Surviving the Applewhites (11 page)

J
ake and Archie each managed to get hold of one of Wolfie’s horns and together dragged the struggling goat out of the house. “We were only herding Hazel, just like you said,” Destiny told Jake, as he hurried alongside them toward the goat pen. “But Wolfie got out too.”

“I’m getting a padlock for that gate!” Archie said.

By the time they got back to the house, everyone except Randolph stood on the porch as Mrs. Montrose and Priscilla headed for their car. The yellow silk suit, Priscilla’s white sailor dress, and her ruffled socks
were stained with purple.

“We’re terribly sorry,” Sybil was saying. “You’ll be sure to send us the cleaning bill, won’t you?”

“No, no, now it wasn’t your fault,” Mrs. Montrose said. Jake thought she was maintaining her calm with a supreme effort of will. There was an edge to her voice that bordered on the hysterical. “Besides, nothing will take these stains out. We’ll just…we’ll just…” Her voice dwindled and stopped.

“My father will call you,” E.D. said.

Govindaswami’s usually cheerful face was creased with a frown. “You didn’t get your ice cream.”

“Another time, perhaps,” Mrs. Montrose managed to say as she got into her car and closed the door firmly.

The rehearsal that night didn’t include any of Jake’s scenes, so when the others left for the theater or scattered to work on costumes or sets, he and Destiny helped Govindaswami clean up the mess in the dining room. Afterward, Jake caught the butterfly, which Destiny had named Blackie, and tried to persuade Destiny to turn it loose outdoors.

“What if it rains?” Destiny asked.

“It won’t. And even if it did, butterflies stay out in the rain all the time.”

Destiny, his lower lip stuck out and his arms folded firmly across his chest, shook his head. “I want him to
stay in my room tonight. Winston stays in your room; I want Blackie to stay in mine.”

“But he needs to eat! We have to put him outside where he can find flowers.”

“It’s dark outside. He won’t be able to see them.”

Jake remembered the website that had given the recipe for feeding butterflies. What had been in it? Soy sauce, he remembered. They had that. And milk. What else? Then he remembered. “Can’t feed him,” he told Destiny. “We don’t have any Gatorade.”

“We gots Kool-Aid!” Destiny said.

“It isn’t the same. Besides, Wolfie spilled it all.”

“There’s more. We can make more.”

Sugar syrup, Jake remembered then. You could also feed butterflies sugar syrup. “We don’t need Kool-Aid.”

“What do we need?”

“Sugar and water.”

“We gots that!” Destiny said.

So, when Govindaswami had gone off to do his evening meditations, Jake let Blackie loose in the kitchen. Immediately, the butterfly fluttered to the floor. Winston’s whole body went rigid, his ears up, his tail straight out behind, his eyes riveted on the butterfly’s slowly moving wings. For a long moment he remained that way, so still he might have been carved of stone. Then he launched himself at the butterfly and pounced, his heavy body lurching into the air and
coming down where the butterfly had been. Destiny screamed. Luckily the butterfly had fluttered up toward the counter.

There followed a skirmish—the butterfly landing on the floor, Winston charging after it and pouncing just as it flew up. Destiny yelled at Winston to stop, and Jake did his best to catch the dog’s collar. But the awkward, ungainly dog, his hunting instincts fully engaged, had suddenly become a canine athlete. He leaped into the air, trying to catch the butterfly on the wing. Jake had just grabbed the net, hoping to catch the butterfly and get it safely away from Winston’s snapping jaws, when it fluttered up toward the ceiling and then landed on the philodendron plant that hung by the window. There it stayed, opening and closing its wings gently as if the whole thing had been a game that it had easily won.

Jake put Winston outside, then put some water on to boil.

“Why are you making it hot? It’ll burn Blackie’s tongue!”

“We won’t let Blackie have it till it cools. Hot water will dissolve the sugar faster,” Jake said. When the water boiled, Jake put a cup of sugar into a bowl and poured in some water. He stirred awhile, then poured in some more. “I think that should do it,” he said.

Destiny frowned. “Blackie won’t like that. Butterflies like flowers. That isn’t pretty like flowers.” Destiny
climbed onto a stool and got a packet of grape Kool-Aid out of the cupboard. “We can make it purple. That’s pretty.”

Jake shrugged. If butterflies could eat soy sauce and Gatorade, grape Kool-Aid probably wouldn’t hurt them.

Destiny dumped the package of drink powder into the bowl and Jake stirred it. “That’s good!” Destiny said, looking at the deep purple syrup. “Pretty.”

Jake nodded. “Blackie will love it.”

Jake poured a little into a saucer and set it on the counter. “Now that’ll be cool in a minute and he’ll come and sit on the edge and drink some. I
think
.”

They waited. And waited. Blackie didn’t move off the philodendron. Finally, Jake put his hand out in front of the butterfly, thinking he might shoo it off the plant and down to the counter. To his surprise, it stepped onto his fingers. Gently and carefully, he moved his hand down next to the saucer and the butterfly began uncoiling its long, black tongue. In a moment, the butterfly stepped delicately off Jake’s hand and onto the edge of the saucer, then stretched its tongue like a long straw into the purple liquid.

“It’s working! It’s working!” Destiny said. “He’s drinking!”

Jake could hardly believe his eyes. He wished he had E.D.’s camera.

After a while Blackie coiled his tongue back up and
fluttered away from the saucer. He flew around the kitchen a couple of times and then landed on Destiny’s shoulder. Destiny’s eyes got very big and round. “Look, Jake. He likes me!”

“Of
course
he does. Now, if you are very quiet and walk very carefully, maybe he’ll ride up to your room with you.” He picked up the butterfly net, just in case, and followed as Destiny took tiny baby steps out of the kitchen and up the stairs.

Three hours later Jake was in the schoolroom going over his lines when Randolph, E.D., Jeremy, and Cordelia got home. E.D. came in to see if any of the other butterflies had come out. She didn’t believe him about Blackie and the Kool-Aid. “You’ll see for yourself tomorrow,” he told her.

“Where’s the butterfly now?” she asked.

“Somewhere in Destiny’s room.”

“Is Destiny asleep?”

“He wasn’t when I came down a little while ago. He was singing to Blackie. He says Blackie is the bestest pet he’s ever had except that he can’t pet him. I tried to get him to go to sleep about an hour ago, but it was no good. He’s used to being up till rehearsal’s over.”

“It’s a good thing.”

“Why?” E.D. sighed. “Dad’s decided on the replacement Gretl.”

“Not Priscilla Montrose?”

“This is Randolph Applewhite we’re talking about here. Of
course
he’s not going to use Priscilla Montrose. He’s going to call Mrs. Montrose first thing tomorrow morning and tell her his choice. When she hears it, she’ll cancel the show. He’d rather have a musical with good singers canceled than one with lousy singers that actually happens.”

“Who’s he going to cast?”

“Destiny.”

Jake felt his jaw drop. “He can’t cast Destiny. Gretl’s a girl!”

“He’s the director; he can do anything he likes. He’s going to turn Gretl into a boy and call him Hans. Destiny’s little enough to be cute, which is more than you could say about Priscilla Montrose. There’s nothing in the script that can’t work that way.” E.D. sighed deeply. “It won’t matter, though. The whole reason Mrs. Montrose hasn’t canceled it already, the whole reason she didn’t get up and leave the minute she took a bite of Govindaswami’s chicken, was that she thought her daughter was going to get to be on network television. The minute she finds out that isn’t going to happen, it’ll all be over.”

Jake felt his stomach clench.
No!
It could not all be over. Enough bad things had happened to him this year! He was going to do this. He was going to play Rolf. He and Jeannie Ng were going to sing their duet and dance and he was going to kiss her. He was going
to hold a gun on the von Trapps when they were escaping. And to do all this he was going to cut off his scarlet hair and take off his eyebrow ring and all his earrings.

“It’s
your
fault,” E.D. told him. “You’re the one who taught Destiny to sing. If he hadn’t heard Destiny, he would have
had
to cast Priscilla.”

“I didn’t teach Destiny; I just sang with him. All it was was practice. Maybe all of you can sing.”

“The thing is, it doesn’t matter. It’s all over.”

Jake thought about what had happened ever since Randolph Applewhite had asked his family for help. And then he smiled. Little by little, he felt his stomach unclenching. E.D. was wrong. How could she, an actual member of the Applewhite family, possibly think it could all be over? All of them, even the invisible Hal, had put their whole
selves
into this show by now. Not just family, either. Bernstein. Govindaswami. It didn’t matter anymore that it was Randolph’s show, that it was a project nobody else had wanted anything to do with. Everybody was involved in it now.

And the way these people got involved was like nothing he’d ever seen before. They might moan and groan and grouch and complain about how much there was to do, but they put everything else aside and
did it
. “Passion,” Govindaswami had said. That was it. What the Applewhites did they did with passion. They cared about the show now the way some
people cared about flying around the world in a balloon or sailing across the ocean alone or climbing Mt. Everest. “She may cancel it, but it’ll happen anyway. Some way or another, it’ll happen. You’ll see. I’ll make you a bet.”

E.D. was an Applewhite after all, he thought. She knew better than to take the bet.

E
.D. woke early, dreading her father’s call to Mrs. Montrose. She tried for a while to go back to sleep, but she couldn’t. Finally, she decided that she didn’t want to face catastrophe on an empty stomach, so she pulled on jeans and a T-shirt and headed downstairs to fix herself something to eat.

Destiny was already up. She could hear him in the kitchen singing “Do-Re-Mi.” Dad’s right, she thought. Destiny
can
sing a whole lot better than Priscilla Montrose. She hoped what Jake had said would turn out to be true, that there would be a show for Destiny
to sing in. When she got to the kitchen, it was the butterfly she noticed first, standing on a saucer full of purple syrup, its wings moving delicately, its long tube of a tongue arched into the liquid.

Then she noticed a puddle of purple syrup on the counter and a bowl in the middle of the puddle. And then she noticed Destiny. He had a purple-stained towel around his shoulders and purple syrup in his hair and running down over his ears and neck.

He stopped singing and grinned at her. “Isn’t he
beautiful
? His name is Blackie, and he stayed in my room the whole night. He roded down on my shoulder and I fed him. He’s the bestest pet I ever had. He—”

“Why did you put syrup in your hair?”

“That lady said Kool-Aid won’t wash out. Jake washes all my other colors out. Now my hair gets to stay purple like Jake’s gets to stay red.”

E.D. had her brother on a stool by the sink with his head under the faucet when her father came in. As much of a mess as the sticky purple syrup had made, it had not turned Destiny’s hair purple. Almost all the color had washed out, leaving his white blond hair with just the tiniest tinge of lavender. His hands and his ears were another thing altogether. They were stained a deep, purply gray, and his fingernails were almost black.

Randolph stood in the doorway and looked. E.D. braced herself for his reaction. But her father let out a
long, dramatic sigh. “I suppose this is what comes of getting up in the middle of the night,” he muttered as he set about making a pot of coffee. The butterfly fluttered up to the philodendron.

“Might as well get it over with,” Randolph said when he’d drunk his coffee. He went off to make the phone call to Mrs. Montrose. E.D. scrubbed and scrubbed Destiny’s hands and fingernails with soap and a nail-brush until most of the color was gone. But she dared not take a brush to his ears. They were apparently going to have to fade on their own.

When her father came back ten minutes later, he was shaking his head. “It would have been interesting, integrating a purple-eared boy named Hans into the show.”

“She canceled it?” E.D. asked.

“She canceled it.”

“Did you try to reason with her?”

“Reason with her? She started babbling like a maniac, and I couldn’t get a word in edgewise. She said I had violated her trust and the trust of an innocent and impressionable eight-year-old child. What do you suppose she meant by that? I never promised that wretched little girl would get the part.”

E.D. had never fully explained what she’d told the woman on the phone when she invited her to dinner. She decided this was not a good time to do so.

“I tell you, the more that woman talked, the more
berserk she got. Something about fried chicken and false pretenses and crazed wild animals endangering her daughter’s life. I couldn’t get her to stop, so finally I just hung up on her.”

As the news of the cancellation spread around Wit’s End, it was as if someone had lit a string of firecrackers. One after another came the explosions. Nobody blamed Mrs. Montrose. They blamed Randolph. “You never once think of anyone except yourself!” she heard her mother say. “It’s not as if it’s a Broadway production. What harm could the little girl have done the show?” All E.D. caught of her father’s answer was the phrase “artistic integrity.”

Zedediah, who was usually the solid rock under the family’s waves, raged about the customers he had put on hold in order to build sets instead of furniture and the cost of the raw materials they had used from the wood shop. He sounded more like Paulie than himself. Archie yelled about not having had time to finish two of the pieces for his gallery show. Cordelia was the most dramatic. She held her hands out to her father. “Look at them. Just look! My fingers have
bled
and I’m practically going blind from making ruffles for little girls’ dresses. Besides all those ruffles—
and
the choreography,
and
teaching twenty-five people with two left feet how to waltz—I have hemmed four nuns’ habits. Do you know how far it is around the bottom of a nun’s habit?”

Jeremy Bernstein shrieked when he was told. Thanks to Randolph Applewhite, he said, his television career was over. “First my car, now my career—totaled. Totaled!” Randolph pointed out that his TV career hadn’t actually started yet—and Jeremy burst into tears. Jake just clenched his fists. His face went almost as red as his hair, and he stormed off across the field with Winston following. Lucille, being Lucille, did not explode or shriek or cry. She got a faraway look in her eyes and went off to meditate.

Govindaswami was the only one entirely unmoved by the news. “Aaahhh,” he said gravely. “This will be a good thing. Everything works for the highest good. Always this is so. You will see. The Universe works in mysterious ways.”

E.D. went to the schoolroom and watched two more butterflies struggle to break free of their gray-brown cases. She couldn’t help thinking about what Govindaswami had said. It seemed stupid. Worse, it was
mean
. Everybody was miserable, and he was telling them that their misery was perfectly okay. How could any good, let alone the highest good, come from wasting all that time and effort? And what could be good about having to call people who had their hearts set on being in the show and telling them it was all off?

Her father was going to call the leads, but as stage manager she was the one who had to call the minor
actors. She could hardly bring herself to think about it, much less do it. Govindaswami talked like somebody out of one of those old black-and-white movies, she thought, where everything always turned around just in time for a happy ending.

It was when she thought about those movies that the idea popped into her mind. Her father had rented one of them once about a theater company that lost its theater. They’d put on the show in a barn instead. Wit’s End had a barn. A big barn. They parked cars in it sometimes, and the riding mower was there. But when it was empty, it was really quite a lot like a theater, except that it didn’t have a stage. Or seats. Or lights. Maybe they could fix that. They’d have to build a stage and find some lights and some sound equipment and some chairs for the audience. They’d have to do publicity. Sell tickets.

Could they?

If they could, Jeremy wouldn’t have to give up his television career. The network people might like the story even better this way—art struggling against impossible odds. Today was Friday, October tenth. The original opening had been set for the twenty-fourth. Two weeks away. Fourteen days. E.D. went to find her father.