Sparrow Road (4 page)

“Does she paint eggs?” I asked. So far, I hadn’t solved that mystery. And I couldn’t imagine Diego embroidering those napkins. Eleanor didn’t sound kind enough to leave a basket at our door.

“Eggs?” Diego raised his eyebrows.

“You know, like colored eggs for Easter?”

Diego laughed again. “I wouldn’t be surprised.”

I trailed him down another shadowed hallway until he stopped, reached up to a ledge, and slid down a silver key. “This little jewel,” he said, grinning, “Josie just discovered! I don’t know how she found it, but she did.”

He slid the key into the lock and led me up another staircase. At the top was an abandoned attic room, the air so thick I could feel it in my throat. Gauzy cobwebs hung over the windows. Dust clumps littered the old floor. There were rows of metal beds, some bare down to the springs. Someone had taped kids’ drawings on the walls.

The attic had the haunted feel of lives left off in the middle. “Who lived here?” I asked. “The servants?”

Diego plucked a tarnished penny off the floor and handed it to me. “Orphans,” he said.

“Orphans?” Were those the children Lillian imagined? The ones who played Old Maid? The ones who slept down at the lake? “In this attic?”

Everywhere were scraps kids left behind—broken crayons, silver jacks, glass marbles. Small forgotten things that reminded me of toys I used to buy from the bubble-gum machine at Grandpa’s store. Parachutes and rings and fake tattoos.

“Yep,” Diego said. “Back when Viktor’s great-grandsomething owned this huge estate he leased it to a charity. Folks who made a home for kids. Sparrow Road Children’s Home. Josie found the nameplate in some box out in the barn.”

I counted off the empty beds. Ten, twenty, thirty. “Thirty orphans?”

“Probably more,” Diego said. “No question this old house had the space.”

“But where did they all go?”

“Grew up.” Diego wiped the sweat off of his forehead. It felt like we were roasting in an oven. “Like everybody else.”

“When did they all leave?”

“That’s Josie’s latest mystery.” Diego laughed. “She’s always looking for a story. And I’m pretty sure she’s going to find one here.”

The whole room was a mystery—the empty beds, the drawings, the dusty trinkets some kids must have loved. I felt like if I waited long enough voices would float out of the walls. “Can’t she just ask Viktor?”

“Viktor?” Diego scoffed again. “He won’t talk about this place. Not any of the history. Too many old ghosts here.”

“Ghosts?” Suddenly I pictured wisps of orphans swooping through the dark, slipping through our cottage walls while Mama and I slept.

“Not real ghosts,” Diego said. “
Old ghosts
is a phrase. You know, like the secrets people keep. I get the feeling the orphanage is history the Iceberg would rather not remember.”

“The Iceberg?”

“Oh, that’s our name for Viktor. The Iceberg. Josie made it up. It’s fitting, don’t you think? Impenetrable. Cold.”

“Yes,” I said. The Iceberg was the perfect name for Viktor.

“Speaking of—” Diego squeezed my shoulder. “Let’s finish off this tour before the Iceberg ends our fun.”

The last stop on Diego’s tour was the tower. “It looks cool from the outside,” Diego said. “But it’s ten times better standing at the top.” He pointed to an iron ladder bolted to the wall. “With all their money, the Berglunds should’ve built a staircase. But you’ll see it’s worth the trip.”

Diego cupped his hands into a stirrup for my foot. “Grab hold of that first rung and after that keep climbing.”

“That’s okay. I don’t need to climb up to the top.” I hated heights, all heights. Even monkey bars at recess. It was a safety fear passed down from Grandpa Mac and Mama. Ever since I could remember, the two of them always worried I would fall.

“Come on,” Diego said. “It’s totally spectacular.”

“I can’t,” I said.

“Sure you can, it’s easy. If I can do it, anybody can.”

“No.” I shook my head.

“It’s too good to be missed. I swear it’s worth it, Raine.

Here’s the trick: just focus on the ceiling. One rung after the next and then you’re there. I’ll be right behind you all the way.”

“You’re sure?” Scared as I was, I reached up for that first rung. My heart raced, but still I did it. Rung after rung. The higher that I climbed, the worse the bars slipped between my sweaty fingers. Still I held on hard, because down below Diego cheered me on.

“You’re almost there,” he said when I made it to the top. “Give a shove to that trapdoor and push it up. Keep going, Raine, and you’ll be on the other side.”

The other side was like standing in the sky. A place so high I could see the whole of Sparrow Road—the artists’ sheds, our cottage, the path to Sorrow Lake, the old gray barn we’d wandered past this morning, the ancient glassy greenhouse, the turtle pond, another bench swing underneath a gnarled oak. And tucked back in the woods, an old white building Viktor hadn’t shown us on our tour.

“What’s that?” I asked when Diego finally stood beside me on the deck.

“That’s the old infirmary. The place the orphans went when they were sick. The Iceberg lives there now.”

“The infirmary? Do you think Viktor has a phone?”

“A phone?” Diego looked surprised. “I would imagine that he does. You got a call to make?”

“I might,” I said.

“Not me,” Diego said. “At home, I’m so busy teaching college I’m glad to have it gone. All of it. Telephones, TVs. Newspapers. Radio. Nothing but pure peace.”

“You are?” I groaned. Diego seemed too happy to like the Iceberg’s rules.

“Time floats at Sparrow Road.” Diego smiled. “There’s nothing here to mark the days but sun. I don’t even keep a calendar. For all I know it’s January now.”

I laughed. “It’s July seventh.”

“It is?” Diego looked surprised. “Oh, right. We just saw the fireworks in Comfort!”

“But the silence until supper?” I asked. “Every day? That sounds absolutely horrible.”

“I know.” Diego nodded. “It sounds bad in the beginning. But trust me, you’ll learn to like it, Raine. If Josie can keep quiet, anybody can.” He laughed and leaned his elbows on the railing. “And Sparrow Road’s the perfect place for dreams.”

“Dreams?”

“Sure. Like the way you start to daydream when you’re bored. Or, there’s nothing but the quiet, so you dream.”

I thought of sixth-grade science and how Mr. Wetmore’s lectures on amoebas always made me daydream. But I wouldn’t want to do that every day. “Six days a week till supper? That’s a lot of bored.”

“Oh, it’s not boring really. Because an artist just gets busy and creates. All that time alone becomes a painting or a poem. Josie fills her quiet up with quilts.”

“When I was young I used to dream up stories,” I said. “But that won’t keep me busy until supper.”

Diego laughed again. “You’re still young, Raine. And you might be surprised how much you create in all the quiet. You could write a book at Sparrow Road.”

“About what?” I said.

“Who knows?” Diego smiled. “That’s part of the discovery. Just start out on a journey. Ask yourself, What if? Or think about what was or what could be. And suddenly”—he snapped his fingers—“like magic, you’ll be drifting in a dream.”

“What if?”
I asked.
“What was? Or what could be?”
Diego made the silence sound enchanted. Not a rule, but a chance.

“I swear it works for me,” Diego said. “Just give a try tomorrow. Let me know what you dream up.”

I’m going off to write,
I wrote to Mama the next morning. I was eager to drift off in the daydream Diego promised was ahead.

“Write?” Mama glanced up from her Betty Crocker cookbook.

I shook my head and pressed my finger to my lips.
The rule
, I wrote. I wanted to spend one full day in silence, the way the artists did, so I could see if what Diego said was true.

Mama looked at me, confused. She didn’t know about my tour of the tower, or the attic, or the games of Old Maid I played with Lillian. She only knew I met two artists when I wandered from the cottage. A thing she said I shouldn’t have done, but she was too troubled after town to ask me questions, too lost in thought like she had something weighing heavy on her mind.

We can talk here in the cottage,
Mama wrote.

Why??? Why’d you change your mind?
Mama studied me like she was staring at a stranger
.

I shrugged. This was already too much talk. I wanted to get out in the meadow, the place Diego said a dream would surely come. I zipped my backpack closed. I’d packed two pens, a box of colored pencils, and a sketchbook Diego gave me for my dreams.

OK,
Mama wrote. She scrunched her worried eyebrows.
But stay where I can see you.

I will.
I’d spent my life so close to Grandpa Mac and Mama, I never had the nerve to wander far.

 

Outside in the meadow, I stood still for a second. Diego was right. Sparrow Road wasn’t really silent. It was filled with a background hum most people didn’t slow down long enough to hear. A steady insect buzz, birdsong, the rustle of leaf brushing against leaf. I could even hear the wind whistle through the weeds. If I stood still long enough, Diego said, I might just hear the sun.

I crossed the grass and settled on a bench beneath a weeping willow.

Sparrow Road,
I wrote down in my sketchbook.
Who left that breakfast basket at our door? Why did Mama bring us here for the last half of my summer?
Diego said most daydreams started with a question, a wonder, a puzzle you couldn’t solve. A blank space for the imagination to create.
What was wrong with Mama when she came back from town? Why didn’t she take me with her?

A red dragonfly landed on my leg. Doves cooed in the distance. I couldn’t believe my kind of wonders could ever fill a day.

What if?
I wrote. Wasn’t that all Diego said I’d need to get a story started?

I stopped and stared out at the hills. If Mama died today, I would be an orphan, a girl without any parents left. Only I wouldn’t end up in an orphanage like the kids at Sparrow Road; I’d have Grandpa Mac.

All of my what-ifs seemed more like worries than a dream. It was thoughts like these that made me hate to sit in silence by myself. The kind of what-ifs that sometimes made me anxious before I fell asleep. I tore the questions from my sketchbook and started a fresh page. I didn’t want to imagine Grandpa Mac or Mama gone.

What was?
I wrote.
What was or what could be?

A cardinal settled on a low branch, flicked its wings, and waited. I closed my eyes. Maybe daydreams came faster in the dark.

Once I had a family,
someone said.
People think we didn’t have parents. We had parents. Everybody does. They had to be there once upon a time.

It was a boy’s voice I imagined, a boy’s voice speaking in my daydream. A story, just like Diego promised. A boy I’d never seen, but there he was. In old wool pants that hung below his knees, scuffed ankle boots, a flannel shirt rolled up at the sleeves. A boy who lived up in that attic. His skinny lower legs were nicked and scarred. His face was round, his eyes the same grassy green as Mama’s.

Life just has a way
, he said.
I think you must know what I mean. Even parents can get lost.