Coming Apart (9780545356152) (11 page)

Willow tried to focus on the weekend, which was certain to be exciting. (The biggest storm in forty years!) But her mother had found her way into her thoughts and now Willow recalled the conversation she'd had with her father the previous weekend. It had taken place on Sunday afternoon while Cole was playing outside with the Morris boys and Willow was deeply involved in
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
, which she thought was one of the best books she had read in her entire life.

“Knock, knock,” her father had said, standing in her bedroom doorway.

“You could actually knock,” Willow had told him, smiling.

“I know. I guess ‘knock, knock' is corny. Can we talk for a minute?”

Her father had sat on Willow's desk chair, and Willow, who had been lying on her bed, had straightened up and set the book aside. “Is something wrong?” she'd asked.

Her father had shaken his head. “No. But I promised you I'd keep you informed about your mother, and I had a conference with the doctors on Friday. I thought you'd like to know what we talked about.”

Willow, who had been comfortably settled in Francie Nolan's world of Brooklyn more than a hundred years in the past, had felt her chest tighten. “Okay,” she'd said. “I mean, yes, tell me what the doctors said.”

“They think your mother will be ready to come home in about three months — the middle of April. She's making good progress.”

Willow let her breath out but said nothing.

“Are you okay with that?” her father had asked.

“I guess I have to be.”

“No, you don't. But if you aren't, we need to talk about it.”

“I want her to come home. She's my mother. But … everything's going to change. And since she left it's been so, I don't know, so peaceful here. Cole is happier …”

“You're happier,” Mr. Hamilton had said.

Willow had nodded. “And I can't even think about the rules, all the things she used to ask us to do. They never made sense. Cole and I couldn't keep them straight.”

“But she's been working on the rules — or her need for them — while she's been in the hospital. I promise you that when she comes home, things will not be the way they were before.”

“How can you promise something like that?” Willow had asked.

“Okay. Fair enough. I can't promise. But I can tell you that the doctors are very pleased with her progress. And another thing — something I actually
can
promise: I plan to be at home much more than I used to be. And you and Cole and I will talk more than we used to. Okay?”

Willow had nodded. And she had tried to feel comfortable with the new knowledge, especially since she truly did miss her mother. But when she thought about April, her stomach lurched and her chest tightened.

“Hey, Willow!”

Willow turned from the window, leaving her thoughts outside with the gathering storm, and peered down the hallway. “Hi, Olivia! Hi, Flora!”

“Ready for the meeting?” asked Olivia.

Willow held up her book. “Yup.”

“Walk with us to Mr. Barnes's room,” said Flora. “We're going to meet Nikki there.”

It was hard to miss Mr. Barnes's classroom. It was the only one on its corridor with a small crowd of students outside the door.

“There's Nikki,” said Olivia.

“Let's find seats together,” said Willow.

The girls edged through the door, Flora saying, “Hey, Mr. Barnes, Aunt Allie just sold another book to her publisher. Isn't that exciting?”

This piece of information seemed to make Mr. Barnes look flustered, intrigued, and embarrassed all at once, a source of fascination for Willow, who continued to glance at him as she and her friends settled themselves in a row on the window ledge near the front of the room.

“What —” she started to ask Flora.

But at that moment Mr. Barnes clapped his hands and said, “If everyone's here we'd better get started. I'd like to send you on your way before it starts snowing. Who wants to begin?”

A forest of hands shot into the air.

“Rachel?” said Mr. Barnes.

“This was the best book I ever read in my whole life.”

“Me, too,” said a chorus of voices.

And Willow added, “I thought that when I'd only read a few chapters and I never changed my opinion.”

“Why was it such a good book, do you think?” asked Mr. Barnes.

Another forest of hands. This time Mr. Barnes stepped back and sat on his desk, and the students knew the discussion was now up to them.

“You get pulled right into Francie's world,” said a girl.

“But it isn't a very nice world,” said Jacob, who had rushed into the room at the last minute and plopped down next to Olivia. “I mean, Francie's family hardly has any money, they don't have enough to eat, her father drinks — and still you want to keep reading on and on about the Nolans.”

“Because you like Francie so much,” said Flora.

“Because Francie's mother has so much hope,” said Nikki.

“Because her world is so different from ours,” said someone else. “Imagine looking out the back window of your apartment and seeing a man taking care of a horse in the yard of
his
apartment building. And the kids had a lot of freedom. Even little kids. They collected stuff and got to sell it and keep the money and spend it on candy. All on their own. No adults around.”

“Penny candy actually cost a penny.”

“Deliveries were made by horse and buggy.”

“Francie's mother could make a meal for the whole family out of stale bread and an onion and a tiny bit of meat.”

“I liked the story because it was about Francie but it was about other people in her life, too, including grown-ups,” spoke up Nikki. “It wasn't really a kids' book.”

“Some things made me uncomfortable,” said Claudette Tisch. “The way Francie and her family talked about people who were Jewish or Italian. I didn't like the names they used.”

“But I guess that's the way things were in a neighborhood like Francie's back then,” said Willow. “That's how people really talked. If the author hadn't used those names, the story wouldn't have been … what's the word? Authentic?”

The conversation continued, but Willow noticed that Mr. Barnes glanced out the window more and more often until finally he said, “I'm sorry to interrupt, kids, but I'm getting a little concerned about the weather. I think we should wrap things up a bit early and get you on your way home.”

Ten minutes later, the members of the club had chosen the book for their next meeting and were gathering their belongings and emptying into the hallway.

“Bye, Mr. Barnes,” said Flora as she breezed by his desk. “I'll tell Aunt Allie hello for you.”

Willow looked curiously at Flora but held her tongue until she and Flora and Olivia and Nikki were leaving the school grounds and heading for Main Street. At last she said, “Flora? If you don't mind my asking, how come you kept mentioning your aunt to Mr. Barnes?”

Flora let a slow smile spread across her face. “I think Mr. Barnes has a crush on her,” she said.

Well. That's interesting, thought Willow. You just never know what's around the corner. She thought about Francie Nolan, who had started her story mired in poverty and managed to rise above it. Maybe, Willow realized, her mother's return would yield surprises.

Willow tipped her head up to the clouds, squeezed her eyes shut, and made a wish for her family.

“It's here! It's here!” cried Mae. She turned from the window. “Come on, everyone! Come look outside. You can see snow in the light from the porch.”

Nikki, Tobias, and Mrs. Sherman joined Mae at the window. Sure enough, the snow had begun to fall, and not just a flake here and there, but fistfuls of snow being hurled from the sky. The storm had held off all afternoon, and Nikki, despite the dire predictions on every single television news show, had begun to think that maybe the blizzard wouldn't hit Camden Falls after all. But here it was.

“It's snowing pretty hard, considering it just began,” commented Tobias.

“I think we're as prepared as we can be,” said Mrs. Sherman. “We have plenty of food in case we can't get to the store for a few days and plenty of firewood in case the electricity goes off. And I don't have to go into work until Monday.”

“I left food in one of the sheds for the dogs,” added Nikki, “if they can make their way to it. Where do you think stray dogs go during a big storm?”

“Honey, don't worry about that,” said her mother.

“I can't help it. Paw-Paw could be one of them. He
was
one of them.”

“But he's here with us now, and you've done all you can for the others. I think they'll find shelter before the snow gets too deep.”

“How much snow is twenty-four to thirty inches?” asked Mae. “That's what the weatherman keeps saying we're going to get.”

“Two to two and a half feet,” Tobias told her. “That's about up to there on you,” he added, pointing to her waist.

“Whoa,” whispered Mae. “I couldn't even
walk
through snow that deep.” She paused. “Think of the giant snowmen we can make. Hey, how are we even going to be able to open the front door tomorrow?”

“It might be hard,” admitted Tobias. “I'm glad I'm here to help you guys with the shoveling.”

“This is the most exciting thing that has ever happened to me,” Mae declared dramatically. “I don't know
how
I'm going to be able to eat my dinner.”

“You'd better eat it, though,” said her mother. “It might be the last hot meal you get for a couple of days.”

“I hope the power does go out!” Mae skipped to the table and slid into her seat. “It would be an adventure.”

Apparently, Mae didn't remember the days when the Shermans' power was regularly cut off because they hadn't paid their bills.

By the time dinner was over, more than an inch of snow had fallen. Nikki watched as her sister flitted back and forth between the window and the array of toys her father had been bringing her. Every time he showed up at the Shermans' house he brought something else for Mae and occasionally something for Nikki or Tobias. But Mae's treasure was piling up faster than the snow. A board game, art supplies, a pair of cowgirl boots, clothes for her new doll. The gift he'd arrived with the previous afternoon, though, had topped all the others: a completely furnished dollhouse. And not a gaudy plastic dollhouse with stiff plastic dolls and pink plastic furniture, but a large wooden house with a front that opened to reveal the rooms inside, furnished with intricate dressers and tables and beds and chairs and couches — all considerably fancier than anything human-size that the Shermans owned.

Mae kneeled before the house, opened its front, and gazed at the rooms inside. “Dining room,” she said dreamily, “kitchen, bedrooms, playroom, living room.”

“In a house that fancy,” said Tobias, “I think you call the living room the parlor.”

Mae continued to stare at her treasure. “I'm going to switch everything around,” she said. “I'm going to put the bedrooms downstairs and the kitchen upstairs and — hey, this house doesn't have a bathroom!”

“You could turn that room into the bathroom,” said Nikki, squatting beside her sister and pointing to the second floor.

“But there's no furniture for a bathroom.”

“We'll make the furniture. That's the fun of a dollhouse.”

“I am not,” said Mae indignantly, “going to make a toilet.” She examined the dolls — a girl, a boy, a mother, and a father — that had come with the set. “But you know what we could do tomorrow when we're snowed in? We could make some more clothes for the dolls. Boy, Nikki, this is the best present I ever got. Daddy is so nice.”

Nikki smiled at her sister, but as she stood up she felt an uncomfortably familiar sensation wash over her — a feeling of the world tilting or of the need to swerve out of the path of danger — and a phrase wormed its way into her head:
Something wicked this way comes
.

“Mom?” said Nikki. “Can we talk?”

“Of course,” replied her mother, who was curled up on one end of the couch.

“I mean, in my room? Now?”

“Oh.” Mrs. Sherman set her magazine aside. “Nikki? Are you all right?”

Nikki nodded, but she frowned as she looked at her sister, who was busily removing furniture from the dollhouse. She led the way to the second floor, the words
Something wicked this way comes
sounding in her head like a drumbeat in time to her footsteps, and closed the door behind her mother.

“I'm scared,” said Nikki. She threw herself onto her bed and hugged a pillow to her chest.

“What's the matter?” Mrs. Sherman sat on Nikki's desk chair and leaned forward, hands clasped in front of her.