Some Kind of Happiness (3 page)

But dinner at Hart House is like a dance. Not only do I not know the steps, but I seem to have forgotten how to move my legs entirely.

All twelve of us sit around the polished dining room table.

The room is full of glass. There is a sparkling chandelier. Old-fashioned music plays from a long, skinny stereo on a side table. Even though the stereo looks new, the music crackles and pops.

My aunts bring in dishes, serve drinks.

I have a list of the Harts in my notebook. For a couple of days I have studied their names and the photographs Dad gave to me. Grandpa sent them, in an e-mail.

(Obviously it is beyond strange to not have photographs of one's own family.)

(When I asked Dad about this, he rubbed his head and said, “Fin, it's complicated.”)

(Whatever that means.)

My aunts whisper to one another as they set out silverware.

“I can't believe they didn't stay for dinner,” says one of them. Her face is soft, and she keeps looking at me like she is terrified I might start crying again.

Aunt Deirdre. Dee for short, Dad said.

“I'm not surprised,” hisses another of my aunts, thin and sharp all over. Her shiny blond hair is pulled back into a tight bun. “I
am
surprised they actually showed up.”

Aunt Bridget. I must never call her anything but Aunt Bridget. Certainly not Bridge. In real life she looks even scarier than her photograph. Dad said Aunt Bridget kept her last name instead of taking Uncle Reed's, which I think
is pretty wonderful. I wouldn't want to give up
my
last name.

But I'm not going to tell Aunt Bridget that. I'm not sure I'll say anything at all to her, in fact; she reminds me of a beautiful bird you would want to pet if you weren't afraid it might peck out your eyes.

“Stop it,” says my third aunt. Aunt Amelia. Long, tan legs and arms. Lots of teeth. She is a runner, always has been. Everyone calls her Stick. “Not in front of Finley.”

I inspect my napkin like it is the most interesting thing in the world.

“Girls,” Grandpa says to my aunts, folding his napkin into his lap, “don't cause trouble. Bridget Lynn, that means you.”

Aunt Bridget frowns, sits, takes a gulp of her drink. The ice cubes clink against the glass.

Grandpa's chair is at the head of the table. He has a lot of hair, combed into stiff silver waves. When he catches me staring at him, he winks. He is not very good at it.

Everyone is looking at me now, which makes me want to slither under the table and eat on the floor, but I think that is probably not allowed here.

(Focus, Finley.)

I must think of my list.

Aunt Bridget is married to Uncle Reed, who isn't here. He's hardly ever around, Dad said, because Uncle Reed took over Grandpa's business, which is basically about buying and selling companies and sounds to me like the most boring thing imaginable.

One of Aunt Bridget's eight-year-old twins shrieks. Dex, the boy.

“Ruth!” Aunt Bridget snaps. “Stop shaking pepper on your brother.”

“But, Mom, he's been poisoned! This is the cure! He has to sneeze it out!”

Ruth's shouting makes me nervous. I wish my notebook weren't all the way up in my room.

I wish I were home.

I wish—

(Focus.)

Aunt Dee is married to Uncle Nelson, who drawls his words and looks like a cowboy without a horse. They have two kids: Kennedy, twelve years old. (The girl who looks like she belongs on a beach somewhere.) Avery, seventeen years old. (The girl I saw playing on her phone, the girl so pretty she doesn't look real.)

Then there's Aunt Amelia—Stick—and her daughter, Gretchen. Stick is 90 percent smile, 10 percent human. Gretchen has frizzy brown hair.

Mom told me Gretchen is the same age as me. She said it in this cheerful way, like the fact that there is another eleven-year-old in the house is supposed to make me feel better about my situation.

(Doubtful, Mom.)

And then there's me.

Grandma, Grandpa. Aunt Bridget, Uncle Reed (away on
business), Dex, and Ruth. Aunt Dee, Uncle Nelson, Avery, and Kennedy. Stick and Gretchen.

And me. Finley.

Aunt Dee sets a plate in front of me and smooths back my hair in a way that reminds me of Mom. I decide it probably isn't a great idea to start crying again, so I grab a fork and dive in before my body has the chance to betray me.

Maybe if I stuff my mouth with enough food, it will prevent me from saying what I want to say:

There has been an awful mistake.

I'm not supposed to be here.

I'm not one of you.

Someone kicks me under the table.

When I look up, everyone is staring at me—except for Grandma, who stands at the head of the table with her hands clasped at her waist.

My lips are smeared with salad dressing.

What did I do wrong? Who kicked me?

I glance across the table. Gretchen shakes her head, her eyes wide.

Grandpa clears his throat. “Finley, here at Hart House nobody eats until Grandma sits down.”

“She's the key,” Dex explains cheerfully. “You can't eat until she unlocks the meal.”

Ruth claps her hands over her mouth and giggles hysterically.

“Ruth, for God's sake, calm yourself,” says Aunt Bridget. “Right this minute. Stop laughing.”

“Also, you're using the wrong fork.” This is Avery, who looks like she's trying not to smile. “You're supposed to use the salad fork. You know, to eat your salad.”

I look down at my table setting and see six utensils—three forks of different sizes, two spoons, and a knife.

“Uh. Okay.”

Stick replaces my fork with a clean one and nudges my shoulder with her elbow. “Not to worry. How could you possibly be expected to know that?”

She smiles, but I'm not sure I believe her.

“It's not like Lewis would teach her,” says Aunt Bridget. “He doesn't care about such things. He thinks everything we do is . . . What did he call us? Obsessed with the superficial.”

Aunt Dee touches Aunt Bridget's arm. “Bridget, let's not do this right now.”

“I'm just saying what everyone else is thinking,” Aunt Bridget snaps.

Beside her Avery smirks and looks down at her lap. I see a soft glow on her shirt and realize she's playing with her phone under the table.

“That's enough, Bridget,” says Grandma, and then she sits down at the only empty chair. “We do not talk about upsetting topics at the dinner table.”

(
Upsetting topics.
Does she mean my dad?)

(If he is an upsetting topic, what does that make me?)

Grandpa leads a prayer—another thing I'm not used to,
another thing that makes me feel small and bulky at the same time.

Everyone begins to eat, and I pretend to, but I have lost my appetite.

People are talking to me—Gretchen and Stick, whose default setting appears to be talking. Kennedy, whose smile looks like it is straight out of a teeth-whitening commercial.

But I am too afraid to say anything much.

I am afraid that if I open my mouth, the wrongness inside me will come gushing out.

The wrongness of using the incorrect fork.

The wrongness of not knowing that Grandma is the key.

The wrongness of the tight, jumbled knot that is my insides. And how heavy it feels. And how it is pulling and pushing and molding me like clay.

I grab the crystal glass to the right of my plate and gulp down some water.

When I set the glass back down, I see the prints my sweaty fingers have left behind. I feel a sense of deep, sudden friendship with that smudge.

That is me. My aunts and uncles, my grandparents, my beautiful, beautiful cousins—I am a smudge on their glass.

I
WAKE UP SWEATING AND
pinned to my bed with terror.

Once, at home, I woke up like this and ran crying to my parents.

I told them I felt like I was going to throw up, that I heard terrible thoughts screaming in my head and couldn't make them stop.

They brought me a glass of water and sat with me until I fell asleep.

Nothing was wrong with me, they said. I had had a nightmare. Sometimes bad dreams linger.

I didn't believe them; I'd had nightmares before. This wasn't the same thing.

I knew something must be wrong, for me to feel like that. Something deep down where no one could see.

Since then I have never told my parents when I wake up sweating, feeling hot and sick and small. Instead I write about the Everwood until nothing else matters.

I never want to scare my parents again.

I don't want them to look at me like I am broken in a way they don't know how to fix.

(We are already broken enough; it's the reason I'm here.)

Gray light seeps in through the long white curtains of my bedroom, and I finally remember that I am not at home.

Everyone has spent the night at Hart House. The twins made a tent on the porch. My aunts and uncles and cousins all live nearby, but apparently they do this a lot: sleep over like a bunch of kids at a party.

Before I can talk myself out of it, I throw on some clothes and slip downstairs, out through the glassed-in sunroom attached to the kitchen.

At first the backyard looks pretty typical: Thick green lawn. Swing set with two swings. Bushes overflowing with pink flowers. Wind chimes tinkling on the patio.

There is no fence around the yard; Hart House is virtually in the middle of nowhere.

A path of pebbles leads to a slope in the ground. I creep closer and see stone steps set into the dirt, leading down into a pit of leaves and grass. It is almost as if someone carved a pond into the earth, sucked it dry of water, and filled it with trees.

There are so many of them that the air feels heavy and alive, like it's full of people. But I am the only one here.

Beyond the pit there is a small river. And beyond the river there are woods.

There is no fence to block my view, nothing to separate my grandparents' property from the woods beyond.

Wind blows past me, pricking me with goose bumps. The branches overhead knock against one another. The leaves whisper and shiver and sigh.

Something inside me unclenches.

I have read stories where the main character encounters a door—a window, a gate—and on the other side lies a magical land where anything is possible. If, that is, you dare to step through.

That is what I feel like right now: ready to leave the world I know and enter another.

The trees tower over me; I am small, but I am brave, and my heart is everywhere inside me. My fingers tingle.
Now.

I take a deep breath and begin down the stone steps, into this pit that is another world.

A rope swing hangs from an impossibly tall tree. I have never been so close to so many humongous trees; they must be decades old. Maybe even centuries old.

Like the Everwood.

I sit on the high riverbank and let my feet swing out over the water.

In my stories about the Everwood, I have imagined a vast and tangled forest, a dense web of dark trees. I have imagined it to be dangerous inside, a forbidding place where only the wild-hearted live.

In my stories I have never visited it. Others have, and I have collected their tales.

But clearly they were wrong. I was wrong.

This
is the Everwood—this towering green place full of sunlight.

And I belong here.

I forget about wrong forks and Hart House etiquette and my bedroom as white as clouds. I smell dirt, decomposing logs, river water.

Beneath these trees I feel the same way I have always felt when opening my notebook to a clean page:

As long as I am here, I am safe.

NCE THERE WAS AN ORPHAN
girl.

She had been wandering for months, lost in an unfamiliar country.

Sometimes her loneliness felt so overwhelming she found it difficult to continue her search—for family, for a home—but she always did.