The Humming Room (12 page)

Late in the afternoon, the clouds began to thin, finally vanishing altogether. In their place was a placid blue sky. Heavy with rainwater, the river was dark and thick, and it moved so slowly that the little canoe had a quiet trip back. But as they approached Cough Rock, Roo lifted her chin and stared at the island with a quizzical look on her face.

The great house seemed to stand out awkwardly against the sky, and when the canoe angled around the island toward the cove she noticed that the Whaler was missing.

Something's happened,
she thought.

Jack stopped paddling and tipped his head to the side, watching her carefully.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

At the sound of his voice, the dark feeling left. She smiled at him and nodded. But once she was inside the house, the apprehensive mood returned. She paused in the lobby, listening. The house was quiet, but that was not unusual. She sniffed the air, the way she used to when she found herself in uncertain situations. She smelled the scent of wood polish and damp air and beneath that something else too—a frenzied whipped-up residue.

She rushed across the lobby to the east wing and hurried up the stairs, then down the hall to Phillip's room, where she burst through the open door. The room was in chaos. The floor was strewn with books and games that appeared to have been flung from all the shelves, and in the center of it all was Violet kneeling on the ground. Her back was to Roo, though she turned at the sound of Roo's entrance. Roo thought that her eyes looked odd—pink and swollen. But Violet quickly looked away again and resumed picking up the pieces of a chess game. Roo watched in confusion as Violet carefully nestled each piece in the velvet-lined wooden box, twisting them so they faced outward.

“Where's Phillip?” Roo asked, her voice rigid.

Violet said nothing at first. Then, “I swear that man washes in with the storms.”

“Who?” Roo asked. “
Where's Phillip?
”

“He's gone,” she said. She put the last chess piece in the box, then shut the lid and snapped the latch. “Dr. Oulette's taken him.”

Violet turned now and looked at Roo. Her eyes were raw-lidded and bloodshot and she was clearly struggling to keep from crying again.

“Took him? Where?”

“To his clinic. In Rochester.”

“And Ms. Valentine let him?” Roo cried, appalled.

“She had no choice, Roo.”

“But Phillip was getting better,” Roo protested.

“That's what Ms. Valentine told Mr. Fanshaw on the phone—even she saw it.”

“Then why would he have sent Phillip away?” Roo asked.

“It was Dr. Oulette's doing. He's been pressuring Mr. Fanshaw to send Phillip to his clinic for months now. The biting incident nearly sealed it, but your uncle kept putting off the decision. Then Dr. Oulette showed up this afternoon. He checks in on Phillip every few weeks. I don't know what was said, but Phillip went into a rage. It was awful—as you can see.” She waved her arm around the room. “So the doctor called Mr. Fanshaw, and Mr. Fanshaw told us to pack Phillip's bags, that he'd made his decision. He wouldn't budge on it, no matter what Ms. Valentine said. I even took the phone myself, snatched it right out of Ms. Valentine's hand, and I told him Phillip's change was nothing short of a miracle. He said miracles were nothing short of hogwash. And that was that. Well, you know how willful
Phillip
is, and where do you think he gets it from?”

“But if my uncle just came back, if he just
saw
Phillip—”

Violet shook her head. “He told Ms. Valentine that he won't be back in the States for another few months at least.”

“But Phillip will be a wreck by then! He'll start wasting away just like before, worse than before because he'll be away from the garden!” Roo felt her throat clench. “I didn't even get to say good-bye to him.”

“It's better that way, Roo. Really. It would have been worse for him if you were there, and it would have broken your heart. I nearly scooped him up and ran away with him myself, I felt so bad for him. My only consolation was that he scratched some lovely stripes into the doctor's face.” Violet's brown eyes narrowed. “I hope they leave a scar.”

 

The next morning the overcast sky turned the garden's ceiling panes into dusky gray diamonds. Jack would not come for another hour. He would be crushed too when he heard the news.

Roo watched as the black squirrel climbed up the garden's tallest tree, running along the ropy liana that coiled around it. He stopped, flipped himself around and stared down at her. It was just the same way he had looked on those stairs up to the trapdoor the first time she found the garden.

“I can't follow you up there,” Roo said.

The squirrel turned and continued up the tree, higher and higher until he reached the very top. The uppermost tip of the liana hung off the highest limb. It was slender and tapered, bent like the tongue in the mask that hung in the east wing's lobby. It was right then that Roo remembered what Phillip's mother had told him about the liana. That they are the tongues of jungle spirits. And that if you want to summon someone, you hold the tip of a liana on a treetop and called the person's name three times and they have to come.

Roo walked up to the tree and looked at it speculatively. She was not afraid of heights, but she had never scaled a tree before; she had spent so much time finding places that were small and hidden, it never occurred to her to try it. This was a straight-up climb with few branches along the way, but the liana was so thick it formed a sort of rough ladder.

She put her hand on one of the coils and tested it. It was dry and hard, rough against her skin. She pulled herself up and wedged her foot on the edge of the vine. It held her weight easily, so she took another step upward. Bit by bit she climbed as the black squirrel watched her from above. When she was up high enough she found that she was able to see the river through the glass-dome roof, stretching out in all directions. It made her dizzy so she looked up again and focused on the tip of the liana.

The tree's trunk began to narrow, the branches growing precariously thin as she approached the top. The squirrel was perched on the branch just to her left, his eyes on her.

Almost there, almost there,
she thought.

She grabbed the slender branch above her head. The liana coiled around it like a snake, narrowing. The tongue-like tip quivered as she pulled herself up. Leaning her body across the branch, barely breathing, she stretched farther and farther until her fingers touched the end of the liana. She closed her hand around it and shut her eyes.

“Emmett Fanshaw, Emmett Fanshaw, Emmett Fanshaw.”

Mr. Fanshaw did not come home. One week passed. Then another. The sky turned hot and white. Outside the air grew thick and the sun beat down on the river so that it burned silver at midday. The fish plunged deeper in the water, trying to escape the heat.

In the garden, Jack and Roo continued to tend the newest green shoots. They grew more thickly every day. The weeds did too. Jack and Roo tugged at them day in and day out, though the heat in the garden bore down on them mercilessly. The soil could not drink enough. They had no sooner poured out their bucket loads than the earth turned ashen again.

“The flowers look feverish,” Jack said.

Roo knew what he meant. Their colors were almost too bright, like skin that was flushed. If the heat kept up, she doubted they could keep them alive.

Outside, Sir was croaking. He had staked out his hunting grounds by the cove, and now he often chased off ducks or loons that came too close, charging at them with his rasping call. But when the croaking didn't stop, Jack frowned.

“What is it?” Roo asked.

“I don't know.” Jack started for the trapdoor, but it was too late. Ms. Valentine's head appeared, then her body. In a moment she was standing in the garden, her face pale with outrage, and beside her stood Mr. Fanshaw.

“What on earth do you think you're doing?” Ms. Valentine demanded.

Roo's attention was on her uncle though. His brow was cinched as his eyes drifted across the stretch of flowers blooming wildly everywhere.

“How is this possible?” he muttered.

“It's the girl,” Ms. Valentine said. “I told you she has been a problem from the start. But this is beyond everything…I had no idea, Mr. Fanshaw.” She glared at Roo and demanded, “Who is the boy there? How did he get into the house? Does Violet know what you've been up to?”

“You can go, Ms. Valentine,” Mr. Fanshaw said. “Leave my bags in the boat, I'll get them later.”

She left reluctantly, showering a withering look on both Roo and Jack before she went. For a moment, Mr. Fanshaw stood quite still, looking at the flourishing blooms tumbling across the garden. Curling petals dripping from tall stems nudged against wild bursts of orange and purple threadlike petals that reached out like sea anemones. And rising up out of the waxy green leaves, growing in the soil and on the rocks, were the brilliant spiked flames of the flower that had grown by Phillip's foot. In her uncle's face Roo recognized the look of wonder mixed with something else, something more tangled.

“How did you do this?” he asked in a faraway voice. “The garden was dead.”

“It was dying, but it wasn't dead,” Roo told him.

“We watered it from the river,” Jack said.

“Phillip helped,” Roo added defiantly.

Mr. Fanshaw looked at her full-on, and once again Roo felt a lurch of emotion at how like her father he was. But then his expression hardened and her father vanished.

“You brought my
son
here? You had no right,” he reproached. “I shut the garden up for a reason.”

“For what reason?” Roo demanded.

“If you plan on living in this house, Roo, there's one thing you'll have to learn,” he said coldly. “The Fanshaws are private people. We keep our troubles to ourselves.”

“You keep things hidden. There's a difference,” Roo shot back. “There were living things in this garden when you shut it up. You nearly killed them. And you've done the same thing to Phillip. You walled him up in this house, and now you've walled him up in some clinic! Everything is a secret here. Everything is hidden. I hate it! I don't blame my father for running away!”

Mr. Fanshaw flinched at this. Then he looked around the garden again, his eyes settling for a moment on the boulder.

“You want to know why I shut up the garden?” he said.

Roo nodded.

“I suppose he's told you the local gossip?” Mr. Fanshaw's eyes flitted toward Jack. “About how my wife died?”

“I heard it, but not from Jack.”

“And do you believe it?” Mr. Fanshaw asked, as if he already knew the answer.

“No,” Roo answered.

“Well, you should. The gossip is right. Right on the whole.”

“What do you mean?” Roo asked.

“When I first saw Ana, she was sitting on a rock by a waterfall. I had gone in the waterfall to cool off, and when I came out, she was there, above me, watching. I've never felt easy around people, not like your father. But with Ana, it was different. It was effortless. She was—” He faltered, shook his head. “I couldn't believe she loved me too. But she also loved the jungle, and she left it to be with me. So I built her a garden. I brought in the best landscapers from all over the country and they filled the garden with the same trees and plants and flowers that grew by that waterfall, where I first met her. I wanted the garden to be a living poem to her. Everything needed to be exactly the same. I insisted on it. But there was one plant that the landscapers couldn't find—a type of bromeliad. It had a beautiful red bloom and had grown out of the rock that Ana was sitting on when I first saw her. The landscapers brought in plants that were like it, but they couldn't find the exact one. Ana said she didn't care, but I couldn't rest until it was perfect. That's how I'd always been. It was a point of pride for me. I went back to Brazil, back to the waterfall, and I found the plant. I hid it in a mask that was specially made with a false front and smuggled it back into the country—I was that obsessed—and I planted it there.” He pointed to the boulder. “What I didn't know was that something was hidden in the plant. I found it later, after Ana became sick, when I realized what I should be looking for. A brown spider, very poisonous, hidden in the leaves. But it was already too late. Ana died just a week after the thing had bit her on the leg. I had the garden fumigated and then I shut it up. I just couldn't bear to look at it again. It reminded me that I had been the cause of her death. And Phillip…” He sighed and shook his head. “I took his mother from him. And I'm a poor substitute. I couldn't do anything to help him either, so I've just…stayed away.”

“Then why did you come back here now?” Roo asked. “Why did you come into the garden?”

“For the past two weeks I kept seeing Ana everywhere. I would see her standing beside a tree or moving through a marketplace. I'd even hear her voice calling my name. But when I'd come close she was never there. I had pushed her out of my mind for so long. Now it felt like she was insisting that I think of her, that I pay attention. I felt like she was calling me back to Cough Rock, back to her.”

“Phillip thought he heard her too,” Roo reminded him.

“I know. And now that I'm here, I think I was wrong. Ana wasn't calling me back to her at all. She was calling me back to Phillip.”

Draped across a branch, high up on the black squirrel's tree, Roo looked down at the lianas that canopied the greens and pinks and reds of the garden. The view reminded Roo of the Lucite domes of flowers she used to place around the crawlspace under the trailer. How funny to see things from above when she had spent so much of her life burrowing into things, watching people's feet pass by.

Down below she could see Phillip standing with his back pressed against the tall sheer rock, dressed only in shorts and no shirt. He was still thin but his shoulders were no longer hunched and his chest had filled out in the past few weeks. He was smiling and his eyes were squeezed shut as he called out, “Not yet!”

She turned away and looked through the garden's domed glass roof. The St. Lawrence stretched in all directions, blue and burnished. Roo traced the white scars on the surface—one to a wooden boat, another, a frantic ringlet—to a Jet Ski. And then she saw what she was looking for: an angular gray-blue silhouette of a bird slicing through the sky, then circling back.

She climbed down the tree, using the thick, twisting lianas as steps. These days she scaled the tallest garden trees nimbly and with no fear. She passed the black squirrel on her way down just as he was climbing up. They glanced at each other quickly—the amiable greeting of two wild creatures with many things to do—then continued on their way.

There was a sudden loud hiss and Phillip yelled out, “It's working!”

Roo looked down to see a curtain of water tumbling over the top of the sheer rock, splashing down into the once-empty pool and coursing through the streambed, filling it. Phillip was completely concealed behind the waterfall, except for his arms, which poked through the falls and waved at Roo. She could hear him laughing and laughing, the way he had laughed when he slid down the chute.

In a moment she saw her uncle climb up into the garden from the trapdoor, smiling at the rush of water, and at his son behind the waterfall, and finally at Roo, who jumped down from the tree.

“Going in, Roo?” He nodded toward the waterfall.

She smiled and shook her head. “Later.”

Outside, the day was clear and bright. She sat on the rocky ledge above the little cave where she had once hidden, and she watched the canoe approach the island. The river was unnaturally calm. Its surface was laid out like a fresh sheet snapped smooth, and the canoe slid across it effortlessly.

The sun caught on her silver ring and made it gleam white. Roo traced her finger over the two hearts. Had a friend of the girl from long-ago given it to her as a gift—the two hearts being each of them, fused together forever? On an impulse, Roo hopped off the ledge and scrambled into the cave. It had been so long since she'd been inside it. For a moment she remembered the comfort of crouching in tiny places and looking out at the world, watching it without being part of it. But it wasn't long before her legs felt cramped and she began to crave the movement of the air outside. With her pointer finger she dug a hole into the soil. Then she removed the ring from her finger, dropped it in the hole, and covered it over with earth before scrambling back outside.

“Where are you off to?” Violet called, half her body leaning out of the first-floor window.

“To visit the tern chicks,” Roo called back.

“Good day for it,” Violet said. “I've hardly ever seen the river this quiet. The Donkey grannies must have left Jack a very generous offering this morning.”

The little canoe pulled up to the island. Jack steadied the canoe as Roo climbed in and raised the paddle in greeting toward Violet, flashing her a smile.

“Yes, yes, you're very charming! Just remember to bring her back to us,” Violet called to him.

They skirted the islands, which seemed like old friends now. Roo knew the secret coves and the places where the deer swam from one island to another. She knew where a toppled pine served as a diving board for the ducks and where the crows had hidden their nests in the bluffs. Yet just when she thought she knew the St. Lawrence, the river showed her something new and mystifying. Just like Jack. Sometimes when they were in the garden she would look at him and wonder:
When the trees grow tall, years and years from now, will we still know each other? Or will you just drift away one day, like the ice floes during spring melt?

“Hey.” Jack stretched his legs out and captured her ankle between his bare feet and held it there. “What are you thinking about?”

“I'm thinking…I'm thinking that I might like to learn how to swim.”

Jack's face brightened. “Really?”

Roo nodded.

“I'll teach you,” Jack said. “You'll see. By the end of the summer, you'll be swimming like a dolphin.”

Sir swooped down over them, then rose again and headed off toward Eel Bay to find some lunch. I think we'll go with him now. The day is so clear, we'll have a fine view of the islands below—green puzzle pieces flung across the water, waiting for someone to fit them back together again. If we follow Sir, we'll pass directly over Cough Rock. Look down. There is the great stone house, so formidable even from above. You can see the garden's glass dome in its center, cradled like a secret jewel.

A huge flock of cormorants has gathered beneath the island's stone arch, stretching out their sleek black wings in the sun. It's a strange sight. Cormorants have never collected on Cough Rock before, and Sir circles back to get a better look. All at once the cormorants take flight. Their bodies rise in a single black mass that billows out and twists, undulating like a woman's long black mane of hair, whipping in the wind.