Anastasia at Your Service (10 page)

Probably the book her father would kill for was right here in Mrs. Bellingham's study. She knew he was exaggerating, though. Her father would never kill anything. Maybe a cockroach. Nothing else.

Probably Mrs. Bellingham never even read any of these books. Some of their pages were stuck together, proof that they'd never been opened.

Her father would read every one, she thought sadly. Life just wasn't fair. She had never really wished before that her family was rich. Now she wished it for a minute, just so that her father could have these books.

She had dusted a complete set of novels by Henry James. Anastasia didn't know who Henry James was, but she had heard her father speak about him. Her father taught a course in Henry James at Harvard. She had once wondered how someone could spend an entire semester just teaching about one author. If she ever had to take a whole course in, say, Nancy Drew, she would be so bored by the second week that she would probably drop out of college and become a waitress.

Now she could see that Henry James, whoever he was, had written more books than the author of Nancy Drew. Now
that
was an accomplishment. Poor Henry James. He had to spend all his time writing in order to write
so many books. He probably never went out for pizza or anything. He couldn't possibly have any social life; there wouldn't be time. She wondered if Henry James had ever been to a movie or a disco. Probably he was
old
by now and had never had any fun in his whole life. He must have been sitting at a typewriter for fifty years.

Probably he was Mrs. Bellingham's age.

Probably he would enjoy meeting Mrs. Bellingham, since she had bought all of his books. He wouldn't have to know she'd never read them.

I could get my father, thought Anastasia, to tell Mrs. Bellingham the plots of the books. Then she could pretend she'd read them. A lot of kids at school did book reports just by reading the inside flaps of the covers and maybe the chapter headings. My father could fill old Bellingham in on the plots; then we could invite Henry James to dinner, and Mrs. Bellingham, and it might be the start of a big romance. She could say stuff like, "Henry, I loved that last book of yours"—Anastasia glanced at a title— "
The Turn of the Screw.
" Then old Henry could twirl his mustache, if he had one, and say, "Thank you, Willa. May I take you to the movies on Friday?"

But then Anastasia made a face. It would never work. With a title like
The Turn of the Screw,
old Henry's novel was going to be about hardware. Hardware or sex. She was quite certain Mrs. Bellingham wasn't interested in either subject.

Anyway, why should she drum up a romance for Mrs.
Bellingham, who had never done anything for her except humiliate her?

She had another idea. There was a fountain pen on the desk. What if she wrote, inside the cover of
The Turn of the Screw,
"To my dear Willa, with fond memories of the passionate night we spent together. Henry James"?

She could do it in
lots
of books.

"Willa, dearest: I will never forget the week in the hotel room in Paris. Fondly, Scott Fitzgerald."

Or: "Willa, my love, you are the inspiration for all of my work. Charles Dickens."

Anastasia giggled, thinking about it. But she didn't do it. Not that she cared anything about Willa Bellingham's reputation. But she cared about the books.

Carefully, she dusted the last of the Henry James and set it back on the shelf. She started on the complete set of Virginia Woolf.

Suddenly the door to the study flew open, and there was Daphne, grinning.

"Greetings from the Cat Burglar!" Daphne said. Then she whispered, "I'm here to steal the invitations. They're in her desk, and I knew she wasn't home today. She spends half her time out doing dumb charity work. Giving her money to poor people or something."

Daphne opened a desk drawer, took out a handful of thick, engraved cards, and stuck them into her backpack. "There, that'll do it. I'll make the deliveries over the weekend."

"Let me know how it goes," said Anastasia.

"I will. I'll call you. Where were you yesterday? I kept calling, and no one was home."

Anastasia explained briefly about Sam's accident. Daphne's blond eyebrows furrowed, and she looked concerned.

"Gee, that's awful. Is he going to be okay?"

"Yeah. He's doing fine."

"You really love him, don't you, Anastasia? I can tell from the way you talk about him."

"Love Sam? Of course I love Sam. He's my
brother,
for Pete's sake!"

"I wish I had a little brother," said Daphne wistfully. Anastasia was startled. It was the first time that she had seen Daphne being anything other than flippant, funny, or sarcastic.

Then Daphne's mood changed. "Hey," she said, "I have to go. I told Mrs. Fox I'd come by to pick up a sweater I left here.
Voilá!
The missing sweater!" She laughed, and took a sweater out of her backpack.

"I'll call you!" she said, and left the study.

Anastasia picked up a volume of Virginia Woolf and began to rub the soft leather with her dustcloth.

That was weird, she thought, when Daphne said she'd like a little brother. Daphne hates her whole family. Why would she want one more person to hate?

She doesn't, Anastasia thought suddenly. Daphne wants someone to love.

***

It seemed lonely at the dinner table, with just the three of them and no Sam. Anastasia's mother had spent the afternoon with him at the hospital.

"Tell us everything," said Anastasia. "How he looks, and what the doctor said, and everything."

"How soon can he come home?" asked her father. He had had to teach a class that afternoon. "I really miss him. I even miss changing his diapers."

"Well," said Mrs. Krupnik, "I guess it falls into the category of Good News, Puzzling News, and Terrible News."

"Start with the Good," said Anastasia. "And if the Terrible is really terrible, I don't want to hear it."

"Good News: he can come home on Monday. He's recovering just fine. The nurses say they've never seen anybody bounce back as quickly as Sam has. He's sitting up, doing puzzles, looking at his books—he really loves those airplane books you brought him, Anastasia."

"Good! I'll go over tomorrow afternoon and read to him, if I get out of work in time."

"You said there was
puzzling
news?" asked her father.

"Yes. When I got there, he was having lunch. They've taken out his IV and started him on regular food. So he was sitting there with a tray of food in front of him. They'd given him soft-boiled eggs."

Anastasia burst out laughing. "Oh, gross! The one thing Sam hates more than anything else in the world! Soft-boiled eggs! He always makes fake throwing-up noises when he even
sees
a soft-boiled egg!"

"Well," said her mother, "that's part of the puzzling
thing. There he sat, with a nurse's aide helping him, and he was eating his soft-boiled egg. I didn't want to create any problems, but I was so startled that after he was all finished, I said casually, 'Gee, Sam, I sort of remembered that you didn't much care for soft-boiled eggs.'"

"Understatement of the world," Anastasia pointed out. "What did he say?"

"He said, 'Mrs. Flypaper told me to eat everything so that I'd get well quick.'"

"Who's Mrs. Flypaper? The nurse's aide?"

"Well, that's what I thought. So I said, 'Are you Mrs. Flypaper?' to her, but she said no, her name was Miss Cameron. Then I asked Sam who Mrs. Flypaper was, and he just grinned and said, 'She's my friend.'"

"What kind of friend could ever get Sam to eat a soft-boiled egg?"

"I don't know. I asked all the nurses, but none of them knew of anyone named Mrs. Flypaper or anything that even sounded like Mrs. Flypaper. When the doctor came in, I asked
him,
but he didn't know who it could be."

"It doesn't sound terribly important, Katherine," said Anastasia's father.

"Well, it wouldn't be. But I started thinking, what would make a child eat something that he never in his entire life has eaten voluntarily? Even when he was an
infant
he'd spit soft-boiled eggs out all over his highchair tray! And on top of that, what would make a child say that someone who apparently doesn't even
exist
had
convinced him to eat soft-boiled eggs? Especially if that child had had a serious head injury?"

"Good grief," said Anastasia. "Brain damage."

"Right," said her mother. "That's exactly what I started thinking. And I suggested it to the doctor. But he said they've done all sorts of tests, and Sam's brain is functioning just fine. In fact, Sam is the brightest two-and-a-half-year-old they've ever seen in the pediatric ward."

"Of course he is," said Anastasia's father smugly.

"But then the doctor and the nurses and I were all starting to wonder about the mysterious Mrs. Flypaper and the soft-boiled eggs. So they called in a child psychiatrist."

"A junior shrink!" said Anastasia.

"Right. So the psychiatrist came in—a woman named Dr. Cunningham—and she talked to Sam for a long time."

"What did she decide?"

"She said he's the brightest two-and-a-half-year-old they've ever had in the pediatric ward."

"Big deal," said Anastasia. "We already knew that. What about Mrs. Flypaper?"

"She said Sam has invented an imaginary friend."

"A
what?
"

"Well, she said Sam has been through a very stressful situation ..."

"Big deal," said Anastasia a second time. "He fell about a million feet from a window, landed on his head,
had an operation, and woke up in a hospital bed with ivy in his arm.
I
could have told you he's been through a stressful situation, and I never went to psychiatrists' school!"

"Let me finish. She said that very often, particularly with very bright children, they will invent an imaginary companion to help them get through the fear and loneliness and pain of hospitalization. So Sam invented an imaginary friend named Mrs. Flypaper."

"You'd think he would have chosen a better name," said Anastasia. "
Mrs. Fhlypaper.
That's so dumb."

"Well, dumb or not, Sam invented her, or him, or it, and she convinced him to eat soft-boiled eggs."

"That's weird."

"Well, I told you it was puzzling."

"Katherine," said Anastasia's father, "you've given us the Good News and the Puzzling News, but—"

"I don't want to hear the Terrible News," said Anastasia firmly. "May I be excused? I'm full."

"No, stay here, Anastasia. You've got to hear the Terrible News, especially if you're going to visit Sam tomorrow. You may as well be prepared."

"My stomach hurts. My stomach hurts already, and I haven't even heard the news yet."

"They've taken the bandages off Sam's head," said her mother. "The doctor said the incision will heal faster if it's exposed to air."

"I hate that word,
incision.
Does it look awful?"

"No, actually it doesn't look all that bad. It's very neat, with little even stitches."

Anastasia's father said, "I'm surprised that you can even
see
the incision, with all of Sam's curly hair."

Her mother looked miserable and didn't say anything.

"His hair!" said Anastasia suddenly. "It's his
hair,
isn't it? His curls. What have they done to Sam's curls?"

But she knew, even as she asked. It
was
Terrible News.

"They shaved his head," said her mother in a sad voice.

Her father sighed, and then started to laugh. "Good grief," he said. "That's not the end of the world. It'll grow back!"

But Anastasia knew how her mother felt. She felt the same way. "Dad," she said unhappily, "you don't understand."

She asked her mother fearfully, "How does he
look?
"

Her mother's eyes were filled with tears. But she was biting her lip, too, and Anastasia could tell that she didn't know whether to laugh or to cry. So she did both. The tears ran down her cheeks. But she was chuckling when she answered the question.

"He looks like Kojak," she said.

It was true. A miniature Kojak, wearing seersucker pajamas printed with pictures of Mickey Mouse.

Anastasia flinched when she saw Sam. But she didn't say a word about his shaved head. She had decided, while riding her bike to the hospital, that she wouldn't, no matter how gross it looked.

She remembered how terrible she had felt one morning, back when they lived in Cambridge, when her best friend, Jenny, had greeted her with "Hi, Anastasia! That's an awful mosquito bite on your forehead. It looks just like advanced acne."

It really was only a mosquito bite. But after Jenny said that, Anastasia was self-conscious all day. She tried to comb her hair over her forehead. She sat with her
hand over her forehead as much as possible, until her sixth-grade teacher asked whether she had a headache, and when she said no, told her that she looked like Balboa discovering the Pacific Ocean. And showed her a picture of Balboa, with his hand over his forehead, discovering the Pacific.