The Humming Room (11 page)

Dressed in regular clothes, Phillip looked even more fragile than he had in his pajamas. His spindly arms poked out of his short-sleeved shirt and a belt was cinched tightly around his pants.

“He won't like me,” Phillip said.

“He might if you don't act like a monster,” Roo replied. She reached over and adjusted his shirt collar so that his jutting collarbone didn't show.

“I don't see why he won't just come up here to meet me.” His voice turned peevish.

“He's shy of people,” Roo explained.

She had told Phillip only that she was going to take him to meet Jack. She hadn't mentioned the garden at all. Phillip's moods were so unpredictable that she worried he would throw a fit when he learned that the garden had been there all along, abandoned and left to die. It would be safer, she reasoned, for him to see it for himself, out of earshot.

“Do you remember what to say to Ms. Valentine?”

“I think so.”

He pressed the buzzer on his nightstand. Ms. Valentine was at the door so quickly that Roo worried she had been just outside the whole time, listening. Her face revealed nothing, though, as Phillip gave her instructions: “I'm teaching Roo how to play chess today, and we are not to be disturbed.”

“You're dressed,” Ms. Valentine said with surprise.

“I
made
him get dressed,” Roo cut in quickly. “I was sick of seeing him in his pajamas.”

Ms. Valentine ignored her and studied Phillip's face. “Shouldn't you rest? You've had a difficult night.”

“I'm fine,” he said.

“Your eyes look a little bloodshot.”

“My eyes are my business,” he snapped at her. “Now leave us alone. If you bother us again, you'll make me mad, and I'll tell my father when he gets back.”

Ms. Valentine hesitated, then glanced at Roo suspiciously before she left the room.

“She won't bother us now,” he told Roo.

“I don't know how she doesn't hate you,” Roo said, half marveling. “I would.”

“My father pays her not to hate me,” he said simply. He started for the door, but Roo stopped him.

“Not that way,” she said. “We're going through here.”

Roo led him through the door that opened out to the secret passageway, stopping by the chute. With the toe of her sneaker she gave it a little tap.

“That's our way down,” she told him.

Phillip looked at the dark chute apprehensively. “I used to throw candy wrappers down it. Where does it go?”

“All the way to the basement.”

Roo got down on the floor and went into the chute, feet first, careful this time to brace her legs against the edges to keep herself from sliding down. She looked up at Phillip. “Come on. I'll hold on to you.”

Phillip crouched down and adjusted his legs so that they were resting over her shoulders. She wrapped her arms around his calves, then she pulled them both forward into the mouth of the chute.

“Ready?” she asked.

“I guess so,” Phillip said, his voice faltering.

Relaxing her legs, Roo let herself slide with Phillip sliding behind her. When they began to pick up speed, Roo heard him make a small sound, as if he were trying to stifle a scream. Quickly she pressed her legs against the side again to stop them.

“All right up there?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“You sound funny.” She tried to twist her head to look up at him, but in that small space, it was close to impossible.

“It's just that…,” Phillip said, “it feels…I've never moved so fast.”

“Do you want me slow down?”

“No. I want you to go faster.”

Roo laughed, then wrapped her arms around his legs more tightly. “You asked for it.”

She let go and they sped downward at full speed, their backs skimming across the cool metal. It was nearly as thrilling as Dumbfounder's Current, and the two of them laughed helplessly the whole way down, right up until they reached the bottom. And there was Jack, waiting there, looking bemused.

“It sounded like the walls were laughing,” he said.

Roo shimmied to the floor so fast that Phillip slid onto the platform awkwardly, his legs strangely splayed. The smile left his face and his eyes darted toward Jack ruefully, as if he were waiting for an insult. But Jack had experience with creatures that were mistrustful of him.

“I'm Jack.” He put out his hand for Phillip to shake. Phillip took it, and Jack gave him a discreet tug, just enough so that Phillip could ease himself into a sitting position and then slip off the platform.

His dignity recouped, Phillip now looked at Jack carefully, taking in the odd clothes, the pale hair in its short ponytail.

“Where is Sir?” Phillip asked.

“Just outside.” Jack nodded his head toward the basement door.

“I'd like to see him,” Phillip said, and started for the door, but Roo grabbed him by the wrist.

“Not yet. We wanted to show you something else first,” she said.

She led him past the wired panel and he followed her up the narrow stairs with Jack behind him. Roo pushed open the trapdoor and they all scrambled up into the garden.

“It's still here,” Phillip murmured as he looked around.

Roo braced herself for an outburst. Jack moved up beside him, hands in his pocket, his body looking deliberately relaxed.

He's trying to keep him calm, Roo realized. Like he did with the mink on the shoal.

But the crying and shrieking that Roo had expected never came. Instead, Phillip began to walk through the garden, looking up at the towering trees and the lacy brown creepers clinging to the glass panes; at the bare patches of earth and the small hummocks of leaf litter that Roo and Jack had piled in the corner.

“It used to be all green,” he said finally, “with flowers everywhere.”

He stepped onto the stone path and began to walk along it. “This was a stream.”

“We thought it was a footpath,” Roo said.

“No, a stream…there were berry bushes that grew along here.” He paused to run his hands over a skeletal bush, then followed the stream to its end at the base of the rocky ledge, below the boulder. Gazing up, he said, “And this was where the waterfall was. There are pipes in the stones.”

“I didn't see them,” Roo said.

“They're hidden. Look.” He hopped out of the streambed and scrambled up the slope, his spidery body clambering over the rocks. When he got to the top, he pointed to the tiny metal pipes embedded in the stone. He showed them other things too, like the fissures in the rocks where flowers grew from and where the banana tree once stood, parsing it all out, just as he'd done with his skeletons. And in a way, Roo thought, all that was left of the garden was its bones—and a bat squeak of life beneath the soil.

Phillip stopped talking suddenly. His head lifted as though he were listening. Then he turned to them, smiling. A small, quiet smile of relief.

“What is it?” Roo asked.

“She's here,” he said.

 

They found another bucket for Phillip, though he wasn't strong enough to carry it full. At first, Sir startled at the sight of Phillip. He spread his wings and scrambled into the air, flying to a nearby tree. But soon he grew used to him. As the stately bird patrolled the shallow waters for fish, he ventured closer. Once, Phillip reached out very quickly and let his fingertips brush against the bird's wing while Sir kept perfectly still, his round yellow eyes fixed on Jack.

After an hour of watering, Phillip grew tired. He stretched out on the boulder above the waterfall and rested his head on his flung-out arm while Roo and Jack kept working. Soon he lay so still that Roo went up to the boulder to check on him. Phillip's body had shifted so that it fit against the contours of the rock more comfortably. His right hip had found a depression to lean into and his right foot had slipped into a narrow crack in the lowest part of the rock. Roo put a hand to his cheek. His skin was cool and dry. He was breathing peacefully. Fast asleep.

Satisfied that he was okay, they left him so they could cool off in the river. They went down into the hidden cove and poured bucketfuls of water over each other's heads, while Sir paced the banks, watching them skeptically.

Even before they reentered the garden, Roo knew something was wrong. The door to the basement was slightly ajar, when she was sure she had shut it tightly. As she and Jack climbed the ladder to the trapdoor, a sickish feeling began to fill her belly.

“Someone's here,” she whispered to Jack.

A shadow passed across the open trapdoor and they heard footsteps above them.

“Maybe Phillip's awake,” Jack said.

Slowly Roo climbed to the top of the stairs and peered into the garden to see a pair of long, jean-clad legs.

“Oh, Roo,” Violet murmured. She glanced over at Phillip, still asleep on the boulder. “What were you thinking?”

“He wanted to come,” Roo cried. “He was happy. He was
laughing
! I've never heard him laugh like that.”

“Yes, I heard him too. I heard the both of you, though for the life of me I couldn't figure out where the laughter was coming from. It was when I poked around outside and saw the trampled grass by the basement door that I put it together.” Violet shook her head. “What have you done, Roo?”

“I've been trying to make things better.”

“Better? What you've made is a colossal mess. Can't you see the harm you've done? Your uncle shut the garden up for a reason.”

“What reason?” Roo countered combatively. “Because he killed his wife? Mrs. Wixton said people think he did.”

“I know what people think, and I know the people who think it. They have all sorts of other nonsense to say too. If they had to mind their own business for a full week, they would give themselves hernias, every last one of them.”

“Then why did he shut the garden up?” Roo demanded.

“I don't know. But that's not our concern, is it? What you should be concerned about is what will happen when your uncle comes back to find that you've opened the garden up and brought Phillip down here too…I wouldn't be surprised if he tossed us all out.”

“Then you can't tell him,” Jack said.

He had been hidden from Violet's view, behind Roo on the stairs. At the sound of this unfamiliar voice Violet's eyes narrowed.

“Who's with you?” she asked.

Roo said nothing, but an urgent tap on her back persuaded her to climb up into the garden so that Jack could do the same.

At the sight of him, Violet caught her breath. She looked at Roo, then at Jack, then back at Roo. “It
is
him, isn't it?”

Roo nodded.

Violet smiled, then put the back of her hand against her mouth as though to hide it. She shook her head. “If the Donkey grannies could see this…” Violet glanced back and forth at the two of them. “Even if I keep your secret—and I'm not saying I will—you'll be caught sooner or later. Ms. Valentine doesn't miss much. And if
she
doesn't guess, Phillip is bound to spill the beans during some tantrum. Incidentally, how were you planning to sneak Phillip back in the house?”

“I was going to wait until eleven when Ms. Valentine goes to Choke Cherry for the mail, and then tell you that Phillip wanted his lunch.”

“And while I'm fixing it, you sneak him back upstairs.”

Roo nodded.

“The nerve of you two!” But she seemed more amused than angry. Her eyes returned to Jack and she shook her head. “The Faigne, here in our house! The Donkey grannies would keel over! They'd never believe me, even if I swore up, down, and round the bend…”

Then Jack did the most astonishing thing. From his back pocket he pulled out a knife and opened it. Grabbing the top of his ponytail, he sawed at the hair above the rubber band, and in a minute he held out his blond ponytail toward Violet.

“Show them this,” Jack said. His hair was now short and jaggedy. It made him look more like a regular sort of boy—the kind that Roo might have seen on the streets in Limpette.

Violet stared down at the flaxen thing.

“Is this a bribe?” she asked, raising her eyebrow at Jack.

“Yes,” he answered, smiling. And to Roo's relief, she could see the Faigne again in his smile, and so apparently did Violet.

“All right.” Violet reached out and took the ponytail. “I'll keep your secret.”

“Thank you, Violet,” Roo said.

Violet nodded, her eyes still on Jack.

“You look real enough,” she mused.

“You can squeeze me if you want,” he said.

“Well then, I think I will.” And she gave him a hug. When she let him go, she said, “Mind you, that was for my mother's sake. She thinks you're nothing but a boy who needs a home, and she'd plunk me on the head if I didn't say, Patty McPhail, Donkey Island, first house on the left on Quarry Street. Done.”

With that, she walked up the garden's incline to fetch Phillip. But as she bent to wake him, she paused, her head tipped to one side as she stared at the boulder.

“How pretty,” she said.

“What is?” Roo asked, hurrying over with Jack behind her.

“That little red flower,” Violet said. “I didn't know flowers could grow on rocks like that.”

Indeed, growing out of a narrow crack in the boulder, by Phillip's foot, was a spiky red flower where, Roo was quite sure, there hadn't been one before.

Every morning, Roo and Phillip did schoolwork in Phillip's room, with Violet watching over. In her own way, she was as stern a teacher as Mrs. Wixton; but when the sound of Ms. Valentine's boat motor started up to make its mail run to Choke Cherry, Violet set them free. They hurried into the passageway and slid down the chute to the garden, though Violet said it was bad luck for live children to go down it.

The garden was changing slowly. One morning Roo noticed a patch of pale green near one of the walls of the atrium. To her delight she found several tiny new shoots, filament thin, pushing out of the earth.

“Look!” She called Jack and Phillip over to show them.

As they kneeled by the young shoots, marveling, Roo stretched herself out against the ground and put her ear to the earth.

“What are you doing?” Phillip asked.

“Shhh,” she told him.

The boys waited in silence as Roo listened.

“I can hear it,” she said. “It's louder now.”

“What is?” asked Phillip.

“The earth.”

“You can hear the earth?” Jack asked.

“Of course. Can't you?”

Jack and Phillip shook their heads.

“That's funny,” Roo said. “I thought everyone could.”

“What does it sound like?” Phillip asked.

No one had ever asked her that before. She listened again. It was like a long fluttering sigh made between closed lips. It rose and fell in pitch, and there seemed to be a song woven through it that never repeated itself. Roo took a breath and tested out a sound. She stopped and shook her head.

“It's not exactly right,” she said.

“Do that again,” Phillip told her.

Roo gave it another try. She struggled to mimic the lilting rhythm, the way it snaked under and over itself.

When she stopped, Phillip was staring at her, his dark eyes so wide and bewildered that Roo sat up, alarmed.

“What's wrong?” she asked.

“That was how it sounded,” he said. “Exactly how it sounded.”

“What?”

“My mother's humming.”

 

Day by day, the garden's ashy haze became interspersed with patches of fresh green. The first plants to bloom were the fragile shoots by the wall—with the most delicate yet complicated flowers Roo had ever seen. They had a slender bell-shaped center, ringed yellow on the inside, and lavender petals with gently fluted edges, like the sleeves of a small girl's nightgown.

Every day they found new things pushing out of the soil. It felt as if each new flower had convinced yet another one to bloom. Tall spikes of red flowers that looked like Aladdin's slippers attached to each other at the heel. Slender red-and-yellow flowers that flared out like torches and great papery white flowers with long necks that bent as elegantly as Sir's; and all around the boulder, forming a crooked wreath, spiked flowers of purple, blue, and yellow grew within the cracks. Bromeliads, Phillip called them. He knew what all the flowers were called, and as they bloomed he greeted them by name, like old friends—blue passion flower, goat's milk, parrot's tongue.

Other living things began to find their way into the garden too. Bees hovered over the flowers and ladybugs examined new leaves. Once they found a green snake—exactly like Roo's glass one—sunning itself on a rock.

“Yesterday, after you left, I noticed a little shoot growing up by the stump of one of the banana trees,” Roo said one morning, as they were waiting for Jack to arrive. “Jack thinks it might be a new tree beginning to grow.”

“Maybe the whole garden will be full of live trees one day, years and years from now,” Phillip said.

Roo had never heard her cousin talk about the future before. She looked at him, noticing that he had lost that withered, pinched look. There was a new quickness in his eyes and the purple smudges beneath them had faded.

“It might,” Roo said.

“How does it sound now?” Phillip asked.

“What?”

“The earth.”

“I don't know,” she said.

She got down on her belly and pressed her ear to the ground. She had never listened to a garden in full bloom before. There were layers of sound threading out in all directions.

“The whole garden is humming!” Roo cried. “The earth is humming to the seeds and the seeds are humming to the roots and the roots are humming to the leaves and each part is telling another part to stay alive.”

 

One afternoon, after they had put it in a morning's work on the garden and Phillip was back in his room, Jack and Roo took the canoe out to see the terns' shoal. The snowy terns shrieked in protest as Roo and Jack approached the shoal, and others flew into the air and circled above them. Some of the nests had been plundered, with bits of shell littering the dried grass, but a few had clutches of beautiful brown-speckled eggs lying in the patchy nests.

“Who knows? Maybe some of them might make it,” Jack said.

They checked the shoal for the mink, and when they were satisfied that she was not there, they hopped back into the canoe and headed for Cough Rock.

The day had been warm and clear, with thin-skinned clouds raking across the sky. But as they entered the seaway, the air suddenly cooled.

Jack tipped his head back and looked up at the sky.

“Storm's coming,” he said.

Not a moment later a dark purple cloud swept in above them, low in the sky, and as it unfurled the rain began to fall. It was a hard, furious rain. It whipped the river into confusion. Jack began to paddle hard, though Roo could not imagine how he could see where he was going. A tricky vapor hovered just over the river's surface, and they sailed blindly into it. Each time the canoe pitched up, Roo sucked in her breath and held it until they crashed down again. She felt a rush of panic, certain that even if the frenzied water didn't flip the canoe, they would certainly ram it into an island or shoal. The canoe's bottom was filling—the tops of Roo's sneakers were underwater. Squinting to keep the driving rain out of her eyes, she looked at Jack. His expression was grim but focused on a shadowy mass a few yards in front of them. It might have been land but it was impossible to be sure. Still, Jack tried to paddle toward it, fighting the currents. Each time the canoe was thrust aside by a wave, Jack maneuvered it back into line with the shadow, closer and closer until Roo was certain that it was an island. A wave sideswiped them and the canoe tilted so sharply that Roo let out a sharp yelp and a second later she felt the canoe's bottom rubbing against land. Quickly Jack leapt out and held the canoe while Roo scrambled out after him, her legs shaking so badly that she stumbled.

“You all right?” Jack called to her over the sound of the thrashing rain.

Roo nodded.

“Do you know where we are?” she asked as they carried the canoe onto the island and set it down on the bank.

“I have an idea. I'll tell you for sure in a minute,” he said.

They headed into a thicket of woods that flanked the shore and rose high above the river on a sharp incline. The canopy of leaves helped shield them from the rain and muffled its roar. Bit by bit, Roo could feel her muscles unravel as they hiked up the hill, the smell of pine growing sharper as they went. Quite suddenly the trees gave way and they stepped out into a grassy clearing, in the center of which was a large red boat. It was such an unexpected sight—a boat roosting on top of a hill in the middle of the woods—that Roo stood in the rain, just staring at it.

“Come on!” Jack said, and they both ran toward the boat's set of makeshift stairs onto its deck and through a metal door that led inside.

“What is this place?” Roo asked, looking around at the paneled walls painted bright yellow, the rows of slatted wood benches, and the wide windows with the arched tops. A hammock hung from the ceiling in the front of the ship, just behind the captain's wheel.

“It's an old tour boat,” Jack said, collapsing into one of the bench seats. “No one's lived in it since forever.”

“Do you stay here?” she asked, eyeing the hammock as she sat down on the bench in front of his.

“Sometimes. I'm careful though. Other people know about it too.” He lay down on one of the benches, his head below the window, and put his hands behind his head. “Want to know my favorite thing about this place?”

“Okay.”

“Lie down.”

She lay down on her seat and turned her head to look at Jack. Between the slats she could see the top of his flaxen head, then his eyes, then his mouth with its scrolled upper lip.

“Now what?” she asked.

“Now look out the window,” he said.

She twisted her head back a little to see out the arched window. The view was of the smoke-colored sky and, around the edges, the tops of the trees rocking in the wind. The dark clouds slowly slid past, making Roo feel like the boat was sailing in the opposite direction. Not sailing, really, but flying in the sky, just above the treetops.

Roo laughed.

“You see it?” he said, one delighted gray eye staring at her through the slat.

“Yes!” But she stopped laughing suddenly and sat up. “
Pendragon.
”

“What's
Pendragon
?” Jack sat up too.

“A flying boat. It's a story my father told me. The boat was red and yellow and it flew above the treetops….” She stared at Jack.

“Do you think he was here?” he asked.

Roo imagined her father winding through the river in his skiff, restless, fearless. His pale eyes always searching for something new. He would have found this place somehow. In his own way he was as wild as Jack.

“I'm sure he was.”

They both lay back down. Jack slipped his hand between a slat and held it out for her. She slid her hand out and took his, then turned back to the sky. The darkness was lifting. Bands of distilled sunlight were touching down on the wet pine needles, making them gleam silver.

“The rain's stopping,” Roo said, turning back to Jack. He had been watching her, and now, caught, he blinked and his cheeks turned a deeper red. He looked upward at the thinning clouds.

“Not yet,” he said. But it was unclear if he was talking to Roo or to the sky.

The wind shifted and a purple-gray cloud, thick and mottled, moved across the sky. The light inside the boat dimmed, and Roo and Jack watched as
Pendragon
flew back into the storm, its hull just clearing the tops of the trees.