The Green Glass Sea (18 page)

The new president's name was Truman. Harry Truman. Dewey had stared at the picture of him in the paper for a long time that morning, a bland-looking man with a round face and round glasses. He didn't look like he'd be much of a match for Hitler, and that worried her. She lay in her bed Friday night, thinking about him. She didn't think Harry was a good name for a president. Not very dignified. Franklin was a much better name. It was—

“Are you asleep?”

Dewey wasn't sure for a minute if she'd really heard the whispered question, but when she looked over at the other bed, she could see the vague outline of Suze, propped up on one elbow.

“Not really, ” Dewey said.

There was a silence then, as if the conversation, such as it was, had ended, but neither girl moved to turn over. The ticking of the clock on the nightstand seemed unusually loud.

Another whisper. “I'm, um, sorry about your box. ”

Dewey wasn't sure what to say. “That's okay” was a lie. “Yeah, ” she said after a few seconds.

“I shouldn't have done that. The president was dying, ” Suze said, and Dewey could hear the tremble in her whisper. “Maybe if I hadn't . . . ” She let the sentence drift off.

Dewey flinched in surprise. Not just because Suze had apologized, but because she had been feeling that same uncomfortable sense of “what if?” She'd disobeyed the rules, and something terrible had happened. She didn't really think that sneaking under the fence had killed the president, but the two events were linked so tightly together in her mind that they
seemed
connected.

“I don't think it was your fault, ” she said quietly, as much to herself as to Suze. “The president, I mean. ”

“I know. But I can't stop thinking about Eleanor Roosevelt. I don't think she'd like me.
She
wouldn't have knocked your box down. ”

Dewey giggled. She couldn't help herself. Suze sounded very serious, but the idea of tall, dignified Mrs. Roosevelt standing on the playground with a cigar box was just too funny. “No, I can't quite see that, ” she said. “‘I shall bat away your cigar container, '” she continued, in a high-pitched voice that was a pretty good imitation.

It was Suze's turn to giggle. “Is it busted up really bad?”

“Not too much. And I've got another one, if it cracks more. ” Dewey hesitated, then said, “But don't do it again, okay?”

“No, ” Suze said. “I don't think I will. ” A pause. “What are you making with all the junk inside it?”

Dewey bit her lip in the darkness. Suze sounded a lot different tonight than she had on the playground, but was it safe to tell her about the project? It was private.

“I won't tell or anything, ” Suze said. “Really. ” Her voice sounded a little sad.

“I'm trying to make a wind-up guy, ” Dewey said after a minute. “Kind of like a robot, except it doesn't walk right yet. ”

“Oh. ” Silence. “You like inventing stuff, huh?”

“Yeah, ” Dewey said. “Especially trying to get the pieces to fit together. It's like doing a puzzle, except I'm making it up as I go along. ”

“That does sound kinda like fun, ” Suze said. She pushed her pillow behind her and sat up against the headboard. As she did, a dark shape fell off her bed and hit the floor with a muffled thump. It slid on the wood, ending up just under Dewey's bed.

Dewey reached down to pick it up and peered at it in the dim light from the window. It was some kind of stuffed animal. A teddy bear? Dewey had never seen it before. She smiled. Most of the time, Einstein the duck sat on the shelf over her bed, because she was really too old to sleep with him anymore. But tonight she had taken him down and tucked him under the edge of the covers, for comfort. Suze must have had the same idea.

“What's your bear's name?” Dewey asked. She handed it back across the gap between the beds.

There was a small pause, and then Suze said, “Maxwell.”

Dewey immediately thought of James Maxwell, who formulated the first equations about electromagnetic fields. But she doubted Suze knew about him. Maybe after Maxwell House coffee. Or maybe she just had an uncle Maxwell who'd given her the bear. She—

“Because of the scientist guy, Maxwell, ” Suze said.

Dewey just about fell out of bed.

“See, my mom's a chem—a stinker—you know, ” Suze continued. “His name used to be Fuzzy, when I was little. But Mom used to laugh and say, ‘Maxwell was right, opposites do attract'—I guess 'cause he's a dark brown bear, and I've got blonde hair—and she and Daddy started calling him Maxwell. It's really a more interesting name than Fuzzy, if you think about it. Mom's big on giving things science names. Our cat is Rutherford, and even my—”

Suze stopped abruptly in mid-sentence, and Dewey heard her make a funny noise with her mouth, like she was trying hard to think and stop herself from talking at the same time.

Dewey waited.

“If I tell you something, will you promise never to tell anyone else?” Suze asked slowly.

Suze's face was just a sort of pale blur under paler blonde hair, but even without her glasses on, Dewey could tell that Suze was very serious. “Yeah, I promise, ” she said after a moment's hesitation, during which curiosity won out over anything else.

“Scout's honor?”

“I'm not a Girl Scout, ” Dewey said. “So I don't know if it would count. But pinky swear. That's what my Nana did if something was
real
secret. ” She held up her right hand, pinky extended, and kissed its fingertip. “Pinky swear I won't tell. ”

“Okay. ” Suze took a deep breath. “I was sort of named after my mom's favorite scientist, Marie Curie. ”

“I thought Suze was short for Susan, ” Dewey said, puzzled.

“It is. My first name's fine. But my
middle
name . . . ” Suze sighed.

“What?”

“Okay. You know Marie was Polish before she married Mr. Curie?”

“Sure. ”

“Well, Mom gave me
that
name. My middle name is Sklodowska. ”

“Wow, ” said Dewey.

“Yeah. I don't think I'd mind—much—if she'd given me Marie. It's not the greatest middle name but—” She stopped because Dewey was laughing.

“I'm not laughing at you, ” Dewey said quickly. “It's just that—” She giggled again. “See, my middle name is Marie. After my Nana, though, not Madame Curie. ”

“Dewey Marie Kerrigan?”

Silence.

“Well, kind of. ” It was Dewey's turn to think hard. Ever since yesterday afternoon when she'd heard the news about the president, nothing had felt quite real, as if she'd stepped out of ordinary time. Lying here talking in the dark, Suze was very different from the bossy girl on the playground. But who would she be in the morning? Would she try to show off with this?

“I won't tell either, ” Suze said after a minute. “Scout's honor. Brownie's, anyway. ” She held up her fingers in what Dewey supposed was the Brownie salute.

It was Dewey's turn to sigh. “See, Dewey's not really my name. It's a nickname, like Suze. ”

“I wondered about that. But I thought you could have been named after a librarian or something. Like the Dewey Decimal system. So what's it short for?”

“You said your mom's nuts about chemistry?” Dewey ran a nervous hand through her hair. “My papa's the same way about math. And puzzles and codes. All his letters to me have parts I have to unscramble or decipher. It's kind of fun, but sometimes he gets a little carried away. ”

“What does that have to do with your name?” Suze asked.

“
Every
thing. See, my birthday is December twelfth. The twelfth day of the twelfth month. Twelve-twelve. That was too good a number for Papa to pass up. So instead of giving me a normal name,
he
picked the Latin word for ‘twelve. '” Dewey paused, then said, slowly and deliberately, “Duodecima. My real name is Duodecima Marie Kerrigan. ”

“Jeez, ” said Suze. “Dewey's
lots
better. Do teachers ever call you the whole thing?”

Dewey made a face. “Not here. But the nuns did. I had to go to Catholic school when I lived with Nana. Nuns don't like nicknames. And they
love
Latin. I hated Catholic school. ”

“I can see why, ” Suze said. They sat in silence for a minute or two digesting this new information about each other.

“So look, ” Suze said finally. “I won't tell anyone about Duo—about your name, if you won't tell about mine. Deal?”

“Deal, ” said Dewey.

“Spit on it?”

“Sure, ” Dewey said, although she'd never spit on anything before.

They sat up onto the edges of their beds, legs dangling, and each girl spit into the palm of her right hand, then extended it. They shook hands across the narrow gap between the beds, then disengaged with a faint moist sound.

“G'night . . . Twelve, ” said Suze with a chuckle.

“G'night, Curie, ” Dewey replied. She tucked Einstein under her arm and settled down to sleep.

WHY DID IT
always rain on Saturday afternoons? Suze sat at her desk in the corner of the living room, listening to the water hit the glass of the window and spill over the sill. The building didn't have much insulation, and a few times the downpour was so intense that she felt as if it might come right through the walls.

She got up and got a glass of milk from the icebox. The kitchen windows were fogged up so that she couldn't see anything outside. She took a handful of saltines from the tin on the counter and went back to her desk.

She'd already finished her homework—a page of long division that was pretty easy, and a list of spelling words that weren't. They were tricky, because they were words that came from Spanish, and didn't spell anything like they sounded.

Some of them meant something. Like Los Alamos, which was the name of the ranch that had become the Hill, and meant “the cottonwood trees. ” She picked up her pencil and began to doodle. She drew a few stick trees, and underneath wrote ΛOΣ ΑΛΑΜOΣ. That was
Los Alamos
, in Greek. Greek letters, anyway. It was almost recognizable, even in another alphabet, when she used capital letters.

She drew another clump of trees and wrote λoσ αλαμoσ underneath it. That was better. More mysterious in lowercase letters. If you didn't know, it could be almost anything. She wrote her name, Συζε Γoρδoν. She liked her name, because the Z, zeta, was fun to draw. It had taken her a long time to get it right. It was the second-hardest letter. Lowercase xi was the hardest: ξ. She drew a skeleton hand and wrote ξ-ραψ, “x-ray, ” beside it.

Her favorite letter to say out loud was
omicron
. It sounded like the name of a villain, someone Wonder Woman might have to battle for the safety of Earth. Omicron the Magnificent. “Omicron the Terrible, ” she said out loud. She drew a crown on the paper, and then sighed. It was fun to say out loud, but it was the most boring of all boring letters to draw. O. It just looked like a stupid O, and what was the point of having secret writing if it didn't
look
different?

She continued to doodle idly, singing under her breath, “Omi-cron. Pi. Pi. Omi-cron. Pi. Pi, ” sort of to the tune of the flying monkeys song from
The Wizard of Oz
. She wanted the letters to be bolder, stand out more from the white of the paper. She drew a larger
zeta
, an outline, and began to fill it in, pressing as hard as she could with the pencil. But she pressed too hard, and the lead snapped off, ripping a small furrow in the paper.

Stupid pencil.

She opened the drawer of the desk to see if there might be an ink pen. She pushed aside the papers and rubber bands and other odds and ends that had accumulated there, and uncovered the score pad from the gin rummy games. It had been so long since her mother had any free time in the evenings that Suze had almost forgotten about it. She wondered if they would ever play again. Some of the penciled scores had faded so much they were nearly illegible.

Suze sighed. She rummaged to the bottom of the disarray, but came up empty and shut the drawer. The she remembered that there
was
a nib pen and a bottle of black ink in the art box under her bed. It would make a nice dark line, and she could even make the thick parts of the letter look different from the thin parts, the way it showed in the chart in the encyclopedia at school. That was almost impossible with a pencil. Suze thought longingly about the dark ink, and about the pad of thick, bright white paper that was also in the box.

But Dewey was in the bedroom. Mostly, for the three weeks she'd been living there, they had kept to themselves, in separate rooms, between school and bedtime. They didn't talk to each other much, unless Suze's mother was around, which wasn't very often. Then they both pretended until she went back to the lab.

She sighed again. She really wanted the pen. And it was
her
room, after all. She got up off the hard desk chair and marched into the bedroom, her red socks making muffled thumps on the wood floor.

Dewey was sitting on her bed, her back against the headboard, working on one of her gadgets. Suze wasn't quite sure what any of them
did
, but Dewey always seemed to be working on one of them. She kept the half-finished ones in her empty dresser drawer. It didn't look like any of them were completely done yet.

This one was flat and thin, with wheels and a wind-up box on top. One of the wheels was bolted on, and the others dangled loose. Dewey had dumped out her whole Mason jar of screws and nails and junk onto the bedspread and was pushing them around with her fingers, looking for something. The littlest pieces had rolled and lined themselves up in the ridges of the chenille like beans in a furrow.