“Uh-huh.”
I picked up the deed that was closest to me on the table. It was bigger than I remembered it, maybe five inches by seven inches—bigger than the whole of the eight square inches of Inchland that Carly and I owned put together. “Deed of Land,” it said on the top, with fancy gold curlicues around the edges. I skimmed the long paragraphs of legal language on both sides of the deed: “Witnesseth that . . .” “this conveyance and everything herein contained shall be wholly subject to a perpetual easement for ingress and egress, to, from, over and upon the tract herein conveyed for the use of the owner . . .”
Perpetual sounded like forever. There was a seal at the bottom of the back side of the deed, from the Klondike Big Inch Land Co. Inc.
“I think it’s still good,” I told Carly.
“Cooper, what if we went there?”
“To Canada? For our winter vacation?”
“No. Not with Mom. Just us.”
There was no point in asking her how she expected to get there, whether she thought we could walk a thousand miles, or however far it was to the Yukon, or whether she thought Mom would be as indifferent to our absence as Inchitella’s parents were to hers. Or what she thought we’d find when we got there—the real castle, the real stable, the real flying rabbit.
“I wish we could,” I said.
“Maybe Gran-Dan would take us. He must want to go there, too.”
“No,” I said. “Gran-Dan didn’t want his deeds anymore. That’s why he gave them to us. To get rid of them.”
Besides, Inchland was just more artsiness, for bums who didn’t want to work and crazy moms who didn’t do what they were supposed to do to take care of their kids.
“We’ll never get rid of our deeds, will we, Cooper?”
“No.”
“We’ll keep them forever and ever, won’t we? And we’ll go there someday?”
“Sure,” I said. There was no harm in pretending. “We’ll go there someday.”
That Saturday morning I slept late and didn’t bother waking up for Gran-Dan’s phone call.
The morning was cold. Shards of frost lay littered on the lawn like broken glass. Once I’d roused myself from bed and gobbled down a bowl of cereal for breakfast, I found Carly in her room, seated at the little table by her window.
“Where’s Mom?” I asked.
“She’s asleep.”
She hadn’t slept late for months. Wild hope stirred in my chest. Instantly I tried to douse my joy with guilt. I shouldn’t be rooting for a return of her long months of sadness, when she lay in a darkened room all day long, not caring about anything.
“She said she was tired,” Carly added.
The geyser of hope inside me gurgled again. I dropped into the little chair across from Carly.
“You need to get a bigger chair,” I told her. “For when normal-size people come to visit.”
“Oh, Cooper.” Carly gave the first smile I had seen since the night of the play. Maybe she was grateful, too, that our mom was still sleeping. “You’re normal-size for a sixth grader, and I’m normal-size for a second grader. And Inchitella and Parsley are normal-size for Inchies.”
“How are Inchitella and Parsley?” I could see the Inchland deeds still spread out on the table.
“They’re fine.” She paused. “I was wondering if maybe we could make them be grownups, so that they could get married.”
“Sure. What about Button? Is she older, too?”
“I don’t think she gets older. Because she’s magic. Regular people get older, but flying bunnies always stay the same age.”
“Sounds good to me.”
“If they grow up, and if they get married, they could have a baby. A teensy-tiny, itty-bitty baby,” Carly suggested.
“Boy or girl?”
Carly looked up at the ceiling, the way she sometimes did when she was thinking hard about something.
“Both. Teeny-tiny, itty-bitty Inchie twins. And we can go see them when we visit Inchland. Do you think they’ll know who we are? When we get there?”
“Maybe,” I said, not really paying attention to the question. I was listening to see if I heard any sound from Mom’s room, any sign that she was awake and stirring. The longer she slept, the better it was for all of us.
I spent the afternoon at Ben’s house, working with Ben and Spencer on a science project, leaving Carly at home with Mom. We had to design a racing car powered by a mousetrap. The goal was to see how far it would go and how fast it would go. Actually, the first goal was to see if it would go at all.
After two hours, our car shot across Ben’s gleaming living room floor at dazzling speed, and Ben’s mom had decided that the finger Spencer caught in the mousetrap on one of our early tries wasn’t broken, just bruised and battered. She gave him a bag of frozen peas to hold against it to keep the swelling down.
“Do you think mousetraps are cruel and unusual punishment for mice?” Spencer asked, gazing down at his wounded hand lying flattened under a pound of frozen peas.
“No,” Ben said. “The mouse is killed instantly. It doesn’t feel anything.”
“My finger feels something,” Spencer said mournfully. “I think mousetraps are cruel and unusual punishment for fingers.”
Spencer and I walked home from Ben’s together. My house was halfway in between Ben’s house and Spencer’s house, the way my family used to be halfway in between the order and calm of Ben’s house and the noisy mess of Spencer’s. Now my family belonged on Mars.
We were mostly silent on the way. Spencer kicked a stone but didn’t bother pretending that he was scoring the winning goal in the finals for the World Cup. Despite all Spencer’s joking, his finger must really hurt.
“Ben’s lucky,” I said as we neared my yard.
“Why?”
Didn’t Spencer know? “Because his house is perfect, and his parents are perfect, and he’s perfect.”
“Are you implying that I’m not perfect?” Spencer asked with mock indignation.
“You know what I mean.”
“Maybe it’s boring being perfect,” Spencer said.
“Does Ben look bored to you?”
“No,” Spencer admitted.
We reached my house; although the dusk was deepening, all the lights were turned off. I hoped Carly was out with Mom, and not cowering there in the semidarkness.
“Hey,” Spencer said in a low voice. “Don’t look now, but somebody is coming.”
Despite Spencer’s warning, I whirled around. Lindsay and her friend Allison were walking toward us.
“Hi!” Allison called to us.
“Hi!” Spencer said back.
Lindsay didn’t say anything.
I didn’t say anything.
“We’re out for a walk,” Allison said, as the two girls approached where we were standing.
“So are we,” Spencer said. “We were working on our mousetrap car, at Ben’s house.”
“Wow!” Allison said. “We were working on our mousetrap car, at Tamara’s house!”
“This is Cooper’s house,” Spencer said, pointing to it.
“It is?” Allison asked, as if stunned by the news. Lindsay was staring very hard at the ground.
“Wow,” Allison went on. “We didn’t know you lived here. I mean, Lindsay didn’t know that Cooper lived here. I mean, we both thought somebody else lived here. We were just walking by. You know, on our way home from Tamara’s house. Where we were working on our mousetrap car. The way you were working on your mousetrap car.”
Lindsay finally looked up and gave me a quick, sheepish smile.
“Did your mousetrap car turn out okay?” she asked. It was obvious that she was speaking to me, not to Spencer.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Except that I caught my finger in the mousetrap, and now I may have to have it amputated,” Spencer added.
Both girls laughed.
I tried to think of something funny of my own to say, but I couldn’t. But maybe it
didn’t matter. Ben was perfect, and Spencer was funny, but it was obvious that Lindsay liked me, not Ben, not Spencer. And she liked me even after “Pasta Live,” even though my mother was weird and their mothers were normal.
“Well, I guess we’d better go,” Lindsay said.
“Sure,” I said. I gave Lindsay a huge smile, and she gave me a huge smile back.
Reluctantly, I headed up the path toward home.
“If I die from the amputation, you can have my iPod,” Spencer called after me.
“You goof,” I called back, turning around to smile at Lindsay one last time.
I had been afraid I’d find Carly huddled on the couch again, hidden under a blanket. But the house seemed to be completely empty. Mom must be out somewhere. I hoped Carly was with her, unless she was playing at Jodie’s house; but Jodie’s house was dark, too.
Just to be sure, I checked Carly’s room; she wasn’t there. Relieved, I went into my own room, but as I was about to sprawl on my bed, I saw it: a sheet of paper left prominently on my pillow, where I wouldn’t be able to miss it.
In Carly’s big second-grade printing, all in caps, I read:
DEER COOPER
I HAV GONE TO INCHLAND
LOVE CARLY
18
Don’t panic! I told myself sternly. I took a few slow, deep breaths to calm my racing heart.
Carly was only seven. She couldn’t have gone very far. I had last seen her before I left for Ben’s, around one o’clock. Mom had still been home then. It was five-thirty now. I didn’t know exactly when she had left the note on my pillow, but it might have been just an hour ago, or even less. How far could a little girl walk in an hour? Of course, depending on when Mom had left, it might be a whole lot longer.
Which way would she have headed? Inchland was in the frozen Yukon, so north. But would Carly know which direction was north? Was that something a second grader would know?
For lack of a better idea, I threw on my jacket, hurried outside, and started walking north. The mountains were on the west, so north was always the direction with the mountains on your left. I tried to think of what Carly would be wearing. I should have checked the closet before I left the house to see which of her coats was missing—probably the pink one. Pink was Carly’s favorite color, and she’d want to look her prettiest to meet Parsley and Inchitella.
The thought made my heart swell with Inchitella’s frozen, diamond tears.
As I walked, I looked to the right and to the left for a glimpse of pink. “Carly!” I called, just in case she had stopped to rest somewhere out of view. “Carly!” My voice sounded desperate and pathetic, calling for someone who might already be miles away, or might even just be at a friend’s house, pretending the friend’s house was Inchland. I tried to remember all of Carly’s favorite places for make-believe: the overgrown bushes at the edge of the Deer Creek Elementary field, the “castle” at the park built of plywood and old rubber tires, the tree house at the home of one of her other friends—what was her name? Katie, maybe. I should have looked all those places first; I should have started with the places where Carly might pretend to find Inchland.
Breaking into a jog, I trotted back home. The lights shining through the living room window sent my heart soaring, but then I remembered I had left them on when I went out. Still, I gave one quick check inside to see if Carly had by chance returned home before setting out again. This time, I’d be more systematic. I’d make a mental list of every possible place she could be, check each place, and then cross it off the list, starting with the places closest to home, and radiating out from there. I’d start with the school, the park, and Katie’s tree house.
At Deer Creek Elementary, my eyes searched the playground. It was hard to believe that I had been a student there just a few short months ago; I felt like I had been a middle schooler forever. There on the playground were the monkey bars where Ben and Spencer and I had loved to climb all through third grade: Ben with effortless strength and grace, Spencer always cracking us up as he was about to fall off, me watching the others, taking it all in, drawing a picture of the three of us on the monkey bars that got a blue ribbon at the school art show.
I didn’t see any flashes of pink anywhere, but it was getting too dark to see.
“Carly!”
I jogged up to the fringe of bushes at the far end of the school field. This had always been one of my own places to hide and dream. During fourth grade, Ben and Spencer had started hanging around with another kid, Matt P., and for a while I had thought they liked Matt P. better than they liked me, and I would slink off to sulk in the bushes and make up stories about a band of three pirates named Ben, Spencer, and Cooper, and how they made a fourth pirate named Matt P. walk the plank.
Carly wasn’t there hiding in the bushes.
The park was also deserted—who would go to a park after dark in December? Well, maybe a little girl who was running away to Inchland, but Carly wasn’t there. On the base of the slide, I found one toddler-size shoe. How could somebody lose a shoe? Wouldn’t you notice it was gone as soon as you started walking?
At Katie’s house, light poured from the windows into the yard. Afraid they would think I was a trespasser, I darted over to the tree in the backyard and swung myself easily up the rope ladder to the wooden platform, but I knew already that Carly wasn’t there.
My cheeks stung from the frosty air, and my fingers inside my gloves were cramped with cold. Maybe Carly had given up and returned home. Summoning hope, I ran back toward my house. She must be there by now, and if she wasn’t, I’d call Ben and Spencer and they could help me look, each of us taking a different direction: north, south, east. I would just have to hope that Carly hadn’t headed west instead.
Just as I burst, panting, into the still silent house, calling Carly’s name one last hoarse time, I heard my mother’s key opening the door into the kitchen from the garage.
Please, please, please, let Carly be with her.
Mom stumbled into the kitchen, carrying two overstuffed shopping bags; the bottom had given way on one of them, and she was struggling to hold on to it from underneath. There was no sign of Carly.
“Cooper, quick, take this bag before I drop it,” she ordered.
“Carly’s gone,” I told her. “She’s run away.”
“What do you mean, she’s run away?”
The bottom of the shopping bag gave one final rip, and everything in it cascaded onto the filthy, littered kitchen floor. Christmas presents, I saw: flat boxes that would be board games; thicker boxes that would be jigsaw puzzles; a large doll, dressed in an old-fashioned costume, with a fur-trimmed coat and hat and muff, staring up at us with glassy, unseeing eyes.
“Look what you did!” my mother yelled.
“Look what I did?” Now the fear had turned to rage. “Mom, Carly is gone. She left a note. She’s run away. To Inchland.”
“Inchland?”
How many times did I have to explain it to her? “Gran-Dan’s deeds? To the Yukon? Our imaginary country?”
I wanted to shake her, to say something that would make her turn back into the person she had been before.
“Why aren’t you out looking for her?” she demanded.
“I’ve been looking for her! What do you think I’ve been doing for the last hour? I came home to see if maybe she had come back while I was out searching, or to call Ben and Spencer and get them to help, or to call the police.”
The word police seemed to energize her. “All right, Cooper, you go back outside and look for her on foot, and I’ll search in the car.”
I imagined myself wearily circling again around the school, the park, Katie’s tree house, still calling Carly’s name, still finding nothing. What else could I do?
The doorbell rang, a sudden, sharp explosion of sound. My mother and I both ran to answer it. I got there first.
It was Jodie’s dad, and clinging to his hand was Carly.
“Look what I found!” he said. “I was driving al
ong when I saw a familiar-looking little girl walking by herself down the street, and I said, Wait, isn’t that Carly? And sure enough it was. She tried to tell me something about where she was going, but I couldn’t quite make it out. But here she is now, safe and sound.”
“Josh, thank you,” my mom said smoothly, as if seven-year-olds normally wandered around town after dark all by themselves and were given rides home again by various dads who just happened to be driving by on their errands. What if Jodie’s dad hadn’t seen Carly? How long would she have wandered in the dark all by herself?
“No problem,” Jodie’s dad said.
As soon as he left, I hugged Carly so tight I was half afraid I’d smother her.
“Cooper, stop! Cooper, I have to go to the bathroom!”
I released her, and she raced upstairs.
I turned to face my mother. “Mom. What if Jodie’s dad hadn’t found Carly? It could have been hours before anybody found her. You left her alone, again, and went off—shopping!”
“Shopping isn’t a crime, Cooper,” she said with exaggerated patience. “You sound like your grandfather.”
Her words seemed logical enough, but there was nothing logical about leaving a seven-year-old home by herself, or ruining Carly’s play, or making a scene during “Pasta Live,” or not paying the electricity bill, or organizing all the cereal boxes in the pantry at three in the morning.
I had to tell her. Even if she hadn’t listened to Jodie’s mom, I had to make her listen to me.
“Mom, there’s something wrong with you. You need to go back to the doctor. You need to be taking your medication.”
She gave a snort of bitter laughter. “And where did you get your medical degree?”
“Mom, other people can see it, too. On Thanksgiving —I could hear you talking with Jodie’s mom—”
I broke off as her face twisted with fury. She raised her hand, as if about to slap me full in the face, my mother who had never once struck me or Carly.
I backed away from her, frightened not by the possible blow but by the anger, even the hatred, that shone from her blazing eyes.
As I started up the stairs, she followed, shouting.
One Square Inch Page 11