by N. E. Bode
Now here they were all under one roof: Mary, the Bone, Howard, the Drudgers and Fern—although Fern felt deeply that someone was missing.
Howard asked, “Can I pick up the magnets? I hate to see them all over the floor like that.” Actually, Fern loved seeing them all over the floor like that. Mess! It felt good.
The Bone sighed, frustrated, as if Howard had said something that belonged to a long, wearisome battle.
“Yes,” Mr. and Mrs. Drudger said to Howard. “Surely. Pick them up! That would be lovely.” And they both looked at Howard with such love and affection that Fern thought poor Howard would melt.
4
THE PHOTOGRAPH
HOWARD AND FERN WERE SENT TO FERN’S BEDROOM so the adults could discuss the situation. Fern glanced over her shoulder as she climbed the stairs: Mary Curtain was still wearing her brightly flowered rain cap, still dripping. Wringing her pudgy hands, she looked anxious, but the Bone was calm. He smiled at Fern and gave her a wink that seemed to mean everything was going to be all right. Fern winked back at him. It was a reflex. She was surprised she’d done it, actually, and couldn’t understand why she had. She’d never winked at anyone before. She ran up the rest of the stairs.
She didn’t know what was going to happen. Was she not a Drudger after all? She’d never truly felt like one, not really. She’d always felt more comfortable calling her parents Mr. and Mrs. Drudger, and stumbled over the words “Mom” and “Dad.” She’d tried “Mommy,” “Ma,” “Mammy,” “Pop,” “Pa,” “Pappy,” “Daddy.” But none had ever felt right in her mouth. Had there really been a mix-up? Would she leave with Mary Curtain and the Bone? Would Howard stay here? Would he take over her room?
Fern had decorated her bedroom herself. She was only allowed to open her door quickly when going in or out so that Mr. and Mrs. Drudger didn’t have to be exposed to what was inside. The room was small and felt even smaller because the walls were painted a deep purple, and it was crammed with stuff. Books, mostly. Old second-hand books with that old second-hand-book smell. And keys, for another thing. Fern loved keys—roller skate keys, diary keys, house keys, old car keys, bike lock keys, a skeleton key she’d found on the street. She hung them all from small strings attached to the ceiling.
The room was lit only by a streetlight outside the window. One wall fluttered when the door closed behind Howard. It startled him.
“Butterflies and moths,” Fern told him. “I only collect the ones I find already dead and pin them up on the wall.”
“Very nice,” Howard said a little nervously.
“I’m not allowed to have anything in here that’s alive. But I’ve got lichen growing in my closet. Don’t tell.”
“I won’t.”
There was also a dented umbrella in her closet, the black umbrella that had once been carried by a nun who was also a tree and a lamppost, but she didn’t mention this.
In addition to the keys hanging from the ceiling, there were flashlights dangling here and there, too. Fern switched on a few. The lights swayed, and so did the room’s shadows. Fern sat down cross-legged on the floor. Howard stood for a while and then, cautiously, sat down across from her with his knees pulled up to his chest. Now Fern could see the scar on his knee quite clearly. There were a few jagged streaks and a general redness. She didn’t bring it up because she knew how she felt when people pointed out her googly eyes and her unruly hair. Even when they said something nice—“Oh, she’s got the most beautiful peepers, and the curliness!”—Fern was sure they’d just caught themselves staring and were trying to cover it up with a compliment.
“So,” Howard asked, “who’s coming after the Drudgers?”
Fern envisioned a lineup of people. “What do you mean?”
“You know, their enemies. Who’s the arch enemy coming after them? Who do I have to look out for?”
“No one. I don’t think they have any enemies,” Fern said.
“Really?”
“They don’t like conflict. They don’t like anything that’s too much. They don’t like too-muchedness.”
“Well, then, what do they want? You know, what are they trying to get?” Howard asked.
“I don’t think they want too much. Sometimes they get a bonus from Beige & Beige after tax season.”
“That isn’t much to want.”
“They aren’t wanters,” Fern told him.
“Do you know what I like most?”
“What?”
“This.” He held out his arm.
“What? You like your arm?”
“My wristwatch!” he said.
Now she saw it hanging loosely around his skinny wrist.
“The Bone doesn’t like time. He says it plays tricks on him. But some plans really rely on good timing. I’ve taught the Bone that much. He finally got me the watch. I wanted an ironing board and spray starch too, but he said no to that.”
“I have three ironing boards and six cans of spray starch and I never wanted any of them!”
“Well, there you have it. That’s the whole thing, isn’t it?”
“What whole thing?” Fern asked.
“You’re the Bone’s kid and I’m the Drudgers’.”
“Do you really think so?” Fern still wasn’t convinced.
“Of course!”
“Here.” Howard stood up and pulled a wallet out of his back pocket. It was a plain brown wallet, exactly the same as Mr. Drudger’s. He handed Fern a small rectangular piece of paper, a photograph. “See what I mean?”
The photograph was of a woman with long brown hair. She was pregnant, her hands cupped under an enormous belly. Her long arms were skinny. She was smiling with her head tucked to her chest. The most startling thing about the woman, however, was her giant, lamplike eyes. “She looks like me,” Fern said, and as she did, she felt a tingle sweep through her body.
“No,” Howard told her. “You look like her. That’s your mother: Eliza Bone.”
“It is?” Fern was incredulous. “You think so?”
“Certainly.”
The woman looked beautiful to Fern. Her long arms were supporting her round stomach and the baby inside…could it have been Fern? It must have been. She thought back to the words once written on the scraps of paper that had been snow: Things aren’t always what they seem, are they? She stared into the photograph. This was her mother! Her true mother! She’d found her, and this, maybe, was the thing Fern had written about in her diary, the thing Fern had been waiting for—the world turning inside out. “But where, where…”
Howard paused. He pressed his hands together and then he sighed. It was obvious he had something to say but didn’t quite know how to put it. “She died,” Howard said. “She died giving birth. Don’t mention it to the Bone. He doesn’t handle talking about it well.”
And so it was gone, this hope that had risen up in Fern. It was gone as quickly as it had filled her. She still gripped the photograph, gazing at her mother’s soft face.
There was a knock at the door. Mr. Drudger’s voice: “Kids? You can come on down now.”
“Keep the picture,” Howard said. “I’ll miss it. I got used to looking at her, but I’ve got the picture memorized.”
Howard started for the door. He put his hand on the knob and then turned back to Fern. He whispered quickly, “Oh, and watch out for the Miser.”
“The Miser?”
“Kids!” Mr. Drudger was calling from downstairs now.
Howard nodded. “The Miser.”
And they left the room.
5
THE SCAR
“SO, YOU SEE,” THE BONE WAS SAYING, “IF WE WANT to avoid any further drama, I think this is the best course of action.” He was pacing now, hands in his pockets, face stern. His hair was slicked back. Fern wondered when he’d done that. And was he now wearing a tie? How could she have missed a yellow-striped tie? Had he run to the bathroom to put on a tie? Had one just miraculously appeared on his neck? He was talking in a low baritone. Occasio
nally he would gesture—a firm chop here, a finger point there. Mr. and Mrs. Drudger were enthralled. They sat huddled together on the settee. “Lawyers would only further tangle the arrangement. Mary Curtain is the prime witness.” Mary glanced around startled, her mouth a wrinkly O. “You’ve heard her testimony, seen the documentation”—there was a stack of papers on the coffee table—“and, most importantly, you’ve seen the evidence.” Howard stepped forward, perfectly on cue. “Feel free to look him over.”
Mr. and Mrs. Drudger stared at him. They smiled in a buttery kind of way that made Fern roll her eyes. They looked Howard up and down. Then the scar caught their eyes. “What’s that?” Mrs. Drudger asked.
“That’s the scar that led us to the knowledge that Howard, here, didn’t have the blood type of either me or my wife.” The Bone’s mouth crumpled a little around the word “wife.” His eyes glistened. He wiped his nose.
“I told him I didn’t want to learn circus tricks,” Howard said. “I wanted to go to math camp.” Fern groaned inwardly. “I knew I couldn’t ride that unicycle. I told you I couldn’t.”
The Bone explained, “The circus is a fine, longstanding Bone tradition. My mother, God rest her soul, was a trapeze artist.” He turned back to Howard. “I thought you were a Bone. I thought you’d take to it like a fish to water. How could I have known you come from…from…” Pasty heritage! Fern wanted to yell out. From bland descendants! From a long line of dullards! The Drudgers looked at the Bone, waiting. He cleared his throat and swept his hair back with a soft stroke. “From such perfected stock,” he finished, diplomatically.
Mary Curtain spoke up. “Mr. Bone thought that Howard might need a blood transfusion. He didn’t. But Mr. Bone is sensitive about people losing blood, because of his…”—she paused—“previous loss.”
Fern was still holding the picture of her mother. Her eyes filled up with tears, but she didn’t want to cry. She wiped them away, hoping no one would notice. But the Bone did. He looked into her eyes. He wilted a little—then snapped to, clapped his hands. “Well, well then. Summer. We’ll trade for the summer. See how it goes. No lawyers. This way we can avoid any more…”
“Drama,” the Drudgers said in unison.
“Good. It’s settled,” said the Bone.
Mary Curtain lifted herself from the sofa. “I feel that something’s been put right. I can’t tell you how relieved I am about this. Although I still feel horrible.” She busted another gasket and tears spilled down her cheeks. By now, though, everyone had seen enough and ignored her.
Howard was sent to get his bags from the car, and Fern ran to her room to pack enough for the summer. She was nervous, excited. She packed quickly, not bothering to fold anything. She crammed a few of her favorite books in a zippered side compartment of her suitcase and shoved a few new barrettes into her pocket. She took her diary from under her pillow. Fern wouldn’t go anywhere without that. She pulled a key with its string from the ceiling, unlocked the diary and slipped the photograph of her mother into its pages. She then snipped the string with a pair of scissors from her desk and turned the key on the string into a necklace. She said to herself, “I’m not a Drudger. I’m a Bone. Magnets and fliers aren’t in my blood, neither are lawn treatments or ironing boards. I’m a Bone. My mother had big eyes, and my father’s got lumpy hair.” She was trying it on, seeing if she could believe it. She almost could. She smiled broadly and then she thought, My mother is dead. And the smile slipped from her mouth. She tucked the diary into her bag and, at the last minute, grabbed the slightly crumpled umbrella from her closet, the umbrella that had belonged to the nun, or was it the lamppost?
By the time she ran downstairs, Howard was in the kitchen already eating from a white dinner plate. Mr. Drudger was staring at the boy from across the table. “He’s got my skin. He’s got my head. He’s got your thin neck, dear.”
Mrs. Drudger broke away for a moment to hand Fern a few pieces of butterless toast wrapped in a white paper towel and an envelope containing crisp bills perfectly arranged in ascending order. “Good luck, Fern.”
Fern felt a nervous speech revving up in her mind, something of the You might be thinking…variety. But then there was a warm hand on the top of her head, the Bone, and a soft pat on the arm, Mary Curtain.
Suddenly she felt completely calm. “Thanks, Mrs. Drudger. Thanks for everything. And good luck with Howard.”
“Howard,” Mrs. Drudger said dreamily, “our Howard.”
PART 2
THINGS AREN’T ALWAYS WHAT THEY SEEM
1
THE ART OF BEING ANYBODY
THE BONE ’S CAR WAS OLD, RUSTED OUT. IT growled cancerously. It pitched thick balls of gray smoke out of its tailpipe. The Bone seemed to be volleying more than steering. He’d turn the wheel, and eventually the car would decide to go in that general direction. Every once in a while one of the wipers would bump along the windshield, stall, then bump back again. One of the backseat doors was tied shut with rope that was attached to the driver’s headrest. The ceiling lining, which had been originally set at some distant and probably now-abandoned factory, had come unglued and hung like the stretched-out underbelly of an ominous cloud; Fern’s mind fluttered momentarily back to the man from the census bureau with the misty gray hand.
Fern was nervous again, and the Bone’s driving didn’t help any. Mr. and Mrs. Drudger, though not known for their eye-hand coordination, were flawless drivers. They always kept both hands firmly on the wheel, never went over the speed limit or below it. They always used their blinkers. They never cursed and were never cursed at. Fern had been in the car with the Bone for only a few seconds and he’d already had someone blow a horn at him—for good reason, as he’d dipped into another lane for a second—and, though he was clearly in the wrong, he’d blown his horn back. Fern, however, doubted the other car had heard the horn. It sounded like a wounded goose, a very old wounded goose. (I now drive such a car as this, more or less, and I hope one day I can sell this book and become wealthy enough to sell the car, or its handful of working parts, so that I can look back on these days with a deep fondness and nostalgia that can only really take hold when you’re poolside, sipping something fruity.)
“You did a good job, Mary,” the Bone said. “The tears were very nice. You overdid a bit, just a little.”
“I did?” She was rubbing makeup off her cheeks with a hankie, looking into a broken vanity mirror that was attached by duct tape to the car’s visor.
Fern was confused. Mary had overdone what? Why was she taking off her makeup?
“Just at the end there. It was too much.” The Bone, behind the wheel, shook out his hair so that it fluffed up more on top.
“What was too much?” Fern asked timidly.
“Well, you were very compelling,” Mary told the Bone, ignoring Fern. “Honestly, I was a little scared of you.”
“You were?” The Bone was grinning, full of himself.
“Yes. And where did that tie come from?” Mary asked.
“Oh, it just popped into place. Inspiration, I guess!” the Bone said, clearly impressed with himself.
“What do you mean, inspiration?” Fern asked, a little louder this time.
But again the two up front chattered on. “Well, Howard is always reliable. He’s like clockwork. He’s dependable. A good kid, in the end.” Mary and the Bone seemed very happy, all charged up. They’d succeeded, that was clear. Fern wasn’t sure, though, if she wanted them to have succeeded. Were they fakes? Had they succeeded in fooling the Drudgers? Her? Fern’s heart started to tighten with fear. No, she told herself, they were nice. Howard, too. Howard wouldn’t have fooled her, would he?
Fern sat in the backseat, slumped down low, trying to be invisible. Mary Curtain untied her flowered rain cap and tugged off a wig. And as if her high fluttery voice were attached to the wig, it dropped, too. Mary Curtain was suddenly not Mary Curtain, but a man with close-cropped hair. “It went perfect. I was crying at the end because it was all so p
erfect. I got emotional.”
Fern swiveled around to get a view of her house on Tamed Hedge Road disappearing in the back window. The white house with cream shutters looked like every other house in the row, and now there were more rows of white houses with cream shutters. Fern felt dizzy. She pressed her hand to the window. She thought she might cry. She suddenly missed Mrs. Drudger’s blah food, and Mr. Drudger’s weedless, blah lawn, which was always mown in perfect lines, which she wasn’t ever allowed to walk on. She missed the clean, scentless living room. She was suddenly afraid she’d never see the Drudgers or her house ever again.
Fern didn’t start a little narration in her head. No, this time she shouted, “You’re liars! Are you stealing me? I’ll start screaming! You might think I can’t scream, but I can. Very loudly. And you might think that I’m weak, a scrawny little girl, but I know some karate and I know how to bite really hard. You might think that you’ve got me. But you would be wrong, very, very wrong. I can’t tell you how wrong!” And then Fern screamed. She screamed, high-pitched, loud and long. She screamed an enormous, almost perfect, scream.
(Here you could possibly decide that this is an altogether bad book. If these two have abducted Fern in any way, shape or form, then this should be a story with a lesson to girls about always being on guard and never straying from home. If Fern were a boy, this thought probably wouldn’t cross your mind. What if Stuart Little had been a girl? We would have arrested her parents for allowing a young girl to set off alone in a motorcar, that’s what! What if Harry Potter had been a girl, spirited away by a giant of a man with a magical umbrella? We’d have said, “No, no,” and “Tsk, tsk.” You may think that girls are better suited to stay in little houses on prairies and within the confines of secret gardens. Or at least working within a buddy system. Wendy couldn’t have gone off with Peter alone, you know. Would you have put up with Violet Baudelaire being hunted, on her lonesome, by that man with the singular eyebrow? And there’s always that foursome traipsing around in Narnia—Susan, Lucy, Edmund, and Peter—which is fine, because at least they’re trying to stick together, protected by their older brother. But Fern isn’t a boy. She’s a girl and she isn’t in a buddy system. She’s alone. Yes, she’s in a car with two men, one of whom was dressed like a woman moments earlier—evidence of trickery. But you’ll just have to see it through. And please don’t go rooting for a moral about girls being good or punished for adventure…like Little Red Riding Hood or Goldilocks. You won’t find it here! Not on my watch!)