The Romeo and Juliet Code (10 page)

I had always been good at cheering up quickly. I always was good at thinking of something pleasant or odd, like the way the guards outside of Buckingham Palace never smiled or spoke. They always looked straight ahead as if they were statues, even if you jumped up and down in front of them or touched their hand or asked them where to find the Tower of London.

I squeezed my eyes tight now and hoped something cheeky would come to me in a bright moment. Then I opened them and looked up at Derek. He seemed so tall and clever sitting there with all his code-breaking ideas on paper in front of him.

“Anyway, it doesn’t matter about anything. What matters is this,” he said and he flung his one useless arm up high. It dropped heavily back to his lap. “I can’t help my country and I can’t ever ask a girl to dance. And so I’ll be staying here in this room. Good-bye.” And then he went over to the record player and put on the Bathburns’ favorite song again: “I Think of You.”

Yes, I am quite good at turning cheerful suddenly, and I can also be rather bold. Winnie said my peculiar boldness always came out of nowhere just when she least expected it. Like one time in London when we were hurrying to the air-raid shelter down in the tube (the subway). We passed a small child on the street all by himself, trudging along slowly. I felt sorry for him, all alone as he was, so I rushed up to him and I grabbed his little hand and pulled him along with us to the shelter.

Now I could feel that strange British boldness coming over me again and there was nothing I could do to stop it. I went over to Derek face-to-face and I said, “You see, you
can
ask a girl for a spin on the dance floor. I’ll dance with you. Pick up your left arm and prop it on my shoulder.” And I took him by the right hand. He seemed kind of surprised and suddenly we started to do a slow dance, a waltz I think it’s called, in the darkened room with “I Think of You” playing.

It felt lovely to dance with Derek. I was thinking, for a boy with no paperwork and an assigned birthday, he was quite nice, really. And then in spite of the letters and the code and the piano and the rift, and even in spite of the war, I rather loved him just then.

Yes, the ocean in Maine was very loud and the wind was wheezy and wild, but of course, London could be much noisier on the nights when the bombers struck. I would be sleeping in my bed and then we would hear the terrible whine of the air-raid sirens warning us to take cover, to go to the tube for shelter. Sometimes it was too late and we didn’t go at all. One night during an air raid, Winnie and Danny and I stood under the staircase in our hall. We were told that the stairwell was the strongest part of the building. Danny was in his slippers. I was barefoot and my feet were cold. So under that stairwell Danny gave me his slippers. I stood there listening to the airplanes droning above us, wearing my Danny’s huge, blue, felt slippers. That night, a building down the street was bombed. It was the loudest noise I’d ever heard. We seemed to feel that building collapsing all around us. We smelled dust and smoke. The paintings on the walls in our flat shook and yet, they didn’t fall. We lost our electricity for good, but our building was safe.

Later that night when I was in bed again, I heard Winnie and Danny talking. They talked and talked and Winnie cried. When I peeked through my door, I saw my parents sitting together, mostly in the dark except for a small candle flickering on the table. They were talking about something I couldn’t understand. It seemed important. Because of that and the bombs, they couldn’t keep me in London anymore.

Winnie said, “There’s no other choice. We have to take her to your mother’s in Maine, darling. You know we must. There’s no other alternative.”

“I know you’re right,” said Danny, “but I don’t
want
to and I don’t know how to approach Gideon after all this time. He’s so terribly upset with us. And how would we get there anyway? It’s almost impossible to catch a boat to America.”

Danny went to the office the next day. It was on Baker Street, the same street where Sherlock Holmes lived in all his books. Winnie seemed very nervous, pacing about while he was gone, embroidering late into the night by candlelight. A few days later, Danny came back from Baker Street looking very sad and cheerful, which was Danny’s way, really. He said, “Okay, it’s all been figured out. We have a new plan and it’s rather extraordinary. A new approach
entirely
.”

And so it was decided. We would be leaving London. I went to Lily Jones’s flat to have tea and say good-bye. The whole time I was there, her little brother, Albert, held Wink. He was terribly fond of him and almost cried when I had to take Wink back. Lily Jones put her yellow canary in its pretty cage next to us by the table and for our special good-bye, we ate a whole tin of jam. Then Lily let her canary out of the cage and it was the loveliest thing to see it flying round the room in its brilliant yellow coat, darting this way and that, singing all the while.

The very next day, Winnie and Danny and I took a train. We got the seats with a table in front of us, and Winnie and Danny were drinking ginger beer the whole way. The train was going to Southampton, where the huge boat the HMS
Queen Anne
was leaving the port that night in secret.

A small box arrived at the Bathburn house from overseas in mid-July, and while I didn’t actually get to hold it and look at it, I could tell it was from Portugal by the way Uncle Gideon made off with it like a rugby player who finally has his hands on the ball. He tried to make light of it, horsing about in the parlor later, saying he had finally received those shoes he had ordered.

“From Portugal?” I said.

Uncle Gideon winced then and backed up as if a seagull had somehow swooped into the house and had flown too close to his face. Well, that only made me more certain.

I forgot to say that Uncle Gideon was a sixth-grade teacher at the elementary school in town when it wasn’t summer, and he was always drinking coffee and shuffling papers, working on his lesson plans. If The Gram asked him to tidy up the kitchen after tea, he always said, “Sorry, old thing, school’s starting soon and I’ve got work here,” and then he’d wave his papers about. (As soon as I got to Bottlebay, he started calling
everybody
“old thing.”)

“Shall we eat on the porch, old thing?” I heard him say to The Gram a little later. We were going to be having Grammy’s Clammy Stew for dinner. It was a great Bathburn favorite. For me, I couldn’t believe how much food was in Bottlebay, Maine. In London, we’d had very little to eat. And I was wondering all the while in a wistful sort of way
what
my parents would have sent to Uncle Gideon. And why was there nothing for me?

I was sitting upstairs with Derek in the dark bedroom. He had a pencil behind his ear and a pad of paper on his desk. He was looking at me and thinking out loud. “The first thing we have to do before we figure out the code is figure out what ‘a favorite in Miami’ is,” he said. “Hmmmm, do you think they mean Miami, Florida? And what sort of things are favorites in Florida … seashells? Pink flamingoes?”

“Derek,” I said, looking over to see if he was willing for me to drop the Captain part. “Derek,” I went on. “I have been thinking and thinking. It can’t be Miami, Florida. It has to be Miami Bathburn. Aunt Miami.”

“Oh, of course. Of course,” said Derek. “Flissy, you are showing brilliance.”

“Don’t forget the long division,” I said.

“Oh, right,” he said. I got another Derek-coal-fire smile then, the kind that tingled all through me and went straight to my toes and then came swimming back round to the top of my head.

“What would be a favorite with Miami?” said Derek. He was whispering now, which was a good thing because suddenly Uncle Gideon was casting a heavyhearted shadow out in the hall. It was a large shadow and fell across the floorboards and stopped just at Derek’s doorway. Uncle Gideon paused, then took a few steps backwards. He seemed to be listening and watching all the time and then looking at me as if I’d just jumped out from behind a door and surprised him. He never seemed to get used to my face.

“Hello, Fliss, how are you? Okay? It’s time to eat. It’s a great summer evening. You’ll like this stew, I think, I hope. We haven’t had a dinner on the porch in ages. What do you say, Derek? Do you think we can drag him out of there, Fliss, you and I, as a team? You pull on one leg and I’ll pull on the other? What do you say? We’ve never done anything together. We might be unstoppable, you know.”

I folded my arms in front of me. Some of Uncle Gideon’s jokes were very flat and childish, I thought. “I daresay Derek won’t want to come out at all,” I said.

“What, Flissy? Don’t be silly,” said Derek. He had hidden the paper with the numbers on it when he heard Uncle Gideon’s voice in the hallway, and now he put several books on top of the paper and looked over at me. Then he stood up and walked across his room as if nothing had been wrong in the first place.

Derek paused at the threshold of his door. I waited. Uncle Gideon waited. Down below, The Gram and Miami waited. Derek looked over at me and I looked back at him. There was a split second when the whole house seemed to stop; even the wind was quiet for a moment. And then after weeks and weeks of being in his room, Derek set out towards the landing.

When he got to the top of the stairs, there was a rousing cheer from Auntie, Uncle Gideon, and The Gram. And I joined in, of course. We all clapped and called and cheered with every step Derek took towards the porch.

Downstairs, Uncle Gideon patted Derek on the back. I thought perhaps Uncle Gideon had a cold, because his eyes were all wet and he got out his handkerchief.

We sat on the porch at a table, looking at the sea. This evening it was rolling in and out in a calm, quiet way, reminding me of a lion that was taking a nap for a moment. There was a beautiful pink sunset wrapped round the sky.

Auntie Miami stood up before we ate and said she wanted to do her favorite Juliet lines just one more time. “I know. I know. You’ve all heard it before. Perhaps I
am
a bit of a dreamer, but
he’s
much worse than I am.” She pointed to Uncle Gideon, who closed his eyes and took the punch without retaliating. “But it
is
a lovely part and I did so want to play that role,” she said. “Do you really think I would make a good Juliet?”

“You have great stage presence,” said Uncle Gideon. “You really do. When you are in a room,
no one
sees anyone but you. Isn’t that so, Derek?”

Aunt Miami smiled softly.

So with the sky darkening and churning like a stew being stirred, and the smell of salt and clam chowder in the air, she began,
“O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?”

And suddenly, Derek and I both perked up at the same moment, I looking once again into his brown, win-some eyes. Suddenly, we both knew what “a favorite in Miami” was. We both wanted to jump up and shout, “That’s it! That’s it. We’ve got it!!!”

Well, we hadn’t exactly cracked the code, but we knew now that Auntie’s favorite lines would help. So when Auntie and Uncle Gideon were doing the dishes later, singing together at the top of their lungs in the kitchen, Derek went into the library quietly and snatched Auntie’s copy of
Romeo and Juliet
. Just as he was leaving the library, The Gram caught him up and gave him a hug and said, “So glad you decided to join the land of the living, dear.”