I Don't Know How the Story Ends
Read I Don't Know How the Story Ends Online
Authors: J.B. Cheaney
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Copyright © 2015 by J. B. Cheaney
Cover and internal design © 2015 by Sourcebooks, Inc.
Cover illustration © Greg Call
Sourcebooks and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systemsâexcept in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviewsâwithout permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks, Inc.
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious and are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.
Published by Sourcebooks Jabberwocky, an imprint of Sourcebooks, Inc.
P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567-4410
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Fax: (630) 961-2168
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is on file with the publisher.
Source of Production: Worzalla, Stevens Point, Wisconsin, USA
Date of Production: August 2015
Run Number: 5004597
Chapter 1: How We Came to California
Chapter 2: The Boy with the Hat
Chapter 4: Truth, Beauty, and Flickers
Chapter 5: A Start in the Pictures
Chapter 7: By the Beautiful Sea
Chapter 9: Hearts of the World
Chapter 10: The Night the Stars Came Out
Chapter 13: Talmadge and Prospect
Chapter 17: The Perils of a Life of Crime
Chapter 18: Down at the Station
Chapter 19: Another Way to Lie
To Melissa,
for those early days
and the footsteps I so often followed in.
How We Came to California
The first I heard of Mother's big idea was May 20, 1918, at 4:35 p.m. in the entrance hall of our house on Fifth Street. That was where my little sister ended up after I pushed her down the stairs.
It wasn't all my fault. She pushed me before I pushed herâfiguratively, I mean.
She'd picked a bad time to tangle with me, for I was in a drippy, dismal mood, like our Seattle weather that day. While walking from my room to the stairs with an open bookâ
Jane Eyre
, my new most-favoriteâI heard a moaning noise behind me, starting low and growing louder: “
AhhhhWOOOO
!
”
I turned around. “Whatever you're doing, stop it.”
A cobwebby ghost was creeping up behind me: Sylvie, draped in gauzy curtains she'd somehow pulled down from our parents' bedroom window. “
AWOOOO!
I'm the ghost of the battlefield. NoâI'm Daddy's lonesome spirit come back to haunt you, and⦠Quit it, Isobel!”
I had smacked her on the shoulder with my book. She smacked me back, so then I pushed her against the banister and she stumbled on the wads of curtain under her feet. The next moment, she was bouncing down the stairs, howling at every bump.
The noise brought Mother from the study and Rosetta from the kitchen. Both could only stare at first, flummoxed by the noisy cocoon I was frantically trying to unwrap. Sylvie had made it all the way to the bottom without breaking anything, I was pretty sure. Father used to say he was going to take her on the road as a scientific curiosity because her bones were made of rubber. But the fact remained that she had been pushed, and someone had done the pushing.
“Isobel,” my mother said accusingly.
“I'm sorry! But she was acting silly, as usual, and saying she was Father's ghost, and we know that Father's alive and well, but I can't stand it when she⦔ Et cetera. And all this time Sylvie was yelling that it wasn't her faultâshe was just playing, and I hit her before pushing her, and so on.
Rosetta stepped in to lend a hand, and finally Sylvie was standing on her own two feet, both of us waiting for Mother to send us outside for a switch from the forsythia bush. But she just looked at us, lips pressed together, the silence lengthening like the long shadow that had fallen over us ever since Father left for France.
“That does it,” Mother said at last. “I've had enough of dreary days and melancholy daughters. We're going to California for the summer.”
⢠⢠â¢
Once the idea was in the open, I learned it had been building for a while. Mother was California born and bred, and her sister, my aunt Buzzy, had been begging her to come for a long stay ever since Father volunteered to serve his country in the Great War. Father had left in November, and now it was almost Juneâa very wet and gloomy almost-June, all the wetter and gloomier without his quiet smiles and bad jokes. But that didn't mean I was ready to turn my back on home.
“We always spend July on San Juan Island!” I protested when Mother bought our train tickets. “And what about digging clams with Grandpa or taking Sylvie to Pike Street Market? You know Rosetta needs me to do the shopping for her when school's out. And I don't know anybody in Los Angeles!”
“You soon will. Your aunt married a very wealthy man with a child about your age. Thirteen, I think.”
“He's a
boy
!”
“Boys can be human. You have fog and rain in your soul, Isobel. As for me, I've been longing for the sunny hills and orange groves of home. A trip south will wring us both out.”
“I don't
want
to be wrung out,” I whined. “And California is not my
home
.” To no avail: in Father's absence Mother had swung about and pointed south, like a contrary compass needle.
I didn't understand it. The calling of a Seattle doctor's wife had always suited her like gravy took to a roast. (Even though Mother photographed much better than a roast, with her dark eyes and stately beauty flawed only by a slight vertical scar on her upper lip.) Hardly a month went by without some item in the newspaper about a tea or charity show hosted by Mrs. Robert F. Ransom, Jr. And now she was ready to throw over all those radiant good works for a dollop of California sunshine!
She did have a point about the melancholy daughter though. All winter and spring, I'd moped about the house and snapped at Sylvie when she got unbearable, which only made her more unbearable.
Jane Eyre
was teaching me to accept new challengesâand besides, there's not much a twelve-year-old can do about her immediate destiny. So I tried to think like Jane Eyre, setting off for Thornfield Hall and a fated meeting with Mr. Rochester. Perhaps I was destined for my own fated meeting, and besides, we'd be back by the end of August.
But that didn't mean I should not feel a little teary when we gathered at King Street Station on a drizzly afternoon, the tenth of June. Granny kissed us one more time, and Grandpa stood aside, looking like he didn't care all
that
much, even though I knew he did. He took a swipe at his eyes as Granny told us to get lots of sunshine.
My stiff upper lip trembled, for I couldn't help remembering the last time we'd lingered on a station platform. That was the day Father left.
He is just the best, kindest man in the worldâtall and handsome too, especially in his uniform with the captain's bars on the shoulderâand the harder he worked to cheer us up with his jokes and ha-ha's, the worse we felt. Finally my mother said, “For heaven's sake, Bobbyâ” and grabbed his shoulders and boosted herself on tiptoe to kiss him, right on the mouth! Firmly too.
Father was as shocked as the rest of us, but at least it stopped the ha-ha's. Some honest and dignified sniffling followed the kiss, and Father wiped his glasses, after which he picked up Sylvie and bear-hugged me. Just before letting me go, he whispered, “You're the responsible one, Isobelâlook after your sister and be good for Mother. I know you'll make me proud.”
That was last November. Now it was June and we were the ones climbing into the coach, California-bound, saddened by farewells past and present. At least I was. Mother, who took her seat and faced resolutely forward, seemed no sadder than the proverbial clam. As for Sylvie, any excuse to get on a train thrills her to no end. While I waved through the window at my grandparents receding from view, Sylvie was climbing the brakeman's ladder on the back platform. The porter pulled her down before she could kill herself.
I will admit to cheering up somewhere south of Portland, as we dined on oyster stew and filet of sole while gazing out our dining-car window at an orangey sunset. After dinner, Sylvie wandered up the aisle making the acquaintance of all our fellow travelers, including a gentleman in a soldier's uniform three seats ahead on the opposite aisle. Being the responsible one, I kept an eye on her in case she overstayed her welcome, which usually didn't take long.
There was something odd about the soldier's face: while he seemed to be speaking, his mouth never moved. With a start, I realized that it wasn't a mouth. It was a mask. When Sylvie's hand went out to touch it, I jumped out of my seat and started up the aisle, saying, “Sylvie! Don't be rudeâ”
“It's all right, miss.” The soldier's muffled voice came through a narrow slit in the mask. His eyes tried to smile as he touched his painted-tin jaw, which was attached by almost invisible threads to his ears. “She means no harm. Unlike that exploding shell that got me in France.”
I smiled sickly as I murmured an apology and pulled Sylvie back to our seat. “Well done,” Mother said when I explained. “Sylvie, I think you can stay put until time for bed.”
“I wonder where he was when he got hit,” I mused. “Maybe Father was the first one to treat him!” This thought, dreadful as it was to contemplate, made me think of striking up a conversation with the wounded soldier myself.
“Who knows?” was Mother's only comment as she turned a page of the
Ladies' Home Journal
, adding, “Leave the poor man alone.”
I didn't just miss my fatherâI was slowly starving for him. Or I was living each day in the half dark, without the light of his easy smile. (Mother's smiles were not so forthright; I guess you would call them ironic.) Every week we faithfully sent letters to him, and at first he'd written back long, detailed replies about roughing it in a barn and trying to buy fresh vegetables from the Frenchies and the funny things his orderly said and how he'd improvised a scalpel from a British colonel's penknife and helped the nurses put up a scraggly fir tree at Christmas, decorated with cutouts from sardine cans. He was at pains to reassure us that his ears were within range of the fighting but the rest of him wasn't:
Bullets won't get me but the bedbugs might,
ha-ha.
Since January his dispatches were much shorter and farther between. “Maybe there'll be a letter waiting for us in California,” I said.
“Don't count on it.” Mother still gazed at the magazine but her eyes weren't moving. “We've talked about this, Isobel. He's extremely busy and too exhausted after a long day of patching up soldiers to write anything funny.” She turned a page with a snap. “And if he can't write anything
funny
, he can't write at all.”
She sounded almost angry at him for trying to keep a cheerful countenance, but then, she was angry at him for going in the first place. It would have made more sense, it seemed to me, to be angry at Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, who started the whole thing. Still, her irritation showed almost every time I mentioned Father going to the war, so I usually didn't.
But I longed for someone to talk to about it. All through the winter, my school chums and I had sold war bonds and marched in parades and knitted socks for soldiers, but the war felt so far away, and so did Father. What was it really like, tending to the wounded in a field hospital lit by the rockets' red glare?
Grandfather Ransom would know, since he had served as an army surgeon in the Philippines back in '98. But he never wanted to talk about that part of itâonly steaming into Manila Bay with Admiral Dewey, banners flying and artillery roaring. When I asked about his work, he usually just chewed his mustache and looked preoccupied.
Before long, Sylvie started kicking the seat, and Mother put her magazine aside. “When the seat-kicking begins, it's time to get ready for bed. Suppose I read not one but two chapters of
Robin Hood
tonight?”
For one so proper, Mother is a very good read-alouder, giving a bearlike growl to Little John and a thin sinister tone to the Sheriff of Nottingham. Sylvie begged for a third chapter, but by then the porters were coming through to turn down our bedsâliterally I mean, pulling down upper berths from the walls and nudging lower seats together to be made up with starchy sheets. I took an upper berth, with Sylvie opposite me. Mother tucked us in and kissed us good night before settling below.
Sometime in the wee hours, a rare thunderstorm rolled up and Sylvie tried to leap across the aisle from her berth to mine. I can't say why she thought this was a good idea, and she couldn't either. That may have been becauseâafter the hubbub caused by her catching her foot in the drapery pull and hanging upside down hollering like a banshee until the entire coach was awake and scrambling to her aidâit slipped her mind.
“Hoo-law,” the porter said, chuckling as he unwound the cords she'd wound herself in. “Derrin'-doin' like Mister Douglas Fairbanks.”
He meant the Mr. Fairbanks who was renowned for derring-do in the moving pictures, but Sylvie did not get it.
“I'm not a mister!” she cried, still undignifiedly upside-down. “I'm a
gir
l
!”
“Oh, for heaven's sake.” Mother was holding Sylvie up by the waist and trying to keep her nether half decently covered while gravity ruled otherwise. “As if every roused soul in this car didn't know that by now!”
In the confusion, I blundered into a shape behind me and turned to meet a horror: a ghostly face with no jaw and a shapeless lump of a mouth: “
Ahhhh
!
”
“Sorry, miss!” the soldier slurred. He'd forgotten his mask. “So sorryâtrying to helpâ”
He backed into his berth, pulling the curtains closed, and I felt as small as a shrub for hurting him like that. But really, what other response was possible for such a face? Those soldiers my father was patching upâhow many of them looked like him?
That was enough excitement for one night, even for Sylvie. She crawled in with me so I could talk her to sleep with a story, though I was hardly in a storytelling mood. Thunder boomed and lightning throbbed through the window blind as I tried to launch a plot: “Once upon a time, there was a little girl, six years oldâ”
“Just like me!” she interrupted, as usual.
“â¦who lived happily by the Northern Sea with her mother and fatherâ”
“And sister too?”
“Sylvie, can't you just go to sleep for a change?”
She insisted, so I made up something about the girls traveling south to the mysterious land of California, and fortunately she was asleep before I could get very far. I almost never got a chance to end my Sylvie stories, which might be why I wasn't good at endings. As Sylvie snored softly, my surroundings took on a sinister character, looming like a ghost.
Trains have a special kind of aloneness about them, especially at night in the sad glow of dim lights with restless sleepers all around. Our little bed, closed off by heavy curtains, began to feel like a box. It reminded me of Jane Eyre being locked up in the Red Room and made me glad of Sylvie's company, twitchy though she was.
The locomotive whistle moaned in the night and the iron wheels clacked relentlessly over the rail joints, their sharpness muffled by the rain:
ch-click
,
ch-click
.
Ch-click
,
ch-click
. I drifted off in the middle of a prayer for Father's safety, but sleep for me was iron-riddled and trembling with the shaky glow of the ceiling lamps.