Taking Care of Terrific (13 page)

The policeman's ball-point pen stopped in midair.

"Just a minute," said Seth. "Let me speak to him." He moved toward Tom, the policeman still holding his arm firmly.

"Tom," said Seth gently, "it's Presto Chango time, remember?"

Tom nodded solemnly. "Presto Chango," he said. Then he looked at the policeman again. "My name is Joshua Cameron," he announced, and the policeman wrote that down.

"Whose kid is he?"

I sighed. "In my backpack I have the phone number where you can reach his mother."

They wouldn't let me get it myself. Maybe
they thought I had a weapon in there. Someone went through the pack, found the slip of paper, and went off to one of the police cars.

"What did you do,
steal
this kid?" asked the policeman.

It struck me as ridiculous that we were all standing there beside a very large boat that we had
obviously
stolen, and instead of asking about that, they were more concerned with a sleepy, gutsy kid who'd just had the night of his life.

"I guess I borrowed him" was the only answer I could think of. Unfortunately there were reporters gathered by then, and they heard me. "I guess I borrowed him" was the subheadline in the
Herald-American
the next morning. It came under the disgusting headline:
TEENS HEIST HILL HEIR.

The "teens," of course, were me and Seth. The "Hill Heir" was Tom Terrific, who, according to the
Herald
story, was heir to the Cameron fortune, whatever that might be.

I only saw the newspaper the next day because Mrs. Kolodny smuggled it up to me in my bedroom, to which I'd been banished. My parents weren't speaking to me at that point. They'd had to come to police headquarters in the middle of the night.

So, of course, did Seth's. But his father came alone. His mother was conducting a seminar on Love and Discipline in San Diego while her only son was heisting the Hill Heir in Boston.

I don't know who came to get Hawk (Wilson B. Hartley, though it was hard for me to think of him by that name). And I don't know who came to get the bag lady.

But I know who both of them are, now, because of the newspaper.

"Omigod, Enid," said Mrs. Kolodny when she brought the paper upstairs. "How did you ever meet those people?"

"They're not bad people," I told her. "They're just poor, Mrs. Kolodny. You've got to get over that bigoted notion that poor people are
bad
." I frowned and took the paper from her; it was creased and folded so that you couldn't miss the awful picture on the front page: the Swan Boat floating, empty, by the dock; policemen milling around; Hawk's gaunt face staring out over the tops of everyone's heads; my back, my hair a mess; and Tom Terrific's little head leaning on my shoulder. You couldn't see Seth or the bag lady.

"I don't know what you mean about
poor
" muttered Mrs. Kolodny. "Here. Read. What'd
that lady want to get mixed up in such craziness for?"

I read. I read the bag lady's name: Julia Simpson Forbes. I read her address. She lived in the penthouse at the Ritz. She'd lived there ever since the death of her millionaire husband fourteen years before.

No
wonder
she knew where to pee.

And I read more. I read about Wilson B. Hartley, Ph.D., who was a professor of sociology at Harvard, who was sometimes called Hawk in memory of the jazz saxophonist Coleman Hawkins.

And the other bag ladies? Those phantom people who had appeared that night from behind the trees, as if they'd been waiting for that moment all their lives, and who climbed aboard a swan and sang? They were real. They were real bag ladies—homeless women, the
Herald
called them—and the police let every one of them go. They couldn't fine them because they had no money. They couldn't take them to shelters because there were none. So they turned them all loose that night, back out to the streets, to wander and disappear into the shadows of the scrapheap city once again.

At least they turned them loose with some
memories, I like to think, of that one night in such a sweet, green place.

Looking glumly at the newspaper, at my tangled, messy hair in the photograph, I remembered something: the dumb burglar disguise, the ski cap I had worn that night.

"I lost my best ski hat," I wailed, bursting into tears.

"You can get another one," said Mrs. Kolodny. "That old one never looked too good on you anyway, Enid." She rubbed my back and stroked my hair as a comfort, and I cried and cried.

But my tears weren't really for the crummy old hat. I felt as if I had lost so much else. Mrs. Kolodny massaged my shoulders and back with her gnarled hands, and she murmured, "There now, there now," but she didn't know what I cried for.

It was for lots of things. For Hawk, and the soaring notes that he blew into the night for those lonely ladies, and for all the sociology he taught at Harvard, which could never explain why, as he sat there tall and proud and defenseless, a nightmare voice had yelled: "
Cuff the black guy!
"

I cried for Julia Simpson Forbes, who lived all alone in a penthouse tower and came down to
wander each day in a Garden, where most people looked away when she passed because she was old.

And for Seth, because of what he had said before the police dragged him away from me; because I knew he had not said it before and it was not likely he would ever say it again.

But mostly I cried for Tom Terrific. The Hill Heir. Crap. That little kid, with all his funny giggles and bright eyes, had never in his life had a Popsicle, or a bubble bath, or a Swan boat ride, or dirty hands. And now, I knew—because I saw his mother's face when she looked at me in the police station that night—he never would have another chance at any of those things.

It turns out that I won't go to jail after all. Eventually all the charges were dropped. It took a lot of negotiating, my father said, when he was talking to me again.

The last one to let go—she had wanted to charge me with kidnapping—was Ms. Cameron. She was finally talked out of it by my persuasive father, the lawyer; by the police, who were sick of the whole thing; and by Seth's father, the TV magnate. He did a
Heartwarmers
spot about the bag ladies, turning the Swan Boat
hijacking into such a heroic tale that probably half of Boston puked watching it. Famous Wilma Sandroff, too, apparently turned on her charm, saying soothing things like, "Your anger is very healthy, Ms. Cameron. I certainly understand your anger."

There were compromises made and prices paid.

We had to pay for the chains we cut, and let me tell you, you'd be amazed at the prices they're getting for chains these days. I contributed all my summer savings, and so did Seth. Hawk wrote a check for his share. Some of Julia Simpson Forbes's millions were kicked in, too, by a man called a conservator who had been appointed to oversee her life. Conservator is just a fancy word for
keeper,
and I cried again when I heard that, that a feisty old lady who can stop all the traffic on Arlington Street with a wave of her hand will now and forever have to ask permission to make a single move.

Seth and I are on an informal sort of probation, which only means we have to go to school and get decent grades and stay out of trouble. We always did that anyway, except for me and geometry. Seth says he'll tutor me in math.

Hawk is on rather bad terms with the Harvard administration because of the embarrassing publicity. But he has tenure, my mother says. I'm not exactly sure what tenure is. If Hawk has it, it's got to be okay. And the police did give his saxophone back.

The worst thing is that I am never to see Tom Terrific again. That was a rule made by Ms. Cameron, and my father said it was absolutely nonnegotiable. Ms. Cameron has hired a governess for the Hill Heir. I cringed when I heard that, picturing a hatchet-faced woman in a uniform, slapping his hands and washing his mouth out with soap. Mrs. Kolodny and I know all about governesses from British novels. Mrs. Kolodny says that she grieves and mourns for Tom Terrific, even though she never met him. I grieve and mourn for him, too.

Mrs. Kolodny, sitting in my room with me during that bad time, smuggling me cookies and filling me in on
As the World Turns,
told me to remember that books with sad endings very often have something called an Epilogue. In the Epilogue, it becomes clear that the sad ending was only temporary. "You wait, Enid," said Mrs. Kolodny with her mouth full of oatmeal cookie, "all of this will have an Epilogue for sure."

I do love Mrs. Kolodny. But she is one of the spaciest people I've ever known.

It's a rainy Saturday afternoon in October, and I'm waiting for Seth to come over and help me with the math homework. Mrs. Kolodny is down in the kitchen making brownies because she says that the way to a man's heart is through his stomach. When she said that, while serving pancakes at breakfast, my mother announced that the way to a man's heart is through his superior vena cava, but she was laughing when she said it.

I laughed, too, because I didn't need either one of them to tell me how to find my way into Seth's heart. I seem to have a pretty firm place there already. His interest in tutoring me in math is not really very academic, and we spend a lot of time goofing off and drawing each other's initials in the middle of isosceles triangles. But I didn't say anything at breakfast because it's a good way to get some homemade brownies out of Mrs. Kolodny, although I've got my fingers crossed that she won't burn them on the bottom this time.

A little while ago, the telephone rang. When I answered it, the giggly little voice was so familiar that I almost burst into tears.

"Is your refrigerator running?" he asked.

I bit my lip to keep from crying. "Nope," I said very seriously, "I just ran down the street and caught it."

"Hey!" he sputtered. "You're spozed to say, 'Yes,' and then
I
say—"

"I know that, silly," I said. Then I lowered my voice to a whisper. "How come you're able to call me?"

"My mother's not home," he whispered back.

"But I thought you had a governess now."

"Yeah," he said, and I could almost see his dimpled grin. "I do. She looked up your number for me. But I dialed it all by myself. Guess what we're going to do next!"

"Take a bubble bath?"

"Nope. Eat a pizza. Then we're going to call the mayor, the real mayor of Boston! And we're going to ask him if his refrigerator's running!"

"Tom Terrific," I said, "I love you."

"I love you, too. I gotta go now."

"Okay. Hey. What's her name? Your governess?"

His laughter chimed through the phone. "Promise you won't tell my mother?"

I promise.

"
Wonder Woman!
"

We kissed each other through the telephone and said good-by.

There was a pad of paper by the phone, and I'd been doodling as I talked to him, drawing little flowers and smiling faces. After I hung up, I printed my name: ENID.

I looked at it for a long time. Then I wrote, under it:

SPLENDID.

SPLENDID.

SPLENDID.

It almost rhymes.