Read The Romeo and Juliet Code Online
Authors: Phoebe Stone
The Romeo and Juliet Code
Contents
I was always told that my dad, Danny, loved danger. I was told that he was a bit reckless and daring. And that’s just the way he pulled the car up into the sandy driveway at my grandmother’s house in Maine. We could see the ocean below us crashing and pounding against the jagged rocks. Danny seemed to put the brakes on just at the edge of the cliff.
My mum, Winnie, reached out and touched his arm gently and we sat there in silence for a moment while Danny took a deep breath. “Shall we carry on, then?” said Winnie, looking round to the backseat at me. “Felicity, shall I bring Wink up to the porch?”
Even though I was eleven years old, I was still quite attached to Wink. I was most dreadfully embarrassed about it and hoped no one my age here in America would ever find out that I still loved a big, brownish, cheerful British bear. The thing about Wink was, he always smiled, even at the edge of a cliff.
Danny got out of the car and started for the house with my suitcases. He took the path through wild rosebushes because he knew the way. After twelve years of being in England, my Danny was coming home. I had never been here before and neither had my mum, Winnie. Winnie kept saying, “Danny, you should have told us how lovely it all is. Felicity, isn’t it lovely! Look at the sky.” She got out of the car, and the veil on her hat blew across her face. Her white linen dress billowed in the wind. She put her arm over my shoulder and we followed Danny along the path towards the old house that seemed to loom at the highest point along the coast.
Uncle Gideon, whom I had never met before, stood on the long wraparound porch and didn’t say anything much when we walked towards him. His hands seemed large at his sides, and I noticed he was frowning and shifting his weight back and forth from one foot to the other.
Then Winnie’s hat blew off in the wind and went dropping down the long steps towards the sea. Uncle Gideon saw the hat go rolling off and he rushed down the steps, slipping on the last one and stumbling in the sand, but he caught the hat. Then he came huffing and puffing back up to the porch. His hair was all blown about and his face was terribly red. But when he handed the hat back to Winnie, he looked away, and when she talked to him, he wouldn’t answer her.
My dad, Danny, reached out to shake hands with Gideon, who was his brother, but Gideon seemed unable to move. He stood there frozen as if he’d just been shot. Then Danny lunged towards Gideon and tried to hug him, but Uncle Gideon pushed him away and shook his head. Danny finally slapped one arm across Uncle Gideon’s back. And as they stood there staring out at the water, I saw Danny slip a small box into Uncle Gideon’s jacket pocket.
“Felicity darling,” said Winnie, with pearly drops of water on her cheeks, “this is your uncle Gideon. Yes, it is. There he is. Run and give him a great hello.”
On the whole, British children are very forgiving and proper and I was trying to be so, but secretly, very secretly, I was thinking,
If Uncle Gideon has been angry with Winnie and Danny, then I shall be angry with Uncle Gideon.
Suddenly looking at me, Uncle Gideon got terribly apologetic and he tried to pat me on the top of my head and act all chummy in a very awkward way.
I took two tiny steps backwards and I said, “Hello,” looking down at my feet. I had a hole in the bottom of one of my shoes and there was sand on the porch and I was letting the sand seep into my shoe, trying to collect as much as I could under my toes.
My grandmother stood in the hallway. Her face was behind the mesh of the screen door, all shadowy and silent. She did not come out of the house.
Just for balance, I held on tight to my bear, Wink. I held on because it felt a bit like the wind might sweep us all off the porch and away into the dazzling white American clouds. It felt like the wind might sweep us all off the porch and away into the blue ocean sky that seemed to pitch this way and that with the sound of the roaring sea crashing against the rocks below us, over and over again.
I always called my mum Winnie and my dad Danny. I never called them Mum and Dad as other children do.
“Is that the British way?” asked Uncle Gideon, picking up a shell and holding it out in front of me in his large palm. I thought his hand was shaking ever so slightly. “Is that the way they say it over there?”
“No actually,” I said, rolling my eyes away, trying not to look at him or the shell. I was wondering what terrible things had happened in the past that had caused everyone to seem so uncomfortable. And besides, I was trying not to cry because Winnie and Danny had just pulled away in that car without a roof. Winnie’s hat was tipped to one side, her veil blowing out behind her. Danny was in a white linen suit as well, with his silk necktie fluttering in the wind. They beeped the horn as they disappeared down the road and I could still hear it in my mind.
“Just as if they’re going off to be married again. It’s so romantic,” whispered Aunt Miami to me. She had stayed in the hallway with my grandmother while they were here, but in the end she had rushed out to hug Danny good-bye. “Did you see how he held her hand the whole time? Does he often do that?”
I would always remember Winnie and Danny like that, in a wash of sunlight, veiled and waving, the ocean behind them and beyond the ocean, Britain, England, my true home.
As I walked back towards the house with Aunt Miami, Uncle Gideon tried to interest me in several more seashells, but my eyes were all blurry. I actually only cried about five teardrops. I was counting them to keep the sadness away. I found out that one eye cried more than the other eye, or else a few tears got away without being accounted for.
In the dark hallway, my grandmother (everybody called her The Gram) looked at Uncle Gideon and said, “Have they gone?”
And Gideon nodded. The Gram closed her eyes and leaned her head against the brown wallpaper. Then she popped them open and said, “Well, after all these years, I meet my granddaughter! And how do you do! I see she has the true Bathburn forehead.”
“I
am
half Budwig,” I said quite loudly. “My mum, Winnie, keeps her maiden name. And I am called Felicity Bathburn Budwig.”
Then my grandmother whispered something in Gideon’s ear and he said, “Oh. Um, of course. Well, shall I show you where your room is and all that?”
