Jumper (2 page)

*

After the double shift Maddie had worked the day before—first Brendon’s and then her own—she felt justified lazing in bed. She vaguely remembered something about a town that had disappeared, her memory hazy about the details. She thought she’d maybe read it in a novel or seen it in some B movie she couldn’t remember the name of.

She shrugged the thought away.

Hunger drove her to the kitchen. She took her tablet along and, over scrambled eggs and toast, toured through her Pinterst collection of knitting patterns. She’d salvaged almost all the jumper’s yarn, but didn’t want to make just another one.

She decided on a hat and cowl—not challenging as a project but something that would still keep her warm and feeling snuggly.

By half past noon she’d finished the hat, a flapper-style cloche with an embossed silver button holding up one side of the rim, and was trying it on when her cell rang.

“Where are you?” Trish said, a sharp edge to her voice.

“Crap, I’m sorry.” Maddie would have preferred to stay home and work on the cowl, but she had promised Trish to meet for lunch. “Are you still at The Ninth Wave? I can be there in twenty, if the bus comes on time.”

“I don’t mind waiting,” Trish said, her voice softening. “Great scenery here.”

Maddie laughed under her breath. Great scenery meant the guys walking dogs, skateboarding, roller-skating, or carrying surfboards past the large windows of the beachfront restaurant.

“Ummm,” Trish said, “you haven’t by any chance finished relining that purse?”

Guilt pricked at Maddie. She hadn’t even thought about Trish’s purse and the work she’d promised to do.

“Not yet. Sorry.”

There was a silence, then Trish said, “No problem. But soon maybe?”

“Soon,” Maddie promised and pressed the call off.

She left on the hat, even though it was really too warm for it today, grabbed a light jacket, just in case, and went out the door.

*

“Oh my God, Maddie,” Trish said as Maddie slid into the booth next to her. “That is the most beautiful hat you’ve ever made. The same color as that sweater you bought.”

Maddie gave a little embarrassed half shrug. “It’s made from the same yarn. The jumper kept unraveling, so I took the whole thing apart and made the hat out of it.”

Trish leaned close. “You’re so clever with your hands. I wish I could make something like that hat. I’d wear it everywhere.”

Maddie let the hint slide past her. Anything she made from that yarn was going to be hers alone. Besides, she was getting really tired of people taking advantage of her willing nature.

“You’re a people pleaser,” her mother had said on many occasions, “just like me. We can’t help ourselves.”

But that wasn’t really true, was it? Maddie thought as they drove in Trish’s car to the local mall for some serious shopping. She could help herself. She could say
No
. She could make a new world and new way of living for herself if she tried.

And she would try, Maddie decided while inside one of Trish’s favorite shops, nodding as her friend held up a red wrap-around dress, giving her unspoken approval of the purchase. The dress had looked great on Trish. She hadn’t had to “people please” to give her thumbs up for that, at least.

It was dark when Trish dropped Maddie off in front of her apartment building. Maddie waved goodbye and stood a moment breathing in the night air. She looked up. The second moon was rising, smaller than the first but just as full and bright.

Her heart clattered in her chest. A second moon was wrong. There was only one moon in the sky. Was it a satellite falling towards Earth? Were they all going to die? Probably not, she reasoned. She’d read somewhere that space junk falls down all the time but burns up in the atmosphere.

She shook her head. Geeze, she was losing it. There had always been two moons—one silvery white, the other a pale version of her jumper’s peacock blue.

*

In the morning Maddie did something she’d never done before—she called in sick though she felt fine. More than fine, actually. She felt full of joy and life, too fireworks happy to serve cappuccinos or chocolate muffins to anyone or worry that Nico would come in unexpectedly and chew her out if she happened to be just standing for a moment in a slow period. Not that she’d likely be standing at all. Today, if Nico walked in during a slow time, he’d find her dancing.

Her lovely peacock blue jumper no longer existed to keep her warm. She shrugged on the genuine 1940s trench coat she’d found at an estate sale over jeans and a rose-print long sleeved shirt, tugged on her new hat, slung her houndstooth bag over her shoulder and headed out into the street. It was, to Maddie’s mind, a perfect October day—the air cool but not cold, as crisp as a dill pickle, the sky bright blue with streaks of white Mare’s Tails clouds.

Her arms swung freely at her sides as she hurried toward her destination—a small parkette at the end of her street. She glanced at the sign by the gate: Homer Homeswell Parkette, and laughed. She’d read that sign a hundred times and every time it struck her funny. Not the Homer Homeswell part—whomever he was or had been—but the word
parkette
. Such a stupid word. As if this barely one-block long strip of grass and five or six trees was in any way related to, much less a younger sibling to, say, Yellowstone Park, or even Central Park in New York, of Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. Those were Parks, with a capital P. Homer Homeswell Parkette was just a sad little play on words. Still, she appreciated the green respite among all the houses, apartment buildings, and strip malls, and spent time here when she could.

She stepped through the iron gate and stopped cold. Why had she just been thinking of the park as something small and cramped? It was hardly that—stretching out for blocks and blocks, then dropping down a small hill. And the sign for the public pool. How had she forgotten that people could swim here? Hadn’t she swum here herself this summer? She and Trish? Of course they had. She’d worn her new yellow polka dot swimsuit. Not a bikini, like in the old song, but a one-piece with crisscrossed straps in the back that made getting in and out of the suit a struggle, but worth it.

Maddie sighed, shaking off her discontent at how screwy her memories seemed to be lately. At least her favorite bench under her favorite tree was still where she thought it was. She settled herself on it beneath the wide spreading branches of a big magnolia and took out her knitting. She cast-on and started working a pattern she’d made so many times she knew it by heart.

“Maddie!” someone called out. “Hey, Maddie.”

She looked up. A group of people where coming her way, waving like they knew her. She felt suddenly queasy. Who were these people? Why were they making fun this way, acting like they were her friends and all? She hated to admit it, but she really only had one friend and that was Trish.

“Sorry we’re late,” a nice looking woman about her own age called out. The woman hiked her thumb over her shoulder at one of the men with her. “Jonny’s cat got loose and we had to chase it down. It was hiding under the porch of a house three doors down.”

The one Maddie thought must be Jonny turned a slight shade of red in the cheeks, clearly unhappy with being named as the cause of their lateness.

Was she meeting them here? Evidently. They seemed to be friends of hers. She struggled to remember their names, but couldn’t. She finished off the row she was working on as they came toward her. With each stitch, she remembered more of their names. Elaine. Amber. Jonny, of course. Reuben. She’d known them forever. They were friends since middle school. She looked up and saw another man running toward them, one with longish copper penny hair and a grin on his face. Was he one of her old friends, too? Why couldn’t she remember him when he so obviously knew her from the way his gaze locked on her face?

When he reached them, he bent over and kissed her cheek, then straightened up.

“What’re you making now?” He waved his hand toward the ball of yarn. “Nice color.”

Maddie cleared her throat nervously. Why couldn’t she remember him? “A cowl. Like a scarf but the ends are stitched together instead of hanging free.”

Copper Penny smiled and nodded, but she could see his interest in her work was already flagging. Maybe he’d hoped it was something for him. Why would she be making
him
something?

She picked up her needles and made a few stitches—an activity to calm her nerves. It came to her then who he was. Copper Penny was Oliver—her boyfriend of over a year. She was completely losing it if she couldn’t remember her own boyfriend.

“I could make you a scarf, if you wanted,” she said.

He waved his hand loosely. “I have the one you gave me for my birthday. And the one from Christmas. And the one from our anniversary with the beanie.”

“Oh,” she said, and looked down.

Her hands went to work on the next row while she wondered why she didn’t remember making those. When she looked up again, all her friends had gone, except Oliver. It was still him, she knew, but now his hair was brown and cut short. He had a full beard and his moustache was waxed at the ends and turned up.

Her hands were still moving, but she knew she’d dropped a stitch.

“Are you all right?” Oliver said. “You look a little peaked.”

“I. . . I’m not feeling too well. I think I should go home.”

“Okay. Did you drive or take the bus?”

What kind of question was that? Maddie wondered. She couldn’t afford a car.

“I walked,” she said, her eyes cast down again, undoing the mistake she’d made with her needles. She half waited for Oliver to say something more, but he didn’t. She sighed, and put her yarn and the part-worked cowl back into her bag, and stood up.

Oliver had gone. He hadn’t said good-bye and she hadn’t heard him leave, but he was as gone as if he’d never been there. Tears welled in her eyes. He was her first boyfriend, her only boyfriend, and he’d just walked off and left her.

Well, let him, she though and wiped off her tears with the back of her hand. She had the place practically to herself now they’d all gone. She wasn’t going to let
that
go to waste. She sat back down.

Needles in hand, yarn in lap, all’s right with the world
.

Maddie’s needles clicked and she thought all she needed was a cat curled beside her on the bench and the scene would be perfect. No cat appeared, but a squirrel skittered down a tree, sat back and chattered at her a moment, then ran off.

Of course no cat. Because all isn’t right with the world
.

She’d never seen those people who claimed to be her friends before. She had one friend—Trish. She didn’t know why they’d showed up claiming to know her or why she’d thought she knew their names and remembered shared histories. Or why Copper Penny had kissed her cheek and how on earth he’d changed the way he looked so quickly.

“Damn.” She threw down her work, slipped stitches galore in it now, the section she’d been working on a total mess.

Things had been strange since she’d bought the peacock blue jumper, she realized. Even
it
was strange, unraveling on its own, almost as if it wanted something new to be made of it. She took off the hat and examined it. Every stitch was in place. The ends were still woven in tightly.

“Obviously I do a better job making things than whoever made the jumper,” she muttered as she gathered up her things. “Except for the cowl. I’m screwing that up big time.”

The late afternoon light was fading and the air growing chilly. Soon both moons would be up. Maybe she
should
get a cat, she thought. Something to come home to.

She was crossing 54
th
Street when a car swung around the corner, tires squealing, shots ringing out from the rider’s side window. Maddie squeezed down tight into herself and ran for her apartment. Another car followed, firing at the first one. Maddie dug out her keys with shaking hands, opened the front door and ran inside. Her neighbor was on his way out. Maddie didn't know his name, but she grabbed his arm and said, “Don’t go out there. People in cars are shooting at each other.”

Her neighbor gave a small laugh. “So what else is new? They never shoot at anyone on the streets. They have those laser guns or whatever they’re called that target what the shooter is looking at. So long as you don’t draw attention to yourself, they never look at pedestrians.”

More gunfire was being exchanged on the street, the pop, pop, pop escalating till it seemed just one big long explosion. Maddie hurried to her apartment and shut the door behind her, leaning on it as if to keep the world outside from getting in.

Slowly her breathing returned to normal and she began to feel foolish. She sat on the couch and pulled out the cowl. It would take a while to undo all the bad stitches. Rows of them. Unravel the tangled yarn. It wasn’t like her to mess up a piece that way. She’d been knitting since she was nine and was good at it, conscientious. She dutifully undid all the tangled yarn and wrong stitches, listening as the gunfire outside lessened while she worked and stopped all together as she undid the last wrong stitch.