Bigger than a Bread Box (19 page)

“Oh yes!” I said. I couldn’t believe I’d gotten distracted for this long. “I do! Let me get it.”

As I leaned down to reach into my backpack, I felt nervous, tingly, almost scared. Then, rooting around in my bag, I couldn’t find the spoon!

“Hang on,” I said. “I’m sure it’s here. I know I brought it.” I lifted the bag to my knees to paw around inside it, but I still couldn’t find the spoon. Was it possible I’d lost it, after all this trouble? I stood up and walked over to the
counter, where I set down the bag under the overhead light and practically stuck my whole head inside it.

At last I saw a silver gleam. There it was! Tucked away beneath a fold of fabric, buried under my sweater. I pulled it out, breathed on it, and shined it against my shirt.

I whirled around and held the spoon out to Adda. “Found it! Here it is!” I called out, elated. “Look!”

Across the room, Miss Adda stood up. Her eyes widened as they settled on the spoon. Her mouth opened. Her chin went down.

“Oh,” she said. She looked stunned. “Oh!” She gasped as she fell against the table, caught herself, but then pushed herself back up.

The table wobbled. The tray of tea things shook too, then slid and tipped onto the floor. All the dishes crashed against the tile and shattered. The thin, lumpy milk and tea ran together and made a puddle all over the floor. Sugar scattered.

I looked over at the floor below Miss Adda’s feet. “Oh no. I’m sorry!” I said. I reached for a dishcloth that hung over the faucet beside me. Then I froze.

Miss Adda had such a strange look on her face. She didn’t even seem to notice that she was standing in a puddle of milky tea. She just stood there, her eyes fixed like laser beams on the spoon in my outstretched hand.

At last she mouthed, “It … can’t … be.”

She moved toward me quickly, pushing through shards of china in her soft slippers, and grabbed the spoon, as if she were in a trance.

“Where? How? Where …,” she babbled, wrapping her fingers around the spoon.

I let go of the spoon, and she pulled it close to her face to read the inscription out loud. “ ‘To Adda. From Harlan. With love,’ ” she whispered softly. Then she clutched it to her chest. “It really is the spoon,” she said. “Our spoon. How did you—”

“I
knew
it was yours!” I shouted happily.

Miss Adda’s face shifted. It was like watching weather change. The trance faded. Her orange mouth drew into a tiny smudge, the lips pinched and tight. Her eyes slitted. Her painted brows lowered, and her shoulders hunched. She shook the spoon in the air, in front of my face.

“
How
did you get this?” she demanded.
“How?”

“I … I bought it …,” I said, confused. “In a junk store, for my mom.”

“Liar,” she spat, jabbing the spoon in my direction. I took a step back.

She said it again:
“Liar!”
Like she was stabbing me with both the spoon and the word. “Thief!”

My heart began to race. How could she possibly know that? What was going on?

“I don’t know how you did this,” Miss Adda said in a strange hissing voice. “I don’t know why you did this!
Why
did you do this thing?” She jabbed again, pushing at the air in front of her with the spoon.

“I don’t know! I didn’t mean to—” I cried, taking another step back.

The weather shifted again. Like a sudden storm, Miss Adda’s tiny face crumpled and she began to weep, standing there in the middle of that green room. She cried deep, deep sobs, clutching the spoon to her chest. Her whole body shook.

I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know what I had done. What had happened to her? How could I help? I felt like I should comfort her, but I was scared to touch her.

“I was only trying to—” I started, reaching out a hand.

Miss Adda jerked her head up, and her eyes opened wide. “Cruel!” she shouted. “You horrid girl. You … grave robber!” Then she reached up and raged at me with her bony little arms, the way Lew does when he’s having a temper tantrum. She was almost like a baby, helpless, waving her arms in the air.

Even so, I was scared. Her arms scared me suddenly, those twiggy, pale, helpless arms. I didn’t want them to touch me and I panicked. I leaned away from those spotted, tiny hands, stretching back, back, back—and fell.

The green curtain brushed lightly against my back, and then cold air whipped past me, enclosed me, as I felt myself falling and tumbling, clattering down a flight of stairs my feet couldn’t seem to find. My knees banged against
a step and then another as the side of my face slapped into a wall. I managed to twist myself, grabbing wildly, and I caught hold of a splintery railing, stopping myself from falling any farther. Then I knelt like that. Just like that, clutching the railing, halfway down the stairs. I just needed to hold on to something. I could feel my nose bleeding. I could taste blood. My arms were scraped. I felt like one big bruise. What had just happened?

I looked above me, squinting up the stairs. I saw Miss Adda’s thin body silhouetted in a rectangle of light, holding aside the curtain. Her voice sounded witchlike as she called down at me, “You can just wait
there
!”

A door slammed shut and I was lost in total darkness. It was like something from one of the mystery novels I’d been reading.

All I could think was,
Grave robber?

C
HAPTER 20

I
sat there on the step and felt at my legs and arms. I clenched and unclenched my hands. Nothing was broken. Nothing hurt badly enough to be serious. So I sat there in the pitch black, tilting my head and pinching my nose and trying to figure out what had just happened.

“Grave robber?” I whispered.
That
didn’t make any sense at all. Maybe Miss Adda was just plain bonkers. Maybe I’d stumbled into the home of a truly sick person. Maybe she had Alzheimer’s. Maybe she had multiple personalities or something scary like that. She had changed her mood so suddenly! I thought about the dead bird and what she’d said about “seeing all the greens.” She wasn’t okay. I could see that now.

But crazy or not, even though I was banged up pretty badly and I wanted out of that basement, I still felt sorry for her. Poor old lady. Waving her arms and screeching,
she seemed so lost and wild and sad. I thought about her shuffling through the broken teacups, the dusty silk flower in the vase, the powdered milk.

Still, I had to get out!

I pushed myself to standing and inched my way back up the stairs. I kept one hand on the rough wooden railing and the other hand flat against the cement wall beside me, trying to find a light switch. Instead I found that the wall beside the staircase was hung with heavy metal tools. I felt a big wrench and a shovel. I knocked something small, like a screwdriver, loose and listened to it fall down the steps in a series of clunks and thunks. I’d been lucky in my fall. I could have easily smashed my head into a rusty saw.

Reaching the top, I felt the kitchen door against my shoulder. I grabbed for where the doorknob should have been, but there wasn’t a doorknob to grab on to, just a wedge of wood. I pushed against the door with all my strength and it shook, but the latch didn’t give way. It was dead bolted or something. I was trapped.

I ran my hands along the wall all around the door, thinking there had to be a light switch somewhere, but when at last I found one, it clicked uselessly. I guess Miss Adda wasn’t tall enough to change the lightbulb. There were an awful lot of things someone like Miss Adda probably couldn’t do.

It had been horrible, watching her shift from a nice old lady into a crazy person. She hadn’t seemed violent, but
she was so old. Maybe the shock of seeing that spoon had just pushed her over the edge. I didn’t think she’d meant to hurt me or trap me in the dark. She was like a cat or something, lashing out with her little claws.

Finally I did the only thing I could think of—I knocked at the door, as though it were a normal door, the front door of a house, as though I were starting over, paying Miss Adda a regular visit.

“Miss Adda?” I called out. “Hello? Miss Adda?”

It felt bizarre to knock from inside that dark cellar.

When she didn’t respond, I put my ear to the crack of the door and pushed gently with my shoulder. The door didn’t budge.

On the other side, Miss Adda was sobbing quietly. She sounded like some kind of old, broken machine. Her cries were tiny jerking sounds, little tugs and chokes.

“Miss Adda?”

“What do you want now?” she called out.

I thought that was pretty obvious. I wanted out. But I didn’t say that. Instead I said, “I want to apologize. I’m sorry, Miss Adda. I really am.…”

She just kept crying.

I tried again. “Please? Let me out?”

This time the crying stopped. “You have to wait,” she said. “For the police.”

Had she really called the police? “But … I’m scared down here,” I said. “It’s dark.”

“So? What
isn’t
?” asked Miss Adda.

“Please,” I said. “Let me out. You don’t need to call the police. I didn’t mean to steal anything,” I said. “It was an accident.”

“How can
that
be?” cried Miss Adda with a sad little laugh. “How do you steal something by accident?” Miss Adda blew her nose, then continued. “How do you
accidentally
rob a casket?”

It was my turn to be bewildered. “Casket?”

“I buried that spoon with him myself,” she said. “Slid it into his pocket just before they closed him up, just before I kissed him goodbye.” She started to cry again, shuddering through the words. “Before they slid him into that cold, cold ground forever.”

Then I understood, and shivered. I remembered the cold, thin metal of that spoon the first time I held it. I remembered taking it out of the bread box and pressing it against my cheek. I could almost feel it between my fingers now, and I wanted to throw up in the darkness, knowing where the spoon had come from: a dark, cold place in the earth.

Miss Adda kept talking. “It was the finest thing he ever gave me, for our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. You might just think it’s a spoon, but it isn’t. It’s very rare. Valuable. A special spoon. It was his mother’s to begin with, but he had it engraved for me. So then I gave it back to him, when he left me. To keep. Until I could join him.”

“Oh,” I said.

“And you took it from him, just like that! So now I’m going to call the police on you, like I would for any thief!” I heard her pick up a phone, heard the faint sound of a bell as she lifted the old-fashioned receiver. I wondered what on earth the police would do when they came. Would they believe her? And even if they didn’t, how would I explain any of this to my mom when I came home in a squad car?

“Please, just let me out,” I said. “I’ll try to explain.”

“No!” said Miss Adda. “You can wait for them to come and take you away—you can wait down there in the dark. Alone. Like poor Harlan. Besides, how can you possibly explain?”

I shivered. I couldn’t tell if she’d hung up the phone.

“I … didn’t mean to,” I said quietly. “It’s so complicated. I
did
steal it, I guess, but I didn’t know I was doing it. I made a mistake. I was wrong. I was selfish, and I’m sorry. But I wasn’t
trying
to take your spoon.”

I
was
sorry. I shouldn’t have taken the spoon. I shouldn’t have taken anything. I regretted it all now. The magic only made everything worse. Wishes were curses. I took a deep breath. Miss Adda didn’t understand, and she never would unless … Should I tell her everything? The truth was all I had left, and maybe, maybe she’d let me out if she understood what had really happened. Was there any chance she was crazy enough to believe me?

“Would you believe me,” I asked, “if I told you it was magic?”

She didn’t answer me at first. So I knocked at the door again and said, “Miss Adda? Did you hear what I said?”

“I … I might,” she said at last. “I
might
believe you.”

So I told her. I told her everything. It all came tumbling out, the whole mess of a story. I told her about the fight and the move, about hiding in the attic and finding the bread box, about the seagulls that first night, and everything after …

It took a minute before Miss Adda said, “I don’t … know. I don’t know if I can believe that.” She took a deep, shuddery breath, the kind of breath that means you’re done crying. “But I’d like to.”

I heard her return the phone to its cradle. Had she been holding it the whole time?

“It’s true,” I said. “I don’t understand it myself, but it’s all true.”

“I want to believe you. I do,” said Miss Adda. “Because maybe if I can believe you, if I can believe in magic, the way I believe in other things—trees, or rocks, or pancakes, or my tired body, or anything else I
know
is real—maybe if I can believe in magic, I can believe all the other things I see. Does that sound crazy?”

It
did
sound crazy. Totally nuts. But I could tell she was standing just on the other side of the door now, inches
away from me. I could hear her breathing between sentences. I thought she might still open the door.