by Juliet Bell
It took a second to register that it was not the wail of a person but of a device. An alarm was going off like crazy, at my grandmother’s house.
To me the cabin seemed a nice, safe place to be, and I wasn’t eager to go anywhere else, but Rosie had a plan of her own.
“We’ve got to get out there. I have to find out if my dad is OK.” This thin, tough kid, even if she wasn’t my friend, was brave, too.
By the time we opened the door to peer out, lots was happening. Lights were on everywhere, birds were crying, and there were a hundred dogs barking, not just Lou and Hildy, but every other dog in a two-mile radius, it seemed. It was as if some big, ugly, middle-of-the-night party had just come alive.
“Come on,” Rosie said urgently. Her hand clutched my arm tightly. “Let’s see what’s going on.”
“OK,” I said, like I thought that was a great idea, and off we went.
Outside, the scene was weirdly beautiful. It was like a stage, with these bright outdoor beams I’d never seen before lighting up all the peacocks, the feed bins, the cottonwood trees, and the House of Mud itself. It could have been a postcard picture: Greetings from Albuquerque! It was only the noise, and what it might mean, that made the scene a nightmare. Thieves? Murderers? Pirates?
I heard my grandmother and suddenly panicked that she had been hurt. What if someone had fired a gun at her? “Ella! Ella!” The high, scared voice hardly sounded like hers. “Where are you? ELLA!”
“Here! Grandmother—I’m here.” Rosie and I jogged to the front door, which was ajar. I slipped inside. Rosie let go of my arm and stayed outside.
There was Violet Von Stern in a long white nightgown, her skin like ash, her blue eyes fearful. She stood tall and upright, but her face was droopy and haunted.
At her feet, her dog Hildy (Brunhilda, for long) was yapping away and turning around in mad circles. Someone must have let Lou out of my bedroom, because he came and jumped up on me and gave me a big licky greeting.
“Ella,” my grandmother said weakly, and reached her hands out. It was only the second time she had ever touched me. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine, Grandmother. Are you?”
“What on earth is going on?” A gray-blond man in a purple bathrobe came out of the Haitian Room blinking, his eyes bloodshot. This was Abercrombie, Our Honored Guest. One of the last people I felt like seeing. “Violet, are you all right?” He didn’t ask about me, I noticed.
“Christopher.” My grandmother said his name as if to remind herself who he was. She was pulling herself back together. “There seems to be some sort of disturbance.” A remark for the Department of Understatement, if you asked me.
The telephone rang in the kitchen, and my grandmother went to answer it. “Hello? Yes, this is Violet Von Stern.” On the phone she repeated her remark about the disturbance. “Yes, you had better send someone around immediately. Thank you.” She hung up. The alarm finally stopped.
I heard a scuffle outside. The front door opened again, and in came Miguel, his arm wrapped around Rosie.
“Mrs. V,” he said in a hoarse voice. He looked spooked, too. “Are you all right?”
In his hands he held a rifle.
“Good heavens, Miguel,” my grandmother replied, folding her arms across her nightgown. “Please, let me find a bathrobe. Wait there.” She disappeared to her mysterious chamber. Tiny Hildy stood in the bedroom doorway looking important, guarding her mistress. She growled, which would have been funny under different circumstances. She was about half a foot tall. I tried to catch Miguel’s eye, but he wasn’t looking at me. Neither was Rosie.
“All right.” My grandmother returned in a long golden robe and elegant flats, her hair brushed, lipstick on, even. She looked like a goddess, the kind you’d see on Halloween. “We are all accounted for, at least. Now—Miguel.” She cleared her throat, Ahem. “Why are you holding that gun?”
He snapped the thing in two, as if it were a stick, so it hung broken-looking in his hands. “I saw someone out by the Library …” Miguel’s voice was nervous. “I wasn’t going to hurt them. I was just trying … trying to warn them.”
My grandmother raised her eyebrows. “And?” she asked impatiently. “Did you see who it was? Or what the person was doing?”
He looked uncomfortable. “I’m not sure, Mrs. V. He—or they, there might have been more than one—got away.”
“Maybe someone was trying to get into the Library,” I piped up. “There’s a lot of valuable stuff—I mean, things—in there.”
Miguel gave me a strange look, as if I’d said something I shouldn’t have.
“Kepler’s Dream,” Our Honored Pest said in a hushed, dramatic tone. He was talking about a book—the one that meant more to my grandmother, it sometimes seemed, than me and my dad put together.
“You’re right.” With an air of determination, the GM buttoned up her robe. “We had better take a look.”
“Violet, do you really think that’s wise?” Christopher Abercrombie asked. “Shouldn’t you wait for the police?”
My grandmother dismissed the question with a wave of her jeweled hand. “Be good enough to accompany me there, Miguel, would you?”
“Sure, Mrs. V. Of course.” He stroked Rosie’s hair reassuringly and told her he’d be right back. Hildy trotted off with them, like that tiny animal was going to be a big help if they found a pack of burglars back there.
With just Rosie, Abercombie, Lou and me standing around, things got mighty quiet. And uncomfortable. If Our Guest hadn’t been there, Rosie and I could have talked about what was going on, but as it was we were locked into silence, our eyes on the ground. Every second took an hour.
We heard footsteps outside the front door just as cars started to pull up in the driveway. The police were arriving. Miguel ushered my grandmother in and made a come-here gesture to Rosie, who returned to the fold of his arms. My grandmother looked wide awake now, the General Major again. Her face was pale and fierce, her lipstick a bright, frowning line.
“Well,” she said. “We can’t know everything that might be missing right away, of course, out of the thousands of books in the Library. But one thing is clear.”
She looked around with a stern, distressed expression. I couldn’t tell from the way she was talking to us if we were supposed to be her soldiers, getting ready for battle—or if we were actually the enemy.
“Kepler’s Dream,” my grandmother said, in a voice heavy with upset, “is gone.”
TWO
I HaVe TO BaCKTRaCK a minuTe TO eXPLaIn.
It wasn’t my idea to spend that summer at my grandmother’s house. I hardly even knew my grandmother had a house—made out of mud or anything else. I’d heard that she and my dad didn’t get along, and that she was maybe mean, or crazy, or both, but I had never met the woman before. She was like a made-up character, Cruella de Vil or Darth Vader, someone you’ve heard stories about but don’t believe actually exists.
I should explain something about my family. When some people divorce, the situation is bad but not a complete disaster: people still see each other, or talk on the phone, or meet every now and then at a counselor’s office with the plastic dinosaurs in the sandbox. The kids eventually get stepparents and maybe half siblings, back-and-forth schedules between houses and divided-up vacations. We had a lot of that in Santa Rosa.
But when we Mackenzies do things, we do them all the way. It’s Extreme Divorce, like some kind of reality TV show.
So with my parents, the break happened when I was a tiny baby. I guess one day they just looked up at each other and BOOM! realized they hated each other’s guts—they must have forgotten to notice that when they got married. According to Mom, my dad “was never cut out for having kids,” though there weren’t “kids,” there was just me, Ella. Anyway he ended up far away, like he’d been thrown off a moving train, in Spokane, Washington (say Spo-can, not Spo-cain), where he ran fishing expeditions in the wilderness. Fish seemed to suit him better than pe
ople. Maybe he felt bad about leaving my mom and me behind; then again, maybe he didn’t. He sent the odd card, mailed guesstimate-type presents around Christmas (books for the wrong age group, toys mismatched to my tastes), and every now and then made his way down to California for a visit that involved some combination of bowling, ice cream and a movie, and embarrassed awkwardness all around. My dad wasn’t a bad person—at least I didn’t think so—he just didn’t know how to be a dad. It was like no one ever gave him the manual. You got the feeling when our visits were over that part of him was thinking, Phew! Got that done. Now, where’d my rod and reel go?
So in Santa Rosa it was just Mom and me and Lou living together, happy as clams (who I guess are happy though I don’t know why, when all they have to look forward to is one day being chowder). Or we had been until that winter of my fifth-grade year, when my mom got sick.
She had cancer. Leukemia. Leukemia sounds better than cancer, but as I learned from her doctor, the two words were too close for comfort. Leukemia, Dr. Lanner explained, was a kind of cancer, and it was in my mom’s blood making her very sick. First, sick as in not feeling very well, hard to shake off that lingering cough, better get some tests done; then sick as in, Well, Ella, your mom has leukemia and has to start going to the hospital for chemotherapy treatments, and though they aren’t going to make her feel great, the important thing is they’ll help cure her; and finally, by May or so, sick as in, OK, no kidding, your mom has to stop working at her job, she has to be in the hospital all the time and we need a superhero, or a miracle, fast. Like I said, when we Mackenzies do things, we do them all the way. My mom had Extreme Cancer.
I loved Dr. Lanner, we both did, even when it seemed like we should hate him for giving us such bad news. He was tall and silver haired, with a kind, long face; he looked a little like Lou, actually, who probably has some bloodhound in him. He—Dr. Lanner, I mean, not Lou—nodded with a serious expression, like he was listening to you, but not too serious, like your mother was about to die and he didn’t know how to tell you. He answered all my questions, even ones I realized later were stupid (“Can I catch it from her?”) or that he didn’t really know the answer to (“Is she going to be OK?”). The way he looked at my mother with his bright eyes, I sometimes used to get this fairy-tale story in my mind about them getting married after she got better.
But by that spring, when I was trying to finish up my science fair project—a cardboard construction I called the Consequence Machine where you started by rolling a marble that knocked down a domino and one thing led to another until at the end an Alka-Seltzer tablet fell into a glass of vinegar and there was a cool fizz—my mom’s getting better was beginning to seem far away. On bad days, it seemed impossible. She had already had a boatload of chemotherapy, which turns you pale and bald as you probably know if you know anything about it. That hadn’t done the trick.
So now Dr. Lanner was talking about a transplant operation—“stem cell,” it was called, though what it had to do with stems I couldn’t tell you. The idea was to zap all her old blood out and then pump her full again with better blood.
It sounded like science fiction to me (Wouldn’t she die, in the part where they zapped her old blood? Would she turn into someone else, or an alien?), but this was real life and the only thing that might make her better. For the operation they planned to ship her up to a famous hospital in Seattle, where they’d lock her alone in a sparkly clean, antiseptic chamber for weeks, so no germs or bugs could get at her. “Sounds like Solitary Confinement,” Mom said when he told her. Santa Rosa wasn’t the best place for this—all the pros were in Washington, where they worked in between fishing trips, I guess.
Great plan. Let’s save Amy Mackenzie’s life. Oh, just one little problem.
Me.
Because anywhere other than in old-fashioned books, you can’t actually have eleven-year-old kids living on their own in a boxcar, cooking on a gas stove and having adventures with their dog. I wouldn’t have minded trying that—summer was hot in Santa Rosa, and there was always take-out pizza if I couldn’t find a stove. I had never seen a boxcar myself, though, and wouldn’t necessarily recognize one if I did.
But in today’s world, you have to place the almost-middle-schooler with some kind of house and grown-up. The first person we thought of was someone my mom called my “technical” aunt, her sister Miranda. My aunt and boy cousins lived in Arizona. We didn’t really get along. It was like apples and oranges, or more like otters and elephants: two totally different species. When Mom and I talked it over, she joked, “Well, Ella, I don’t want to say, over my dead body will you go stay with Miranda, because that seems like bad luck.” My mom, as the nurses used to tell me in teary whispers, was famous for keeping her sense of humor throughout her ordeal. That’s how you knew she was still Amy Mackenzie underneath it all. This (expletive deleted) disease might have taken her hair and her nice looks, but it hadn’t taken her personality, in spite of its evil efforts.
(I should explain “expletive deleted.” An expletive is a swearword. I got the phrase from Mom, who used to say it instead of swearing. And she got it from Richard Nixon, who left the presidency in a cloud of shame and cusswords when Mom was a kid. Nixon, I guess, had a pretty dirty mouth—something he had in common with my dad—and when they wrote down what he used to say in meetings, they kept substituting “expletive deleted” for all the bad words. Like an earlier version of bleep!)
When the Miranda solution didn’t work, because they were going to Christian family camp in Florida, we weren’t exactly heartbroken. We were still stuck, though.
The next obvious idea was to stay with Abbie. Abbie had been my best friend since first grade, and the Lunzes were a kind of substitute family when I needed one. They had helped us a lot through that spring, taking Mom to some of her chemo treatments or Lou out on a walk, organizing people to cook meals when Mom was too sick to manage. I went over there for sleepovers and homework afternoons with Abbie in their soft-pillowed den, where we snuck around on the Internet in between bouts of math sheets. I built my Consequence Machine over at their house, with Mr. Lunz giving me tips on construction.
The Lunzes were going to be gone, too, though, seeing grandparents in New York, and after that Abbie had sleepaway camp somewhere scenic. They felt bad, but had done so much already that you couldn’t exactly blame them.
So there was nothing else for it. I had to find my dad. I mean, why have a dad if he couldn’t take care of you in a situation like this? Even if he wasn’t familiar with the contents of the dad manual, wouldn’t it be obvious from plain common sense that this was a point where the guy ought to step up?
I was staying at Auntie Irene’s by then, because Mom was in the hospital full-time. Irene Liu was our next-door neighbor, a super-nice person who seemed to assume from day one that it was her job under the circumstances to help take care of me. Auntie Irene wasn’t a blood relation—in Chinese culture you can call people aunts who aren’t—but we were pretty short in the relations department, as you can tell. Irene would have taken me herself except that she worked eight-to-ten-hour days at the photo shop, and there’s only so much time a kid can spend alone, whistling to a pet canary.
Irene helped me track down my dad. He wasn’t big on e-mail, and leaving voice mail didn’t get us anywhere, so finally Irene had the brilliant idea of contacting the outdoors company he worked for and pretending she was planning a fly-fishing trip for her nephew and had heard Walter Mackenzie was the best guide in the business. That got us a call back quick.
I don’t think Dad was too thrilled when he figured out the trick. Auntie Irene’s face was usually smooth and calm as a pebble, but her thin, pressed lips suggested that she did not think too highly of Walter Mackenzie as she listened to him talk after she explained our request to him. She shook her head and handed me the receiver.
“Belle, old girl! How are you?” came a surprisingly cheerful voice, as if my dad hadn’t understood that I was not having the best
of times. Still, he sounded friendly and was calling me Belle, his nickname for me. My heart went soft. The thing is, you want your dad to like you, even if—well, even if he’s the kind of dad mine happened to be.
“OK,” I said. “You know. Not great.”
“Yeah. Listen, I’m sorry to hear your mother’s not better yet. That’s crappy. But I bet those docs in Seattle will fix her up again. They know what they’re doing up there.”
“Mmm hmm.” I wanted to believe what he was saying. I didn’t want to imagine the other possibility. Me, Momless.
When he didn’t add anything else, though, I finally had to ask. “And do you think, Dad, that while she’s in the hospital …” you could, you know—take care of me?
My voice trailed off, and his became more businesslike. “Yeah, listen, Ella: here’s the thing.” And then he went on to explain that much as he would love to have me come stay with him (Yeah, right, Dad!) the problem was that now in May, and certainly in June, he just wouldn’t be around, hardly, he’d be out guiding fly-fishing trips on the various rivers. He started to go into all this detail about Chinook salmon on the Skykomish and river trout on the Yakima, and he might as well have been speaking Eskimo for all that I was listening by then. The point was, he was saying No.
No!
I wondered what I had done to deserve all this: a sick mom, a flaky dad, a sure-to-be crummy summer. I must have gotten bad karma somehow, by cheating or hurting someone, but I had no memory of such a crime. Was it teasing Emily Holmes in kindergarten for pronouncing my name “Eya,” something I still felt bad about because maybe she couldn’t help it? Or the time I made Sierra Singer cry by saying she couldn’t write for my and Abbie’s second-grade newspaper, the Mackenzie Lunz Tribune?
Still, Auntie Irene must have had hidden persuasive powers. She shooed me out of the room so she could whisper fiercely for a few minutes with my dad, in private, and after that he came back on the line to talk to me, with a whole new plan.