The Romeo and Juliet Code (13 page)

When I got back up the long stairs, I went into the dining room, where Derek was sitting with a deck of cards. He loved to play hearts. All the Bathburns did. I slipped the thin letter up my sleeve and I sat at the other side of the table and looked at Derek. I tried to be very ho-hum and not act excited at all about the letter. I put my elbows on the table and leaned my chin in my hands and I just sat there watching Derek. He had such lovely posture. He would have made a tremendous knight, I thought just then, if he had lived long ago in England near, say, Goodrich Castle in Herefordshire.

Derek and I played a round of hearts. You can play with two people, but you have to make a dummy hand. And the whole time we played, I had the letter inside my sleeve. It felt very itchy and I was sure that’s why I lost the game. The day before, I lost because there was a fly buzzing round my head and I couldn’t think properly, and the day before that, I lost because I was hungry. In fact, I’d never won at hearts since I’d been in Bottlebay, Maine. I almost beat The Gram on Saturday. She appeared to be losing, but then at the very last, she had all the best cards. That’s when I had decided to lie down on the floor and pretend I was floating in the ocean. The Gram had said, “Oh, Flissy, don’t pout. You’ll get the hang of it. The Bathburns always win at hearts. The card game, that is.”

Derek was trying to prop several cards in his one miserable paralyzed hand now, but the cards just fell from his fingers and scattered about. Then Derek dropped his head and shoulders down so that his cheek was lying now on the tabletop. “It’s not fair,” he said. “How am I supposed to discard and draw when I am already holding a handful of cards? And I’m not going to go back to school either.”

“I should think you’d be feeling rather smug right now, having just won at hearts again,” I said. And while Derek was moaning and groaning, I pulled the letter slowly out of my sleeve and I set it on the table right near Derek’s nose.

Derek sat up. “Where did you get this, Flissy?” he asked.

“It came today in the mail,” I said. “Uncle Gideon must have gone to town with The Gram for groceries and missed it.”

“We’d better not open it,” said Derek, “but there’s no harm in holding it up to the light.” With his good arm, Derek held the envelope up to the window. But we couldn’t see through it. It seemed to stare back at us in silence. I traced my fingers over the address and Danny’s handwriting. It felt quite nice, really, to be so close to something Danny had written not long before. And then my heart got heavy again because he hadn’t written to me. It sank just as if it weighed six stones five, the very weight of Jillian Osgood before she even entered the fifth form.

“Let’s try leaving the letter here on the table and see what Uncle Gideon does about it. See if he goes anywhere, so we can follow him,” I said and I put my hands on my hips and I scrunched up my nose to show that I was quite serious.

And Derek said, “Flissy, if they had horses and cattle and cowboy boots and lassos and campfires and Wyoming in England, you’d be a true British cowgirl.”

We went into the hall and got into the closet to hide. I had said, “Shall we get in the cupboard?”

And Derek had said, “That’s not a cupboard, it’s a closet, and yes, let’s.” Quite cleverly, we left the door open just a crack. Through that crack we could see the dining room table and the letter lying there. Derek said, “At school, Roland Rupert shut himself in his locker once because he didn’t want to take a math test. Those lockers lock by themselves when you shut the door, you know. And Roland was in there all afternoon.”

“But how did he ever get out?” I asked.

“When he didn’t come home at two thirty, his mother had them search the school, and when they opened his locker, Roland Rupert rolled out. That’s what I’ll do if they make me go back to school,” said Derek.

“I wonder if there’s room for two in your American lockers,” I said.

We were all stuffed under a row of wool coats and I was sitting on some old rubber boots, with a fuzzy cape draped over my shoulders. Derek put on a big wool hat with fur-lined earflaps, the one he said Uncle Gideon always wore in the winter when he went to the Shriners Club. Then Derek buckled his feet into some enormous snowshoes, which caused me to get a bit of a laughing attack, which then caused us both to fall into the back of the closet. When we got straightened out, I ended up quite close to Derek, looking at his nice, soft, land-of-counterpane eyes, and even in the semidarkness, it felt as if I were in a little airplane hovering over the surface of Derek’s face, roaming over his brown eyelashes, skimming lightly across his handsome forehead.

Just then, we heard voices on the steps outside, and Derek tried to get up, but he kept falling back into the depths of the stuffed closet, laughing. Finally, it was me who got to my feet and watched The Gram and Uncle Gideon carry bags into the kitchen. It was me who saw Uncle Gideon notice the envelope on the table in the dining room. It was me who heard Uncle Gideon call out, “What did you say, Mother? You unpack the canned goods. I think I’ll go up to my room and then I’ll take a walk while the sun’s high.” He picked up the letter, went upstairs, unlocked the study, and went in, clicking the door shut behind him.

Uncle Gideon seemed to be taking his time in the study. Looking out through the crack and waiting for him to come back, I felt a bit like a jar full of crickets. My hands were jumping about on their own. I tried to glare at them in a fierce sort of way to get them to stop, but they kept on going. Derek was lying on a pile of sweaters, snoring. He was faking, of course. As he lay there, I thought he looked so much like that little tin soldier with the missing arm and the sad smile, the one who wanted to be just like the others and tried so hard and had such a lovely heart.

What was Uncle Gideon going to do with this new letter and how long would he be? What would we do or say if by chance he should stop by the closet for a hat? In the kitchen, The Gram and Auntie Miami were unpacking groceries from bags. I could hear cans being stacked and the icebox door being opened. The Gram was saying, “Well, if Flissy is a little immature for her age, I wouldn’t blame her. I would be too, given her unstable situation. Under these circumstances, Winifred had no business having a child in the first place. And then to be so neglectful and selfish.”

I was hoping I had been mixed up and heard that all wrong. Perhaps they were talking about someone else named Winifred and not my lovely Winnie. I wanted to shout out loudly again, “No, that’s not so. The Gram is wrong. I
know
she’s wrong. You’re wrong.” I closed my eyes and I pinched my lips shut with my fingers so I couldn’t say a word.

“Fliss,” said Derek. He tilted his head and looked at me up close. “Are you upset? Come on,” he said, putting on a partly smashed black bowler hat, the kind all the businessmen in London wear, minus the smash. “Don’t be sad.”

Just then, we heard Uncle Gideon coming down the stairs. Derek and I waited silently, watching through the crack as Uncle Gideon passed quickly by, holding in his arms a plain brown folder.

Uncle Gideon already had a good start on us because it took a few minutes getting out of the hats and capes and snowshoes. As we were creeping out of the closet, The Gram was still talking with Auntie. She was saying something like “Well, they were only married three months and then it was over, from Winifred’s perspective. I can’t understand how one woman could wreak such havoc with my sons. Did you put the mayonnaise away, dear?”

I wasn’t sure what “wreaking havoc” meant, but I wanted to go into the kitchen right then and shout out, “I awfully, terribly, dreadfully hate hearing you say any bad things about my Winnie!”

I was about to leap towards the kitchen when Derek gently pulled on my arm. “Fliss,” he said, “now’s our chance. Come on.” He motioned to me to be quiet and to follow him, which I did. All the while, The Gram’s words were tumbling about in my head.

We slipped out on the porch and looked off towards the beach below. There was Gideon scooting along. We hurried down the steps, doing two at a time.

When we got to the beach, the sand was clean and wet and firm, once again the best conditions for making very nice footprints, and Uncle Gideon was leaving perfect ones behind him as he walked.

We decided to step only in Uncle Gideon’s footprints so that no one would ever know that we had been following him. His footprints were big (my print took up less than one half of his), and they were far apart so that I had to leap sometimes to make it to the next print. Derek did it too, and one time he tripped over me and we both fell onto the sand, having another laughing fit. It was nice to see Derek outside lying on his back, looking up at the clouds, laughing. It seemed as if he had forgotten all about his paralyzed arm for a moment. I was laughing too, as if The Gram hadn’t just said all those terrible things about my Winnie, which was good because when you can’t do anything about something, it is better to try to forget all about it.

We had lost Gideon completely by now. He had gone quite far down the beach, moving at a fast pace, and had taken a turn away from the water towards land. We were able to follow his footprints right to a forest path, which cut across the point. There in the brush we lost the footprints, but we followed the path anyway, all the way to the other side of the woods.

Derek was looking rather pleased and energetic, like a hunting dog happy to be out running, one of those lovely brown and white springer spaniels with long legs, the kind Winnie grew up with in Devonshire. He looked so interested that I took the opportunity to say, “Derek, do you think I could have the little tin soldier with the missing arm, the one who’s got chipped paint on part of his uniform? He’s so much sweeter than the others.”

“Well, he’s my mapmaker,” said Derek. “I kind of need him. Look where we are now. Look up, Flissy.”

And I did look up and we had reached the edge of the woods and we were on a bluff covered in wild yellow flowers. The sky was a pure, drop-away, British blue, the same blue on the British flag, the same blue in one of Winnie’s summer dresses, the same blue as the sky above the Long Man of Wilmington in East Sussex County, England. There was one big, fat, white cloud puffing along that looked a bit like Wink floating across the sky, wondering why he was always left behind these days.

I could hear the ocean, which
was
rougher on this side, but until we got to the top of the bluff, I couldn’t see it, and then we went over a rise amidst hundreds of windy yellow flowers and there it was, way down below at the bottom of the cliff, the true blue, forceful, crashing ocean that makes all creatures in every corner of the world feel small and shivery and lonely in a terrible, lovely sort of way.

The drop-off made me take a deep breath. My feet felt light, like they might lift up and away into the air, and I tried to push down on them so that they would stay put. There was a steep path that wound down the bluff and I could see, far below, a short wooden dock and a small open boat, and Uncle Gideon was in that boat, starting the motor.

“I guess he’s going to Peace Island,” said Derek. “It’s over there. It’s like a bird sanctuary, covered in cliffs of nesting plovers, sandpipers, puffins, seagulls, and blue herons.” Derek looked all shadowy for a moment, as if the sun suddenly had gone behind a cloud, taking the color out of everything. “There’s nothing over there,” he said. “Nothing except birds and fields of long grass and rocky cliffs. Because of those jagged bluffs and the heavy wind over there, it’s considered dangerous. As far as I know, nobody ever goes to Peace Island.”