Sons of Liberty (14 page)

But Brontie ran to the mudroom door and stood on tiptoe, pressing her face against the door. “Wynona,” she called softly. “Wynona.”

“You need help?” Cliff asked their mother. She shook her head.

Brontie didn’t look so good, in Rock’s opinion. She’d turned away from the mudroom, and her eyes, flat with grief, stared into space. Their mother walked to her and took her hand.

“It’ll be okay,” she said.

Rock wondered how his mother could manage to tell this lie when not even Brontie believed her anymore. He stared at his mother now, daring her to speak to him, to try to tell
him
that everything was okay. She moved to touch him, and he stepped away from her.

He followed Cliff up the stairs and then slipped into his room. He took another pair of socks from his top drawer and rolled them over the first pair before climbing into bed. His fingers were shaking, and not just because of the cold.

He closed his eyes and let himself slip away into one of his favorite pictures, of himself and Liza at his home in California, a house Cliff had designed. They were out by the pool and he was on the high dive, about to do a perfect jackknife into the water. He could feel that Liza was watching, but he wasn’t nervous at all. There was no room for anything less than total confidence. His toes curled over the sun-glittering edge of the diving board …

“Hey.”

Rock opened his eyes. Cliff was standing at the foot of his bed.

“What?” Rock sat up.

“I gotta tell you something, so listen up.” Cliff began rubbing his hands together. “Man, is it cold in here. So, I called Aunt Louisa. Thanked her for that vase. It’s colder in here than my room.”

“Because your room’s over the fireplace,” Rock reminded him. “And gee, thanks for letting me in on the big news.”

“Actually, the big news is that I asked her if you and me and Mom and Bront could come out to Arizona for a while,” Cliff said. He stopped rubbing his hands and became very still, watching Rock. “Anyway, Aunt Louisa and I’ve been talking. About Dad, mostly. Matter of fact, she called me today at school.”

“At school? Aunt Louisa?” Rock’s mind tried to picture the scene, the crackling voice on the intercom, Cliff Kindle, please come down to the secretaries’ station, you have a phone call. Then Cliff, turned away from a secretary’s desk with the phone receiver clamped to one ear and his fingers pressed against the other, whispering and nodding.

“I don’t get it. What did you tell her, Cliff?”

“I told her that Dad needs some help and we need some time away from him. I told her about Mom, a little, and Brontie’s problems, and Interrupted nights—”

“You told her all that?” Rock’s voice ended in a squeak. “When you said you’d break my arm if I even talked about that with anyone, then you just go ahead and blab everything to Aunt Louisa? Why?”

“Rock, you need to get this straight. Aunt Louisa can help us, she’s family. She knows that Dad’s a little extreme. That’s her word to describe him, by the way, not mine. I’ve got plenty better words. But anyway, I think Mom’s ready to do the trip. You know we walked all the way to the milk store today? I just wish we had another car for her to practice her driving. She says driving isn’t such big a jump, though. It’s mainly just the being-outside part that kind of gets to—”

“Dad won’t let us take a trip out to Arizona without him.” Rock started to laugh at the absurdity of the idea. Cliff’s plan was completely stupid. Get Mom able to drive out to see Aunt Louisa in Arizona on a trip that didn’t include Dad. “It’s nuts. We’ve never done a trip without him before. He’ll flip out. He won’t do it. He won’t—”

“He won’t know.” Cliff spoke gently, the way he sometimes made his voice for Brontie. “Because we’re not going to tell him.”

“That’s …” Rock started to wag his head back and forth, turning the idea over and over. Everything about it seemed wrong, but he couldn’t figure out the exact reason why. “That’s weird,” he said weakly. “Not to tell.”

“It’s not weird, Rock. Weird—I say weird is telling Brontie that her doll doesn’t love her anymore and then chucking it in the mudroom. Besides, this is just temporary, okay? It’s a visit, but it’s a good way to say, ‘See, Dad, we can go ahead on another plan of our own. We don’t have to keep freezing away in this place, bending under all your rides and power trips.’ ” Cliff’s eyes were vicious, and he wagged an accusing finger at Rock. “Like Liza, how she had to show Arlene—‘Look, Mom, I got another plan.’ And Liza got away. Why can’t we?”

“But …” Rock was still shaking his head. “No, no, you can’t compare. I mean, we’re a whole family. She was just one person, but we’re almost the whole entire family leaving our home.”

“Which is why it’s gonna work even better. Because we can stick together. Liza didn’t have anyone to stick to, so she had to leave on her own.”

“Hey, since you brought it up.” Rock drew his legs against his chest and rested his chin in the cleft between his closed knees. It would hurt to hear, he knew, but he had to ask. “About Liza. You think she’s okay, Cliff? Honest? You think it’s weird she hasn’t called? Or sent a postcard, or anything?”

“I don’t want to get into this now.”

“It’s like she went up in smoke.”

“We just gotta worry about ourselves, Rock. That’s what she’d’ve wanted.”

“You think she’s dead?” Rock asked. “I don’t think Liza’d do that. Just die like that. Go and get herself killed by some drug addict.”

“I hate to think something like that,” Cliff said. “I like to think she was smarter than that, and she got far away, and she’s putting it all behind her. Timmy, Arlene, Sheffield—and you and me, too. This place is all part of bad memories for her.”

“I’d never do that,” Rock mused. “Turn my back on my home.”

“Listen, Rock, you don’t have to come with us,” Cliff said, his hand cutting a dismissive slice through the air. “But even Mom thinks we need the time away. I have maps, Mom and I did a budget. The car can get us there if we’re careful, and Aunt Louisa says she’d even meet us—”

“Shut up, okay? I don’t want to listen to this dumb, stupid, bad plan anymore.” Rock tipped his chin toward the ceiling and closed his eyes on the conversation. What a lame plan. A plan to run away from their father just because Cliff didn’t have enough discipline, because Cliff was lazy and thought that their father was too strict, bossed them around too much. “Get out of here,” he added.

“It just goes to show how thick you are,” Cliff said. “I mean, you’re the one who can’t shut up about the patriots, and how they fought to the bloody death just so they could live in a free country. But you know what? I personally think all those patriots would have been embarrassed if they ever met you. You’re no rebel, Rock. You’re totally spineless.”

“You’re totally jealous,” Rock snapped back. “Because Dad gets along better with me.”

“That’s not it at all, dummy. Don’t you get it? You’re a lackey. Just like in the wars, the king always had—”

“Shut
up.
” Rock reached behind his head and threw his pillow as hard as he could. Cliff ducked and the pillow flopped onto the bookshelf, knocking over a couple of soccer trophies with a clatter. “No one in the Revolution fought against his own father,” he hissed. He lay back, his body trembling in frustration. He and Dad were practically in the same boat, both of them skimming on the surface of their day, never pulled into the secret undercurrent of what was really happening in the heart of this family. He was no lackey. He had spine. He could start a revolution, if he really wanted to.

“Think about it,” Cliff said stiffly. He cleared his throat, waiting for a response, and when none came, he walked to Rock’s door and touched a hand to the doorknob. “Good night, then,” he said over his shoulder. “All you need to do is pack some stuff. It’s better this way, Rock. I promise. If Liza were here, she’d tell you that, too. I only wish you could see it.”

T
HEY WERE CALLED MINUTEMEN
because they were ready to fight in a minute’s notice. As soon as a colonist spy galloped down the road, his lantern flickering its signal through the trees, the minutemen had their coats buttoned, their guns oiled, and their reflexes triggered for the general’s next command. Rock always thought he’d have made a good minuteman, since he was quick to wake up and alert in a flash.

But now Cliff had appointed himself the general of a battle Rock wasn’t sure he understood. Cliff had made their father the enemy. Cliff had ordered Rock to pack. Cliff had told him be ready to leave at any minute of the day or night. No matter how much Rock thought about it, though—no matter how many times he looked at the plan and tried to understand it—he couldn’t feel prepared. He felt dazed with indecision and frightened by the consequences. They were leaving his father. They were leaving him without telling.

Rock had always thought that he’d know immediately which side to choose if he were asked to fight. But how could he know where he belonged when the battle lines were being drawn inside his own family?

His mother wasn’t to speaking to Rock about Aunt Louisa. She made delicious school lunches for him instead, with napkins folded over little notes that read, “Thinking of you, Rochester. I hope your day is a happy one.” Rock knew it was the best his mother would be able to do. She only trusted Cliff.

Rock also began to notice that things were disappearing from his room. His cable-knit sweater, a couple pairs of socks, and definitely some underwear all went missing one day. Cliff was packing for him, he figured. Packing and stashing. Rock tried not to think about it.

His paper was almost finished. He had recopied everything his father had destroyed, and he had long stopped caring about the ten-page maximum. His paper now was twenty-six and a half pages long. Rock included everything he thought was important, and then typed out his final draft on the library’s one puttering old computer after school while Ms. Manzuli stood over his shoulder, helping him find the right words and the smartest ways to explain the battles and treaties.

He included passages about the loyalists and the mercenaries. He described the battles of Bunker Hill and Saratoga. He mentioned George Washington’s speech about hearing the bullets whistle. He wrote three paragraphs about the winter at Valley Forge, describing the blistering cold and even including a few gruesome details about how the soldiers’ toes froze off. All weekend he was in a finger-aching fever, and he knew his spelling was off and his sentences weren’t so perfect; fuzzy grammar, Mrs. Lewin would say. But when he read back through it, Rock thought he could hear a fearsome shout in his paper, a voice that held the same fury of the Revolution, the excitement and description and important characters whose hearts pounded and blood boiled for freedom. He stashed the floppy disk in his sock drawer next to his pen, both of them hidden inside the black-walnut cigar box that had belonged to his grandfather Kindle.

His paper was due on Friday. There was also a test, with a multiple choice and fill-in-the-blank section and a pick-three-out-of-five essay section. It would take up the whole period, Mrs. Lewin explained. She would pass out extra paper if you needed it. Rock knew he would need it.

It would have been dorky to admit, but just thinking about that test made Rock sweaty with wishing for Friday. He would crush every kid in his class, even brainiac Brooke Allister. Cliff was always the machine mind, the one who brought home the A papers. But this time would be different; it would be Rock’s one hundred percent, a perfect score to present to his parents. And then his father wouldn’t be able to talk about Cliff’s natural intelligence the way he always did.

“Photographic mind,” Rock practiced saying, for when anyone asked him how he knew so much. He even rehearsed giving a modest little twitch in the corner of his mouth as he spoke. “Yeah, I just decided to take a quick look at the book the night before. But history kind of comes naturally to me.”

Ms. Manzuli had asked him for an extra copy of his paper to keep and to show her husband, and so Rock worked out a deal with the secretaries at the front office. They would make him an extra Xerox if he arrived early enough to school on Friday morning, and he got special permission to ride the early-bird transit bus that picked up kids on the junior-high and high-school diving teams.

He walked home from school on Thursday feeling content. His book bag was weighted with a huge volume about the Federalist papers that Ms. Manzuli had taken from her own house to lend to him. It wasn’t even a kid book; it was dense and pictureless.

“I think you can handle it,” Ms. Manzuli had said. “Since you’re pretty much an expert on the Revolution.”
An expert.
The words formed on his lips several times that same afternoon after he’d heard them, and they never failed to put a secret smile on Rock’s face.

He went to bed early that night. Just as he snapped off his lamp, he looked once more at the printout of his paper, now rolled up and resting on his bookshelf and neatly tied with a piece of blue ribbon, the way they delivered important documents in colonial times. The ribbon, stolen out of Brontie’s room, had been his finishing touch. The completed paper was thirty-four pages long, not counting footnotes and the bibliography. Ms. Manzuli said she would speak personally to Mrs. Lewin about waiving the page-length rule. She’d even been talking about getting Rock’s paper entered in the Daughters of the American Revolution writing contest in March. The thought made him squirm, thinking of everyone’s shocked faces, their disbelief in his thoroughness and care.

Faintly through the beginning of sleep, Rock heard a thumping on the roof. Later, he heard Cliff and their mother on the landing, whispering, as they set down a bucket. He was aware of his mother floating into his room, her soft dry palm lightly touching his cheek.

“What’s going on?” he called sleepily.

His mother’s “Shhh” pacified him, and his head dropped again on the pillow. The drip of water into the bucket lulled and filtered him deeper into dreams.

“Okay, men. Everybody up.”

Rock felt like he was being yanked up from the bottom of a pond into the artificial sun of the searing overhead light. He squinted at the alarm clock. 12:38.