The Penderwicks in Spring (23 page)

PICTURES
. That’s what was written on the lid. More recent family photographs—ones taken since Iantha’s arrival—were neatly stored in albums. The
opposite of those albums, this box was a delirious jumble of the four sisters’ years before Iantha. Batty had looked through it several months earlier for pictures of Hound, especially for that perfect one she remembered but had probably made up. But tonight she was looking for something different, though what it was she wasn’t exactly sure.

She dove in, at first scanning each picture carefully, leaping higgledy-piggledy from one year to another, summer to winter, Christmas to Fourth of July, first days of school to last. Many of the pictures did include her—Batty with paint on her face in kindergarten, Batty dressed as a clam for the third-grade play, Batty with Hound and Funty in the red wagon.

“See that?” she said to herself. “You weren’t always left out.”

But something kept her digging into the box, though after a while, she went more quickly—she was getting tired and there were so many pictures. And maybe she wearied of seeing her mother with Rosalind, her mother with Skye, her mother with Jane—but wait, here was one of Hound as a puppy. Batty held it up for a long look, just as she’d done the last time through the box. In the photo, Hound was still so tiny that Skye could hold him in her arms—a young and pigtailed Skye clutching him and beaming. Then, just like the last time, Batty decided she wouldn’t take this one up to her room. It belonged to Skye, not Batty, if Skye ever wanted it.

Batty went even more quickly now, past vacation pictures, sports pictures, on and on, until there, at almost the bottom of the box, finally, she found what she now knew she’d come looking for. A photograph of her mother in a hospital bed, looking so thin and weak that the resemblance to Skye was almost gone. But she was smiling and proudly cuddling the baby who had been brought into the world at such a great price. Who was to say if the price had been too great? Batty, alone in the night, staring at the only photograph she’d ever seen of herself with her mother, couldn’t know. And she had no one to ask.

Exhaustion swooped in and she needed to return to bed before falling asleep right there on the floor. Batty piled the pictures back into the box, except for the most precious one—that was hers now—and maneuvered the box back onto its high shelf, and the chair back to her father’s desk. She would leave the study just as she’d found it, so that no one would know she’d been searching. Then she took the purloined photograph upstairs to her room, and slid it under Hound’s canvas bag at the back of her closet. Another secret, carefully hidden.

She was caught as she left her room to go back to Lydia’s. Ben, who could usually sleep through anything, must have heard her, because suddenly there he was in the hall, only half awake.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“Nothing. Go back to bed.”

“You’re sleepwalking, aren’t you?” Ben’s look of alarm filled her with guilt. “Maybe you do have that tsetse fly thing after all.”

“Ben, don’t be silly. I’m fine, really I am.”

“But—”

“Go back to bed. Now.”

His face scrunched with concern, Ben disappeared back into his room.

B
EN HAD NEVER BEFORE
seen someone sleepwalk, and now that he’d caught Batty doing it, he definitely didn’t like it. As confused as he’d been about her Quigley Woods adventure, at least that had been within normal behavior. Sleepwalking wasn’t. He went back to bed hoping that when he saw her in the morning, she would laugh and tell him it had been a joke. But the Batty he ate breakfast with was pale and sleepy and not in the mood for jokes. Both parents asked how she felt and she said fine, but Ben didn’t believe her. And then when he tried to bring up sleepwalking on their way to school, she said she didn’t want to talk about it. So they talked about nothing.

Ben fretted over it all through school on Monday—except during the exciting touch football
game at recess—and decided to discuss it with Rafael. He waited until the end of the day, when they were waiting for Batty outside the big Wildwood front doors.

“You know how Batty slept so much yesterday? I caught her sleepwalking last night.”

“Definitely sleeping sickness,” said Rafael.

“No, because the right flies don’t live in Massachusetts. Uh-oh.” Here came two little girls who looked exactly alike. Ben took hold of Rafael and dragged him across the sidewalk and into the middle of a cluster of sixth graders.

“What are we doing?” asked Rafael. Usually they avoided sixth graders, especially these extra-big ones.

“An evasive maneuver.” Ben wished he could explain the twins to Rafael, but they were tied up with stuff he’d sworn to keep secret at the MOYPS. He risked a glance backward through the sixth graders. The twins had disappeared. No, there they were, getting onto a bus. Whew.

“Alpha-Lima-India-Echo-November-Sierra?” whispered Rafael.

Ben didn’t think it was a big stretch to call those twins aliens. “Yes, but they’re gone now.”

He pulled Rafael back to the safety of a sixth-grader-free zone. There were several fourth graders nearby, but not big ones, so that was okay.

“What did they look like?” asked Rafael. “Blobs or tentacles? Or like robots?”

“Who?”

“The aliens.”

“Oh, you know.” Ben wanted to get back to the oddness of Batty. “So, it can’t be sleeping sickness. And she keeps putting her hand on her stomach.”

“Maybe she has a hernia,” said Rafael. “My uncle Albert had a hernia and needed an operation.”

“It’s not a hernia.” Ben had never heard of a hernia—she couldn’t have that.

“Maybe a giant stomach tumor, then. Or maybe she has an alien implantation!”

“
Who
has an alien implantation?”

Ben jumped. Somehow Batty had snuck up behind them. He’d dropped his guard once those twins got onto their bus.

“Well, obviously not you,” he answered. “Rafael, tell her it’s not her.”

Rafael was too busy staring at Batty. “How
are
you?” he asked.

She frowned at them both. “I’m fine, and everybody better stop asking, if they know what’s best for them.”

“Sorry,” said Ben, though he wasn’t, because she didn’t look any better than she had that morning, maybe even worse.

“Sorry,” said Rafael, though he wasn’t, either, because he thought Batty looked terrible, and he was very curious as to which mysterious disease she might be suffering from.

“That’s better. Now let’s go, Ben.”

The walk home was even quieter than the one in the morning. Batty didn’t ask Ben about how his day went, or what Ms. Lambert had taught his class, or even about his homework. He hated it. And as soon as he got home, he ran across the street looking for male companionship, particularly with a male who wouldn’t talk about sisters having alien implantations.

Ben found just what he needed behind the Geigers’ house: Nick working out with weights.

“Can I do it, too?” he begged.

“You’re too young for weight training.” Nick put down the forty-five-pound dumbbell he’d been using for bicep curls.

“But I’m strong.” Ben leaned down to grab the dumbbell with one hand but could just barely lift it off the ground. When he tried with two hands, Nick took it away from him.

“If you touch that again, I’ll have you running laps until you’re in the fourth grade.”

Being scolded by Nick was somehow more fun than being praised by anyone else. Content, Ben sat on the grass and watched as Nick went through his workout. The very last part was push-ups, and for a special treat, he did them with Ben sitting on his back, proudly pretending to be an army pack crammed with gear.

“Enough,” said Nick finally, tumbling Ben onto the grass. “So what’s the news in Penderwick land?”

“Batty doesn’t have sleeping sickness, like Rafael thought.”

“I’m glad to hear it. Why did Rafael think that?”

“Because she slept for so long yesterday.” Ben thought for a minute about the nature of the MOYPS secrecy oath he’d taken, and decided that he didn’t have to keep secret what Nick already knew. “But you know why she slept so long—because she was in Quigley Woods and hurt her ankle. Her ankle is better now.”

“That’s good.”

“But she’s acting weird. Different. And she was sleepwalking last night.”

Nick picked up his dumbbell and started lifting again. “Maybe she’s worried about something.”

“But what?” The MOYPS hadn’t explained anything at all. “You know my father’s dead, right? My first father, not Dad.”

“Yeah, I know that.”

“That’s what I told Batty, that everybody already knows.”

“Huh,” said Nick, and switched his dumbbell to the other hand. “Just keep a watch on her. Consider it collecting data, what we in the military call intel.”

“Intel.” Ben liked that word.

“Not that you’re spying on her, because you and she are on the same side. It’s more like you’re on a reconnaissance mission, keeping the area safe for your unit.”

“Only Batty is my area.” Ben liked this idea. “And I can report to you.”

“If you discover anything you need help with, report to me. In fact, promise me you will.”

“I promise. And now I need your phone number, too.”

“Oh-ho! You know about that, do you?”

“Yes, and I want it on my stomach, not my arm, so that no one else can see it.”

Nick laughed, but he went inside and came back with a pen. Ben found that having his stomach written on tickled, but he bore it like a soldier.

“It’s upside down,” he said when Nick finished.

So Nick wrote it again, but this time upside down so that it was right side up for Ben. “Anything else?”

“Tommy’s number?”

“Why not?” Nick wrote Tommy’s number, too. “Anything
else
? The phone number for the secretary of defense, maybe? Or the woman I’m taking to dinner tonight?”

“No, thanks.” Ben looked happily at his stomach.

“And how was school today for you?”

“Good. We played football at recess. But then after school some twins showed up.”

“The twins I saw yesterday when I picked up Batty? The ones who made drawings for you?”

“Did you see those drawings? They had hearts and flowers all over them.”

Nick whistled. “Maybe the twins like you.”

“I don’t want them to like me.”

“Just tell them you already have a girlfriend. Remy, right?”

“No!” He couldn’t believe it. Even Nick thought this awful thing about him. “Remy isn’t my girlfriend!”

“Sorry.” Nick did look sorry. “I can remember the time when I, too, would have been horrified. These days, I’m delighted when women draw hearts for me.”

“Well, I’m not delighted. No way.”

“This is not a big problem. If the twins bother you, tell them, ‘I’m sure you’re nice people—’ ”

“I’m
not
sure they’re nice people!”

“You don’t have to be sure. You’re just softening the blow,” explained Nick. “Repeat after me: ‘I’m sure you’re nice people, but I’m not interested in developing a relationship with you.’ ”

Although Ben felt that so tame a statement would be powerless against crazed females, he obediently repeated it until it rolled off his tongue. Then he asked Nick to teach him a few military self-defense moves, just in case Tess and Nora got too aggressive.

“No, I will not,” he answered. “Use words instead.”

“Then could you teach me to jump out of a Black Hawk?”

“Do you see a helicopter here in the backyard? Because I don’t.” But Nick picked up Ben and threw him out of a “helicopter” a half dozen times. “Enough? Because you’re beginning to wear me out, and I thought that was impossible.”

“One more time,” pleaded Ben, who’d landed in a different country each time and had a few more he wanted to try.

“No more times, but we can shoot hoops if you want to.”

Ben did want to, even more than he wanted extra jumps, so they went into the garage for the basketball. Just before they got started playing, Ben thought of another thing that had been bothering him about Batty.

“She’s quiet now,” he told Nick.

“What do you mean? Like not talking?”