Kepler’s Dream (3 page)

“Mrs. V,” he said in a hoarse voice. He looked spooked, too. “Are you all right?”

In his hands he held a rifle.

“Good heavens, Miguel,” my grandmother replied, folding her arms across her nightgown. “Please, let me find a bathrobe. Wait there.” She disappeared to her mysterious chamber. Tiny Hildy stood in the bedroom doorway looking important, guarding her mistress. She growled, which would have been funny under different circumstances. She was about half a foot tall. I tried to catch Miguel's eye, but he wasn't looking at me. Neither was Rosie.

“All right.” My grandmother returned in a long golden robe and elegant flats, her hair brushed, lipstick on, even. She looked like a goddess, the kind you'd see on Halloween. “
We
are all accounted for, at least. Now—Miguel.” She cleared her throat,
Ahem
. “Why are you holding that gun?”

He snapped the thing in two, as if it were a stick, so it hung broken-looking in his hands. “I saw someone out by the Library …” Miguel's voice was nervous. “I wasn't going to hurt them. I was just trying … trying to warn them.”

My grandmother raised her eyebrows.
“And?”
she asked impatiently. “Did you see who it was? Or what the person was doing?”

He looked uncomfortable. “I'm not sure, Mrs. V. He—or they, there might have been more than one—got away.”

“
Maybe someone was trying to get into the Library,” I piped up. “There's a lot of valuable stuff—I mean,
things
—in there.”

Miguel gave me a strange look, as if I'd said something I shouldn't have.

“Kepler's
Dream,
” Our Honored Pest said in a hushed, dramatic tone. He was talking about a book—the one that meant more to my grandmother, it sometimes seemed, than me and my dad put together.

“You're right.” With an air of determination, the GM buttoned up her robe. “We had better take a look.”

“Violet, do you really think that's wise?” Christopher Abercrombie asked. “Shouldn't you wait for the police?”

My grandmother dismissed the question with a wave of her jeweled hand. “Be good enough to accompany me there, Miguel, would you?”

“Sure, Mrs. V. Of course.” He stroked Rosie's hair reassuringly and told her he'd be right back. Hildy trotted off with them, like that tiny animal was going to be a big help if they found a pack of burglars back there.

With just Rosie, Abercombie, Lou and me standing around, things got mighty quiet. And uncomfortable. If Our Guest hadn't been there, Rosie and I could have talked about what was going on, but as it was we were locked into silence, our eyes on the ground. Every second took an hour.

We heard footsteps outside the front door just as cars started to pull up in the driveway. The police were arriving. Miguel ushered my grandmother in and made a come-here gesture to
Rosie, who returned to the fold of his arms. My grandmother looked wide awake now, the General Major again. Her face was pale and fierce, her lipstick a bright, frowning line.

“Well,” she said. “We can't know everything that might be missing right away, of course, out of the thousands of books in the Library. But one thing is clear.”

She looked around with a stern, distressed expression. I couldn't tell from the way she was talking to us if we were supposed to be her soldiers, getting ready for battle—or if we were actually the enemy.

“Kepler's
Dream,
” my grandmother said, in a voice heavy with upset, “is gone.”

TWO

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It wasn't my idea to spend that summer at my grandmother's house. I hardly even knew my grandmother
had
a house—made out of mud or anything else. I'd heard that she and my dad didn't get along, and that she was maybe mean, or crazy, or both, but I had never met the woman before. She was like a made-up character, Cruella de Vil or Darth Vader, someone you've heard stories about but don't believe actually exists.

I should explain something about my family. When some people divorce, the situation is bad but not a complete disaster: people still see each other, or talk on the phone, or meet every now and then at a counselor's office with the plastic dinosaurs in the sandbox. The kids eventually get stepparents and maybe half siblings, back-and-forth schedules between houses and divided-up vacations. We had a lot of that in Santa Rosa.

But when we Mackenzies do things, we do them
all the way
. It's Extreme Divorce, like some kind of reality TV show.

So with my parents, the break happened when I was a tiny
baby. I guess one day they just looked up at each other and BOOM! realized they hated each other's guts—they must have forgotten to notice that when they got married. According to Mom, my dad “was never cut out for having kids,” though there weren't “kids,” there was just me, Ella. Anyway he ended up far away, like he'd been thrown off a moving train, in Spokane, Washington (say Spo-can, not Spo-cain), where he ran fishing expeditions in the wilderness. Fish seemed to suit him better than people. Maybe he felt bad about leaving my mom and me behind; then again, maybe he didn't. He sent the odd card, mailed guesstimate-type presents around Christmas (books for the wrong age group, toys mismatched to my tastes), and every now and then made his way down to California for a visit that involved some combination of bowling, ice cream and a movie, and embarrassed awkwardness all around. My dad wasn't a bad person—at least I didn't think so—he just didn't know how to be a dad. It was like no one ever gave him the manual. You got the feeling when our visits were over that part of him was thinking,
Phew! Got
that
done. Now, where'd my rod and reel go?

So in Santa Rosa it was just Mom and me and Lou living together, happy as clams (who I guess are happy though I don't know why, when all they have to look forward to is one day being chowder). Or we had been until that winter of my fifth-grade year, when my mom got sick.

She had cancer. Leukemia. Leukemia sounds better than
cancer
, but as I learned from her doctor, the two words were too close for comfort. Leukemia, Dr. Lanner explained, was a
kind of cancer, and it was in my mom's blood making her very sick. First, sick as in not feeling very well, hard to shake off that lingering cough, better get some tests done; then sick as in, Well, Ella, your mom has leukemia and has to start going to the hospital for chemotherapy treatments, and though they aren't going to make her feel great, the important thing is they'll help cure her; and finally, by May or so, sick as in, OK, no kidding, your mom has to stop working at her job, she has to be in the hospital all the time and we need a superhero, or a miracle, fast. Like I said, when we Mackenzies do things, we do them all the way. My mom had Extreme Cancer.

I loved Dr. Lanner, we both did, even when it seemed like we should hate him for giving us such bad news. He was tall and silver haired, with a kind, long face; he looked a little like Lou, actually, who probably has some bloodhound in him. He—Dr. Lanner, I mean, not Lou—nodded with a serious expression, like he was listening to you, but not too serious, like your mother was about to die and he didn't know how to tell you. He answered all my questions, even ones I realized later were stupid (“Can I catch it from her?”) or that he didn't really know the answer to (“Is she going to be OK?”). The way he looked at my mother with his bright eyes, I sometimes used to get this fairy-tale story in my mind about them getting married after she got better.

But by that spring, when I was trying to finish up my science fair project—a cardboard construction I called the Consequence Machine where you started by rolling a marble that knocked down a domino and one thing led to another until at the end
an Alka-Seltzer tablet fell into a glass of vinegar and there was a cool
fizz
—my mom's getting better was beginning to seem far away. On bad days, it seemed impossible. She had already had a boatload of chemotherapy, which turns you pale and bald as you probably know if you know anything about it. That hadn't done the trick.

So now Dr. Lanner was talking about a transplant operation—“stem cell,” it was called, though what it had to do with stems I couldn't tell you. The idea was to zap all her old blood out and then pump her full again with better blood.

It sounded like science fiction to me (Wouldn't she die, in the part where they zapped her old blood? Would she turn into someone else, or an alien?), but this was real life and the only thing that might make her better. For the operation they planned to ship her up to a famous hospital in Seattle, where they'd lock her alone in a sparkly clean, antiseptic chamber for weeks, so no germs or bugs could get at her. “Sounds like Solitary Confinement,” Mom said when he told her.
Santa Rosa wasn't the best place for this—all the pros were in Washington, where they worked in between fishing trips, I guess.

Great plan. Let's save Amy Mackenzie's life. Oh, just one little problem.

Me.

Because anywhere other than in old-fashioned books, you can't actually have eleven-year-old kids living on their own in a boxcar, cooking on a gas stove and having adventures with their dog. I wouldn't have minded trying that—summer was hot in Santa Rosa, and there was always take-out pizza if I couldn't find a stove. I had never seen a boxcar myself, though, and wouldn't necessarily recognize one if I did.

But in today's world, you have to place the almost-middle-schooler with some kind of house and grown-up. The first person we thought of was someone my mom called my “technical” aunt, her sister Miranda. My aunt and boy cousins lived in Arizona. We didn't really get along. It was like apples and oranges, or more like otters and elephants: two totally different species. When Mom and I talked it over, she joked, “Well, Ella, I don't want to say, over my dead body will you go stay with Miranda, because that seems like bad luck.” My mom, as the nurses used to tell me in teary whispers, was famous for keeping her sense of humor throughout her ordeal. That's how you knew she was still Amy Mackenzie underneath it all. This (expletive deleted) disease might have taken her hair and her nice looks, but it hadn't taken her personality, in spite of its evil efforts.

(I should explain “expletive deleted.” An expletive is a swearword. I got the phrase from Mom, who used to say it instead of swearing. And
she
got it from Richard Nixon, who left the presidency in a cloud of shame and cusswords when Mom was a kid. Nixon, I guess, had a pretty dirty mouth—something he had in common with my dad—and when they wrote down what he used to say in meetings, they kept substituting “expletive deleted” for all the bad words. Like an earlier version of
bleep!
)

When the Miranda solution didn't work, because they were
going to Christian family camp in Florida, we weren't exactly heartbroken. We were still stuck, though.

The next obvious idea was to stay with Abbie. Abbie had been my best friend since first grade, and the Lunzes were a kind of substitute family when I needed one. They had helped us a lot through that spring, taking Mom to some of her chemo treatments or Lou out on a walk, organizing people to cook meals when Mom was too sick to manage. I went over there for sleepovers and homework afternoons with Abbie in their soft-pillowed den, where we snuck around on the Internet in between bouts of math sheets. I built my Consequence Machine over at their house, with Mr. Lunz giving me tips on construction.

The Lunzes were going to be gone, too, though, seeing grandparents in New York, and after that Abbie had sleepaway camp somewhere scenic. They felt bad, but had done so much already that you couldn't exactly blame them.

So there was nothing else for it. I had to find my dad. I mean, why have a dad if he couldn't take care of you in a situation like this? Even if he wasn't familiar with the contents of the dad manual, wouldn't it be obvious from plain common sense that this was a point where the guy ought to step up?

I was staying at Auntie Irene's by then, because Mom was in the hospital full-time. Irene Liu was our next-door neighbor, a super-nice person who seemed to assume from day one that it was her job under the circumstances to help take care of me.
Auntie Irene wasn't a blood relation—in Chinese culture you can call people aunts who aren't—but we were pretty short in the relations department, as you can tell. Irene would have taken me herself except that she worked eight-to-ten-hour days at the photo shop, and there's only so much time a kid can spend alone, whistling to a pet canary.

Irene helped me track down my dad. He wasn't big on e-mail, and leaving voice mail didn't get us anywhere, so finally Irene had the brilliant idea of contacting the outdoors company he worked for and pretending she was planning a fly-fishing trip for her nephew and had heard Walter Mackenzie was the best guide in the business. That got us a call back quick.