The Year the Swallows Came Early (8 page)

R
eports from Luis were good. He sent word with Frankie, who stopped me outside my locker at school the next day.

“They all sold,” he said. “And Luis thinks you should bring in another batch.”

The happiness of hearing this news distracted me so much that, in class, it caused me to accidentally do the odd-numbered math problems instead of the evens that Miss Johnson had assigned.

When I got home that day, Mama called the wholesale fruit market in the next town, said we
needed to lower our costs, that the test had gone well, and I was in business for real now.

I knew I'd be able to earn enough money to do whatever I wanted. I knew this deep inside because Marisol—yes,
Marisol
—had believed it too.

I'd see her at the Swallow most days after school buying two chocolate-covered strawberries—one for her and one for Felix.

“I'm contributing to your cause,” she'd say, for which I'd always thank her.

“I understand about wanting something,” she'd say.

And I'd tell her, “I know you do.” And a feeling would settle over me like we were the same at our very inner core, and that each strawberry she bought connected us together even more.

I put aside my usual dinner-menu planning and cooking for me and Mama. I concentrated only on chocolate-covered strawberries. I wore a path in the cement from my house to the Swallow with all the delivering. Mama kept my earnings
safe in a new account at the bank. One that had only one name on it: mine.

At night, after I'd done my homework, we'd sit in lawn chairs on the back patio and dream about me being Groovy Robinson, Fortune 500 company owner.

Next to all this, though, I still thought a lot about Daddy. I thought about him during music class when Mr. Perez asked the class to play a slow song. I'd play that song on my oboe like I was the one who'd wrote it, like every high and low note was telling my story.

Thoughts about Daddy would sneak into my head even when there was nothing to remind me of him. Tying my shoes. Riding the bus. During math when Miss Johnson explained prime factorization with variables. A lot came to me during math.

In my mind, there were certain things I wondered about. Plus, I'd been mulling over the thought of getting into Great-grandmother Eleanor Robinson's pages and pages of stories.
The ones she'd left to me and told Mama I'd know what to do with. So far, though, no ideas were coming to me.

“Frankie?” I said to him the next Saturday morning as me, Marisol, and Felix sat at the back counter of the Swallow watching Luis make flour tortillas from scratch. “Can you help me with something?” A fresh tray of my strawberries sat next to the cash register. Two were already gone, bought by you-know-who.

“What?” he asked. He'd been going around not bothering to smile much or tell anyone about his mama, acting like nothing had happened the week before. Like she'd never appeared out of the blue looking for him. But I knew he was thinking about her. I knew by the way he held his stomach, his arm wrapped tight around his waist, holding everything in, how he tried to act all ho-hum.

“It's a cardboard box,” I answered, and then added, “a big one.”

“Does it have chalk inside?” asked Felix.

“No,” I said, and Marisol rolled her eyes.

Luis looked confused. “Where's this box?” He dusted his rolling pin and the countertop in flour. Tiny white particles floated in the air around his hands as he rolled out the circles of dough.

“In our hall closet at home,” I told everyone. “It's been there a really long time. It's marked
ER
, for
Eleanor Robinson
, in black marker. Mama told me it was mine.” I traced the initials
ER
in the flour on the countertop with my finger.

Marisol's eyes lit up, and she immediately began drawing a swallow in the flour.

Felix watched and then started to write his name.

“What's inside?” Frankie asked.

“Stories,” I told them. “They're written by my great-grandmother. She left them to me. I guess there could be other stuff, too. I'm hoping there's something there that might help me. I mean, since it was her money in the first place.”

Marisol glanced at me, looking confused.

“My savings account. The one I told you about that's gone now,” I said.

“Right.” She nodded that she remembered and then continued drawing a pair of wings in flight.

“Marisol, how do you make an
X
again?” Felix asked. He'd made several
H
s next to the
I
in his name. It was easy to see he was still learning his letters.

Marisol sighed loudly, like it might actually kill her to stop her drawing. “Like this,” she said, scratching a large
X
next to his
H
s. “It's only two lines, crisscrossed—like a bird claw, but simpler. Remember?”

“Oh, yeah,” he said, smiling.

She sighed even louder.

“Well,” Luis said, “you sure are a good printer, Felix.”

He beamed, then frowned. “I'll never be an artist, though. Marisol was an artist by the time she was three.”

We all looked at her. She was working on the bird's tail, its feathers fanned out perfectly. She worked so hard, without looking up, that I wondered if she heard us.

Finally Luis said, “Felix, I know you'll be something good someday. Maybe a business owner like your dad.”

Felix smiled again. “Probably I'll be that.”

Luis put down his rolling pin and wiped his hands, while Frankie pressed his palms against his stomach and looked out the window. I could tell Frankie was deciding something big.

“Let's check out that box,” Frankie told me finally, like he was relieved to have something to think about other than his stomachaches.

I smiled at him.

“Can I come too?” Felix asked.

“We have to go home now,” Marisol told him, and she jumped off her stool and held her hand out for Felix. I could tell by the way she waited for her brother with her hand held out firm that she loved him. Even if she did roll her eyes and sigh sometimes when he talked.

“This was a good medium to work with,” Marisol told Luis, pointing to the flour. “Thanks for the experience. It's given me some new ideas.”
Then she turned to me. “See ya later,” she said.

“Okay,” I answered.

“Glad to be of help,” Luis said.

Marisol and Felix walked toward the front of the shop.

“I wish I could see what's in that box,” Felix called over his shoulder to us as Marisol dragged him out the door.

Frankie helped Luis clean the flour off the counter. Then we made our way to the box shoved behind Mama's old hair dryers in the closet. So I could see for myself about the original Eleanor Robinson.

“Y
ou could've done it yourself. It's not that heavy.” Frankie stepped back and stretched his arms up. We'd slid the box into the middle of the kitchen floor. The smell of burned tuna melts and lemon-scented dish soap hung in the air. Mama, who'd taken over the routine cooking, had made sandwiches while home from the salon on her lunch break. She left them on a paper plate for me with a note saying, “
Bon appétit.
According to your horoscope today, good things are in store.”

The frying pan lay in the sink unwashed.
Drops of water splashed in threes from the faucet.
Drip, drip, drip. Drip, drip, drip.
Something Daddy had never got to fixing.

“I thought the box would be heavy because it's so big,” I told him. “Let's open it.”

It took us a few tries with the scissors to cut it open. Masking tape and years of heat waves had glued the seams shut, protecting what was inside.

When we finally peeled it away, the odor of dust and old paper came into the room, circling around us.

“What's this?” Frankie grabbed a yellowish crumpled piece of paper the size of a dollar bill. It was very wrinkled but looked like someone had tried their hardest to smooth it out. Like maybe they'd almost thrown it away but then thought,
No, this belongs in here after all.

“It looks like an article about her life,” I told him, thinking that it was probably the closest I would ever come to knowing her.

Frankie looked it over. “It says that she lived
in New York, that she had one daughter, a granddaughter, and a great-granddaughter…. That's you.” He looked up. “It also says she wrote a lot of books.” He stopped and gave the article to me.

I looked at the picture of her. She was not smiling, but she looked real smart, and I wondered if I would look like that someday when I was older.

I put the article on the kitchen table and we unpacked the rest of the box. An envelope fell to the ground next to my legs. In perfect cursive handwriting, it read, “To: Eleanor Robinson.” For a second I thought it must have been for her, but then I realized it was for me.

“Open it,” Frankie said. “It's addressed to you.”

“I know,” I answered, thinking how Frankie always got things before I did. Inside was a letter written in the same handwriting. “It must be from her.” My heart pounded.

“Well, what does it say?”

I stood up. I held the letter with both hands, like the words might have been written by a past president. “I'll read it to you.”

“She sounds nice,” Frankie said after a minute. He picked up the newspaper article and looked at her picture again. “She doesn't look nice, but she sounds nice.”

The words
I'm certain I would have loved you
rang in my head. “She
was
nice,” I told him. “I think we should look at the stories. There might be something in there, like a message or a clue.”

“You mean about your father and what happened?”

“Maybe.”

“I doubt it.” He reached into the box and took
out a very old book written by Isaac Asimov. Its pages were slightly yellow and some were torn. “She wasn't a fortune-teller.”

I took the book from him and held it. The cover showed a picture of what looked like a swirling galaxy and rows of spaceships flying around. I'd never seen anything so special. And I felt an overwhelming love for my great-grandmother, who had once read to my mama from these very pages. “Frankie, don't be so negative,” I told him.

He shrugged.

“I know you're mad. Do you wanna tell me what your mama said to you last week?”

“No,” he told the kitchen floor.

I waited.

The kitchen faucet dripped.

Finally he stood up and took a fresh roll of Tums from his pocket, opening it with his fingernail. Cherry, lemon, lemon, orange. He ate the fourth one. Then he reached into the box and took out the rest of the papers, a stack at least eighteen inches high, and set them on the table. “I
guess we could look through them,” he said.

It took some time, but we figured out there were three stories there, with a summary for each one.

I read the first summary. “It's about a deadly virus that creeps up through a cavern in the desert,” I told Frankie. “And aliens come down from space to heal the human race.”

“That doesn't sound like it would help with your situation.” He grinned his I-told-you-so grin and picked up the next one.

I sighed, thinking how science fiction was not at all like real life. Maybe he was right.

“Here's one where a boy travels though time to the future and discovers a colony of people on Mars who are the only living species left from Earth.” Frankie held up the summary of the second story. “I'd like to read this one.”

“Maybe later. This is
serious
, Frankie.”

“Sorry.” He put the story down and picked up the last one. I watched him skim the summary page.

“What's it about?”

“Looks like another undiscovered colony of people. Only this one is living on a space station, orbiting Earth. She sounds like a good writer, though. These would make good books.”

“I guess so.” I didn't care just then if she'd written award-winning books.

Frankie walked to the kitchen sink and put his hands under the faucet, catching the drips in his palms. “I wish there would've been something in there that you wanted.” He looked out the window, the same way he'd been staring at the ocean lately. Finally he said, “Oh, well. Just forget about it.”

“How can you put things out of your head like that, and pretend like your mama didn't come?”

Frankie shrugged.

“I mean, I can't just
not
think about things that happen. Like yesterday on my way to catch the school bus, I said to myself, ‘Okay, I'll take the long way to the bus stop. The way along the shore. And I'll pick up just one seashell—one.'”
I held up one finger. “‘If a hermit crab pokes his legs out, I'll go see my daddy in jail. I'll ask him why he did it. I'll find out what happened—from his side.' Frankie, I must have picked up fourteen seashells before I found one with a hermit crab living inside. It was like I
wanted
to find one.”

Frankie stared at me like I was speaking Latin.

“Don't you get it? I want to know
his
side.” Feeling exhausted from everything, I leaned my head against the box, and it slid backward. As I pulled it back, I saw an envelope lying on the bottom, tucked into the corner. Something Frankie had missed when he'd unpacked the stories. It read,
HARBOR BANK, 12 HARBOR DRIVE
.

I climbed to my knees, grabbed it, and tore it open. “It's a key!” I showed it to Frankie. It was silver and shiny, and just bigger than a quarter. I held it up to the light coming through the window. Its reflection darted around the kitchen walls as I turned it over and over.

Frankie walked closer. “Hold on,” he said.
“It has the number one hundred seventy-three engraved on it.”

It was true. On the back were three small numbers that could be seen if we looked close enough. And I remembered seeing one just like it last summer when Daddy had taken me with him to the safe-deposit boxes inside the bank where he kept his insurance policies and coin collections. He said he had to keep them there so they'd never get lost, and those boxes were the one place in the world where things would be completely protected. Even from fire.

“It's for the safe-deposit boxes at the bank,” I told Frankie.

“Really?” His eyes came back to life.

“I think so.”

The doorbell rang three times suddenly, like whoever was out there ringing it was having some kind of actual emergency.

I ran to open the door. Marisol stood holding Felix's hand. He grinned up at me.

“He won't stop talking about your mystery
box,” said Marisol. “I finally had to bring him up.” She rolled her eyes.

“I told her there could be treasure inside,” Felix said.

Marisol rolled her eyes again.

Frankie came to the door. “We didn't find any treasure, but we found this key.” He held it up to show them.

“See?” Felix said to Marisol. “A key to
open
the treasure.”

“Actually, I'm pretty sure it opens one of the safe-deposit boxes at the bank,” I told them. “I was just on my way over there.”

“That's where treasure is usually kept,” Felix said, like he'd seen some just yesterday in a safe-deposit box. “It's not kept buried anymore.”

I didn't want to tell him that treasure didn't really exist these days, but Marisol didn't have a problem with it.

“I told you, there's no such thing as finding treasure. That's only in books. And movies.”

Felix pouted. “Are you sure?”

I bent down to him. “If I find anything good, I'll let you know,” I told him.

“Thanks,” Marisol said. And by the way she said it, I could tell she really was thankful, and that there was a little part of her that looked like she hoped I might find something, just so Felix could see it.

“I'll walk into town with you,” I told Marisol and Felix.

“Can I hold the key?” asked Felix.

I nodded and gave it to him. Then I quickly packed all of Great-grandmother's stories back into the brown box and pushed it into the closet.

The three of us headed for the bank while Frankie started back to the shop to meet Luis.

I was sure the answer I was looking for would be inside box number 173.