Kepler’s Dream (12 page)

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Fourth of July.

In Santa Rosa we usually had music or games at the fairgrounds around Independence Day, and a few fireworks, but nothing too fancy. With luck you'd get cotton candy out of the experience, maybe some popcorn. It was always really hot, and Lou spent most of the night hiding under the bed because he hated the sounds of explosions.

This year, though, the day had a special significance: it was the date of the stem cell transplant, when my mom got her new blood. The story was, once they had radiated the heck out of her and she was totally nuked, they could give her the new, better blood that was supposed to cure her. Who knows how they think up these things, but from what Dr. Lanner had told us, the procedure could work miracles. (Which in Mom's case was what we needed.) I called her that morning. She said she had seen the stuff they were going to give her hanging in clear plastic bags and it looked like tomato juice. I think she was trying to make a
little joke about it, but I couldn't get that picture out of my head, these mad doctors in Seattle injecting my poor mom with tomato juice. From that point on, the chance I'd ever drink a glass of the stuff was zero.

Usually after I talked to my mom, I had a huge urge to watch TV or some dumb YouTube video, but at my grandmother's house all I could do was play Jewel Quest on my phone, so I did that for a while, in secret. The GM wasn't supposed to know I had a Jewel Quest habit. I had no doubt that would be on her long list of unworthwhile activities.

I wasn't trying to be sneaky as I soft-footed my way to the kitchen. First of all, you never knew when my grandmother's hearing was going to be good—when, for instance, the noises I made chewing, or closing a car door (“
Must
you slam it so, Ella? Are you
eager
for the doors to fall off?”), would drive her crazy; and when she was going to be half deaf, like when I was trying to tell her something that happened to me that she suddenly couldn't hear. “Do stop mumbling, Ella, it's impossible to understand what you're saying. The
hmm-hmm
ran away with you, and you fell on your
hmm-hmm
… ? Tell me again.”

Anyway, that morning, post–Mom talk, I thought I might as well find some banana peels or bread crusts to give to the peacocks. But I stopped when I saw that the kitchen door was shut. Behind it, I could hear my grandmother's voice: loud, bossy and not especially friendly. Whom was she talking to?

I kept quiet and stayed still.

“Well, what you don't understand is that while he's here—
Now, there is
no
need for that kind of language. The point I'm trying to make—”

It couldn't be Abercrombie Books. She never spoke to Dear Christopher in this tone.

“The timing is
inconvenient
. It would be inconsiderate. You can't just arrive somewhere without giving someone notice! Planning is not your strong suit, I know, but—”

I realized she must be on the phone. That would explain the louder voice, too.

“It is not as though you haven't already imposed a great deal on me this summer, Walter, and—”

Walter. That was my dad!

“—while I sympathize with poor Ella's circumstances, of course, it has hardly been easy—”

“Having a little listen-in, are we?” came a sly voice at my shoulder.

I nearly had a heart attack.

It was Abercrombie Books. He must have slithered in from the Haitian Room without my hearing him.

“I—I was just—” I stuttered. Oh, I hated him! And he was going to make me miss the best part now, on top of everything else.

“I wouldn't, Walter. I am warning you. It is not a good idea. Wait until—”

“Some people might call this …
spying,
” Abercrombie whispered in the same snaky voice. He seemed incredibly pleased with himself for catching me.

“
Well, don't,” came the voice from the kitchen. “That is my last word on the subject.
Don't
.”

There was the sound of a receiver being slammed down.

Suddenly the door opened, and there was the GM, looking highly irritated—the more so when she discovered Abercrombie Books and me right in the corridor.

“Good heavens!” she exclaimed. “What on earth—?”

“Violet,” Abercrombie said, flustered. “I was just trying to tell your granddaughter—”

“You weren't eavesdropping, were you?” The GM's voice was harsh, but directed at both of us. Her eyes were the blue of an iceberg. “It's a loathsome practice.”

“I didn't hear anything.” I held up my hands, as if to show that they were empty.

“Er—no, no.” Abercrombie glared at me. “Neither did I.”

“Good,” my grandmother said curtly. “That was not a conversation for others to hear. Now, Christopher, are we to meet with Tweedle—that is—”

“Jason and Jackson, yes.” At least someone around here knew what they were really called. “The boys are going to give us a progress report. And then a
prognosis
: how long they think it will take to correct and digitize the accounting of your inventory.”

Grandmother nodded, but seemed hardly to hear him. “My library, Ella,” she said, as if in answer to some phantom question, “holds an extraordinary and valuable collection of books, though
some
people”—here she glared, as if I were one of them; it was probably Phyllis Stine and her ilk she was referring to, I
figured—“find this hard to understand. It is to catalog and order this collection, a task long overdue, that I hired …” She gestured impatiently toward Abercrombie.

“Jackson and Jason,” he supplied.

“Precisely, Jason and Jackson. And it is also why Christopher so kindly came all this way this summer, so that he could consult with me about it—a plan that we could not easily change, incidentally, just because you were coming here, too.”

This was pretty unfriendly, even for my grandmother. I blinked. She did, too, and I had the sense that she suddenly noticed that it was me, a kid, standing there, not my dad. Sometimes grown-ups' fights were like that, I'd noticed: they kept at it with each other even after the other person was gone or no longer on the line. After my dad's occasional visits in California, my mom used to carry on muttering for a day or two, to no one in particular.

“In any case.” The GM tried to fix her voice—take it down the dragon scale a few notches. “Would you like to go see a movie today, Ella?”

“A what?” I figured I must have feathers in my head and misheard.

“A movie.” She didn't even correct the
what.
“Joan offered to take you sometime, if you'd like, and today seems a good day for it.”

A movie? A
movie
? A MOVIE??!!

“Uh, yeah.
Yes.
I would, Grandmother. That sounds fun. Thanks.”

“
Good. I'll call her and let her know, and she can come and collect you.”

At last we agreed on something!

I had been screen starved for so long by this point that the idea of a movie made me giddy. I was so excited that I went outside to tell the birds the good news and give them the celebratory banana peels. They were happy for me, I could tell.

“Here, chick-chick-chick-chick-chickens,” I called out, trying to do something like Miguel's “pea-song.” I liked to call the peacocks chickens so they didn't get too snobby, thinking they were better than everyone else. “Here you go.”

A little embarrassing to be caught doing that when up the driveway came two teenager-sized clouds of dust swirling around Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Jackson and Jason, as at least their own moms must call them.

“Hi,” I said like a normal person, but high school boys, I don't know if you know any, aren't normal people who say something simple, like “Hi,” back to you. The dark-haired one, whose thumbs were a blur of activity, didn't even look up, but the taller, blond floppy-haired one—who wore a starry T-shirt that said POLARIS: FIND YOUR TRUE NORTH—said some small syllable like “Hey” or “Eh” before spitting out a bunch of sunflower-seed shells in the direction of a few peacocks. They darted away, then circled back to peck at the remains.

“Come on, dude—we've got to get in there,” Sunflower said. Texty grunted vaguely, and the two of them shuffled up toward the door.

To Texty I was still invisible, but Sunflower half nodded at me, which might have meant “Bye” in his language. I never knew when these boys were coming or going, but they paid so little attention to me, it hardly mattered. The idea that they were using computers to somehow sort through the GM's books seemed to me a bit like trying to use a scooter to scale Mount Everest, but whatever. It was a summer job. It wasn't like either of them had the personality to be a friendly barista, or a swim lesson instructor at the local pool. I wondered if they used white gloves while they worked, or if they ever illegally licked their fingers before turning a page, when no one was looking.

After that brilliant social encounter I was ready for more, so it didn't seem surprising somehow that Rosie's mother Adela should pull up soon after to drop Rosie off. I wondered if Rosie was going to gloat about my fall, or even ask how I was doing, but when she got out of the car, she slammed the door so hard, it made my efforts with Grandmother's big boat look like little love taps.

Miguel trotted over and tried to give Rosie a hug, but she pulled away and skulked off to the cabin. She didn't even glance at me. I began to wonder if I had been given a magical invisibility cloak without knowing it, which was why everyone suddenly seemed able to see right through me. Then again maybe Rosie just had more divorce mess to deal with; that produces a lot of bad tempers. Miguel went over to talk to Adela, who was still sitting there in her car. There were more rapid, low voices.

“He said he'd try to come before the Fourth,” I heard Miguel
say, “but you know how reliable he is.” Adela replied with something that made him laugh. Miguel put a hand on the side of the car and then knocked on it lightly, like,
OK, see you later
. She drove away. Not mad this time, though, I don't think. The air was easier.

Grandmother's driveway was like a parking lot, because at the same time a VW pulled up, honking like it was coming to a party.

“Hey, you two!” Joan called cheerfully from the driver's seat. Phew: someone could see me, after all! “Shoo, you pesky pea-things. What do you say, Ella? You ready for the movies?”

“I sure am.” I found it hard not to go into a Southern accent around Joan. It was sort of contagious.

“How about it, cowboy?” she hollered over to Miguel in a friendly way. “You and your girl want to join us?”

“Oh, thanks, but Rosie and me are going to have a picnic up in the Sandias.” He tipped his hat to us. “You ladies have fun, though.”

“You know we will.” Joan waved good-bye. “All right. Buckle up, Ella. I don't need to come in and speak with your grandmother. She gave me permission to kidnap you for the day and skip all the social niceties. Much as I'd lo-o-o-ve to talk more to the divine Mr. Abercrombie.” She rolled her eyes, and I giggled. The GM had brought Abercrombie to the bookstore the day before, and the meeting had not been a success.

“I love your grandmother, you know I do,” Joan said as we drove away. “But she doesn't have a whole lot of sense of what
it's like to be a child. I told her the other day, ‘Violet, you've got to get this child to a mall!' And she said, ‘Whatever for?' I had to tell her: ‘Ella doesn't live on books alone, like you and me, Violet. The girl needs a movie! She needs to go shopping! Take her to a mall, for pity's sake! If you won't, I will.'”

“Thanks,” I said to Joan. “You saved my life.”

“Mrs. Von Stern knows an awful lot—there are some incredible things Violet knows about, from all her travels and reading and conversations—but on the subject of how an eleven-year-old spends her time, the woman is sorely underinformed.”

I could only agree. Then, as I stared out at the wide streets of Albuquerque, I asked Joan if she could tell me something about my grandmother.

“Why, sure, hon. What do you want to know? I'll give it my best shot.”

I thought of that harsh voice on the phone. “Why don't she and my dad get along?”

Joan whistled. “Makes sense you'd ask about that.” She sighed. “First of all, sometimes it's easier to be a person's friend than it is to be their relative. I have some kin in Louisiana, and I love them and all, but let me tell
you …
” She shook her head. “Well, never mind about that. I don't know your daddy, Ella, so I only know one side of the story, and believe me, with families there are always at least ten sides to every story.”

She went on to tell me the Von Stern side, which was that years ago, maybe almost ten years ago, my grandmother had gone out to visit dear old Mr. Abercrombie on the occasion of
her finally buying a book she had hankered after for a very long time.

“Kepler's
Dream
?” I asked.

“That's the one.” Joan said Mrs. Von Stern was so pleased and excited about her “biblio-find” that she stopped on her way back from Vancouver to show it off to her son. My dad had been going up to do fishing trips in Washington during the summer at that point, but was just then deciding he would stay living there full-time and leave us in California—in other words, that he and my mom were going to divorce. My mom had come up to Washington, too, to talk it over with him. It was a typical case of family members getting their wires crossed: Grandmother came for a visit just as my dad and mom were fighting about the future, and to make things even more complicated, there was a little tyke around.