True Colors (15 page)

It also seemed like a good place to hide a cow. I didn’t think ahead to what I’d do once cold weather settled in—I’d figure that out when the time came.

I got Daisy inside the fence by dumping the grain on the ground. I pulled her up some clumps of clover, too. I knew at some point she was going to start bawling for the others, but I hoped she was too far away from the barn for them to hear her. I also hoped she wouldn’t look for holes in the fence.

I wished Nadine were with me, both for the company
and for sharing my plan to save Daisy. (Hannah had a saying, “If wishes were horses, beggars would ride,” whatever that meant, but I guessed it had something to do with not wasting your time wishing for things that can’t be.) I wasn’t sure I could trust Nadine, either, after what she’d done to Raleigh at the rehearsal.

There were apple trees near the cellar hole. I picked some green apples for Daisy and Dolly and tucked a few in my pocket.

I left Dolly cropping grass and found a flat, mossy rock to sit and eat my green apples. I was plumb tuckered out, and it felt good to sit and let the wind cool me down. Even on hot days, there always seemed to be a breeze up here. ’Course that wasn’t so nice in the winter, when the wind came straight from the North Pole, and drifts piled up twenty feet high, but it was worth it, living in a place where you felt you were on top of the world.

I braced my hands behind me and leaned back to feel the wind on my face. Under my fingers, I felt the moss and lichen, small bits of gravel, and little grooves in the rock. Maybe those grooves were glacial scratches. Miss Paisley had told us how rock-studded glaciers had scraped over all the mountaintops in Vermont, shaping them, and leaving scratches in the rocks.

I thought Miss Paisley would be impressed to learn that I’d found some glacial scratches. I picked at a couple of pieces of lichen, and a
V
appeared.

I was pretty sure glaciers couldn’t spell, so I peeled away a little more of the lichen.

The
V
wasn’t a letter: it formed the bottom of a heart instead, and inside the heart, someone had carved
M + R
.

Who were they, I wondered, and how long had it been since they’d carved their initials? Fifty years? One hundred? Two hundred?

I could almost picture them, a young man and woman, early settlers, sitting here holding hands, dreaming of their future together. Likely
M
and
R
stood for old-fashioned names, probably something out of the Bible, like Moses and Ruth, or Micah and Rachel, or maybe even Methuselah and Rebekah.

I chuckled. Poor little Methuselah. Imagine having to learn how to spell that!

I looked west, at the layers on layers of mountains, like folds in a quilt: Owl’s Head in Canada, the spine of the Green Mountains, Jay Peak, Mount Mansfield, Camels Hump, and beyond that to the Adirondacks. A lot of settlers had moved on, heading west. I wondered if M and R had moved on, too, or if they’d stayed right here and lived out their lives.

Someday, I’d fly over those mountains and see what was beyond, too, but right then, sitting on that rock, it was so pretty and peaceful I could see why Hannah’s great-grandparents had settled here. Maybe M and R were even Hannah’s ancestors. I’d have to ask if she had an M and R in
her ancestry. I pictured them cutting hay with scythes, reading and sewing by lamplight, sturdy people, dressed in old-time clothes. Sometimes, when Hannah was pegging out laundry, her dress flapping around her, she looked like the old photographs of her great-grandparents, or of pioneers that Miss Paisley had shown us.

Hannah would have made a good pioneer, I decided.

Hannah! I suddenly remembered. She was waiting for me to help her with those canning jars!

I pushed Dolly for home, trying to get her to speed up, but Dolly was pretty much a one-speed horse. I spent the time fretting, wondering what I was going to tell Hannah when she noticed Daisy was gone. I knew from watching Humphrey Bogart movies, and reading the Hardy Boys, that I’d need an alibi. Too bad I’d told Hannah I was going to see Mr. Gilpin. I wouldn’t dream of asking him to lie for me, but Nadine would do it. If we were still friends. Maybe I could patch things up between us. Sometimes it seemed like that’s all I’d been doing the whole summer, patching up our friendship.

But it was Mrs. Tilton, not Nadine, who ran out to meet me as soon as I pulled into their yard.

“Thank goodness,” she said. “Everyone’s been looking for you. Hannah’s in the hospital.”

chapter 20

Other than Mr. Trombley, and Esther when she’d had Rodney, I didn’t know anyone who’d gone to the hospital. If you were sick or hurt, you either stayed home and got better or you didn’t. If you were sick enough to go to the hospital, that usually meant you were going to die. I’d heard Mrs. Wells say that, and Hannah, too.

“Mr. Gilpin took her to the hospital,” Mrs. Tilton said. “He found her at the bottom of the cellar stairs, unconscious. That’s all I know, except that there were broken jars all around her.”

Broken jars. Jars I was supposed to have carried up.

“You’ll stay with us, of course,” Mrs. Tilton said. “At least until Hannah gets home.”

I wondered how Nadine would feel about that, seeing as how we hadn’t talked in weeks, but I was too scared about Hannah to worry about that.

I didn’t want to stay home with Mrs. Tilton. I just wanted to go to the hospital to see Hannah, but I couldn’t. No one under age twelve was allowed.

“Mr. Gilpin will stop by to tell us how she is,” Mrs. Tilton said. “You go wash your face, dear, and I’ll fix some lemonade for you.”

When I came back from the bathroom, I overheard her talking on the telephone.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I’m waiting to hear from Mr. Gilpin. No, I don’t know if they’ve made any arrangements for Blue, if Hannah were to, well, you know …”

I felt my stomach drop. Die. That’s what Mrs. Tilton meant. If Hannah were to die.

I slipped back into the bathroom so Mrs. Tilton wouldn’t see me, and sat on the edge of the bathtub, feeling trembly all over.

I’d never thought about what would become of me if something bad happened to Hannah. Hannah was the only family I had. I didn’t even know my real mama’s name.

I heard a little knock on the door and hurried to wipe my nose on my shirt. I didn’t want Mrs. Tilton to know I’d overheard her.

Nadine’s worried face poked around the door. She came in the bathroom and sat on the edge of the tub beside me. She nudged me with her shoulder.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “About saying you didn’t have a
father. Of course you
had
one, you just don’t know who he was.”

I could have said that it was a good thing she had such a big mouth seeing as how she was always sticking her foot into it, but that didn’t feel right, what with Mrs. Tilton being so nice for letting me stay there. Besides, it was a comfort having Nadine sit next to me. I gave her a nudge back, letting her know I’d forgiven her.

“You want to play Monopoly?” Nadine asked.

I shook my head. How could Nadine be thinking of games when Hannah might be dead?

“How about Chinese checkers?” she asked.

“No, I don’t feel like it,” I said.

“I know,” said Nadine. “Let’s play Crossing the Iron Curtain.”

Crossing the Iron Curtain was a game Nadine and I’d invented. We didn’t know what the Iron Curtain was—we’d heard it mentioned in movies—but it sounded mysterious and dangerous. I didn’t feel like playing that, either, but since I didn’t want Nadine to get mad again, just when we were back being friends, I nodded.

So I played, but all I could think about was Hannah. If only I hadn’t gone off with Daisy. If only I’d come back sooner and brought those jars up like I was supposed to. It was my fault that Hannah was in the hospital. She
had
to be all right. She just
had
to.

Maybe God was punishing me for stealing Daisy, though it didn’t really feel like stealing. I’d just wanted to save her. Or maybe he was punishing me for wanting to trade places with Nadine. I hadn’t really meant it. Didn’t God know all that? Didn’t he know that I didn’t want anything bad to happen to Hannah? I’d do anything if only Hannah was all right.

I kept swallowing, trying not to cry, but then my chest hurt. Could you have a heart attack if you were only ten years old?

Mrs. Tilton hugged me.

“She’ll be all right, honey,” she told me. “Hannah’s the strongest woman I know.”

Hannah was the strongest woman I knew, too, but even strong people died. Why hadn’t Mr. Gilpin come to tell me anything yet?

Mrs. Tilton took wonderful care of me; it wasn’t her fault that she wasn’t Hannah. She made eggplant Parmesan for supper. I didn’t tell her I wished for Hannah’s baked beans and brown bread, or her boiled dinner and johnny-cake, or one of my favorites, rumbledthumps, made with potatoes and cabbage.

I choked down a few mouthfuls and then couldn’t eat any more. I was waiting for Mr. Gilpin to come by. What was taking him so long?

It was almost dark before we heard his car pull into the driveway.

“She’s got three broken ribs, a broken wrist, and she
needed six stitches on her head,” Mr. Gilpin told us. “They’ll be keeping her in the hospital for a couple of days.”

“The poor thing,” Mrs. Tilton said. “She’s going to be laid up for a while.”

“Well, if I know Hannah,” Mr. Gilpin said, “it won’t be as long as you’d think.”

Mrs. Tilton offered Mr. Gilpin a cup of coffee, but he said he needed to get back to work.

“I’ll visit Hannah again tomorrow,” he said, and looked at me. “Try not to worry.”

Mrs. Tilton tucked Nadine and me into bed, just as she had when we were little, and read us
The Secret Garden
.

“It was my favorite book, as a child,” Mrs. Tilton said. I didn’t tell Mrs. Tilton that Mary Lennox, the spoiled girl in the story, reminded me of Nadine. I also didn’t tell her that I liked
Anne of Green Gables
and Laura Ingalls Wilder better than
The Secret Garden. Anne of Green Gables
was one of the reasons I’d so wanted to go to Prince Edward Island, to see the place that Anne talked about, the farm where she lived with Marilla and Matthew. Hannah reminded me of Marilla, gruff on the outside but tender inside. Marilla had taken in Anne, too, when she was an orphan, and given her a home.

It was the thought of Anne being an orphan that made me go all shivery. Mr. Gilpin had said Hannah was going to be all right, but what if he was wrong? If Hannah died, I’d
be an orphan, too, just like Anne Shirley. What would become of me then?

Long after Nadine fell asleep, I lay staring up at the ceiling, thinking about summer nights when Hannah and I’d sat on the porch and she’d pointed out Cassiopeia, Pegasus, and Cygnus the Swan. I was glad Mrs. Tilton couldn’t hear me sniffling.

chapter 21