The House That Wasn't There Read online

  Oak considered opening her eyes, then thought better of it. She rolled onto her side and tucked her hands beneath her head. “I’m tired,” she said.

  “It’s only four o’clock in the afternoon,” Mom said, but when Oak did not say anything to this, Mom sighed again. Oak heard the bed shift as her mother stood up and headed to the bathroom. “Twenty minutes,” she said. “Then we’re going for a walk.”

  Though Oak had often wished for a pool, after spending over two weeks hanging out at the hotel’s, she decided it would be perfectly fine to stay dry for the rest of her life. When the first of September arrived, Oak didn’t look back as they drove away from the motel and toward 11 Rollingwood Drive. They arrived to find that the walnut tree had become a stack of firewood in the garage and that the skeleton of what would be the new rooms was attached to the top of the garage.

  After depositing their things inside, Oak and her mom waited together on the small front porch for the moving van. There were three good things about this day:

  One, Oak wouldn’t have to stay in the terrible hotel room any longer.

  Two, her stuff from home—the rest of her clothes, her books, the model horse collection that she was too old for but loved anyway—would arrive.

  Three, her father would be driving the moving van.

  And, Oak thought, watching her mother out of the corner of her eye, she wasn’t the only one who was excited to see her dad. Mom had put on lipstick this morning—a deep burgundy red—and she was wearing earrings too, little gold dangly ones with tiny bells.

  They were both dressed in cutoff shorts and T-shirts, ready for a day of unpacking, but even so, Mom had put on the earrings and the lipstick. That made Oak feel kind of happy but also sort of embarrassed at the same time.

  Without the tree, their front yard and that of their neighbors’—the house where the angry-looking boy had peered out at her through the front window that first day—sort of blended together. Both front yards were mostly grass. The neighbors’ house had a bed of flowers that ran along the front underneath the windows, splitting to allow for the path to the front door and then resuming along a small front porch that matched the front porch of Oak’s new house.

  Between them was the near-flat stump of the decimated walnut tree. And as she studied it, she saw that the grass that had been shaded by its foliage was thinner than the rest of the lawn, probably because it hadn’t gotten as much sun. She wondered how long it would take for that circle of grass to grow in as thick as the rest of it, how long before you couldn’t tell anymore where the tree had once shaded.

  Then Oak saw something that she wasn’t sure she saw. Or she didn’t see something that she thought she saw. A flicker—a shimmer—right near that tree stump, or maybe just beyond, a movement of light almost as if a mirror had cast and reflected a beam of sun, just there. She squinted her eyes, trying to decide what was casting that strange light.

  Just then, a car pulled up into the neighbors’ driveway. The driver was a woman with pale skin and strawberry hair. She wore it loose and long, like her skirt. A boy—the one from the other day, the one who had looked so mad—climbed out of the back seat. He was pink cheeked, a little bit round, with moppish dark curls. Together, the boy and his mother gathered grocery bags from the rear of the station wagon.

  Maybe she should offer to help, Oak thought. After all, this kid looked about her age, and it would be nice to know someone on the first day of school. . . . She was about to take a step in their direction when she saw that the woman had already collected the final bag.

  The kid slammed shut the trunk, and he followed his mom up the path to their front door. But before they went inside, both the woman and the boy turned to look at Oak and her mother. Oak started to raise her hand to wave hello, but then the woman tightened her lips into a straight line. Slowly, she shook her head—at Oak? at her mother?—and then turned to unlock the door.

  The boy did the same thing; he shook his head at her. Suddenly Oak felt glad she hadn’t offered to help.

  “Did you see that?” Oak’s mother said. “How rude!”

  It was rude. Oak’s hand, which she had been prepared to wave, tightened into a fist instead.

  Chapter 3

  Having set his share of groceries in the kitchen, Alder retreated to his bedroom, where he watched the new neighbors.

  He was watching even though it felt remarkably like spying, something he knew his mother wouldn’t approve of. Alder and his mother were both fans of privacy, and Alder had always known that the price of privacy was granting others privacy in return.

  Still, he found he couldn’t look away from the girl and her mother, who stood together on the front porch next door waiting, it seemed, for something.

  He told himself that it was their own fault that he was watching them; if they hadn’t cut down the beautiful walnut tree, he wouldn’t have had nearly as good a view. And oh, that tree. It had been much older than Alder, already a giant before he was born. It seemed so cruel to kill a giant. And his mother agreed. When she had seen what the new neighbors had done, she had looked for a moment as if she would cry. His mom was something of a crier; a goofy commercial for homeowners’ insurance that featured a family weathering a storm together could find her bursting into tears; if the mood struck her just right, even the beginning of the commercial’s jingle could get her going, so Alder had gotten good at grabbing the clacker and switching the channel at the very first notes of that particular ad.

  She cried when she was happy; she cried when she was sad. She cried sometimes listening to Canary’s music. She cried when Alder gave her a picture he had painted of Mort when he was in the third grade. So the day the tree had been cut down, Alder had expected his mom to cry.

  But she hadn’t. Though her eyes reddened and her mouth stiffened and her nostrils flared, Alder’s mother hadn’t cried. Instead, she’d said just two words:

  “That woman.”

  Then she’d turned and gone to her bedroom, and she’d closed the door softly.

  After his mom had closed herself in her room, Alder had visited the portrait of his family. There he was as a baby; there were his parents; there was the tree. If they were to try to take another photo now, it would be just Alder and his mom standing in front of a stump. No more tree. No more Dad.

  As Alder watched the girl and the woman through his bedroom window, he thought about the way his mom had said those words. That woman.

  Then there was the rumble of a truck and the honk of a horn, and a moving van—not a professional one but the kind that people rent to move their own stuff—pulled up in front of 11 Rollingwood Drive, and the girl’s face broke into a wide happy smile, bright as sunshine. She took off at a run down to the curb.

  The truck’s driver got out and picked her up and swung her around in a wide happy arc. That woman joined them at the curb, and the man—the girl’s father, Alder suspected—put the girl down. He turned to the woman and hugged her tight, lifted her off her feet, and swung her around too, and then he kissed her on the mouth.

  Alder turned away. Enough of that, he told himself.

  School started the following Monday—sixth grade at Golden Key Elementary, the same school Alder had attended since kindergarten.

  This year, he’d gotten lucky. Mr. Rivera would be his teacher. Mr. Rivera was everyone’s favorite. He was known to be funny and he liked practical jokes, both those he played and those played on him, and Alder couldn’t wait to share his prank idea with his friend Marcus.

  So Alder woke up that morning in a particularly good mood, and he hummed over his oatmeal, and he packed his backpack with pencils and pens and notebooks and the sheet of googly eyes and the little tin of false mustaches. Marcus would laugh hysterically when Alder told him the plan—to decorate all the classroom’s posters with the googly eyes and the mustaches. Alder barely stopped to say goodbye to his mom before he rushed off to the bus stop.

  Marcus would already be on the bus; his house was th
ree stops before Alder’s.

  It was a beautiful day—as hot as summer still. Though fall was just around the corner, there was a difference to the quality of light that signaled it was time to go back to school. The deciduous trees’ leaves were dry at the edges, beginning to transition to oranges and yellows, and though it was still a ways off, Alder began to imagine what Halloween would be like this year. Was sixth grade too old to wear a costume, or trick-or-treat? He didn’t think so, but maybe he’d check with Marcus to see what his thoughts were.

  It had been a month or so since he and Marcus had actually talked, because Marcus had dropped his phone in the toilet and his parents had decided that he’d have to wait until his next birthday, all the way in April, to get a replacement. Also, Marcus had signed up for the cross-country club, and Alder guessed that getting into shape for that was probably taking lots of Marcus’s time. That was something Alder had no interest in, at all—sports in general, and running in particular. Apparently, that’s all cross-country was. Running, for a long time.

  But that was the thing about friends, Alder thought happily. You didn’t actually have to have a lot in common with someone to be their friend. After all, he and Marcus were pretty different if you thought about it: Marcus had a big family with two parents and four siblings, while Alder’s family was just him and his mom; Marcus was into sports, and Alder was into knitting—a hobby Marcus loved to tease him about; Marcus had lots of friends and Alder did not. Marcus talked to everyone—before class, at lunch, during recess, after school.

  They’d been friends for so long that probably those differences didn’t mean much. Alder had known Marcus since the first grade. He had been there the day that Marcus broke his wrist when he fell from the climbing structure at the park. Marcus had cheered Alder up that time he’d gotten that horrible haircut. And he and Marcus were comfortable together; they knew things like where to find extra toilet paper at each other’s houses. He wondered if Marcus’s family still kept it where they used to—in the cabinet under the sink all the way to the right.

  Maybe, Alder admitted to himself as he walked up the block to wait for the bus, he was a little bit more Marcus’s friend than Marcus was his friend. Marcus could have come by Alder’s house some day after running with the rest of the kids in the club, or he could have asked his mom to call Alder’s mom to see if they could hang out. But Marcus had been busy. That was okay; because Alder was his friend, he understood. Besides, they’d get to hang out a lot now that school was starting again.

  Alder grinned, imagining Marcus’s face when he saw the mustaches and the googly eyes.

  The bus arrived right on time, and there was Faith, the same driver from last year, grinning down at him as she opened the door.

  “Hiya, Alder,” she said. “Welcome aboard.” That was what she always said.

  “Hiya, Faith,” Alder answered as he mounted the steps, which was what almost every kid said in reply.

  The year was off to a comfortable start, Alder thought comfortably. He turned down the bus’s aisle, looking for Marcus and the seat he always saved for Alder. And there was Marcus, five rows back on the left.

  But there was no empty seat beside him.

  Instead, there was Beck Taylor.

  It’s no big deal, Alder told himself as he made his way down the aisle. Maybe Marcus told him he could sit there just until my stop.

  He stopped alongside Marcus and Beck’s bench. “Hey, Marcus,” he said. “Hey, Beck.”

  Beck grinned back at him, his face sunburned and ruddy. “Hey, Alder,” he said.

  Marcus raised his chin in Alder’s direction. “What’s up,” he said, but it wasn’t really a question.

  “Um,” said Alder. “Guess what. I mean, I brought—” He swung his backpack around to his front and unzipped it, feeling around for the mustache tin.

  “Train’s pulling out of the station,” Faith called from the driver’s seat. “Have a seat, Alder!”

  “It’s in here somewhere, I’ll find it in a second,” Alder muttered, glancing at Marcus. “It’s the stuff for the prank.”

  “What prank?” Marcus asked. Not in a mean voice—just as if he truly didn’t remember. Which, Alder thought, his hand dropping away from his backpack, was even worse.

  “Dude, look at this one,” Beck said, nudging Marcus. He was watching a surfing video on the small screen of his phone, and Marcus turned his attention to it.

  “Awesome,” Marcus said.

  Alder trudged down the aisle and slumped into an empty row near the very back of the bus. Faith pulled the bus onto the road and they headed off toward school, toward what suddenly felt like unknown territory to Alder.

  It should have made Alder feel better that Mr. Rivera started off the school day with a prank: he’d turned all the desks toward the back of the room, lined up in neat rows just as they should be, but facing in the wrong direction, away from the whiteboard.

  Everyone laughed, and there were screeches and scratches as desks were turned right way around, as everyone settled into seats.

  “You can sit where you want for now,” Mr. Rivera said loudly, over all the rearranging sounds, “but if you guys start to get out of control, we’ll have to assign seats.”

  Mr. Rivera used “we” in the same way most grown-ups did: not to indicate the group as a whole, but rather to speak of himself.

  “The royal we,” his mother called it. “Also known as the majestic plural.”

  Mr. Rivera’s use of the majestic plural did not bode as well for the coming year as the turned-around desks did.

  The desk next to Marcus was open, but the one on his other side was taken by Beck, and they were talking loudly about some weekend surfing trip up the coast the two of them had taken with Beck’s family, something Alder hadn’t known had happened. Apparently they had been spending lots of time together this summer.

  Alder could have sat on the other side of Marcus, but instead he took a desk in the front row, close to a window, and turned it to face the front of the room.

  “Okay, gang,” Mr. Rivera said, grinning at them. He had a friendly face—a bushy dark mustache, brown skin and eyes, black hair that flopped over his forehead. He wore a tie, one unlike any ties Alder had seen before; it seemed to be knit out of yarn, and it was skinny and squared off at the bottom. His shoes, Alder noticed, were loafers with actual pennies inserted into the slots on the front.

  “Most of you know each other, but I don’t know all of you just yet,” Mr. Rivera said. He went to his desk and picked up a stack of name tag stickers and began counting out five per row, handing them to the kids at the front desks to pass back. Alder took the stack, kept the top name tag, and passed the rest to Cynthia Chen, who sat behind him. “I’m pretty good at names, but not great, so if you’ll all do me the favor of writing down your first name on one of these babies and wearing them for the rest of the day, dollars to doughnuts I’ll have your names memorized by the last bell.”

  “Do we get doughnuts if you don’t know our names by then?” called out Beck, and the class laughed.

  “Sure, why not,” Mr. Rivera said. “But if I do know them, you owe me a doughnut, how about that?”

  “All right,” Beck agreed, and immediately students started whispering plans to one another to sway the odds in their doughnut direction:

  “Write your name really small so he can’t read it!”

  “Wear your tag upside down!”

  “Use pencil instead of pen! That makes it harder to see!”

  Mr. Rivera chuckled and smiled, and he didn’t shush them.

  Alder wrote his name in little tiny letters, then peeled the backing from the name tag and stuck it to his chest just above his heart.

  Mr. Rivera really was cool, Alder thought. This made him feel a bit better, even if he wasn’t sitting next to Marcus.

  Then the classroom door opened.

  “Excuse me?” came a voice. Everyone’s head swiveled to see who it was.

  Alder
froze. It was the girl. Alder’s new neighbor.

  “I’m new here?” said the girl like it was a question. “I’m sorry I’m late.”

  “Welcome,” said Mr. Rivera. “Come on in, take a seat. Here’s a name tag.”

  The girl took the tag from Mr. Rivera’s outstretched hand and looked around the room. There was an empty desk one row over and one seat back from where Alder sat.

  She took it.

  “Write your name really small,” Cynthia whispered to the new girl. She nodded, took out a green marker, and did as Cynthia had told her without even asking why.

  Pretending to look for something in his backpack, Alder turned around and stole a glance at the girl’s name tag as she stuck it on her shirt. She’d made the letters tiny; Alder squinted to read them.

  Oak, the name tag read.

  “A funny name for a tree killer,” Alder muttered.

  But the words came out more loudly than he’d meant them to, and the girl heard him, her wide eyes meeting his. She looked surprised for a moment, like he’d caught her off guard, but then she narrowed her gaze.

  “So you’re the creeper who keeps watching me out his window,” Oak said, and her voice rang loudly so the whole class could hear her—no accident, Alder knew.

  He turned quickly back around, feeling his cheeks flame red. That girl, Alder thought to himself, his voice in his head echoing the exact tone in which his mother had said That woman.

  It was only 9:17 in the morning. And already, the day felt ruined.

  Chapter 4

  Until today, Oak had spent every school day in the same building—a kindergarten-through-sixth-grade Montessori school that had been just around the way from her house.

  Her old house, Oak reminded herself.

  She’d never given much thought to the school, just as she’d never given much thought to her house—actually, her apartment, a first-floor flat in a three-story purple row house. Painted Ladies, they were called, those colorful San Francisco homes. That was something else she’d taken for granted—how colorful all the buildings had been back home. Here, most of the houses were beige stucco, and if an occasional door was painted a bright color, it was almost always red.