Storyteller (2 page)

He mumbles a few words, and then he’s gone.

Blotches of red stain Libby’s neck. She moves forward and reaches out to Elizabeth. A hug? But Elizabeth realizes it’s her jacket Libby’s after. Drops of snow are beginning to melt on the carpet.

Elizabeth has to feel sorry for Libby. She imagines Pop calling on the phone, talking Libby into taking Elizabeth, as if she’s the third duffel bag.

There’s another sharp zing in Elizabeth’s chest. Maybe something’s wrong with her heart. She catches a glimpse of herself in the mirror. Nothing’s wrong with her heart, of course. Too bad. It would serve Pop right if she keeled over and stopped breathing.

She pictures it. He’d have to delay his trip while he buried her. She sees him dumping out one of the duffel bags on this shiny floor and sliding her in—

Elizabeth is alone now with Libby. What can she say to her? But Libby hoists up one of the bags, so Elizabeth takes the other one and follows Libby upstairs.

“There’s just one bedroom here. Your own bathroom,” Libby says. “You can read in the tub. I’ve put a few books on the table.”

Fine. Elizabeth tells herself that she’ll hide in the bathroom reading. She remembers having left the water running
in the tub at home once, and later, Pop looking up at the kitchen ceiling, water dripping down from the bathroom. Pop shaking his head.

Now she and Libby stand in the doorway, and instantly Elizabeth loves the room. It’s nicer than hers, nicer than her friend Alexa’s. There’s something cozy about it, something wonderful. If only it were really hers. The wooden floor gleams here like the one in the hall downstairs, and at the foot of the bed there’s a rag rug, blue, red, and green, almost like the quilt.

Cloth houses are sewn on the quilt. They’re a little crooked, but you could spend hours lying on that bed looking at those houses, pretending to open a door and walk right in.

The windows overlook the garden. It’s hard to see because of all that snow mounding up over the bushes, clinging to the tree branches. A huge chair’s right there at the window.

“This was my room when I was your age,” Libby says. “I shared it with your mother for a while.”

Her mother’s room! But it’s almost as if Libby’s warning her not to get too fond of it. Is Libby thinking about getting her room back to herself, her house back?

Right, Elizabeth thinks.

They get through the afternoon, and dinner in the dining room, while Elizabeth keeps trying to think of things to say. At dinner the knives and forks clink loudly; she can almost hear herself and Libby chewing.

The dinner is terrible—hamburgers dry as dust, French
fries with burnt ends—but Elizabeth says, “It’s the best meal I’ve had in a long time.” And to herself, At least since breakfast.

Afterward, she and Libby watch television in the living room. Then Elizabeth sees Libby raise her hand, a fluttering motion, and Elizabeth follows Libby’s eyes to the front hall. On the wall is a drawing of a girl in a sliver of a frame.

Elizabeth leans forward to get a better look. The whole thing is a mess. It’s stiff with water stains and fingerprints, but worse is the girl herself. She’s faded, but still you can see she wasn’t pretty, not with those apple cheeks and that tiny round nose.

But Elizabeth sees what Libby wants to show her. The girl looks like Elizabeth, almost exactly like her. If Elizabeth had been wearing that cap, the kerchief crossed over her shoulders—

“Who is she?” Elizabeth asks.

“Her name was Eliza, a name like yours,” Libby says. “The picture belonged to my grandmother, and her grandmother before her, and back before that. The girl was called Zee.”

Elizabeth thinks, My great-grandmother, then, and her grandmother before her.

“Done on parchment. It was soft once, made from sheepskin. Zee lost—” Libby stops, her cheeks almost as red as those blotches on her neck.

There’s something sad about the girl’s eyes. She reminds Elizabeth of herself. “She lost her mother?”

Libby nods reluctantly.

There’s more; Elizabeth can feel it. “Her father?”

“Yes, during the Revolutionary War.” Libby raises her thin shoulders. “Your hair is like your mother’s,” she says. Changing the subject? “Shiny and straight.”

Elizabeth touches her hair. Those streaks. A mistake to have tried to do them herself, she knows that.

She keeps glancing at the drawing of Zee from the living room. It’s strange to look like someone who lived more than two hundred years ago. It makes her feel not quite as alone as she might be.

That night, she hunches deep under the crooked-house quilt, her head covered so Libby, downstairs in her room, can’t hear her crying.

After a while, she looks toward the window at the snow drifting down. She falls asleep thinking about Eliza, called Zee. Zee, who looks like her. Zee, who seems just as sad as she is.

Snowflakes like feathers! I twirled myself around in the field, mittens up, catching them, diamonds in my hands
.

I turned. Mercy, the gate! How did I leave it open? Where did the sheep get to with their woolly bodies and their stringy curls?

How important those sheep were to us: food all winter, and wool for our clothes. My mouth went dry. What had I done!

I hiked up my petticoat and ran, breathless, searching. The sheep dotted the fields like mounds of snow. Who could tell the difference between them and the bushes where they sought shelter?

I stamped my feet, calling, “Weiss, Stern, Clara, where are you? Where are the rest of you?”

Not one of them came. Not one moved. The poor dumb things with their watery eyes would freeze to death
.

I could imagine Father’s sorrow, my brother John’s anger. If only they hadn’t gone to help Caleb Walker. If only Mother had returned from spinning with Mistress Patchin. I wouldn’t be alone
.

But I knew what I had to do
.

The shame of it
.

I stumbled through the drifts, which were becoming thicker, to pull the rope and sound the bell for help. It rang in my ears, deafening. It echoed across the mountains, through the valley, calling our neighbors
.

I didn’t wait. I ran past the henhouse, glancing toward the river with its blocks of ice, and into the back field, looking, calling, remembering how Father had walked for thirty miles to bring home the first pair of sheep years earlier
.

How proud he had been of our growing farm. Small as I was, I’d listened as he’d talked about the Palatinate, the place where he and Mother had grown up near the Rhine River in Europe. “But here we came, to a new farmland, with its own river,” he’d said, “and here we’ll prosper.”

But he’d never thought he’d have a daughter like me, who would burn the bread, ruin the fat for soap …

And lose the sheep
.

Neighbors came from different directions: Old Gerard, the Lenape Indian, from his lean-to; Mr. Walker, with Father and John, across the back field; my best friend, Ammy, and her brother, Isaac, with the soft gray eyes, from the path through the woods
.

Miller and Julian, the brothers who laughed at everything, laughed at nothing, came running. “Good men,” Father always said
.

The good men laughed even now, as Miller lifted me, swinging me away from the drifts. I pounded his shoulders. “Useless boy,” I yelled
.

He leaned forward, his face so close to mine that his thick dark hair brushed my forehead. “Who is useless, Miss Zee?”

Father heard. He turned and our eyes caught. I was sure he was thinking that I was indeed the useless girl who had caused half the valley to tramp through the snow looking for our sheep, rather than tending to their own affairs. Isaac, cheeks reddened from the cold, looked at me sympathetically
.

That night, huddled under my quilt in the loft, I listened to hail pattering against the roof just over my head. Below were the crackle of the fire in the keeping room and Father’s angry voice. He was talking to Mother. “What is the matter with that girl? Couldn’t she take better care of the sheep?”

That girl. Me. Zee
.

I longed to make him proud of me, but he was always disappointed. He’d worked so hard to carve our farm out of the wilderness; his fingers were bent from heaving rocks and tearing roots out of the soil. Father, whose rare smile warmed his face
.

“We have such good neighbors to help us,” Mother said. I knew she wanted him to think happier thoughts
.

But as Father answered, I heard the hesitation in his voice. “We are all still friends, but our disagreements are growing stronger. Who is for the king of England? Who is against? Who wants to pay taxes for the king’s last war with the French and who does not?”

For a moment there was silence. “How foolish we are,” he said, “to work so hard in this colony, serving a foreign king who cares nothing for us.”

Below the loft there was silence except for the snap of a pinecone in the hearth. I shivered under the quilt, my feet like blocks of ice. Stout Lucy, our cat, moved closer
.

I felt hot tears on my cheeks. I had lost two of the past year’s spring lambs with my forgetfulness
.

Useless Zee
.

Elizabeth walks up the front path to Libby’s house and stops. She’s forgotten the key. Useless, she tells herself. She can almost see the key lying on the table under the drawing of Zee.

At home, the key, tied on a ribbon, hung from a nail on the lowest branch of the evergreen in back. And even when she lost that key a couple of times, the deli was on the corner, and she could sit on a bench inside, sipping a Coke until Pop came home.

She’d watch the people coming in, guessing what their lives were like: a skinny man might be a bike racer, a plump woman would be on her way home to thump out a pie on her counter.

She closes her eyes. All this first terrible week at the new school, where she managed to lose herself on the way to social studies, and then on the way to English, she thought about the bedroom at the top of the stairs.

She can’t wait to fold herself into that warm chair in front of the window and lean back into its giant pillow. She pictures herself watching the squirrels sail from branch to branch, the phoebes nesting, the pale mist of forsythia against Libby’s back fence.

It’s still cold, windy. Crumpled leaves skitter around, blowing into doorways. She’ll have to huddle on the step, waiting until Libby gets home, like some kind of orphan.

That’s not so far from the truth with Pop off somewhere in Australia, telling people about his carvings. He’s e-mailed and called to tell her how much he misses her, but still it sounds as if he’s having a wonderful time.

She sinks down on the brick step, feeling the cold through her jacket and jeans; even her toes feel icy. She stares at the other houses, which line both sides of the street.

After a while, she turns to look up at the window to see into that robin’s egg–blue hall. It’s like a warm day in there. She stares at Zee’s picture, Zee warm on the wall …

And catches Zee’s eyes. They’re actually nothing but dark smudges, but it almost seems as if Zee is looking back at her, curious, interested, friendly.

Elizabeth angles her head. “Fine for you, Zee,” she whispers, and then feels guilty. Zee has lost both parents and has been through a war. There’s even more than that, Libby has said. But so far, Elizabeth hasn’t been able to pry the story out of her; Libby barely talks.

She’s really trying, though; Elizabeth knows that. This morning Libby made pancakes, thick and hard as cardboard. “Your mother loved pancakes,” she said, hands fluttering. “She even ate them cold, left over, on the way to school.”

Elizabeth choked down the first one. Could her mother possibly have eaten these? “Did you make pancakes for my mother?” she asked.

Libby’s eyes widened. “No, our mother did. I don’t really cook that well.”

Together, suddenly, they were laughing, and Libby reached over, took the plate, and dumped it into the garbage. Instead, they finished off a box of raspberry Pop-Tarts. Delicious.

Elizabeth waited to hear more, but Libby glanced at her watch, rubbed her napkin across her mouth, and said, “Getting late. We have to go.”

So now with nothing to do but wait for Libby to come home, Elizabeth tucks her hands into her pockets and begins to talk to Zee.

She tells Zee about sitting on the front steps of her house in Middletown, watching her father paint the door with careful stripes of the brush. It was a hideous gray. “Why not red?” she asked him. “Or peach?”

He grunted.

“Why not?”

He finally answered. “I had this paint left over in the garage.”

“It’s horrible,” she said, imagining that her mother was alive and painting the door a creamy yellow. Without thinking, she leaned back on her elbows and knocked over the paint can.

She scrambled to put the can upright, her hands sticky with paint. But as Pop watched the thick paint flowing down from the top step to the next, he just shook his head. “Think!”

She finishes telling the story to Zee. There are a dozen
other things she might talk about as well: losing her mother’s silver ring; wishing she had a dog she’d name Elliot; her new homeroom teacher, Mrs. Sparks, who licks her lips before she speaks, a dreadful habit.

Elizabeth stares at the drawing. Zee looks so much like her. It’s almost as if she’s found a friend to talk to.

She can’t wait to find out more from Libby. She wants to gather together every single scrap Libby knows about Zee; she wants to know Zee.

And here comes Libby in her small car. She hurries up the front path, keys in her hand.

“I forgot the key,” Elizabeth says, shrugging a little.

Libby shakes her head.

It reminds Elizabeth of Pop. It’s a wonder Libby doesn’t say think. It’s good, too, that Libby doesn’t know she’s been sitting there, talking to a picture.