by Gail Banning
I put a cardboard box of dishes in the dumbwaiter, climbed up to the porch and winched them up. I brought my box inside the arched doorway, into the kitchen we had made. We’d put up a whole bunch of shelves above and below the windows. In one of the six corners, we’d made a tiled counter around the giant oak branch. On the counter was a big water container with a spigot. It was going to be our kitchen tap. Right next to it was the plastic washbasin that was going to be our kitchen sink.
I opened the flaps of my box and unwound the newspaper bundles inside. I hung our mugs on our hooks, and put our plates on our shelves. Mom cut the stems of the brokennecked flowers and arranged them in a bowl on the table that folded out from the wall. I stood back to admire it all.
“Smell those lilies,” Mom said. “They’re so sweet.”
“Really sweet,” I said, breathing in.
“They make me feel sick,” Tilley said, covering her nose. It was true. The scent seemed to have gone from heavenly to poisonous in a few breaths.
“They are a bit much for such a small space,” Dad said, and we moved them to the great outdoors on the porch.
Back inside, we kept unpacking. We worked until the sunset coated everything in the treehouse with transparent colour, like apricot skin. “You kids must be famished,” Mom said, and she got a container of cold Kentucky Fried Chicken from the tiny propane fridge under the counter. Dad took out a bottle of champagne and brought it to the arched doorway. The cork flurried though oak leaves. He poured champagne for himself and Mom into Plexiglas goblets, and sparkling apple juice for Tilley and me. “A toast,” Dad said, raising his glass. “To adventure.” The four of us clinked glasses, or tried anyway. Plexiglas doesn’t clink all that well.
Long after the chicken was gone, we sat around on the treehouse porch, swatting mosquitoes and sipping our celebration beverages. The deer was back at the stream. Way across the meadow, lights were coming on in the turrets of Grand Oak Manor. So Great-great-aunt Lydia was there, I thought, even if we’d never seen her. We stared at the golden rectangles of light, hoping for other signs of life. There were none.
“Well, I for one am exhausted,” Mom said after a long silence. “Therefore, it is your bedtime.”
“Bedtime! Since when do I have a bedtime?”
“Since now that we all share a room,” Mom said, rummaging in a box on the porch. “Here. From the camping store. Our lighting system.” She handed me a sort of updated miner’s headlamp. I stretched its elastic band around my head until its compact light rested on my forehead like a third eye.
“Stylish,” I said, getting to my feet.
I’d complained about bedtime as a matter of principle, but actually I was looking forward to bed. As we walked through the arched doorway into the concentrated darkness of the treehouse, I switched on my headlamp and aimed it at the three bunks. Being grown-ups, Mom and Dad had picked the bottom one. Tilley wanted the middle to be close to Mom and Dad, so I got the top. I climbed eight feet up the wooden ladder and clambered onto my brand new foam mattress. On top of my quilt lay the green garbage bag that contained my entire wardrobe. There wasn’t much space to put my clothes away. My bunk had three drawers underneath, sort of like a captain’s bed. Like a lot of old wooden drawers, though, they were hard to open. I filled two of them but the third was jammed shut. I gave up on trying to open it and hung the rest of my clothes on the hooks that we’d screwed into the oak branches at either end of the bunks. We had put curtains around the bunks to make them all private, like the sleeping berths of trains. I pulled my curtain shut. I had enough headroom to sit up, so I changed the normal way into my pyjama top. Pants required a special method. I lay down, lifted my butt, wriggled my shorts to my knees, sat back down and pulled the shorts over my feet. Pyjama bottoms went on the same way, in reverse order. Before hanging up my shorts I took out my wallet and removed the torn blue strip of the letter we’d found in the stream. Maybe, I thought, Great-great-aunt Lydia is one of those people who can’t say anything at all unless they can think of the perfect way to say it. Maybe she’d ripped up the letter because its welcome didn’t quite match the welcome in her heart. Maybe it seemed too inky and papery compared to the welcome that she really wanted to give. I thought this was the best theory so far. I put the torn blue strip back in my wallet, and shut it in the little cupboard above my bunk. “Goodnight,” I called. I got under my quilt and switched off my headlamp.
That night I realized that what I’d always thought of as silence had actually been the buzz of the fridge and the hum of faraway traffic. The same thing for darkness. My street-lit version of darkness at the apartment was nothing compared to this. In my bunk I couldn’t see my own hand, not even when I touched it to my nose. The pure silence and total darkness of the treehouse were new to me. It was actually fascinating to see and hear absolutely nothing. I listened to the silence and I watched the darkness for as long as I could manage to stay awake.
NOTEBOOK: #5
NAME: Rosamund McGrady
SUBJECT: The Code
Bird twitters woke me up.
I propped up on my elbow to look out the round porthole window above my pillow. There was a nest on the oak branch, and a yellow-crested something swept in for a landing. Baby birds raised their fluffy heads and I watched the yellow-crested mother dangle breakfast worms down their throats. Then I got up. It was my first day of living at the treehouse, and I had things to do.
I stuck my head out from my bunk curtains. Below me, Mom and Dad and Tilley sat eating Cheerios at the folding table. Mom and Dad were eating them out of bowls; Tilley was threading hers onto a string, then letting them slide down into her mouth. On our camping stove a coffee pot blurped out nice coffee smells.
“There she is,” Mom said, blowing me a morning kiss. “Better get some breakfast. We’ve got to go soon.”
“‘We’ as in you and Dad, right?” I asked. I knew that Mom and Dad had to go to their summer jobs at the university. Dad’s job was to count the live bugs and the dead bugs in a huge glass case and put the results on a chart. Mom’s job was to make computerized voice-graphs out of tape-recorded animal noises.
“‘We’ as in all four of us,” Dad said.
“Where are Tilley and I going?” I asked, but my sinking heart already knew the answer. We were going to the University Childhood Development Centre drop-in day camp. Every single summer of our lives Mom and Dad had taken Tilley and me to the University Childhood Development Centre drop-in day camp. I had hoped that this summer would be different.
“To day camp,” Dad said. “Where else?”
“Not day camp!” I said. “Please spare me day camp. Please, O merciful one!”
“What’s wrong with day camp?”
“What’s wrong with day camp? Like, everything! They make us do a bunch of stupid crafts, like making caterpillars out of egg cartons. Five days a week. Eight hours straight. It’s like being in some child labour factory.” I thought hard for the worst thing I could say. “It’s unstimulating.”
“The University Childhood Development Centre is unstimulating?” Dad asked.
“Totally. I can actually feel my left brain shrinking in that day camp room,” I claimed. “Couldn’t we just stay here and, um, study the ecosystems of the meadow and stream and stuff? I can look after myself, you know. I’m practically twelve. I can look after Tilley, too.”
“I don’t know, Rosie,” Dad said.
“I hate the way you think that if we’re not supervised every second we’re going to throw ourselves into traffic, or make friends with weirdos or something.” I searched my mind for the right buzz words. “It lowers my self-esteem.”
“And there’s no traffic here,” Tilley pointed out.
“No weirdos either,” I said. Mom wasn’t saying anything, so I guessed she was on my side. I had an inspiration. “How can you expect us to develop any sense of responsibility when you won’t give us any responsibility?”
Dad and Mom looked at each other.
“We’ll obey all your rules,” I persisted. “We’ll use common sense. We’ll be on our best behaviour. We’ll be mature for our ages. We’ll be....” I paused to think.
“Good,” Tilley supplied.
“Good,” I agreed.
“Maybe we could give it a try, David,” Mom said, and then they both recited rule after rule, as if they were getting paid for each one they could think up. No playing with matches. No playing with camping fuel. No playing with propane. No approaching raccoons. No feeding raccoons. No enabling raccoons to feed themselves. No leaving garbage where raccoons can get it. No leaving the treehouse with an open door, or with a window opened wider than a raccoon. No riding in the dumbwaiter. No horseplay on the ladder. And for Tilley, no climbing to or from the treehouse unless I was on the ladder below. (The idea, I guess, was that I could catch her as she hurtled toward me like a meteor.) On and on, the rules went.
“Okay, got them,” I said.“ Got the rules. Okay, so Tilley and I will clean up. You guys go off to work.” I wanted them gone before they could think up any more rules, or, worse, change their minds about leaving us alone. I watched until Mom and Dad disappeared through the trap door in the porch, and then I just stood there awhile, experiencing the feel of myself alone in my new home. “I guess I better do the dishes,” I said, listening to the responsibility vibrate in my voice.
I squeezed dish soap into the plastic washbasin and carried it to the pump on the porch. I pumped the handle until my arms ached, then Tilley pumped for a bit, then me again, then Tilley again, then me again. I was thinking that our plumbing system had failed when the water finally gushed out of the spout, all over my runners. After swishing the bowls and mugs through the suds I turned them upside down on the porch boards to dry. When I threw the dishwater over the porch banister, blue jays swooped from the oak branches and flew off with the soggy Cheerios. “Okay Tilley,” I said. “Let’s explore.”
On that first day of freedom, we discovered about a gazillion cool things. We found a little island in the stream, with a snowball bush in blossom. The stream was full of little see-through fish, all darting around in one big school and failing to think for themselves. We ran back to the treehouse for a saucepan to fish with. They were innocent, unsuspicious fish, and easy to catch. In the meadow we found fluorescent green grasshoppers. The grasshoppers were smarter than the fish. We had to sneak up to catch those.
Our grasshopper hunt brought us further and further across the meadow, all the way to the stable near the stone wall that separated the Grand Oak estate from Bellemonde Drive. It was a fancy stable, sort of a miniature Grand Oak Manor for horses. But there were no horses, we saw as we flattened our noses against the dusty window. There was only an old car with a running board and a winged hood ornament. “A Bentley,” I said, because I know my hood ornaments. From the stable, Tilley and I followed the little hedge that enclosed the Manor and its garden. The Manor garden was all formal and manicured, not at all like the tousled meadow on the other side. The hedge was so short that I could have jumped over without even taking a run at it, but one of Mom and Dad’s rules was that we couldn’t go inside the hedge without an actual invitation. I wasn’t about to violate any rules and find myself imprisoned in day camp, so Tilley and I just looked over the hedge at the paths that wound through the Manor garden. We saw birds splashing in a birdbath, and we saw the random flight patterns of yellow butterflies, but we saw no sign of human life. “Where do you think Great-great-aunt Lydia is all the time?” I asked.
“Inside her mansion,” Tilley guessed. I thought so too.
At lunchtime Tilley and I climbed back to the treehouse to get crackers and cheese. We were going to eat them in the cherry orchard in the meadow, along with cherries for a balanced diet. The crackers had not yet been unpacked, and Tilley drifted around the treehouse as I looked for them. “Hey,” Tilley said as I knelt rummaging in a box. “Look what I found.” She held out a paper. It was the exact same blue as the torn strip of letter from the stream.
“What? Where?”
“In here,” Tilley stuck her finger inside a hollow knothole in one of the huge oak branches that cut through the six corners of our treehouse. “Right here, in this little cave in the branch.”
I took the blue paper from her hand and unfolded it.
From the Desk of
Lydia Florence Augustine McGrady
Grand Oak Manor
Number 9 Bellemonde Drive
ID ID NOTEVERTHIN KAPA IROFSCIS SORSCO ULDDO
SOMU CHHARM. IHAVETOLE AVETH ISBLO ODYHO USE. ABADDESTINYAWA ITS MEHERE.
ALI FEISSOE ASI LYL OST.
LETUSESCA PE. LETUSELO PE.
I SOB ELME ETME:THETRE EHO US EATTEN.
X
“It’s on Great-great-aunt Lydia’s stationery,” I told Tilley. She was just out of kindergarten and couldn’t read cursive yet. As she looked at the block letters though, she moved her lips to sound out the words.
“What does Great-great-aunt Lydia say?” Tilley asked, giving up.
“I don’t know. It’s in code.”
“Let’s uncode it.”
“Decode it. Yeah.I’ll do that while you pick the cherries.”
Pen and paper in hand, I headed across the meadow and climbed one of the gnarled cherry trees. Settling onto a branch, I stared at Great-great-aunt Lydia’s coded letter. My best clue for cracking the code was the final letter,‘X’, where the signature would normally be. That had to be an ‘L’, for Lydia. So if ‘X’ was code for ‘L’, that meant the code alphabet was twelve letters ahead of the real alphabet. I wrote out the two alphabets.
A=M B=N C=O
D=P E=Q F=R
G=S H=T I=U
J=V K=W L=X
M=Y N=Z O=A
P=B Q=C R=D
S=E T=F U=G
V=H W=I X=J
Y=K Z=L
Then I started decoding. WR WR BC HS JSFHVWB was what I got for the first five words. It made no sense.
Tilley climbed down to my branch, dangling cherries from her fingers. “What does it say?” she asked. Cherries dangled from her ears too.“
This is harder than I thought,” I said. “I’ll figure it out later.”
“Okay,” Tilley said. “I bet I can spit cherry pits farther than you.”
“We’ll see about that.” I curled my tongue into a blowgun and spat my cherry pit. It shot a respectable distance over the meadow. Tilley spat her cherry pit. It went a really long way. She had a natural advantage at spitting because of her missing front teeth.
“Good one,” I said.
“That code letter is on the same blue paper as the ripped-up letter you found in the stream,” Tilley observed.
“Yeah,” I said. “The exact same blue.”
“And Great-great-aunt Lydia’s name is at the top of the code letter, right?”
“Yeah. It’s her stationery.”
“And that means Great-great-aunt Lydia wrote both letters, right?” Tilley spat another long-distance cherry pit.
“Right.”
“How come she rips stuff up, and writes stuff in code? How come she doesn’t want us to read what she writes?”
I ate a triplet of cherries while I considered. Then I spat the three pits one after another, like semi-automatic gunfire. “Maybe she’s testing us. Maybe she has a secret that she doesn’t want to tell unless we prove ourselves worthy. Maybe she wants to find out if we’re smart enough to share her special knowledge.”
“What kind of special knowledge?”
“That’s what we’ve got to figure out,” I said.
“So Great-great-aunt Lydia’s not like other grownups, right?”
“Right. She’s eccentric.”
“What’s eccentric mean?”
“Eccentric? Eccentric means weird,” I said. “Weird in a good way.”
NOTEBOOK: #6
NAME: Rosamund McGrady
SUBJECT: The Pleasure of her Company
Great-great-aunt Lydia’s
letter was harder to decode than I’d expected. Every night at bedtime I’d pull the curtain shut around my bunk and read it with my headlamp. I experimented. I wrote out the normal alphabet with possible code alphabets beside it. I tried a code alphabet starting with ‘B’. I tried one starting with ‘C’. I tried one starting with every possible letter. None of it was right. Sometimes I’d also get out the torn blue strip that we’d found in the stream, and I’d put it beside the coded letter, and I’d stare at both papers as if their mystery would solve itself, like one of those optical illusion pictures where you stare and stare and can’t see the old lady’s face, and then suddenly you can. But it never worked. Every night I’d give up and turn off my headlamp, and lie in the dark wondering about Great-great-aunt Lydia.
Weeks had gone by without any other sign of her. She didn’t leave any more flowers and she didn’t leave any more notes. She didn’t appear in person, either, even though Tilley and I were constantly on the lookout, wherever we were.
The whole of July, Tilley and I almost never left the grounds of Grand Oak Manor for the outside world. It was a long way to walk. We’d sold our car and bought bikes instead, but with Tilley on training wheels even the ride seemed long, and then when we reached the outside world, it was all normal and boring anyway, with its sidewalks and streetlights and parked SUVs. Tilley and I rode once to the community centre to wash our hair in the showers of the swimming pool changing room, but it was unrewarding. On the ride back to the treehouse we decided to start cleaning ourselves in the stream instead. We found a deep spot upstream, and we made it deeper by damming it with river rocks. It was a lot of work. When Mom and Dad saw our dam I was afraid they’d say that we had abused our riparian rights, or something, but they were actually pleased, and impressed by our engineering.
“But no soap or shampoo, not even biodegradable,” said Dad. “We don’t want to give Great-great-aunt Lydia anything to complain about.” It was a constant concern of Dad’s, that we not give Great-great-aunt Lydia anything to complain about. We were very careful. Our garbage, for example, we bundled up like a baby every morning and tucked into our bike trailer. Dad transported it to the university for proper disposal. Our outhouse is another example of how careful we were. Instead of making an ordinary one we made an environmentally friendly composting toilet. We all had to dig and dig, even Tilley, because Mom and Dad had taken me seriously when I’d said we needed responsibility. It was worth the effort, though, because our composting toilet was so environmentally amazing that Mom and Dad actually got a government grant for making it. As scientists, Mom and Dad are skilled at getting government grants. Tilley thought it was hilarious that the government was paying us to study our own toilet.