Ah.
She had started Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events in the spring, but thought them a bit silly. They seemed just about perfect now. She grabbed the ones she hadn’t read yet, books four to eleven, laid them on top of everything else and zipped up the bag.
Done.
She paused in the doorway and thought about the carefully wrapped package she had stuffed under the bed that morning. At least she wouldn’t be needing that! She wasn’t going to have to share Christmas with a baby that wasn’t even born.
She bit her lip hard. Sure, Angie had said her mom was going to be okay, but what if she was wrong? What if her mom was dying? Dying! And here Martha was feeling glad that she didn’t have to hand over a present. Tears washed up the backs of her eyes.
When she came out of the bedroom, Doug was waiting at the bottom of the stairs. She wasn’t thrilled that he had come right into her house without asking, but she didn’t say a word. She just held her body as straight as she could and marched right past him, out the door, down the walk and straight into the backseat of his rumbling, crumbling car.
Back at Doug and Angie’s, Doug carried her small bag and led her upstairs. Chance was up there, standing in the hallway, arms full of stuff—a pillow, a couple of books (must be mostly pictures, Martha thought), a clear plastic bin of pencil crayons—looking up at Angie. “Why can’t she sleep on the pull-out couch? That’s where other guests go.”
Martha was sure that he had seen her coming before he had opened his mouth. He wanted her to hear this. He wanted her to know. He didn’t look at Martha, but she could still see his tight mouth and the flush on his face. Chance was mad. Really mad.
Angie just smiled, put her hands on his shoulders and steered him down the hall. He was moving in with Mark, where there were twin beds, and Martha was to have Chance’s room all to herself. Angie had a bunch of clean sheets under her arm. At least Martha assumed they were clean. They didn’t have that fresh, folded look that clean sheets had at her house. These looked like they had been bundled straight out of the dryer into the linen closet.
“Where’s Louise?” Doug said from the doorway of what must have been Chance’s room.
“Mark’s watching her,” Angie said. She smiled. “At least he promised to. Chance,” she called, for Chance had passed through a door with all that stuff in his arms, “can you go downstairs and help Mark keep an eye on Louise?”
Martha heard a crash from inside the room that Chance had just entered. She imagined pencil crayons skittering across the floor. Chance came into the hall with his chin down and his shoulders up. When he pounded down the stairs, Martha could have sworn the house shook. She wasn’t sure that she would trust Louise to him in that state.
“It’s hard for him to be uprooted,” was all Angie said a few minutes later as she pulled the quilt up over the wrinkly sheets that they had just put on Chance’s bed.
Hard for Chance! He had found the perfect home at last. He was part of a family. They were probably going to adopt him any second. He was about to spend Christmas with them. He should be doing somersaults down the hall, not stomping down the stairs!
But, no. He was too spoiled to let a girl whose mother might die, who was practically an orphan, spend one single night in his house.
Well, she knew the best treatment for that. She was not afraid of a silly little boy. Martha followed Angie downstairs a few minutes later. They went through the dining room, and Martha glanced at the game, abandoned on the table. Would Angie and Doug want them to finish it?
No, they would not be finishing that game. All the pieces were askew. Strewn on purpose, Martha was sure. The television blared some cartoon from across the hall. In a moment of bewilderment, Martha pictured her mother in a hospital bed. She was screaming. No. She was white and still. Martha shoved the awful pictures out of her head.
Desperate, she darted into the kitchen. “Can I help with supper?” she said.
Supper was strange. Apparently it was what these people always ate the night before Christmas, but it didn’t seem very festive to Martha. Some sort of thick, gloppy thing with hunks of meat in it, served with powdery boiled potatoes. Mark gulped his down, chattering away about his afternoon as he ate. Mouth empty. Mouth full. It seemed to make no difference to him. Or to anybody else.
The rest hardly spoke. On Martha’s left, Chance tapped his fork on the edge of his plate, rhythmless and relentless. Martha had heard the expression “attention-seeking behavior.” Well, wasn’t that tapping just a classic (and annoying) example? Mark reached out and snatched at Chance’s hand several times and appealed to his parents once.
“If he needs to tap, let him tap,” Doug said.
“Tap, tap, tap!” Louise shouted, grinning around a mouthful of potatoes.
Martha spent the dinner hour imagining that her body was divided precisely down the middle. Her right side was normal; her left, a perfect sculpture carved in ice. She sat straight, shoulders back, and angled her body toward the dining companions who were worthy of her attention.
She never looked at that boy, not even for one second, even though the tapping made her want to snap her fork in half with her teeth. And he never said one word. Not even one. So she did not have the satisfaction of learning how the chill affected him. Still, she enjoyed the exercise.
Dessert was just ice cream, vanilla or chocolate. If Angie couldn’t bake, couldn’t she at least scan the shelves in the grocery store?
“Time for the movie!” Angie said as she spooned up the last melted bits in her bowl.
“Ohhh, I was going to go online,” Mark said.
“Not on Christmas Eve. That’s family time. And I’ll bet that Chance has never seen It’s a Wonderful Life!”
Martha would have bet all the money in her beaded purse that Mark wanted to say, Let Chance watch it then. But he didn’t. Angie went off to put Louise to bed. Doug started washing the pots while Mark, with only a bit of grumbling, loaded the dishwasher with dishes that Chance carried out to him. Martha did look at Chance then, but he didn’t look back at her. He still seemed stiff and angry, his eyes fixed mostly on the ground. He had a lot of nerve!
Her frozen left side was melting by the minute, and misery was leaking into her bones. She couldn’t stand there waiting patiently and then sit and watch some movie about a wonderful life. She couldn’t!
“I’m going upstairs,” she said, though she was pretty sure only Chance could hear, and he made no sign.
In Chance’s room, Martha unzipped her suitcase to get her nightgown, and there were the Lemony Snicket books right on top. She gathered them up and put them in a stack by the bed. Then she sat down, just for a moment, opened Book the Fourth and scanned the first couple of pages. The Baudelaire orphans looked out the grimy window of the train and gazed at the gloomy blackness of the Finite Forest, wondering if their lives would ever get any better.
Forget a wonderful life. This was more like it! Moments later, dirty clothes in a heap on top of the open suitcase, teeth unbrushed, hair uncombed, she was in that wrinkly bed, burrowing her way into a book for the first time since she had learned that her mother was going to have a baby. Halfway through Book the Fifth, she fell asleep with the light on.
CHAPTER 11
Mom Calls
The banging on her door woke her, and for a moment Martha didn’t know where she was.
“You have to get up!”
Martha had been fast asleep, and she was pretty sure that she had been having a great dream. Goodbye to that. She managed to hold her eyes shut tight for only another moment before the banging came again and the voice. This time the door flew open. That brought her eyes open and her feet onto the floor.
“Hey! You can’t just barge in!”
“I can so. It’s my room.” Chance was positively vibrating. “You have to come right now. We’re not even allowed to touch our stockings till everyone’s down there.” The words were ground out between his teeth and spat bruised and bl
oodied into the room.
If she had been the type, Martha would have been frightened. As it was, she moved away from him along the side of the bed.
Through the open door, Martha saw Mark walk past on his way downstairs. He glanced in at them. “Come on, Chance,” he said.
Then Angie and Doug and Louise were there. All of them. Louise waddled in, her face alight with excitement even though she had no idea what Christmas was all about. Her wet diaper hung down almost to her knees. Martha edged a little farther away.
“Merry Christmas,” Angie and Doug said, together, but not quite. Their faces were alight too, but they were watching her a little bit too carefully. They didn’t seem to be aware of the state their foster son was in.
“Merry Christmas,” she mumbled as she watched them back. Then she got it. Pity. Pity was all mixed in with those smiles. And that pity felt like a big scratchy rock right inside her heart. “All right, all right,” she said. “I’m coming.” And she managed a smile, just to get them all out of the room.
Chance ran past them, and by the sound of it, hardly touched down on the stairs.
Again tears threatened. One even got out and onto her face. It was bad enough having to cope with this weird place, but when she remembered why she was here, she could not bear it. She dug in her suitcase for some clean clothes. She wasn’t going to sit around downstairs in her robe and slippers. She just wasn’t.
Angie’s voice floated up the stairs. “Martha, are you coming?”
The living room looked just like a storybook. The tree was lit up, the floor beneath it heaped with presents, their sloppy wrapping lit invitingly by the multicolored lights. Doug was on his knees laying a fire in the fireplace—a real fire!—and, above his head, six fat, lumpy stockings hung all in row. Angie was handing out hot chocolate. And music was playing. “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing.”
Mark was on the couch distracting Louise, who looked more normal and less smelly in a clean diaper.
Chance, though…Chance was pacing the room when she came in, but he stopped dead when he saw her. Dead. She took a step backward. She hadn’t taken such a long time upstairs. Had she?
Doug leaned back on his heels and held out an arm. “Chance,” he said, “come here.” The voice was calm and insistent, and Chance went. Martha felt him pull his eyes off her, as if they were sticky tape on her skin, maybe sticky tape with tiny knives built in. On his way to Doug, he kicked the corner of the couch. Hard.
“Hey!” Mark said.
Angie handed Martha a mug and ushered her to the couch. Then she went to the far side of the fireplace and began to take down the stockings.
Doug had Chance in the crook of his arm now and was speaking quietly into his ear. When Chance replied, it was not so quiet. “I have to be nice to her at school. On field trips. Trick or treating. Everywhere. And now I have to give her my room. And she’s nasty and stuck-up. She won’t even come downstairs when she’s supposed to.” He stopped for a moment, and when he spoke again, his voice was higher, louder.
“She’s wrecking everything. I don’t want her here. I don’t!”
Doug spoke some more into his ear.
“But it’s Christmas.” Again a pause, longer this time. “My first real one.”
Martha got up from the couch. She felt her body straighten, almost robot-like, and her voice, when it came out was precise, prim. Yes, that was the word. Maybe she had one of those dolls’ mechanical voice boxes in her throat.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t want to ruin anyone’s Christmas.”
Chance had turned again when she started to speak, and there were his eyes again, stabbing into her skin.
“I didn’t ask to come here. I didn’t ask for any of this!” Now she was shouting and crying all together. “It’s Christmas for me too!” Even in her miserable state, she hated the way she lengthened the word too, whining and crying all at once.
Angie put down the stockings and pulled Martha against her. Doug was on his feet. He stood behind Chance, hands on his shoulders.
Martha heard Mark speak under his breath. “Great.
Just great!” he said.
“Christmas is hard for a lot of people,” Angie said. “Martha, you miss your family, and you’re worried about your mom. Chance, this is your first Christmas with us, and you’ve been looking forward to it, and now Martha is here. All right. You’ve both expressed your feelings. We sympathize.”
Martha couldn’t see behind her, but she’d bet Angie gave Mark a look at that point.
“Now we are going to open our stockings together and drink our hot chocolate. Then we are going to have breakfast.”
They seated Chance and Martha on opposite sides of the room. Martha stared at her feet, trying to stop the tears from coming. She had never been so humiliated in all of her life. She jumped when something was laid in her lap. A stocking. She blinked. It was her stocking from home! She looked up, and Doug was smiling at her.
“Your dad told me where it was,” he said. “And I snuck in and found it. They wanted you to have your own stocking on Christmas.”
That brought the tears back. It must have been hanging by the fireplace when she came in. She hadn’t even taken in that six stockings meant one for her, let alone that it was her very own. She unhooked the candy cane from the top.
Strange, though. The stocking was hers. The beautiful needlepoint snowy woodland scene had greeted her on every Christmas morning that she could remember. But the contents seemed wrong. A package wrapped in yellow tissue paper stuck out the top. The paper had been kind of crushed around the gift and encircled with scotch tape to keep it there. Her stocking always contained gifts neatly wrapped in thick embossed or patterned paper.
It took some doing to get that yellow paper off. Inside was a book. Not new. The Secret Garden it was called. She looked inside. For Angie, with love from Auntie Flora it said. Underneath that was a note to her: For Martha, a special book for a special girl, with love from Angie. She flipped farther on: When Mary Lennox was sent to Misselthwaite Manor to live with her uncle, everybody said she was the most disagreeable-looking child ever seen. It was true too. Martha must have gasped out loud, because she heard a laugh from across the room.
“You’re beautiful inside and out, Martha, not disagreeable. But I think that you might like that book. I did when I was your age.” Angie paused. “And I still do. I think it’s almost time for me to read it again!”
Martha managed a small smile and set the book aside. The rest of the stocking was surprising too. And, unlike at her house, nothing but the book was wrapped. First was a small stuffed monkey, its skinny arms wrapped and pinned around a fat marzipan pig. Martha wasn’t sure that she liked marzipan, but she liked the monkey. He had a bright smiling face that pleased her. Next came some sort of puzzle made up of a stack of squares of cardboard with parts of a picture on them that you had to match up to each other. Under that was a box of pencil crayons and a small pad of thick drawing paper. And near the bottom, a bag of licorice and a packet of round syrupy, sandwichy-looking things called stroopwafel. She could feel another lump down there, near the bottom, that was round but not an orange. Martha reached her arm down, way down, and closed her fingers around a smooth sphere. She pulled it out, and the light struck the thin glass instantly, sparkling off the gold-painted pattern: a Christmas ornament. Martha held it up and gazed at it as it spun gently on the end of its golden thread.
Again, Angie was watching her. “You can hang it on the tree here if you like. That way you’ll be able to enjoy it until it’s time to go home. Then you can take it with you.”
Martha shifted her stocking and its contents onto the couch beside her, got up and walked over to the tree. Music flowed over her. The fire crackled. The tree smelled of pine. And she saw the perfect empty spot just at eye level near a yellow light. It took a moment to get the glittery ball to hang so that it could swing without hitting any branches, but she did it and then stood back.
&nb
sp; “It looks perfect,” Doug said.
Martha nodded. Yes. It was perfect!
She turned back to the room and found herself face-to-face with Chance.
She looked into those hurt, angry eyes and, once again, the magic of the morning was gone. She was in a strange place with strange people, one of whom hated her. Hated her! It was Christmas morning. And her life was never, ever going to be the same again.
A silent cry rose from deep inside her. It didn’t come out, but it filled her from the middle, right out to the skin of her front and her back and her scalp and the soles of her feet. Martha wanted her mother—not the sick woman in the hospital with a baby inside her, a baby that had already managed to ruin her life. No. She wanted her proper mother back. The one who made snacks and entertained her friends.
And loved only her and her dad.
She stood in the middle of the room. Helpless. And Chance stood looking at her, hurt and wanting to hurt back. Anyone could see that. He had emptied his stocking. She could see the contents over on the floor where he had been sitting. She looked at him again, and this time she saw what he held in his hands.
“Go on, Chance,” Angie said. “Hang your ornament on the tree too!”
Martha could have told them they shouldn’t give a mere visitor exactly the same thing they gave their foster son on his very first Christmas with them. It seemed like a no-brainer to her.
He kind of bundled his glass ball onto the tree— setting it on a branch instead of hanging it by its thread—and retreated.
Angie scrambled to her feet. “Let me help you,” she said. And she hung the glittery ball so that it twisted and turned and caught the light.
Breakfast followed. A quiet breakfast. Pancakes— nowhere near as good as Dad’s—and sausages and mandarin oranges. Chance gulped his down and left the table. Martha ate hers almost as fast, excused herself and headed back to the living room to collect her stocking, her book and the other things. Chance was sitting on the floor by his stocking, holding a small glass-and-metal butterfly. A strange present for a boy, Martha thought as she stuffed her gifts back into her stocking. Then she remembered the painted lady butterflies from last year’s class. No one had loved those creatures as much as Chance, though he’d been pretty weird about it.
Somebody's Girl (Orca Young Readers) Page 7