After Sylvia (5 page)

It was heading straight for Horace's car.

“Look out!” Owen called, and he and Andy started running, but they were too far behind.

The others scattered in all directions just as the runaway hit the side of the family car.

It was hard to say which was tougher. The car hardly moved, but sustained a prow-shaped dent in the wood of the passenger door, while the boat jumped back and fell off the cart, but was otherwise undamaged.

One car window on the side unhit by the boat fell out and left a gaping hole.

Owen and Andy stopped some distance from the scene. Horace was glaring at them across the driveway with laser heat in his eyes
.
His fists were doubled and he wasn't moving at all. He wasn't even inspecting the damage.

“I don't think we're going camping,” Andy said in a little voice.

It was a long day. The boys cleaned up the luggage and put away all the equipment. They dragged the boat behind the garage and stored the cart again. Then they raked the lawn and tidied up the basement and scrubbed the dirt from the floor in their room and tidied even the corners of the closet. There was hardly anything to say in their gloom.

“It's all Eleanor's fault!” Andy muttered. “If she hadn't thrown Sylvester's rock in the river, none of this would have happened!”

But Owen found himself thinking about Sylvia. It seemed more and more as if everything in his life was going wrong since she'd moved away.

In the evening, unexpectedly, Uncle Lorne showed up to make the boys a campfire. He said he felt badly about cancelling the trip. The girls had stayed behind with their mother, but Leonard was too tired to go down and Andy claimed he wanted to stay in the bedroom and plot a proper revenge against Eleanor. Horace sat inside and read the newspaper in such a bad mood that no one wanted to disturb him.

Lorne made the fire in the backyard away from the apple tree and the house, close to a stone wall where the first farmhouse had been built on the property long ago. It was a dark, chilly night. Owen pretended he could hear the lap of the water against the shore of the lake, but actually it was cars on the highway in the distance. Margaret stayed just long enough to warm her toes. Then she went inside.

Owen and Lorne were alone with the stars and the fire. Lorne was as tall and thin and bony as ever, and his hands were scarred and marked from working with boilers for so many years.

“It's been an awful day,” Owen said. His eyelids drooped with fatigue. Sylvester was exhausted, too, but he at least had his special rock, which was tucked under his chin as he lay by the fire. Owen told Lorne about the miraculous recovery and Lorne nodded.

“I used to know an underwater dog,” he said. “He caught a fish once and came up all splashy and proud. But he got these spines stuck in the roof of his mouth. Turned mean after that.”

Lorne faded into silence. He was a man of few words in general. Owen had been dying to ask him about being on the radio, about the bird songs, but he didn't feel he could, somehow. Silence wrapped around Lorne like a blanket you didn't feel right disturbing.

Owen was trying so hard not to bring up the subject that he started whistling on his own without really thinking about it. He scrunched his lips into a small hole and curled his tongue and blew, letting loose a short, hard shriek. Lorne immedi­ately turned and looked at him.

“Use your throat, too,” he said, and he let out a haunting loon warble, his cheeks flapping like loose sails. The sound split into three or four echoes. Then it rose in a single note that broke halfway up and swirled into different parts again before dying out over the road like a lonely trail of fireworks.

Owen tried again and felt jiggly in the throat.

“You have to be wild,” Lorne said. “Let yourself go.” Lorne closed his eyes
then, and the sound that came out was black cold water and darkest night that turned into a ripple of notes punctuated by huffing and loneliness, by hard sighs.

Owen tried again with his eyes closed. The first few sounds were ugly, but he surprised himself after a moment when a strange trilling vibrat­ed through his body.

“That's it!” Lorne said. “That's a start.” And he trilled, too, both below and above Owen's voice at the same time. When Owen's breath gave out, Lorne seemed to be doing three trills at once, till Owen came back in again.

And for a time it didn't matter about the lost camping trip. They were two loons, one small and one large, who might have been singing at the side of a cold lake in fall. When they were finished, Owen felt like he had a long neck and fished under water and cried out regularly in the dark for a single mate lost somewhere in the wild.

ANDY
was obsessed with the idea of getting back at Eleanor. For a while he wanted to lure the girls into the basement and have the Bog Man come and threaten to suck out their brains through their eye sockets. But the Bog Man had been unreliable lately and as quiet as a ghost, and the basement was nowhere near as scary as it used to be.

Then Andy was sure the girls would be terrified of aliens arriving, and for a time he tried to revive the crystal radio. But it didn't work nearly as well after the fire in their bedroom, and the boys had no other way of contacting distant galaxies.

It was a difficult problem, this issue of revenge.

For Owen, schoolwork was much easier now that the mystery of the multiplication code had been put aside. Twelve times six stayed put and eight times seven never moved and four threes were content the way they had always been. He found he had a lot of spare thinking time to try to keep his memory of Sylvia alive. He gazed out the classroom window imagining her moving toward him in her orange coat, her small form getting larger and larger. He tried to see the softness of her skin and the bright dance of her eyes. But the harder he looked, the blurrier she seemed to get. She was like a sandcastle in his brain, crumbling at the edges in the wind and water.

Miss Glendon became more comfortable in front of the class. She had a way of becoming still, now and looking at the author of any disruption much like a snake will look at a little mouse trapped against a tree root. And slowly, fewer spitballs flew through the classroom air space. Rulers stayed rooted more often, and the dark wet patches in the underarms of Miss Glendon's blouse became smaller.

She got her hair cut one day and suddenly looked very pretty. Her face had more shape and her
eyes
seemed larger. Gradually, before Owen knew what was happening, the Sylvia in his mind began to look more and more like Miss Glendon.

Once he realized that Sylvia was changing this way, he tried hard to stop it. When he mentally walked her around the schoolyard she remained herself perfectly as long as she kept her distance and didn't turn around. But when she got close, she was Miss Glendon in Sylvia's clothes.

He was losing her.

Before she moved away he had given her a ring that made her invisible to everyone else. Now she was becoming invisible to him and turning into someone else in his mind.

Owen stayed in for recess one day, cleaning the blackboards and chatting with Miss Glendon the way he did from time to time. The weather had turned cold and the sky looked gray and full of unfallen snow.

“Sometimes I wish things didn't have to change so much,” Owen said, just to make con­versation.

“Do they?” Miss Glendon said. She seemed to be only half listening. She was marking an arithmetic test about which Owen was unconcerned.

“If you think about it, nothing stays the same even one day to the next.”

“Was everything so good before?” she asked.

She looked at him now, her red pencil poised in mid-air.

“No, it wasn't all so good,” Owen said. “But when I thought about how it was going to be, it was going to be better than it is now.”

Miss Glendon glanced at Owen in a curious way. For a moment it seemed like she had gazed deep into his thoughts and knew everything — how she was replacing Sylvia on those long walks in his mind, how her scent lingered in the air whenever she walked along the aisle past Owen's desk.

Her words surprised him completely.

“We're going to need a class president,” she said. “You should think about it.”

“Class president?”

“Yes. I'm going to introduce the idea this afternoon. I'd like the class to join the Junior Achievers program, and to do that we need an executive body— a president, vice-president, a secretary and a treasurer. I think the other children really respect you, Owen.”

Class president!
Owen felt himself swell with the words. It was hard to breathe, his chest suddenly felt so presidential.

“What do you think, Owen?” she asked.

“All right,” he said after a moment.

All afternoon his heart beat like a military drum while he waited for the announcement that he, Owen Skye, had been named president of the class. The tide ran through his mind in an endless song. President Owen. Excuse me, Mr. President. Owen Skye, Class President! In his own mind he heard his name pronounced so often, and in such admiring tones, that he was slow to respond when Miss Glendon actually said it out loud. Martha Henbrock had to punch him on the shoulder, and then he stood up expectantly, as if acknowledging applause.

“Well?” Miss Glendon said, a look of great inquiry on her face.

“Thank you. I accept,” he replied. Everyone laughed, which made Owen feel quite gratified, and he turned to look at his friends, his supporters.

“Owen,” Miss Glendon said. “I am asking you what is the capital of Belgium?”

“Of Belgium?” he replied. For a moment he was in complete confusion. He imagined that she was asking him, as the new class president, to represent them all in Belgium for some important reason.

“Yes. Of Belgium,” she said.

Owens jaw slowly lowered in a puzzled and non-presidential way as he realized that he was simply being quizzed. No appointments had been made, and his fellow students in fact were laughing directly at him and not with him over the issue of Belgium.

The pressure to say something, anything, grew enormous.

“Boston,” he blurted finally, and wished at once that he had remained in noble silence.

“Sit down, Owen,” Miss Glendon snapped. “Pay attention!”

Owen felt his spirits sink. Why had Miss Glendon dangled the prospect of the presidency in front of him and then snatched it away by embarrassing him in front of everyone? For clearly she had changed her mind about him. The class president would know the capital of Belgium without even thinking. Such facts would be in his blood, would be part of his presidential nature.

Miss Glendon wouldn't even look at him now. Her eyes were everywhere except on him. She was obviously casting around for other candidates who knew their basic geography.

When she finally brought up the topic of the Junior Achievers Club near the end of the day, Owen sat in misery, hardly following her words. The hands on the clock on the wall above her head stopped moving, as if they'd been glued in place.

Then Martha Henbrock punched him in the shoulder again.

“Owen?” Miss Glendon said. Apparently she had just asked him another question.

Owen stood up.

“Brussels,” he said, his jaw clenched. Everyone laughed again.

“You have been nominated for president, Owen. Will you accept to let the nomination stand?”

The floor seemed to be falling beneath Owen's feet.

“Yes,” he said weakly, and he sat down again.

Once more drums began beating inside his chest, and he had to breathe through his mouth to get enough air. He had just become president. Yet again, how quickly life changed. There would be important decisions to make, although what they might be he couldn't say.

Had there ever been a president in the Skye family? Possibly not. Not even Andy had been president before.

He focused on the board again, forced himself to pay attention despite the enormity of his new status. He saw that under the word
President
there were four names, and his was not even at the top of the list. It was fourth, behind Michael Baylor, Martha Henbrock and even that lowly spitballer Dan Ruck.

Why would Miss Glendon list four presidents? he wondered.

Then he listened more carefully.

“Candidates,” Miss Glendon said, “please prepare your speeches for Monday. Then we will vote and form the executive. Are there any questions?”

Owen felt weak with questions. Wasn't he already president? Why did he have to make a speech? How long should it be? What should he talk about? What did the president do, anyway?

The bell rang and Owen sat still and befuddled, and when he walked home it was in a non-presidential way, with his eyes on the ground and no drums beating to mark his steps.

At the kitchen table Owen poked his finger into a glass of milk and tried to salvage part of a cookie that had fallen in. He explained everything to Margaret, as much as he understood.

Finally she said, “So you've been
nominated
for class president.”

“But there are others nominated, too!” Owen said.

“Yes. The class will have to choose,” Margaret said, as if it were perfectly reasonable to start off with four maybe-presidents and then disappoint three of them. “You'll have to think about what you want to say in your speech.”

At the dinner table Horace took up the topic.

“School is so limiting,” he said as he carved the meatloaf. “I read in the newspaper the other day about one class going all the way to Japan. The teacher had started them off by linking up pen-pals, and after some months a lot of the kids were really good friends, and they did a few bake sales. And the school principal was related to an airline pilot. The next thing they knew they had cheap tickets. So they all went to Japan and had the time of their lives. School doesn't have to be so boring. There's plenty of time to be bored once you start working.”

“You should go to Gibraltar,” Leonard said.

“What do you know about Gibraltar?” Andy challenged.

“It's on the same latitude as Japan,” Leonard said. “If Owen could go to Japan, then he could go to Gibraltar, too.”

“Maybe we should think of what's possible,” Margaret said.

“But Japan is possible!” Horace argued. “The newspaper was full of that class that actually went there.”

Owen chewed his meatloaf in a worried way. It felt as if his presidency was running away from him.

“What did that class do in Japan?” he asked.

“They went to temples. They learned Japanese!” Horace said. “I forget the details.”

The whole family worked on the campaign over the weekend. Andy found important information about Japan, such as the fact that Samurai warriors were able to slice through armored bodies with a single stroke of their swords, and that airplanes flying to Japan might have to crash land in the Pacific Ocean if there was ice on the wings.

Leonard made a big banner that read
School Doesn't Have to Be So Boring
in black and red Japanese-style lettering.

Margaret worried over Owen's election suit. His jacket and pants that had been fine just a few months earlier had tightened hopelessly. But Andy's suit would do as long as Owen rolled up the cuffs and wore two sweaters underneath and a strong belt.

“I don't think I need to wear a tie,” Owen said, frowning in front of the mirror. It was going to be hot in the two sweaters, and he hated the scratchiness of a collar snug around his neck.

“Of course you have to wear a tie,” Horace said. “Little things make the difference. How are you going to raise thousands of dollars to get to Japan if you aren't even willing to wear a tie?”

Owen wrote out his speech on foolscap sheets. Then, following Andy's direction, he transferred it onto Margaret's recipe cards using the tiniest printing he could manage and eliminating the spaces between words. In the end Owen's hand ached but he had managed to get every word of the speech onto four little cards. Each card now looked like an inky, meaningless congestion of letters.

“But I can't read it!” Owen said in despair.

“You aren't supposed to,” Andy said. His eyes looked full of extra years of learning. “All this printing helps you memorize it.”

Owen practiced his speech in front of the mirror.

“Some people are content to confine their education to little portable classrooms,” he said; “Others have shown us that Japan has classrooms, too, and we could go to school there for a time, and eat rice, and if there was an earthquake we wouldn't have to read about it in the newspaper because we'd be right there for once.” He tried to look serious and confident, like the man who read the television news.

At school on Monday morning nobody else was wearing a suit. Michael Baylor had on an argyle sweater with a stiff-collared shirt, but no tie, and Dan Ruck was in an old brown sweatshirt that smelled like it might have been used to towel down horses, and Martha Henbrock was in a gray dress she'd worn many times before. Her shoes, however, were shiny black patent leather with silver buckles.

Owens dress shoes didn't fit so he had just slipped on his classroom shoes, a pair of desert boots handed down by Andy months before. Both laces had been snapped and re-tied with tiny knots, such that it now took great skill to tighten the laces without breaking them again.

Owen sat at his desk and tried to conjure up Sylvia. It took a great deal of concentration now to summon her, to make her eyes blue enough, to keep her face from turning into Miss Glendon's. He thought of how they had walked together to the river and she had told him how her father had hurt his back playing tiddlywinks. He thought he could hear her voice in his head telling the story again, but realized with a start that it was Miss Glendon's.

“Martha Henbrock,” she was saying, and the class was applauding, and Martha walked slowly to the front.

She too had tiny cards that she gripped against her belly like a life preserver.

“Miss Glendon, fellow classmates and candidates, thank you for this opportunity to share my views,” she said, pronouncing each word painfully, as if moving her jaw through too much toffee. “Every year, children die of terrible diseases all over the world. I think that we, as fellow children, should dedicate ourselves to wiping out disease, malnutrition, poverty and ignorance everywhere. As president of the Junior Achievers, I would spare no effort to aid in the fight for planetary improvement. Even though we are young, we are the future. And without us, there would be none!” She threw her arms out dramatically but dropped her cue cards, which scattered like petals around her feet.