Hello There, Do You Still Know Me?

by Arnold, Laurie B. ;

  Late that night, my friends and I were still in the bungalow with Rosalie Claire and Thomas when the doctor finally called.

  “It’s not malaria,” Rosalie Claire said when she hung up the phone. She closed her eyes and breathed deep. When I asked her what it was, she said the doctor didn’t know. “He thinks it could be some rare disease she picked up in the Amazon jungle. He’s never seen anything like it. He’s asked some tropical disease specialists to help him figure it out. We may not know for a few days. Maybe more. If your grandmother gets any worse, they want to airlift her to the hospital in San José.”

  The hospital?! I hate hospitals. The last time I was in one was when my mom died. That was the last place I wanted Florida to go.

  I remember my mom used to say that things happen for a reason, except I couldn’t see any reason for so many people in my life to leave me behind. My dad disappeared when I was a baby. My mom died. Was it possible that my grandmother could leave me too? My eyes stung hot with tears.

  Rosalie Claire pulled me close.

  “Does the doctor think she could die?” I whispered.

  “He won’t know anything until they figure out what’s going on.” Her eyes were damp as she stroked my shoulder.

  I laid my head on Rosalie Claire’s lap and my tears splashed down my cheek, spilling onto her fanny pack.

  Her fanny pack! It had to have exactly what my grandmother needed to get better.

  “Madison, what do you say we use a little magic?” It was as if Rosalie Claire had read my mind.

  I bolted upright, drying my eyes on the back of my hand.

  “This time let’s go for something more powerful than a wet washcloth, cotton balls, and a bottle of Calamine lotion.” She slid open the zipper of her pouch.

  “Once again, my Rosalie Claire is about to save the day.” Thomas beamed at her from across the room.

  But when she reached into her fanny pack, all she pulled out was her cell phone.

  Her face froze in shock. “What in the world?”

  “Maybe it’s too much to ask of your pack. Curing a rare jungle disease is a tall order,” Thomas said.

  “It shouldn’t matter.” Rosalie Claire looked as confused as I felt.

  “How could it just stop working?” Violet asked.

  Rosalie Claire sighed. “It has been acting up lately. For what it’s worth, I do remember Grandma Daisy saying that everything expires after time. Bodies, milk, even magic. It’s lasted well over thirty years without needing a recharge, but now is a rotten time for it to quit working.”

  “The magic can be recharged?” asked Noah.

  Rosalie Claire nodded.

  “Then let’s do it! What are we waiting for?” Could it be that Florida’s cure was right around the corner?

  Rosalie Claire didn’t look as excited as I did.

  “If only it were that easy. As far as I know, it can only be recharged with a rare piece of Baltic amber that belonged to Grandma Daisy.”

  Grandma Daisy had been dead for nearly five years. What had she done with that stone?

  A familiar feeling rushed over me like a gust of warm wind. I stared at Grandma Daisy’s old leather trunk. The one that gives me the shivers. With a sweep of my hand, our playing cards flew to the floor. There was something in there that we needed. I just knew it. I felt it. My gut told me that maybe, just maybe, it was the magic piece of amber.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Treasures in the Trunk

  I unlatched the rusty clasp and pushed open the lid, its hinges creaking from old age.

  Rosalie Claire let out a heavy sigh. “I looked through it when it first arrived. I can’t say I remember seeing the amber, although maybe I missed it.”

  We gathered around the trunk and peered inside. It was jam-packed with ancient treasures. We discovered raggedy yellowing books on herbal remedies, shape shifting, and black magic. Thomas and Rosalie Claire gathered up all the ones on herbs and began to read, hoping to find a cure for Florida’s mysterious disease.

  My friends and I kept digging.

  Violet found Grandma Daisy’s dusty red leather-bound photo album. The edges of the black construction paper pages were tattered and torn.

  We thumbed through the fragile black-and-white photos. Mostly they were pictures of fifteen-year-old Rosalie Claire, taken the summer she came to live with Grandma Daisy in Truth or Consequences, right after her parents died. Instead of the braids she now wore encircling her head, they were wild and loose, like an explosion of twisty snakes.

  “Nice hairdo.” Violet giggled.

  “My Medusa period.” Rosalie Claire smiled at the memory. “Not my best look.”

  Thomas disagreed and said he thought Rosalie Claire looked as pretty as a rosebud.

  I’d read about Medusa in my book of Greek mythology. Her hair had been turned into a mass of wriggling snakes after she got in trouble for marrying Poseidon, the God of the Sea. She spent the rest of her life being generally nasty and turning people into stone. The total opposite of Rosalie Claire.

  “Madison! Check it out! You were such a cute baby!”

  Huh?

  Noah waved a greeting card in the air. “Your baby announcement!”

  I snatched it from his hand and stared at the photo. My mom and dad beamed from the picture as they held me up to the camera. Written at the bottom were the words:

  ANGELA BROWN AND DANNY MCGEE

  ARE THRILLED TO INTRODUCE THEIR NEW DAUGHTER,

  MADISON.

  My mom must have sent it to Grandma Daisy after I was born.

  “I’ve never seen a picture of my dad before.” I couldn’t take my eyes off the photo. It was a revelation. Mostly I resembled my mom with my stick-straight brown hair and pale freckled skin, but I saw that I had my dad’s broad nose and his bright blue eyes.

  “What happened to him, anyway?” Noah asked.

  “No idea. My mom always said she thought he died, although nobody knows for sure. He just disappeared. Right, Rosalie Claire?”

  “I’m afraid so.” She sighed and her mouth pinched tight.

  “He left when Madison was a baby,” said Violet, who knew me better than almost anyone.

  “Kind of like my mom, except I was seven when she took off,” Noah said. “She sent an e-mail to my dad saying she’d moved to Chicago.”

  I wondered what it would be like to get a note from my dad saying he’d been living in Chicago all along. Weird.

  I could have stared at that photo all night, but we had work to do. We plowed through the rest of the stuff in the trunk. Not far from the bottom we found a heavy cardboard box. We set it on the floor and lifted the lid. Dozens of crystals and colorful rocks glistened under the lamplight.

  “This could be it.” Violet’s eyes gleamed as bright as the crystals.

  One by one, we picked out the stones and examined them until we came across a chunk of amber. It looked like a nugget of hardened golden honey.

  “Score!” Violet lifted it up in victory.

  “Oh my, let’s see!” Rosalie Claire set down the remedies book and Violet handed her the amber.

  “Is it the magic piece?” I asked, realizing that in the blink of an eye my grandmother could be back to normal again.

  Rosalie Claire sighed. “Sorry, it’s not. The one we need has a tiny frog trapped inside. In fact, my grandmother was never quite sure if it was the frog that was magic or the amber. I always thought it was the combination.”

  “Wait a minute,” said Noah. “Since amber was liquid tree sap that hardened, couldn’t we just melt that piece down, press a dead frog into it, and let it harden again?”

  Rosalie Claire shook her head. “If only that would work, Noah. Sadly, there’s no tricking magic.”

  “And where in the heck would we find a magic frog anyway?” Violet asked.

  Violet was right. There were about a bazillion gift shops in Jacó and I was pretty sure not one of them carried ancient dead magic frogs.

  We were just
about to give up hope when we found an old videotape at the bottom of the trunk. On it was a tattered sticker. “Daisy’s Special Remedies,” it said, handwritten in black Sharpie. I felt a tingly rush of hope.

  “Maybe Grandma Daisy says something about curing rare jungle diseases.” I handed the tape to Rosalie Claire. Was this the thing my gut told me I needed to find?

  “This could be the answer to our prayers.” Rosalie Claire kissed the black plastic case. “Now where’s our old tape player?”

  Thomas retrieved it from the top shelf in the hall closet and hooked it up to the TV in the corner of the living room.

  The image on the tape was scratchy from age. Even so, I could still make out the famous Grandma Daisy. I’d always imagined her being surrounded by silver sparkles of fairy dust, but when I saw her in action, I could tell that the sparkles lived right in her eyes, the same way they did in Rosalie Claire’s. My mom used to say you could tell a lot about a person just by looking into their eyes. She said it was a window to their soul. Grandma Daisy’s soul must have been filled with a galaxy’s worth of glittery magic.

  On the tape, she sat at her kitchen table in the house next door to where my grandmother and I still lived in Truth or Consequences. It looked almost the same as when Rosalie Claire had lived there except for one big difference. Thumbtacked on the wall was a calendar, flipped to May 1994. The tape had been recorded nearly twenty years ago.

  For an hour Grandma Daisy talked about remedies. She recommended herbs for fighting the flu, for curing stomach cramps, and getting rid of warts. She suggested magical crystals to treat headaches. She didn’t mention a single word about rare tropical diseases.

  By the end of the tape, my heart felt as if it had been hit with a hammer. I’d been so sure that this was what I was supposed to find. Rosalie Claire must have sensed how I felt. She wrapped her arms around me and we touched forehead-to-forehead.

  “We’ll think of something,” she whispered. “Don’t give up hope, Madison. I can feel in my bones that the universe will deliver something. I just don’t know what it is yet.”

  I wished I felt as sure as she sounded.

  Even though it wasn’t even eight thirty, we were all dog-tired. We told Rosalie Claire we were heading to bed. “Why don’t you kids get some fresh air and take the long way around through the garden? Being outside usually makes things better.”

  I slipped my birth announcement into my pocket. Then I peeked in on Florida. She was muttering something in her sleep about accidentally buying a vicious warthog from a shopping show when she’d meant to order a diamond ring.

  “We’ll figure something out,” I whispered, even though I knew she couldn’t hear me. “I promise.”

  I headed outside into the night with Violet, Noah, and Leroy. A gigantic full moon lit up the garden. Rosalie Claire had been right. It felt good to be outside. It was still warm enough to be in shorts, but a slight breeze cooled my skin. We followed the trail behind the inn, being careful to whisper so we wouldn’t wake the guests as we passed their rooms. Only Riptide and Wingnut’s light was still on. We could hear the beeping sounds of computer games through their open window.

  My brain buzzed a million miles a minute. Why hadn’t we found anything in that trunk when my gut said we would? Did we miss something in the videotape that contained the secret we needed?

  I glanced up at the night sky just as a billowy cloud slid across the moon. Clouds always made me think about my mom. It may sound weird, but there’s part of her that lives up there in those clouds. When things get tough I talk to her and I’m pretty sure she’s listening. I concentrated hard, trying to remember the sound of her voice. A gust of wind swirled around my legs and I almost felt as if she were with me. I spoke to her in my head because I didn’t want my friends to think I was crazy. Mom, I lost you, I thought. I can’t lose Florida, too. Tell me what to do, OK? If only she’d appear by my side and guide me. I watched for a sign as the cloud danced in front of the moonlight.

  That’s when it hit me. Maybe the video was the answer. Maybe, if we got the MegaPix 6000 back, I could teleport into it while the tape was playing, the same way I had into a real TV show. Then I could zap with Rosalie Claire’s fanny pack to the past and ask Grandma Daisy to recharge it.

  And if I went into the past, would I get to see my mom?

  I watched as the cloud evaporated into the night sky.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Miracle Movers

  We settled into our room. Noah laid down on his futon on the floor. I crawled into bed, and after Violet switched off the lamp, she sailed in next to me. She could barely contain herself. “So what you’re saying is, if we had the magic TV, we could travel to the past? How awesome would that be?”

  “That’s what I’m thinking. Except I don’t even know if it works with a videotape. Or how we’d get the TV back.”

  “Can you track down the guy who delivered it the first time?” Noah asked.

  “Mike? I have no clue where he is. Or even where he came from.”

  We whispered in the dark until I heard my friends’ soft breathing and Leroy’s snores. I tried to sleep, but a slew of thoughts ping-ponged through my head. I kept thinking about Florida, my mom, and my baby announcement. I switched on the reading light and stared at the photo. At last I had proof in a picture that my dad had looked happy to be my dad.

  I dug out my drawing book and got to work. I loved to draw. Sometimes I did it to entertain myself. Other times it helped me to make sense of things, and that’s what I did tonight. I sketched my family, hoping it would be a small way to reunite the three of us in pencil and etch the image into my memory.

  I was adding the final shading to my drawing when I heard a curious screech. Leroy barked and leaped off the bed.

  “Lee-roy, shush,” groaned Violet.

  “Yeah, go back to sleep, buddy,” Noah yawned.

  Leroy whined.

  A funny feeling came over me. A tickle in my gut that I couldn’t ignore.

  “Guys, I’ll be right back. I need to check something out,” I whispered.

  “I’m up now. Might as well come with you.” Violet slipped on her flip-flops.

  “Me too.” Noah rubbed his eyes.

  The three of us tiptoed down the breezeway in our PJs, into the darkened lobby. Two headlight beams sliced through the front window, lighting up the room like a soccer field at night.

  When I opened the front door you could have knocked me over with a tropical breeze. The Miracle Movers delivery truck, dents and all, was parked outside. Mike got out, checked his clipboard, and scratched his scruffy red beard.

  “Hello, Squirt! Your MegaPix 6000 has arrived!” Then he winked.

  The magic TV was back!

  Had my mom heard me ask for the MegaPix? It wasn’t the only time she’d helped Mike deliver a little magic. Last summer after he’d picked up the TV from our house in Truth or Consequences, he told me he could sense what my mom wanted by reading her messages in the clouds. OK, maybe that sounds a little bit eerie, but it was definitely awesome.

  “Hey, can you kids give me a hand?” Mike asked. “I’m traveling solo tonight.”

  The three of us helped him haul the enormous flat screen MegaPix 6000 into the lobby of La Posada Encantada. Violet volunteered to get the videotape player.

  “Not so fast, Short Stuff. It won’t do you a bit of good,” Mike told Violet. “We’ve got a slight hitch. The last fellow who used this gadget teleported himself from New York City into a National Geographic documentary. He had a close encounter with a lion who mistook the remote control for dinner. Swallowed it whole. Now the poor man is stuck in Africa, maybe forever.”

  Last year, when I’d first told Rosalie Claire about the MegaPix, she’d warned me about the dangers of magic. At the time, I couldn’t imagine what could possibly be so risky, but after nearly dying in the Amazon and now hearing about this guy stuck in Africa, I understood.

  “So the bottom line, Squirt? We’re
down to zero remotes.”

  OK, here’s the thing. I was kind of responsible for the first missing remote control. When I’d zapped into Stranded in the Amazon, the TV host took it from me. He’d stuffed it into the pocket of his safari jacket. Then he’d hung it on a tree branch. I’d tried to retrieve it, although I wasn’t fast enough. A spider monkey got to the jacket first and hurled it, remote control and all, into the Amazon River.

  Without a remote control, the MegaPix 6000 was useless.

  “So, here’s the deal. Before you can help your grandma, you’re going to have to find that remote you left back in the rainforest.”

  OK, magic or no magic, it was still a little weird that he knew my grandmother needed help.

  “It’s probably at the bottom of the river. Or in the belly of some crocodile,” I said. How in the world would we find it?

  “Wait a minute. If you’re magic, can’t you just, you know, poof us another one?” Violet pretended to wave an invisible magic wand through the air.

  Mike stared at her as if she’d asked him if gravity was something he’d just made up. “It doesn’t work that way. First of all, wands are only in fairy tales. And second of all, you can’t just magic everything out of thin air. It took a lot of engineering along with a little magic to make those remote controls. Oh, speaking of magical engineering, I did bring along this handy-dandy gizmo.”

  He presented us with a shiny black high-tech gadget, about the size of a cellphone.

  “The GammaRay Particle Scanner. GPS for short. Use this baby to track down the remote. If it’s around, the GPS will find it. Even if it’s stuck in the guts of a crocodile.”

  Oh boy, I hoped we weren’t destined for a spine-chilling round of crocodile wrestling.

  “But it was lost in Brazil,” said Noah. “Which is approximately 2,000 miles from here. How do we get there?”

  “You kids’ll figure it out. I have confidence in you.” Mike winked again.

  “Has anyone ever used a videotape with the MegaPix to zap back in time?” I asked.