The Atomic Weight of Secrets or The Arrival of the Mysterious Men in Black (27 page)

It was Wallace’s mother who had named him Wallace, instead of naming him Benjamin Banneker V, which is what was expected.

“We’ve had enough Benjamin Bannekers,” Wallace had heard his mother say in defense, time and again. “Let there now be a Wallace Banneker, the first.” She had never told Wallace he had any shoes to fill but his own.

Though Wallace’s mother had been a very busy person, too, she’d never been too busy for Wallace. She had meetings and laboratory work and late nights at her desk, but she would come home every night and climb into Wallace’s bed and cuddle close, caress his cheek, and rub his head with the bottom of her chin. The thought of it made him feel warm inside.

Sometimes, Wallace’s mother would scoop him up in her arms and sit with him in the rocking chair, telling him about her day and listening to him about his. Wallace tried to remember, and thought she might have sung to him, too, but he wasn’t sure. Thinking about it had been keeping him up nights, angry with himself for forgetting.

Wallace’s mother would never leave the house in the morning without getting a kiss from Wallace, even if she was just going out to collect the morning paper. When she left for work at the laboratory, she made it clear how important those kisses were.

“It’s hard for me to go an hour without a kiss from my number one boy,” she would say. “Can you imagine? Me going through an entire day without one? I just would not survive.”

Wallace would give her the biggest kiss he could muster to get her through what was usually a very long day. She would close her eyes and soak it in.

Wallace knew now that his kisses—even his biggest kiss—had not been big enough. Wallace had never heard of brain fever before. He knew all about it now.

Miss Brett knew some of Wallace’s story. She never asked him to tell her things, but she was always there to listen. He had told her about his lucky coin.

“I always kept it in my pocket,” Wallace had told Miss Brett. “But Father said he needed the luck and took it while we were on the train to Dayton. He never said why. He just took it.” And then Wallace’s father had just driven away, leaving the little boy standing there, alone, at the door of a hotel, with nothing but a paper that said “One Oak” and no explanation as to what that meant.

Miss Brett could hear the pain in Wallace’s voice and see the confusion and hurt in his eyes when he told her about that day. She could imagine the little boy, standing there in a cloud of dust, the piece of paper in his hand, watching his father leave. She could imagine that little boy feeling utterly alone as the carriage disappeared.

As Wallace followed the doorman to Room 258, his hand had gone instinctively to his empty pocket.

That night, alone in the hotel, Wallace didn’t go down to supper. Instead, he lay in bed, wondering what life had thrown at him. He had never been totally alone before, although there were times when he felt he was. He had taken off his glasses and closed his eyes. He imagined his mother tickling his head with
her chin. It was hours of lying there, fighting tears, fighting fear, fighting to understand the reason he was alone in a strange city with no one to tell him why. He had tried rocking himself to sleep. He rolled himself into a ball and tried to imagine being held by someone. He tried, but failed.

In the morning, he realized he had actually fallen asleep at some point in the night. For a moment, he forgot where he was and why he was lying, fully dressed, on a strange bed in a strange room. But quickly, the lack of understanding flooded back, and he lay there for a long while, staring at the tall arched ceiling. There were carvings of little angels and something that, at first, Wallace thought was a moose. He reached for his glasses. The moose turned out to be a unicorn.

Wallace had told Miss Brett about much of this on that first night. He had also told her how his mother used to rock him to sleep every night, no matter what else was going on. After his mother had died, Wallace had found sleeping the hardest thing to do. He would climb into bed with his father, but it was not the same. And Wallace could never imagine asking his father to rock him. That kind of weakness would never have been tolerated.

Miss Brett thought about the little boy alone in the hotel. She thought about the little boy, scared and lonely, lying awake in his bed, afraid to tell his father he couldn’t sleep. The poor little boy, Miss Brett thought to herself as she rocked him to sleep. Poor, sweet little boy. At least she could give him this.

T
HE
G
REEN
B
OOK
S
HARES
A S
ECRET

OR

LUCY’S FLOWERS

“T
he thing I still don’t understand is what those devils were doing in your mother’s nightdress drawer,” said Faye. Miss Brett was in the kitchen making supper and all the children were in Faye and Lucy’s room, discussing the same thing they always discussed—until Faye brought up something new.

Three weeks had passed since deciding to pursue their flying machine as both a fabulous invention and the means to rescue their parents. Every day, they worked and worked, and they came close to finishing several times, but there was always something not quite right.

And there were a few moments when things were very wrong indeed. As they tested the speed of Jasper’s propeller, they accidentally launched a cornhusk they were using to balance it, creating a rocket that shot through the orchard into a grazing pasture—they could hear the angry retorts of a sheep in the distance. They then sent a propeller over the trees and startled a passing birdwatcher, who most likely thought it was some kind of never-before-seen bird. Wallace had to be revived after his
nose got a bit too close to the diethyl ether he was using to power up the engine. (Luckily, Miss Brett had been making supper at the time.)

Through the weeks, they fell victims to some of the same pitfalls that had prevented would-be flyers from getting off the ground for centuries. The thing just wouldn’t fly.

But in some ways, they were getting closer. With Noah’s engine adjustments, Faye’s change in wing angle, Jasper’s propeller enlargements, and Lucy’s tail designs, they were getting closer every day.

All the while, Wallace felt heavy guilt because he was mostly working toward perfecting his polymer. He avoided Faye’s glare, but he felt it. And his guilt was not only about his contributions to the aeroplane. It was double guilt.

He knew he had helped—some. His suggestions had made the engine powerful and efficient, even though the original idea to use diethyl ether was Jasper’s. But more than anything, Wallace knew he had a promise to keep, and he was not sure he’d be able to do it. He could not help feel the importance of what he was doing on his own, and balance that against the importance of what his classmates were doing.

And Wallace knew he was not in the only one who felt his absence.

“Where’s Wallace?” Faye asked when they were trying to move the cockseat, which was attached to the engine, from the wooden gardening table to a more stable workspace. They could have used the extra hands and, because he was near an open window, Wallace had heard her ask. But he couldn’t put down his burette at that moment.

“He’s never around when we need him, is he?” Faye had groaned in frustration.

Wallace had flinched from the comment, dropping the beaker and wasting the fluid inside. He could have gone to help them then, he thought, because he had failed to finish this stage of his experiment. It had only made him feel worse when Faye walked by and saw him there, burette still poised in the air. She looked at him, daggers in her eyes, then shook her head and walked away.

The children kept their notes and drawings in Lucy’s desk, all proof of their singular focus. Though they felt they might very well be headed for a successful mission, they spoke very little about how they would escape from the farm, and what they would do once they did. Where would they go? How would they find their parents?

“We are surrounded,” said Noah. “Whether by love or greed or nefarious men wearing bear suits, we are certainly surrounded.”

“I can’t help but think there’s more to this than simply keeping us from harm,” Jasper said. “We’ve been invaded, not just surrounded. Those men were in my mother’s room, in her things.”

That’s when Faye asked the question. “I just don’t understand it,” she continued. “What was that book, when it was a book? Why do they want it? Why is it important?”

Jasper jolted up from the girls’ bed where he had been lazily reclining. Was he a fool? An idiot? A dimwit? Had he never questioned what the men were doing or why that green book was important?

“Lucy, where is that book?” he asked.

“It’s pressing my flowers,” she said without concern.

“Where is it pressing your flowers?” Jasper asked.

“Why?” asked Lucy.

“We want to see it,” said Wallace. He, too, was at full attention.

“Why?” asked Lucy, concern rising. The book was hers now, she felt. It was her flower-pressing book.

“Because it might have something to do with all of this,” Faye said, trying to keep her anger in check. Did they have the answer in their possession? Did they actually have a clue that they’d ignored? Had Jasper been so stupid as not to have looked at the thing?

“We looked at it,” Jasper said to Faye’s silent accusation. “It was just an old green leather book with no pages.” But he felt something nagging at him. Had he really looked at it?

“We did not
all
look at it, Jasper,” Faye said. “You told us about it. I want to see it for myself.”

“It’s my flower book!” Lucy said.

“Get it, Lucy,” demanded Faye, crossly. “Get it now.”

“Don’t shout at her,” Jasper said, rising to his feet as he turned to Lucy. “But it would be good if we could see it, Luce.”

“But I want it back,” she said.

Faye rolled her eyes. “It isn’t yours, Lucy.”

“Yes, you can have it back,” Jasper said, throwing an angry look at Faye. It was none of her business, and the book certainly wasn’t hers to command.

“Well, if that’s a promise, then I’ll let you see it.” Lucy reached under the bed and pulled out her weekend satchel. She opened it and took out the green book. It was tied with a ribbon, as it had been when Jasper had seen it under her bed at the house. She held it close to her chest.