Lost Children of the Far Islands (4 page)

Gus and Leo climbed the stairs together, both skipping the squeaky board on the fourth step. Ila followed them but went into her room to retrieve the bears, who were not allowed to go to school with her.

Gus and Leo went down the long hallway that ended at their mother’s studio. The voices were coming from there. The door to the studio hung slightly open in its crooked frame. They could just see their father’s back.
He was kneeling on the floor. Their mother was in the rocking chair. Her hands were limp inside their father’s larger hands.

“Rosemaris,” their father said, sounding weary, as if he’d been speaking for hours. “How can I help you?”

“You can’t,” their mother replied. She bent her head farther so that her shining hair, as smooth as water, fell over her face. “No one can. I just have to focus. Only I’m not sure I’m strong enough, not after all this time. I don’t know how long I can protect them.”

Their father gathered her in his arms. She laid her head on his shoulder and closed her eyes.

“I should have known this would happen,” she said. “We’ve been so naive, Peter. What were we thinking?”

“I love you,” their father said. “I loved you then, and I love you now.”

“I should never have come to you,” their mother said. “And now the children are going to pay for my recklessness. I just want—” Her voice broke and she took a shaky breath. “I just want them to have normal lives.”

She turned her face into their father’s shoulder. Her own shoulders heaved as she wept.

“They will,” their father said. “I promise you, they will.”

Their mother’s reply was muffled.

Gus was suddenly horribly frightened. Without speaking, she and Leo backed away from the door. They got Ila from her room, and the three of them went to the kitchen.

“Pay for what?” Leo said, moving automatically to the cupboard to pull out cookies. “What in the world is she talking about?”

“It doesn’t make any sense,” Gus said, pouring the milk. “But at least she’s talking, right? I mean, she’s barely said a word in weeks. Not that there’s anything wrong with that,” she added quickly.

Ila didn’t seem bothered by Gus’s comment. She just took a glass of milk with her thank-you smile and then crouched back down on the floor to share it with the bears.

“What does she mean, come to you?” Leo said. “Do you think she means when they met?”

“I don’t know,” Gus said doubtfully. “She didn’t really come to him, right? I mean, she was drowning. That doesn’t really count as coming to someone.”

“Grown-ups always say weird things,” Leo said, but he sounded doubtful too.

Gus took the cookie Leo had been dunking and leaned down to give it to Ila. “Yeah, whatever,” she muttered.

That night, before dinner, Gus took a long, hot bubble bath. The bathroom was the only room in the Brennan house with a lock on the door, and for that reason it was Gus’s favorite. She locked the door, filled the tub, and floated happily for a while. Then, slowly, she slipped under the water, so that she was totally submerged. Long ago, she had discovered that if she lay underwater in the
bath, she could hear her family moving about downstairs through the bottom of the tub. It was very faint, but it always gave her a feeling of safety just to know that they were down there.

Gus let her hair float up around her face and blew some bubbles, feeling sleepy and warm. She should be coming up for air, she knew, but oddly enough, she didn’t feel any need to. Then this oddity was eclipsed by another. She realized that if she closed her eyes and concentrated, she could actually hear her mother and father speaking downstairs, probably in the kitchen. That had never happened before. Their voices were as clear as if they were in the room with her.

“Listen to me,” her mother was saying. “This is important, Peter. I’m not sure I can do this. I’m not strong enough. You have to take them to her.”

“No,” her father said sharply. Then, more gently, he added, “Nothing’s going to happen. You’re imagining things, Rosie. And we agreed that they would never go there. You left all of that behind you.”

There was a moment of silence, and then her mother spoke again. “I thought I did,” she said, “but now I think that you can’t escape your past. I was a fool. And now it’s up to us to keep them safe. Promise me, Peter.”

Gus strained to hear more, but there was only a long silence, followed by footsteps as someone—she thought it was her father—left the kitchen.

Gus suddenly realized that she was freezing. The
water around her had grown tepid, all the bubbles dissolved. As she had that thought, she also realized that she was still underwater, and that she had not surfaced for air in—how long had it been? Long enough to hear the conversation between her parents. Long enough for the water to grow cold. She burst out of the water in a panic, scrambling over the edge of the tub to lie on the bath mat, gasping and choking.

“Gus, is that you?” she heard her father call. He was standing outside the bathroom door. “Did you go and drown in there?”

No, but I should have
, Gus thought wildly. She pinched her arm just to make sure, but she wasn’t sure of what. That she wasn’t dead? That she wasn’t dreaming?

“Gus?” her father said, sounding concerned.

“Um, I’m fine,” she said shakily. “I’m OK.”

“Well, dinner’s ready. You sure you’re OK?”

“Yes,” she said, thinking,
No, no, no
. “Yes. Dinner. I’ll be right there.”

She toweled off and put on pajamas, her head still spinning. What had just happened? She needed to talk to Leo.

“Gus!” her father shouted. “Come on! We’re waiting for you!”

Gus went downstairs. She would talk to Leo about it later. But the conversation at dinner was about the possibility of her getting a puppy for her upcoming birthday, and then there were dishes to clear and stack in
the dishwasher and spelling words to practice and she was in bed drifting off to sleep before she remembered it. When she woke up again, it was to the sound of Ila screaming, which shocked the whole incident out of her mind entirely.

Ila’s bed was empty, so Gus followed the sound down the hallway to her parents’ room. Ila must have gone in there in the night, because she was sitting up in their bed in her nightie, and although she had stopped screaming, her face was red and she was crying. Their mother was leaning over her and murmuring. Their father stood at the end of the bed in his pajamas.

“Just a nightmare,” he said to Gus and to Leo, who had joined them and stood blinking. Leo obviously had fallen asleep while reading in his clothes again. “Everything’s OK.”

Ila nodded sleepily and snuggled in closer to their mother.

“Tell you what, you two,” their mother said. “Come over here to the bed and sit with us for a few minutes.”

“Can I get my book?” Leo said.

Their mother patted the bed. “Come on. You don’t
need your book. Just for a minute. It will make Ila feel better.”

Ila turned her sleepy, tear-stained face to them, and Leo sighed dramatically.

“OK, I guess.”

Leo and Gus crossed to the bed and sat down. Ila crawled over to Gus and leaned against her legs. Their father remained standing, now framed in the doorway.

“OK,” their mom said. “Instead of a story, I’ll tell you a poem. From when I was a little girl.”

“When you were little?” Gus said, intrigued. Their mother never talked about her childhood.

“That’s right,” their mother said. “I don’t know why I haven’t remembered it before. It’s an old, old thing, from way before I was born. Ready?”

She began to speak, slowly at first, as if she were trying to remember the words.

“ ‘On the fire’ and ‘On the bower,’ ” Gus said dreamily. “I like that. What’s a bower?”

“It’s a dwelling,” their mother said.

“There’s a bowerbird that lives in Australia,” Leo said from his side of the bed.

Their mother laughed. “Well, this bower is a dwelling. The poem is an old prayer to protect the home. You say it at night, before you cover the fire at the hearth.”

“Who would say it?” Gus asked, trying not to sound too eager. “Your mother?”

Instead of answering, their mother said, “There’s another verse. Would you like to hear it?”

“OK,” Gus said, feeling slightly defeated.

Their mother leaned over and gave Gus a quick squeeze on her leg. “Right,” she said. “Let’s see if I can remember the rest.”

A sharp gust of wind buffeted the house. Rain began to slash at the dark windowpanes. Ila whimpered.

Their father had been moving quietly around the room, closing windows. “I’ll get the other bedrooms,” he said, and disappeared down the hallway.

“Who are the three?” Leo asked.

“Why don’t I say it again,” their mother said, raising her voice over the sound of the storm, which was now driving at the windows so that they rattled in their frames. “I’ll say a line, and you can say it back to me. It’ll be fun.”

Her voice didn’t sound like she was having fun. It sounded thin and tense.

“Again,” she said when they had finished, and she started the poem before anyone could object.

Ila huddled closer to Gus as their mother began to say the poem again, stopping at each line so Gus and Leo could repeat it.

Together they recited the poem, almost shouting over the screaming wind, huddled together on the big bed as though it were a lifeboat on a storm-tossed sea. As they reached the last lines a second time, there was a blinding flash of lightning, followed immediately by a crash of thunder that seemed to break right over the house. Ila screamed, and as she did, the lights went out.

Without thinking or pausing, they said the poem a third time, really shouting it now. It was like a game, the poem against the storm, except that there was something frightening about it too. The storm seemed to be fighting their voices, raising its own volume to drown them out.

When their voices died, so too did the storm, dropping away as though it had never been, leaving the room heavy and humid and still. The lamp next to the bed blinked back on. Their father came into the room, lit
in the doorway by the reassuring yellow of the hall light, which had also come back on.

“Over already,” he said cheerfully.

“Just a squall,” their mother murmured. She was lying back against the pillows and looked pale and sick.

“Rosemaris?” their father said, crossing the room to her.

“I’m fine,” she whispered. “Just tired. But, Leo, Gus? And Ila too,” she added, struggling up to lean on her elbows. She was breathing heavily, as if the motion were almost too much for her. “I want you three to remember that poem, OK? No matter what. It’s important to me that you remember it.”

“Rosemaris,” their father said, a warning in his voice. “You should rest.”

“What for?” Leo said. “It’s just a poem, right?”

“Of course,” their mother said. “Of course it is. It’s just a nice thing to remember, that’s all. Something from my past that you can keep.” She lay back again. “Off you go. It’s late. Ila, you can sleep with us tonight.”

Gus paused at the door. “What’s it called?” she asked.

“What?” her mother said in a distracted voice.

“The poem. What’s it called?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I always thought of it as the night poem.”

“The night poem,” said Gus. “I like that.”

“Peter, just check outside, would you?” her mother said. She pulled Ila nearer to her and closed her eyes.

“Rosie,” their father began, but she spoke again, without opening her eyes.

“Please, Peter. Just, please.”

Gus and Leo went to their rooms, and their father headed downstairs. Leo slipped into Gus’s room a minute later. Gus was already pulling on a pair of sneakers.

“Let’s go,” she said. “We’ll need to hurry.”

Outside, there was no sign of the storm that had passed over them. The moon shone as brightly and cleanly as a white sun, and the stars glittered in a cloudless sky. The moonlight reflected off the ground and cast the backyard in sharp, unfamiliar angles and shadows.

“There’s Dad,” Leo hissed. Their father was kneeling outside the kitchen window, which meant that he was also under the window to Ila and Gus’s bedroom, above the kitchen. He seemed to be looking down at something. He got up quickly when he saw them.

“What are you two doing here?” Their usually easygoing father sounded angry and … something else.
Was he afraid?
Gus wondered. The thought made a tingle climb up her spine. “Back in the house,” their father said. “Now. I’ll be right in.”

He walked quickly away from them, to the edge of the yard, where it began to slope down to the rocks. He stood there, turning his head to one side and then the other, searching the darkness. Quickly, Leo dropped to his knees and put one hand, palm down, inside some sort of depression in the soft dirt there. He looked closer. It was an animal’s paw print.