They send me a priest. I know because he wears a collar. Hello, Father, I say.
Hello, son.
Can I ask you a question, Father?
Of course, my son, that’s why I’m here.
What have they done to your face?
My face? He pauses, rubs his hand over his face. Nothing has happened to my face that I know of. What do you mean?
Your face, it’s smooth and blank. No eyes, no lips, no mouth. Just smooth and blank. How are you talking to me if you have no mouth?
He pauses for another moment before he says, Try to be at peace, my son. Would you like to pray together?
Yes.
But the prayers are blank, without words. The priest moves to trace his cross of blessing on my forehead, but I cannot feel his touch.
The doctor comes by and the priest moves to talk to him. I hear only the word addled. I think again, How are they talking? Where does the sound come from if they have no mouths?
Later the doctor says, We’ve decided to send you home.
Where’s that? I ask.
The doctor checks my tags. Maine.
Is it nice there?
I’ve never been, the faceless doctor answers.
When I woke up, it was late morning. I could tell because of the sun’s brightness and because there was no hustle and bustle in the house. Everybody must have left.
I sat up and looked at the clock. Just after eleven. Which meant I’d been asleep for … sixteen hours. And I’d had those dreams again, the war dreams. They made less and less sense each time. Nobody had had faces in this one.
Mom and Dad had just let me sleep through the whole night and half the day. I didn’t even know when Dad had gotten home.
I was hungry.
Mom had left a note on the kitchen counter. She’d checked and my forehead was cool, so she and Lucca had gone out to playgroup and the grocery store. Back by two. Feel better!
I crumpled up the note and threw it away.
Breakfast … breakfast …
Mom would probably say to have cereal and milk. Not interested.
I put together a breakfast sandwich and sat down to eat.
Was Sarah’s story over now? Was that all I was supposed to know—how she’d lost her voice?
But why would that be something to know? Did people actually stop talking just because someone else didn’t want them to? Was this house for kids who didn’t talk?
The feeling around here hadn’t changed at all. I had figured if I got to the bottom of the mystery, at least the house wouldn’t feel like it had ghosts anymore.
I sighed.
I went upstairs, sat down in the window seat, and stared out the window for a moment, still thinking about how unchanged the view was.
There had to be more to this story. There had to be. I wasn’t going to give up on Lucca, and I wasn’t going to abandon Sarah now. What had happened to her next?
The weight of the pen in my hand—grounding, but never too heavy—had become such a familiar feeling that it was somehow calming to me to pick it up and set to work.
Mama went through all kinds of feelings when I wouldn’t talk.
First she thought it was a game.
Then she was angry. “Snap out of it, Sarah.”
Then, after a week or so, she just seemed to be sad. She thought I was upset about Joshua being gone and decided to be understanding.
I started fourth grade. The teacher didn’t like that I wasn’t talking—my teacher from last year said that I had talked then. My new teacher had a meeting with Mama, and I don’t know what Mama told her, but my teacher let me be.
Jezzie came by still, smirky and superior. She took my things and I couldn’t say anything about it. Sometimes I wanted to punch her and shove her in the ocean.
Miserable as it was, the magic worked somehow.… We got a message that Joshua was coming home.
My heart was joyful to think my brother would be back. Nothing to worry about, then. So what if I could never talk again?
The day finally came.
Mama and Vicky had been cooking all day. The whole house smelled like pie. A happy smell.
My job was to tidy up Joshua’s room. I dusted his desk, dresser, and windowsill; shook and aired his blue quilt outside; and put new sheets on the bed. I tugged and tugged the sheets and blankets to make sure everything was tight and smooth. There. What a nice room to come back to. A homey room because he was coming home.
Dad drove to pick up Joshua at the train station.
I waited by the front window. It was getting dark out.
But there they were! The car’s lights!
I wanted to scream out that they were here, but the sounds caught in my throat. Instead, I ran to the door and flung it open.
Joshua came up the steps first. I jumped up into his arms. His hug was stiff and he set me down again. He didn’t even call me Little Bug. I looked up into his face, which seemed tired, yellowed, like he’d been sick. I looked into his eyes, but the laughing light that was usually there was dead. Dead.
Dad followed with Joshua’s bag and set it down.
Mama and Joshua placed kisses on each other’s cheeks, as stiffly as he’d greeted me.
Vicky came from the kitchen. “Welcome back!”
“We’ll let you get washed up,” Mama said. “And we’ll have a lovely dinner together.”
“If it’s all right, I’ll just have a sandwich,” Joshua said. “I’ll take it in my room.”
At first, no one knew what to say. I felt angry. Didn’t he know how we’d waited, how much we’d wanted him to come home? Didn’t he want to be with us again? Didn’t he know we’d had to save our ration stamps for the meat and sugar for his special dinner?
Then Vicky said, “You must be terribly tired from traveling. Of course I’ll fix you a sandwich.”
Joshua went directly upstairs.
Mama turned to me. “Have whatever you want for supper.” And she went upstairs, too.
I was hungry. At least, I thought I was hungry. I followed Vicky into the kitchen.
I wandered around until I stopped in front of the pies. The pies that had taken all day to bake. Three of them.
“Here.” Vicky handed me a spoon and left to bring the sandwich upstairs.
I went at the peach pie first, just eating big scoops straight from the middle. The filling was sticky sweet and goopy and almost too delicious. After I’d dug a huge hole in that pie, I went on to the next one, a berry one. I ate and ate, getting sticky red juice on my fingers and licking it off.
Then I started to feel not so good. I sat down on the floor, clutching my stomach. That was probably more pie than I’d ever eaten. I could have won the county pie-eating contest.
Dad came by, found a plate, and served himself portions of meat, green beans, potatoes. Then he spotted me on the floor.
“You have a stomachache? No wonder. You made fine work of those pies.”
He sent me up to bed.
I curled up in a ball with my sick stomach.
But I didn’t think I felt sick just from pies. It was the missing light from Joshua’s eyes. Dead. Dead, dead, dead.
Joshua hadn’t come home after all. Just an empty shell of Joshua.
From what I’d heard, Sarah hadn’t spoken again, not even after Joshua had returned—was that because she’d felt like he hadn’t?
So Sarah was missing her voice and Joshua his spirit.
And I was an expert collector of missing things.
But how was I to find these things? They were probably gone forever. And Sarah and Joshua would both be grown up by now—old, in fact, if they were still alive—and it was too late.
Not to mention that the things I’d collected had always been that—things—not spirits or voices. I’d never managed to get Lucca’s voice back and I’d been trying and trying for ages.
I looked out the window, at the beach, at the water.
Now, how was it that we’d come to be here, in t
his place of many coincidences? That we came to a place with a history of not talking? What was it Mom had said? There were my dreams about the house, of course, but something had called to her here, too, even if she swore she couldn’t sense the ghosts. She could, in her own way.
I needed to get out. I ended up pacing up and down the beach.
From far away, I could see someone walking. I should have recognized her from there, what with those curls blowing around in the wind, but when I got closer I was surprised to see that it was Morgan.
“Hi.”
“Oh, hi.”
“What are you doing out here?” she asked.
“I live just up there.” I pointed to our house. “What about you?”
“I was just with—Oh, never mind.”
She’d probably been with Sam. Why couldn’t she just come right out with it?
“Hey.” She took one of my hands and examined my nails. “I like this color. What is it?”
“Some kind of dark green. It’s not black, either.”
She laughed. “That purple one you had on before …” She paused. “Could I really borrow it?”
“You want to?”
“Yeah. It’d probably annoy Sam. Plus I like it.”
“Ha. Yeah, okay.” I led the way up the stairs to my house, and then up to my room. “All my nail polish is out on my dresser.”
Morgan paused at my collection. “What’s all this?”
“Just … stuff.”
“I see,” she said, though she didn’t. She started looking at the nail polish.
I handed her one of the bottles. “This is the one you liked.”
“Thanks.” She pocketed it. “I’ll bring it back.”
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. She went to head down the stairs. “Are you …?”
“What?” she asked, turning back.
“Are you doing anything tomorrow?” I couldn’t ask her what I really wanted to, for some reason, because I just couldn’t get the words out, about her and Sam. So now I seemed like I wanted to make plans with her. Great. Maybe I was in for an entire day of bumping around questions I was too shy to ask.
“Oh.” She thought. “Yeah, I’m busy. But maybe soon, okay?”
Eventually Mom and Lucca came home with the groceries. Lucca zoomed over to me, waving around some kind of craft project, two wildly painted paper plates stapled together and filled with dried beans, with colored streamers dangling from it.
“I think that needs a trip to the beach,” I said.
Lucca jumped up and down and ran for the door.
Mom laughed. “I see you’re feeling a bit better.”
A queasy memory of not feeling well—and it having to do with Lucca—squirmed in my stomach. But I shrugged at Mom and hurried after my brother, who was already way ahead of me.
18
In the morning I had to watch Lucca so Mom could work. I packed a big picnic lunch, dressed us both in bathing suits, and got the big bag of sand toys.
We ran to the beach, where Lucca spun around and fell down in the sand heaps, giggling and rolling.
I spread out a beach blanket and watched him run.
Suddenly someone plopped down next to me.
“Sam!”
“Your mom said you were here.”
“It’s true, we are.”
“Are you better?”
“Yeah, I think so.”
“What was the matter?”
I shrugged and smiled at him. Even if I could explain, I wouldn’t in front of Lucca.
When Lucca fell down, panting, and didn’t spring back up again, I said, “Let’s build a sand castle.”
It was probably the best sand castle I’d ever seen. Sam knew how to use just the right amount of water to pack the sand firm enough that he could stack bucket after bucket on top of one another. The towers ended up as tall as Lucca, who’d put himself in charge of building a wall around the castle, which he decorated with rocks. After Sam had constructed each tower, I smoothed it out, then traced designs and shaped turrets with my fingers.
When we were done, if Lucca had been talking, he would have said, “Wow!” I could tell by his bright eyes. He gave a whoop and jumped in the air and fell back into the sand, laughing.
“It’s a great castle, buddy.” Sam used his fingers to trace in the sand Siena’s Castle.
We brushed the sand off our hands as best we could, and I unpacked sandwiches, corn chips, cantaloupe, and juice boxes. It was a great picnic, and I had packed enough food even though I hadn’t known that Sam was coming.
“I like your sandwiches,” he said. They were plain, just turkey and brown mustard.
“Thanks.”
After we ate, we lay back on the blanket and watched the clouds. Sam and I said what we thought each cloud looked like, hoping that Lucca would tell us what he saw in the sky. But whatever he saw remained a mystery.
Sunday morning.
Extra sleepy, I slumped down to the kitchen.
Dad was there. It was nice when he was.
“Games?” I mumbled.
“What?” Dad asked.
“Do you have games?”
“Oh. Not today. Exciting, right?”
That made me start to wake up. Maybe we could do something cool together, like all get in the car and go somewhere. We could explore a different town or beach. I hadn’t seen much of Maine at all.
But before I could even ask, Mom came through, all dressed and with a full laundry basket, on her way to the basement.
“It’s Housework Day.” Super-final, already-decided, the-last-word-on-everything.
“But it’s the weekend.”
“Only time we’re all here to do it.”
“But I’ve been sick.”
“You seemed fine Friday and yesterday when you were out at the beach. Sorry, sugar.”
I moaned and put my head on the table. Mom went on down to the basement.
“Hey, don’t pout,” Dad said. “You’ve at least got a good job.”
“We have jobs?” Worse every minute.
“Yeah. I have to mow the lawn and make sure the basement is properly sealed so it won’t flood if we get a lot of rain. And get some more paint-scraping done.”
“What did I get stuck with?”
“You have to clean out the built-in china cabinet in the dining room.”
“Clean it out? There’s nothing in it.”
“There’s years and years of dust. Mom wants to put her nice dishes in it.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it. Not so horrible, is it? And things will look even better after you have some waffles with strawberries.”
Probably true. Dad makes really good waffles with strawberries. The juicy, cut berries were already in a bowl on the counter. Dad poured batter onto the hot iron. In a minute, there was a pair of waffles for me, and in two minutes, a pair for him.
“Even Lucca has a job.” He started eating.
“Really? What?”
“Sorting his toys. We’ve only been here a few weeks and his room’s a disaster zone. Mom got him some colored bins to put everything in. Thomas toys in green, Playmobil in blue, blocks in red … He’s throwing everything in, playing explosion, having a blast.”
That was lucky. Getting a three-year-old to clean anything can be tough.
When I was done eating, Dad and I washed up. He gave me a special spray for the cabinet’s wood and a different one for its windows and a whole bunch of rags.
I set to work. I have to admit, it was kind of fun. I shined up all the glass first and could see the improvement right away; Mom wouldn’t be able to tell me to try my job again. The amount of dust that can settle inside cabinets is unbelievable. When I finally got around to wiping down the shelves, the rags quickly turned black.
I got up on a kitchen chair to clean the top shelf and reached one of the rags along the side, stretching all the way back. Something shuffled—thick paper. I slid it along until I could grab
it properly.
It was a folded yellowed card. When I opened it, a black-and-white photo fell out. I picked it up and saw a girl with light hair pulled away from her face with some kind of ribbon headband. She wore a sweater with a button-up shirt under it. I flipped the photo over, but there was no name or date. She looked a little younger than me, maybe eleven.
I knew this girl.
I turned to the card. The front had typed lettering with neat script filling in the blanks. It was a report card written by Miss Jeremy, Grade Five, for the school year 1944–45, for Sarah Alberdine.
Sarah’s report card.
I held my breath and opened the card, hardly believing what I was holding. Inside was a list of school subjects with names like Penmanship, Arithmetic, and Geography, with the letters S and E across from each. The letters stood for “Satisfactory” and “Excellent.” There were more marked S than E. I flipped the card over to read the teacher’s comments for November, March, and June.
November
Sarah is a good student who focuses well on her work. We are making every effort to encourage her to talk again, keeping in mind that her comfort in our school environment will be a primary factor. We understand that her difficulty is not a matter of intelligence, as demonstrated by her written performance.
March
Sarah continues to perform adequately in her written academics, but she seems unable to form close friendships with her classmates because of her unwillingness to communicate with them.
June
Sarah seems to have become more withdrawn as we approach the end of the year; we hope that the summer is restful for her and perhaps during the extra time with her family she will become interested in talking once again.
So it was all true. I had the proof. She’d continued not to talk.
There was nothing I could do. This had all happened already. It was all written. It was right here in my hands.
“Siena?”
“What?” I jumped a mile, then got a toppling feeling, a reminder that I was still standing on top of a chair, and grabbed the side of the cabinet.