Some Kind of Happiness (17 page)

T
HAT EVENING BEFORE DINNER,
I show Gretchen and Kennedy the newspaper article Grandpa did not throw away, and I tell them everything I have learned about the Travers fire.

We agree not to talk about it with the little ones, and we are certainly not mentioning anything to the adults. I learned my lesson after trying to discuss it with Grandpa.

Obviously something is being kept from us; otherwise I'm sure I would have heard about the fire by now, and how my aunts tried to save the Travers family. My cousins would have already known about it. They would have told me right away after finding the Bone House. They wouldn't want to hide that their mothers are town heroes.

I'm glad I'm not the only one who didn't know about this. We are in this mystery together, my cousins and I.

I tell Jack everything in a note and leave it in the Post Office with the article.

Jack's response, a couple of hours later, says this:

Dear Orphan Girl,

I didn't know about your aunts and the fire either. Cole says same for him.

I noticed one thing. Why doesn't the article talk about your dad? It says your aunts saw the fire, and it talks about your grandparents. But it doesn't say anything about him. That's weird, right?

Your friend,

Captain Jack

P.S. Don't worry, we won't talk about this to the troll, either.

Standing beside the Post Office, I stare at the article, which Jack has returned to me. A messy circle in blue ink surrounds the paragraph talking about my aunts—and not my father.

So Jack noticed it too.

Even if the article just said,
Thankfully, the youngest Hart, Lewis (14), wasn't home at the time, and did not have to witness this terrible tragedy
, that would make sense to me. So why doesn't it say at least that?

I stare at the photos included in the article. The burned Bone House. My three aunts, golden-haired. Grandma and Grandpa standing behind them with their hands on my aunts' shoulders. Grandpa's face is blank. Grandma's smile is gentle and sad. It looks, I think, just like someone should look if they are being photographed after something awful has happened.

Dad may not be in this article, but he has to know about the fire.

And if that is the case, why has he never told me about it?
Even with everything that happened, and his huge fight with Grandma, it seems strange that he would have been able to resist telling such a dramatic story for eleven years.

He is hiding something from me. They all are—my aunts, my grandparents.

I am going to find out what.

•  •  •

We sneak out after dinner to meet with the Baileys. Avery is covering for us again, but I don't think she's happy about it. This time Dex, Ruth, and Bennett are coming with us.

Gretchen is making notes on her map of the Everwood, which she does every time we're outside.

Jack has a backpack crammed full of cleaning supplies.

So do I. And so does Kennedy.

We are quite serious about cleaning tonight. I have insisted upon it. The Bone House needs us.

I raided the pantry and the garage, sneaking things back up to my room while the adults were busy.

I am a thief.

It feels good.

I try to think about that feeling instead of the article, or the fire, or my father.

Gretchen and Kennedy are arguing about something, hissing back and forth. The sounds become wrapped up in the whispering trees until I cannot tell the two apart.

Ahead of them Cole is herding Dex, Ruth, and Bennett like cattle.

So back here it is just me and Jack. I like that.

I think I have a crush on Jack.

This is not the first crush I've had. Last fall, when Dad was working on an important journal article and Mom was wrapped up in a huge house renovation, we ordered cheap pizza all the time. The delivery boy was freckled and a teenager and had shaggy, sandy-colored hair. He smiled at me and remembered my name.

I quickly fell in love with him. At least I think it was love. I have read about falling in love, and I have watched movies in which people fall in love. Whenever the delivery boy came to the door, I could feel myself becoming silly, like I might start either laughing or crying at any moment.

After a couple of weeks, he stopped delivering pizza to us.

At this point in my life I like to think he got a better job or went on vacation. But at the time I feared he had sensed my love and had run as fast as he could in the other direction.

I did not eat pizza after that, even though refusing pizza and requesting Chinese instead made Dad cranky. The sight and smell of pizza had become too painful. Every time I even thought of it, my throat clenched up and my stomach flipped over, and I wished the world would swallow me up so I wouldn't have to feel that way ever again.

If that is what falling in and out of love is like, it is no wonder Mom and Dad don't want me around this summer.

(It occurs to me that this is the first time I have accepted the possibility that Mom and Dad are not in love anymore.)

(It sort of feels like I am noticing this about someone else's parents. I'm like a doctor observing something strange about my patients, who are nice, but I don't have to be friends with them or anything.)

“
Arrrrrrr
you okay?” Jack asks, his finger crooked into a pirate's hook. “You look kind of intense.”

Jack absolutely cannot know I have been thinking about love and crushes and other delicate subjects. Instead I say the first thing that comes into my head:

“So, what's up with your dad?”

Right. Because Geoffrey Bailey, the drunk driver, is not a delicate subject at all.

Jack freezes for a second. “What? What do you mean?”

(Do not say you have been secretly researching his family, Finley. Whatever you do.)

“Just wondering. You never talk about him. Or your mom.”

Jack starts walking again, his hands in his pockets. His arms are so skinny, they are mostly elbow. “Well, my parents are being held captive too, of course.”

“By the troll.”

“Right.”

I take a deep breath and concentrate on the sensation of my legs taking a step, a step, another step.

“You're weird tonight, Finley,” Jack informs me. “What's going on in that orphan-girl brain of yours?”

(Grandma missing Dad. Does he miss her?)

(Geoffrey Bailey being arrested for drunk driving.)

(The dying Everwood trees, and newspaper articles, and blond heroines, and a dead child named Cynthia Travers.)

(How Jack smells like dirt and sweat, which is not as disgusting a smell as you might think.)

But I do not want to scare Jack away. I will not tolerate another pizza-delivery-boy disaster.

“I don't know,” I say. “Random stuff.”

“
Super
random,” Jack agrees. “But it's okay. I like random.”

We have reached the Bone House. The dry grass of the Wasteland makes strange, scratchy noises, and the open air makes me feel lonely, although I am surrounded by people.

It is a feeling I am used to.

Kennedy figures we can be away from Hart House for an hour without the adults getting suspicious. Currently, as is their custom, they are gathered at the dining room table playing dominos and drinking after-dinner cocktails and probably not thinking about us at all, but you cannot be too careful.

So we move fast.

We pull on thick gardening gloves from Grandpa's workbench and take pieces of rotting wood and scraps of ruined furniture outside.

Jack and Gretchen sweep dirt and leaves out of the kitchen, into the living room, and out the open side of the house into the field.

Kennedy and Cole scrub the countertops. I gather trash into big garbage bags. Dex, Ruth, and Bennett work on the floor, although it is so badly damaged that I am not sure it will
ever be clean. It will take us many trips to make a noticeable difference here.

But we will make this house look something like a home again, little by little.

We owe it to the Travers family.

I take a garbage bag outside and, with Gretchen's help, lift it into the bed of the old pickup truck. Everything stinks; I almost gag at the smell. But Gretchen looks completely unaffected, so I try to look that way too.

WHAT IT MEANS TO BE A HART

• You look pretty even after sprinting across a forest.

• You look completely unaffected even when you are up to your eyeballs in garbage that smells like feet and rotten eggs.

Back inside the kitchen, Gretchen stops and makes a horrible face.

“Oh, gross. Do you think they're, like,
into
each other?”

I follow Gretchen's glare to the sink, where Kennedy and Cole are having a dirty paper towel fight.

The more Kennedy giggles, the darker Gretchen's expression becomes.

“So what if they are?” I say. “Once I had a huge crush on this pizza delivery boy—”

“That's different,” Gretchen whispers. “She can like all the pizza delivery boys she wants. But Cole is a Bailey.”

“Gretchen, you don't know anything about them.”

“I know Grandma and Grandpa hate their guts. That's enough for me.”

“What does that matter? We've been hanging out with them for days now.”

Gretchen blows hair out of her face. “I have my eye on him, is all I'm saying.”

Jack shows up out of nowhere and grabs another bag of trash to take outside.

Gretchen scowls and stalks away, and I follow Jack into the backyard. We are quiet for a few minutes, going back and forth between the kitchen and the truck with whatever trash we can carry.

I start to worry that I should be saying something. Most of the time I think I could be perfectly content without saying a single word, but no one else seems to function that way. There is so much talking in the world, and so much expectation to talk, even if you do not feel like talking.

I find it overwhelming.

“Sorry about Gretchen,” I say.

“Whatever. I'm not worried about her.” Jack squints one eye shut and jumps onto the truck's open tailgate. “
Arrr
, I am wise in the ways of the world, orphan girl. I have sailed across many seas, and made port in many lands. One knight is not enough to scare me!”

I laugh, and Jack jumps down beside me, grinning. “Come on,” he says, “let's go visit them.”

I do not have to ask who he is talking about. How wonderful a thing that is, to understand someone else without even trying to.

We crawl through the big oak tree's branches and sit on the dirt by the Travers family's gravestones. Jack's knee bumps against mine.

My thoughts are a whirl of . . . well, to be honest, I am not quite sure, so I take a second to organize a list in my mind.

ABOUT JACK BAILEY

• Jack does a great pirate accent.

• When he says my name, it sounds beautiful.

• When he smiles at me, I cannot help smiling back.

• Jack is a
Bailey
.

The evening is still and hot around us, but under this tree we are in a cocoon of cool mud and night noises and shifting leaves with a thousand different voices. My shirt is sticky from all the cleaning, and when the wind trickles past us, I shiver.

“Do you think it hurt them?” Jack asks quietly. “You know, when they died?”

“Yes.”

Jack looks at me. “That doesn't freak you out?”

“What doesn't?”

“Dying.”

“I guess. Other things freak me out more.” I hesitate, but Jack seems interested.

“Like what?” he asks.

I should not have said anything. “I don't know. Stupid stuff.”

“I'll tell you what I'm scared of.”

“Yeah?”

“Totally. Let's see.” Jack settles back on his arms and watches the leaves move overhead. “Tornados. Comets, like, flying off course and crashing into Earth. Dolls.”

I crack up. “Dolls?”

“Yep. Dolls. Hey, don't laugh! They have these tiny little demon faces. Like if you look away, they'll jump on you and suck out your soul. You know?”

“I think that might just be you.”

“Fine, fine, believe what you want. But when the dolls rise up, you'll think about this moment and wish you'd listened to me.”

I lean back against a branch. The tree sways ever so slightly in the wind, and I let it rock me.

“So what are you afraid of, Finley?” Jack asks. “I told you mine.”

WHAT I AM AFRAID OF

• What Mom and Dad are talking about while I am gone.

• That I will never be a real Hart.

• My blue days, when I feel like I am stuck underwater, where everything is slow and cold.

• When I lose myself, and my brain speeds up, and my heartbeat speeds up, and everything inside me comes crashing down until I can hardly remember what it feels like to breathe without a hundred stones stacked on my chest.

• That I will feel this way for the rest of my life.

“Jack?”

“Yeah?”

Looking at the gravestone of Frank Travers, I think about how the Bone House must have looked when they were all alive—two solid stories, maybe three solid bedrooms; whole and breathing and warm with light. Strong, like a house should be.

(Like I am not.)

“Can I tell you later?” I ask Jack.

“When?”

“Sometime. I promise.”

Jack yawns. “Okay. Deal.”

ABOUT JACK BAILEY

• When you promise him something, he'll believe you. No questions asked.

•  •  •

Before we leave, we construct a tiny shrine to the Travers family under the stairs that lead up to the second floor.

We find this chair with a stained, frayed cushion and
wobbly legs, and on the chair we arrange the framed picture of the Travers family, along with one of the coffee cups we found in the kitchen, a couple of books from the living room, and one of Cynthia Travers's stuffed animals—a purple dog with one ear and one eye. But it is still smiling hopefully.