The Penderwicks in Spring (22 page)

Batty tried to smile, knowing that’s what Rosalind wanted.

“And then it’s your birthday!”

In what was already an instinctive gesture, Batty put her hand on her stomach, trying to soothe the writhing knot. “I’m not sure I want any presents,” she said.

“That’s crazy,” laughed Rosalind. “Of course you want presents.”

“Rosy!” said Oliver.

“I’ve got to go, honey.” Rosalind kissed her good-bye and left, taking with her Oliver, whom Batty hoped never, ever to see again for the rest of her life and beyond.

She pulled back her covers and cautiously examined her ankle. It was only a little sore, and when she stood up, she found she could walk normally. This was a big relief. Limping would have made it hard to keep her morning misadventure a secret. She also needed to get rid of the ice pack, but that was easy. She emptied it out the window—by now it was only
water—and threw the plastic bag into the closet to join the sweater and boots. Her pajamas were a bigger problem. Dirt could be washed out, but the rips were gaping, far beyond Batty’s small mending skills. Briefly she considered taking them to Jane for repair, but she’d have to make up a story to explain how they’d gotten that way, and lying wouldn’t make her feel any better about herself. The pajamas went into the closet, too.

Anything else? Socks would cover the telltale scratches on her feet and ankles until they healed. But wait, those drawings from Tess and Nora! If Batty didn’t hand them over to Ben, and then those twins approached him with a story about his sister appearing in their backyard with leaves in her hair, he would go berserk. Batty had to give Ben the drawings, along with some sort of an explanation, and bind him to secrecy. She would call a MOPS.

The tradition of the MOPS, originally standing for “Meeting of the Penderwick Sisters,” had been started long ago by the three oldest sisters. Batty had attended plenty of these as she grew up, and so had Ben, although when he was added to the family, “Sisters” had been changed to “Siblings” to accommodate his boy-ness. A MOPS was always a private meeting, with built-in rules about honor and secrecy. Secrecy! Batty was thoroughly sick of secrecy.

Taking the drawings with her, she snuck to the bathroom, hoping a shower and clean clothes would
give her the sense of a fresh start. And afterward, when she scrutinized her face in the mirror, she couldn’t find any traces of her new burden. Maybe she could pull this off. Holding her head high, she went downstairs to test out this new Batty—“After Batty”—on the family.

Parents first, she decided, and found them in their study, peacefully preparing for the coming week at work.

“You’re up!” said Iantha. “How are you, sweetie? Feeling okay?”

“I’m good. Hungry.”

“Hungry is excellent.” Her father got up from behind his desk. “Plenty of quesadillas in the fridge. I’ll reheat some for you.”

“I can do it, Daddy. Honest.”

And she fled, because right now that was all she could handle. Cursing herself for weakness, she pressed onward. Next up was Skye, not by Batty’s choice, but because there she was at the dining room table, under the shadow of Oliver’s absurd still lifes, and working on her computer. She looked sad but was wearing the calculator watch Jeffrey had given her. That was something, Batty supposed.

“Hi.” Batty stopped beside Skye’s chair. She had to get this over with sometime.

“Hi.” And Skye glanced up, one second, two seconds, then bent over her work again.

That done—and who
cares
if Skye is sad, thought
Batty—she soldiered on, into the kitchen for the quesadillas. She got down two of them, and the food propped her up enough that she hardly noticed when Jane breezed through looking for pretzels. Now to tackle Ben about the twins. She went outside, hunting for him.

She heard him before she saw him, from somewhere behind the hydrangeas.

“You can play with the Chinook,” he said. “And this is the sound it makes:
schwoof, schwoof.
”

“Schwoof, schwoof, schwoof.”

Batty peered through the stalks. Good grief, it was Lydia back there, waving Ben’s Chinook in the air. Ben never, ever let her play with his action figures.

“Lydia, are you bothering Ben?” she asked.

Ben answered, with a shade of embarrassment, “No, she’s okay. The Chinook is already missing some rotor blades. I won’t let her touch the Black Hawk.”

“Lydia is the army,” said Lydia.

Batty’s surprise at this cooperation between her two younger siblings must have shown in her expression, because Ben offered an explanation.

“You know, the quesadilla smashed on Oliver,” he said. “Plus that Spanish thing she yelled at him.”

“No me gusta,”
said Lydia obligingly.

“It was cool.” Ben beamed proudly. “When Oliver left, neither Lydia or I said good-bye. I thought you’d want to be there not to say good-bye, too, but Rosalind said you were still in bed. Why were you in bed
all day, anyway? Everybody thought you were sick, and I called Rafael and he said maybe you were bitten by a tsetse fly and dying of sleeping sickness.”

Batty pushed her way through the bushes and sat down with them. “You can see that I’m not dying. Anyway, there are no tsetse flies in Massachusetts.”

“Are you sure?” Ben was used to her being healthy. Except for that time a few years ago when she’d gone into the hospital to have her tonsils out—he hadn’t liked that at all.

“Yes, I’m sure. We learned about them in science.” They’d studied bugs that March. Vasudev had done his report on tsetse flies, glorying in the details of their lethal bite. Keiko had chosen crickets, and Batty, ladybugs. Strange, she thought, how that ladybug report seemed to have happened a very long time ago. Right, because that had happened to Before Batty.

“Then why did you sleep so much? You missed lunch and everything.”

“I’ll explain, but I have to call a MOPS, but just us. No Skye or Jane.”

“Then it’s not a MOPS,” said Ben. Among the MOPS rules was one about not leaving people out.

“You’re right. But since it’s just for you and me, and Lydia, since she’s here, I guess we could call it a Meeting of the Younger Penderwick Siblings. A MOYPS.”

“What can you tell me that you can’t tell Skye and Jane?” asked Ben, suspicious.

“I can’t tell you until we swear secrecy. Obviously.”

“This better not be about dying, because you already said you weren’t. Anyway, Lydia doesn’t know how to do the swearing part. Or how to keep secrets.”

“We’ll teach her the swearing part, and I’m not worried about her and secrets. Nothing she repeats ever makes sense,” said Batty. “Lydia, put down the Chinook and face this way. Good. MOYPS come to order.”

“Second the motion,” said Ben with a marked lack of enthusiasm.

“All swear to keep secret what we say here, even from the parents, and also from the older sisters.” Batty made her right hand into a fist and held it out toward Ben, who put his fist on top of hers. “Now you, Lydia. Make a fist.”

It took a while to persuade Lydia to make a fist and then, once she’d made it, not to punch it in the air like a winning athlete—no one knew where she’d learned
that
—but eventually her little hand ended up on top of the pile, and Batty and Ben could chant the oath.

“This I swear, by the Penderwick Family Honor,” they said, then broke apart the fist pile.

“Here’s why I slept late,” said Batty. “I woke up really early this morning, took a walk in Quigley Woods, got lost, hurt my ankle a little bit but it’s much better now, found a way out of the woods, called Nick, he picked me up in his truck, and I came home and went to sleep again. The end. Except there were these twins—”

Ben interrupted her. “You’re going too fast. Why did you get up so early?”

Batty hadn’t counted on questions. How could she possibly explain her pre-dawn madness? “I had a lot on my mind.”

“Like what?”

“Like—” She picked up the Chinook and flew it around for a while, but her thoughts weren’t coming together. “Ben, do you ever think about your dad, you know, not Daddy, but the one whose genes you have?”

“Jeans.” Lydia pointed to Ben’s denim-encased legs.

“
Genes,
not jeans,” said Ben.

“Jeans,”
repeated Lydia happily.

“No, Lydia, you don’t understand,” said Ben. “My first father died in a car accident before I was born, and then Mom and Dad got married and Dad adopted me. And I do think about my first father. Mom’s told me lots of stories about him.”

“Right.” Batty used putting the Chinook down—slowly, carefully—to get control of the tears that threatened to spill.

“Why are we talking about my dad? And what’s wrong with your stomach? You keep touching it like this.” Ben put his hand on his own stomach, where his knot would be if he had one.

“Nothing’s wrong with my stomach.” Batty sat on her hand to keep it from betraying her. “So I was lost in Quigley Woods, hurt my ankle, and called Nick to come get me, and there were these twins.”

“Twins.”
Lydia loved this game.

But Ben was still trying to catch up. “How did you know Nick’s number?”

“He gave it to me.” Batty rolled up her sleeve to show him. “In case we needed help with Oliver.”

“Oh.” Ben really wanted Nick’s number written on his arm, too.

“So there were these twins”—Batty paused to let Lydia say “twins” again, but this time she just stared, unheedingly—“named Tess and Nora, and, Ben, they know you.”

“Me?”

Batty got the twins’ drawings out of her pocket and handed them to Ben, who laboriously unfolded them. “What are these
hearts
?”

“Hearts,”
said Lydia gaily. She’d gotten hold of the Dexter (also known as Spike) action figure and was having him climb up the side of the house.

“And is this supposed to be you?” He handed one of them back to Batty.

The drawing indeed contained lots of red hearts and lots of flowers, plus one unattractive stick figure with wild hair, huge boots, and
BATI
written beside it.

“Yes, that’s me. I looked a little strange. And I don’t know why there are hearts. Maybe she likes you.”

“There are hearts on the other one, too. How can they like me? I don’t even know them.”

Batty thought of Keiko and Ryan the movie star. “It happens sometimes.”

“Here, Lydia, you can tear these up if you want to.”
Ben passed the drawings to Lydia, who jabbed them to pieces with Dexter and buried the results under a rock.

“Okay, good,” said Batty. “Thus ends the MOYPS.”

“What?” Ben protested. “We’re done? This was the weirdest meeting ever.”

“I’m sorry, Ben. It’s the best I can do right now.”

This time the dream was about school. Nick was visiting the fifth grade to explain that book report charts were an accurate measure of one’s inner worthiness. The class gave three cheers for Ginevra and her inner worthiness and three boos for Batty, who Nick said had the worthiness of a worm. When Batty tried to stand up for herself—but mostly for worms, because worms were as worthy as anyone else—Nick interrupted to announce that they would now sing “The Itsy Bitsy Spider,” in French, which everyone but Batty could speak.

Halfway through the song, Batty managed to fight her way out of French spiders and into wakefulness, which at first presented another confusion, since she wasn’t in her own room, but in Lydia’s. And then she remembered that Lydia had pleaded for her to stay another night, in the apparent belief that she would be able to hold on to the safety of the crib as long as Batty slept in the big-girl bed.

So here Batty was again, awake while everyone else in the house slept, just like she’d been the night
before, or actually that morning, or—she looked at the clock and it was almost two a.m.—since this was morning again, that had been
yesterday
morning. With all these extra wakings and sleepings, she was losing track of which day was what.

“This is very early Monday morning,” she told herself. “Which means I need to get back to sleep so I can get up again in five hours to get ready for school.”

Sleep, however, was not so easily bidden. Not after bad dreams and not with the awful ache in her middle. Batty let her gaze drift around the room, hoping for distraction from her woes. The Hound constellation, Lydia on her back, clutching Baby Zingo in one arm and Jeffrey’s pink rabbit in the other, a duck night-light casting strange shadows across the walls and onto the framed photographs on Lydia’s dresser. One photograph showed Lydia’s class at Goldie’s, with a beaming Lydia surrounded by her friends Tzina, Jordy, Gradie, and Lucy. A second was of Asimov trying to remove the doll’s sweater Lydia had just put onto his head. And a third—Batty got out of bed to look more closely at this one, her favorite of the three—was from when Lydia was only a week old. Still just a tiny lump of person, she was being held up to the camera by Iantha. They were in the front yard, under the maple tree, and the sun was shining and Iantha was smiling and her red hair was blowing. Batty leaned in and looked more closely, noticing something she never had before. What was that, just where the picture
went into the frame? She turned on the bureau lamp for more light. Why, it was a hand. And though it was only a hand, cut off at the wrist, Batty suddenly remembered that day, and how she’d been standing off to one side, waving at the new baby. It was her own hand.

She turned off the light and turned away then, her stomach throbbing. Stupid girl, she told herself, to be upset because she’d been left out of a photo. She’d been left out of plenty of photos before.

“And I’ve been in plenty, too,” she told the room.

Batty waited, listening, but the room offered nothing back, not from the sleeping Lydia, the duck light, or even from the Hound constellation.

“All right, I’ll prove it to you.”

She turned off the bureau light and made her way downstairs to her parents’ study. There were her father’s bookshelves, crammed with hundreds of biology texts with impossible titles, and way up, at the end of the top shelf, was a box. To reach that high, she dragged over a chair, and even with the chair, she had to stretch up on her toes. There were a few seconds of uncertainty, the box wobbling at the tip of her outstretched fingers, but Batty’s determination won out, and soon she and the box were down on the floor, sitting in a pool of light cast by her father’s desk lamp.