Odessa Again (12 page)

Just then, Mom’s car came into view.

It was a new ritual since she’d started work. Odessa and Oliver walked to the bus stop, where they’d meet Ben Greenstein and his mother, who waited with the three of them until the bus arrived. Mom would leave the house right after the kids and honk and wave as she drove past on her way to work.

Odessa flailed her arms wildly. “Stop,” she yelled.

Mom pulled over.

Odessa ran to the passenger door and opened it.

She spoke without stopping to breathe. “You have to take Mud to the vet—it’s really important he’s really, really sick—Oliver is too scared after what happened to Truman to tell you—if Mud doesn’t see a doctor he’s gonna die.”

Odessa slammed the door, ran to the bus, and climbed on.

She sat next to Claire and smiled. It was nice having her as a bus friend. She shut her eyes and took a silent vow never to enter her mother’s medicine cabinet again. Never would she bear the responsibility of taking another’s life, even if that life belonged to a smelly hamster with rice-sized teeth.

She didn’t talk to Oliver once all day.

Walking home from the bus stop that afternoon, Odessa thought about how she could get Oliver to repay her. He owed her big-time. The problem was, he didn’t know he owed her. He didn’t know she’d gone back and helped him. No matter. She’d figure out a way to make him pay.

When they walked through the front door, Odessa did not smell pumpkin muffins. And she did not find Mrs. Grisham waiting for them in the kitchen.

Mom sat at the table with a serious look on her face. A face that said:
We
need
to
talk
.

“It’s Mud.” Mom held out her arms to Oliver. “He isn’t going to make it. I took him to the vet, but there’s nothing they can do to save him.”

9 Hours

Odessa had started to see herself as someone with limitless capabilities. Kind of all-powerful.

Odessa
Almighty.

No more.

As it turns out, going back in time can’t fix everything. Mud’s demise made that clear.

Now she was just
Odessa
Who
Can
Go
Back
and
Correct
Mistakes, Sometimes—
a title that didn’t have quite the same ring to it.

She told herself that she had never killed the hamster in the first place. Just believing, briefly, she that
had
caused Mud’s death … it didn’t fit with how she saw herself.

She was a giver, not a taker.

A fixer! Not a breaker.

And now that she knew Mud was going to die anyway, she felt … well, better.

Oliver, however, was not recovering speedily. He rarely smiled, and had no energy to be his pesky self.

Mom offered to get him a new hamster, but he refused.

“How about a guinea pig? They’re hardy!”

“No thanks.”

“I’d consider a ferret.”

Oliver shook his head.

“You know, we could always go back to being a cat family.”

He didn’t even bother to respond.

“Hey,” Odessa said. “Remember when your bike got stolen and then Dad went out and got you a new one and it was way better than the one you used to have?”

Oliver looked at her. For a minute she thought he might tell her to
shut
up
or ask why she had to be such a
stupid
butt-brain,
but he just walked off and closed himself in his room.

Odessa listened outside his door. Was he crying? Talking to his stuffed hamster, Barry? She heard nothing.

This silence was maybe the worst sound of all.

She thought of giving him the hundred-dollar bill. Maybe that would cheer him up. But she decided against it: money can’t buy happiness. At least, that was what grown-ups said.

Oliver was particularly glum over the weekend. Because they shared a room in what was now Dad
and
Jennifer’s apartment, it was hard not to notice the depths of his
blueness.

She didn’t know how to cheer him up, but that didn’t stop her from trying. One attempt, a happy dance, ended with her twisting an ankle.

He wouldn’t play Scrabble. Jennifer had picked up a deluxe version, the kind where the board spins to face the next player, and Odessa brought along her new grown-up dictionary with the purple underlined words, but Oliver shook his head. “No thanks.”

Odessa set up a runway for a fashion show and Jennifer let her borrow her heels. She wore her lavender dress even though the wedding was months away, but Oliver refused to put on his suit with the matching tie.

Jennifer tried too. She suggested a Lego challenge: Who can build the tallest structure in three minutes? Oliver took a pass.

And then on Saturday morning, while they were watching TV, the only activity Oliver would engage in, his favorite commercial came on. It was for a car driven by hamsters in baggy pants and gold chains, hamsters that could break-dance. Every time Oliver saw this commercial he’d laugh until he cried, except for this Saturday morning when he started crying without any laughing first.

Odessa sat across the room, stunned. She wanted to go comfort him somehow, but she took too long, and before she knew it Jennifer hurried to the couch and put an arm around the sobbing Oliver.

That was when he shouted at her.

“Don’t touch me!”

Shy, timid Oliver roared like a lion.

Dad came storming into the room. “What’s going on in here?”

“Nothing,” Jennifer said. She stood, hands deep in her pockets. “Oliver’s just upset.”

Dad looked from Oliver to Jennifer and back again, and then at Odessa, as if she could do anything other than keep her heart from pounding its way right out of her chest.

The first thing she wanted to do was run upstairs to her attic. To turn back the clock and reach Oliver first. That way, if he’d shouted, he’d have shouted at her. That’s the way things were supposed to be. Brothers are supposed to shout at sisters. Not at the woman your dad is going to
re
marry.

But Odessa couldn’t run upstairs, because she was at the Light House: Dad’s. Her attic was at the Green House: Mom’s.

“Oliver?” Dad looked at him.

The room felt like it was shrinking. It felt like someone had turned up the thermostat.

“It’s okay, Glenn,” Jennifer said.

More than anything, at that moment, Odessa wished her mom was there. She’d know what to say to make the room expand, and cool down, and feel normal again.

Odessa looked at the clock above the sofa. They weren’t going home until tomorrow evening, and that would be too late. She couldn’t fix a thing.

Jennifer walked out of the room. Dad sat by Oliver and all at once Odessa felt that water tank inside herself filling up, not with tears, but with rage.

If Dad hadn’t left their old house, if he hadn’t de-hyphenated the family, they wouldn’t be in this apartment, and there wouldn’t be an almost stranger named Jennifer in the other room, and Oliver wouldn’t be looking so miserable because he wouldn’t have screamed, and anyway he wouldn’t have even been given a hamster who died, because when Dad and Mom lived together they said no to rodents.

Odessa went and took her brother by the hand. It had been so long since she’d held it she could feel that it had grown bigger, and she pulled him into their bedroom. They spent most of what was left of the weekend in there. Odessa wrote in her journal. Oliver played with his Legos.

When Dad dropped them off on Sunday evening he honked, Mom came to the door, and they smiled at each other. As she walked up the steps, Odessa thought again about their smiles and about all the things she couldn’t fix.

Still 9 Hours

Odessa’s tenth birthday was approaching, and she found herself wondering if this was what it meant to grow up. Did the world just get more and more mysterious? More
confounding?
More
bewildering
?

There was the attic floor, of course, and then the door with no handle under her desk. There was how your best friend could step out of the way and let you split your head open, yet continue to be your best friend. There was the way two people could smile at each other, and then one could go and
re
marry somebody else.

She wished she could just live in
Dreamonica,
where she got to make every decision—how many puppies, how big a mansion, even what color hair and eyes she had.

And speaking of eyes, there was Sadie Howell, who had turned her attention to Theo Summers, big-time.

Odessa could not compete with those pale blue eyes; she couldn’t even match their shade when she designed her online self.

Smile, blush, giggle. Smile, blush, giggle.

That was Sadie Howell. Hovering over Theo’s desk. Sitting next to him at assemblies. Running up to him at recess.

Smile, blush, giggle.

Odessa couldn’t believe this sort of thing worked. It made Sadie look kind of dumb, or—as Uncle Milo liked to say—one fry short of a Happy Meal.

But Theo seemed to fall for it. Without his shaggy hair to hide behind, Theo had no choice but to stare right back into Sadie’s eyes.

All this time Odessa had thought the secret lay in math! If she could show Theo how good she was at solving equations, he’d see that she was worthy of his love.

It seemed so stupid now. Maybe Odessa’s Happy Meal was the one missing the fry.

She needed a plan. Solutions to mysteries didn’t fall from the sky. They didn’t materialize out of thin air or show up in the bottom of a box of Honey Nut Cheerios. Library books didn’t unravel mysteries, and you couldn’t buy answers with a one-hundred-dollar bill. Asking the grown-ups in your life a whole bunch of questions wasn’t any help either.