A handful of young hoppers were out gathering night crawlers in the rain. “Tad? Is that you?” somebody called.
“It’s me,” he cried. “I’m back! I’m home!”
The news spread quickly, and toads came tumbling out of Toadville-by-Tumbledown, hopping up Cold Bottom Road.
“We thought something had happened to you!” Tad couldn’t tell the voices apart, they came so fast. “We thought we’d never see you again.”
Well, he thought he’d never see them again either. But here he was. Tad felt as if all the joy in the world glowed inside him.
The clamor continued until an old toad came out to greet him officially. “Welcome home, Tad,” he said, his voice deep and hoarse.
Where was Seer? Why didn’t the young hoppers go get him and bring him out?
“What took you so long to get back?” somebody demanded. “Where’s Buuurk?”
“Buuurk was very brave,” Tad said, seeing Anora in the crowd. She was beside Shyly. “He gave his life trying to help me kiss the queen. He was taken up into the Great Cycle. I went on.”
The toads looked at him, their eyes shining in the rain. Someone called, “Buuurk was very brave.” Anora said, “He was a great singer.”
“He was a good friend,” somebody else added.
“He was my best friend.” Tad felt the empty space beside him just as sharply as he felt the jewel of dreams growing behind his eyes.
“But did you kiss the queen?” one of the old toads asked. “Are we saved?”
“Yes,” he said.
Rain dripped from the tree overhead. Otherwise Tumbledown was silent, and Toad wondered if he’d even spoken.
Then the toads broke into shouts. “We’re saved! We’re saved! He kissed the Queen of the Hop!”
“I’d like to talk to Seer,” Tad said when the ruckus had died down.
The silence became as thick as the misty sky. Finally Anora said, “We celebrated his lifting up into the Great Cycle two moonrises ago. We lined the hall with purple phlox. We remembered his prophecies and his wisdom.”
Tad felt as if a big rock had fallen on him.
After a while, a chant began very quietly. “Long live the Seer, long live the Seer.” All of the toads were looking at him.
Chapter 37
IT HAD ONLY BEEN TEN DAYS since she’d seen her grandmother, but Taylor felt as if she’d been gone for months. Her grandmother looked thinner. But her hug was as good as ever.
“We brought you a ton of stuff,” Taylor told her. “Wait till you see.”
All the souvenirs were in a big black canvas tote with reno written in rhinestones. Taylor’s mom put it on the table.
“Now, this is the first thing.” Taylor took out a CD of Ryan and the Rompers. “This is Mom and Dad’s band.” She put it on the table in front of Eve. “And look. They had this up during the whole festival.” She unrolled the poster she had seen the first night of her dad on drums and her mother singing.
Her grandmother smoothed back the curling edges of the poster, then looked at Taylor. Her eyes were pleased. “I think you had fun.”
“Well, yes. But look at what I bought for you. With my own money.”
Her grandmother unwrapped the T-shirt that Taylor had rolled carefully in tissue paper and tied with ribbon.
“Do you like it?” Taylor asked, her fingers crossed.
Eve held the T-shirt against her front and looked down at the toad logo. “I love it! Thank you, Taylor. Did you see John Verdun in the hotel?”
Taylor shook her head.
“I saw him entering the lobby with his entourage one night,” her dad said. “And I heard he dropped another billion or two on his ecology foundation.”
“Put the shirt on,” Taylor urged her grandmother. “We can take some pictures. Then we can add them to the album you gave me before we left.”
“I can’t believe you kept all those old pictures and clippings,” Taylor’s mom said.
Eve smiled. “They were happy times. Most of them.”
Well, of course, it hadn’t been happy when Taylor’s grandfather got killed so young.
“It’s happy music,” Taylor’s dad said. “Come on, Taylor, show Eve your crown and sash. I’ve gotta get going.”
Was she hearing stuff, or had her dad called her Taylor? She was just starting to like Peggy Sue.
She took the sparkly tiara out of her tote and handed it to her grandmother. “It’s kind of big,” she explained. “It slides off my head.”
Her grandmother turned it so the stones caught the morning sunlight. “It will fit better next year.”
“And here’s the sash,” Taylor said, spreading out the wide red satin ribbon that proclaimed her the Queen of the Hop.
“Look, I hate to say this, but I’ve really got to hurry,” her dad said.
“Me too,” her mom added. “Stacks of files will be towering on my desk. What about we take some pictures first, though?”
“Outside. In the garden,” Taylor said. She knew there was no stopping a parent in a hurry. This morning they’d turned on their BlackBerrys, laptops, pagers, beepers, and whiners.
As they went out, Taylor saw the earthmoving machine parked by the old tumbledown shed. She’d glimpsed it in the rain last night. She could still try to save the pond by talking about it on television, but she understood that you couldn’t always make things be the way you wanted them to be.
She said to her grandmother, “Maybe we’ll see my toad. Did you hear us last night when we came to turn him out into the grass? It was after midnight. That was my special present. I’ll tell you all about it later.”
Off the back deck, the billowing white baby’s breath was almost up to Taylor’s waist. “Whoa! That’s gotten big. Let’s take our pictures standing by that.”
So they took pictures of Taylor in her crown and sash standing by the baby’s breath. Taylor in her crown and sash, standing between her parents. Taylor and Eve in their matching toad shirts.
Then Taylor took pictures of her grandmother and her parents. In the last one, Taylor’s mom wore Taylor’s rhinestone crown, and her dad wore the red sash.
“Wait! Don’t go away,” Taylor said, after she snapped it. “We need the hula hoop.”
She ran to the car and got it and hung it around her dad’s neck along with the sash.
“Now, that’s a picture!”
Her mother took off the crown, her dad lost the sash and hula hoop, and they were gone before Taylor could say rock and roll.
And now, finally, Taylor had her grandmother to herself.
They sat down in the grass. Eve hugged her knees, and Taylor copied her grandmother. She leaned against her side. Her grandmother put her arm around Taylor. They still fit like a lock and key.
Down the hill, paddling ducks made Vs on the pond. A cawing crow flew from one mulberry tree to another. Clematis sprawled down the pond bank and grew up on supports. Daylilies caught the sun.
Her grandmother squeezed her. “Tell me every little detail of the trip.”
Taylor did, trying to leave nothing out. All about the toad and the dance contest and Diana, last year’s queen, and Number 11. About Tad and how he was a little odd, but also nice, and really into the environmental thing. “I poured water over my head the last night,” Taylor confessed. “Because he did it. And it was fun.” Later, she might tell her grandmother about the kiss.
Eve smiled.
Taylor gazed over the field. From where she sat now, things looked undisturbed. But down the hill, the woods were all torn up. She’d seen it this morning. It made her heart hurt. But if her grandmother could survive whatever was going to happen, Taylor could too.
That afternoon while her grandmother was napping, Taylor walked down to the pond. She lay on the dock and stared up at the clouds, then turned onto her stomach and stared into the water. A school of little fish, their bodies almost clear, shifted and darted. She and Kia had lain here for hours last summer, waiting for fish to swim into
their nets. This would be the very last summer. Actually, it could be the last day. She shut her eyes, trying to store everything she loved about the pond in her memory.
She opened her eyes when a heron came in for a landing, its body a T-shape as it dropped its long legs. A fish leaped, sending circles across the pond. Taylor bounced the toes of her sandals against the dock, then quit, wanting the world to be totally quiet. She could hear the little waves making their way to shore, then finally that stopped, and all she could hear was her blood moving around inside.
But then a bullfrog began its silly thrumming call, so loud it made her laugh and forget how solemn and sad she had been feeling. Across the pond, another bullfrog spoke. A breeze stirred her bangs. Taylor yawned. She made a cradle with her arms and rested her head against them. She thought of the little toad she had brought home, and of the boy who had made her promise to look for the blue topaz beetles.
As she walked back up the hill to the house, she stopped at the old tumbledown shed, which was full of rotting wood. She pulled back the clematis vine that curled around the old posts. At first she only saw scurrying ants, but then, near a hole where the wood had rotted almost totally away, she caught a flash. It flew, but not before she saw that it was a little beetle, so bright it looked like a piece of pale blue glass.
Chapter 38
IN THE HALL OF YOUNG HOPPERS, a golden light fell through the translucent pebbles. Usually Seer would be settled on his pile of milkweed fluff, telling his dreams, drawing the young hoppers out to be their best, whatever that was. Buuurk had been his best—a toadly brave and strong friend. Tad still felt lopsided without Buuurk.
“So what did you see out there?” one of the young hoppers asked Tad.
Shyly asked, “How far did you go?”
“Mother Earth is much bigger than what we can see from the top of the mulch pile,” Tad told them.
Murmurs of surprise drifted through the toads.
“Did you hop all the way?” someone asked.
“I hopped a lot. And I moved for several sunrises in a roaring stinky thing with a turtle shell on its back. And once I went fast beneath the foot of a small human. I was in many different nests, and some of them moved around.”
“What’s a roaring stinky thing?”
Tad explained the best he could.
The hoppers gazed at him, their eyes full of dazzlement and doubt.
“I sat among the stars,” Tad said, “and looked down on Mother Earth.”
“No,” several toads said.
“And I could see that much of Mother Earth is already covered.”
A tremor went through the hoppers, and some of the younger ones peed.
“Buuurk and I found another toadville too. The toads there were good to us.”
After murmurs of amazement, Shyly said, “So, we’re not alone.”
“Coverings are very close to their toadville,” Tad said.
“Rumbler still has his big stinky feet right by us,” somebody said. “So how do you know we’re saved?”
“Because I kissed the Queen of the Hop,” Tad said. And he could only hope that she would keep her promise.
Chapter 39
AS SOON AS HER GRANDMOTHER WOKE UP, Taylor said, “Please! Run me home for a minute. I need to get something out of my backpack.”
Before Eve could even ask what, Taylor said, “Remember the boy I told you about? Well, we went through this exhibit of creatures that everybody thought had been wiped out forever, but the ones in this display were discovered alive again—just a few of them, so they’re still very endangered.” She sucked in a breath and tried to explain calmly about the blue topaz beetles and how the boy had made her promise to look for them. And she had seen one just a while ago! “The lady at the exhibit gave us a postcard and said if we ever saw one, to contact the place printed on the back.”
She watched her grandmother trying to follow all this.
“And see, if it really is the blue topaz beetle I saw by the old tumbledown shed, then I’ll bet the ecology people will be really interested and will want to come here and check it out, because think how totally special it would be! The lady said it was one of the most endangered beetles in the world.”
When she paused for breath, her grandmother said, “But Taylor, I’ve heard there are more than five thousand different kinds of beetles, or something like that. Some of them must look an awful lot alike. And I’ll bet there are many blue ones.”
Her grandmother was just trying to keep her from being disappointed. “I know. But run me home so I can get the card, okay?”
An hour later, she was back at Eve’s, talking on the telephone to someone who wanted a ton of information. What did the beetle look like? Where did Taylor live? Exactly. In terms of miles and directions. Eve had to help her with that. What was the history of the land? How had it been used? Her grandmother had to help her with that too.
Well, truthfully, she had seen it for less than a minute, but she just knew it was the blue topaz beetle, so she used the postcard a little to help her describe it.
“Hmmmmm,” the person on the phone said. “I think we’d like to send out an entomologist. Just to have a look, you know. The chances are one in a billion. Probably less.”
“Well, you have to hurry,” Taylor said. “The place is going to be turned into a strip mall. Some of the woods have already been knocked down, and there’s a big earthmoving machine parked right by where I saw the beetle. Right by it!”
There was a long silence on the other end, then the voice asked Taylor to hold for a couple of minutes while she checked the availability of an expert.
Taylor felt herself gripping the phone, staring out the window at the tumbledown shed, hoping she was in time. Her grandmother made a cup of coffee, poured Taylor some milk, and got down a bag of cookies.
Finally, the person came back on the line. “We happen to have someone at the university near you. He’s an expert in temperate zone beetles, and he says he can visit the area where you think you might have a sighting. He can be there in two hours. Will you be available to take him to the exact spot?”
“Oh yes!” Taylor said. “In two hours,” she whispered to Eve. “The bug person will be here in two hours.”
She and Eve sat on the deck eating cookies and keeping watch. “If anybody tries to move that machine before he gets here,” Taylor vowed, “I’ll lie down in front of it.”
Her grandmother smiled. “That’s what we did when I was a girl protesting Vietnam,” she said.
Taylor felt like she could hardly breathe. She had almost given up hope, and now that it was back, it filled her to the brim.
“What do you think will happen if there really are blue topaz beetles living in the tumbledown shed?” she asked.
Even Eve acted truly hopeful, though Taylor could tell she was trying not to. “First of all, there will be a lot of publicity. It will get people talking. It will get environmentalists interested in the acreage.”
“Maybe that rich guy’s ecology foundation will buy it,” Taylor said. “Isn’t he the second-richest man in the world? Maybe he’ll buy it to save the beetles.”
“John Verdun.” Her grandmother smiled. “You never know.”
Chapter 40
THE LOAMY TUNNEL had fallen around Tad during the long night of winter and padded him like a brown blanket. But now the earth was stirring. And even three feet down, the old hopper felt it.
Maybe it was footsteps in the garden, or the deep, seepy drip of warm rain. Maybe it was the chorus of spring peepers.
Tad stirred too. With the ancient toady wisdom, he knew the days were getting warm and sunny up top.
Tad woke up half frozen to his center from a long season of sleep. Sluggishly, he scootched upward through the sand and clay and veins of rotting roots. Moisture soaked through his dry, papery skin.
Near the surface, Tad tried a little hop. But it was lopsided and feeble—just a lurch, really, that flopped him half out of his hole.
Using his rear diggers, he scrambled the rest of the way out and sat in the April sun for a while.
He could no longer see the sun, but he could feel it. Tad’s eyes had turned milky over the years, like crystal balls. But although he was blind, he could still see many things.
He sat as still as the clod of earth he might have been mistaken for. A newly awakened young hopper would come along soon and lead him back to Toadville-by-Tumbledown. That was the place he was headed. That was the place he was always headed this time of year.
How many springs had Tad come to life again?
He wasn’t sure and couldn’t say. But many.
He sensed the girl nearby, as he often did. He couldn’t see her anymore, but he knew when she was there. She still warmed him like the sun, tugged him like the moon, and made his heart dance like the stars.
Today, Taylor was picking oxeye daisies by the tumbledown. As she pushed her hair back from the wind, her ruby ring that Eve had given her for her fourteenth birthday caught the sunlight.
“Pretty!” Kia exclaimed, looking at it.
She and Kia were on the committee for the eighth grade end-of-year party, and Taylor was supposed to bring flowers for the refreshment table—which was why she was picking her grandmother’s daisies.
“So who do you think you’ll dance with?” Kia asked, plucking the petals off a daisy and naming two boys she thought were cute.
Taylor shrugged. There was Carter Harris. He was cute, and he’d called her twice already. But even after three years, Taylor still compared all boys to the one who’d helped her look for her toad in Reno. The one who had told her about the blue topaz beetles. The one who had helped her save the pond.
The ecology people had located fourteen blue topaz beetles in the rotting timbers of the old tumbledown shed. It had all been on TV, better than Taylor had hoped—the beautiful beetles, Taylor, and Eve. Several ecologists and entomologists. Mr. Verdun, the second-richest man in the world. Even the owner of the pond and woods. In front of the cameras, he acted like he’d bought the land because it had a few wonderful shiny blue beetles. And he had happily sold it for a ton of money to the Verdun Foundation as a land preserve. He didn’t say a word about the woods he had turned topsy-turvy and the pond he had been planning to drain.
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