Bliss (19 page)

Downstairs, they flew out the backdoor and circled Ty.

“What was that all about?” Rose asked, brushing away a stray piece of garbage that had fallen on Ty's sleeve during the drop-off.

“Those garbage men just delivered garbage,” said Ty, kicking at one of the bags. “They delivered it instead of doing what they're supposed to do: take it away.”

“Is this even our garbage?” Sage asked. “It smells kind of funky.”

“Why were they walking backward?” Rose asked.

Ty gasped, his lips forming an O. “I don't think that's all. Look!”

Rose gazed down the driveway at the street that, in the dark, had finally come to life. Lights had flickered on in all of the houses, and a few people in bathrobes were backing down their front walks, depositing their folded newspapers in the grass, and then walking backward inside again. A few garage doors were raised, and cars reversed out into the street, then swerved backward to the end of the block and around the corner. Mr. Roller was busily wiping dirt onto his Corvette with a muddy sponge, as Peter Strickland, the paperboy, slowly rolled his bike backward down the sidewalk, stopping every now and again to steal a newspaper off a lawn. Mrs. Burns dragged her sheltie down the opposite side of the street, a blue plastic bag in her hand.

“I don't even want to know what she's going to do with that dog,” Ty said.

Across the street, Rose saw Mrs. Calhoun kiss little Kenny on the head and hand him his lunch box. Kenny ran off backward with his backpack in the direction of the elementary school.

“What is everyone doing?” she asked. “It's nighttime! They should be getting ready for bed.”

Lily smoothed Rose's bangs over her forehead. “It seems that the Turn-Around-Inside-Out-Upside-Down Cake is doing just what it claimed to do.”

“Yeah, I'm starting to think the Upside-Down cake was maybe not the best idea,” Ty said, frowning. “In retrospect.”

“So it's the cake's fault?” Sage asked.

“It's our fault,” Rose said, feeling like she was going to throw up. She and Ty hadn't fixed everything—they'd made it worse.

Their next-door-neighbor Mrs. Daublin walked backward in front of the house wearing her muumuu and turban. She looked at Rose with a friendly expression—a stark reversal for their very cranky neighbor. “Olleh, Esor!” she shouted, lifting one foot in the air and shaking it back and forth like she was waving. She lost her balance and fell to the pavement, laughing hysterically.

Rose paced to the end of the driveway and saw Mrs. Havegood speeding backward down the street in her silver Cadillac, then screech to a halt at a green light at the end of the block. She spotted Rose out her window and awkwardly managed to lift a foot out the window of the car and wiggle it, as Mrs. Daublin had. “ESOR!” she yelled. “M'I A LACIGOLOHTAP RIAL!” Then the light turned red, and she slammed on the gas and squealed down the road until she was out of sight.

“Esor?”
said Rose. “What does that mean?”

Sage pulled a piece of chalk out of his pocket and wrote
ESOR
on the driveway. “Esor. Esor.” Then he raised one finger in the air and gasped. “
ESOR
is
ROSE
backward! Everyone is talking backward!”

“So everyone is driving backward, talking backward, waving hello with their feet, and doing the opposite of what they usually do,” said Rose, pulling at her hair.

Aunt Lily's eyes darted around nervously. “My goodness. You certainly have a situation on your hands.”

“We should have made the recipe that sewed people's mouths shut instead,” said Ty.

Rose watched in horror as her neighbors stumbled blindly through their morning routines, and she winced to see each one step backward, falter, and fall.

The four of them grew quieter and quieter on their walk into town. In the schoolyard, pigtailed and cowlicked summer-school students wagged stern fingers at their teachers, who were playing tag and building sand castles in their jackets and ties under the bright moon. At the firehouse, Fire Chief Conklin and his team were trying to climb up their fire pole, without much success. Construction workers unscrewed pieces of drywall from the frame of a house, a landscaper covered well-manicured lawns with heaps of cut grass, a toddler pulled his mother in a stroller. Retirees practicing tai chi in the park looked the same as always, until they tried to meditate on their heads.

In the town square, Rose walked with her aunt and her brothers past the Reginald Calamity fountain, where passersby were stepping into the water and fishing coins
out
of it. The librarians Mrs. Hackett and Mrs. Crisp were scooting around the plaza, stealing books from the hands of readers on the benches and carting them back to the library. At Pierre Guillaume's, Monsieur Guillaume himself waited hungrily, fork and knife in hand, while diners ferried plates of food from the kitchen to his table, backward, most of them tripping over themselves and sending gratins and fillets of sole and crèmes brûlées careening through the air.

“Am I mistaken,” Aunt Lily said, “or did the woman just sell a plate of filet mignon
to
Monsieur Guillaume?”

Rose nodded slowly. “Yes.”

“I can't watch this any longer,” Aunt Lily said. “Something has to be done. I have an idea. Perhaps if we give everyone some warm milk it will encourage them to sleep. Sage, come conference with me a moment and tell me where I can get a hold of a lot of milk.”

As Sage stepped to the side with Aunt Lily, Rose stepped in close to Ty. “We have to call Mom and Dad. They're the only ones who will know what to do.”

“No way,” Ty said. “We'll get in so much trouble.”

“I think we'll probably be in more trouble if we say nothing and Mom and Dad come home and get a ticket for driving
forward
,” said Rose.

“Can't we just ask Aunt Lily for help?” Ty said. “She's one of us. She's even got that ladle on her shoulder…”

Rose watched as Lily marched toward their house, tall and proud as a swan, the Bliss family birthmark pulsing as she moved her shoulders back and forth. Of all the people currently blubbering backward through Calamity Falls, Aunt Lily was certainly the one most likely to save the day. And Lily
was
one of them. Better still, she believed in Rose and had taken an interest in her talents and potential like no one ever had, not even her own mother. Still, there was some niggling fear that kept Rose from wanting the Cookery Booke to fall into Lily's hands. “I just—”

That's when Sage rejoined them, and Rose noticed that there was no longer any key glinting in the moonlight around Sage's neck.

“Sage!” Rose hissed, spitting his name out like it was something you couldn't say on TV. “Where is the key?”

Sage cowered and shielded his face with his puffy pink hands. “Don't hit me!” he screamed, even though he had never been hit in his life, except once by the rim of the trampoline on a jump gone wrong. “I gave it to Aunt Lily!”

“Why?” Rose screamed.

“Because she asked for it! Because we need her help! Because she knows what she's doing! She said she wanted to find a way to solve the problem with magic,” Sage said, looking frightened. “I bet she's consulting the cookbook even as we speak.”

Rose looked around and realized it was true: Aunt Lily was nowhere in sight.

CHAPTER 14

A New Cook in the Kitchen

R
ose, Ty, and Sage burst into the kitchen to find Lily leaning over the Bliss Cookery Booke, which lay splayed out on the countertop. She was wearing a button-up white dress with short sleeves and a collar that made her look like a lab technician or a World War II nurse, or both.

Rose's first instinct was to grab the book away, but Lily was leaning on it with her elbows so that there was no way of snatching it up. Besides, Rose saw something else that took the fight out of her: Aunt Lily had the whisk key dangling from her neck.

Then she spied the little red light on the answering machine blinking. “Did someone call?”

“Yes,” Aunt Lily answered, not looking up from the book. “Your father. I encouraged Mrs. Carlson to let the machine get it. I didn't want to have to tell him what was going on. He said they're coming home the day after tomorrow, so if you burned the house down, you should fix it before then. His words, not mine.”

Rose rubbed her forehead vigorously with her hands the way her mother did whenever she was truly upset. “I'm dead. That's it. I did everything wrong, and now I'm dead meat.”

“Roooooose,” Aunt Lily said, slowly folding her mouth around the word, like she was saying it for the benefit of someone who could only read lips. “We are a family. And we are going to fix this as a family. Remember that part of greatness is admitting that you need help.”

Rose slumped like an old rag doll, utterly defeated. She had failed: to help her town, to keep her little sister safe, to protect her family's most important possession. The Bliss Cookery Booke was even more important than their house. It was like a fifth child. And there it sat, out in the open, being squashed by someone Rose didn't entirely trust.

Still, she had to admit that seeing Lily there, strong and capable, standing over the book, came as something of a relief. At least now Rose wasn't the only one in charge.

“Now. Show me the recipe that made everyone crazy,” said Lily. Ty and Sage rubbed their hands together like determined con artists and surrounded the chopping block. Ty flipped to the back cover, where the section labeled
ALBATROSS'S APOCRYPHA
lay nestled in its compartment.

As Lily lifted the booklet onto the table, Rose noticed that the pages were fuzzy. Aunt Lily ran her fingers over the pages and found that they were covered in a gray dust that was neither ash, nor mold, but something else, something rotten. Lily looked genuinely shaken as she discreetly wiped her fingers on the side of her white nurse's dress.

“I'd heard about this section of the book,” Lily muttered to herself, “but I thought it was just a legend.”

Rose perked up and looked at Lily suspiciously. “I thought you said you never heard of the book.”

Lily froze and backpedaled. “I… heard of my great-great-great-grandfather Albatross writing down some recipes of his own. And these must be them.”

“Albatross's recipes are rank,” said Sage, waving a hand in front of his nose.

Lily laughed. “Your great-great-great-uncle had a flair for darkness and mayhem,” she said. “I'll bet all his recipes are like that. If we want to fix this town, we should probably look elsewhere in the book.”

Lily closed the moldy gray booklet and nestled it back into its hiding place, then took a deep breath and flipped to the very beginning of the book, turning the thick, creamy white pages one by one and studying the etchings in the margins. Winter-Warmth Cookies. Obedient-Children Mousse. Kickstart-a-Small-Business Carrot Cake. The more she read, the more the lines of her face filled with wonder. It seemed to Rose that Aunt Lily was growing younger and younger with each flip of the page. Her milky skin seemed to glow a little pinker and her eyes seemed to shimmer like ripples on a lake at sunset. The corners of her mouth were tacked into a plastic smile that seemed to Rose to smack more of greed than of joy.

“You know, it's amazing what this book could do,” Aunt Lily murmured. “Did your parents ever think of sharing these recipes with the world? It's sort of unfair to keep them cooped up in that little room where only the Bliss family bakery can profit from them, don't you think?”

“Actually, they keep it locked in there to protect it from people who want to abuse its power,” Rose said, knowing that Lily's mind was too lost in an ocean of possibilities to really hear her.

Lily turned to a page where there were two drawings in the margin, one of a town overrun by calamity—like Calamity Falls in its present state—and one of a town where everything looked happy and peaceful.

Back-to-Before Blackberry Torte: For the Restitution of Prior Conditions

It was in 1717 in Scotland that Sir Albatross Bliss did feed to the entire town of Tyree a slice of the Upside-Down Cake, and everyone did walk and speak in a manner most unbecoming. This was in order to ruin his brother Filbert's wedding ceremony. Filbert Bliss did leave the church and run to his kitchen, where he concocted this Blackberry Torte, which undid the chaos that Albatross wrought, and each attended the blessed wedding without remembering his prior folly
.

Aunt Lily looked down, embarrassed at her great-great-great-grandfather's bad behavior. “Looks like this ought to do the trick, hmm?” She read out the ingredients list:

Filbert did mix four fists
chocolate
with one fist
butter
with one fist
sugar
and four of the
chicken's eggs
over a trouble boiler. Then he did coax the Dwarf of Perpetual Sleep from his perpetual sleep and bade him whisper the
secret of time
into the batter. He did bake for a TIME of
eleven songs
at a HEAT of
five flames
. He did top the torte with a sauce made from
blackberries
and
sugar
.