The Singing Stick, page 6
She’d rather have a cheeseburger than pizza. A cheeseburger with ketchup, honey mustard, and sweet pickles. Order it on the Net. Delivery by drone. For that, she’d leave her window open through the most humongous snowstorm ever. She’s sick of ramen.
She’d order a burger for Lucy, too, if she could.
But that might make Lucy poop before Charley gets home.
Lucy’s pink tongue, all scratchy and wet, licks Olivia’s cheek. Olivia giggles.
“No one gets you like I do,” Charley always tells her.
But the old man next door just might. In her secret mind, she calls him Grampa.
She used to have a real grampa. He lives in heaven now.
Heaven might be up in the sky, with the sun and the moon. She isn’t sure. She can’t see it through her binoculars.
Every day, when Charley’s selling cars and her mom’s working her shift at the store, Olivia spies on Grampa. He sits in a chair at his window, over the hedge. He opens his window, like he wants her to hear his music, only he doesn’t know about her spying. He doesn’t even know she’s here.
His music makes the birds at his bird feeders real happy. Red ones and gray ones and blue ones and brown ones.
While Grampa plays, she always sits real still and listens real close. The sun can’t be too bright or it stabs her eyes. Then her binoculars are no good.
She always keeps her head down. She’s real good at being invisible.
“Quiet as a church mouse,” Charley said once, bragging her up.
“What’s a church mouse?”
“A mouse that lives in a big old church. She runs up Pastor’s leg when he’s not looking and makes him laugh—like this!”
She doesn’t like being a church mouse. Not at all.
Charley said it’s going to snow today. A lot.
That’s very bad.
When it snows, Grampa lowers his window almost the whole way down, and she can’t hear his music much at all.
He’s just like her, locked up all alone in his little room. Except he doesn’t have a Lucy. He has a cat. The cat’s gray with white on her chest, belly, and paws. Her name is Shadow.
Shadow’s a name Olivia made up. But it could be the cat’s name, for real.
Or maybe Ashes. Or Smoke.
Olivia likes Shadow.
Shadow’s a real good leaper. She jumps on Grampa’s back when he bends over. And sometimes, when Grampa’s sitting in his chair, playing his music, Shadow jumps up and perches on his shoulder, like a big owl on a wizard. Grampa doesn’t get mad and swat her off. He lets her stay.
Sometimes, when Charley’s home and making her “feel good,” and Lucy’s outside the door, whining and scratching—whoosh! she’s suddenly up in the air, like in a dream. She flies like a fairy over to the red storybook house with the yellow shutters, right through the window into Grampa’s room. She floats like a birthday balloon, up by the ceiling. She doesn’t know how it happens, but it does, like magic.
Grampa can’t see her floating up there, but she can see him down below, like Charley says God sees all His children. Especially the bad ones, who don’t do what they’re supposed to. They get into big trouble, Charley says.
She doesn’t want to be bad.
So she floats up there, listening to Grampa play songs on his black stick, till Charley gets done and leaves. Then whoop! she’s back in her bed again, and Lucy’s there beside her, whimpering and washing her face with her tongue.
THE RED TURTLE
1:11 P.M.
Simon stands at his desk, leafing through a short stack of mail. Several greeting card envelopes are addressed to him.
Must be an occasion you’ve forgotten.
By the return addresses, one card is from Gertie McClure. Another, from Mike and Victor at Dinky Creek. A third, from a Dr. R. Betts at the University of Chicago.
Beneath the cards, the junk. Then the Daily Register. The New York Times.
And here’s a piece of Priority Mail. He smiles. It’s from Gilly.
He rips the tear strip on the mailer.
Fritz bats at the strip with a frisky white paw.
Inside the mailer is a large manila envelope decorated with hand-drawn red hearts.
Valentine’s Day, maybe?
On one side of the envelope, Gilly has printed: “Do not open this envelope until your birthday!!!”
My birthday.
What day is today?
Doesn’t matter.
He unfastens the envelope’s clasp and draws out a sheaf of papers. Clipped to the top is a note.
His eyes return to “Don’t show Mom.” This can’t be good. Gilly’s never been one to keep secrets from her mother.
His curiosity quells his misgivings. He riffles through the papers. They appear to be copies of official documents and correspondence from a bygone era. Typewritten on vintage machines, with strings of longhand cropping up in the margins.
And here’s a sepia-toned eight-by-ten photograph.
The sight of it shoves him down into his chair.
Memories of the day Pop took this picture rush back like a movie reel stuck in high-speed rewind. It can’t be switched off.
“Stand still,” Pop says, pointing his new Kodak. “Smile!”
What are you and Mama supposed to do—pose here in the yard, pretending to be as light and happy as those jackrabbits nesting only a short distance away in the patchy spring grass? Pretending that you—and Mama too—haven’t just done a god-awful thing? Pretending that Pop hadn’t arrived home from Lincoln in the nick of time?
“C’mon, you two!” Pop coaxes. “Say cheese.”
“Why cheese?” You scowl. “That’s dumb!”
Mama snatches off your cap and rakes her fingers through your hair. You shy from her touch, still smarting from her slaps. But you smell her talcum powder. A smell you love. Faintly vanilla. Clean. Safe.
“Karl,” she says to Pop, “must we do this now? It’s not the best time . . .”
“Won’t take long.”
“But it’s so windy!”
“Just a few more shots!”
Pop studies the Kodak’s viewfinder. All the while, those darn rabbits just lie there in the grass. Any other day, he’d be running for his twelve gauge.
“I’ll get these prints developed right away,” he says. “Want to make sure I know what I’m doing with this gizmo. Got to be good by Easter—Christ! So damn windy! Keeps messing with your hair!”
Mama pulls you closer. You wriggle against her.
“On three!” Pop announces.
“Mama loves you so much, Chasker,” she whispers. She seldom uses your middle name out loud. Never in front of anyone else. “Smile for your father.”
“One . . . two . . . chee-eeze!” Pop sings.
Empty and raw, you stare at the camera.
Shick, clicks the shutter.
Shick, shick.
And here’s another photograph—black and white. An orchestra of young people. Mama isn’t hard to spot, dressed in white, clarinet across her lap.
Someday soon, you’ll be a forgotten old photo. Like her.
His eye drifts to the bass drum in the back.
Genoa Indian School it says on the side.
Indian School.
Indian.
His skull is pounding.
He flips the picture, hoping for some sort of caption or note. Any kind of explanation.
“Your mother,” Gilly had written along the bottom edge, in fine blue felt tip, “was a Dakota woman from the Sisseton reservation—”
Dakota.
Reservation.
His mind throws him back into the kitchen of the homeplace. To the red coffee can, high up in the cupboard, where Mama had stored her matchbooks. To the turtle, beaded red, hidden inside the battered matchbox at the bottom of the can.
That turtle wasn’t a toy.
He shoots up like a man in his prime, the photographs cascading to the floor with the rest of Gilly’s papers. His chair topples. His music stand tips. Sheet music flies.
Fritz darts with flat whiskers under the desk.
Simon’s out of breath as he tops the attic ladder. He yanks the chain of the light fixture with such force that the end swings up and clinks against the naked bulb. That lone bulb must be loose in its socket. Or dying. It yields a flickering light.
Maybe Iris had discovered that red turtle in the coffee can when she purged all evidence of Mama from the house—a job Pop had put to her after the wedding. Or maybe she’d stumbled upon it in the course of her housework.
Either way, if Iris had found the turtle, she would have kept it. She’d have known it had to be kept.
And if Iris had kept it, the turtle must be up here, in the far corner, amongst the stuff his stepbrother, Colin, had shipped to him after she died.
Simon has to hurry. Time is his enemy. It has him surrounded. He’ll soon forget why he’s up here.
In his haste to cut across the attic, he clips his ankle on Gilly’s old rocking horse. He careens against the crib. He grabs at its spindles to break his fall, but misses. His knees smack the floor, square. He buckles forward with a sharp moan.
Slow down before you break something! Fee says in his brain.
In the winking light of the faulty bulb, Simon tussles with the margins of memory.
He sets his sights on the steamer trunk his grandparents had brought over on the boat from Germany.
Too obvious, Fee says. Iris was smarter than that.
“Where, then?” he says aloud.
Somewhere Colin could never have found it and thrown it out—you know, not realizing that it mattered.
He picks himself up, his banged-up knees on fire.
All the boxes from the homeplace are taped shut. Except for one.
It’s the train set Pop had bought that first Christmas without Mama. One of the last sets Lionel had manufactured before Pearl Harbor.
Following a hunch, Simon unwraps car after car after car.
Here, at last, is the red caboose.
Simon pushes his spectacles higher on his nose. He lifts the caboose toward the light bulb, somehow no longer flickering. By its steady light, he peers through the tiny windows.
Triumph surges. Snug inside is the big matchbox from the coffee can.
He inspects the caboose’s black undercarriage, its peacock-green roof, its red body with tarnished brass railings and ladders. No easy way to get in. Extracting the matchbox will be delicate work, like excavating a fragile fossil in the field.
How had Iris ever managed to lodge it inside the caboose? Next to impossible, like fitting a ship through the neck of a bottle.
Only a woman trying to protect another woman’s secrets—and pass them on—would ever go to such bother.
He digs his Swiss Army knife out of his pocket.
SEE-THROUGH
1:21 P.M.
Olivia gets up to peer through the curtains again. Where can Grampa be?
She’s not sure, but his black stick might be a “clarinet.” That’s a big-people word. She read about it on the Net.
She’s on the Net a lot. She can almost use it like a big girl. She can almost read like a big girl too.
The Net’s fast, like melt-your-face fast. Maybe it runs on electric, like a clock. It doesn’t have a cord, not that she can see, but the whole world seems plugged in.
And the Net’s got all kinds of stuff. It has, like, all of everything. Like Noah’s Ark. The Bible says the Ark had two of every creepy, crawly thing. It was stuffed with animals: dogs and cats and horses and giraffes and unicorns and mermaids.
The Ark must have had trolls, too, and vampires and zombies—how else could they still be around? The Flood would have taken them out, like a bomb.
Charley might be a werewolf in disguise. His body’s so hairy! The Ark must have had werewolves too.
Olivia’s pretty sure her mom is a witch ’cause she has a fat wart and she’s always burning candles and she acts like strange stuff that should never happen is fine and perfect.
If her mom is a witch, maybe that means Olivia’s a witch too. She thinks about this a lot. If she is a witch, she wants to be a good one. And brainy, like Hermione Granger. Only not so bossy.
She’ll never be a hairy werewolf. Not if she can help it.
Maybe God’s in charge of the Net. Maybe it’s His castle, since God is King, and kings live in castles. Or maybe the Net is heaven—you can’t see it, but it’s up there, and it’s humongous.
Or maybe the Net is God.
Praying to the Net doesn’t help, though.
She doesn’t know how the Net works, but she needs it, like Charley says he needs her, more than anybody. Sometimes he shows her secret “big-girl” stuff on the Net, because she’s “special.”
She doesn’t like being special.
She wishes she could tell the Net all her secrets. Or maybe she could tell Grampa. But Charley says if she tells her secrets to a single soul, they won’t be special anymore. And God will be very, very mad.
She has to keep God happy. Or else He might write her name in the Bad People Book.
That would be very, very bad.
She drops down on the floor with a tablet and her crayons. Lucy’s still on the bed, fast asleep, lying on her back, paws in the air.
Olivia turns her tablet sideways.
She pulls a black crayon from the box. She draws a house on the left side of the paper. Her house.
Now, down the middle of the paper, a thick hedge, with green.
Now, with red, Grampa’s house on the right, much bigger than the black house.
She picks up orange. She hates orange.
Back in the black house, she puts Charley, with blobby eyes and a big crooked mouth and teeth like an angry pumpkin. Fat, hairy arms too. Fingers like knives.
In the red house, she puts Grampa in purple, with a smile. She puts a black stick poking out of his mouth. She gives him long purple eyelashes. Bright blue eyes. Silver hair.
She picks up white. She puts Hat Lady right beside Grampa. On the white paper, you can hardly tell she’s there. When you hold the paper just right, she shines.
But Olivia wants to see her better. She puts a pink hat in one of Hat Lady’s see-through hands.
Olivia smiles then. Pink’s her very own favoritest color.
When Grampa sits at the window and plays his black stick, he thinks he’s all alone, but Olivia knows better. He’s never alone. Not ever.
Hat Lady is always with him.
Grampa can’t see Hat Lady. Not one bit. But Olivia can.
This may be her bestest secret of all.
Hat Lady looks old, like Olivia’s mom. But not as old as Grampa. Her hair is long and almost black, pulled back and wrapped in a coil. It’s mussed up, like she’s been out in the wind. Or maybe in a big fight.
Her clothes look real funny. Nothing like the clothes pretty women wear on the Net. More like what Olivia’s mom wears. “Frumpy,” Charley would say.
Hat Lady is always carrying a pink straw hat. It’s decorated real nice with flowers. It’s never on her head, where it belongs. Maybe it doesn’t fit.
Hat Lady hovers, just like Charley says Olivia’s mom does. Charley gripes about her mom’s hovering, but Grampa’s not bothered by Hat Lady. He never even seems to notice her. Like, she’ll be standing so close to him, he has to feel her, right there . . . but nope! Not even when her tears drip.
Hat Lady can walk right through walls, the way Olivia can fly through windows when the fairy magic happens. Hat Lady can even walk straight through Grampa. Whoo-ee! So cool!
Once, on the Net, Charley showed Olivia a kind of butterfly with see-through wings, like glass. It can hide in plain sight without even trying. It doesn’t have to be afraid of anything. Not even werewolves. Not ever.
That’s the kind of creature Hat Lady is. See-through. But she’s not solid, like those glassy butterfly wings.
At first, Olivia thought maybe Hat Lady was a ghost. But ghosts aren’t see-through. They look like white sheets, and when they pay you a visit, they make a room go scary-cold. They make you hide under the covers and screw your eyes shut.
Hat Lady’s nothing like that. She’s like a foggy window with a light on the other side. She glides around real quiet. You want to get closer to her, not run away.
Maybe she’s a guardian angel. But angels should have wings, right? And angels don’t make tears, do they?
Besides, shouldn’t an angel be able to see a little girl flying into a room and drifting up by the ceiling?
Hat Lady has eyes only for Grampa and his black stick. She wants to touch him so bad. But when she goes to kiss him, her lips pass right through his cheek. She can’t even pat his head or tap his shoulder. When she tries, her and him get all mixed up in each other, like some crazy kind of cartoon.
Hat Lady tries to talk to Grampa too. He’ll be playing his black stick, and she’ll be telling him stories. But her voice is as see-through as her body is. It sort of melts into the music. You can’t tell one from the other.
What Hat Lady’s trying to say to Grampa must be super important, or she wouldn’t try so hard. Maybe that’s why she starts crying sometimes, ’cause she can’t get through to him.
So Olivia wants to help Hat Lady.
“Listen real close to your music,” Olivia will whisper to Grampa through the curtains at her window. She’ll wave her Mystical Magical Mermaid Wand at him and use that witchy voice she always uses to cast good spells (in case she actually is a good witch).
Or if she’s over in his room, floating up by the ceiling, she’ll point her finger down, like all those pictures of God when He’s playing at working miracles.
“Listen better!” she’ll tell Grampa in her bestest God voice.
Lately, she thinks Grampa’s ears might be starting to catch a hint of . . . something. She’s not sure what. Her own witchy whispers? Hat Lady’s see-through talk? Whatever he’s hearing, it’s making him play way better.
She’d order a burger for Lucy, too, if she could.
But that might make Lucy poop before Charley gets home.
Lucy’s pink tongue, all scratchy and wet, licks Olivia’s cheek. Olivia giggles.
“No one gets you like I do,” Charley always tells her.
But the old man next door just might. In her secret mind, she calls him Grampa.
She used to have a real grampa. He lives in heaven now.
Heaven might be up in the sky, with the sun and the moon. She isn’t sure. She can’t see it through her binoculars.
Every day, when Charley’s selling cars and her mom’s working her shift at the store, Olivia spies on Grampa. He sits in a chair at his window, over the hedge. He opens his window, like he wants her to hear his music, only he doesn’t know about her spying. He doesn’t even know she’s here.
His music makes the birds at his bird feeders real happy. Red ones and gray ones and blue ones and brown ones.
While Grampa plays, she always sits real still and listens real close. The sun can’t be too bright or it stabs her eyes. Then her binoculars are no good.
She always keeps her head down. She’s real good at being invisible.
“Quiet as a church mouse,” Charley said once, bragging her up.
“What’s a church mouse?”
“A mouse that lives in a big old church. She runs up Pastor’s leg when he’s not looking and makes him laugh—like this!”
She doesn’t like being a church mouse. Not at all.
Charley said it’s going to snow today. A lot.
That’s very bad.
When it snows, Grampa lowers his window almost the whole way down, and she can’t hear his music much at all.
He’s just like her, locked up all alone in his little room. Except he doesn’t have a Lucy. He has a cat. The cat’s gray with white on her chest, belly, and paws. Her name is Shadow.
Shadow’s a name Olivia made up. But it could be the cat’s name, for real.
Or maybe Ashes. Or Smoke.
Olivia likes Shadow.
Shadow’s a real good leaper. She jumps on Grampa’s back when he bends over. And sometimes, when Grampa’s sitting in his chair, playing his music, Shadow jumps up and perches on his shoulder, like a big owl on a wizard. Grampa doesn’t get mad and swat her off. He lets her stay.
Sometimes, when Charley’s home and making her “feel good,” and Lucy’s outside the door, whining and scratching—whoosh! she’s suddenly up in the air, like in a dream. She flies like a fairy over to the red storybook house with the yellow shutters, right through the window into Grampa’s room. She floats like a birthday balloon, up by the ceiling. She doesn’t know how it happens, but it does, like magic.
Grampa can’t see her floating up there, but she can see him down below, like Charley says God sees all His children. Especially the bad ones, who don’t do what they’re supposed to. They get into big trouble, Charley says.
She doesn’t want to be bad.
So she floats up there, listening to Grampa play songs on his black stick, till Charley gets done and leaves. Then whoop! she’s back in her bed again, and Lucy’s there beside her, whimpering and washing her face with her tongue.
THE RED TURTLE
1:11 P.M.
Simon stands at his desk, leafing through a short stack of mail. Several greeting card envelopes are addressed to him.
Must be an occasion you’ve forgotten.
By the return addresses, one card is from Gertie McClure. Another, from Mike and Victor at Dinky Creek. A third, from a Dr. R. Betts at the University of Chicago.
Beneath the cards, the junk. Then the Daily Register. The New York Times.
And here’s a piece of Priority Mail. He smiles. It’s from Gilly.
He rips the tear strip on the mailer.
Fritz bats at the strip with a frisky white paw.
Inside the mailer is a large manila envelope decorated with hand-drawn red hearts.
Valentine’s Day, maybe?
On one side of the envelope, Gilly has printed: “Do not open this envelope until your birthday!!!”
My birthday.
What day is today?
Doesn’t matter.
He unfastens the envelope’s clasp and draws out a sheaf of papers. Clipped to the top is a note.
His eyes return to “Don’t show Mom.” This can’t be good. Gilly’s never been one to keep secrets from her mother.
His curiosity quells his misgivings. He riffles through the papers. They appear to be copies of official documents and correspondence from a bygone era. Typewritten on vintage machines, with strings of longhand cropping up in the margins.
And here’s a sepia-toned eight-by-ten photograph.
The sight of it shoves him down into his chair.
Memories of the day Pop took this picture rush back like a movie reel stuck in high-speed rewind. It can’t be switched off.
“Stand still,” Pop says, pointing his new Kodak. “Smile!”
What are you and Mama supposed to do—pose here in the yard, pretending to be as light and happy as those jackrabbits nesting only a short distance away in the patchy spring grass? Pretending that you—and Mama too—haven’t just done a god-awful thing? Pretending that Pop hadn’t arrived home from Lincoln in the nick of time?
“C’mon, you two!” Pop coaxes. “Say cheese.”
“Why cheese?” You scowl. “That’s dumb!”
Mama snatches off your cap and rakes her fingers through your hair. You shy from her touch, still smarting from her slaps. But you smell her talcum powder. A smell you love. Faintly vanilla. Clean. Safe.
“Karl,” she says to Pop, “must we do this now? It’s not the best time . . .”
“Won’t take long.”
“But it’s so windy!”
“Just a few more shots!”
Pop studies the Kodak’s viewfinder. All the while, those darn rabbits just lie there in the grass. Any other day, he’d be running for his twelve gauge.
“I’ll get these prints developed right away,” he says. “Want to make sure I know what I’m doing with this gizmo. Got to be good by Easter—Christ! So damn windy! Keeps messing with your hair!”
Mama pulls you closer. You wriggle against her.
“On three!” Pop announces.
“Mama loves you so much, Chasker,” she whispers. She seldom uses your middle name out loud. Never in front of anyone else. “Smile for your father.”
“One . . . two . . . chee-eeze!” Pop sings.
Empty and raw, you stare at the camera.
Shick, clicks the shutter.
Shick, shick.
And here’s another photograph—black and white. An orchestra of young people. Mama isn’t hard to spot, dressed in white, clarinet across her lap.
Someday soon, you’ll be a forgotten old photo. Like her.
His eye drifts to the bass drum in the back.
Genoa Indian School it says on the side.
Indian School.
Indian.
His skull is pounding.
He flips the picture, hoping for some sort of caption or note. Any kind of explanation.
“Your mother,” Gilly had written along the bottom edge, in fine blue felt tip, “was a Dakota woman from the Sisseton reservation—”
Dakota.
Reservation.
His mind throws him back into the kitchen of the homeplace. To the red coffee can, high up in the cupboard, where Mama had stored her matchbooks. To the turtle, beaded red, hidden inside the battered matchbox at the bottom of the can.
That turtle wasn’t a toy.
He shoots up like a man in his prime, the photographs cascading to the floor with the rest of Gilly’s papers. His chair topples. His music stand tips. Sheet music flies.
Fritz darts with flat whiskers under the desk.
Simon’s out of breath as he tops the attic ladder. He yanks the chain of the light fixture with such force that the end swings up and clinks against the naked bulb. That lone bulb must be loose in its socket. Or dying. It yields a flickering light.
Maybe Iris had discovered that red turtle in the coffee can when she purged all evidence of Mama from the house—a job Pop had put to her after the wedding. Or maybe she’d stumbled upon it in the course of her housework.
Either way, if Iris had found the turtle, she would have kept it. She’d have known it had to be kept.
And if Iris had kept it, the turtle must be up here, in the far corner, amongst the stuff his stepbrother, Colin, had shipped to him after she died.
Simon has to hurry. Time is his enemy. It has him surrounded. He’ll soon forget why he’s up here.
In his haste to cut across the attic, he clips his ankle on Gilly’s old rocking horse. He careens against the crib. He grabs at its spindles to break his fall, but misses. His knees smack the floor, square. He buckles forward with a sharp moan.
Slow down before you break something! Fee says in his brain.
In the winking light of the faulty bulb, Simon tussles with the margins of memory.
He sets his sights on the steamer trunk his grandparents had brought over on the boat from Germany.
Too obvious, Fee says. Iris was smarter than that.
“Where, then?” he says aloud.
Somewhere Colin could never have found it and thrown it out—you know, not realizing that it mattered.
He picks himself up, his banged-up knees on fire.
All the boxes from the homeplace are taped shut. Except for one.
It’s the train set Pop had bought that first Christmas without Mama. One of the last sets Lionel had manufactured before Pearl Harbor.
Following a hunch, Simon unwraps car after car after car.
Here, at last, is the red caboose.
Simon pushes his spectacles higher on his nose. He lifts the caboose toward the light bulb, somehow no longer flickering. By its steady light, he peers through the tiny windows.
Triumph surges. Snug inside is the big matchbox from the coffee can.
He inspects the caboose’s black undercarriage, its peacock-green roof, its red body with tarnished brass railings and ladders. No easy way to get in. Extracting the matchbox will be delicate work, like excavating a fragile fossil in the field.
How had Iris ever managed to lodge it inside the caboose? Next to impossible, like fitting a ship through the neck of a bottle.
Only a woman trying to protect another woman’s secrets—and pass them on—would ever go to such bother.
He digs his Swiss Army knife out of his pocket.
SEE-THROUGH
1:21 P.M.
Olivia gets up to peer through the curtains again. Where can Grampa be?
She’s not sure, but his black stick might be a “clarinet.” That’s a big-people word. She read about it on the Net.
She’s on the Net a lot. She can almost use it like a big girl. She can almost read like a big girl too.
The Net’s fast, like melt-your-face fast. Maybe it runs on electric, like a clock. It doesn’t have a cord, not that she can see, but the whole world seems plugged in.
And the Net’s got all kinds of stuff. It has, like, all of everything. Like Noah’s Ark. The Bible says the Ark had two of every creepy, crawly thing. It was stuffed with animals: dogs and cats and horses and giraffes and unicorns and mermaids.
The Ark must have had trolls, too, and vampires and zombies—how else could they still be around? The Flood would have taken them out, like a bomb.
Charley might be a werewolf in disguise. His body’s so hairy! The Ark must have had werewolves too.
Olivia’s pretty sure her mom is a witch ’cause she has a fat wart and she’s always burning candles and she acts like strange stuff that should never happen is fine and perfect.
If her mom is a witch, maybe that means Olivia’s a witch too. She thinks about this a lot. If she is a witch, she wants to be a good one. And brainy, like Hermione Granger. Only not so bossy.
She’ll never be a hairy werewolf. Not if she can help it.
Maybe God’s in charge of the Net. Maybe it’s His castle, since God is King, and kings live in castles. Or maybe the Net is heaven—you can’t see it, but it’s up there, and it’s humongous.
Or maybe the Net is God.
Praying to the Net doesn’t help, though.
She doesn’t know how the Net works, but she needs it, like Charley says he needs her, more than anybody. Sometimes he shows her secret “big-girl” stuff on the Net, because she’s “special.”
She doesn’t like being special.
She wishes she could tell the Net all her secrets. Or maybe she could tell Grampa. But Charley says if she tells her secrets to a single soul, they won’t be special anymore. And God will be very, very mad.
She has to keep God happy. Or else He might write her name in the Bad People Book.
That would be very, very bad.
She drops down on the floor with a tablet and her crayons. Lucy’s still on the bed, fast asleep, lying on her back, paws in the air.
Olivia turns her tablet sideways.
She pulls a black crayon from the box. She draws a house on the left side of the paper. Her house.
Now, down the middle of the paper, a thick hedge, with green.
Now, with red, Grampa’s house on the right, much bigger than the black house.
She picks up orange. She hates orange.
Back in the black house, she puts Charley, with blobby eyes and a big crooked mouth and teeth like an angry pumpkin. Fat, hairy arms too. Fingers like knives.
In the red house, she puts Grampa in purple, with a smile. She puts a black stick poking out of his mouth. She gives him long purple eyelashes. Bright blue eyes. Silver hair.
She picks up white. She puts Hat Lady right beside Grampa. On the white paper, you can hardly tell she’s there. When you hold the paper just right, she shines.
But Olivia wants to see her better. She puts a pink hat in one of Hat Lady’s see-through hands.
Olivia smiles then. Pink’s her very own favoritest color.
When Grampa sits at the window and plays his black stick, he thinks he’s all alone, but Olivia knows better. He’s never alone. Not ever.
Hat Lady is always with him.
Grampa can’t see Hat Lady. Not one bit. But Olivia can.
This may be her bestest secret of all.
Hat Lady looks old, like Olivia’s mom. But not as old as Grampa. Her hair is long and almost black, pulled back and wrapped in a coil. It’s mussed up, like she’s been out in the wind. Or maybe in a big fight.
Her clothes look real funny. Nothing like the clothes pretty women wear on the Net. More like what Olivia’s mom wears. “Frumpy,” Charley would say.
Hat Lady is always carrying a pink straw hat. It’s decorated real nice with flowers. It’s never on her head, where it belongs. Maybe it doesn’t fit.
Hat Lady hovers, just like Charley says Olivia’s mom does. Charley gripes about her mom’s hovering, but Grampa’s not bothered by Hat Lady. He never even seems to notice her. Like, she’ll be standing so close to him, he has to feel her, right there . . . but nope! Not even when her tears drip.
Hat Lady can walk right through walls, the way Olivia can fly through windows when the fairy magic happens. Hat Lady can even walk straight through Grampa. Whoo-ee! So cool!
Once, on the Net, Charley showed Olivia a kind of butterfly with see-through wings, like glass. It can hide in plain sight without even trying. It doesn’t have to be afraid of anything. Not even werewolves. Not ever.
That’s the kind of creature Hat Lady is. See-through. But she’s not solid, like those glassy butterfly wings.
At first, Olivia thought maybe Hat Lady was a ghost. But ghosts aren’t see-through. They look like white sheets, and when they pay you a visit, they make a room go scary-cold. They make you hide under the covers and screw your eyes shut.
Hat Lady’s nothing like that. She’s like a foggy window with a light on the other side. She glides around real quiet. You want to get closer to her, not run away.
Maybe she’s a guardian angel. But angels should have wings, right? And angels don’t make tears, do they?
Besides, shouldn’t an angel be able to see a little girl flying into a room and drifting up by the ceiling?
Hat Lady has eyes only for Grampa and his black stick. She wants to touch him so bad. But when she goes to kiss him, her lips pass right through his cheek. She can’t even pat his head or tap his shoulder. When she tries, her and him get all mixed up in each other, like some crazy kind of cartoon.
Hat Lady tries to talk to Grampa too. He’ll be playing his black stick, and she’ll be telling him stories. But her voice is as see-through as her body is. It sort of melts into the music. You can’t tell one from the other.
What Hat Lady’s trying to say to Grampa must be super important, or she wouldn’t try so hard. Maybe that’s why she starts crying sometimes, ’cause she can’t get through to him.
So Olivia wants to help Hat Lady.
“Listen real close to your music,” Olivia will whisper to Grampa through the curtains at her window. She’ll wave her Mystical Magical Mermaid Wand at him and use that witchy voice she always uses to cast good spells (in case she actually is a good witch).
Or if she’s over in his room, floating up by the ceiling, she’ll point her finger down, like all those pictures of God when He’s playing at working miracles.
“Listen better!” she’ll tell Grampa in her bestest God voice.
Lately, she thinks Grampa’s ears might be starting to catch a hint of . . . something. She’s not sure what. Her own witchy whispers? Hat Lady’s see-through talk? Whatever he’s hearing, it’s making him play way better.
