It’s just a social-studies project! It doesn’t really matter! None of the fates are real!
Silently she started reading the information typed on her card.
You are Martha Talbot, wife of Tom Talbot.
Tom Talbot! Dunk! She was Dunk’s wife!
She skimmed over the rest, about the three children she already had, plus the two more born when she got to Oregon, and how she became a contented shopkeeper’s wife.
Nora knew there was no way she could have gotten a fate card for being a scientist heading west on the Oregon Trail, studying its flora and fauna—its plants and animals—through the changing terrain. There were hardly any women scientists back then.
But anything would be better than being happily married to Dunk!
Emma must have seen Nora’s face darken.
“What did you get?” Emma whispered.
While Nora had no intention of reading her horrible card aloud, it seemed silly to refuse to answer Emma’s simple question. Wordlessly, she handed her card to Emma.
Emma flushed as she read it, then thrust it back at Nora almost as if she was angry. Angry at Coach Joe for sticking Nora with the worst fate of all?
No. Nora suddenly understood: Emma was angry that Nora had gotten the fate Emma wanted. She could so see Emma and Dunk together in their covered wagon—their pink covered wagon!
Tom Talbot would do or say something dumb.
“Oh, Tom!” Martha Talbot would giggle.
Coach Joe held up the last girls’ card. “Who hasn’t picked yet?” He looked around the huddle. “Emma, I guess this fate is for you.”
Emma snatched the card from Coach Joe’s hand, glanced at it, and then put it facedown in her lap.
“All right, pioneers,” Coach Joe said, dismissing them. “First diary entry is due on Monday. Get saddled up and ready to ride off on the Oregon Trail.”
As the others hurried back to their pods, Emma laid her hand on Nora’s arm.
“No one else has seen our cards yet,” she whispered. “We could trade, and no one would know.”
“What did you get?” Nora asked.
Emma held out her card so Nora could read.
You are Ann Whittaker, 26 years old, single. You are an independent woman heading west to make your fortune in the new land. You set up one of the first schools in the Oregon Territory.
Wasn’t Nora meant to be Ann Whittaker?
Wasn’t Emma meant to be Martha Talbot?
And yet…
Coach Joe had told them that they couldn’t trade cards to get the fate they wanted. He hadn’t let Brody switch his tragic fate for Mason’s happy one.
Of course, Coach Joe wouldn’t know if Emma and Nora quickly, quietly, slipped their cards to each other.
Nora didn’t believe in fate any more than she believed in luck. Especially not fates typed up on index cards and handed out for a social-studies assignment.
But even if it hadn’t been a direct violation of Coach Joe’s rules, it still felt wrong in some strange way to take the fate that belonged to someone else.
She shook her head.
“I’m sorry. Coach Joe said…we shouldn’t…I can’t.”
“Fine!”
Emma flounced back to their pod, her cheeks blazing.
If it had been impossible to have Emma as her science-fair partner before, what would it be like now that Emma’s eyes glittered with rage?
How could Martha Talbot and Ann Whittaker, each one hating her fate, ever manage to work on the science fair together?
“They’re here!” Nora’s mother called from her post by the front window.
Nora’s father hurried down from his upstairs office, taking the stairs two at a time.
Feeling suddenly shy, Nora lingered by her ant farm, set on a table in one corner of the family room. It was reassuring to see the ants going about their ordinary antlike business—digging tunnels, carting a morsel of cracker off to a new location—utterly unconcerned with the arrival of the newest human family member.
“Auntie Nora!” her mother called. “Are you coming?”
Nora didn’t know why she felt nervous about meeting a two-day-old baby, but for some reason she did. Would people expect her to hold Nellie? What if she dropped her? What were you supposed to do and say around a human being so tiny, so utterly new to the universe?
Her parents had both gone outside to the car to greet Sarah and Nellie. Her father’s smile as he carried in Nellie’s car seat, with Nellie in it, was even bigger than Brody’s biggest grin. Nora had never seen him so excited about anything—not Sarah’s college graduation, or her job as a geologist. Not her brother’s scholarship to MIT. Not her own blue ribbon at the regional science fair.
And all Nellie had done so far was get herself born!
Nora’s mom followed behind, lugging Sarah’s suitcase and a diaper bag in one hand and a huge vase of roses in the other. Pink roses, every one of them.
Sarah came last, looking less bulgy than she had when Nora had last seen her, but still a lot rounder than her usual skinny self. She raced over to Nellie’s carrier, placed on one cushion of the couch, as if to make sure that Nellie was still in it, alive and breathing.
Nellie was.
Drawing closer, Nora studied her tiny, sound-asleep relative.
She couldn’t help but notice that Nellie was bald.
Not completely bald, like an egg, but all that grew on the top of her head was pale, almost invisible fuzz.
Instead of hair, Nellie had a little pink headband with a little pink bow on one side. She was tucked under a little pink blanket. Popped into her mouth was a little pink pacifier.
She was the littlest, pinkest person Nora had ever seen.
“She gets cuter every day!” Nora’s mother exclaimed.
Nora refrained from pointing out that two days wasn’t a very long time.
Was Nellie cute? Nora didn’t think so, but maybe she wasn’t the best judge. Would Emma think Nellie was cute? Sarah certainly seemed to. She hovered over the carrier with adoring eyes. Nora’s mother sighed, as if overcome by the magnitude of such extravagant cuteness. Her father was now filming Nellie’s cuteness with his video camera, even though the baby had done nothing so far but sleep, and not in a particularly cute or interesting way. What was cute about sleeping?
“I have to hold her,” Nora’s mother apologized as she unclipped the car-seat harness and lifted Nellie into her arms. Nellie stayed asleep as first Nora’s mother and then her father took a turn rocking her.
“Here, Nora,” her mother said. “Sit down on the couch, and we’ll give her to you.”
Nora swallowed hard.
“Maybe later,” she said.
She didn’t have to hold Nellie today. She had the rest of her life to hold Nellie. It didn’t have to be today that she tried to act like a real, true aunt to that tiny little bundle.
“Oh, come on,” her father said. “You can just sit still while we set her on your lap.”
“Um, I just remembered,” Nora lied, “that I forgot to feed my ants this morning.”
“All right,” Nora’s mother said, “but hurry back. This is Nellie’s big day!”
Nora didn’t hurry back, though. She carried her ant farm upstairs to her bedroom and sat for a long while watching the ants do their quiet tunneling. Nora’s ants didn’t expect her to hold them or say goo-goo or ga-ga or whatever you were supposed to say to babies. All Nora’s ants expected of her was some food and water at regular intervals. She could do that. She could do that perfectly well.
Even though Emma hadn’t sounded enthusiastic about doing their science-fair project on Nellie, Nora thought she should check to see if Sarah was on board with it. If the baby’s own mother thought that it was a cool idea, how could Emma possibly object?
Of course, all Nellie had done so far was eat and sleep. Even Nora couldn’t think of anything scientifically interesting about that. But sooner or later, Nellie was bound to start doing
things worth recording in Nora’s baby-fact notebook.
Nora waited until her parents had set out purchased deli salads for lunch and everyone except for Nellie had sat down at the table.
“So,” Nora said, in as offhand a way as possible, “my science-fair partner, Emma, and I were talking about possible ideas for our project. We thought we’d like to study something about Nellie. You know, how she reacts to light, heat, sound— things like that.”
“You’re joking, right?” Sarah asked just as her mom said, “Oh, Nora!” Her father smiled, but that was pretty much what he had been doing nonstop since Nellie was born.
How could a whole family of scientists be so unscientific?
A piercing cry came from the living room.
In a flash, Sarah dashed away from the table, followed by both of Nora’s parents. Apparently, it took three human adults to respond to the cry of one human baby. That could be a science-fair project in itself: Why exactly did adult humans respond to newborn babies the way they did?
But the longer Nellie kept on wailing, the more Nora felt herself losing interest in Nellie as a subject of scientific study in any way, shape, or form. She tried to eat the curried chicken salad and cabbage slaw on her plate, but the crying went on.
And on.
And on.
And on.
By the end of the weekend, Nora knew one definite scientific fact about the behavior of babies.
They cried a lot.
Nellie didn’t cry when she was eating, but she had trouble settling down enough to nurse.
She didn’t cry when she was sleeping, but she had trouble settling down enough to sleep.
Now Nora knew why people thought sleeping babies were so cute. Sleeping babies were so cute because they weren’t crying.
“Do all babies cry so much?” Nora asked Sarah after Nellie finally fell asleep on Sunday afternoon. Nora’s father had gone to work at his university office; Nora didn’t need to guess why. She, Sarah, and their mother were all in the newly silent family room. Nora had never realized how beautiful silence could be.
Sarah looked offended by the question. “She hardly cries at all!”
If Nellie hardly cried at all, Nora would hate to be around a baby that cried a lot.
“Did I cry when I was a baby?” Nora asked. It was hard to believe she had started out as a squalling, red-faced thing.
“All babies cry,” her mother said. “But of my three, I think you cried the least. Or maybe with the third, you don’t notice it as much.”
“Was I bald when I was a baby?” Nora asked.
Sarah didn’t like that question, either.
“Nellie has hair! You just can’t see it because it’s so blond!”
Or because it’s not there.
“You had quite a bit of hair, as I recall,” her mother said. “But Sarah’s right: dark hair stands out more than light. I have to admit I’ve forgotten a lot about all of you as babies. Those days go by so fast. Before you know it, you have a toddler, then a kindergartner, then a fourth grader working on her science-fair project. What I do remember most, Nora, is what a one you were for questions. All kids do the why-why-why thing until it drives their parents crazy, but with you, I always thought you asked those things because you really wanted to know.”
“What kinds of things?”
“ ‘Where do numbers come from?’ ‘Is there a biggest number?’ ‘If God made the world, who made God?’ ‘Can worms think?’ ‘Can there be a color no one in the world has ever seen before?’ ”
Nora liked to think of her little-girl self asking questions like that. Could there be a color that no one in the world had ever seen before?
Over the baby monitor came a sound that might have been a cat meowing or might have been a baby starting to cry.
Nora’s family had no cat.
Sarah jumped up.
“Just wait,” Nora’s mother told her. “Give her a chance to settle down on her own before you go to her.”
Sarah had already started up the stairs.
“Oh well,” Nora’s mother said. “That’s how you are with your firstborn.”
Nora looked over fondly at her quiet, quiet ants.
It wasn’t until Sunday night that Nora remembered that the first entry in their Oregon Trail diary was due on Monday.
With a heavy heart, she carried her ant farm up to her bedroom and sat down at her desk to start thinking about poor Martha Talbot married to awful Tom Talbot—Dunk!—with three children to look after in their cramped covered wagon.
Maybe one of them was a newborn.
A newborn named Nellie who cried a lot.
After all, Nellie was an old-fashioned name that could have belonged to a pioneer baby.
Inspired now, Nora picked up her pen and started writing.
Dear Diary,
Today we set off from St. Joseph, Missouri, on the Oregon Trail. It is hard being in such a small space with all of us, especially with Nellie, who cries all the time.
I mean, all the time.
Because babies are not in fact interesting to write about, contrary to what some people might think, I am going to describe the fascinating mammals, birds, insects, and plants that we see along the trail. I am especially hoping that we might see some ants that are different from the ants in our hometown back in Kentucky.
Nora stopped to think about what to write next. Luckily, she had just finished reading a library book about crows.
In the sky right now, I see a flock of crows. Crows look a lot like ravens because they both are completely black, but crows have smaller bills. Crows are highly intelligent. They even use tools to get food.
After adding a few more crow facts, Nora checked the length of her diary entry. It was over a page now. That was more than enough for the first day of her westward migration.
I hope we see more crows, as well as geese, beavers, bison, prairie dogs, and, of course, ants. Now Nellie is crying again—surprise, surprise. So I must go.
Yours truly,
Martha Talbot
During science time on Monday, Nora waited to see if Emma had thought of any science-fair ideas over the weekend. But Emma sat busily doodling hearts all over her science notebook, as if Nora wasn’t even there.
“So,” Nora finally said. “About the science fair?”
“You don’t even like Dunk!” Emma burst out.
That much was true. But it had nothing whatsoever to do with the science fair. Apparently, Emma was still furious that Nora had refused to trade fates.
“If you don’t even like Dunk, how can you be married to him?” Emma asked, her voice rising higher with rage.
“I’m not married to Dunk,” Nora tried to explain. “I’m not married to anybody. The person on my index card is married to Tom Talbot, but I’m not her, and Tom’s not Dunk.”
Come to think of it, Nora hadn’t mentioned Tom Talbot at all in her diary entry. She had filled it with information about crows.
“Anyway,” Nora said, as it was clearly time to change the subject. “Nellie’s home now, and I talked to my sister, and she said—”
“That we can come over!” Emma finished Nora’s sentence for her, a baby-adoring smile replacing her fate-hating scowl. “When? Like, this weekend? Saturday is better for me, but Sunday’s okay, too. And Bethy, Elise, and Tamara are all free on Saturday, too. Can you check with Amy?”
“Well, actually…”
Nora hadn’t yet asked Sarah about having all of her girlfriends over to the house for a Nellie party. What she had been starting to say was that Sarah had nixed the baby project, so they definitely had to think of something else. But it was a relief to have Emma distracted from her disappointment over her fate card.
“I think Saturday will be great,” Nora said, desperately hoping that this was true. “Like, at two o’clock?”
“Will she be napping then?” Emma asked.
She’ll probably be crying then.
Nora shrugged. “I
don’t know. I mean, she’s only four days old. So I don’t know her very well yet. But she’s cute when she’s sleeping, too.”
Or as cute as she ever is.
“I can’t wait to tell everybody!” Emma said. “You did bring pictures, didn’t you?”
Nora shook her head. “I don’t have a cell phone like you do,” she apologized. Emma was the only girl in their class who had her own cell phone.
“Well, we’ll see her on Saturday anyway.”
“So about the science fair,” Nora said, now that Emma was finally in a good mood.
“What’s it like holding her?” Emma asked. “I’ve held babies—I have two cousins who are babies—but I didn’t get to hold them until they were, like, two months old. I’ve never held a really tiny baby.”
Nora felt herself flushing. “It’s okay, I guess.”
Nora still hadn’t held Nellie yet, but she couldn’t make herself tell that to Emma.
Emma came up with more questions. Had Nora given Nellie a bottle yet? Had she helped change her diaper yet? Had she given her a bath yet?
No, no, and no, Nora admitted.
Emma looked surprised. Nora was clearly a disappointment in the aunt department.
“All right, team!” Coach Joe called out. “Science time’s over! Get ready to line up for music. Hope you all are closing in on an idea for your project. Let me know if you need any help. I have some books filled with science-fair ideas if anybody’s stuck.”
Nora filed into line behind Mason and Brody, glad to escape from Emma.
Now it was her turn to be furious. Emma had wasted every single minute of their science time.
They had no ideas for the science fair, none at all.
How could Nora, of all people, be stuck on what she loved most?
But she wasn’t about to ask Coach Joe for help. Real scientists didn’t copy project ideas out of books, ideas for the same old science-fair projects that had been done by millions of kids for centuries—well, for as long as science fairs had existed. The research of real scientists was driven by a burning desire to answer questions they really cared about.
The Nora Notebooks, Book 2 Page 3