by Susan Adrian
Clover touches my arm, so I look at her. She’s smiling big. “It’s so pretty, isn’t it?”
“It’s so pretty,” I echo.
My head feels foggy, the tiredness of not sleeping and the time difference between here and home clouding it. We got on the plane at nine p.m. in San Diego—bedtime—but it’s past five p.m. now, and we didn’t sleep much on the way here.
I don’t know if I think the house is pretty or not, but I hope it has a nice bed.
* * *
—
We have our own room in the attic, which Grandmother says used to be the nursery. She winked again when she said that, but I don’t know why. I follow my feet slowly up the narrow stairs, and Grandmother opens a tall white door. “Here you are!” she says. “I hope you love it.”
It looks like the pictures, but smaller when you see it all at once. There are two big beds, one on each side of the room, with fluffy white bedspreads. A dark wood floor stretches between them, and a sloped ceiling that I want to touch, to run my fingers along as far as I can reach. A big window sits evenly between the beds, bigger than me, with giant shutters and a bench underneath you can sit on, and white curtains. In the corner there’s a dollhouse, a rocking horse that’s too small to ride, and a shelf of books. The room looks old, and not like anything I know. But it feels warm and welcoming. Like it wants us to be here.
“Oh!” Clover squeaks. “It’s beautiful! Mom grew up here?”
“Not just your mother,” Grandmother says. “I did too. And your great-grandmother before that. And her mother.” She rests a hand on my shoulder, and I want to squirm away—I don’t like being touched like that—but I just step forward into the room, reaching up to touch the ceiling. The wood is smooth, like I hoped. I go to the window and look out at the green square, the red and brown buildings rising around it. I like this window. I want to sit here tomorrow, just sit and look at the city spread out like a map.
Clover’s stomach growls, and Grandmother laughs. “Yes. I did promise dinner. Come on, and then you can rest.”
We eat dinner—cheese pizza, which I nibble at even though the cheese is wrong, too thick and too sharp—and I make it through without having to say anything. Grandmother keeps smiling at us. Grandfather I don’t really look at yet. There’s something about him that bothers me. It’s the way he looks at me, I think, like he’s disapproving. After dinner we call Mom. Clover chatters to her about the plane and the house and lots of things. I say hi.
I get more and more tired, until my head feels like it’s going to float away. Finally Grandmother tells us to go up to our room and go to bed if we want. Even though it’s light outside, it’s late enough, she says. Jet lag shouldn’t be too bad.
When we get back to the nursery, I only get as far as the doorway. I’m too tired to take another step. Everything feels fuzzy, blurry.
Clover goes to the window. She gazes out at the green square and London and asks me to do something. Look outside, I think.
I’m too tired for even that. I feel everything hit me at once: the plane, the people, the airport, all the voices and bright lights, no sleep, all the changes, all the holding everything in when I wanted to be feeling things and shouting loud. So many new things. So, so many hours of concentrating and talking and paying attention when I just wanted to be by myself. At home. In our room, in my own bed, where I know what everything will be like. Here it’s the wrong food, wrong sounds, wrong textures, wrong people. Wrong.
“Wrong,” I whisper. “Wrong wrong wrong.”
I think I need to scream, to let out the pressure in my head, the too much. I want to hold it in. I don’t want to do this the first night. But I don’t think I can stop it. I feel like my body is going to explode if I don’t scream, and I can’t….
I drop to the floor, hug my legs, and close my eyes. It helps to get small. To rock in my own rhythm. Not the world’s.
“Fergus, are you all right?”
I hear Clover dimly, but I can’t reply. I rock, keeping my eyes shut tight, the floor hard against my tailbone, which already hurts from the plane. I moan a little, the rhythm the same as the rocking. My chest aches, stretching, like something inside is trying to escape. The moan changes slowly into a scream, the way a siren can’t help getting louder. It feels bad—I know I shouldn’t scream, not here—but good at the same time, to be letting it out. It helps the too much pressure.
“It’s okay,” Clover says somewhere near me. “It’s okay, whatever you need to do. But I’m going to sing, okay? I’m just going to sing, and you can listen if you want.”
There’s knocking behind me. I rock, and keep screaming. Let it out, all of it. Let the wrongness go. That’s what Mom says. Let the wrongness go.
“Be right back,” Clover says. I feel her absence, a space of cold air, and hear voices. They’re too harsh, they’re wrong, and I feel worse, like I might spin off into blackness. Then she’s back, not touching me, but sitting right next to me, solid.
“Alouette, gentille alouette,” she starts, low.
Clover’s voice is like water, calm blue ocean water circling me, soothing me. I listen to it. The scream gets a little quieter, the siren dying down to a moan again, so I can hear.
“Alouette, je te plumerai….”
I focus on her voice, picture that ocean. A Greek ocean like I’ve seen in books, so clear, a magical, bright blue. The ocean Odysseus sailed through.
“Alouette, gentille alouette. Alouette, je te plumerai.”
The moan stops, and my breath starts to come back to normal. The pressure is almost gone. I like this song. Weirdly, it’s about plucking the feathers off a bird, in French.
“Je te plumerai la tête, je te plumerai la tête. Et la tête, et la tête! Alouette! Alouette! Ohhhh…”
I open my eyes. I see Clover right next to me, watching the floor as she sings, her hands folded, a line in the middle of her forehead, like Mom’s.
Behind her, at the window, I see a boy.
He’s about my age, dressed all in green. He has reddish hair that curls wildly like mine, pink cheeks, thick eyebrows, and a pointed nose. He’s floating there in the window, watching us. Floating outside a sixth-story window.
He waves one hand and smiles at me. He has strange baby teeth, with too much gum showing, but I still want to smile back. To grin back.
“Clover,” I whisper so she’ll see him too. But before the word is out of my mouth, he turns and flies away. In a second he’s out of sight, like he was never there.
Clover stops singing. She sits back on her heels. “Are you feeling better?”
I shut my eyes tight again. I don’t want to tell her about the boy. It would be too hard to find the words, to even try to explain whatever just happened. Besides, he left when I tried to show her. Maybe he came for me. I like that thought.
I think I’ll keep that secret to myself.
I wake up in the middle of the night and can’t go to sleep again for a couple of hours. I stay in bed anyway, watching the curtains sway in the breeze from the open window. The lights of London aren’t visible from the bed, but it feels different from home. I hope we can have fun here. I hope that I’m wrong about Grandfather and that Mom gets all her studying done and passes the bar exam. She could be a lawyer soon! That’s exciting.
I hope that I do my job well and Fergus makes it through this trip okay. I have to be his person, since Mom’s not here.
Sometimes—almost always at night—I wish that everything could be easier. I wish that Fergus didn’t have to struggle so much. That Mom was home more. That Dad hadn’t died. I wish I could stay after school and do choir instead of hurrying home. I always have to be there.
But I can’t stop my brain from worrying about Fergus, about Mom, about school, about things I know are silly. In daylight I don’t allow those thoughts to get through. I d
on’t want to be that kind of person. I want to be calm, and sure, and able to handle anything.
I glance over at Fergus—snoring gently—close my eyes, and hum songs until I go back to sleep.
* * *
—
In the morning we go downstairs to the main apartment, where Grandmother and Grandfather live. It’s beautiful, with gold light pouring in the windows onto flowered peach wallpaper and heavy, dark furniture. It looks like one of those British PBS shows Mom watches. Everything feels historical and plush and, well, nice. Not like our flea-market furniture at home. I try to imagine Mom here as a little girl, as a teenager, but I can’t. She doesn’t fit.
Do I fit? Mom always says I’m just like her. Maybe that’s why I feel strange here.
At the bottom of the stairs the wall is packed with old pictures, mostly black-and-white. There are even a few that are paintings, not photographs. I stop to look, and Fergus waits a few feet away. I lean in close to get a better look at a picture of a girl dressed in white, her hair down her back. She’s staring off into the distance, with a secret smile. She looks a little like Mom, I think, like me. The picture next to it is of the same girl with two boys, both younger than her, in old-fashioned suits, their arms around each other. Her brothers, probably.
“Do you think they’re our relatives?” I ask.
“Every last one.” Grandmother pokes her head around the corner, her eyes crinkling up. Her hair’s in a long braid today. She points at the picture of the three together. “That one has a special and wonderful story. But come and have breakfast. I’ll introduce you to them later.”
We follow her around the corner to a little kitchen tucked in the back of the house. There’s a gleaming black stove taking up most of the space, almost bigger than the refrigerator next to it. Fergus runs a finger along the counter, a smooth, swirled marble. He leans down really close to it so he can see the pattern. I nod to Grandfather, who’s reading the newspaper at a round table. He nods back. It smells good in here, like the ghost of bacon.
“Is this the original kitchen?” I ask.
Grandmother laughs. “Oh, no. The original kitchen was most of the bottom floor. With the poor servants having to run all the way up the back stairs with food trays. A lovely young man lives there now who teaches literature at the university. He visits us sometimes, for inspiration. Sit, sit. Fergus—your mother says you like buttered toast in triangles, yes? Clover, would you like eggs? Fried?”
“I’ll have toast too, please,” I say. “I always feel like fried eggs are looking at me.”
Grandfather snorts. Grandmother bustles around, getting breakfast. I check on Fergus. He seems all right, standing there looking at the kitchen, at the flowered wallpaper, running his finger back and forth along the counter. I sit next to Grandfather. He glances at me over the paper but keeps reading.
This is awkward. I don’t know how to start a conversation, or even if I should. I stare at the table, looking at all the little scratches and dents and rings. This table must have been here for a long time. Everything in this house feels old, worn…but in a good way. Worn by our family. It’s weird that we’ve never been here before.
I really want to talk to Mom, to ask questions about all of this, about growing up here. When we talked to her last night, her voice sounded so far away and small. With the time difference, she’s asleep now.
“Jack,” Grandmother says, spreading butter on thick toast, “ask them.”
Grandfather clears his throat and lays down his paper. “Would you two like to visit the British Museum with me this morning?”
Fergus starts to rock back and forth on his heels, his hands fluttering around his face. Flying, he calls that. “British Museum,” he says, low. “British Museum.”
I smile. “Yes,” I say. “Thank you. That’s a definite yes.”
“How do you know?” Grandfather asks.
I frown. “How do I know what?”
Grandfather points at Fergus, who’s still rocking, looking at the wall. “How do you know he wants to go? He didn’t say yes.” His face is so serious, I can’t tell if he’s really interested or mocking.
I bite my lip. I have to assume he’s interested. “His hands do that when he’s excited about something, or happy,” I say. “Rocking can mean he’s either upset or excited, but if you pair it with the hands, and repeating the words, he’s telling us yes.”
Grandfather grunts. “But why doesn’t he just say yes? He can speak normally.”
“Jack,” Grandmother interrupts. “Enough.” She sets two plates of buttered toast, cut in perfect triangles, on the table. “The museum it is, then,” she says cheerfully. “After you get back, I can introduce you to your illustrious relatives.” She smiles, looking so much like Mom that it startles me for a moment. I rub my finger over a dent in the table as Fergus sits next to me and eats his toast.
I take a deep breath and let it out slowly. It’s all okay. Everything will be okay, even without Mom. The British Museum is a great start…even with Grandfather.
I see what Mom meant about Grandfather when she was talking to Great-Aunt Tilly and didn’t think I heard. Cold and distant, she said. He doesn’t listen to anyone. That’s why she left, why she never came back.
I glance at him again and take a bite of my toast. It’ll all be okay. It’ll be fine.
* * *
—
The best thing about this neighborhood is that it’s on a square: that’s what it’s called, and all the houses are built in an actual square around a massive park in the center, an iron fence barely holding in the explosion of green. Grandmother and Grandfather’s house is on the corner, directly across from the open gate. We stand on their steps and look at the park. There’s a little green building just outside the fence, a café. The sun is warm and bright, lighting up the trees like a fairyland. It looks different from the parks in San Diego, with unfamiliar tall, leafy trees instead of eucalyptus, but the feeling is the same. It seems green and calm, a place to escape to.
I turn around to ask Grandfather about it—how old it is, whether those are the original trees—but I don’t even get the words out before he swears loudly, and I jump.
“So sorry,” he says immediately. “It’s only…does that boy ever do what he’s meant to?”
I spin back just in time to see Fergus disappear into the park.
Oh, I should’ve known he’d do that. It’s so tempting. I kind of wanted to go explore it myself. I wouldn’t, of course, because we’re supposed to go to the museum. But I wanted to.
“I’ll go get him,” I say, and run down the steps. “Be right back.”
I think I hear swearing again behind me, but I don’t look. I have to find Fergus and get us back on track for the morning.
I trot through the open iron gate. A small group of trees and plants is in front when you come in, and a path that goes right and left on either side of it. There are actually far fewer trees in here than I thought, once you’re inside. On the other side of the group of trees, another path heads toward the middle. Surprisingly, there are a lot of people in here, walking through, lounging on the grass, sitting on the benches. I shade my eyes and squint in all directions, trying to spot Fergus’s rumpled head in the middle of all the people. I don’t see him. I have to find him. Do I go left, right, or straight?
I remember Fergus saying that in the old mazes, you always go right. I run to the right, past dark bushes sprinkled with little white flowers that smell sweet. I keep going, looking everywhere. When I get to the other corner with no Fergus, I take one of the middle paths, to the center of the park. There’s a fountain, with benches circling it. It’s oddly flat, with a grate all the way around to drain it, and jets of water bubbling up all over. Children squat in the shallow water, their hands over the jets, laughing. Fat pigeons waddle past. Busy people with headphones walk throu
gh, drinking coffee.
No Fergus.
I thought for sure he’d come to the middle, to the fountain. I don’t see Grandfather, either—maybe he didn’t follow us in. I frown, feeling a little sick. I’m not doing very well at taking care of Fergus. Five minutes into the first day and I already lost him.
I follow the ball of light through the trees, past all the people. I’m supposed to be somewhere else, I know that, but I couldn’t help it. The little light danced right in front of the gate, twisting in the air like a live, bright leaf, and when it flew into the park, I had to follow it. I had to see how it could move like that.
It could be a spark, or some strangely lit piece of fluff. But it looks like a will-o’-the-wisp.
In folklore, will-o’-the-wisps are floating lights that lead travelers where they’re not supposed to go, like bogs or quicksand. They’re called Hessdalen lights in Norway, and Martebo lights in Sweden. In the movie Brave they’re spirits who help people. I’m not worried about following this one. It’s a park, so even if it was the bad kind of spirit, there isn’t a bog or anything I could fall into.
I almost crash into a man jogging the other way, and he looks at me squinty-eyed. He doesn’t look at the light, though. I wonder if he even notices the light, if anyone else does.
It is small, but it seems obvious to me.
The smell of the park surrounds me, earth and trees and flowers, so strong I can taste it in the back of my throat. The path stretches ahead through an arcade with thin trees bending over it, following an iron arch. There aren’t any people on this part of the path, so I can focus on the ball of light, zipping away too fast down the lane of trees. I run, my hands flying.
The light stops suddenly, and I catch up to it hovering in front of a little birdhouse attached to one of the trees. The house is brightly painted with flowers, and I realize the hole is too big for it to be a birdhouse—it’s more like a message box. The sign says OPEN ME! CONTINUE THE STORY. The light ball dances in front of my face, and I reach out, not quite touching it. It’s warm, like a candle. Definitely not a spark or fluff. The light is searing so close to my eyes. I squeeze them shut.