Drizzle (18 page)

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Authors: Kathleen Van Cleve

BOOK: Drizzle
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Her eyes tighten as she looks at me. “Your aunt has tons of money, you mean.”
“You don’t know anything,” I tell her. “The farm’s worth millions and my dad owns half of it.”
“If you say so . . .”
“It is!”
“Good for you. My dad doesn’t think so.”
“Well, tell your dad that we could sell the farm for fifty million dollars if we want to!” The words fly out of my mouth so fast I can almost see them as they hang in the air.
Jongy’s smile slashes through her face, her eyes bright and sharp.
Oh no.
“My father’s going to love hearing that.”
Oh no oh no oh no.
Dad explicitly said not to say anything and here I am, telling—no, announcing it to Jennifer Jong. What if she tells her dad? What if she tells her
mom
?
“Please, Jongy, don’t say anything. Please. I wasn’t supposed to tell anyone.” I know I look pathetic, begging like this, but I don’t care. She can’t tell her parents.
“Oh sure,” Jongy tells me. “I won’t tell a soul. Cross my heart.” She flashes both of her hands in front of my face. All her fingers are crossed.
What have I done?
There isn’t a sports equipment closet at St. Xavier’s. There’s a sports equipment
room
. But I found a new spot to hide. The chapel. It’s in the basement, far away from the schoolrooms, and I don’t think people go there that often. It’s cool. It’s quiet. And no one can hear me cry.
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 13
 
Girard
 
I need to tell Mom and Dad what I told Jongy. What I
stupidly
told Jongy. She’s going to tell her mother and then her mother’s going to write about it and then everyone will know what Aunt Edith tried to do and even more bad things will happen.
It’s a quiet afternoon. The churning noise of the lakeside pumps is soft, not any loud clunking. The plants alongside the edge of the dirt road are all slumping down toward the ground, which has changed from thick dark soil to light brown sand. The lake still shines under the sunlight, but I can see that the level of the water has shrunk. Before, water would slosh up against the ground, sometimes splashing up on the fields. Now I can actually see the muddy edge of the lake’s shoreline.
The mist has continued to seep out from the truly weeping cherry blossom tree and over the lake. It’s covering about half of the northern part of the lake, up almost to the iron bridge. The farther it spreads, the thinner the mist gets. Now, when I pass my hand through it, it feels like my hand is passing through about a trillion soggy spiderwebs. Every time I ask Spark why he and his family are working so hard, he just bobs up and down and then zips back inside the mist, leaving his sparkling trail.
I’m trudging along the dirt road, on my way to Dad’s cottage. Mom says he’s been up late every night working on his research project, so that it doesn’t suffer because of the extra work around the farm. I saw him for a second at breakfast; I could tell how worried he was, no matter how much he pretended he wasn’t. He had given me two Vitamin Es and told me that “good things were coming! I promise.” But I don’t even think he believed what he said.
I’m about one hundred yards away from Dad’s cottage when I hear someone calling my name.
“Polly?”
I turn. UGH. It’s Girard, Aunt Edith’s assistant. He stands directly in front of the sun, blocking it out like a dark, creepy planet.
“What are you doing here?” I hear how rude I sound, but as soon as I see him, I can only think about Dad telling us that he wants to uproot all of our plants.
“I have a meeting with your father.” Girard smiles one of his creepy smiles.
My eyes flash.
He
shouldn’t be meeting with Dad.
He
shouldn’t even be anywhere on our property. “Why?”
“To tell your father that the offer is still open.” He smiles wider now, even creepier. It triggers something mean in me.
“You know, you’re not even a farmer,” I accuse. “You don’t even like the farm.You want to ruin all the good parts!”
He steps closer to me. “What are you talking about?”
“The chocolate rhubarb, the Giant Rhubarb. Dad said you want to uproot all of that.”
“I do,” he says, looking genuinely puzzled. “It’s the proper business decision.” His eyes sweep across the fields. “I’m not the villain here, Polly. Neither is the buyer. I’ve been studying the business of rhubarb from a macro perspective.” He walks away from me, lecturing. “Which means that the profit center of this farm is with the Juice Company contract. People around the world want juice. You can understand that, surely.”
“People around the world want chocolate rhubarb too.”
He shakes his head. “Not as much.” He runs one of his hands through his thick, short hair. “There won’t be any more so-called ‘magic’ crops.” When he says “magic,” he flicks the first two fingers of each hand in arcs, like he’s showing me how to draw parentheses.
“You don’t even like to walk in the dirt,” I yell. “How can you run a farm!”
He laughs. “Do you think your aunt Edith has been getting her feet dirty all these years?”
“You’re not like her,” I say. “You’re the exact opposite of her.”
He doesn’t even seem mildly annoyed with me, like he’s just ignoring what I’m saying.
“Dad’s not going to change his mind,” I tell him.
“I’ll let him tell me that.” Girard looks over my head, his gaze pointed in the direction of the Giant Rhubarb fields. “Alessandra is prepared to sweeten, shall we say, our original offer.”
“Why do you want it so much? What if it doesn’t rain for you either?”
“It’s all in the plans.” Girard continues.“Luckily Alessandra is a woman of incredible means. It will require a massive reconceptualization of the infrastructure, of course. We’ll be uprooting everything on the property that isn’t regular rhubarb and installing a state-of-the-art irrigation system. The Juice Company is all for it.”
“You’ll get rid of the White House?” He nods. “And the Learning Garden?” He nods again.
“And your parents’ house, the Giant Rhubarb, your father’s lab, the Dark House. We may cordon off a section of the chocolate rhubarb field and see what thrives. Alessandra and I have discussed it—the Alessandra di Falciana Preserve, something like that.”
“What about the castle?”
“The castle stays. Alessandra wants to live there.”
My world—my whole life—is disappearing as he talks.
“You can’t do this!” I plead. “This is our home!”
For once, Girard seems to really look at me. “I’m not a monster,” he tells me quietly. “I realize how hard this will be for you and your siblings.” He stops. “Believe it or not, I’m quite fond of all of you.” He coughs, composing himself. “But children have to relocate all the time. In fact, I relocated sixteen times when I was a kid.You’ll survive and it will make you stronger.” He smiles. “And listen. You’ll have so much money. Your father can take you guys anywhere you want.”
“But we don’t want to go anywhere. We don’t care about the money.”
In a flash, Girard’s expression shifts to his typical smug face. “That’s because you’ve always
had
money,” he snaps. “People who have money have no idea what it’s like for people who don’t.” He kicks the dirt. “They don’t even know when they act like spoiled little brats because they don’t know any other way.”
I’m stunned.
Girard shakes his head. “Of course you don’t see it. But you can’t help it.You’ve always been rich. And now you’re going to be richer. If your father stops trying to pretend he’s some groundbreaking scientist.”
I can’t move my mouth to say anything.
“Think about it. The farm will die unless he accepts our offer.” He straightens up. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to stop by the Dark House before I see your father.”
I try to imagine our farm without a White House or chocolate rhubarb or even the Dark House. I see a farm that doesn’t have the name Peabody anywhere; I see a farm that’s sunk back in the ground, with all the diamond sprigs and chocolate rhubarb and magic bugs.
“We all hate you,” I say. “We all hate you: me, Freddy, Patricia. You’re just a big, pompous loser.”
Girard recoils, his shoulders drawing in, his eyes casting downward. But then he recovers, pulls himself back to his full height.
“You should tell your father to sell before it’s too late. Before you all lose everything.” He swallows. “And you should think about how calling people names is not only immature but unproductive.” He smiles meanly. “Big pompous losers aren’t likely to care if children have to leave their homes.”
He whirls around and starts to stalk out of the field. I choke, as if I’m drowning in air.
“Stop!” I yell. But Girard doesn’t stop walking. I run after him, breathless. “Please Girard! I’m sorry I called you a loser. Don’t do this.”
“Polly,” he says tonelessly, “grow up. It’s over.”
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 14
 
The Organic Psychic
 
No one has to tell me that things are getting worse. I can see it every single day when I walk out to the chocolate rhubarb field. Harry, unsurprisingly, has not sprouted at all, but even all the rhubarb plants around him—the whole field, even—look pale and tired, ragged.
It’s like our farm has become a walking tour of upside-down images.
So when the mist starts to take up the full northern section of the lake, I’m not surprised.
When my finger starts to throb as I walk around the PEACE maze with a watering can, I’m not surprised.
And then, when I hear Freddy couldn’t even play a whole
game
on Saturday, I’m not surprised either. Don’t get me wrong, I’m worried—
really
worried—just not
surprised
.
But this morning, I
am
surprised.
Ophelia Baird arrives at our house with a crystal ball, exactly like you see in movies and comic books. Nothing loony about it. Just a normal crystal ball.
“Hi Polly! The farm looks bad. I’m very concerned.” Ophelia speaks in a high, strained voice, as if her nice, smooth voice was run through a cheese grater. She holds up a velvet bag. “I brought
everything
.Tarot cards, wheatberries, the crystal ball. Please get your mother! And everyone else! We should have all the spirits!”
I find Freddy in the playroom with a video game.
“Ophelia wants us upstairs.” I pretend that I can’t notice that his skin is basically white, like the bones of a skeleton.
“For what?”
“I don’t know. A séance.”
I’d never admit this to Freddy, but I’m counting on this séance thing to give us some answers.
Freddy grins as he stands up. “What are we waiting for? Maybe one of those spirits can tell my little sister here to relax so she stops looking at me like I’m some zombie.”
A half hour later, my whole family plus Beatrice, Basford, and Chico sit in a circle around Ophelia. (Actually, Dad and Chico sit in chairs behind the circle because Chico says his knees hurt and Dad is pretending to pay attention but is really sneaking looks in the papers he’s hiding under his arm.) Dad has been on the phone with Dunbar all day, although I’m not supposed to know that. He didn’t say anything about his meeting with Girard, and I didn’t tell him that I spoke with him.
I also didn’t tell him, or Mom, that I told Jongy about the sale. Every day I rehearse what I’m going to say to them. But I don’t do it. Each day that it
isn’t
in the papers, I think that maybe Jongy has found some streak of good in her evil mind and hasn’t told her parents. Then I remember that I’m talking about Jongy, and that I should tell my parents before it’s too late. And the whole cycle starts again.
Patricia keeps taking the wheatberries and eating them, right in front of Ophelia, but Ophelia doesn’t care. She focuses on the crystal ball; her long, skinny, silver-tipped fingers flitting along the surface.
Patricia rolls her eyes. “I think we should be figuring out why there’s an eerie green mist on our lake instead of sitting around a Ouija board,” she says loudly.
“Don’t be disrespectful,” Mom whispers sharply. Mom’s usually as calm as a rock, but it’s obvious everything is getting to her. “It can’t hurt.”
Ophelia just keeps tapping the crystal ball . . . tap tap tap . . . and humming the song
“
We’re Off to See the Wizard
”
from
The Wizard of Oz
.
“We’re almost there,” announces Ophelia. “Just one more thing.” She takes out a football helmet and places it on her head. It doesn’t have a faceguard, so we can see her expressions perfectly well, even though she looks 100 percent ridiculous. “It blocks the bad spirits,” Ophelia explains, “like a defensive lineman.”

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