The House That Wasn't There Page 13

  “We’re not a democracy,” Oak said, quoting her mom.

  “That’s right,” Mom said. “We are on some things, but not on all the things. But the bookshelf—you’re right about that. I should have asked. We can put the books back the way you had them, if you want.”

  Oak shook her head. Putting the books back into a rainbow wouldn’t change anything real. Anything that mattered.

  “And we can paint your room,” Mom said. “Any color you want.”

  “Black?” Oak asked. She didn’t even want a black room.

  “Well,” Mom said, “any color within reason.”

  That was the problem—what felt reasonable to Oak and what felt reasonable to her mother weren’t the same.

  “As for the tree—”

  “I don’t want to talk about the tree anymore,” Oak said.

  Her mom set the mug down on an end table and rubbed her face with both hands. “Okay,” she said, but then she said, “I can’t uncut the tree. I can’t unmove the move.” Mom’s hands dropped to her sides. “This new job,” she said, “is tougher than I thought. It’s stressful. And the construction, all the mess and dust. And I miss your dad.”

  Walnut meowed and made a figure eight between Oak and her mother, purring and circling as if to knit them together, but neither of them took a step toward the other.

  “I miss him too,” Oak said.

  “Of course you do,” said her mom. She sat down on the couch. “It’ll all work out. It just takes time.” She patted the spot next to her, but Oak didn’t sit. “Now, what was it you were saying? Something about a book?”

  Just a few moments ago, Oak had been on the verge of telling her mom all about the strange book, and the kitten coincidence, and maybe even about Mort. But now . . . “Never mind,” Oak said. “It’s nothing.”

  “Nothing’s nothing,” Mom said. “Even ‘nothing’ is something. It’s nothing.” She smiled at the joke, but Oak refused to smile.

  Still, she wanted the conversation to be over, and Oak knew that when she wanted her mom to drop a subject, the best tactic was to bring up another. “How are the blueprints coming?”

  “Oh, fine,” said Mom. “It’s no Palace of Fine Arts.”

  This was a joke Mom often made when she was working on a project that wasn’t particularly artistic—comparing it to her favorite San Francisco structure.

  “Well, they can’t all be the Palace of Fine Arts,” Oak answered, which was what her father usually said in reply.

  “That’s right,” Mom said, running her hand across her hair. “So,” she said, “pizza?”

  While they were waiting for the pizza to be delivered, Oak tucked the book safely and secretly away in her room, inside a pillowcase on her bed. As she did, she pictured the look on her mother’s face when she had told her that the book had come from the woman next door. She had seen a similar look somewhere else lately . . . where was it?

  Her gaze drifted out her bedroom window. And then she remembered—Alder’s mother. The way she had looked when she’d come home to find Oak sitting in her front room. No, that wasn’t exactly true; when she’d first seen Oak there, she had looked happy about it, like maybe she was glad to see that Alder had a visitor. It was only after he had told her that Oak was the new next-door neighbor that her expression had shifted.

  Oak had said to Alder then, “That was weird, wasn’t it?”

  And now she found herself saying the same thing again, this time to herself, about her own mother: “That was weird, wasn’t it?”

  There was no one to answer her question except for Walnut, who had nothing to say on the matter. And, Oak ruminated, the list of things to which her question could apply—the kitten coincidence; the apparition of the house that wasn’t there, and its strange inhabitant; the disappearance and reappearance of Feline Teleportation—all of it was weird.

  But even in the midst of weirdness, most things stayed reliably commonplace. Dinner and dishes; kitty litter and showers; homework and bedtime.

  Oak had just managed to get through all the things she had to do for the evening when her mom poked her head into her bedroom to say, in her regular voice, with no trace of her earlier upsetness, “Lights out, ladybird!”

  “Already?” said Oak.

  “Morning comes early,” said Mom. She crossed the room to turn down Oak’s bedcovers. Oak was seized with a sudden fear that Mom would fluff her pillow, discover the book, and take it away, which was completely irrational, because the book had been on their family’s bookshelf less than a week ago. There was nothing contraband about it.

  Still, the fear persisted.

  Mom’s hand grazed the pillow, but just then Walnut decided it was time to play, and he attacked Mom’s slippered feet as if they were two great warships and he was the kraken, determined to take them down.

  “Ow!” Mom yelped and turned away from the bed. “Walnut, cut it out!”

  Now Walnut purred and flipped onto his back, stretching his front legs up high to expose his orange-and-cream belly. No one could resist such a sight; Mom cooed and knelt to scratch him, and Oak dove into bed, thumping her head onto her pillow and pinning the book into place.

  “Good night, Mom,” Oak said. “Hand me Walnut, will you?”

  Mom scooped up the kitten and kissed his head before tucking him in along with Oak. “Sleep well,” she said, and she turned off the light on her way out, leaving Oak’s door cracked open.

  She would wait until Mom’s light went off. And then she’d get a flashlight from the kitchen, and she’d fish the book out from her pillowcase, and she’d see what Feline Teleportation was all about.

  It was a good plan. A solid plan. But as Walnut purred and knit his paws into Oak’s arm, as he rubbed his head beneath her chin and settled warmly into sleep, Oak’s eyes grew heavy too, and she felt her thoughts slip away on the vibrations of his purrs.

  I’ll just close my eyes for a few minutes, she thought.

  “Oak!”

  Oak’s eyes shot open, then squeezed shut at the sudden assault of light.

  “Honey, we overslept,” called Mom.

  Oak groaned, and against her side, Walnut echoed her protest with a weak mew. She heard the sound of Mom pushing Oak’s bedroom door all the way open. “Up and at ’em,” Mom said.

  Oak could feel her mother standing in the doorway, and she knew she wouldn’t leave until she saw, as she liked to say, “the whites” of Oak’s eyes.

  With great reluctance, Oak peeled her eyes open. “I’m up,” she croaked.

  “You may be marginally awake, but you aren’t yet up,” Mom said.

  She was too tired to argue, so Oak chose the path of least resistance and threw back the covers, swinging her legs over the edge of her bed. Startled by the movement, Walnut shot off, racing past Mom and away into the house.

  “I’m up,” Oak said again, and this time, Mom nodded in agreement.

  “The bus will be here in fifteen minutes,” she said. “I’ll make you some toast for the road.”

  “Road toast,” mumbled Oak.

  “Fifteen minutes!” Mom called from the kitchen.

  Oak rubbed her eyes, sighed, and began to get ready for the day.

  Toast in hand, hair unbrushed, Oak barely made it to the bus in time.

  In fact, she didn’t quite. “Wait!” she yelled as it began to pull away, but there was no way Faith could hear her through the thick glass doors, over the rumble of the engine.

  But then the bus stopped anyway, just a few feet down the road, and the doors hissed open, and Faith called out, “Hiya, tree girl! Tree boy told me to stop.”

  And there was Alder, smiling a small smile halfway down the bus on the street side. “I saved you a seat,” he said, “and I watched out the window just in case you were coming after all.”

  “Thanks,” said Oak. “I overslept.” She offered Alder a slice of toast.

  “Thanks,” he said, and they fell into companionable silence as they ate.


  The bus turned out of their neighborhood and onto the main street. Sitting comfortably next to Alder, Oak remembered the way she had felt about him not that long ago, on the day she’d been so angry and frustrated that she’d shoved him out of her way. She remembered the satisfaction of watching him fall.

  “Alder,” she said.

  “Mm-hm,” he answered, taking another bite of the toast.

  “I never really apologized for that time.”

  “What time?”

  “That time I pushed you down. I’m really sorry. That was mean. I promise I’ll never do it again.”

  Alder looked over at Oak and smiled. “That’s all right,” he said. “I forgive you.”

  “Thank you,” said Oak. There was a lump in her throat that was not peanut butter toast.

  “Let’s be friends,” Alder said suddenly, and he looked a bit startled, as if he didn’t know he was going to say those words until after he had said them.

  Oak swallowed. “Okay,” she said.

  And it was almost magic, or maybe there was no “almost” about it. Those words, said, felt like a charm.

  When the bus arrived at school and Faith called out, “Bye, tree kids,” Oak and Alder answered in unison.

  “Bye, Faith!” they said. And, tree kids together, they went inside.

  Chapter 21

  At lunch, Alder did have a brief flash of hope that maybe Cynthia would have forgotten her mom’s knitting stuff.

  She had not.

  In fact, by the time Alder had made his way over to the girls’ lunch table, Cynthia had taken everything out of her bag: five sets of needles, ranging from thick to thin, and a half dozen skeins of yarn in various sizes and thicknesses. And Cameron had her sweater, the red one with the hole in the arm near the elbow. They were really going to do this, then.

  “Okay,” said Alder by way of greeting. “One thing at a time. Repairing a sweater is a whole different thing than starting a new knitting project. What should we do first?”

  “Let’s fix Cameron’s sweater,” said Oak, “since that’s what got us started down this road in the first place.”

  Alder appraised the thickness of the yarn in Cameron’s sweater. It was medium, probably wool, and tomato red.

  There was no perfect match among the yarn selections Cynthia had brought; in fact, none of the skeins were even close. Alder unzipped his backpack.

  “I brought some yarn from home,” he said. “It’s probably not exactly right, but I thought it would be better than nothing . . .” He extracted a small paper bag from the bottom of his backpack and turned it upside down. A ball of dark-red yarn spilled out. It was more burgundy than tomato, but the thickness was almost perfectly matched.

  “Hey!” said, Cameron, pleased. “That’s great!”

  From the smaller pocket of his backpack, Alder fished out a little leather pouch that held a set of oversize sewing needles. “Fixing a hole,” he explained, “is really more about sewing than knitting. It’s actually called darning.” He wet the end of the yarn in his mouth, then lined it up with the eye of the needle. He felt a little flutter of pride when it went through on the very first try. “Knitting is really just a series of fancy knots,” he went on, “but darning is more about weaving back and forth.”

  He set aside the yarn and the needle and picked up Cameron’s sweater. He pulled the sleeve inside out.

  “Oak,” he said, “can I borrow your water bottle?”

  She had one of the cylindrical metal reusable bottles, which she passed to him. Alder made sure the lid was on tight and then put it in the sweater sleeve to brace it.

  “Okay,” he said, “here we go.”

  The hole was the size of a quarter. Alder made his first stitch about half an inch to the left of it. “You want to leave a tail,” he said, indicating the extra yarn he had left hanging, “so that you have something to tie off with at the end.”

  He looked up. All of them—Oak and Cynthia, Miriam and Cameron and Carmen—were watching as if he were doing something really cool instead of just darning up an old sweater.

  He cleared his throat. “Then you just pick up every other stitch, like this.” He wove the needle over one stitch, under the next, and over the one after that, then pulled the yarn through. “What I’m doing is starting to make a sort of an anchor, for when I go over the hole.” He stitched about a two-inch line, then wove back in the other direction. “When you get to the hole,” he said, “you just stretch the yarn straight across it, like this, and then pick up your stitches again.”

  He went on like that, back and forth, and then did a few more rows on the other side, to anchor it down again. “Then you’ve got to do the same thing in the other direction,” he said as he worked, “except this time, when you get to the hole, you weave over and under the new stitches across the hole, just like you do with the other stitches, see?”

  Someone—one of the twins, maybe, gasped a little when the weaving across the hole was complete.

  “It’s not perfect,” Alder admitted. “The color is a little off, and you can see where the new stitches are, but it’s better than a hole. And the repair will keep it from getting worse.” He tied off each tail of the yarn and took a small pair of silver scissors from his leather pouch, snipping off the remainders.

  Then he extracted Oak’s water bottle and turned the sleeve right side out. “And, voilà!” he said, grinning and feeling sort of shy. “Not quite as good as new, but better than before.”

  All the girls clapped, and Cameron took back her sweater and clutched it close. “Alder, thank you,” she said.

  “Now,” said Oak, “show us how to make fancy knots.”

  By the time the bell rang, each of the girls had the beginning a very short, skinny scarf.

  “Not bad, not bad,” Alder said as they packed up their yarn and needles.

  “Let’s bring our scarves back tomorrow,” Cynthia suggested, and everyone nodded.

  Alder walked to class and slid into his seat with a warm, full feeling in his chest.

  “So, you knit?”

  Alder looked up. It was Beck, looming over him. The warm, full feeling turned to a block of ice.

  “Um,” said Alder.

  “I saw you knitting in the cafeteria,” Beck said.

  Alder wasn’t quite sure how to respond. Why had Beck asked him if he knit if he already knew the answer? Actually, why had Beck asked him if he could knit at all? Alder hadn’t ever seen Beck acting mean to anyone, but in Alder’s experience with Marcus, being a knitter was a pretty solid reason to get teased.

  “What does it matter if I knit?” Alder asked. He folded his arms and did his best to look tough. As he did, he considered if the fact that he was defending a knitting hobby was undercutting his toughness.

  Beck put his hands on Alder’s desk and leaned forward, about to say something, but then Mr. Rivera said, “All right, everyone, settle down and take your seats. We need to get started.”

  Never had Alder been so relieved to hear the royal we.

  “Wait for me after school, okay?” Beck said, and he rapped his knuckles on Alder’s desk.

  When the final bell rang three hours later, Alder was out of his seat and down the hallway like a shot. He didn’t wait for Beck; he didn’t wait for anyone. And for the first time all year, Alder was glad that there was such a thing as cross-country club. It meant that Marcus wouldn’t be on the bus, but it meant that Beck wouldn’t be either.

  He was the first kid aboard, and he saved a seat for Oak, who slid comfortably beside him.

  “What was that about?” she asked. “I’ve never seen you move so fast.”

  “Beck wanted to talk to me about knitting,” Alder said, “and I didn’t much feel like having that conversation.”

  Oak laughed. “Maybe he wanted to compare techniques.”

  Alder had no idea what Beck wanted. But the idea of talking about knitting with the coolest boy in fifth grade didn’t sound like fun. It sounded humiliating.
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  But he didn’t need to think about that now. Alder was on the bus and Beck wasn’t. With a sigh, Alder relaxed back into his seat. It was a pleasant ride home; the sky was full of big white puffy clouds, and there was that autumnal, crisp feeling in the air that promised leaf piles and jack-o’-lanterns soon.

  “When we get home,” Alder said, “let’s take another look at that book.”

  “Exactly what I was thinking,” Oak replied. Then she hesitated. “Will your mother be home, do you think?”

  “Not until five,” Alder answered. “She’s running errands today.”

  “Then let’s meet at your house,” said Oak. “My mom . . . will be working from home.”

  “And you don’t want us to disturb her?”

  “Sort of,” said Oak slowly. “Actually . . . remember how your mom was weird the other day, when I was over at your house?”

  “Yeah,” said Alder. He felt kind of embarrassed. “I’m sorry about that.”

  Oak shook her head. “Don’t worry about it,” she said, “because yesterday, after you left, and I told my mom who you were—that you’re our next-door neighbor—my mom was weird, too!”

  “Huh,” said Alder. “Are you sure?”

  “Positive,” Oak said, and Alder believed her. “I think there’s something strange happening with our mothers.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know,” Oak said, and she looked off into the middle distance, like she was trying to see something that was almost there but not quite. Then she snapped back into the present and looked Alder straight in the eye. “But I think we should find out.”

  Alder waited outside Oak’s door as she made a brief stop inside to gather up the book and her kitten. As he waited, he looked up at the construction, at the progress being made. He could hear the workmen hammering, and the high-pitched whine of an electric saw. There was the smell of wood shavings in the air.

  Then his gaze drifted to the stump, and, out of habit, he let his eyes roam loosely around the air just above it. He hadn’t seen the shimmery patch since the Sunday after he and Oak had lost their kittens and found themselves with the walking, talking Mort, but he hadn’t given up the possibility of its reappearing.