by Juliet Bell
His phone friendliness was more strained the second time around, but here is what he told me. My grandmother lived in Albuquerque, which was in New Mexico (I know, Dad, we did state reports in fourth grade, Caitlin Berenson got New Mexico), and although I’d never met her, she was a very—ahem—interesting person, and my dad was sure—or pretty sure—well, he was going to check, anyway—that she would be happy to have me. That she wouldn’t mind having me. That it would be OK, for a while.
He reminded me of one of those ads on TV for some magical drug that is supposed to fix your life, but then under their breath they list all the things that could go wrong if you actually take it.
“Then maybe after the June floats are over, I can come out there for a visit, too. Though, you know, the Old Dragon and I don’t … my mother and I don’t always get along.”
It was sounding better and better.
When I told Mom, I set up the news like this game she and I used to play together over dinner, before she got sick. (That seemed like the olden days now, back before cell phones and electricity, when dinosaurs still roamed the earth.)
We called it the Vacation Game. One of us would start by asking where the other one had gone on vacation, then that person would make up some fabulous tale about going to watch sheep shearing in New Zealand, or eating tasty crepes in Paris, or, like I once said, canoeing down the Amazon in Peru. Mom had had to stage whisper that the Amazon River didn’t actually run through Peru, and so we settled on my having gone to the famous ruins at Machu Picchu instead. Which we then looked up online. I saw pictures of these amazing Inca buildings on top of a grassy, stony mountain in Peru, and learned that the whole place was like an incredibly early astronomy lab, where the Incas watched the movement of the stars and performed special rituals at the equinox. It all sounded very cool and like something out of a Tintin book. You had to go through jungle and rain forest to get there. I wanted to go there someday. For real.
“So,” I said to my mom one day late in May, before I got promoted out of fifth grade. “Guess where I’m going on vacation while you’re in Solitary Confinement?”
My mom was half curious, half out of it. She tried to act peppy, but she looked like someone whose batteries had run low. The light flickering off and back on again.
“I don’t know, honey,” she croaked. She used to say this disease had given her new sympathy for frogs. “Where?”
“My grandma’s house.”
She looked baffled. I think she was about to remind me that my grandma, the one I had known and actually called “Grandma,” was dead, so I added, “Dad’s mom, you know, who lives in Albuquerque.”
“You’re going to stay with Violet Von Stern?” She turned a paler shade of white. I hadn’t realized she could go any paler.
“Yeah,” I said. This was my grandmother, after all. What was she, a serial killer? Why should this be such a shock?
“Does your father know?”
Weird question. “Well, yeah—he was the one who called her. He said it was fine.” (Actually what he said was “Mother promised me she wouldn’t feed you to the birds.” I think he was trying to be funny.)
“Violet Von Stern.” My mother sighed, a heavy sigh with no humor in it at all. The plan seemed to alarm her, which didn’t make me feel any cheerier about it, either. “Well. It will have to be all right.” She was talking more to herself than to me. “Though the last time …” she muttered, and shook her head. “That house … All those peacocks …” I figured the chemo was making her ramble. Sometimes she would just stop making sense. All the chemicals they’d soaked her in—that stuff is bad for your brain.
The week between our deciding I was going to my grandmother’s and my actually going to my grandmother’s was a blur. I don’t know how much astronomy you know, but from what I’ve read, when you get pulled closer to a black hole, time speeds up. That was what it felt like. For Mom, the black hole was the hospital room in Seattle; for me, the black hole was the house of Violet Von Stern. If I could have stopped time altogether and never had to go to my grandmother’s at all, I would have.
Of course then I would have been trapped in fifth grade for the rest of my life, and I was just as glad to be done with that. After the ceremony for our “promotion” (l always thought that was a weird word, as if we were workers being told we’d done a good job and were going to move up in the world) everyone said good-bye, comparing all the different camps they were going to that summer: wilderness camp, soccer camp, music camp. I felt like saying, Guess what! I get to go to Broken Family Camp! but I wasn’t sure anyone would get the joke. Our teacher Ms. Nelson gave me a special good-bye hug and told me I was a “brave, good girl,” which made me feel like Lassie or a Saint Bernard. I had gotten a lot of sad, kind smiles from teachers at my school that spring because of Mom’s cancer. I never knew what to do about it except smile back. I tried to look brave and good, though I didn’t feel much like either.
The Lunzes gave me two great gifts before I left. From Mrs. Lunz, a pair of fancy cowboy boots. “It’s horse country out there, you know, Ella,” she told me. “You’ve got to be equipped.” (I didn’t know—Caitlin Berenson hadn’t covered that.) And from Abbie, the best gift of all: she had the genius idea that I should take Lou along for the trip. “He’ll be like your mascot,” she said. This seemed completely inspired but also completely impossible, so when the word came back from my dad that my grandmother said it would be fine, I was amazed. “Mother likes animals,” he said in his message.
It was the first positive thing anyone had mentioned about my grandmother.
Saying good-bye to Mom in the hospital that June is something I can still hardly think about. The scene is like the sun, in my memory—something you can’t look at directly without going blind. I know I cried and she did too, though we were both trying to be brave and good. I hugged her as tightly as I could without suffocating her.
She explained how she was getting through this trip to Seattle and the transplant and everything by pretending she was going on a kind of special mission.
“This may sound a little crazy, El,” she told me, “but I’m imagining I’m like an astronaut. I’ll be in my airtight shuttle for a month and a half, going to some distant moon, where I’ll pick up the cure for my leukemia. It’s going to be tough and lonely, but when I get back, you know, the cancer will be gone, and life can go back to normal.”
I nodded. The astronaut idea did seem a little crazy, but I liked the sound of going back to normal, after.
“Remember when you were little”—she touched my arm, and her touch was featherlight—“and we read all those books about the men who walked on the moon?”
I remembered. I was obsessed with the moon walk when I was in first grade or so. We studied space and the planets at school, and I decided I was going to work for NASA when I grew up. The Eagle has landed! I loved Mom telling me how she watched the moon landing when she was a tiny kid. It was one of her earliest memories.
“The super-famous guys were Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin,” Mom said. “But there was also Michael Collins. He was the one circling all by himself in outer space when Armstrong and Aldrin landed on the moon, in the Eagle. I always liked Michael Collins. Not everyone knows his name, but they couldn’t have completed the mission without him.”
She paused. “Anyway, I’m sure he got scared. There were a thousand things that could have gone wrong for them: Armstrong and Aldrin could crash, the ship could run out of oxygen … Any of a million elements might have malfunctioned and they would all have died.” She looked at me. “I’m sure Michael Collins got lonely. And missed his kids. They had to sit and watch the rocket lift off from Cape Canaveral just like everyone else, knowing their dad was in there and hoping that the astronauts would come back OK.” My mom gave a watery smile, like she had finally gotten to the point. “And of course they did. The mission was a huge success.”
“And they got to have a ticker-tape parade afterward,” I added. I al
ways liked those pictures of everyone waving from the car, with the confetti raining down.
“They did,” Mom agreed. “They deserved it.”
Then she promised that when the worst part of her treatment was over, I could come out to visit her. Looking forward to that day would help keep her going through the really tough part of the treatment. But for now, she had to buckle herself in and go.
“Now, Ella, sweetie, one more thing.” She looked worn out, though. “I want you to do something for me while we’re apart from each other.”
I couldn’t think about this too closely, the idea of not seeing her for almost two months. Not to mention the idea that she might never get out of Solitary. Ever.
“I’d like you to write to me,” she said.
“Oh. You mean e-mails?” I nodded. “Sure. And I can send pictures, too. Auntie Irene got me a cool new cell phone—”
“No, Ellerby.” This was my nickname when I was a little kid. She hadn’t used it in a long time. “That’s nice about the phone. But I’m talking about letters. Real letters.”
“Letters?” I said weakly, like I didn’t even know what she meant. Maybe I didn’t deserve to get promoted out of fifth grade after all. “About—about what?”
“Anything. What happens to you—who you meet, what you see. Even”—she raised her hairless eyebrows—“about Violet Von Stern. Whatever you discover in her crazy house: buried treasure, dead bodies. Just write it all down, and let me know.”
“Buried treasure?” That sounded better to me than dead bodies.
“It’s possible.” She winked. On purpose, I was pretty sure, though again with the chemo you couldn’t always tell. “You don’t have to do many, just even once a week would be enough. But I’ll be counting on your letters to entertain me while I’m locked up.”
The project sounded suspiciously like homework. But what was I going to do—refuse?
“OK, Mom,” I told her. “I’ll write you letters. I promise.”
“That’s my girl,” she said, with that warm pride she used to have when I finished my book report, or scored a goal, or sent someone a thank-you note without her having to remind me a hundred times. It was the voice that told me I had done something good.
So, I don’t know if you’ve ever been a kid flying alone. On the one hand, it’s cool, because you’re treated like royalty, with a special escort taking you to the front of the line and then onto the plane first, where you’re handed over to some shiny flight attendant who greets you with a big, toothy smile.
On the other hand, you feel like an orphan.
I stared out the window while all the normal people got on board, and chewed my gum so hard my jaw ached. I sat and watched those guys out waving their orange wands around, trying to get the airplanes to sit, stay, or come, like instructors at obedience class.
To pass the time I fooled around with my phone. I squinted when I saw how hideous my short hair was in the graduation pictures with Abbie and me. Then there were a few of Mom in the hospital wearing this knitted cap someone had given her to keep her bare head warm. It might have made a nice tea cozy, but on her head it made her look like one of those people who stands in the shopping plaza handing out pamphlets about God.
“Sweetie, it’s time to turn that off now.” A Sunny Skies flight attendant with a badge that said KRISTY suddenly hovered over me. Her voice was kind, though—she didn’t sound saccharine-fake, like they sometimes do. “Is this your first time flying alone?”
I nodded. I didn’t want to be a baby about it. It’s just that my mom has cancer! I felt like saying, but it seemed inappropriate.
“Well, it should be a smooth flight. And if you need anything at all, you just let me know. Who’s meeting you at the other end?”
Some guy I’ve never met before in my life, who supposedly knows my dad. Miguel Aguilar was, according to my dad, a good guy who worked for my grandmother and had a daughter “around my age.” Given how spacey Dad was on specifics, though, I figured the kid could be anywhere from five to fifteen.
“I’m going to visit my grandmother,” I told Kristy, to keep it simple.
“Oh, how nice!” Her face brightened. “I’m sure she’ll be glad to see you.”
Actually I think she was pretty much forced into the arrangement. We both were.
“Listen, I’ve got to do the safety announcement now,” Kristy whispered, putting a hand on my shoulder. “But later, I’ll check in to see how you’re doing.”
So she went through the famous mime about the sudden loss of cabin pressure and oxygen in the ceiling, the life vest that would save you and the small tube to blow in if you started to deflate. I wanted to steal one to take with me to Violet Von Stern’s.
The sunny skies themselves were fine, though, once we were flying around in them. I put my headset on so my iPod could wash any thoughts out of my brain, drank a cola, normally against the law in our house, and had a few handfuls of salty peanuts. Kristy kept her word and checked in on me a few times. I always gave her a peanutty smile, like it was no big deal, what was I, a fifth-grader still? No, I was not, soon I’d be in middle school and flying by myself was a breeze.
When I came out, there was a tall man in a blue shirt and cream-colored cowboy hat standing near the gate barrier, with a tag on that said MEETING ELLA MACKENZIE. He had kind eyes and walnut skin, and when he introduced himself as Miguel Aguilar, I knew right away that he was a good guy. My dad had been right about that, at least.
“I know you have a travel buddy for us to find, too,” Miguel said as we walked through the airport, which in New Mexico they call a Sunport. So we went to the baggage claim area, where eventually Lou was led out on a leash by some handler and we had a movie-like reunion, with him jumping up and licking me all over.
The whole day kept unspooling like a movie. Outside, the air was hot and bright like the desert, and there was a pink-colored range of mountains in the distance. When Miguel saw me looking at them, he smiled and said, “Say hello to the Sandias,” as if he were a host and those mountains were part of his family. By then I was climbing up into a huge red pickup truck with Lou and feeling like this was the only way to travel. I half hoped that we would never have to get to my grandmother’s house at all.
“You look like Mrs. Von Stern,” Miguel said, glancing sideways at me as we started jouncing away in the truck. “Do people say that to you a lot?”
“Not so much.” My mom used to tell me every now and then that I looked like my dad—but in a tone that made it clear that it would have been better if I didn’t.
So then Miguel asked how Dad was doing, and I gave my standard Dad speech about his fishing trips. Miguel asked about my mom, too, and I gave my standard Mom speech about cancer. And just when I was pretty much all speeched out, we rattled off the highway at an unpromising exit, passing some gray buildings behind high barbed-wire fences with signs that said WARNING: ELECTRIFIED FENCE. KEEP OUT. I saw a sign on the fence that said Juvenile Correctional Facility.
“So,” Miguel asked me, like these surroundings were perfectly normal. “How long’s it been since you’ve seen your grandmother?”
“Never,” I answered. “I’ve never met my grandmother before.”
“Really?” He frowned, and shook his head slightly.
I wondered if maybe Miguel didn’t know quite what a weird family we were, all far apart and not talking to each other, but before I could think more about that, the truck suddenly took a sharp turn off a nothing-in-particular stretch of road into a hidden dusty drive. You’d never know there was a driveway at all—there were no other houses on the street we’d left, just weird industrial buildings and that big ugly fenced area.
The truck shuddered to a stop on the gravel, under a high canopy of trees. Around us were tangles of bushes and a scurry of creatures running here and there, followed by a huge thump overhead. I jumped. Lou barked. Suddenly it seemed like we were on safari and some lion or an antelope had just landed on top of the truck.<
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“Don’t worry, that’s just a peacock,” Miguel said with a laugh. I saw a blur of brilliant color by my window. “There are a lot of them around. You’ll get used to ’em. They don’t hurt anyone, they just make a lot of noise.”
I looked through the window and saw that we were surrounded by birds. Dozens and dozens of them, with their beautiful blue necks and topknots and green, fanning tails—and the less fancy brown ones, who were the girls, of course. Lou and I stared. I had never seen so many peacocks in my life.
“How many are there?” I asked.
Miguel shrugged. “Nobody really knows. Eighty? A hundred? It’s not like they’ll line up so anyone can count ’em.”
Gradually I got that animal feeling that there were eyes watching us, too. At a short distance from the truck, waiting in the turquoise-painted doorway of a low, dirt-colored building, stood a tall, white-haired figure in an emerald-green dress. She was holding something in her arms, I couldn’t see what.
I felt glued to my seat. At that moment I never wanted to leave this truck, ever.
Miguel took off his sunglasses so I could see his eyes. “Come on, Ella,” he said gently. “Come say hi to your grandmother. She’s excited to have you here for a visit.” He looked back toward the lady and gave her a reassuring wave. “But,” he added in a low voice, “you might not be able to tell that right at first.”
I swallowed and hopped out, and got ready to meet Mrs. Violet Von Stern.
THREE
MY GranDmOTHer STOOD VerY STraIGHT. SHe Was TaLLer than I had imagined, with jewels around her ears and neck so bright, she glittered. Her eyes were as blue as the necks of the peacocks, her mouth a lipsticked red. She had the air of a queen. She was smiling, sort of, as she watched me approach.
She looked exactly like my dad—if Dad were an old lady with white hair and an emerald-colored dress. It was eerie. She was more Dad than dragon.
“Hello, Ella,” she said from the doorway.