The Book of Illumination (27 page)

The hubbub attracted Homer, the flatulent St. Bernard from a few houses over. Homer’s excited barking brought Ellie into the backyard, and as it turned out, she had just come home with half a dozen pumpkins. She wondered if the kids wanted to help her carve them. Beginning to tire of being pricked by the holly leaves, they jumped at the chance. They hurried into her kitchen, where
the woodstove was crackling with an unnecessary fire, black bean soup was bubbling on the burner, and a pan of crusty corn bread sat cooling on the sill.

Had she been planning to try to lure them into an afternoon of grandmotherly delights? I can’t be sure, though black bean soup just happens to be one of Henry’s favorites. But carving the pumpkins? This early? By Halloween, they would surely sag into soft, toothless caricatures of the witchy and the ancient. Still, there’d be no complaints from me—the kids were happy, Ellie and Max sure seemed happy, and I was overjoyed. That only left poor, abandoned Homer, moping on the steps.

I drifted in and out of Max and Ellie’s as the afternoon wore on, making it known to them every half hour or so that I was more than ready to take the kids off their hands. But the kids didn’t want to be taken off their hands. Activities were flowing happily along from one to the next. Finally, Max put it to me bluntly.

“Why don’t you just go … take a walk?”

I smiled. As Ellie led the parade up to the attic, where she had two big trunks of “dress-up clothes,” Max remained at the kitchen table, up to his elbows in pumpkin guck. They were planning to roast the seeds, but first Max had to clean off all the slimy strings.

“A walk where? I’m too pooped,” I responded.

“Then go take a nap!” he snapped.

I don’t take Max’s snaps personally. Snapping is what he does. He’s like my dad that way.

“Sounds like you’re the one who needs a nap,” I shot back.

“Aw, get out of here,” he said. “Stop bending my ear.”

So I kissed him on the cheek, a kiss he squirmed away from, and left him alone with his pumpkins.

I was just drifting off to sleep, wrapped up in an afghan on the couch, when the phone rang.

I reached up to the table behind me, grabbed the receiver, and glanced at the number. Was it Julian?

“Hello?” I said.

“Anza?”

“Yes.”

“This is Esther Winslow.”

“Oh!” I struggled up to a sitting position.

“Am I catching you at a bad time?”

“No, no.” It was inevitable, really—you finally get a half hour to yourself, and the minute you close your eyes, the phone rings. “I just wanted to let you know that I talked to my sister.”

“You did?”

“Yeah. She thinks she might have the book.”

“Really?”

“She’s got some boxes in her attic that she’s going to go through. I gave her your number. I hope that’s all right.”

“Sure,” I said.
No problem at all
, I thought.
I’d be thrilled to hear from the psycho who nearly gave me a heart attack a few days ago
.

“Did you tell her about Mr. Grady?” I went on.

“I had to,” said Esther. “It wasn’t a secret, was it?”

“No, no! How did she respond?”

“I don’t think she believed me at first. Not until I mentioned Millie.” Esther paused. “Anyway, she’s going to look for the book over the weekend. She said she’d call us both tomorrow or Monday.”

“All right. Great. Thanks so much.”

“No problem. I’ll talk to you soon. Oh, and Anza?”

“Yeah?”

“If you see Mr. Grady before we talk again, give him my love.”

“I will,” I said.

All hell broke loose on Saturday night. It wasn’t supposed to happen that way, but it did.

At about five o’clock, I could hear through the upstairs doorway, the one that connects our third-floor hall with Ellie and Max’s, that the kids were beginning to whine and bicker. It was about time, really; if not for Ellie’s angelic good cheer and apparently limitless enthusiasm, it would have started to happen in mid-afternoon. In any case, it was time for me to step in and reclaim my grouchy charges.

They put up only a halfhearted fight, which told me they actually were ready to come home. I put on the DVD of
101 Dalmatians
and had them take turns in the bathtub. By seven thirty, they were clean and restored to relatively good spirits, and we were eating spaghetti and meatballs by candlelight. The candlelight was Nell’s idea and might have been responsible for Henry’s next brainstorm.

“Can we make a campfire?” he asked. “And toast marshmallows?”

“Where?” I said.

“In the backyard.”

“No. Sorry.”

“Why not?”

“Because the trees are too low out there. The branches hang way down.”

“So?” he said, freshly.

“So?” I responded, freshly. Sometimes he brings out the five-year-old in me. “You want to set a tree on fire?” I doubted this was likely, given the rain we’d had in the past few days, but it was the first thought that came into my head. It should have occurred to me that a five-year-old boy would like nothing better.

“That’d be
cool!”
Henry said.

Nell giggled.

“Well it wouldn’t be very cool to burn the house down,” I went on. “I don’t think you’d be very happy about that.”

In a gesture of sisterly solidarity, Delia said quietly, “We do it at the lake …”

“I know, honey, but you have a place to do it there.”

“No we don’t,” Henry argued. “We do it right on the beach.”

“I know. That’s what I’m saying. It’s fine if you’re right by the water. But you have to be careful if you’re building a fire right underneath a whole bunch of trees.”

“We
will
be careful. I promise!
Please?”

“
Please?”
echoed Delia and Nell.

And this was when I started feeling bad, particularly with the girls pleading. Despite the fact that they’d had a perfectly wonderful day, a day 99 percent of the world’s children would consider really first-rate, I suddenly felt it had not been enough. To make matter worse, Dec and Kelly
could
give them a campfire, not only at Lake Sunapee, but right in their own backyard.

“I’ve got an idea,” I said, trying to excite them with an excess of enthusiasm. “How about we make chocolate chip cookie sundaes and you can eat them out in your fort! In the dark! With flashlights!”

“Yeah!” said Nell, who was always easy to please. Henry’s initial expression suggested that he suspected they were being conned somehow, but when Nell got behind the idea, followed by Delia, he went along.

So out came the ice cream and the cookies, and the jar of fudge sauce and the bottle of cherries. I didn’t have cream for whipping, but I had red sugar sprinkles left over from Christmas baking and half a package of M&Ms.

I produced a tray and three juice boxes. I turned up a couple of flashlights for them to share, of immense interest to the girls
because they were the wind-up kind that don’t need batteries. An hour later was when it all went south, after the sundaes had been finished and darkness had really fallen and they were still out there in the dim backyard, playing a primitive version of flashlight tag.

I had been cleaning up the kitchen and having a glass of wine, one ear attuned to their happy shrieks. The sounds had brought me back to the summer evenings of my own childhood, dusky interludes involving Jay and Joe and five or six other neighborhood kids: the Davios and the Cunninghams and Frankie Lobelli. We usually played hide-and-seek. A memory as clear as a film clip came back to me: I was crouched behind some kind of evergreen bush, bursting with excitement over the fact that no one—not even the
big
kids—could find me. I was using every fiber of self-control I possessed not to swat at a pair of humming mosquitoes that had found me behind the bush.

Suddenly, I heard a little scream and then another. Then Henry bellowed, “Mama!”

I was out the door and down the steps in a flash, but I was not fast enough.

Attracted by the kids’ voices and the flashing lights, Homer had trotted over to get in on the action. Cambridge has a leash law, but we all knew and loved sloppy old Homer, who took his pick of front porches for his afternoon nap. No doubt he was trying to protect the kids when he buried his nose in a bank of hostas and began to bark with gusto. And who could blame them for crowding around, to see what the excitement was all about?

By the time they figured it out, it was too late. The skunk had been rooted out from its leafy sanctuary and had sprayed them all.

Homer took the brunt of it. As the perp toddled off, its little white toupee vanishing between the boards of the fence, the dog
began to whine and threw himself down into the grass, trying to rub the oily spray off his snout and face. The spray hadn’t gotten into the children’s eyes, and for that I was truly relieved, but they hadn’t escaped lightly. I wouldn’t fully realize until I got them into the house later how bad it was, but when I did, there was absolutely no doubt—it was really, really bad.

Ellie, who had been sitting in her kitchen, phoned Homer’s owners, a couple in their thirties named Susie and Bud Coughlin, and they came racing over. I was already imagining my bathtub full of tomato juice and trying to figure out how many cans I was going to have to buy to fill it up. I could ask Ellie to stay out in the yard with them while I ran to Star Market in Porter Square. Twenty large cans ought to do it, I figured, wondering briefly if V8 juice would be a better purchase, in case I miscalculated the amount I needed and had a lot left over. I like V8 juice better than tomato.

Bud and Susie knew better, thank goodness. It wasn’t the first time Homer had been skunked, and apparently there was a magic formula known widely to dog owners, some combination of hydrogen peroxide, baking soda, and dishwashing soap. The mix was miraculous, Bud claimed; it completely killed the odor. Susie was falling all over herself apologizing, clearly believing that Homer was responsible for the whole mess. I didn’t agree. Racing around like banshees with their flashlights, the kids easily could have scared a skunk into spraying, even without Homer’s help. But I was thrilled when Susie offered to hop on her bike and make a quick run to CVS for multiple bottles of hydrogen peroxide, the ingredient we were both missing. Bud took Homer home.

Having little idea how truly foul they smelled, the kids milked the situation for every bedtime-postponing minute it was worth. Back outside, Henry was stomping around with a stick, proclaiming how he’d really like to “get” that rotten skunk, and
while Nell and Delia were initially swept up in his fury and outrage, they soon plopped down on the steps in a desolate little huddle.

Nell’s lip began to quiver and she put her thumb in her mouth. “I want my mommy,” she said, tears spilling over.

Delia slid over and put her arm around her little sister. “It’s okay, Nelly-belle,” she said. “Mommy’ll be back tomorrow.”

Max had appeared at their kitchen door. Wisely, he’d kept his distance during all the high drama, but now he joined the rest of us as we waited on the porch for Susie to get back.

“What’s wrong with you?” he asked Nell.

Nell shook her head and refused to reply.

“We got sprayed,” Delia explained.

“Yeah, no kidding,” Max said.

“She wants Mommy,” Delia went on. “They’re in Maine.”

Max nodded seriously. “She can probably smell you from up there.”

Nell looked up quickly, instantly snapped out of her self-pity. When she saw Delia begin to giggle, she put on a madder-than-ever face and smacked her sister on the arm. Nell was not going to smile. She was
not
.

She flew to her feet and headed toward me.

“Eee!” I said, scooting away. “No! Get away from me!”

This brought a smile to her face, as first she, then she and Delia, then she, Delia, and Henry swarmed after me like bees to honey, determined to contaminate me with their skunky stink. I could only dart and swoop for so long before they managed to bring me down with a three-kid tackle. Oh well. At least I had on an old shirt.

“Why weren’t you in bed, anyway?” Max asked.