belong there anymore.

  After she hung up, Emma heard the front door opening. She peeked out of the kitchen and saw Zoe and Natalia walking in.

  “Hey!” she said, surprised. “I thought you guys were busy.” She glanced from one to the other, trying to figure out if they were getting along today. They seemed okay: Zoe was smiling and Natalia looked exhausted, her shoulders slumped, but not angry.

  “We’re both done, and we thought we’d see what you were up to,” Zoe said.

  Emma’s mom came in from outside, too, her jeans smeared with yellow paint. “Hello, girls,” she said, then took a closer look at Natalia. “Natalia, are you all right?”

  Natalia moaned dramatically, casting her eyes up to the ceiling. “Never again,” she said. “I am never babysitting again. At least with my own brothers, I can threaten to lock them in their rooms. Those Miller girls are demons.”

  Emma snickered. “What did they do?”

  “What didn’t they do?” Natalia said, staring at Emma with large tragic brown eyes. “They had an orange juice fight in the kitchen. Do you know how sticky and horrible orange juice is when it’s all over everything? And then one of them locked the other one in the guest bedroom. It took me twenty-five minutes to get her out.”

  “Their mother likes Natalia to babysit them because they’re twins,” Zoe said, smirking. “She thinks Natalia understands them.”

  “I do understand them,” Natalia said, glumly. “Remember when we used to switch places all the time to fool people? They do that.”

  Emma’s mom laughed. “I remember that. You drove your mother crazy.”

  “Didn’t you ever do it?” Zoe asked.

  Emma’s mom smiled, remembering. “One year in high school, I took biology twice a day because Alison didn’t like it,” she said, “and Alison took English twice so I wouldn’t have to read The Scarlet Letter, which sounded incredibly boring.”

  “Mom,” Emma said, shocked.

  Emma’s mom blushed. “But you should never do that,” she said quickly to Natalia and Zoe. “I’m sure I missed a lot. I should probably read The Scarlet Letter now to make up for it. Alison liked it.”

  “We couldn’t get away with it anyway,” Natalia said sadly. “Not now that we have different haircuts.”

  Zoe tucked her short hair behind her ears. “I like looking different.”

  Natalia frowned. “Looking the same is the point of being twins.”

  Emma felt her shoulders tense. Why did they have to needle each other like this? Eager to head off a fight, Emma asked her mom, “Can we look in the attic? Maybe we can find some stuff for my room?”

  Upstairs, Zoe stared at the Christmas ornaments and fishing tackle, then behind them at the heaps of boxes and trunks and dusty furniture stretching as far as the girls could see. She looked down at her clean white shirt and pale green shorts. “This is going to be filthy,” she said disapprovingly.

  “You’re such a princess,” Natalia said, and Zoe shrugged.

  “Come on, it’ll be fun,” Emma told them. “Don’t you want to see what’s back here?” Wiggling her way past a dusty fish tank and a pile of beach toy
s, Emma made her way to the part of the attic that was crowded with the older things, stuff that her family had been storing here for years and years.

  There was a pile of books and papers in one box, and she pulled it over near a dirty window to rummage through. Not much: old Christmas cards and yellowed paperbacks that gave off that weird mildewy old book smell.

  Natalia crouched next to her and dug through the box, pulling out a bunch of sewing patterns of ridiculous wide-legged seventies outfits. “Look at these,” she said, and giggled. “Check out the plaid pantsuit. Who thought that was a good look?”

  There was a sketchbook buried halfway down the box, and Emma pulled it out and flipped through it. There was no name on it, or on any of the drawings. The sketches were interesting: There were some detailed pictures of leaves or flowers in pencil, faded so that the pencil lines they were drawn in were hard to make out in places. On other pages there were more detailed scenes sketched out, brushed here and there with paint. One of these was of the bay, and Emma realized that it was the bay the way she saw it from the upstairs windows of this house. The water was touched with blue—watercolor, she thought—and white boats sailed across, clearly scudding under a brisk wind. They reminded her of riding in Uncle Dean’s boat.

  “Hey, Zoe,” she called across the attic to where Zoe was trying to look at furniture without getting her clothes dirty. “Come look at these.”

  It took Zoe a while to pick her way to Emma, but when she looked at the sketchbook, she was absorbed. “These are really nice,” she said, turning the pages carefully. Stopping on a pencil sketch of a shell, she traced her finger over it. “I didn’t know anyone in the family before me drew, or painted.”

  Beside her, Natalia looked up from the sewing patterns. “The way the lines go on that one,” Natalia said, pointing. “It’s like that drawing you did on the beach last year.”

  They set the sketchbook carefully aside to take back with them—maybe Grandma Stephenson would be able to tell them who the artist had been.

  In another box, Zoe found a program made of thick paper and bound with a ribbon. On the front was printed: Put Your Head on My Shoulder, Waverly High School Junior-Senior Prom, 1963. “This must be from Grandma Stephenson’s prom,” she said, carefully lifting a dried corsage out of the box—white roses and green ribbon—that crumbled in her hand.

  Emma realized that she hadn’t seen her cousins like this—absorbed in the same thing—much lately. Why couldn’t they always be like this?

  Under the prom program was a small square suitcase, or some kind of box with a handle, Emma pulled the little suitcase out and wiped the dust off the top with the bottom of her T-shirt before she flipped the latch and opened it.

  Records. The small kind that had only one song on each side. Emma pulled a few out. The Diamonds. The Platters. The Shirelles. A name she knew: Elvis Presley. These were probably Grandma’s, too, from high school. It was funny to imagine her as a teenager, maybe with a high bouffant and wearing her prom dress with white gloves, like Emma had seen in pictures of dances back then.

  “We’ve got to take these to your new room, too,” Natalia said.

  They lugged the records into Emma’s new room. There was still no furniture, but there were paper towels, and Emma grabbed some to wipe off the suitcase and sketchbook. As she worked, she could hear her mom’s voice down in the yard below the open window, with the pauses and rhythms of speech that made it clear she was on the phone. The dust came off in long gray streaks, showing that the suitcase underneath was shiny white and gold. It was satisfying to get it clean, and Emma rubbed harder.

  “No, I don’t understand!” Her mom’s voice rose, and Emma paused, listening. She sounded really upset. Emma looked out the window.

  Her mom was pacing across the lawn a couple of stories below, almost yelling into the phone. “You keep saying you want to come out here, but I don’t see you doing anything about it,” she said. “If you want to stay in Seattle, you should just say so instead of stringing me and Emma along.”

  Emma winced. Her mom was talking to her dad, shouting at him. Did her dad really not want to come to Waverly?

  Natalia was next to her suddenly and reached to close the window. “Don’t listen,” she said. “Parents fight sometimes.”

  Emma shook her head. “Not like this.” Her heart was pounding hard.

  Zoe wrapped an arm around her. “I’m sure they’ll work it out,” she said. “It’s like me and Natalia—we fight but we always make up. Right, Natalia?” Zoe turned to her sister.

  Natalia grinned. “Only if you’re willing to beg for my forgiveness.”

  Zoe rolled her eyes, and Emma felt a little better. She hoped they were right.

  On the way back to Zoe and Natalia’s house, Emma’s mom acted totally normal. As she fiddled with the radio, driving one-handed, Emma watched her out of the corner of her eye. She didn’t look angry or upset, the way she had sounded when Emma overheard her on the phone.

  Should I ask her about Dad?

  What if he really is going to stay in Seattle?

  Emma clutched the old sketchbook in her lap tightly. Her hands were sweating, and her throat was dry with anxiety. “So, did you talk to Dad?” she asked, sounding, at least to herself, too abrupt to be casual. “I saw you on the phone.”

  “Oh, sure,” Her mom looked straight ahead at the road, but her voice was casual. “They’re still looking for a new chef to replace your father.”

  Maybe I’m just being dramatic. Her mom sounded so normal. Emma didn’t know what to think. She rested her forehead against the window and stared out at the passing scenery, feeling sick with tension.

  From the backseat, Zoe reached up and rested her hand on Emma’s shoulder, a warm comfort.

  When they got back to the house, Natalia lugged in the little suitcase of records and flipped it open. “We’ve got to ask Grandma about these,” she said. She pulled out some of the singles in their little paper envelopes, shuffling through them. “Listen to these titles,” she said, snorting with laughter, “ ‘Mickey’s Monkey’? ‘Sugar Shack’? ‘Mashed Potato Time’?”

  “ ‘Mashed Potato Time’?” Emma asked, laughing despite her lingering worries. “Sounds delicious.”

  Grandma Stephenson came in from her bedroom, leaning on her cane. She was limping, Emma noticed, but smiling, too.

  “The Mashed Potato was a dance,” Grandma told them. “We still had dances with steps then.”

  “Like the Twist?” Natalia asked. “I can do that.” She twisted her hips and bent her knees, going down to the floor and coming up again.

  “Very good,” Grandma said. “Now go get the record player out of my room, and we’ll play some of these records.”

  While Natalia was getting the record player, Emma and Zoe showed Grandma the sketchbook.

  “This was my cousin Carolyn’s,” Grandma told them, turning pages. “She was interested in botany. And art, of course. We had a lot of fun together growing up. Maybe that’s where Zoe gets her love of drawing.”

  “Cousin Carolyn?” Emma’s mom asked. “I remember her from those big Christmas parties. Is she still in Colorado?”

  Grandma Stephenson nodded. “She’ll be tickled to hear the girls found this. Oh, look.” She stopped at a pencil drawing of a teenage girl with short curly hair. The girl had freckles and big eyes and her mouth was drawn up in a mischievous smile, as if she had a secret.

  “She looks kind of like you,” Zoe said to Emma. “But her expression is more like Natalia’s.”

  “That’s you, isn’t it, Mom?” Emma’s mom asked Grandma Stephenson.

  Grandma? Now that her mom had said that, Emma saw the high cheekbones and the decided sweep of her nose. It was hard to imagine Grandma so young and freckled, though. But when Emma looked at her, she saw that same smile.

  “Carolyn and I had a lot of fun,” Grandma repeated, shaking her head reminiscently. “Oh, good,” she added as Natalia staggered in with the record player.
“Put that on the table and plug it in.”

  “You know what weighs less than a record player?” Natalia asked, putting down the record player and shaking out her arms. “My cell phone.”

  “These are cool, though,” Zoe said, squinting at the records.

  Grandma put one of the records onto the record player and used her cane to pull herself to her feet. “For the Mashed Potato,” she said, “you put your heels together”—she moved her feet into something like first position for ballet—“then you push them out.” She moved so her toes were pointing at each other. “You do that a couple of times, then you kick your feet up while you do it.” She demonstrated again. Emma’s mom and Natalia hopped to their feet to imitate her, and Emma and Zoe followed.

  Grandma put the record player’s needle on the record and, after a minute of hissing, the music began, a girl’s voice singing, “It’s the latest, it’s the greatest …”

  They all danced. Grandma had her hands held out at her sides and leaned on her cane as she kicked one foot up, then the other, swiveling on the balls of her feet the whole time. Emma’s mom twirled around, then grabbed hold of Emma’s hands and spun her. Zoe and Natalia were face-to-face, mirroring each other’s movements as they swiveled.

  This is nice, Emma thought, looking at them. If I could just get them to remember how much fun they have together, maybe we could all be friends at school, too.

  The door opened and Mateo and Tomás ran in, followed by Abuelita and Aunt Alison carrying grocery bags.

  “Wow, dance party!” Tomás shouted, and Mateo squealed with excitement, but Abuelita’s face crumpled when she saw Grandma dancing.

  “Be careful!” she said worriedly. “What if you fall?”

  The song ended and the record hissed into silence. Grandma stilled and straightened.

  “I’m not an invalid, Rosa,” she said coolly. “I may have trouble on stairs now, but I’m hardly frail.”

  Abuelita stared back at her, her mouth set. “You need rest,” she said. “As a registered nurse, I feel responsible for making sure you get it.”