All the King's Horses (6 page)

Then – wham! – we were walking into the front yard with Grandpa between us. Mom was running up the hill from the warehouses.

‘Thank heaven!’ she said, panting. ‘I went up the tracks as far as I dared, but I had to turn back because …’ She gestured towards the 3:15 train as it roared by, blasting its whistle at the crossing. ‘Where did you find him?’

‘By the river,’ said Colin. ‘He was fine – just looking at the water.’

Mom gave Grandpa a hug. ‘Come on into the house, Dad. You must be cold. I’ll make you some tea.’

Grandpa smiled his beautiful, empty smile and followed her inside.

‘Wow,’ I said to Colin. ‘As Grandpa would say, there’s a grand future for you in lying.’

I expected him to be pleased (usually I don’t bother to tell him he’s done something right); but
instead,
he looked sore. ‘What the heck do you mean by
that
!?’

‘Come on! There we are with Grandpa, and no way to explain how the faeries got us to him, let alone into the front yard – and you make up that river story, smooth as glass.’

‘Faeries!’ he snorted. ‘
You’re
the one who’s got a grand future in lying!’

‘Hey, you don’t have to pretend to me, remember? I was there, too!’

‘Sure you were,’ he said, in a voice like lemonade without sugar. ‘But finding Grandpa down by the river wasn’t
interesting
enough for you, so you wanted to
embellish
it.’

‘That’s not so, and you know it!’

He shrugged. ‘Have it your way, story-teller.’

I hit him – hard. He swung at me, but I caught his fist with my guard. That made him really angry, and he started punching so fast that I began to think how bad things would be ever after if I lost (which I never had) when Mom ran down the steps and pulled us apart.

‘What on earth are you
doing
!?’ she said, holding each of us by the shoulder.

Neither of us said anything, but not just because the answer was obvious. When we’d asked Grandpa to teach us to box, he’d said no. ‘
See, your mother’s like her mother – it grieves her to
see
matters settled in the ordinary way. So we don’t want to be causing her tears; she’s shed enough of those already
.’ He finally gave in, but only if we promised never, never to have fist-fights at home, only in Pennsylvania. Up until then, we’d never forgotten that promise. I was so ashamed that I couldn’t look anywhere but down.

‘What brought this about?’ asked Mom in a quiet voice that was lots worse than yelling.

‘Nothing, really,’ I whispered.

‘Right,’ muttered Colin. ‘We just … disagreed.’

‘What about?’

I snuck a glance at Colin, then we both looked up at Mom. She was almost crying, just like Grandpa had said. ‘Oh Mom!’ I said.

‘We’re so sorry!’ said Colin. ‘We’ll never, never …’

‘OK.’ But she still stood there, blinking tears away. Finally, she said, ‘Look. It’s hard on all of us, having Grandpa like this. But the only thing we can do about it is stick together.’

This wasn’t the time to explain you could have a fist-fight and still stick together, so I didn’t. Which was a good thing, because she looked at us very closely and added: ‘That doesn’t just mean no fighting. It means no secrets.’

‘Absolutely,’ said Colin, looking at her, not at me. ‘No secrets, from now on.’

Mom’s face suddenly looked a lot better. ‘Great,’ she said. ‘Let’s have some tea.’

We did, and that was that, except after we went to bed, Colin snuck into my room.

‘Just in case you think I’ve still got a grand future in lying—’

‘It’s OK,’ I said. ‘You said
no secrets from now on
; the old ones don’t count, right?’

‘Just wanted to be sure you got it,’ he whispered, looking over his shoulder at the door. ‘And look, Sarah. We
did
see Cathbad and Mongan, and we went to the Burkes’ and …’

‘Oh, for Pete’s sake.’

‘No, no! That’s what I wanted to tell you! I don’t know if you can believe this, but I … forgot. Honest. Like on a test, and everything goes blank, you know?’

‘Really?’

‘Yeah, really. And like after the test is over, when you suddenly remember the answer – bang, there it was: Cathbad and Mongan and the mission and everything else that happened before we got back and they told us Grandpa was down by the river.’ He shivered. ‘Spooky, right? I mean, you
know
the Sidhe are powerful and all, but if they can wipe out your memory like that—’

‘Yeah,’ I said, but then we heard Mom and Grandpa coming upstairs, and Colin whisked back into his room.

I lay there in the dark, thinking about what had happened after we left the laundromat, and wishing Colin hadn’t left; it would have been nice if he’d been around when it all came back to me. But it was even spookier than I’d thought. Because it didn’t come back. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t remember finding Grandpa by the river.

Notes

¹
Manannan mac Lir is pronounced
Monn
-un-aun Mak
Leer

THE NEXT MONDAY
, the bus was late, which only happens when it’s pouring. After we’d been standing at our stop for about ten minutes, the little white dog we’d seen with Jenny bounced out of one of the warehouses, and a moment later Jenny followed it. She didn’t have an umbrella, so she was soaked by the time she got to us. ‘You want to wait in our place?’ she said.

‘Oh … thanks,’ I said, ‘but we couldn’t see the bus from there.’

Jenny glanced at the warehouse, and I knew she knew we could have seen the bus just fine, but all she said was, ‘OK.’ Then she asked us what our names were, and where we’d lived before, and I kept thinking we should make room for her under the umbrella, and Colin
stood
on one foot, then the other, and it seemed like forever until the bus finally came. As we climbed on, I looked back, wondering why she’d stand in the rain just to talk to us. She smiled, showing brown stumps where her teeth should have been. ‘Have a good time,’ she said.

A good time in Wheelock School – sure. Right after the Pledge of Allegiance, Miss Turner looked at Tiffany’s math worksheets and found that she hadn’t done any of the problems for the last week; so she said Tiffany would have to go ‘Downstairs’. I’d learned by now that meant the Detention Room. I offered to help Tiffany with her math so she wouldn’t have to go, but all that did was make Miss Turner look at my sheets, which meant she saw
My Friend Flicka
on my lap and took it away. Miss Turner went to the front of the room and wrote problems on the board, telling all of us we were falling behind the Russians because they knew more math (as if it was
our
fault that they’d just launched a second Sputnik). I was beginning to glaze over, when suddenly the piece of chalk she’d just put down disappeared. She stared at the tray, then at the floor, but it was totally missing, so she went to her desk and got another piece. Most of the kids didn’t notice (I guess they were glazed over, too), but it cheered me up.

The next cheering-up thing that happened was that Tiffany sat next to me at lunch, instead of trying to sit at a table all by herself. It was so noisy we couldn’t talk much until most of the kids had left, but then she gave me a Tiffany smile and said, ‘You know Mr Crewes, that teacher I said was really nice? He was Downstairs today, and he told me he’d like to meet you. Would that be OK? He’s over there.’ She pointed across the lunch-room to a man who had one of those faces that would tell you he was a teacher in a line-up of a thousand people. He nodded in a friendly way when he saw us looking at him, but just as he got up, a short, square man teacher hurried up to him and started talking anxiously about something.

‘Who’s that?’ I said.

‘Mr Stegeth,’ she said, looking surprised I didn’t know. ‘Your brother’s teacher.’

‘Oh!’ I said. And right then, I stopped being worried that it was worry about Grandpa that was making Colin be ‘disruptive’ in class. After you’ve been in school awhile, you can tell when a teacher is the kind who teaches only the stuff in the textbook and feels threatened if kids want to know more. It doesn’t always mean the teacher is stupid – but try, just try, to tell Colin that.

Mr Crewes took care of whatever was both
ering
Mr Stegeth in a few seconds and walked over to us. Most teachers would have started right in talking to me, but he let Tiffany introduce us, and he shook my hand. ‘Glad to meet you, Sarah,’ he said. ‘Tiffany says you and your brother transferred from Maple Street School. How are you settling in here?’

‘I’m settling in fine,’ I said, ‘but my brother—’ Then I remembered that Tiffany had said Mr Crewes had been Downstairs, and I thought,
uh-oh
. ‘Um … have you met him?’

‘I met him this morning. Just briefly. We didn’t have time to talk.’

So they’d sent Colin Downstairs, and Mom couldn’t work things out because she didn’t know. I gulped. ‘Well, my brother is … like our dad – precocious. Is that the word?’

‘That depends upon what you need a word for,’ said Mr Crewes.

‘Somebody whose mind grows up before the rest of him.’

He nodded, looking kind of interested.

‘It was a problem, even at Maple Street School, because it means he gets bored easily, and then he gets fresh. So last year, they skipped him. He was still way ahead, but it worked, because the classes were small and the teachers were really good – but I guess nobody warned this school,
because
they put him in Mr Stegeth’s class.’ Suddenly, I realized what I’d said, and I blushed.

Mr Crewes didn’t seem to notice. ‘So it’s a matter of keeping him interested, is it? I thought so. Let’s see. Would your dad be willing to help him at home if Mr Stegeth assigned him more advanced work?’

I shook my head. ‘Our dad was killed in Korea.’

He gave me the kind of look grown-ups always give after you say that. ‘Oh, I’m sorry.’

‘That’s OK,’ I said. ‘It’s not your fault. But, about helping Colin at home, well, Mom used to do stuff with him, but now she’s pretty tired, because …’ I stopped. Telling him about Grandpa might have made it sound as if it were all Grandpa’s fault Colin was Downstairs.

The bell rang, and Mr Crewes got up. ‘I tell you what. I’ll look at Colin’s transcript, and call the principal of Maple Street School. Then we’ll see what we can do. OK?’

‘That would be great,’ I said, and I felt lots better.

We started into the hall with Tiffany, who had been listening the whole time. When he got to his classroom, Mr Crewes smiled at us – not a teacher’s smile; a real one. ‘Take care, girls,’ he said. ‘I’ll be in touch.’

*

Dinner was awful again. Colin had almost missed the bus home, though all the kids from his class made it in plenty of time. He knew I knew why he was late, but he didn’t say anything about it, so I couldn’t – so neither of us said much when Mom tried to make conversation. When she brought out a special cake for dessert, and still neither of us said anything, she looked hurt, and of course, that made things worse. Finally, after Grandpa had finished his piece and gone to pace around the living room, she put down her fork with a little clank.

‘I thought there weren’t going to be secrets.’

‘There aren’t!’ said Colin, much too fast.

‘Come on,’ said Mom. ‘I know something’s wrong, and you know there’s no way we can fix it if you don’t tell me what it is. Is it school?’

Colin’s face told me he’d die rather than make her worry about him, so I said, ‘No, everything’s fine at school; it just takes time to make friends.’

‘Yeah,’ said Colin. ‘Really.’

Mom looked from one of us to the other, and I could see we hadn’t fooled her. But she just said, ‘Maybe we should read something aloud. We haven’t done that for a long time.’

‘That’s a good—’ Something crashed in the living room. We all jumped up, and there was
Grandpa,
piling a chair on top of the coffee table. He’d started doing things like that after we moved; Mom said maybe he was trying to make the new house look the way the old house did. Anyway, it took us a long time to persuade him that the furniture was all right where it was, and by then, it was time for Colin and me to go to bed.

‘I mean it about reading,’ said Mom as she came in to kiss me good night. ‘We’ll start tomorrow, no matter what. Think of something exciting that we’ll all enjoy.’

‘OK,’ I said. ‘Mom …’

‘Yes?’

I was all ready to talk to her about Colin, but when she leaned over to look at me, I saw how tired she was, and how she hadn’t put on makeup or done her hair the pretty way she usually did. So I just said, ‘Nothing, Mom. I love you.’

She started to give me a big hug, but there was a thump downstairs, so she hurried out the door, instead.

I went to sleep feeling bad – about Colin, about Grandpa, about Mom – but a dream came along and saved me. I’d had it so often that in the middle of it I always told myself I was dreaming, but it started with something that had happened once. I was in Pennsylvania, and I was
riding
Fay, the Smithes’ pony, who was pretty big for me, then. It was my first lesson in riding a course, like they do in showjumping classes, instead of jumping one or two jumps at a time. Fay and I were trotting in circles; Grandpa was lowering huge jumps in the stadium jumping ring to two feet. That was the height I’d been jumping all week, but my hands were so sweaty I could hardly hold the reins.