Summerlost (10 page)

19.

“That was splendid,” Amy said. “Wonderful. We'll be sure to recommend you to all our friends.”

She gave us a fifty-dollar bill even though she only owed us thirty dollars and told us to keep the change. It was our biggest tip yet.

“Wow,” I said. “Thank you.”

“And we appreciate your recommending us to others,” Leo said. “But if you could let them know to follow the instructions on the flyer exactly, that would be great. We don't want to get into trouble with the festival. This tour isn't official.”

“It may be unofficial, but it's extremely professional,” Ida said. “You kids are so motivated. Are you saving up for college?”

“For a trip to London,” Leo said.

“Perfect!” Florence said. “And you, dear?”

“School clothes,” I said, because that was the easiest answer.

“That's wonderful,” Ida said.

It didn't sound wonderful. It sounded like nothing, next to London.

Leo and I walked over to the bank again to get the money split up. “Twenty-five dollars each,” I said as we took the bills
and the lollipops out of the bank tube and waved at the teller through the window. “Not a bad morning.”

“We have eight people signed up for tomorrow already,” Leo said. “Hopefully they'll tip too.”

“Eight!” I said. “That's a record.”

Leo nodded but he had wrinkled his nose up in that way he did when he was worried. “So someone saw us back in the forest?”

“I think so. But it was one person looking in our direction. It wasn't like they called out to us or came over or got mad or anything.”

“Male or female?” he asked. “Tourist or worker? Gary?”

“Too far away to tell,” I said. “But if it was Gary, he definitely didn't recognize us, or he would have done something.”

Leo still looked worried.

“How close are you?” I asked Leo. “To having all the money?”

“Not close enough,” Leo said. “My dad and I counted it out last night and looked into buying tickets. They're already more expensive than I thought they'd be.”

“Are you sure your dad won't cover it for you? Or can't you pay him back once you get the rest of the money?”

“That's not the deal we made,” Leo said, and his jaw was set. “I'm not going to ask for that.”

We walked a few steps in silence. I put the lollipop in my pocket. Root beer.

“My dad's nice,” Leo said. “But he doesn't really get me. He's into football and his job and watching sports on TV and fishing. I like all that stuff fine. Especially fishing. But he's way more into it than me.”

“He's going to the play with you in London,” I pointed out.

“Yeah,” Leo said. “And it was a big deal for him to agree so I want to live up to my part of the bargain. Not ask for help.”

And then I got it. Leo wanted to go so badly because he wanted not only to be in the presence of greatness, but because he wanted to share something he thought was amazing with his dad.

“I feel like if my dad sees Barnaby Chesterfield, he'll understand,” Leo said. “I mean, he will. Right?”

“Yeah,” I said, thinking of my own dad, of the way we'd yell at everyone else to be quiet while we watched Barnaby Chesterfield in
Darwin.
I remembered how my dad would lean in to hear Barnaby talk, how everything he said sounded both sonorous and snipped. But most of all how it felt to be with my dad and to love the same thing so much. “He will.”

That night I put the root beer lollipop on the windowsill. It was gone the next morning.

20.

My next job in the costume shop was sorting buttons. Days and days of sifting through buttons to see which ones might work for repairs and which ones belonged to costumes we weren't using this season but would use again another year.

It was kind of the worst.

And also the best.

Because the buttons were super annoying, but everyone kept forgetting I was in the corner working. So sometimes I heard and saw interesting things.

Everyone went quiet when Caitlin Morrow came in, looking portrait-faced and beautiful even without a trace of makeup. Caitlin played Juliet in one of the plays and Rosalind in another. She was the biggest star of the festival this summer.

“Well,” she said. “I guess you all heard what happened last night.”

I hadn't. But it looked like the others had. Their faces changed from serious to trying-not-to-laugh.

“Romeo's breeches split,” Caitlin went on. “Right down the back.”

No way.

“I had to grab a blanket off the bed on the stage and put it around him and pull him close to me during the scene so that he didn't moon the entire audience,” Caitlin said.

“You saved the show,” Meg said. “And the innocence of that senior citizens' group sitting in the front rows.”

Caitlin snorted. “Can you give me a guarantee,” she said, “that I am
never
going to have to see Brad Murray's butt again?”

“I've been on the phone with the fabric company this morning giving them an earful,” Meg said, “and I'm using our strongest material right now to make him a new pair of breeches for the next performance. They will not rip.”

“
Thank
you,” Caitlin said. “With all my heart.” Then she paused. “I don't suppose there's any chance I can keep the Juliet costume at the end of the season?”

“No,” Meg said. “Not a chance. Festival property.”

Caitlin sighed. “I know,” she said. “But I had to try.”

“She seems nice,” I said after she left.

Everyone turned to look at me and I flushed. “I haven't ever been around her before.”

“She's one of the good ones,” Meg said. “You should have seen Brad Murray down here earlier. He was yelling at me right and left.”

“He's a jerk,” said Emily.

Privately, I agreed. Sometimes Brad Murray came over before the show to get some food from concessions and he liked to walk away without paying the bill. Gary always swore
under his breath when we told him what had happened but he never made Brad come back and pay.

“What's that look on your face?” Meg said to me, so I told her what I was thinking about.

“That little snot,” she said. “Is he ever wearing his costume when he's pilfering food?”

“Um,” I said, because one time he had been and even the fancy actors were not supposed to eat while in costume.

“Little snot,” she said again. “He thinks now that he's been cast as a lead he owns the place. But I remember him when he was a bratty kid running around at the Greenshow. Trying to steal food then too. He hasn't changed.”

“I didn't know he was from here,” I said.

“Oh yeah,” said Emily. “I'm surprised you hadn't heard. Everyone's been making a big deal about it. He's the first local cast as a lead since Lisette Chamberlain.”

An icy hush fell over the room. Or did it? Maybe only I felt it. The other assistants didn't seem to think anything of Emily throwing Lisette's name out there.

“I'll tell you one thing,” Meg said. “Lisette Chamberlain would never, ever have yelled at a coworker the way Brad Murray yelled this morning.”

I felt brave. Daring.

“Would she have eaten food while in costume?” I asked.

Meg didn't get mad. She smiled. “Depended on the costume,” she said. “And the food.”

And then we all went back to work.

When I finished in the costume shop I took the steps two at a time. I couldn't wait to get to concessions and tell Leo about Brad Murray and the wardrobe malfunction. And to share the Lisette information. It wasn't much. Almost nothing. But Meg hadn't seemed annoyed when I'd asked about Lisette.

Leo was standing right inside the door of the building, looking out, with his arms folded.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

Then I saw them. The boys on the bikes. Making gestures at Leo through the glass. Cory was with them.

“Let's go somewhere else,” I said. “Into the Portrait Hall. Maybe they'll be gone when we come out.”

“I'm already enough of a coward for coming inside,” Leo said.

“They'll leave you alone if you walk away,” I said. “You have to ignore them.”

“You sound like my parents.” Leo sounded mad. “Like every teacher ever. That doesn't work. You can't walk away every time they bother you. Sometimes there's nowhere to go.”

The boys had seen me come up next to Leo. One of them pulled up his eyes. Like he was pretending to be Chinese. Making fun of me.

I heard Leo draw in his breath.

And someone else behind me.

I turned around.

Meg.

“Those little brats,” she said. “I'm going to go say something to them.”

“No,” Leo and I said at the same time.

“You two have to cross the courtyard to get to work,” she said.

“They'll go away,” I said. “Soon.”

“Come with me,” Meg said. And as we turned away from the window she called out to the security guard standing near the Portrait Hall, “You've got some kids on bikes out in the courtyard. Get them to clear out.”

He jumped to it.

Meg took us back downstairs and to a door at the end of the hall, past
WIGS
and
MAKEUP
and
COSTUMES
. She opened it with a key. I saw another doorway in front of us but she had us turn to the left and opened a final door. “There,” she said.

“Wow,” Leo said. “Is this one of the tunnels?” Right after he said it he looked like he wished he hadn't.

“You've heard about the tunnels?” Meg asked.

“Yeah,” Leo admitted.

“This is only a hallway,” Meg said. “Sorry to disappoint you.” She pushed the door open. “Follow it and you'll come out right by a stairwell that will take you up to concessions.”

“Thank you,” I said.

The hallway was full of old food trays and other concession
stuff. Boxes and boxes that had come in from shipping, printed with
CU
PS
and
CUTLERY
. Things they threw back in here because people didn't pass through very often, I guessed. Lots of those tall metal racks where you could put a bunch of trays and then wheel them along. Like the kind you see in school lunchrooms sometimes. Leo pushed one out of the way and the sound made me think of lunchroom sounds, of kids talking and trays scooting. And Ben yelling.

When I was in fourth grade and Ben was in second, my parents decided to send Ben to regular elementary school instead of his special school. It lasted for three weeks. He cried every night but couldn't tell us what was wrong. The teachers said he was doing fine in class, which meant he wasn't screaming or trying to run away.

Then I went into the lunchroom one day on an errand for my teacher and I saw him sitting at a table with the other second-graders. (Lunch was one of the parts of the day where they were supposed to integrate the special-needs kids with the other kids.) Ben was not eating. He sat there, nervous, with his eyes closed. He held his wire whisk in one hand and was shaking it back and forth like he did with stuff, like the screwdriver and the toothbrush and other things. I didn't see the teachers. Maybe they were getting their lunches. But the other kids were throwing food at Ben. A fruit snack. A pea. Every time they hit him, he said, “Don't!” in a high-pitched yell, but he didn't
open his eyes, he didn't stop flicking that whisk back and forth. I could tell he was trying to shut out the world. I could tell he wanted to be someplace else.

I went over and told the kids to leave him alone.

Ben opened his eyes when he heard my voice and an M&M hit him in the eye.

He cried.

I held his hand all the way to the office and told them we needed to call my mom. She came over right away and picked him up. He never went back.

That was one of the days I didn't understand Ben completely, but I also knew I understood enough. I felt like my heart was cracking. Those were always the hardest times, when I saw Ben get hurt. Until the accident. Then it felt like not only my heart hurt. It felt like even my blood did, like my broken heart was pushing pain through the rest of my body.
Beat. Beat. Beat.

When I was small I used to pretend that I had to tell my body everything it had to do or it would stop.
Lungs, breathe
, I whispered.
Heart, beat. Eyes, focus. Tummy, digest. Legs, walk. Arms, move.
I was so glad then that everything did what it was supposed to do without any conscious help from me. But after the accident I wished that my heart wouldn't keep hurting so much. Wouldn't keep going like this without my telling it to.
Beat. Beat. Beat.

“That was nice of Meg to let us come through here,” Leo said.

“It was.”

“And she basically admitted that the tunnels are real.”

“She did.”

As we came out of the hallway, I pretended that the whole world had secret tunnels, where people could walk straight to wherever they really wanted to be and ignore all the meanness in the middle.

I wiped my eyes on my sleeve before Leo could see.

21.

The vultures in our yard weren't only roosting in the tree anymore. Now they went back into the part of the lot that hadn't yet been cleared, the corner with an old shed and a rotting fence surrounding a square of dirt that used to be a garden but was now a jumble of soil and vegetation.

“That's next summer's project,” my mother said. “I've got my hands full for now with this deck.”

She did. She'd been sawing and sanding in every spare moment. Whenever it rained, she ran outside to rescue her tools. Hundreds of boards leaned against the outside wall, under the porch.

She had framed in the base of the deck but it didn't look quite right. It seemed too short. Something was off.

But of course I didn't mention that. “Looks great,” I said to her. She put down her sandpaper and smiled at me.

The back door swung open and Miles came out. “I got the mail.”

“We actually have mail?” Mom asked. “Real mail?” All we ever got at the summer house were advertisements or bills.

“Something got forwarded to us,” Miles said.

“Miracles never cease,” Mom said.

Miles handed her the letter and she glanced at the envelope and then her face changed. She looked stunned. Without saying anything, she tore into the envelope and walked inside.

“
Okay,”
Miles said.

“Who was it from?”

“The return address looked like it was from a hospital,” he said.

“Oh no,” I said.

My mom had spent months and months dealing with medical and ambulance bills and life insurance.

Mom opened the door and came back out. “It's okay,” she said, when she saw our faces.

“Miles said it looked like it was from a hospital.”

“Sort of,” Mom said. “But not.”

We both waited.

“There's a family that wants to meet with us,” she said. “A family whose son was the recipient of”—and here she swallowed—“whose son benefited from our decision to donate.”

I knew right away what she meant. And it wasn't
our
decision, it was hers. She was the one who had said that Ben could be an organ donor. My dad was a donor—it was on his driver's license—so they asked her about Ben too.

“Why did they write to us?” I asked.

“I had said it would be okay,” she said. “For them to contact us. If they wanted.”

“I don't want to meet them,” I said.

“Me either,” Miles said.

“Why not?” Mom asked.

I didn't say anything. So Miles did. He spoke in a small voice. “Because it sounds too hard.”

And my mom nodded. Like she understood. Like maybe she was even relieved. “Okay,” she said. “Okay. Let's think about it for a few days, but I can write back and tell them no. That's fine.”

“Which of them was it?” I asked. “Ben or Dad?”

“Ben,” Mom said. “Ben's cornea—part of his eye—was given to another boy. It kept that boy from going blind.”

For some reason that hit me like a punch to the gut. It wasn't like Ben had saved anyone's life. That boy who got the cornea wasn't going to die. He wasn't going to be able to see. That was the worst-case scenario. It wasn't like Ben had died and then that boy could live. It wasn't even as good as that.

My mom folded up the letter and Miles asked for ice cream and I went upstairs.