Any Which Wall (16 page)

Henry, Emma, Susan, and Roy broke into smiles of great relief.

Susan grabbed the bottle of shampoo and plunged into the fountain fully dressed. She plopped down beside Bernice, where she began to work a good lather through the dog’s matted and filthy fur. She carefully avoided the hurt leg, and Bernice wiggled with pleasure as Susan’s fingers tickled and scratched her belly and back.

“C’mon, guys!” Susan yelled.

Henry and Roy, who had been staring in utter shock (and delight) at Susan’s madcap behavior, needed no further encouragement. They galloped into the water behind her, each taking charge of a bit of Bernice. “Man, this is the way to take a bath!” shouted Henry, running his soapy fingers through his own gummy hair.

At some point during the laughing and splashing, Emma slipped off.

And when Susan, Henry, and Roy looked up from their soapy fun a few minutes later, they found Emma holding hands with a thin blond woman wearing a bright purple dress and orange clogs. They gaped as the
woman dropped Emma’s hand, flashed them all a grin, and walked straight into the fountain herself. She sat down beside Bernice and stared at the dog. When she did, Bernice rolled over onto her belly and propped herself up on her front legs, facing the woman as though they were old friends. The dog barked cheerfully and licked the woman’s hand.

“Hello!” said the woman to Bernice.

Bernice didn’t answer in English, but the kids could tell by the way she bobbed her head that she was saying hello right back.

Then Emma walked into the fountain too. She settled herself and said, “Everyone, this is the Chirky Librarian. She’s my friend. Chirky Librarian, this is everyone.”

“Good afternoon!” sang the woman brightly to Henry, Susan, and Roy. She held out her slippery wet fingers and shook all of their hands very firmly and excitedly. Then she turned back to Emma and raised one eyebrow. “Chirky, Emma? What’s that?”

“Cheerful,” explained Emma, “and perky. Chirky!”

“Well then, okay!” said the librarian in (it must be admitted) a very chirky way. She turned back to Henry, Susan, and Roy. “It’s nice to meet you,” she said, “and while it’s true that I am a librarian, and I’m sometimes
cheerful, and perhaps also perky, you might prefer to call me Lily. It’s shorter, though perhaps less descriptive.”

“Okaaaay,” said Susan cautiously, and thinking that perhaps Alexandria was just the least bit right about Lily.

Roy brushed water out of his eyes and Henry simply stared. Emma played happily with Bernice’s tail. Everyone sat in the fountain adjusting to Lily.

“You’re very … wet,” Susan said finally.

“Thank you,” said Lily. “So are you.”

“You’re very wet … for a grown-up,” said Susan, trying to make herself understood.

“It happens,” said Lily. She scratched Bernice behind her right ear. “I’m done with work for the day and I can do what I please. La la la.” She began to sing to herself.

“Huh,” said Susan. “I guess that makes sense.” She smiled uneasily. Lily laughed and kept singing, and the sound was so warm and friendly that the uneasy part of Susan’s smile went away. For some reason, things felt better. Maybe because what Susan had really been asking Lily was, Do you know you’re kind of weird? and in her own way, Lily had answered, Yes, and isn’t it fun?

In any case, nobody talked much after that. They all just sang along with Lily’s la-la-la’s as they finished rinsing the soap from Bernice’s fur. The kids didn’t laugh and shout the way they had before, but that was okay, because you can’t expect to laugh all the time, and singing nonsense songs is nice too. The day had just shifted slightly, like the weather does sometimes.

Once Bernice had shaken herself off in the sun and everyone else had climbed from the fountain and wrung themselves dry as best they could, Lily said, “I think that probably it would be best if we had some cake now. Don’t you all agree?”

And since nobody ever says no to cake (unless the cake in question is very badly burned or poisoned or something else equally terrible), the kids nodded happily. They loaded Bernice back onto the wagon, and the five of them trundled off down Bloomington Street.

Lily waved goodbye to the dolphin.

Of course, Susan called her mother at work to make sure it was okay to eat cake with Lily. When you are having any sort of adventure, you have to be careful of strangers and of cake, even the kind that comes from nice librarians. But her mother, after a chat with Lily, determined that the cake in question was friendly cake, so that was okay.

Even so, Susan glanced over her shoulder nervously as she walked. At one point, she went so far as to fall behind the others, in a way that might be mistaken for
“apart,” just in case someone she knew from Quiet Falls Middle School should happen to pass by and see her trooping along, soaking wet and with a bunch of kids, a gigantic dog in a red wagon, and a strange (if chirky) librarian in a bright purple dress.

Luckily, after a minute, it occurred to Susan that the part of her that walked apart was the very same part of her that had said such mean things about Lily. It was also the very same part of her that had refused to believe in the magic in the first place, and the part of her that had gotten rid of her unicorns and her Little House books. So Susan pushed that part of herself away and ran to catch up. She put an arm around Emma’s small shoulder, and when Emma smiled up at her, she was glad that she had.

From a block away, they could guess which house was Lily’s. It was painted pale green and flanked on both sides by lilac trees. The front porch was purple and deliciously overgrown with honeysuckle and rambler roses. There was a windmill in the yard.

Once inside, they filed down a narrow hallway that led to the back of the house. Looking up, they noticed that the hallway’s ceiling was sky blue and covered with fluffy white clouds. At the end of the hall was a red door, and when they opened it and walked into the
kitchen, each of them gasped audibly. The kitchen looked like it had been transported from an old black-and-white TV show, colored all in shades of gray so that the kids in their bright clothes appeared to have been cut and pasted into an old photograph. There was a white enamel icebox, a silver table with matching chairs, a black-and-white checkerboard floor, and dishes made of cloudy white china that looked like frozen milk.

“Whoa!” said Henry.

“Yes, whoa!” Lily said with a grin, reaching into the icebox for a bottle of milk. “Isn’t it fun? Sometimes I like to go back in time for a bit. Don’t you?”

The kids stifled laughs at this question. They did like to go back in time—centuries back!

When Lily opened a window to toss a handful of birdseed into the backyard, the kids all stared at the yard too. Whereas Lily’s front yard was freshly mown and was bordered by neat beds of flowers, the backyard had clearly not been cut in years. Not only that, the yard was enormous, surrounded by giant old trees that blocked all view of other houses. And it was full, full, FULL of wildflowers: purple coneflowers and yellow dandelions and blue chicory, like a tiny wilderness right there beyond the kitchen door.

“It’s beautiful,” Emma said, sighing happily. “It reminds me of the prairie we saw—”

“Really, where?” asked Lily brightly.

Henry interrupted. “She means a prairie we saw in a movie, right, Emma?”

“Yeah, right,” said Emma, looking flustered. “That’s what I meant—a movie.”

“Really,” said Lily, reaching for plates. “What movie?”

“I forget,” said Emma.

“Hmmm,” said Lily, but she didn’t pry. Instead, she just passed out forks. And in a matter of moments, the prairie was forgotten as they buried themselves deep in slices of the thickest, tallest, most chocolaty layer cake any of them had ever seen. Nobody spoke. Everyone was content just to munch, with forks raised over cake plates, giant mason jars full of icy milk at hand, and Bernice happily lapping at a bowl of water on the floor.

“I gotta say,” offered Henry at last, through a huge mouthful of fudge icing, “your house is really, really neat. I’ve never seen anything like it before.” He swallowed and took another bite before saying, “How’d you dream all this up?”

“I’m good at dreaming,” replied Lily, nudging a
large smear of frosting from her front teeth with her tongue. “But more than that, I’m just not very good at doing things the way most people do. My brain takes the way I’m supposed to do things and twists it all around like a pipe cleaner to make something else instead.”

“Well, I’m glad,” sighed Emma as she gazed around her. “I think it’s all just beautiful. I like things to be different.”

“Yes,” said Lily. “But a lot of people don’t like different. A lot of people work very hard to fit in.”

Susan stared intently at the piece of cake in front of her.

“How’s your cake?” Lily asked, noticing Susan’s sudden stillness.

“Fine,” said Susan, her eyes still on her plate. “It’s fine.”

Lily examined Susan for a second before she said, “Just fine?”

Susan shifted in her chair. “Um, no,” she said, looking up. “It’s great, actually. Maybe the best cake I’ve ever had.” She searched for the right word. “It’s … scrumptious?”

“That’s very nice,” said Lily. She seemed pleased. “‘Scrumptious’ is excellent!”

That, for some reason, reminded Susan of her old
friend Tish—of how Tish, looking up from a batch of peanut butter–banana-raisin cookies she was mixing, a book about goblins, or a dress-up trunk, would often say “Excellent!” with her eyes lit up and her head thrust forward. Susan knew Tish would never have said the cake was “fine.”

“Now,” Lily said when everyone finally took a break from chewing. “Tell me about this dog.” She stroked Bernice, who was sitting beside her. Bernice was so big that her nose was level with Lily’s shoulder. “Emma says you need my help, but why? Where did you get her? Why is she a secret? How did she get so badly hurt?” Lily looked at them all and waved a fork as she asked these questions.

Susan, Henry, and Roy fiddled with their napkins and leaned forward to answer these questions one at a time. Emma, still mildly flustered from having nearly let slip about the prairie, sat back and listened.

“We found her outside,” said Henry, in response to Lily’s first question.

“Because our parents will take her to the pound if they find out,” added Roy, answering the second question.

“We don’t really know,” said Susan, in reply to the last question, “because she came that way.”

Lily took all this information in and then looked at Henry. “Outside?” she asked. “Outside is a pretty big place. Where outside?”

Henry stared back mutely. “Um, hang on,” he said, “I dropped my fork. Be right back!” Then he dropped his fork with a clatter and disappeared under the table to think.

While he was there, Susan swallowed the bite in her mouth, made up her mind, and decided to level with the librarian. Lily was unlike anyone Susan had ever met, but she seemed trustworthy, maybe even more trustworthy for that very reason. Lily seemed like someone who could understand the need for a secret. She seemed like a grown-up who could understand that even kids needed privacy sometimes.

“We can’t tell you that,” Susan said, sitting up as tall as she could, looking Lily directly in the eyes. “And we can’t tell you why we can’t tell you.”

“Is that so?” said Lily, tapping a fudgy fork against her plate. Coming from any other grown-up, the same sentence would have sounded condescending: Is
that
so? But Lily appeared to mean just what she said. She sounded curious: Is that
so
?

This prompted Susan to offer further explanation. Her words tumbled out. “It’s nothing bad,” she said.
“We promise. We aren’t doing anything stupid or mean. We aren’t going to get in trouble. It’s just that we have a … secret.”

“A secret?”

“A secret!” Susan nodded sharply.

“Well, okay,” said Lily. “If it’s a real secret. Though that just makes me curiouser.”

“It is a real secret,” said Susan, “but even if it weren’t, Bernice needs our help, no matter where we found her. If we wanted to, we could just show you a field and pretend we’d found her there. You’d never know the difference. We could lie.”

“Hmmm. You make a good point,” said Lily.

Susan sat back, surprised but pleased.

“Look,” Henry said, “we really just need a place for Bernice to stay until we can figure out what to do with her.”

Emma got up and went over to where Lily was sitting. She patted the librarian’s shoulder. “Please?” she asked. “I’m going to keep her, only my mom doesn’t know it yet. I need to talk her into it.”

“Oh, all right,” said Lily, tousling Emma’s wispy hair. “I’ll help you. But I’m also curious about why you came to me.”

“It was kind of an accident,” said Henry. “Honestly,
we just couldn’t think of anywhere else to go.”

“Also, I knew you liked dogs,” added Emma.

“Hmph,” said Lily. “I don’t much believe in accidents. But that’s fine. And I do like dogs. What kind of person doesn’t?” She rumpled the fur on Bernice’s head. “Now, who wants seconds?”

Everyone did.