Paperquake (5 page)

"Greg, dear," said Lily softly. "I think it's just something twins go through."

"Well, I don't like it. They look like one of those old ads for Doublemint gum."

Jasmine and Rose had their heads together again. They were whispering. Violet edged closer to hear. She caught the name "Brett" and then the name "Casey," and realized that Jasmine's big idea the night before was that they would invite the boys to come along to San Francisco.

But Violet didn't want to share her sisters with Brett and Casey. She didn't want any boys around at all. This was going to be a day for the triplets to work together—alone.

"Mom?" she asked brightly. "Can we invite friends to go along to help us?"

"No, I don't think so, dear," said Lily, switching off the radio news. "I don't want any of your friends there until the place is in better order."

Jasmine and Rose glared at Violet. "But, Mom," protested Rose, "'Many hands make light work.' That's your favorite proverb!"

"Well, I suppose you might ask Beth to go," said Lily. "She'd be a big help."

"How about Brett and Casey?" asked Violet innocently.

"No way," said Greg, thumping his fist on the counter. "No boys. Not alone over there with my girls all day."

"Dad!" shrieked Rose. "We'd be
working.
We'd be cleaning! You have a filthy mind."

"Let's not have any more discussion," he said, sitting down at the counter and pouring himself some coffee. "Wait till you see the amount of cleaning there is. There won't be time for socializing."

"But Dad—," cried Jasmine.

"Call them and invite them over for some other time, girls," said Lily soothingly. She handed Rose a shopping bag full of cleaning supplies and loaded others into Jasmine's backpack. "Here are most of the things you'll need, but there will still be more. There's a hardware store on the same street as the shop. I'm going to give you money to buy a broom and a mop. You'll also need money for your BART tickets and lunch."

Greg finished his coffee and reached for his jacket on a peg by the door. "I can drop you girls off at the station now." He hesitated, looking over at his wife. "Is Vi really going? Maybe it'll be too much for her after all."

"I'm thinking the same thing. Vi, darling, why don't you stay home? You and Beth can get together as you'd planned, and your sisters will go to San Francisco on their own."

"Good idea," said Rose. "After all, it's the big bad city out there. And there could be another earthquake."

"Yeah," said Jasmine. "And don't you have a science paper to write or something?"

Violet ignored her sisters. "I'm going. You can't always make me stay home like some invalid."

Greg reached over and gave Violet a hug. "All right, Lil," he said to his wife. "I guess she'd better go."

"Well, I want you to call me as soon as you get there. There's no phone yet, but you can call from the hardware store. Or from the café down the street."

"And when you're on your way home," instructed Greg, "call from the BART station and tell me which train you're taking. I'll be there to pick you up."

"Be sure to stay together," cautioned Lily. "And Jazzy and Rosy, you take care of Vi."

"We always do," said Jasmine.

And Rose added under her breath, "We always have to."

"Everybody stop acting like I'm two years old!" Violet poked the towel through the handle on the refrigerator door. "I'm exactly the same age as Jazzy and Rosy!"

"You are not," Rose corrected her. "You're forty minutes younger than me, and a whole hour younger than Jazzy." She stomped down the hall after their father.

Jasmine laughed. "You're the runt of the litter, Vi, and there's no getting around it." She hugged their mother good-bye and headed out the door.

Violet flounced out after her without saying another word.

The girls rode the BART train under the San Francisco Bay and got off at the Powell Street Station. Jasmine shouldered the backpack, and Rose carried the shopping bag of cleaning supplies. They trudged to the cable car terminus. Tourists milled around waiting for the famous trolleys to take them up and down San Francisco's steep hills. Vendors sold sweatshirts and flowers and ice-cream cones, even this early in the day. Violet felt excited to be in the city—on their own. She hopped up onto the back of a packed cable car behind Rose and hung on tight, waving away Jasmine's offer of the only available seat. She could hear people around them talking about yesterday's earthquake.

Several blocks past Union Square, enough tourists had disembarked so that the three girls found seats together on a bench across from a thin woman reading a Chinese newspaper and a heavyset man chewing an unlit cigar. The man regarded them curiously.

"Twins, eh? Fred and Ed, eh?" He chuckled.

Rose and Jasmine just smiled at the man, but Violet spoke right up. "We're triplets, actually," she corrected him, ignoring Jasmine's jab to her ribs.

"Fred, Ed, and Ned, eh?" asked the man. He looked skeptical, but Violet felt mollified.

"Don't talk to strangers," hissed Jasmine in her ear.

"I'm not, I'm just telling him."

Rose and Jasmine exchanged one of their looks. After another several blocks up a steep hill, the girls got off, hauling the cleaning supplies. Violet carried the slip of paper on which Greg had scrawled directions to the shop. Walking four blocks up and down even steeper hills brought them to Chance Street.

Chance was long and narrow, with skinny Victorian houses on both sides. Some had been turned into shops, but most were still private residences. They stopped in front of their parents' new property. It had a front stoop feeing right onto the sidewalk. Peeling gray paint and loose green shutters framed the windows. The big bay window in what once must have been the front parlor had been replaced by large shopwindow-sized plates of glass. The windows were soaped over now, and the house had a desolate air.

Violet thought about what Mr. Koch had said about layers of history being all around them. Once this old house had been a bustling shop, bright with new paint and sparkling glass, with a display of something or other in the front window. With some hard work and new layers of paint, it would once more come to life.

Rose set down the shopping bag and fished in her pocket for the envelope their father had entrusted to her. She tipped the key into her palm. The keys to their parents' other shops were small and shiny, no bigger than their own house key. But this one was old, ornate, and dark with tarnish. Nonetheless, it fit into the lock on the carved wooden front door without a hitch. Rose turned the key smoothly and pushed open the wide door.

It was dark and chilly inside. The door swung shut with a thud, immediately silencing the sound of traffic from the street. There was a smell of dust and mildew. Violet looked around in the dim light through the soap-filmed windows, then reached toward the wall for the light switch. The single bulb above the long wooden sales counter cast a tepid glow. Jasmine set the backpack down on the sloping countertop with a groan.

"How can we clean up such a dump?" she asked. "I'm tired already."

"You haven't had much practice with your side of the bedroom," Rose said with a smirk.

It didn't look anything like the bright, airy, flower-filled shops their parents owned in Oakland and Berkeley. Those were part of new, elegant malls. Violet walked around the sales counter, noting the sagging wooden doors hanging on broken hinges. Behind the counter was a wooden ladder-back chair with a few rungs missing. The walls were a dingy non-color; the floor was scuffed wood and Uttered with stacks of old newspapers. In one corner a bundle of gray rags overflowed from a metal bucket. A matted broom with a broken handle lay in the cobwebs along one wall. It would take a whole lot more than cleaning, she decided, to make this place into a florist shop.

A door at the back of the room led into a hallway. Violet wandered on, flicking on lights as she went. There was a little kitchen—at least Violet supposed it had once been a kitchen. It had no refrigerator and no stove, but cupboards along the wall and a chipped iron sink testified to the room's long-ago function. At the end of the hallway a narrow staircase led to the second floor.

"Careful," called Jasmine, hurrying down the hall after Violet. "Let me go first."

But Violet stamped straight up the steps.

"Some of the steps look rotten!" Jasmine climbed right behind her. "This place is horrible."

"Ugh," called Rose. "I'm not going up. Baby, you'd better stay down here."

Violet ignored them both. Upstairs were four small empty rooms and a bathroom the same size. Maybe the bathroom had been a bedroom once, Violet thought, back when people had outhouses in their gardens and chamber pots under their beds. The bathtub stood high on clawed feet.

The upstairs rooms were brighter because their windows were not soaped, but that made it all the easier to see how filthy the rooms were, empty and covered with dust and mouse droppings. In the bedroom at the back of the house, Violet stopped. Her heart gave a funny thump in her chest, just the way it used to do before the operation. She wandered farther into the room, over to the long windows along the back wall.

"Let's go down," said Jasmine. "There's nothing here."

But there
was
something. Violet could feel it. A lingering sadness. As if someone had cried here, long ago, and left a shadow of that sorrow behind.

"I'm going down," said Jasmine. "Come on, Vi."

But Violet looked out the windows. There was no garden, just a paved yard where two metal trash cans stood by a sagging wooden stoop. She stared outside a long moment, trying to see what wasn't there. Then she followed Jasmine out of the room, but the sensation of the shadow followed.

They clattered downstairs and returned to the front room, where Rose was pulling bottles of bleach and pine cleaner and abrasive cleanser from the shopping bag and backpack. Violet leaned against the sales counter, and it wobbled under her weight. She moved hastily away again. No wonder she felt sad here. It was hard to be cheerful in such a dump. Better get to work and brighten things up.

"So, where do we start?" she asked, gathering her dark hair back into a ponytail like her sisters'. She saw a dirty rubber band on the floor and used it to secure the stubby tail of hair. It would do for now. She'd have to let her hair grow, like theirs. She could buy some of those pretty elastic scrunchies at the drugstore when she bought the hair dye.

"The windows, I guess." Rose opened a pack of rubber gloves. "Here, Vi, you work on the lower sections. Jazzy, you and I can trade off climbing up on that old chair to reach the top."

Violet started dragging the chair across the room, but Jasmine stopped her. "Don't strain yourself. We can't let anything happen to you."

"What a stupid waste of a Saturday," observed Rose.

"I could just kill Mom and Dad." Jasmine sighed. "Not to mention
you,
Vi. We should have brought Brett and Casey along. They'd be good helpers, and it would be a lot more fun."

"Yeah," Rose agreed.

Violet didn't argue. But she was happy just to be there, just the three of them, just the way it was supposed to be. She opened the heavy front door to let in more light and some fresh air. She tipped the old rags out of the metal pail in the corner, then took it back to the kitchen, hoping—but not really expecting—there would be running water. And there was. She filled the pail, added pine cleaner, and opened one of the packages of scouring pads. Then she lugged it all back to the front room, water sloshing. "Okay," she announced. "Let's get going."

But the room was empty and the front door stood open Rose and Jasmine were sitting out on the front stoop giggling at some boys showing off with skateboards. The girls didn't even turn when Violet stepped out behind them. One of the boys looked like a younger version of the man in the needlepoint dream—with a large nose and dark curls spilling over his forehead. The boy looked up and pointed at her now.

"Hey, it's the Maid-of-All-Work!"
He has a voice like a bulldozer,
Violet thought.
Loud and grating.
He nudged his companion, and both broke into catcalls.

Violet frowned. What was it about her that set boys jeering, while Rose and Jasmine set them flirting and bantering?

Rose glanced over her shoulder. "Oh, there you are. This is Sam—and his friend David. Guys, this is our sister, Vi."

"You shouldn't be carrying that pail," Jasmine cautioned her. "It's too heavy."

"It is not!" But it was heavy, so Violet set it down in the doorway. "You're supposed to be working, not socializing," she reminded her sisters. Then she gave the boys a tentative look. She felt awkward, as usual.

She tried to turn the tentative look into the same sort of grin Rosy and Jazzy used on boys and flashed it down the steps at Sam and David. She hoped to dazzle them.

The boy named Sam backed down the curb into the street, his skateboard tight under his arm.
Stunned him,
thought Violet.

"We'll get started in a second." Jasmine looked irritated. "There's nothing wrong with meeting our neighbors." She appealed to the two boys. "She may look little, but believe me, she's the boss."

"You can say that again," muttered Rose.

The boys across the street laughed some more. Jasmine bowed to them, blew kisses. Then Rose remembered they needed to buy a new broom and a mop. And they'd never called their mother to say they'd arrived safely.

"We'll just go on over to that hardware store and be back in a few minutes," Rose said. "Hang in there, okay?"

Violet went back inside and slammed the door. There they were already, off without her. She donned the yellow rubber gloves, dragged the pail over to the big plate-glass window, and started scrubbing. With each swipe of her sponge, the front room grew brighter. Outside in the street, cars passed and people walked by. She watched the boys roll off on their boards, tipping up and down the curb effortlessly, Jasmine and Rose striding along at their side. The only time Violet had tried skateboarding, she'd fallen off and sprained her wrist. Jasmine and Rose, of course, had no trouble soaring along on skateboards, Rollerblades, or bikes. Violet didn't ride her bike very often. She seemed to fall as easily as her sisters balanced. They loved flying in airplanes, too, while Violet worried about birds being sucked into the engines or terrorist bombs going off and blowing the plane to smithereens.