I couldn’t believe it. Only ten minutes until I could hug Duck. Ten minutes until I could kiss his head and sniff his ears and man oh man, does ten minutes feel like a million years when you can’t wait to see your dog.

  “Put the pedal to the metal!” I cried happily.

  My mother laughed again.

  “Where in the world did you pick up that expression?” she asked.

  “Mr. Taylor says it all the time. He also says get the lead out, jumpin’ Jehosaphat, holy Toledo, and jickity-jack.”

  “Jickity-jack?”

  “I don’t know exactly what it means,” I said, “but it’s definitely a good thing.”

  My mother smiled.

  “Mr. Taylor is a good thing too, isn’t he?”

  “He’s the best teacher in the whole world,” I gushed. “He doesn’t make me join in if I don’t want, he lets me color in all the o’s on the bulletin boards, and today he told Lindsey Toffle she could sit out in the hall her own self if she didn’t like the sounds I was making.”

  “What sounds were you making?” my mother asked, glancing over at me.

  “Nothing you haven’t heard before. We must be almost there by now. Can’t you drive any faster?”

  My mother ignored the question and kept the speedometer steady at fifty-five.

  “It’s good to be talking again,” she said. “I’ve missed you.”

  “Mom,” I moaned. “Not now.”

  I was finally feeling happy about something—did she have to ruin it with some corny blibbity blabbing about missing me?

  “Please hear me out,” my mother insisted. “I have to get this off my chest.”

  “Fine,” I said, crossing my arms and heaving a giant sigh. “I’m listening.”

  “I feel awful about what I said to you after I found the lighter,” my mother began. “I know you would never have done anything to put our family in danger. It was a terrible thing for me to say, and I’m beyond sorry.”

  I knew I was supposed to say that I forgave her, or that it was okay, or not to worry … but as awful as I’d felt when she accused me of setting the fire, it wasn’t the main thing I was mad at her about. If I said that I forgave her, it would feel like I was forgiving her for everything. I wasn’t ready to do that, and I didn’t know if I ever would be.

  “If you say so,” I told her instead.

  It was clear that wasn’t the response she’d been hoping for, but it was the best I could do under the circumstances. A few minutes later, we slowed down, pulled off the highway, and turned up a narrow dirt road. The houses were small and close together, the yards full of weeds and plastic toys.

  “Julie’s text said fifty-four Bryer Road, but do you see any numbers on these houses?” my mother asked, craning her neck to see.

  “There it is!” I shouted, pointing to a green house with some faded numbers peeling off the side of the mailbox. There was an old car up on cinder blocks in the driveway, and a snowmobile with a FOR SALE sign on it parked in the middle of the front yard. I looked around, but there was no sign of Duck.

  “Let me check again, to make sure we’re in the right place,” my mother said, but before she could pull up the text on her phone, the screen door banged open and a skinny woman smoking a cigarette stepped out. She had on short shorts and a tank top with a big red tongue printed on it.

  “You the folks that lost a dog?” she called out to us.

  “Is he okay?” I asked, jumping out of the car. “He’s not hurt, is he?”

  “Looks fine to me. My husband caught him digging in the garbage this morning. Probably after the chicken bones I chucked in there last night.”

  Poor Duck. He must have been hungry after three days out on his own. I would feed him something really nice for dinner—maybe some of those special hot dogs Julie had mentioned.

  “We’re so glad you called,” my mother said. “We’ve been worried sick about him. You see, our house caught fire the other night, and—”

  “Where is he?” I interrupted. “Where’s Duck?”

  “He’s tied up around back,” she said, pointing with the hand that was holding the cigarette. It left a little trail of smoke behind it, like one of those planes that writes messages in the sky.

  As I rounded the corner of the house and caught sight of his wagging tail, I felt like my heart was about to burst right out of my chest.

  “Duck!” I shouted. “Duck!”

  He let out a happy bark, turned around, and ran toward me as far as the rope would allow. Only it wasn’t Duck. This dog was mangy and old, his teeth were yellow, and instead of a red collar there was a dirty bandana tied around his neck.

  I felt like I’d been punched in the stomach.

  “Guess we better call the shelter then,” the skinny woman said when she found out the dog wasn’t ours. “Somebody must be looking for him.”

  “Why did this have to happen?” I wailed as we drove away from the green house, empty-handed. “I feel like I’ve lost Duck all over again.”

  “I know, sweetie,” my mother said. “I feel the same way.”

  “No, you don’t,” I sobbed. “You don’t know anything about how I feel. It’s my fault he’s gone.”

  “It isn’t your fault Duck ran away,” my mother said. “It isn’t anyone’s fault.”

  I shook my head.

  “I should have made sure that he was with us when we left the house.”

  “You mustn’t blame yourself,” she said. “You were frightened. We all were. Nobody was thinking straight.”

  I covered my face with my hands and moaned.

  “We never should have made those stupid flyers. The drawings don’t even look like Duck. There weren’t enough markers, so the colors aren’t right.”

  “We can get more markers,” my mother said. “As many as you need. We’ll go to the store right now.”

  “You don’t get it, Mom. Markers aren’t going to fix anything. We need a photograph. But I don’t have any pictures of Duck. They’re all in the house, or maybe they’re burned up, gone forever like everything else I ever cared about.”

  My tears were flowing hot and heavy now, and it felt like a giant hand was squeezing my middle. Suddenly, without warning, my mother jammed on the brakes so hard I might have gone right through the windshield if I hadn’t been buckled in.

  “What are you doing?” I cried.

  “We’re going back.”

  “To Scott and Julie’s?”

  “No,” she said, turning the car around so fast the tires squealed. “We’re going home.”

  “Are we going to get in trouble?” I asked as my mother unlocked the front door.

  “No,” she said, stepping inside. “We came into the house once before, and as long as we don’t go upstairs, I don’t see any reason why we can’t be here now. They’ve already started work on the roof, and it’s still completely covered. Besides, we’re not planning to stay long.”

  There were dark streaks of soot on the walls. Plaster peeled from the ceiling where it had gotten wet.

  “What’s that awful smell?” I asked, wrinkling my nose.

  “Mildew,” my mother said. “And smoke. It’s going to be a big job cleaning this mess up.”

  My room looked pretty much the same as it had before the fire except for the dirty walls and a broken window, which had been covered up with a sheet of plywood. The black dots where I’d tapped with the broom handle were still on the ceiling, but the covers had been stripped off the bed and sent to the cleaners. There was a pink sock lying on the mattress—the one I had put the lighter inside before I’d hidden it. That seemed like a million years ago. So much had happened since then—none of it good.

  There were several pictures of Duck pinned to the bulletin board over my desk. Luckily none of them had been harmed. I couldn’t decide which one would be best for the flyer, so I took them all down and went out to the kitchen to find a plastic bag to put them in.

  My mother was standing on a step stool, removing the kitchen curtains.

  “Did you find what you needed?” she asked as she unhooked the last ring and tossed the curtains into a wicker laundry basket along with her yellow apron and a bunch of dish towels, all of which she planned to wash later at Scott and Julie’s. Duck’s rug—the one he always slept on—was lying on the floor. I picked it up and handed it to my mother.

  “We need to wash this too,” I said. “For when he comes home.”

  She nodded and put it in the basket.

  After we’d thrown everything in the car I asked my mother to wait while I went around back and whistled for Duck in case he was nearby.

  “Here, boy!” I called. “Here, Duck!” But the only response I got was a raspy scolding from a blue jay watching from a nearby tree.

  If there was a silver lining to be found in my sorry situation, it was that Heidi would no longer be coming to visit. We couldn’t very well have company when we didn’t even have a house to have company in. I was relieved that I wouldn’t have to share my room with her, but mostly I was relieved that I wouldn’t have to meet her. Knowing what I knew now about my mother’s feelings about her, I would be happy never to have to lay eyes on her at all.

  The next morning, Julie helped me make a new flyer, using one of the photographs I’d brought back from the house. It was a picture I’d taken of Duck the day I’d bought his red collar. We made a bunch of copies at the library, and that evening after my father got home from work, he and I drove all around Liberty, stapling and taping up flyers.

  We got a grand total of three calls over the next few weeks, but they all turned out to be false alarms. I kept checking with the animal shelter until finally they asked me not to call anymore. They promised they would let me know if Duck showed up. My fifteen minutes of fame were over at school, and most of the kids had gone back to ignoring me. Kristie and Joanne were still trying to be nice, inviting me to sit with them at lunch if I wanted to, but I could never think of anything to say to them, and after a while they stopped saving me a seat. Every time I ran into Mrs. Strawgate in the hall, she’d remind me that her door was always open, but I didn’t feel like talking to her either. One day Mr. Taylor taught us how to make book spine poetry, and after that I spent a lot of my time in the school library, pulling books off the shelves and stacking them up to make poems out of their titles. I even made one about Duck.

  One Good Dog

  A Wrinkle in Time

  Out of My Mind

  Wish

  I had tried to find books with the word Duck in the title, but the only ones I could come up with were The Ugly Duckling and Duck for President, neither of which worked. While I’d been searching the shelves for my poems, I rediscovered The Boxcar Children series and checked out a whole stack. Those stories had been some of the very first chapter books I’d ever read, and there was something comforting about spending time with the Alden kids again, even though the boys seemed to have more than their share of the adventures while the girls stayed home and did dishes.

  Scott had patched the leaky air mattress, so I’d been sleeping a little better. During the day, while I was at school, my mother spent her time over at our house, overseeing the parade of painters and carpenters who came and went like ants at a picnic. On weekends we would all go over there together, and while my parents worked on the house, I would look for Duck.

  We stayed with Scott and Julie for a total of three weeks, and when we finally moved back home, things got a little better between my mother and me. It takes a lot of energy to stay mad at someone, even if you have a good reason. The house was coming together nicely; my room had a new window and a fresh coat of paint. The dots on the ceiling were gone. We were still waiting for some furniture to be delivered, including a new couch, and the carpet needed to be installed, but life was beginning to feel almost normal again. As normal as it could without Duck anyway.

  Then one day my mother got another letter from Heidi.

  “Good news,” she said when she’d finished reading it. “Heidi will be here next Sunday!”

  I couldn’t believe my ears.

  “Why is she still coming?” I said. “Didn’t you tell her about the fire? We don’t even have a couch for her to sit on.”

  “She won’t mind if things aren’t perfect,” my mother told me. “And with the baby coming in July, it’s pretty much now or never.”

  Never sounded just fine to me.

  “I’m not sharing my room with her,” I protested. “I don’t even know her, and besides …”

  “Besides what?” my mother asked.

  “Bip-bam-bash boom,” I said, pounding a fist into my palm.

  “Translation, please,” my mother said.

  “You figure it out,” I told her. Then I went to my room, slamming the door behind me.

  The photos of Duck were back on the bulletin board, and my mother had made me a new pair of curtains with flowers and butterflies all over them. At first I had loved the way they looked, like a meadow hanging in my window. Now I wondered if she’d made them for me or if they were really for Heidi.

  My father was late coming home that night, so my mother and I ate together at the kitchen table. I pushed a breaded chicken cutlet around my plate for a while, then asked to be excused so I could get started on my homework. We were reading Esperanza Rising in class. I was pretty sure Mr. Taylor had chosen the book especially for me, because Esperanza’s house catches on fire in the story. Once upon a time I had wondered why so many books written for kids are about sad things, but now I understood that sometimes it helps to know that sad things happen to other people too, even if they’re not real.

  Later, as I was brushing my teeth, I heard my father come home. I rinsed out my toothbrush and walked down the hall to say hello. He was out in the living room with my mother, who was sitting in a chair with her back to me. She was cradling something in her arms, rocking it like a baby as she wept.

  “Don’t cry, Rube,” my father told her, kneeling down beside her. “We can get another.”

  I held my breath as he reached for whatever it was she was holding.

  “I don’t want another,” she said. “It won’t be the same.”

  It wasn’t until he stood up that I could see that he had Heidi’s jelly bean jar in his hands. The fire had cracked the glass and melted the beans into a single gooey mass.

  She was right. It wouldn’t ever be the same.

  That night, I had another dream about Duck. He was sound asleep on his rug in the kitchen. When I came in, he opened his eyes and wagged just the tip of his tail. I lay down beside him on the floor and put my arms around him, pressing my nose into one of his soft black ears. When I woke up I was hugging my pillow, and I swore I could still smell popcorn. I closed my eyes and tried to climb back into the dream, but it didn’t work so I lay there crying in the dark instead.

  There was an ache deep down inside me, like a bruise that wouldn’t heal. Back when I was in kindergarten my mother had explained that the pains I felt in my stomach sometimes when I was at school were called homesickness. Only the home I’d been missing then was a little white house where a black dog with a red collar lived along with a handsome father in a big gray hat and a doting mother in a yellow apron who loved her daughter more than anyone else in the world. The little white house was still there, it even had a brand-new roof, but all the colors inside it were gone, because the family that used to live there didn’t exist anymore.

  It was the end of June when Heidi arrived. School was out by then and I was officially in sixth grade. Mr. Taylor had hugged me goodbye on the last day.

  “Good luck, Aurora,” he’d told me. “And don’t be a stranger.”

  Normally I was champing at the bit for summer vacation to start, but I was going to miss Mr. Taylor, especially with things being the way they were at home and Heidi’s visit right around the corner. I was dreading it.

  I had never had a sleepover in my life, so the trundle bed in my room had never been used. My mother opened it up and put fresh sheets on it the day before Heidi was due to arrive. I didn’t make any secret about my feelings.

  “I’ll sleep in the hammock if I have to,” I said. “I’m not sharing my room with some stranger.”

  “Heidi’s not a stranger,” my mother insisted as she unfolded a pillowcase. “She’s more like family.”

  “Whatever,” I said and started picking at an old mosquito bite on the back of my knee.

  “Please don’t do that, sweetie. It might get infected.”

  “It’s my knee, not yours,” I said. “And stop calling me sweetie.”

  “Are you girls at it again?” my father asked. He’d been out in the yard mowing the lawn, and there were little bits of grass sticking to his neck and arms. “It’s like living with a couple of alley cats, the way you two go after each other lately.”

  “I can’t help it if Mom’s being annoying,” I told him.

  “Aurora has just informed me that she plans to sleep in the hammock while Heidi is here, Roy,” my mother said, brushing a strand of hair out of her eyes. “But of course I’m the one who’s being annoying.”

  I felt sorry for my father, who’d been caught like a monkey in the middle trying to keep peace between my mother and me ever since I’d found out that Heidi was still coming. It drove me crazy the way she’d been fussing, planning all the meals in advance and making everything nice for her precious, perfect little Heidi.

  “What’s going on with you, baby girl?” my father asked me later that day, when my mother had gone off to the store to buy blueberries to make a crumble, since that was Heidi’s favorite. “Is it my imagination, or is someone’s nose a little out of joint?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked, closing my book.

  I was lying in the rope hammock in the backyard, reading Houseboat Mystery, number twelve in The Boxcar Children series.

  “It’s an expression my father used to use,” he said. “If a person is feeling a little jealous, you say their nose is out of joint.”

 

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