The Romeo and Juliet Code

by Phoebe Stone

  A small box arrived at the Bathburn house from overseas in mid-July, and while I didn’t actually get to hold it and look at it, I could tell it was from Portugal by the way Uncle Gideon made off with it like a rugby player who finally has his hands on the ball. He tried to make light of it, horsing about in the parlor later, saying he had finally received those shoes he had ordered.

  “From Portugal?” I said.

  Uncle Gideon winced then and backed up as if a seagull had somehow swooped into the house and had flown too close to his face. Well, that only made me more certain.

  I forgot to say that Uncle Gideon was a sixth-grade teacher at the elementary school in town when it wasn’t summer, and he was always drinking coffee and shuffling papers, working on his lesson plans. If The Gram asked him to tidy up the kitchen after tea, he always said, “Sorry, old thing, school’s starting soon and I’ve got work here,” and then he’d wave his papers about. (As soon as I got to Bottlebay, he started calling everybody “old thing.”)

  “Shall we eat on the porch, old thing?” I heard him say to The Gram a little later. We were going to be having Grammy’s Clammy Stew for dinner. It was a great Bathburn favorite. For me, I couldn’t believe how much food was in Bottlebay, Maine. In London, we’d had very little to eat. And I was wondering all the while in a wistful sort of way what my parents would have sent to Uncle Gideon. And why was there nothing for me?

  I was sitting upstairs with Derek in the dark bedroom. He had a pencil behind his ear and a pad of paper on his desk. He was looking at me and thinking out loud. “The first thing we have to do before we figure out the code is figure out what ‘a favorite in Miami’ is,” he said. “Hmmmm, do you think they mean Miami, Florida? And what sort of things are favorites in Florida … seashells? Pink flamingoes?”

  “Derek,” I said, looking over to see if he was willing for me to drop the Captain part. “Derek,” I went on. “I have been thinking and thinking. It can’t be Miami, Florida. It has to be Miami Bathburn. Aunt Miami.”

  “Oh, of course. Of course,” said Derek. “Flissy, you are showing brilliance.”

  “Don’t forget the long division,” I said.

  “Oh, right,” he said. I got another Derek-coal-fire smile then, the kind that tingled all through me and went straight to my toes and then came swimming back round to the top of my head.

  “What would be a favorite with Miami?” said Derek. He was whispering now, which was a good thing because suddenly Uncle Gideon was casting a heavyhearted shadow out in the hall. It was a large shadow and fell across the floorboards and stopped just at Derek’s doorway. Uncle Gideon paused, then took a few steps backwards. He seemed to be listening and watching all the time and then looking at me as if I’d just jumped out from behind a door and surprised him. He never seemed to get used to my face.

  “Hello, Fliss, how are you? Okay? It’s time to eat. It’s a great summer evening. You’ll like this stew, I think, I hope. We haven’t had a dinner on the porch in ages. What do you say, Derek? Do you think we can drag him out of there, Fliss, you and I, as a team? You pull on one leg and I’ll pull on the other? What do you say? We’ve never done anything together. We might be unstoppable, you know.”

  I folded my arms in front of me. Some of Uncle Gideon’s jokes were very flat and childish, I thought. “I daresay Derek won’t want to come out at all,” I said.

  “What, Flissy? Don’t be silly,” said Derek. He had hidden the paper with the numbers on it when he heard Uncle Gideon’s voice in the hallway, and now he put several books on top of the paper and looked over at me. Then he stood up and walked across his room as if nothing had been wrong in the first place.

  Derek paused at the threshold of his door. I waited. Uncle Gideon waited. Down below, The Gram and Miami waited. Derek looked over at me and I looked back at him. There was a split second when the whole house seemed to stop; even the wind was quiet for a moment. And then after weeks and weeks of being in his room, Derek set out towards the landing.

  When he got to the top of the stairs, there was a rousing cheer from Auntie, Uncle Gideon, and The Gram. And I joined in, of course. We all clapped and called and cheered with every step Derek took towards the porch.

  Downstairs, Uncle Gideon patted Derek on the back. I thought perhaps Uncle Gideon had a cold, because his eyes were all wet and he got out his handkerchief.

  We sat on the porch at a table, looking at the sea. This evening it was rolling in and out in a calm, quiet way, reminding me of a lion that was taking a nap for a moment. There was a beautiful pink sunset wrapped round the sky.

  Auntie Miami stood up before we ate and said she wanted to do her favorite Juliet lines just one more time. “I know. I know. You’ve all heard it before. Perhaps I am a bit of a dreamer, but he’s much worse than I am.” She pointed to Uncle Gideon, who closed his eyes and took the punch without retaliating. “But it is a lovely part and I did so want to play that role,” she said. “Do you really think I would make a good Juliet?”

  “You have great stage presence,” said Uncle Gideon. “You really do. When you are in a room, no one sees anyone but you. Isn’t that so, Derek?”

  Aunt Miami smiled softly.

  So with the sky darkening and churning like a stew being stirred, and the smell of salt and clam chowder in the air, she began, “O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?”

  And suddenly, Derek and I both perked up at the same moment, I looking once again into his brown, win-some eyes. Suddenly, we both knew what “a favorite in Miami” was. We both wanted to jump up and shout, “That’s it! That’s it. We’ve got it!!!”

  Well, we hadn’t exactly cracked the code, but we knew now that Auntie’s favorite lines would help. So when Auntie and Uncle Gideon were doing the dishes later, singing together at the top of their lungs in the kitchen, Derek went into the library quietly and snatched Auntie’s copy of Romeo and Juliet. Just as he was leaving the library, The Gram caught him up and gave him a hug and said, “So glad you decided to join the land of the living, dear.”

  Soon enough, Derek slipped upstairs and copied over those lines, Auntie’s favorites.

  O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?

  Deny thy father and refuse thy name,

  Or, if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love,

  And I’ll no longer be a Capulet.

  I hung over him as he worked, thinking how smart he was and how glad I was that we had the same birthday. I was thinking perhaps we could have a joint birthday party on the day before President Roosevelt had his celebration. We’d have to have two birthday cakes, I thought, because Derek liked chocolate and I didn’t. Well, I wouldn’t mind a chocolate birthday cake with vanilla icing, if that’s what Derek wanted. I could eat just the icing. I’d have done anything for Derek, really. Of course, I didn’t want him to know that, because he might then have sent me on all sorts of dreadful errands.

  Just now, Derek was saying, “You know, Danny and Gideon used to write notes to each other in code when they were boys. I mean years and years before I was here.”

  “They did?” I said.

  “Yes, they did,” said Derek.

  “Well, then,” I said, “that makes sense, doesn’t it.”

  I was thinking how super Derek was to be helping me with the code. He had even taken a flashlight with him to bed to study the numbers in the letter. He was also reading King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table late at night with that flashlight. And he had made a rather big drawing of Sir Gawain. He said he wanted to be like him when he grew up, except Sir Gawain would not have had a paralyzed arm.

  “Now that I have the lines written out, we’ll be able to hold the numbers up and see if anything comes to us,” said Derek. “Keep thinking about these lines, Flissy, even when you’re sleeping. Sometimes you can figure out things in dreams.”

  I looked at him when he was turned away and couldn’t see me. I was wondering what his dreams were like at night. I wanted to float above him then and s
catter sweet dreams on his pillow as he slept.

  For that whole morning, Auntie’s favorite lines seemed to repeat inside my head. And later, when The Gram and I were doing our cleaning rounds, those lines seemed to follow me about. We started with Aunt Miami’s room. My job was to pull off all the pillowcases and stuff the fat pillows into clean, fresh ones. I opened the windows and drew back the curtains.

  Winnie and Danny had been too busy to do any cleaning in London. We had a housekeeper who took care of everything in our flat. I wasn’t at all used to this sort of thing. I was feeling very much like the Little Princess just now, the way she had to work all the time carrying coal about in buckets in the snow. I wasn’t working terribly hard, actually. In fact, I was up on the mattress lying flat on my back, enjoying the cool, clean, new cotton sheet. Then I started trying to stand on my head, but I kept falling over.

  The Gram said, “Flissy dear, I can’t put on the top sheet unless you move. Practice that on the floor for a moment, will you?” So I jumped off the bed, trying to land on the hooked rug The Gram had made and I did. I jumped smack onto the center of a woolen hand-hooked rose. I was thinking about those Juliet lines, but not wanting The Gram to know, I started whistling, which I’m not very good at.

  As I was whistling, I looked about on Auntie’s dressing table at some of her photographs and pressed flowers and things like that. There, lying next to a lilac-colored jewelry box, was a journal. The Gram was shaking out a new clean top sheet for Miami’s bed. It lifted and billowed up above her like a great white parachute and then, as it floated down towards the bed, for just one moment, I opened Auntie’s journal.

  It read, “Oh, will I ever meet anyone in this wretched lonely place?” Then the sheet was down and The Gram was tucking it in and I closed the journal.

  “Busy, busy, busy,” said The Gram just then as she spread the sheet tightly round the mattress. “Too busy to take a side and tuck?”

  I went over to help her. But the whole time after that, I was feeling sad for Auntie because she was lonely and wanted to have a husband and be married. So I said to The Gram, “Does Auntie ever go on dates to the movies and all that?”

  “Flissy, you are full of bright ideas,” said The Gram. “Are you ready to move on to Derek’s room? Will you carry the laundry basket? And if you happen to meet up with an eligible bachelor, send him along our way, will you?”

  I was going to ask her what she meant exactly by “an eligible bachelor” but she’d already moved on, leaving me to drag the big, heavy laundry basket across the hall. I was huffing and puffing and thinking again of the Little Princess and feeling just like her, so terribly over-worked, except that I wasn’t covered in coal, and my clothes weren’t all raggedy and torn. But I had the same miserable sad look on my face. I stopped and looked in the mirror outside of Derek’s room. I tilted my head so that I looked even more sorry and tired.

  Derek was on the floor, cutting out a shield for Sir Gawain with his one good hand. Luckily, it was his left that got all paralyzed. Still, it’s very hard to do all sorts of things with only one hand. For instance, how do you put tooth powder on a toothbrush with only one hand? How do you put on a glove? How do you open a bottle of root beer?

  The Gram and I took his sheets off his bed. Then I went over to the windows and pulled the cords, and the curtains slipped away and all kinds of bright summer light filled Derek’s room. I looked over at Derek. He just went on cutting out Sir Gawain’s shield. Then he held up Sir Gawain’s sword that he had made out of shirt cardboard and glued-on glitter. He pointed it towards the ceiling, and the sun came through the fluttering leaves outside and shone on Derek’s sparkling sword. Then I thought he looked so handsome, so ferocious, so daring, and so sweet that I felt rather giddy, or dizzy, as they say here in America.

  The Gram went trotting off to hang laundry outside with Miami, and I was left to bring down the basket of sheets. When I got downstairs, I noticed there was someone at the front door. Through the curtains, I could see quite clearly it was a policeman. In England we call them bobbies and they carry wooden clubs on their belts. The American policeman was wearing a gun and holster, reminding me of the cowboys I had expected to find when I got to America.

  The policeman was knocking loudly, and suddenly I appeared to be all alone downstairs.

  “Aunt Miami,” I called out in the hallway. No one answered. No one was in the kitchen either, and Uncle Gideon wasn’t in the library. I knew Derek was upstairs in his room, but I also knew he wasn’t always keen on leaving it, so I went myself to the door.

  “Hello,” I said, peering out at the policeman.

  “Is Mr. Bathburn here?” said the policeman.

  “No, I don’t believe he is at the moment,” I said. “Is everything all right?”

  “Perhaps,” he said. “I’m just coming down from the White Whale Inn. Just checking around about something.”

  “Oh,” I said. I looked out the side window, and I could now see The Gram and Aunt Miami in the garden, hanging laundry. Miami’s cotton dresses danced this way and that on the clothesline. “My grandmother is out there,” I said, looking towards the garden, which the Bathburns called the yard.

  “Okay, thanks,” he said, walking off the porch and going round to the north side of the house. Through the lace at the window on the side, I could see The Gram’s face full of darkness, even in the sunlight. And Auntie too was looking down. I watched the policeman talking with them, gesturing and pointing among all those dresses and shirts and towels and white sheets that were flapping and flying in the wind.

  Sometimes ideas can come out of nowhere, as if they simply drop from the sky. Like last week, when a skinny loaf of bread fell from the clouds and landed on the sand in front of Aunt Miami and me as if by magic. We couldn’t imagine where that loaf had come from. Finally, we looked up and saw a seagull circling above us, waiting to pick up the loaf of bread he had just dropped.

  In that very way, an idea came to me out of the blue the next afternoon. I was thinking about Winnie and Danny and the day they brought me to Bottlebay, Maine. After turning away and refusing to speak to Danny for a while, Uncle Gideon had finally gone off for a walk down the beach with him. They took something in a large box with them. The Gram had never asked Winnie into the house that day, so Winnie had sat with me on the porch with her arm round me. She was crying and hugging me. I just lay against her shoulder being very quiet. It’s always that way when someone cries about you. You just sort of wait till its over, not really knowing what to do. I sat there feeling terribly important and terribly sad all at the same time. Then Winnie clicked open her purse. She had a pair of white gloves in there, and her purse smelled of face powder and lipstick. She pulled out a plain sealed envelope. She didn’t say anything about it. She just hugged me and we let the swing rock gently like a cradle.

  Then Danny and Uncle Gideon were coming back. Winnie had said to me, “It’s a good thing they’re patching things up. When you see a real war, suddenly you want to stop with your own petty battles, don’t you? And Danny has missed everyone so terribly.”

  Just now I was remembering seeing Danny and Uncle Gideon going off together down the beach. It was a blurry memory and only now when I thought of it, I seemed to recall that when they came back that afternoon, they didn’t have the box with them.

  Then I remembered how Winnie had quietly handed me the envelope. “Can you do something very grown up for me?” she had said. “Can I trust you not to open this? Will you give it to Uncle Gideon a week before Christmas? Promise?”

  I had taken the sealed envelope and stuffed it under my suitcase in the closet so I wouldn’t be tempted to peek, because British children are very trustworthy. I only looked at the outside of the envelope now and again and quickly stuffed it away.

  I was remembering it all clearly now as I sat in the window seat in the hallway upstairs at the front of the house. The sunlight was dropping across my lap, and I was lining up a row of English pennies
and ha’pennies that I brought from England, making a lovely design with them amongst the velvet-covered buttons on the window seat cushion. Then I looked out the window. Uncle Gideon was taking his long walk down the beach alone. I studied his back as he moved along, leaving footprints in the sand behind him. They made a zigzag pattern, and I noticed he was carrying a folder under his arm.

  I decided to go outside. There was a hot summer wind blowing across the water, and I walked up into the sandy grass next to the house on the ridge, thinking about that folder. I picked some stray wildflowers that were growing in a protected area near the road. All the while, the clouds above piled up in great white mountains against the blue sky and then were knocked down and spread out by the wind.

  I brought the wildflower bouquet back into the house and found a jar in the kitchen and filled it with water. “Busy. Busy. Busy, as usual, Flissy,” said The Gram as I passed the pantry.

  I took the bouquet up to Derek’s room. He was at his desk. I set the bouquet on a little table.

  “What have you got, Flissy?” he said, looking out from behind the cover of his book, which showed a knight rushing forward with a sword.

  “Oh, just something for you that I picked,” I said, turning in a circle. He lowered his book a little more. He sat up very tall. His cheeks went ever so slightly pink. He cleared his throat and then he looked round at everything in the room, except the bouquet.

  I skipped quickly out into the hall. I skipped up and down along the banister and then I ended up sitting in the window seat again.

  The sun had changed positions now and was lying on the floor, making a bright yellow square at my feet. I looked out the window and saw Uncle Gideon on the beach, coming back now towards the house. I noticed with a jolt that he was no longer carrying the folder and that was when another great idea came into my head.