Eleven (3 page)

They sang “Happy Birthday,” and afterward Anima said, “If Night Cat could sing, he'd sound like Mack and Onji.”

“Better,” Sam said. He blew out the candles, and everything did seem the same: all of them smiling at him, the taste of the cake, the presents.

They hurried to put the plates in the dishwasher. It was time for them to go to Anima's. They walked through her restaurant, where small yellow flowers in baskets decorated the tables. Anima stopped to say hello to people, to nod at the waiters, and then they went upstairs to her living room, as they had almost every night since they found out Sam had trouble reading.

He remembered it vaguely, the beginning of her reading to them. He pictured himself sitting on Anima's couch, Mack next to him, Anima opposite, and Onji coming up the stairs. “Sam has to know the world,” Anima had said. “If he can't read yet, one thing we can do while we try to help him is to give him the world of books.”

Mack had nodded.

And Onji: “How?”

“I'll read aloud every night.” So when things quieted in the restaurant, Anima read to all of them for at least an hour. And what she read! Long poems, the Bible, stories about a kid who dug holes, about a spider who saved a pig. Anima's accent made her sound like an English queen.

Sometimes they loved what she read, and sometimes they didn't. She'd shrug, reading about copper mining or sea routes. Onji would fall asleep, his snores almost drowning her out. And sometimes Mack put his head back, his eyes closed. But Sam never slept.

Tonight Anima began an Iroquois legend as they ate the crepes that had been made downstairs in the restaurant. Mack shook his head; he must have heard this one before. He reached out with one hand as if he'd stop her.

But Anima kept going. “The Creator promised land to the people if they'd stop fighting. They tried, but the arguing began again. Angry, God scooped up the land to carry it back to the sky. But ah! It fell and broke into a thousand pieces, some so small you could get your arms around them. They became islands, floating in a river so large it was almost an ocean.”

Sam knew that story; someone had told it to him long ago. And somehow, he remembered that river, too.

Saturday, no school. Free.

The wind roughed the river up into small curls, but for the first time this spring the sun was almost hot on Sam's head and shoulders.

He pulled the rowboat out of the shed, a huge shed big enough for five rowboats, and dragged it across the grass, breathing in the smell of the clean water at the river's edge.

Mack slid open the back window of the workshop, a level in his hand. “Be careful, Sam.”

And from the deli window next door, Onji called, “He's the only kid who could drown himself in six inches of water.”

“Don't worry,” Sam called back. He knew what Mack was thinking. Last week Sam had rowed past the bridge
where the river widened out, the water deeper and swifter there. Somehow one of his oars had floated away from the boat, leaving him a mile downriver to wait for someone to pull him and the boat onto the bank.

“Stay this side of the bridge. All right?”

“I will.”

“He's an accident waiting to happen,” Onji said.

Mack nodded. “Can't take your eyes off him for two seconds.”

They were joking, but Sam knew Mack was afraid of the water. Sam threw his sneakers into the boat, peeled off his socks, and splashed his way into the water.

The temperature was shocking, numbing his toes. He pushed the boat hard, scraping the bottom along the sand, grit under his feet, and jumped in, rubbing his feet with cold hands.

Night Cat came to the edge of the water and meowed. Not asking. Ordering.

Sam angled back and scooped him up. “Okay?” He buried his face in the cat's fur. It had a smell all its own, a Night Cat smell. There was that wisp of a memory: the cat, fur matted down, teetering on the edge of a boat. And Sam, reaching, reaching, the boat tilting, the edge almost level with the water.

He felt a pulse in his throat, his heart thumping, as Night Cat twisted away from him and darted to the backseat.

Stop
, he told himself.

The pipe clanked against the building. He stared at it. It was worse every day. How was he going to get Caroline up to the attic? Sometimes Mack went away for an hour or two to deliver furniture, but he couldn't count on it. Was it possible to screw the pipe back to the side of the wall?

But Onji saw too much; Onji saw almost everything. Sam would just have to wait and see.

He waved back at both windows, a little guilty that he wasn't helping Onji today. Saturday was Onji's busy day. And Mack's, too. Mack had been in the workroom early, repairing an old chair, smoothing out a deep gash in one of the legs and threading in new caning for the seat.

Sam began to row, feeling the pull in his arms and his back. As the boat moved away from the shore, the sound of Indian music floated out of Anima's restaurant, light music with bells that reminded him of Anima herself.

Sam rowed fast, through the narrow channel where the rushes were over his head. He pulled the dripping oars into the boat and dropped the anchor, a brick tied with a rope, onto the sandy bottom.

Overhead, the stalks swayed and rattled against each other, and a kingfisher flew up and away from him. He sat back and raised his face to the sun, listening to the water lapping against the boat.

It was the best place to think.

Missing.
He said it aloud, and Night Cat looked up at him. “I have to think about all this, figure ou…” His voice trailed off.

Mack always tackled things in steps, counting on his fingers, one of them bent from a long-ago accident. “First sand the pieces, then join them with carpenter's glue, use the clamps until everything dries. Next, sand again, stain—”

And Mrs. Waring in the Resource Room: “Look at the syllables, break the word down, one piece after another.”

Steps.

All right.

Caroline first. She was the key. They'd open the box somehow, she'd read what the clipping said, and anything else that might be there.

Caroline didn't know he could hardly read. With her head down, turning pages, she might not have noticed that he left for the Resource Room every afternoon.

How could he tell her?

His mind veered off. That room. He knew it as well as Mack's workshop. And Mrs. Waring, the smell of her lunch coffee strong as she spoke, her voice with a twang:
Saaam.
Her smile was great, even though her teeth were a little crooked.

Once she'd showed him a book with about four words on each page, words he couldn't read. “What does it all look like to you?” she'd asked.

He'd shrugged. How could he say the lines moved like black spiders, stretching their legs and waving their feelers across the pages?

She was sorry, he could see that. “Look.” She pointed out the window. “What do you see?”

“Trees, two of them.”

“Yes. You see the branches, the leaves. And that tells you they're not houses, or clouds. You don't even have to think about it. Trees.”

He'd felt something begin in his chest, because he couldn't imagine that happening when he read.

“That's the way it is with words,” she'd said. “After a while, the circles and lines will mean things. They'll jump out at you, so that trees are trees, and not clouds.”

The bell had rung then, and he'd escaped. That thing in his chest was growing, was going to explode. He'd held it in while they gathered up their books in the classroom, held it in on the bus, almost bursting with it, just waiting until he reached Mack in the workshop.

Mack had sat with him on the bench at the side wall as it finally burst out into the loud sound of his crying. Mack's arm had gone around him, and he'd hardly been able to get the words out, only “—spiders on the page that will never look like anything but spiders.”

He'd buried his head in Mack's shirt, smelling furniture wax and pine, and Mack had cleared his throat. “You have a gift, Sam. A gift like mine.”

He'd burrowed deeper into Mack's shirt, listening.

“You don't know it yet,” Mack had said, “but it's the wood. It talks to us.”

What did that have to do with anything?

“Already you feel the wood under your fingers. I've seen you.”

That was true. Sam would run his fingers over the wood, imagining where it had come from: pine from the forests here in New York State, or mahogany from the jungles far away. He knew what the woods were good for, what they could be made into.

“You read the wood,” Mack had said. “And that's something that almost no one else can do.”

Mack had turned up Sam's chin with those broad fingers. “You'll learn to read, Sam. It may take longer than most, it may never be your strong point. But you have this.” Mack's hand swept over the workroom, wood stacked waiting to become chairs or tables, tools gleaming. And in a voice Sam strained to hear: “You have me, Sam. Me, and Onji, and Anima. And we all love you more than anything.”

Now clouds moved between the sun and the boat. Sam pulled his jacket up against his neck, and Night Cat slid off the backseat, almost as if he didn't have bones, and curled up next to him.

Sam didn't think in steps. He'd started out thinking about telling Caroline, and instead he was remembering Mack that day long ago. No wonder he mixed up those syllables, those words. “But I read the wood,” he told Night Cat, and felt better until he thought again about being missing.

He pulled the oars out, one old and dark, the other fresh wood. He and Mack had cut the new oar and sanded it just the other day.

Mack, Onji, and Anima. Did all three know about that
newspaper clipping? And even though he'd never ask straight out, he'd have to begin in steps to find out where he'd come from, even though he wasn't sure what he'd do when he knew.

One thing, as Caroline would say. He'd never be happy anywhere else.

Sometimes Sam took a detour on the way to Mrs. Waring's Resource Room. He'd open the side door, stick a book in the edge so it wouldn't lock behind him, and sit outside to breathe in a little air.

Or maybe he'd slide along the corridor and have a gargling contest at the fountain with Robert, who came to the Resource Room from the opposite direction.

It was a little dangerous because Mr. Ramon, the assistant principal, patrolled the halls.

This afternoon, Sam hadn't gotten three steps away from the classroom when Caroline opened the door. “Going to the Media Center?”

He stopped. He hadn't told her about his reading yet,
and she was coming home with him this afternoon. “Want to go outside?” he asked.

“I guess.” She followed him out. The grass was coming in green now, and a robin chirped in one of the two trees Mrs. Waring had pointed out years ago.

Sam sank down on the step, and Caroline sat too. “One thing? Are we allowed to do this?” she asked, pulling her hair into a knot in back of her head.

He laughed. “One thing? No.”

She waved her hand. She was wearing nail polish, a horrible Easter egg purple. “You do this every afternoon after lunch.” Her eyes were wide behind her glasses. “What nerve.”

So she'd noticed. “Most of the time I go to the Resource Room for reading,” he said.

She reached out to touch one of the daffodils at the side of the steps. He couldn't see her face.

“I have a little trouble reading.” A
little?
“They call it a learning disability. I'm supposed to spend part of the day in a regular classroom and part in the Resource Room.” He rushed on. “When you come over to work on the castle, I could use some help.”

“I've never taught anyone to read, but I suppose I could try.”

It made him grin to think about it: Caroline trying to teach him how to read. Everyone else had tried, and kept trying; they didn't want to admit that he'd given up.

Anima read aloud every night, running her fingers along the words so he could see. Mack cut cards with pictures and the words underneath. He pulled them out as often as he could and made Sam try to read them. And even Onji had taped up signs along the salad bar.
“Macaroni, Sam, for Pete's sake. What else could it be?”
as Anima had said gently,
“Onji, 1 don't think you spell
macaroni
with a
y.”

They'd all laughed, and Onji had winked. “So I don't spell too well, Sam.”

Now Sam began again. “There's a box in the attic.” He waved his hand. “Maybe you'd read some stuff to me.”

“What kind of stuff?”

“A newspaper clipping with my picture, to begin with. It says I was missing. Am missing?” He hesitated. “Still missing?”

Caroline peered at him, her glasses in her lap now. “You're joking.”

He shook his head. “I wish.”

“I'll try.” She hesitated. “But listen, I don't have much time.”

What had she told him the other day in the cafeteria?
“Don't think I'm going to be friends. 1 won't be here long enough.”

“I'm leaving for my own castle soon,” she said.

“You're joking now.”

“You don't think I look like a princess?” She grinned, showing her braces. There was a constellation of freckles on her cheeks. “I'm leaving, but not for a castle.”

“But—”

“My father's a painter, so we have to go where he wants to paint.”

Sam raised his shoulders. “He could paint right here. There are a million houses, I bet.”