Tobias lifted the bathing suit with his beak. “Good as mew,” he mumbled. With a sniff, Janie reminded Tobias not to talk with his mouth full.
Lilly rubbed his favorite spot and whispered, “Thanks, Tobias.”
“WELCOME! You’re welcome, my dear,” he answered. “I’ll worry now about your going to school.” His raspy voice was solemn.
“I can take care of myself, Tobias,” said Lilly, feeling more confident now that she was home. “Can you keep a secret?”
“TRRRUST ME!” he answered.
Lilly smiled. “I have a trick for escaping.”
“Trrricks-trrricks! Do tell,” encouraged Tobias.
“I float away,” said Lilly smiling. “I’ve been floating away from Isadora and Mr. Stinchfield for years.”
“Timmaaha,” sighed Tobias, “you’ve been leaving your body? That explains it.”
“Explains what, Tobias?”
“GOING, GOING, GONE!” Tobias cried out like an auctioneer. He flew to the end of the bed and gazed at Lilly. “Do you know what an aura is, Lilly?” Lilly shook her head.
“When I look at you, I see a light around you. It is your energy, your spirit… your life force. The energy comes from inside you and flows around you.” Tobias motioned his wings gently in the air around Lilly. “It surrounds your whole body. Your energy is mostly white. White energy is about courage.”
He went on, “Blue energy is about power and control. Most of the world’s leaders have a strong blue light around them.”
The ancient parrot looked at Lilly with a worried face, “Your light is so weak it’s nearly invisible. You don’t want to disappear, do you?
Without waiting for an answer, Tobias flew to the windowsill. “Look at your mother.”
Lilly went to the window and stared out at her mother and her dull, gray cloud. Tobias spoke, “Your mother’s energy is stuck. I’ve seen this once before. It happens when a person goes into mourning and can’t find her way out.”
“Into mourning?” asked Lilly.
“I’ll put it another way. Your mother has been lost ever since your father died.”
Lilly sat on the bed. Tobias made it sound like floating away was bad. What did he expect her to do when Mr. Stinchfield was mean to her in front of the whole class?
Razz Ma Tazz sprang into the air and landed gently on Lilly’s head. He leaned over and rubbed behind her ear with his head.
Lilly smiled. “Does Razz have a light around him?”
“KILLER TOMATO!” screeched Tobias. “Of course, my dear,” continued Tobias more quietly. “All animals do. His is almost entirely a shocking, neon red.”
“Can you ask him how he makes his energy so strong, Tobias?”
“If you insist.” Tobias turned and spoke to Razz who hopped off Lilly’s head and stood at her feet. Slowly, steadily and for an impressive length of time, Razz drew in his breath. As his chest grew rounder and fuller, the rooster stood taller. Then Razz opened his mouth and bellowed. The explosion of sound pierced the stillness for two full minutes.
Lilly shook her head. “I’ll never be able to do that.”
“Razz Ma Tazz is his own beast,” admitted Tobias. “And you will have to discover the beast you are, Lilly.”
That night before falling asleep, Lilly asked, “What can I do to stop my light from disappearing, Tobias?”
“In your case, dear,” he said thoughtfully, “I would ask your father for help.”
“My father?” said Lilly, confused.
“Never forget. Never forget. I know your father died, dear,” answered Tobias. “But that doesn’t mean he can’t help you.”
“I don’t even remember him,” protested Lilly. “How can he help me?”
“Ask yourself!” squawked Tobias. He retreated to his perch on the chandelier and tucked his head under his wing. Minutes later, Lilly heard him snoring.
Lilly stared at the moon from her bed. She wondered how her father could help her when she had no memory of him. She closed her eyes and wished her father were still alive.
Lilly fell asleep and dreamed a dream she would remember. In her dream, Lilly stared into the darkness of her room with wide-open eyes. Lilly’s eyes were wide open and the window was wide open and Lilly was cold. And although she felt wide-awake in her dream, Lilly couldn’t move. She was unable to shut the window. She was unable to shut her eyes.
A cat no larger than a mouse leaped from inside Lilly and through the open window. The cat landed on its paws in the yard. Lilly knew they were her paws because when she looked down, there they were where her hands should be. Her front paws were a furry white. When she turned her head, she saw two furry, white hind paws.
The yard was mostly dirt. Here and there crabgrass and wild wheat grew taller than Lilly’s cat self. With her cat eyes, Lilly saw in the night. She moved slowly, carefully until she felt the stretch in her cat legs. Then she bounded. She pounced at a pebble and caught it in her paws. She tossed it into the air and caught it again. She leaped at a moth. The moth darted away.
Lilly explored the backyard. She pounced at moonbeams that slipped through her paws. What a stubborn moon refusing to be caught by a cat, thought Lilly.
A heavy footstep scuffed against a rock. The harsh sound split the quiet night. Lilly ran. The moonlight was too conspicuous a place for a cat. Footsteps fell heavily. Lilly froze. Heavy steps hit the ground again sending tremors through the earth. Lilly quaked.
The footsteps moved closer. Lilly breathed in deeply and felt her breath fill her. She let her breath flow slowly away. As her breath flowed out, Lilly floated out too. She slipped quietly into her floating self, becoming liquid. Then Lilly floated, a pool of cat. Lilly felt the heavy footsteps move closer. They stopped at the edge of her cat pool. Lilly stared at the black shoes standing at the edge of herself. She felt unable to look up.
Lilly screamed herself awake and everyone else, too. An outcry of quacks, thumps, and chattering teeth ensued.
“TO THE CANOPY!” screeched Tobias, his eyes still closed. A moment later, he opened his eyes and asked, “Are you all right, dear?”
“I’m sorry I woke you up,” answered Lilly. “I had a dream.”
Tobias lifted his wings and emitted a sound as much a bark as a squawk. All the animals quieted except for Janie who for some time afterward thought Lilly had been attacked.
“I assured them you are safe,” announced Tobias. “They’re going back to sleep as am I since you don’t have school today.”
“The weekend!” thought Lilly. She lay in bed and watched Tobias tuck his head back under his wing. What a relief to be reminded there was no school. School had become more nightmarish than ever. She listened to Tobias snoring lightly. Home was now as wonderful as school was terrible. Lilly stretched her blanket up over her chin and eased into the deliciousness of home sweet home.
Chapter10
Lilly spent Saturdays doing chores. After cleaning cages and Zelda’s litter box, Lilly fed the animals. Lilly’s next task was to collect the trash. She trudged upstairs to her mother’s attic bedroom and thought about Tobias. She wondered how old he was and tried to figure his age in her head.
Lilly reached for her mother’s wastebasket and noticed an unopened envelope with red lettering: URGENT… IMPORTANT… PAY ATTENTION… NOW! Lilly tucked it into her back pocket to look at later.
After she dragged the trash to the curb, Lilly went to her room. “What do you do when I’m out all day, Tobias?” asked Lilly. She yanked the envelope out of her pocket and sat at an old dining room table pushed against a wall. Lilly used the table as a catchall desk, bookshelf, clothes hamper and food pantry. In other words, it was piled with stuff.
“BUSY!” boasted Tobias. “I’m very busy all day.”
He watched as Lilly began to open the envelope. “Isn’t that prrrivate?” asked Tobias, alarmed. Lilly stopped mid-motion.
“Yes,” said Lilly. “But it says, ‘urgent.’ Don’t you think I should open it?”
Janie’s teeth chattered. “What is Janie saying, Tobias?” asked Lilly.
“One guinea pig, one vote,” he groaned. “She wants to debate privacy versus urgency then vote on it.”
Tobias translated for Zelda, who twitched her whiskers to say, “Rabbit families are so large, the word, ‘privacy,’ doesn’t exist.” Lilly tore open the envelope.
The fish were still sending their opinions up in bubbles when everyone heard Lilly gasp. She read the letter aloud. “Dear Beatrice Wilder, attached is your bill for unpaid taxes.” Lilly looked at the amount her mother owed. “If we had this much money, we’d be rich, Tobias!”
Tobias was startled too when he looked at the bill. “According to this, your mother hasn’t paid the taxes since your father died, Lilly.”
Lilly continued to read the official letter. “’Taxes not paid within ninety days will be collected at auction at which time the property will be sold.’ Does this mean if we don’t pay the taxes in ninety days, they’ll sell our house, Tobias?”
“I’m afraid so.” Tobias was misty-eyed. “Why don’t you talk to your mother, Lilly? Perhaps she has money squirreled away.” That seemed too much to hope for but Lilly wanted to talk to her mother about this anyway.
When she wasn’t tending her pet plants, Mrs. Wilder spent most of her time in her bedroom. She moved to the attic after Lilly’s father died. Lilly climbed the stairs feeling frantic. If the town sells our house, where will we go with forty-nine animals? When Lilly reached the attic, her mother wasn’t there.
Lilly sat on her mother’s bed, a twin made of iron. She lay back and let her head sink into the pillow. It smelled of her mother; autumn leaves all year long.
Lilly closed her eyes. What was it like to be her mother? What went on in her head? How could she ignore letters from the town threatening to take their house away? What if the people who worked in the town realized her mother couldn’t take care of her? Would they take Lilly away? Where would they send her? If Lilly didn’t take care of her mother, who would? Who would care for the rest of her family – Tobias, Zelda, Janie and her babies and everyone else?
Lilly stood at the window. The only cloud in the sky belonged to her mother. Hanging over the giant, green poodle, her mother’s cloud was as gray as Lilly’s mood. Lilly ran downstairs. She wanted to talk to her mother. Was it possible her mother had done something to prevent their house from being sold?
“Do anything,” repeated her mother slowly. Mrs. Wilder stood on a wooden ladder and trimmed the end of the poodle’s tail, a perfectly round, ivy pompom. The poodle stood several hundred inches taller than Lilly.
Lilly climbed the ladder. When she reached her mother’s feet, she pulled the letter out of her pocket and yelled up, “How many letters have they sent you, Mother?”
“Letters?” asked Mrs. Wilder. She continued trimming the poodle’s pompom.
“Are you doing anything about paying the taxes?”
“Yeees,” said Mrs. Wilder slowly.
“Oh, good,” said Lilly feeling surprised and relieved. “What are you doing?”
“Doing,” said her mother very evenly.
“Yes…?” said Lilly, trying to hurry her along.
“I don’t think about it.”
“What are we going to do?” groaned Lilly. “Where will we all live? Do you know how worried everyone is? Janie doesn’t want to be separated from her babies. Lady and Razz are like lovebirds. And I don’t want to lose any of them. They’re more family than you are. Lilly stopped. She’d blurted out too much, and she didn’t want to hurt her mother but it didn’t matter. Her mother hadn’t seemed to notice and cast her eyes over the green giants in her yard.
“Look at my dear pets,” she said sadly. “I wish I could crawl into a flower pot with them, but they’re too big and so am I.”
Chapter 11
Lilly sat on the windowsill, legs dangling. She thought about a stranger looking at their house. As she stared down, the matted carpeting suddenly reminded her of dirty dog fur. Maybe no one will want to buy a house with wall-to-wall dirty dog carpeting, thought Lilly.
Lilly looked at Lady and Janie who clucked and chattered melodramatically. Razz Ma Tazz screeched and flew out the window. According to Tobias, Janie thought it was time to vote, and Razz Ma Tazz wanted “to do something useful,” which to him meant scratching dirt. Gwendolyn and Zelda cried, and the fish may have, too. Tobias paced side-to-side on the bed rail. He’d bite his lip if he had one, thought Lilly.
Lilly walked to her bureau without glancing at the mirror. Tobias watched her reflection as she opened her jewelry box. The ballerina no longer twirled; the music no longer played. Lilly lifted a small, rectangular picture from the box and carried it to her bed. It was a ritual Lilly performed whenever she was especially sad. She sat on her bed, leaned against a pile of pillows and stared at the picture.
It was her father. Lilly couldn’t remember him. She knew him only from this photograph. Someone must have gathered every image of her father and hidden or destroyed them because Lilly hadn’t seen any except this.
Although her father’s face was slightly blurred, what was perfectly clear was how dearly he loved the young girl he held. Lilly looked at her two-year-old self, a bow tucked into her hair, her faced pressed up against her daddy’s. Both smiled the same sweeping smile – two halves of the same smile sweeping across both faces. She closed her eyes and in her mind saw them spinning around.
Lilly opened her eyes and turned the photograph over. She read its message as she had hundreds of times before.
“I wonder why my father wrote this, Tobias. ‘The tyger in me sees the tyger in you.’”
“RARE BREED!” screeched Tobias. “Your father saw something in you that he saw in himself.”
“A tiger?” said Lilly. “Isadora’s right. I’m nothing but a scaredy cat.”
“On the contrary, you were his Tyger Lilly,” said Tobias. “In fact he called you Tyger Lilly.”
“He did?” said Lilly, trying to remember.
“He was fond of reciting his favorite poem to you, The Tyger by William Blake. He loved Blake for capturing the tyger with words instead of a cage.”
“I don’t remember it,” said Lilly.
Tobias tilted his head and looked at her. “It begins, ‘Tyger, tyger burning bright in the forest of the night.’” He hesitated.
Lilly knew he was watching her face for a hint of recollection. “I’m sorry, Tobias, I don’t remember. Why did Blake write that the tiger was ‘burning bright?’”
“Your father told me that the first time he saw the eyes of a tiger shining in the night, he was hypnotized by them. Perhaps Blake had a similar experience.”
“What do you mean he told you? How could he tell you, Tobias? And how do you know he called me, ‘Tyger Lilly’?”
“BEST FRIEND! I know because I was your father’s best friend. And your father was mine. Timma-timma. Timma-timma.”
With a look of confusion, Lilly said, “But I thought you belonged to my mother. I thought someone gave you to her when my father died.”
“Lilly dear,” said Tobias, “I knew your father before your mother did.”
Lilly’s mouth dropped open. Every time she closed it, her mouth fell open again. Finally she spoke, “I didn’t know you were in the circus too, Tobias. Did you see the tiger eat him?”
Tobias jerked back his head, gave a screech, and nearly toppled over backward. Regaining his balance, Tobias exclaimed, “That circus story is pish-posh preposterous, Lilly. One of your mother’s relatives spun the tale out of thin air. They were always trying to discredit your father because he was a scientist, a poor scientist who considered knowledge more valuable than gold. In fact, your mother’s parents said they’d disown her if she married him. I always admired your mother for marrying him anyway.”
Tobias sighed, “What a dear friend your father was to me.”
Lilly jumped up. “Oh, please, tell me about him. I don�
��t know anything!”
“First, your father would never give up without a fight.” Tobias gave Lilly a challenging stare. “He would expect his Tyger Lilly to fight, too – to fight for her home.”
“I don’t know how, Tobias. What can I do?” Tobias remained silent. Lilly looked at him. She decided Tobias didn’t know what she could to do either.
“Can’t you tell me about my father now?” insisted Lilly, her cheeks bright pink.
“I’d better,” said Tobias, “before you turn purple. But let’s talk in the park.”
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