The Changeling (3 page)

“Don’t you ever see him anymore?” Ivy asked.

The lion faded, and Martha shrugged. “Oh well, I don’t play that kind of game anymore.”

“Why not?”

“Well, because I’m not afraid of the dark anymore—” Martha started, but then she stopped. After a moment she went on, “—at least, not very. Besides everybody teased me. And my mother told people about it at parties and things. She’d tell all about Marty’s imaginary lion, and everyone would laugh. Things like that.”

Ivy nodded. “What was his name—your lion?”

Martha hung her head. “It was—well, I just called him Lion.”

“Okay,” Ivy said. “Let’s go see if you can find Lion again. Do you think you could if we both looked? Together?”

“I—I don’t know,” Martha said. Then something she’d been holding back wavered and slipped away. Feeling daring she said, “Maybe we could.”

Ivy looked at Martha thoughtfully before she looked back down the hallway. Martha’s eyes followed her gaze.

“There,” Ivy said, “can you see Nicky now?”

Martha looked very carefully. “Maybe I can,” she said slowly, and then louder, “Yes, I think I can, just a little. Does he have feathers?”

Ivy nodded. “I thought you could,” she said.

Martha looked until he was very plain—a smallish Indian with feathers in his hair, sitting there quietly on the railing. “Hello Nicky,” she said. Then she looked back at Ivy and—at the very same instant—they both laughed.

They started off then, looking for Lion, and afterwards Martha always remembered how excited she’d felt—as if she’d already found Lion again, or something even better.

F
ROM THE TIME THEY
went looking for Lion, Martha and Ivy were together a part of almost every day, in spite of the problems that arose. There were problems, and one of the first ones started because of Martha’s sister, Catherine. That year, the year that Martha and Ivy were in second grade, Cath was in sixth grade, and Tom, Martha’s brother, was in fifth. Cath Abbott was always the prettiest and smartest girl in her class, and she had dozens of friends, but not any best friend, so it was hard for her to understand about Martha and Ivy. She complained about them quite a bit that year.

Of course, Cath usually had something to complain about. The Abbotts sometimes joked about Cath being a complainer. Mr. Abbott said that Cath had a great many talents and complaining was certainly one of them. “And there’s no use trying to shut her up until she’s made her point,” he said. “I guess she gets that from her lawyer father,” he said, rumpling Cath’s blond hair.

When Martha’s father said that, her mother laughed coolly. “Well, I have to agree that a tendency to complain runs in that side of the family.” Martha’s father didn’t laugh, and Martha had a notion that Grandmother Abbott wouldn’t have laughed either if she’d been there.

Anyway, Martha and Ivy were one of Cath’s favorite complaints for a while. For instance, one night at dinner, not too long after Martha and Ivy had met, Cath said, “Mom, I wish you’d do something about Martha. She and that friend of hers are always doing the nuttiest things at school. And everybody knows she’s my sister. It’s really embarrassing.”

“What kind of things?” Mrs. Abbott asked.

“Well, today they were running up and down behind the backstop when the sixth grade was out for P.E., and they were jumping into the air and flapping their arms and making squeaking noises. I just about died. Everyone was laughing at them.”

Everyone looked at Martha. Tom grinned at her and said, “What were you doing, Marty? Being Superman? I used to do that, Cath. I remember playing Superman with Clay Sutter when I was real little.” He put out his arms and pretended to soar across the table. “Marty the Supermouse to the rescue,” he said.

Cath grinned reluctantly, and asked, “What were you doing, Marty?”

“We were being the flying monkeys in the Wizard of Oz.”

“See,” Cath moaned. “Flying monkeys, right out in front of all my friends.”

“Well, I think that’s understandable,” Mrs. Abbott said. “Children Martha’s age often play make-believe games. After all she’s only seven years old.”

“Well I didn’t,” Cath said, “And the rest of the second grade doesn’t do things like that. At least not right out in public. And Martha never did, either, until she started playing with that Ivy. Besides, Mom, that Ivy’s a Carson, did you know that? I thought you and Dad didn’t want us to play with those Carson kids.”

Mom looked at Dad as if she wanted him to say something, but he only shrugged his shoulders and went on eating his dinner. Grandmother Abbott wasn’t there, or she certainly would have had something to say. As it was, it was left up to Mom, and it was easy to see that what Dad wouldn’t say, or the way he wouldn’t say it made Mom angry. She smiled a hard sharp smile at Dad before she said, in her silkiest voice, “I didn’t exactly say that, Cath dear. As I recall it was your
father,
and your grandmother, I might add, who thought it wasn’t a good idea when Tom brought that big Carson boy home last year.”

“Well, what do you think, Dad? About Martha and this Ivy Carson?”

Mr. Abbott sighed, “As I see it, Cath,” he said, “this is a slightly different situation. The Carson boy was quite a bit older than Tom, and he’d been in some trouble around the neighborhood. Besides Tom had dozens of friends to choose from. He didn’t need to choose a boy who—”

“Jerry’s all right,” Tom interrupted. “And he’s in the same grade as I’m in.”

“But he
is
older, dear,” Mrs. Abbott said. “I don’t really think a little girl like Ivy is anything to worry about. Besides I understand she lives with her aunt most of the time. It’s quite likely she’ll be going back to her aunt’s soon, and the problem will solve itself.”

“No, she’s not! No she’s not!” Martha yelled suddenly, and everyone stared at her in astonishment.

“Marty!” they said. “Don’t speak to your mother in that tone of voice.” “Marty. I’m amazed at you.”

They were amazed because nobody yelled in the Abbott family—and especially not when they were fighting. The rest of the Abbotts fought quietly and politely by using words that said one thing and meant another. It was a dangerous game with rules that Martha could never understand, and so long before she had started crying instead.

She cried that day. When everyone turned on her in amazement, she burst into tears and dashed from the room, headed in the direction of her favorite crying-place. No one was in the least surprised at that.

In those days, Martha was known as a champion crybaby. She knew that a crybaby wasn’t considered a good thing to be, but since she was one, she made the most of it. Not that she ever tried to start crying; but once she had gotten started, she put everything she had into it. The size and wetness of Marty’s tears was a favorite family joke.

“Oh, oh, get out your water wings. There she goes again.”

“Good night, Marty, what are you bawling for? I hardly touched you. Now cut it out before you drown yourself.”

“Marty’s crying again. Every hour on the hour. Just like Old Faithful.”

Martha had begun by crying anytime and anyplace, but after everyone got to talking so much about it, she had taken to doing most of her crying in one particular place. That was in a small luggage closet behind a larger closet. Martha had discovered she could push a tunnel-like passage among stacks of suitcases, to a low spot under the eaves behind a large steamer trunk. After she’d padded the spot with a favorite old quilt, it made a safe and comfortable hideaway for crying or hiding.

After a while, of course, Cath had discovered the hideaway and told the rest of the family, and it became another family joke. “Marty’s Mousehole” it was called. The rest of the Abbotts seemed to think it was just another of Marty’s imaginative games, but it had never seemed like a game to Martha. As it turned out, that evening when Martha yelled at everyone before she started crying was just about the last time she ever used the Mousehole.

With Ivy around, Martha had less and less time for hiding and for crying. Ivy changed a lot of things for Martha, and time was one of the most important. Before Ivy came to Rosewood Hills, Martha had never paid much attention to time, because there was always more of it than she knew what to do with. All the rest of the Abbotts kept very careful track of time, and they were very particular about what they did with it. “No, I just don’t have the
time
today,” they would say, or “You know that Tuesdays at 3:00 is my
time
for such and such.”

Martha didn’t keep a schedule, but if she had there wouldn’t have been much on it besides school, and perhaps working in Grandmother’s garden. The other things Martha did, such as eating and sleeping and reading and daydreaming, were not the kinds of things that had to be scheduled, and there was always more than enough time to do them in.

But time began to seem much shorter after Ivy came. There was never enough of it for all the things they wanted to do.

T
HERE WAS NEVER ENOUGH
time for Martha and Ivy, and for a while places were a problem, too. When they first met, Ivy occasionally went home with Martha after school, but almost from the beginning there seemed to be trouble. There was, for example, the time they bathed the ducks.

It started on the way home from school one day when Ivy happened to find a broken twig shaped like a long thin slingshot.

“Look, Martha,” she said. “It’s a divining rod.”

“A what?” Martha asked.

“A divining rod,” Ivy said. “It’s a special kind of magic stick. You hold it by the two short ends like this, and the other end points the way to water for a well or sometimes to treasure. My Aunt Evaline showed me how to do it.” Ivy turned around in a circle, stopped for a moment, and then began to walk. “Come on,” she called. “It’s pointing.”

Martha knew there wouldn’t be anyone home at her house for quite a while to worry about where she was, so she ran after Ivy and the pointing stick. It led them across the highway and into the slough.

“It must be a water-finding one,” Martha said. “There’s lots of water down here.”

“Well, maybe,” Ivy said. “But I think it’s another kind. Some of them find gold mines, or oil wells, or pirate treasure. Maybe there’s a sunken treasure in the slough.”

“Some kids say there’s quicksand in the slough,” Martha said uneasily. When they reached the reed-covered spongy ground she began to walk gingerly, gasping whenever her feet seemed to be sinking a little. Mud began to ooze up around the tops of her shoes. Ahead of her, Ivy walked lightly, holding the rod in front of her with both hands. They kept going on, through softer and stickier mud, until they reached the bank of the river that flowed through the center of the slough.

“Hey, look,” Ivy said suddenly, and as Martha slogged up alongside she could see that everything was black. They had come onto a finger of stagnant backwater, branching off from the main course of the river, and the surface of the backwater was covered by a thick coating of heavy black oil. “It must be an oil well finding rod. Look, we’ve discovered an oil well.”

Martha had learned about discovering oil wells from a movie on T.V. “I guess that means we’ll be millionaires,” she said.

“I guess so,” Ivy said, but then she added, “oh, oh, look.” She was pointing to where a large rusty oil drum, at the edge of the bank, was oozing its contents onto the water.

“It probably just fell off one of those barges,” Martha said.

Ivy nodded. “Oh, well,” she said. “They probably wouldn’t let us be millionaires, anyway. You probably have to have a license or something. Besides, I don’t much like oil wells. I’d rather find a treasure.”

Martha was just starting to agree when suddenly she said, “Oh,” and jumped and grabbed Ivy so hard she almost made them both sit down in the mud. Something had moved in the reeds just a few inches from her foot.

That was how they found the ducks. There were seven of them, a mother, a father, and five partly-grown babies. They were all covered with a thick scum of oil, which made their feathers stick together so they couldn’t fly. They all seemed very sick.

So Ivy caught the ducks, one by one, splashing after them through the mud and water, while Martha held the ones that were already caught. After the fourth one, she couldn’t hold anymore in her arms, and she had to sit on the rest like a mother hen. That is, she didn’t actually sit on them, but she squatted down so that her full skirt, a new wool skirt with lots of pleats, reached down to the ground. Packed in under the skirt, the oily ducks seemed to stick together and stop trying to get away.

When the last duck was caught, Martha and Ivy divided them up and put them into baskets, formed by holding up the fronts of their skirts, and started for Martha’s house. On the way home Martha did notice the mud and the oil, and the smell, too; but Ivy kept saying that the ducks would die if the oil wasn’t taken off right away, and that seemed much more important.

As soon as they reached number two Castle Court, they started scrubbing the ducks in the stationary tub in the laundry room. Almost immediately they discovered that it took two girls to hold and scrub one wild duck. Afterwards Martha could never quite remember how they happened to put the other six ducks in the wicker toy chest in her bedroom, except that the Abbotts’ just didn’t seem to have any very good place for storing oily ducks.

It wouldn’t have been quite so bad if the ducks hadn’t managed to bump the toy chest lid open—but unfortunately, they did. The result was pretty awful. Fifth grade boys aren’t particularly sensitive to dirty messes; but when Tom, who was the next one home, looked into Martha’s bedroom, he was very impressed.

When Martha opened the door to show him the nearly scrubbed ducks, the father duck was sitting on top of the dressing table mirror and two of the children were huddled in the middle of the bed. On the pale blue and white color scheme of Martha’s bedroom, all the messes, oily and otherwise, showed up very plainly.

“Wow!” Tom said.

Suddenly Martha saw exactly what he meant. “Mom is going to be mad?” she asked.

“Wow!” Tom repeated. “You can say that again.”