Leeva at Last, page 7
The thought struck a surprising cold sting in her heart.
At a shriek from the living room, Fern turned off the stove and sighed. “My brothers and sisters. I can’t leave any of them for a minute.” She looked longingly at her book, then started down the hall.
Leeva knew how difficult it was to leave a book you were reading. She had walked that path. She wished she could offer a solution. But she could already see that Fern’s problem was a difficult one: how to watch over people of vastly different age—
“I have an idea!” Leeva hurried to Fern at the living room doorway. Inside, little kids were launching themselves from couches to chairs to tables and back again. Before she could speak, one of the little girls pulled a set of drapes onto herself and sailed into a bookcase.
Fern rescued her sister with extravagant sighing and eye-rolling, and Leeva thought again that Harry should know about this girl. Once more, she felt an odd freeze in her chest.
Fern looked up from untangling the drapes. “You said you had an idea?”
“Oh, right. I know a television show, Vim and Vigor at Any Age. I think both your great-grandparents and your brothers and sisters would enjoy it. Maybe you could get some time to read.”
Fern’s eyes widened. “Let’s try it.” She went back into the kitchen and woke her great-grandparents gently, then steered them into the living room. Leeva stationed herself between them, ready to catch them if they went over, while Fern found the program and lined up her brothers and sisters.
Trainers Jilly and Jim were leading a round of lunges. “You can do it,” they cheered. “You are vimful and vigorous!”
The two old people perked up when they heard this. They dove in and the little kids followed. Rugs skittered and lamps wobbled.
“Are you sure this is a good idea?” Fern asked.
“It’s Vim and Vigor at Any Age,” Leeva assured her. She went back to get Fern’s book. It was Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH. “I loved this,” she said as she held it out. “But the plow!”
“The plow!” Fern said at exactly the same time, with a look that reflected the same horror Leeva had felt. As she took the book, Fern dropped her head and looked up at Leeva through her bangs. “You could come back, maybe. I can’t leave, but if this works, I could visit with you here while the show is on.” She looked over at her family—nine people jumping happily in unison—and then she raised a hand and crossed her first two fingers. “You could come back anytime.”
Leeva could tell from Fern’s expression that the intriguing gesture was a wish for good luck. She raised her own hand and crossed her fingers in the same secret symbol.
The two of them tiptoed out to the porch, Leeva thinking happily that yes, maybe she would come back. “Well, thanks for the orange peel,” she said. “Harry will be happy.”
The girl pressed her book to her heart. “Harry’s great. He reads my brothers and sisters stories and acts out all the parts so they’ll behave while I pick out my books.”
Leeva tried to imagine the jumble of kids in the library. “You bring them all?”
“Yes, but it’s not their fault.”
“What isn’t?” Leeva asked.
Fern nodded inside. “That I have to watch them all, that I can’t go anywhere without them. Everybody old enough in my family is working. My parents, my grandparents, even my older sister. I miss her so much. I miss them all so much.” She frowned. “Those Thornblossoms!”
Leeva reared back as if she had been kicked in the chest. “The Thornblossoms?” she asked when she’d caught a breath.
“They charged us a Tax-Challenging Tax just because my parents asked why the taxes were so high!”
Well, Reader, Leeva couldn’t take it. She grabbed Bob, bolted off the steps, and ran down the sidewalk as fast as she could. When she was sure she couldn’t be seen anymore, she dove under a bush.
There, in the dirt and the dark and the prickers, she wept—the name Thornblossom, her name, was poison in this town!—until hot mud puddled on her cheeks. As she mopped at it with the collar of her blouse, her fingers tangled in the twine around her neck.
Her sobbing ebbed. Hope flowed in.
Leeva pulled out the library card. “Do you know what this is, Bob?”
Bob sniffed it intently but did not seem to come to a conclusion.
“It’s a card of trust. That says something, doesn’t it? You can trust me, too. Bob, I am going to make Thornblossom a name we can both be proud of.”
Leeva crawled out from under the briars. The sun felt bright and comforting on her shoulders.
But there stood Osmund, looking down at her.
“I was worried about you,” Osmund said. “You were in that house so long. And then you ran away.”
“You were waiting for me? Then you followed me?”
“I was worried. Bad things happen.”
Osmund didn’t say anything more as he followed Leeva out onto the sidewalk, carrying Bob. When they reached his house, though, he said, “You have dirt and leaves in your hair. Wait here.” And then he went into his parents’ office.
When he came back out, he handed Leeva a comb wrapped in cellophane.
“For me?”
Osmund shrugged as if the gift was not a big deal.
But it was a big deal. Red plastic, stamped in gold with the slogan Frisk Insurance, Let Us Untangle Your Insurance Needs!, the comb was beautiful. But more importantly, it was the first thing Leeva had ever been given that was to be all hers forever. Even her clothes were only a loan—her father kept a ledger and she was expected to pay for them when she got a job.
Leeva stood on the sidewalk for a moment, cradling the gift. And then she unwrapped it and began to comb out her tear-salted, muddied, finger-plaited-by-herself braids.
“That’s better,” Osmund said, and then he left.
Leeva placed the comb carefully into its own pouch in the backpack and walked to the library with her head held high.
Harry wasn’t out on the stoop, so she sat down to wait. Mrs. Flowers threw open the window and leaned out. “Would you do me a favor, Leeva?”
Leeva jumped up. Of course she would!
“Harry had to go early and he didn’t have time to water my herbs. Would you do it? The spigot is around the corner, across from the book drop.”
Leeva found the spigot and filled the watering can beneath it. When she’d soaked the last pot, Mrs. Flowers waved down at her. “Thank you, my dear.”
Well, Leeva nearly dropped the watering can. Had Mrs. Flowers just called her my dear, the way Grandmother Cleverton addressed her twin granddaughters, whom she loved?
Leeva pulled out the orange peel and placed it on the table. “I’ll leave it here, okay?”
“Wonderful, thank you. Orange biscotti tomorrow—I hope you like them, my dear.”
My dear! Again!
Leeva walked back to her house pondering life. One minute you’re weeping in the mud under a pricker bush, the next you’re someone’s dear, with a brand-new comb. Life.
Around midnight, Leeva awoke to a frantic scrabbling under her bed. She turned on her lamp and hung over the side to look.
“Bob! What are you doing?”
Bob looked up with an expression that clearly said, What did you expect, I’m a badger.
Leeva got out of bed to examine the damage. In one spot, Bob had scraped clear through the floorboards to the kitchen below. Another week and her bed would fall right through onto the stove. In the unlikely event one of her parents happened to be cooking a midnight snack, she would be fricasseed, a fate even Osmund’s parents had failed to warn her about.
Leeva pulled Bob out and consulted Badger Behavior. Badgers were night creatures, it confirmed. They were born to dig, and dig they must.
Leeva tiptoed downstairs and out to the backyard, where a few holes wouldn’t be noticed, and sat beside him as he tore into the dirt. Watching him gobble earthworms by the light of a half moon, she sighed deeply.
Compared to the many pets she read about in her library books, Bob was a dud. He slept most of the day, and when he wasn’t sleeping, he mainly waddled around and dug holes. His disposition was uniformly crabby. He showed almost no interest in Leeva at all, and when he did, he always seemed kind of judgmental. Whatever Leeva did, he seemed to raise a skeptical eyebrow, as if he wouldn’t be caught dead doing such a ridiculous thing.
In spite of all this, she found herself growing more and more fond of him. The crabbier, the more judgmental he acted, the more she wanted to defend him, to cheer him on in his judgmental crabbiness. It was all very confusing.
Well, what mattered was that she had a badger who could no longer be left alone in the house at all. Leeva curled up on the ground and fell into a light, worried sleep while he dug.
The next day, Leeva brought Bob with her to the library at noon. She tied him to a board on the back stoop and held her breath when Harry came outside with his lunch tray.
Harry looked at Bob. Then he looked at Leeva. Then he pressed his mouth into a tight line and said nothing as he set down the tray.
Leeva made a mental note: Sometimes, nothing is exactly what you want to hear.
Harry motioned to the tray. On it were three muffins, three hard-boiled eggs, and three tall glasses of orange juice. “It’s brunch, actually,” Harry explained. “We didn’t have time for breakfast, what with all of the commotion this morning.”
Before Leeva could ask What commotion? and Why do you have three of everything?, the library’s back door opened again.
And out walked Mrs. Flowers!
“What? How?” Leeva managed.
Pauline Flowers’s face lit up. “I’ve had the best surprise! An elevator! Harry had it installed last night. I’ll be working as a librarian again, beginning today!” She beamed at her nephew.
Harry looked happy, too. But Leeva wondered: Were there two Harrys—one proud he’d given his aunt her dream, and one grieving because he’d given up his own?
Harry was apparently thinking about that, too. “Since I won’t be needed here, I’ve signed up for acting classes at the Community Theater. Now, Leeva, come inside for just a minute, take a ride in the new elevator. It’s really fun.”
“Yes, go try it,” Mrs. Flowers urged. “There’s a famous poem: It goes, ‘Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth,’ and you’ll know just what it means when you press Up.”
Leeva walked over to the door. There, though, she stopped. Her mother was extraordinarily skilled at punishing people. And if someone ignored one of her punishments, she escalated. “No, I’d better not go in,” she sighed at last.
“Well, at least have a look?” Harry opened the door wide.
Keeping her feet firmly outside, Leeva leaned in. There, in the center of the library, stood a huge, sleek silver tube.
Harry went in and pushed a button on the tube. A door slid open silently. He stepped in. The door slid shut with a silky click. Then Leeva heard a quiet, but thrilling WHOOSH!
Next thing she knew, Harry was grinning down at her over the railing in the nonfiction section. Her heart strained against her ribs. She wanted so much to take a ride. She felt a hand on her back.
“Someday,” Mrs. Flowers said kindly.
“Maybe,” Leeva said, although she didn’t believe it.
Harry came back and passed out the food. Leeva sat next to him as usual, but she edged a little closer to Mrs. Flowers’s chair. It was nice to not have to shout, and to see her up close. Today the librarian’s reading glasses were shaped like scallop shells. Her earrings were silver books, with tiny strings of red beads for bookmarks. And she smelled wonderfully of vanilla and baked sugar, which Leeva would not have been able to enjoy from far below.
As she finished her muffin, Leeva realized something. “I guess I won’t see you much, Harry.” She took a swallow of orange juice, because her throat had suddenly gone dry.
“Oh, no, don’t worry. I’ll be upstairs in the mornings. I’m trying my hand at writing a play. And my classes are in the afternoon. I wouldn’t miss lunch with you.” He got up, brushed the muffin crumbs off his pants, and brought the dishes inside.
Leeva turned to Mrs. Flowers. “And you?” Her voice was a little quivery.
“I’ll be right here at noon each day.”
“And will you still …” Leeva glanced at the cookies.
“Of course! It’s a life goal! I’ll just get up a little earlier to bake them.” But then her expression changed. “You know, I’m happy about the elevator. But I’m still quite angry.”
“At what?” Leeva asked.
“We should have had that elevator years ago. And I’m not at all happy that Harry used his school money. I will not allow him to give up that opportunity. Somehow we’ll have to find another ten thousand dollars by the time school starts.”
It suddenly felt wrong that Mrs. Flowers didn’t know who she was. It felt like a lie. My last name is Thornblossom, and my parents are the reason you didn’t get that elevator before, she ought to say. If they’d let you buy it, Harry would still have his school money.
Leeva put down her glass. She would say it, no matter the cost. But as she opened her mouth, Mrs. Flowers spoke again.
“The people who hold the keys, who lie and cheat to get those keys, who clutch those keys in a death grip—why won’t they use them to unlock the doors? Do you ever wonder about that, Leeva?”
Leeva pictured the locked room beside her bedroom, stuffed with money. She thought about all the rules in her Employee Manual. “I do wonder that,” she said.
“I thought you might.” Mrs. Flowers shook her head so hard her earrings jangled. “Well, today we’re celebrating. I’m working as a librarian once more.”
Leeva got up to peer at the elevator again. “Where did the books go? The ones that used to be where the elevator is now?”
“Boxed up. Downstairs, in fiction, it was the cookbooks. They didn’t really belong in fiction anyway. I can fetch them when anyone asks.”
Harry returned just then. He handed Leeva a slip of paper with the day’s address on it.
“And upstairs, in the informational texts,” Mrs. Flowers said, “it was only some town reports. Nobody took those out.”
“Just a bunch of confusing numbers,” Harry agreed, chuckling. “Who would ever read those?”
The next week was the happiest of Leeva’s life.
She found that if she fitted Bob’s paws with tiny Cheezaroni-tray booties, he would give up digging and sleep most of the night. In the mornings, she raced through her chores, exercised with Vim and Vigor at Any Age, then took him out in her backyard, where she read beside him as he dug.
The word of that week was Luminescence—the emission of light by an object that has not been heated. It was a lovely word and she looked forward to using it.
Harry and Pauline Flowers spent every lunch hour with her and shared their delicious meals. Then Mrs. Flowers brought out three fresh cookies and ten new books. She began mixing some nonfiction in with the stories, and Leeva’s sharp mind polished itself on a wealth of fascinating information. She learned all the constellations and memorized the periodic table of elements and read up on all 195 countries. By the end of that week, she could recite the depths of all the lakes in the world, the heights of the mountains, the lengths of the rivers, the salinity of the seas.
At one o’clock each day, rain or shine, Osmund was waiting in front of the library. He always claimed he was there strictly in case Bob’s badger nature became a problem—“You never heard of a goodger, did you?”—but Leeva knew this was an excuse. And she didn’t mind him tagging along. No matter what happened, it was better with someone else there, even with Osmund, as long as she ignored his gloomy mutterings about the odds of this or that tragedy wrecking things.
Harry had been right: She met a wide variety of people when she went on her errands. Though they were wildly different, all of them were happy to contribute whatever Mrs. Flowers needed for her cookies. And at every encounter, Leeva collected another bit of evidence of what people were for, mostly in the form of a story about Harry.
Osmund was sure that Bob was homesick, so after getting the day’s ingredient, they always brought him to the park.
The first day they’d done it, Leeva had let Bob off the leash at the scraped bare patch—how much trouble could one little badger make?
But Osmund had yelled in horror. “Rusty nails, pesticides, wolverines, I don’t know what else! Bring him back!”
“He’ll be fine, I do it all the time at my place. And he loves to dig. Watch.”
Sure enough, Bob went bonkers digging around where he used to live, and anyone could see he was happy. Osmund couldn’t argue with that, so after the first day, he didn’t—he only watched over Bob carefully and scowled at the bare spot until he went home.
Evenings back at Leeva’s house were still pretty miserable. She had stopped doing the dishes and left them for Bob to lick clean, so that was an improvement. And now that she had so many people to talk with each day, she was no longer bothered when her parents ignored her. In fact, she wished they’d ignore her more. Because the more people she met, the more awful her parents seemed in comparison. Several times over that week, in fact, Leeva thought of running away. But deep down, she feared she wasn’t brave enough to set off into the world on her own. Besides, where would she go?
Well, luckily, the days were long and the evenings in her house were short, and after dinner, Leeva was free to read her books upstairs with Bob, so all in all, the week was entirely wonderful.
Well … no. Not entirely wonderful, Reader. One thing was less than perfect: Each afternoon in the park, Leeva shared her cookies with Osmund.
Now, Leeva was happy to share. The cookies tasted even better when she shared them. Everything does. But the simple, undeniable fact was, she preferred three cookies to one and a half cookies. You understand.
And so one evening, when Leeva gave Harry the empty napkin, she hinted, “Um … you know, Osmund comes with me.”
