All the Answers (23 page)

“I think you'll like it,” Mrs. Galvin said. “On the first day, she drops the big feathery plume thing that goes on top of her band
hat, and the whole band starts chanting ‘chicken down!' The only way she can make them stop is to cluck like a chicken.”

“That sounds horrifying,” Ava said. But she laughed. It wasn't her plume, after all.

She headed to the locker room, got changed for gym, and found Sophie out on the soccer field. Mrs. Snell was a die-hard when it came to playing outside. “Bring a sweatshirt,” she always said, “because we're heading out until the snow's too deep to run.”

Ava was fine with that. School air always felt a little stuffy, so it was nice to get outside.

“Hey, isn't that your dad?” Sophie jogged over to Ava and pointed.

“Yep.” The Andersons' car was just turning the corner toward home and the store. “They were visiting Grandpa this morning.”

“Is he okay?”

“Yeah, I think so.” Ava didn't really want to talk about it anymore. She just wanted to run around and clear her head. She'd figured out on the adventure course that you didn't really have time to be anxious when you were out of breath from exercising.

Ava scored a goal and assisted Sophie on another one, and it felt like no time at all had passed when the coach blew the whistle for them to go inside. Ava looked at her watch. “That was the quickest forty minutes ever.”

Ava had pulled open the door and turned to hold it for
Sophie when a car driving fast—too fast—caught her attention. It was her parents, heading back toward the nursing home. Ava's heart sped up. She hurried inside to the locker room, got changed, and pulled the pencil and her legal pad from her backpack.

Where are my parents going?

“To Cedar Bay,” the voice said, calm as ever.

Why are they going back?

“Because Thomas called them and told them they should come right away,” the voice said.

Ava wished it would just keep talking instead of making her ask question after question.

Why did Thomas tell my parents they should come right away?

“Because,” the voice said. “Hank has taken a turn for the worse.”

Ava stared at her question on the page and tried to make some sense of her crazy, swirling thoughts. Grandpa was getting worse, maybe even dying. And the voice had called him Hank. Like the pencil
knew
him or something.

Did Grandpa ever have this pencil that I'm holding right now in his possession?

“Yes,” the voice said. Now it sounded short. Maybe mad.

Did Grandpa use this pencil to gamble?

“Yes,” the voice said again.

Ava was out of space on the page. She flipped to the next one and wrote,
HOW?

“He kept a small notebook on his lap at the blackjack table and asked what the dealer's hole card was—that's the card that's facedown,” the voice said. “Knowing it gave him an advantage when he decided whether to take a hit on his own hand or not.”

Ava was surprised to hear that was allowed. She'd seen a TV show about casino pit bosses once, and they seemed super-strict about stuff like that.

They let you do that in casinos?

“No, they don't,” the voice said. “He got thrown out as soon as the cameras caught him. But he always had a chance to win a hand or two, and then he'd move on to the next casino and start over.”

So he won. A lot. But then he started losing.

And then did Grandpa lose the pencil?
Ava thought she already knew the answer.

“Indeed. When he'd been thrown out of every casino in Las Vegas, he came home and planned a trip to Atlantic City. He lost the pencil before he went.”

“Ava, are you coming?” Sophie was waiting by the door. “We have to get to study hall.” She looked down at the pencil in Ava's hand, took in the words on the page, and shook her head, confused. “What's going on?”

“I—I'll tell you later. I promise. Go ahead, and I'll be there in a minute, okay? I just … I have to do this.”

“Okay.” Sophie shrugged and walked out, and when the locker room door closed, Ava was alone with the pencil.

Why did Grandpa keep gambling after he lost the pencil?

Ava thought she heard a sigh. She turned to the door, but Sophie was long gone. She looked down at the pencil in her hand.

“Because he couldn't stop.”

Ava thought maybe she understood. Maybe it was Grandpa's version of the red shoes.

But the pencil wasn't finished. “Hank started gambling—and kept gambling even after he lost the pencil—because he was trying so hard to fill the hole in his heart after I died.”

After I died?

Ava gasped and put the pencil down. She stared at it, just a three-inch nub now, resting on the wooden locker room bench.

The pencil-voice was a person. A person who had died and left Grandpa alone.

Ava reached for the pencil, her hand trembling, and wrote in shaky letters,
Grandma Marion?

The sigh came again. This time, Ava didn't look for Sophie. She knew.

“Yes,” the voice said.

Part of Ava wanted to scream and drop the pencil-ghost and run away. But the rest of her needed more answers. And she needed the pencil for that.

Why didn't you tell me whose voice this was?

“Because,” the voice said, “you didn't ask.”

How did you get inside this pencil?

“I am not inside your pencil,” the voice said. Ava was actually relieved to hear a bit of its old impatient tone again. “As you
know, I died five years ago. I was using this pencil when I had my stroke behind the research desk at our downtown library branch. And it seems I was holding on tightly enough that a sliver of my spirit seeped into the wood.”

Ava couldn't move her hand fast enough to ask all the questions spilling out of her brain.

Why do you only answer certain kinds of questions? And have you been in the pencil five years?

“In response to your first question,” the voice said, “I answer questions that fall within my responsibilities. When I was a reference librarian, it was my job to help people find answers to questions when answers were available. But not all questions have that kind of solution, and it's not up to a librarian to be making up answers that don't exist.”

“Oh.” Ava nodded. The rules made more sense now.

“Question two,” the pencil went on. “I have not been
in
the pencil five years because as I told you, there is no person, dead or alive, inside the pencil. It's complicated.” The voice had a frustrated tone, like Mr. Farkley trying to explain math that he was sure Ava didn't understand. “It is merely a sliver of spirit that answers certain kinds of questions.”

Ava was glad. But it still seemed awful to have even part of yourself stuck in a pencil sometimes. Unless Grandma Marion meant to do that.

Did you put part of yourself in the pencil on purpose?

The voice let out a huff. “If I'd had any idea such a thing
could happen, I'd have made sure I was using a nice fountain pen when I took my last breath and not some cheap giveaway from a librarians' conference. But alas, in all the books I'd read, they neglected to mention such a possibility.”

Ava couldn't help thinking about all that time the pencil was sitting in the dust under Grandpa's radiator. It must have been so boring. Unless maybe the pencil-voice got to leave when nobody was using it.

Are you in the pencil all the time? Or just when someone is asking questions?

“When no one is writing questions with the pencil, that bit of spirit is at rest.” The voice paused. “But obviously, that's not the case right now. So here we are.”

Here we are
, Ava thought.

She looked up at the ceiling of the empty locker room, as if the real Grandma Marion's ghost might be floating up there. But there was only a water stain from where the roof must have been leaking.

That, and the pencil in her hand.

Ava tried to settle her thoughts so she could sort through them and remember what was going on before the pencil let it slip that it was actually Grandma Marion. Or part of her. Or something.

Ava flipped back through the legal pad, through the bread-crumb trail of her questions, until she got back to this one:

Why did Thomas tell my parents they should come right away?

Grandpa had gotten worse. The pencil—no—
Grandma Marion
had said so. Was he going to die? Ava couldn't imagine her mom going through that now, not with her cancer and with all the bad feelings between her and Grandpa.

Ava took a deep breath and wrote:

Is Grandpa going to die?

“Yes,” the pencil said, in the same matter-of-fact tone it had used to tell her that Gram was going to die someday, too, because everybody dies eventually.

Ava let out a frustrated sigh. She'd thought things might be different now that she knew it was Grandma Marion and not some random magic pencil she was dealing with. It was her grandmother, after all. But no … they were apparently back to the super-strict rules about facts and no future-telling.

She wrote the next question so hard the pencil tip broke on the point of the question mark.

Is Grandpa going to die today?

The voice didn't say anything, and at first Ava thought it wouldn't, but then she heard the quiet breath again … as if it was getting ready to respond.

“Yes,” the voice said quietly in Ava's ear. And this time, the voice was different from the one Ava had grown used to hearing—it was full of equal parts sadness and longing and joy. “Yes, he is.”

The bell rang.

But instead of going to study hall, Ava dropped the pencil
and legal pad into her backpack, tossed the whole thing over her shoulder, and raced from the locker room through the gym. She ran right out the door—for once not worried about the trouble she might get in.

She could explain later.

First, she had to make sure Grandpa got his wish.

Ava ran across the soccer field and down the sidewalk. She ran all the way up Champlain Street and past her house and the store, past Lucy and Ethel, who didn't even look up from their oats. She ran past Sophie's house and the empty lot, down Marshall Street and the long driveway, through the front doors of Cedar Bay.

Thomas was coming down the hall. He looked surprised to see Ava at first but then said, “Come on, kiddo. Your folks are down with your grandpa. I'll take you.” And they headed down the long hallway to Grandpa's room.

“Your parents know you were coming?” he asked Ava.

“Not exactly,” she said. “I thought I should …” She hesitated. “I wanted to say good-bye.”

Thomas nodded. “Okay.” He didn't tell her she didn't need to be there. He didn't tell her Grandpa was going to be all right, and she was grateful for that. She knew.

Even if she hadn't, she would have known the second she stepped into the room. Mom and Dad and Aunt Jayla and Uncle Joe were lined up in straight chairs by the window. Grandpa was in bed, pale and thin as she'd ever seen him. He reminded Ava of those fragile leaves you sometimes found in spring, wispy skeletons left over from the year before, waiting to be blown away.

“Ava!” Her mom stood up and hurried to her at the door. “You're supposed to be in school. How did you get here?”

“I walked.” She realized how sweaty and rumpled she must look. “I ran, really. I wanted—I needed to come.”

“Who signed you out? You can't just—”

“Alisha,” Dad said softly. “She's here and that's good. Let it be.”

“We were about to go find something to eat anyway,” Aunt Jayla said. She stood up, gave Ava a quick hug, and left with Uncle Joe.

Mom didn't say anything else. She took Ava's hand, led her to an empty chair, and sank into her own. Her cheeks were streaked with mascara-smudged tear trails.

“Did you talk to Grandpa?” Ava whispered. She so hoped her mom's answer was yes. He looked so tired now, like maybe he was already leaving.

“I did.” Mom reached out and squeezed Ava's hand. “Thank you for that. I'd like to think I would have done it on my own, but—well, thank you.”

“Can I talk to him?” Ava asked.

Dad nodded and motioned her to pull up her chair. The whole room smelled like cleaning chemicals and old chicken soup. Close to the bed, those smells were even stronger, but Ava forced herself to lean in.

“Hi, Grandpa. It's me.” Ava put her hand on his, but his eyes didn't open. “It's Ava. I just wanted to see you and say hi.” It wasn't all she wanted, not at all. She wanted to talk to him and have him answer and ask him questions and tell him she knew about the pencil. She wanted to tell him she understood what he did—understood what happened to him, because the pencil had pulled her in the same way. She wanted to tell him it was okay. That she'd be okay and so would Marcus and Emma.