She felt so fine, in fact, that she couldn’t help but notice that others were not quite fine. The altos, for example, seemed just the teeniest bit off-key. And Germaine Lasley, who was standing behind Ruby, kept saying “No Peeking” instead of “Topeka” when they sang the song about the railroads. Germaine had a loud, although lovely, voice, and Ruby found it disconcerting to hear “On the Atchison, No Peeking, and the Santa Fe!” bleating into her ears.
The chorus took a brief break after the fourth song. Ruby glanced at Lacey. “Did you hear the altos?” she whispered.
Lacey frowned. “I’m an alto,” she reminded her.
“Well, you weren’t flat,” said Ruby hastily.
“You thought the altos were flat?”
“Um,” said Ruby. And then she couldn’t help herself. She turned around and hissed to Germaine, “It’s To-pe-ka. Not No Peeking. To. Pe. Ka.”
“Sor-ry,” said Germaine.
“Some people just can’t take criticism,” Ruby whispered to Lacey.
Ms. Angelo raised her arm for attention then, and the members of the chorus as well as everyone in the audience fell silent.
Ruby realized that once again she didn’t know which song came next, so she kept her mouth closed for the first few notes. She was surprised to discover that her friends were singing “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy.” Here would be not only her solo line but many others, since the kids were to take turns singing. It was a song full of solos. Ruby drew in her breath and then caught up. The kids sang the first verse as a group. Then suddenly Lacey was singing alone next to Ruby. Germaine had the next line, followed by a sixth-grade boy, and then a girl whose name Ruby could never remember. What on earth was it? Either Jenny or Jeanie, Ruby decided. Or possibly Penny.
Ruby was just thinking that perhaps the girl’s name was Janice when she realized the room was silent. The entire room. Not a single voice was to be heard. The song couldn’t be over, could it? Ruby hadn’t sung her solo line. Then she saw that Ms. Angelo was looking sternly in her direction. At the same time, she felt Lacey pinch her side. “It’s your turn!” whispered Lacey as loudly as she dared.
Ruby gasped. Then she opened her mouth and sang, “He’s in the army now, a-blowin’ reveille.” She paused, not sure where her part ended, and decided to continue. “He’s the boogie woogie —”
“Stop!” hissed Lacey.
And Ruby realized that Jordan Banks was singing, “He’s the boogie woogie bugle boy of Company B,” glaring fiercely at her as he did so.
Ruby’s face was flaming. She listened to the voices as they continued around her. She knew the song. She just wasn’t quite sure about the division of the lines for the solos. She did remember — and just in time — that she was to sing the entire last verse by herself. That was her main solo, the one she’d been looking forward to. It went off without a hitch.
The concert continued. Each time a new song began, Ruby had to wait a beat or two to find out what it was before she could join in. When the final line of “Sweet Slumber” hung in the air, Ms. Angelo turned to the audience, smiled, and said simply, “Thank you.”
The audience erupted into applause, but Ruby knew it wasn’t for her. She looked at her feet as she filed out of the room, and then she made a mad dash for Min.
“Min! Min!” she cried, and she ran into her grandmother’s arms. “Let’s go home right now!”
Min, Flora, and Mr. Pennington were still shrugging into their coats and edging out of their row of seats.
“I’m sorry you’re upset,” said Min, and tried to disengage herself from Ruby and button her coat at the same time.
But Ruby buried her face against Min’s coat, not so much for comfort but because she sensed that Ms. Angelo might be in search of her. She tugged at her grandmother. “Please, let’s just go.”
Mr. Pennington peeked at his watch and said, “We really should be on our way. The concert lasted a little longer than I expected.”
Flora refrained from saying, “Probably because Ruby took so long to start singing.” Instead, she slipped an arm around her sister’s shoulders.
Ruby, gripping Min’s coat, hustled out of the community center before Ms. Angelo could speak to her.
Willow Hamilton stood at the base of a circular staircase that wound from the third floor to the fourth floor. In the lobby, which now seemed very far below, the staircase was stunning, but even up here it was impressive, with a wide, highly polished mahogany banister and a lavender-and-green carpet held in place at the back of each step by a shiny brass rod. Lovely. Willow tipped her head back and looked up. How many more floors did this place have? she wondered.
Deer Lodge, it was called. When her father had first mentioned it to her and Cole, she had pictured a cabin in the woods, and probably not a cabin she would like much — one featuring the heads of slain animals on the walls, their fur as rugs on the floors, and displays of rifles and arrows and other instruments of torture. Hunting was wrong, senseless, useless, and cruel, and now her father was going to make her spend this Thanksgiving, which was already horrible, in a place called Deer Lodge.
Willow should have known better. She should have known that her father, wanting only to give her and her brother a pleasant break from the sadness in their lives, wouldn’t take them to a place with reminders of death in every room. And he hadn’t. Deer Lodge, commanding a striking view from its New England mountaintop, had turned out to be the grandest hotel Willow had ever seen. It was enormous and sprawling, and every inch was beautiful. Willow felt like a princess in a palace. Best of all, her father had said on that first morning, Thanksgiving morning, that she and Cole were free to explore the hotel on their own.
Leaving their father ensconced in an armchair in the lobby, with the newspaper and a cup of coffee at his elbow, Willow and Cole had set off, basking in their independence and also in the sense that around any corner they might stumble across a mystery. But almost immediately, they had discovered a game room, and Cole had settled in. “This is where I’m going to spend the morning,” he had announced. “Look at all these cool old games.”
Willow had tried not to look disappointed. “Couldn’t we explore just a little bit?” she had asked.
“Oh, you can go explore. I don’t mind.”
“But how are you going to play games all by yourself?”
“Well, I need to study some of them first,” Cole replied seriously. “I haven’t even heard of that one,” he said, pointing. “Or that one. And anyway, I’ll bet some other kids will come along and then I can play with them. Just tell Dad where I am, okay?”
“Okay,” Willow said, and realized that she was quite happy at the prospect of exploring on her own. All at once, it seemed like exactly the right kind of thing for this particular morning — a morning of promise and novelty and old secrets.
So Willow dashed back to the lobby and told her father that Cole was down the hall in the game room, and then with a great sense of purpose she climbed the circular staircase to the second floor. At the top she looked right and left along the corridor, which was carpeted in the same green and lavender as the stairs. Just rooms? she wondered. Did something other than plain old hotel rooms lie behind any of these doors? She turned left and wandered through the hallway, noticing that the floor creaked pleasingly beneath her feet. Was she in a castle? In an imposing hotel in London? Had she traveled back in time? Anything seemed possible.
Willow walked all the way to the end of the corridor and found that she could continue to the left — down another long corridor lined with doors. So far, she had seen nothing but room numbers on the doors and was just beginning to feel a bit disappointed when she came to a door that was open. She peeked inside and found a parlor overlooking a lawn, scrubby and brown in the November cold, that rolled away to a pine-dotted mountain slope. A sitting room, thought Willow. And she decided to sit and think. She chose an overstuffed floral chair facing the window. The arms and the back of the chair were draped with lace doilies th
e color of weak tea. Beside the chair, an ornate table held two books, a delicate lamp, and a pitcher. Willow looked in the pitcher. It was empty, but across the room a table with wheels held an immaculate silver tea service, and Willow wondered if a real afternoon tea might be served here later. She imagined herself sipping tea as, on the other side of the windows, shadows fell and the mountains dissolved in blackness.
Willow relaxed into the chair. She felt as far away from her old home, as far away from Camden Falls, as far away from her mother — as far away from her life — as she ever had, and she liked that. She wouldn’t say that living with her mother had been torture; that would be an exaggeration. But living with her mother had been difficult and confusing and sometimes very, very scary. Her mother was mentally ill. That much Willow understood. She didn’t, however, know exactly what was wrong with her mother and had recently decided that it didn’t matter. What mattered was that her mother was in the hospital again, and maybe this time she would truly get better. What mattered was that Willow and Cole could get on with their lives in a more normal fashion. What mattered was that Willow and Cole and their father could try to make their Row House into a real home.
Willow let out a sigh. After her mother had gone to the hospital, as horrible as that night had been, Willow had felt that instead of a hole in the family, her mother’s absence had at last made the family whole.
How awful that sounded. And yet, that was how Willow felt. Most of the time. But strangely not today. Today, Willow wished for her mother; she wished for a mom and a dad and a sister and a brother gathered around the table before their Thanksgiving dinner.
Willow recalled a conversation she had had with her father a week earlier. She had been sitting in the kitchen finishing her homework, Cole already asleep upstairs, and her father had turned on the fire under the teakettle and sat down across from her at the table.
“Everything going all right?” he had asked.
Willow had looked up from her French homework in surprise. “What?”
“Everything all right? Cole has been talking to me more than usual lately, asking questions, and you’ve become … not more quiet, exactly, but it’s been several days since you asked about your mother.”
Willow had allowed her eyes to stray to her homework again.
“Willow?”
She’d sighed and looked up. “I’m not asking questions because I know there aren’t any answers.”
“About what?”
“About anything to do with Mom. When will she come home? What will happen when she does come home? What will happen if it turns out that she hasn’t changed? Will we have to live with her rules again? I know there aren’t answers.”
Her father had reached across the table and rested his hand on hers. “There might be some answers,” he had said. “You will never have to live with the rules again. I promise. I’m not going to let that happen. The moment I see any sign of trouble, I’ll take care of it. Things aren’t going to be the way they were before.”
Willow wanted to believe that. She wanted to believe it more than anything. But she didn’t. Not any more than she believed she was a princess in a castle, or that she had traveled back in time to the year the hotel had been built.
She stared out at the pine trees. What had happened to her lovely morning? “I’m not going to let it get ruined,” she said aloud. She sat and thought some more, recalling the basket she and Cole and her father had found on their doorstep the day before as they were getting ready to leave on their trip. A secret basket. She had loved the surprise of it, loved that someone had thought of them. Cole had pounced on the chocolate, and her father had smiled a genuine smile as he placed the basket on their hall table.
Willow peered into the corridor. No one was in sight. She stepped into the creaky hallway again, and just like that was propelled back into her morning of discovery. Now she felt a bit like the heroine of an old movie she’d seen recently, Rebecca, wandering nervously through the halls of a mansion. She shivered deliciously at the preposterous thought of running into someone as hideous as the creepy Mrs. Danvers.
Willow walked and walked and poked her head through every open door she came across. She found a reading room, stocked with magazines, some of them ancient. She found a room where, apparently, small plays were performed. She found an actual ballroom and for a moment imagined herself twirling around the floor dressed in a gown, looking like Cinderella. And she found a library, which she decided was her favorite room in the entire hotel. It was on the fourth floor and was paneled in dark wood. The carpet was a deep red, and rolling ladders stood by the shelves, which were filled with row after row of books, most bound in leather. Willow let her hand trail along several of them. Jude the Obscure, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Pride and Prejudice, The Wind in the Willows, War and Peace. Willow Hamilton was in heaven.
Willow chose another chair facing out a window, this one with a view of a stand of birch trees, their bare branches scraping the sky, and plopped down into the cushions with a copy of Rebecca, which, to her surprise, she had also found. She had seen the movie and now she could read the book. She opened the cover, decided she liked the first sentence very much, but found the story slow going after that. Still, she persevered, curled tightly against the soft fabric of the wing chair, and willed herself not to think about Mrs. Danvers every time she heard a noise in the hallway.
Willow was still plodding through the story when, from a corner of the library, a clock chimed and suddenly she thought to look at her watch. She was supposed to meet Cole and her father in their room in just fifteen minutes in order to have time to dress for Thanksgiving dinner.
What a strange holiday this was, thought Willow. Thanksgiving in a hotel. Her family had never celebrated Thanksgiving anywhere other than in their own dining room. Still, she and Cole had been pleasantly surprised when they’d arrived at Deer Lodge the evening before to learn that the hotel offered a traditional dinner, from turkey to pumpkin pie, to be served at noon the next day.
“We’ll have to dress up,” their father had said. “No jeans or sneakers in the dining room. And coats and ties for the men.”
“I like that,” Willow had said. “It’s more festive.”
Now she left the library, after carefully replacing Rebecca in its spot on the shelf, and returned to their suite of rooms. She found her father and Cole already there, in the process of knotting their neckties. When Willow emerged from the bathroom a few minutes later, she was wearing a rippling black skirt, a white blouse, and a red vest.
“Very elegant,” commented her father approvingly. “We’ll be the best dressed family in the dining room.”
Downstairs, Willow watched the other hotel guests as they gathered in the lobby.
“This is exciting!” said Cole suddenly.
Willow could smell turkey and gravy and something sweet, probably the pumpkin pie, and she wanted to share her brother’s excitement but found herself instead feeling sorrow.
She missed her mother.
The doors to the dining hall opened then and the guests began to file inside. Willow stood on tiptoe and saw a sea of tables, each covered with a clean, almost sparkling, white cloth, a bowl of gourds and autumn leaves in the center, surrounded by orange candles that glowed softly in the room. It was beautiful, but it wasn’t home.
Willow searched the crowd of guests, looking for another family like hers. Why she hoped to find another girl missing her mother, she couldn’t have said, and she felt mean, but she continued to look. By now, a waiter had escorted the Hamiltons to their table, and Willow was still scanning the crowd when suddenly Cole pulled at his father’s jacket and reached up to whisper something in his ear.
“What was that?” asked Mr. Hamilton.
“That man is alone,” said Cole more loudly.
“What man?”
“That one,” Cole replied, trying not to point too conspicuously. “We should ask him to sit with us.”
Willow looked across t
he dining room and saw a thin, graying man, several years older than her father, she guessed, who was being shown to a table for one.
“Well, Cole —” Mr. Hamilton began to say.
“Please? Please can’t I ask him to come to our table?”
Mr. Hamilton glanced at Willow, who shrugged. Then she looked again at the man sitting motionlessly in the middle of the busy dining room, like a solitary rock in a stream, everything happening around him.
“I think we should invite him,” said Willow.
“Oh! I’ll do it! I’ll do it!” cried Cole, and he dashed away.
When he returned, he was holding the man’s hand. “This is Mr. Allen,” he said. “I told him we had never had Thanksgiving without our mother before and he said he had never had Thanksgiving without his wife before and that it’s nice to eat with a family.”
And that was how the Hamiltons met Mr. Allen, who became their good friend and who, years later when Willow got married, gave her a silver bowl that had been given to him and his wife on their wedding day and had brought them more happiness than they could have dreamed of.
Olivia Walter sat in the community center, surrounded by her parents, brothers, friends, and neighbors — and her jaw dropped.
Ruby Northrop had just made what even Olivia knew was a terrible mistake. Music was not Olivia’s specialty. She lived in a world of science — of facts and theories and principles and properties. She liked music, but she didn’t know it or understand it the way Ruby did, and she was confused when the hall became silent and the silence grew and grew like a balloon that threatened to explode. In that impossibly long moment, Olivia turned to her mother, then looked back at the members of the Children’s Chorus in time to see Lacey Morris glare at Ruby, and Ruby jump as if she had been poked, which, Olivia suspected, she had been.
At last, Ruby began to sing — alone — but after a line or two, she hesitated and then began to sing again at the same time that a boy began to sing, and now he was the one glaring at Ruby.