Waves of Light (11 page)

D
ad dropped me off early for the work party. I wanted to get there before everyone else so I could set up the paint and wood without an audience. Everything seemed to take me twice as long now, too, so I appreciated the extra time. And, I’d wanted to escape Mom.

Today, we’d work on constructing the music box and the cart, and then give each piece a base coat.

If Mr. Reid came back, or if Doug had time to work the saw, we’d also cut pieces for the storefronts. Penny was in charge of the costume projects today, and Ben was going to do all the props. So I’d only have to manage four or five people, which was good.

The air was cool and smelled like dew as I walked across the field to the picnic table and benches that had become my set-construction station. We’d piled the wood on bricks
and covered it with tarps to keep it as dry as possible. A collection of paint cans, brushes, and extra tarps waited on the table. They’d taken all the power tools inside. I laid out the tarp and started sorting the wood into piles, one for the cart, one for the music box, and another for the bakery oven and countertop.

I was so busy measuring boards and comparing them to my notes, I didn’t hear Andrew come up behind me.

“Hey there,” he said.

I almost jumped out of my skin. I whirled around to face him.

“Didn’t mean to scare you.” His smile made my heart leap around in my chest. “Thought I’d come early to see if you needed help.”

“Um, yeah.” I scanned the yard. Just me and Andrew and no one else. I’d managed to avoid him pretty well for the week. But now I had no excuses.

“I’m just sorting the wood into piles.”

Andrew grabbed the other end of a board I was about to pick up, so I wouldn’t have to drag it through the grass. We worked in silence that became more uncomfortable by the second.

After we set down the last board, I wiped off my hands. “I guess I’ll go get the tools.”

I almost got away, but he grabbed my arm.

“Wait, Sadie,” he said. “I want to talk to you.”

Here it was. I didn’t want to have this conversation no matter where it led.

“About Annabelle, I mean.”

Especially not if it was about Annabelle.

“You’re really hurting her feelings, Sades. I mean, she doesn’t understand why you won’t talk to her, and we’re all starting to worry because …”

“Because why?” I asked. I was tired of all the secrets. If something was wrong with Annabelle, someone needed to come out and tell me so.

Andrew opened his mouth and then, as though he’d suddenly changed his mind, he closed it again.

I pressed on. “As far as I can see, Annabelle is fine. She’s the lead in the play. Everyone loves her. She never stops smiling. I have no idea why everyone’s so worried about her.”

“Sadie, she—”

“I get it. You all love her.” The word practically stuck in my throat, but I pushed it out. “I don’t understand why I can’t just stay out of your way. Why do I have to be Annabelle’s best friend too?”

“Annabelle was sick last year. Really sick. She ended up going into the hospital because she didn’t eat.”

I shook my head, not understanding. “Why didn’t she eat? What does this have to do with me?”

“She ate only gummy peaches, Sadie. For months. And she still thought she was fat when she was just skin and bones. We were all so happy to see her healthy and happy, we just didn’t want anything to upset that. And you—”

“Wait. Are you saying she’s not eating again now? And you’re blaming that on me?”

“I’m saying that you’re hurting her. And she’s not the kind of person people should hurt.”

“What about me? Is it fine for everyone to go around hurting me?”

Andrew frowned. “Who’s hurting you?”

“My point exactly,” I said. “People are coming, and I need to get the tools.”

As I walked away, he called after me, “Sadie, I’m serious. Who’s hurting you?”

I turned back to look at him, to see if he was serious. He looked truly baffled as he closed the distance between us.

“Never mind,” I finally said.

“Sadie, out of everyone around here, I thought you’d be the best friend for Annabelle. And I told her so. I made her think the two of you would be perfect together. But you’re acting so … I wouldn’t think you’d be so mean.”

“Mean?” The word came out as a snarl. I couldn’t help it. How could he not see what was going on?

“Yes,
mean
, Sadie.”

I couldn’t come up with anything to say. Not a single thing. I turned and walked away, leaving him standing there, calling after me.

“What’s going on, Sadie?” Bea asked, passing me on her way to the costume station.

“Nothing,” I said, not stopping.

After I passed, I heard her say to Lindsay, “What’s her problem?”

Lindsay answered, “I don’t know. She’s been mean to everyone lately.”

Mean. That’s what I was now. Mean to everyone. Still, the tears wouldn’t come. I was too tired to cry.

S
un streamed through the classroom windows, and the glare off my desk made me squint. “Just one idea,” Ms. Barton had said as she explained the poetry assignment. But none of the ideas in my head were appropriate for a poem. Poetry flowed when you read it out loud, each word sliding into the next. My words were more likely to stab, gashing holes in this dumb worksheet. So to begin:

IMAGES THAT COME TO MIND WHEN YOU CLOSE YOUR EYES.

Mud. Broken fish. White walls. Cracked roof. Freckled nose. Gummy peaches. Mom staring out the window. My mean face.

FEELINGS THAT COME TO MIND:

Nope. Not going there.

SHAPE THESE WORDS INTO A POEM:

It’s

Not

Fair.

The bell rang and I crumpled up my notebook page and threw it into the recycling bin.

“Sadie—” Ms. Barton reached into the bin and pulled out my paper.

I snatched it away from her. “Don’t read it.”

She stared at me and only then did it cross my mind that I shouldn’t have ripped my paper out of my teacher’s hand. I knew I should say something, but the words caught in my throat, so I ran for the door.

“Hey, Sadie,” Ruth caught my arm as I came into the hallway. “Andrew told me he told you. About Annabelle, I mean.”

I blinked at her, my heart still thudding in my chest. She glanced over her shoulder, but Annabelle was still in the classroom talking to Abby and Erin. “Now do you understand?”

I fidgeted with my backpack and clothes, anything so I didn’t have to look her in the eye.

“I should have told you, I know. But I promised Annabelle I wouldn’t. She just wanted to be friends with you on normal terms, not have you know her as the girl who got sick last summer.”

“So you blame me, too, for her being upset or not eating or whatever?”

“I just think we’d be a lot happier if we could all hang out together. I miss you, Sades.”

Annabelle caught up with us and smiled her Annabelle smile. “Where are you sitting at lunch today, Sadie?”

She must be exhausted, keeping this up all the time. I didn’t understand, though, why someone who seemed to have everything wouldn’t eat. What did she have to punish herself for?

Ruth looked from Annabelle, who was all smiles, to me. All frowns, I’m sure.

“You choose. I’ll be over in a second,” Ruth said.

As Annabelle walked away, Ruth turned to me. “Just try being happy today, Sadie. You’ll have fun, I promise.”

“And Annabelle will be happy.” My voice was flat.

Too many feelings had raced through me for the past few days. Guilt, frustration, jealousy that everyone was worried about Annabelle and not worried about me, loneliness, and so much more that I couldn’t even begin to sort it all out. I didn’t know how I could sit through lunch with Ruth and Annabelle again and pretend that everything was okay.

Ruth blinked at me, as though she didn’t understand how I could still be upset. “Well, yeah, Sades, she will. That’s a good thing.”

Whatever I said would only make me sound worse.

Finally, I shook my head. “No thanks. I’ve got some homework to catch up on anyway. I’ll be in the library.”

“Sadie …” Ruth sounded like she was about to begin a lecture on how unreasonable I was being.

I shrugged and gave her a sad smile. “I just need a little time, Ruth. Okay?”

Something in my voice stopped her, because she tilted her head and her eyebrows pulled into a confused frown, as though she’d been looking at an optical illusion a certain way for a long time, and then suddenly she saw the negative space, the opposite point of view.

“Sadie …?” Ruth said again, but this time my name was more of a question.

“It’s fine, Ruth,” I said. “We’ll talk more later, okay?”

I didn’t wait for her to answer before I walked down the hall. I felt her watching me until I turned the corner. I knew we’d have to talk at some point. But not today.

D
ad dropped me off at Vivian’s house after school on Wednesday, telling me to invite Vivian over for dinner afterward.

I walked across the parking lot and up Vivian’s stairs. Lifting my hand to knock on the door felt like lifting my backpack full of textbooks. Maybe something
is
wrong with me. Maybe chronic fatigue syndrome is hereditary, and now I’m getting it too. Or maybe I’m one of those people who suddenly go insane in the middle of seventh grade. I’d heard about cases like that on the news, on some TV special report.

Vivian opened her door. For a second, my watery vision sharpened. Vivian looked terrible, with dark circles under her eyes and rumpled clothes. Her house had a closed-up, stuffy smell, and over her shoulder I could see dirty laundry, clutter, and dishes scattered around. She looked exactly the way I felt.

“Come in,” Vivian finally said. “I forgot about your lesson, but I’m glad you’re here.”

She kicked some laundry aside as we walked down the hall, and then she cleared a seat for me on a chair in the living-room-turned-art-studio.

Since last week, she’d created a number of new chicken-wire forms, which looked like they might be the trees she was planning to use as part of the exhibit.

“I need to finish them. I have to pour the concrete and do the ceramic work,” she said. “For a few days there, all I did was work. But then …” She raised her hands helplessly.

I wandered around the room, trying to picture how the sculptures would look when they were finished. She easily had twenty figures in the room, and I had no idea how she was going to finish them all in a little more than a week.

“A few days ago, the insurance claims adjuster brought me pictures of the cleanup work at my house,” Vivian said. “Not many photos, but enough so I could see how … gone … everything is. And something inside of me just broke. I haven’t been able to work ever since.”

I nodded.

“But I promised you, Sadie. I’m sorry. I just don’t think …”

I forced myself to find words, to form them, to say them. “Me, neither.”

She frowned at me, frowned at the room, and seemed to finally notice something was off. “I should open a window.”

As she pushed the window open as high as it would go, a slight breeze came in and lifted tiny particles into the air,
swirling them in the sunlight so they shimmered like magic dust. I watched them dance in the air, so light and free and beautiful. Why couldn’t I decide to let all of this go? Ruth wanted me to, Andrew wanted me to, and Mom probably wanted me to, as well. “Just be happy,” they’d all say. “Stop worrying so much about everything.”

What’s wrong with me? And where are you?

Vivian stood at the window, breathing in the fresh air. When she turned, her cheeks were wet with tears. She wiped them away and smiled a sad smile.

“Sadie, we’re both a mess.” She gestured around the room. “Literally and figuratively.”

“I tried to work,” I told her. “I tried to pretend everything was okay, but …” I wished the tears would come, but I couldn’t cry anymore.

“Yeah, I know.” She sat across from me. “When David died, I thought I was crazy. I honestly thought I was losing my mind. First, I was angry, and then suddenly I had all of this energy to get things done. But one day, I couldn’t feel anything anymore. Like now. Sadness, pain, loss — they were a fog wrapped all around me, getting thicker every day. Everyone else acted normal, as if they couldn’t see that I was being buried alive by my emotions. Or they demanded that I try harder — cheer up and get back to work. I couldn’t. And I can’t now, either.”

“What happened?” I asked. “Back then, I mean.”

“When you’re in the middle of it,” Vivian said, “You want things to be different. You want to feel better, but you
know that trying to feel better only leads to more pain. And I know you now understand what I’m talking about because you just tried it.”

“But one day, Peter came home with three fish — red fish — and two things happened: I wanted to take care of those fish. I also wanted to paint them, just the way they were. There was something about the color red — a color I couldn’t figure out how to mix. So I got busy drawing up plans for an aquarium built right inside the wall, and I painted those fish who temporarily lived in a glass bowl in my art studio. And somehow, once the aquarium was installed and the fish painting was complete, I felt as though someone had opened a window.”

“And you could breathe again.”

“Yes. But I couldn’t have gotten there on my own, Sadie.”

“I wish I could help you.”

“Why don’t you tell me what’s going on with you? I know it’s not just my house that’s gotten you to this place, right?”

So I told her everything leaving no horrible detail unsaid — even though I knew I sounded like the worst person in the world. And as I told her, something shifted inside of me. I realized I still cared about sending scavenger hunt updates to Frankie. I wanted to be there for her — not because it was a “good thing to do,” but because I wanted to do it. I also wanted to finish the music box for the play because I wanted to see something that I’d imagined in my mind come to life in the real world.

“I’ve been keeping something from you,” I said.

“What’s that?” Vivian asked.

I took the watch out of my pocket and held it out to her. “I found this in the woods on the day we worked at your house.”

She reached out, her fingers shaking, and took the watch. After tracing the initials on the back, she opened the cover and then clicked it closed again.

“I gave this to David as a wedding present,” she said. “He lost it when Andrew was little — only five or six years old. We used to play Find The Pocket Watch, scouring the forest looking for it. But we never found it.”

“It was almost completely buried in the underbrush,” I said. “I’d never have seen it if I wasn’t trying to find ‘something abandoned’ for Frankie’s scavenger hunt.”

“It’s funny how you can lose one thing and gain something else, isn’t it?” Vivian curled her fingers around the watch and looked out the window. For a minute it was almost as if she’d left the room.

“Vivian?” I asked after a pause, prepared to apologize for upsetting her with the watch. I’d been afraid it would upset her more.

Vivian smiled. “Sorry. I left you there for a minute, didn’t I? I’ve been thinking about the centerpiece for my collection since I left New York. My vague idea was one large tree in the middle — part sculpture, and part tree. I’ve been calling it “The Grandfather Tree” in my mind. But what if the tree held memories? I could use objects, such as this watch and other important items, as part of the tree.”

“I love it!” I said.

“I don’t have too many objects like that one, but I do have some that your dad found when he dug around at the house.” Vivian suddenly gasped. “Or maybe — grab your coat.”