Trouble Page 4

  Henry stopped at his locker, and his fingers told the combination. His books still in the same place. The red-and-white crew sweats he kept meaning to bring home to wash but kept forgetting to. Notebooks leaking frayed paper. Very, very important school announcements to bring home scrunched up in balls.

  It was all the same.

  He went in to his first class, American History, which hadn't made much progress since they began Lewis and Clark.

  When Sanborn Brigham sat down behind him, Henry pointed this out. "You're still on Lewis and Clark? How can you still be on Lewis and Clark?"

  "Because Lewis and Clark are Great American Heroes, True Adventurers who Helped Found Our Country. Because we need to read Every Single Page of their journals Out Loud."

  "I guess that explains it," said Henry.

  "That explains it."

  Sanborn, as it turned out, wasn't kidding. Mr. DiSalva came into the room, nodded at Henry to show that he knew he was back, and cleared his throat while he adjusted his red-and-white Whittier tie and extracted from a briefcase a pair of leather-bound books that held—really—every page of every journal that Lewis and Clark ever wrote.

  Mr. DiSalva began to read aloud, pointing out Significant Places on the map of the western United States behind him as he read.

  Henry tried not to fall asleep.

  During the rest of the day, a few of his teachers—and even Dr. Sheringham, Whittier's principal—did more than nod at him. Their voices got low and quiet, and they tilted their heads, and they asked him politely and sadly how his brother, Franklin, was doing. Was it true that he had lost his right arm? What a shame for such a fine athlete. Was he in much pain? Undoubtedly, he was being drugged to relieve the discomfort. How was the family holding up under the strain?

  Franklin was in an induced coma, you jerks, thought Henry. Was there any pain? He'd had his arm ripped off! Was it a shame? Are you kidding? A shame? Of course he was on drugs now, idiots. Either that or he'd be screaming in agony all the time. And no, they weren't holding up under the strain. The strain? His father hadn't gone into work for days. He never left the house. He didn't answer phone calls, or shave, or wear shoes. His mother went around so tight that she was about to snap in two. Louisa had come out of her bedroom once, and then run back in. They were all about to break apart.

  "Franklin is fine," said Henry. It was his left arm. He didn't think there was much pain now. He supposed there were drugs to relieve the discomfort. And his family was doing fine. Just fine. They were all fine. They were all so fine they could be America's Fine Family. Fine.

  That's what he said.

  And then there was silence, because no one knew what to say after they had figured out that everything was fine. Not even Sanborn, who was the only one at Whittier to ask, "How are you?" But he asked too late in the day.

  "Fine, Sanborn. Just fine. How else would I be doing? I mean, I've just got a brother lying in a coma in the hospital with indeterminate brain activity—whatever that means—and missing most of his left arm. I should be fine, right? Every time I go to bed I try not to sleep because I think I'm going to dream about this bloody stump where an arm should be, but everyone has dreams, right? I'm fine, Sanborn, fine. So stop asking."

  Sanborn stopped asking.

  It was a relief to get to Physical Education, where he could run and work his head off and where Coach Santori never said anything except threats against all health and happiness and future success.

  "Three weight sets, and do them well or you'll do them all over again," he announced. And after they were all done lifting, "Two paced miles, and I mean paced, or you'll run them again—barefoot." Henry ran them very fast.

  That afternoon after school, he rowed hard at crew practice—and not just because he had missed a few days, and not just because he was afraid of any new Coach Santori threats. He rowed so hard that it was impossible for him to keep the rhythm, and more than a few times Brandon Sheringham, the perfect and unerring coxswain, barked at him for upsetting everyone else's stroke. "Stay together," he yelled, mostly at Henry. "Together."

  That's what I'm trying to do, thought Henry. Stay together.

  Afterward, in the varsity locker room, Brandon Sheringham wondered kindly if Henry might think about taking this season off, since it must be hard to keep his mind on rowing. Henry wondered less kindly if Brandon Sheringham might think about keeping his nose out of his business, even though it must be hard to keep a beak that size out of anything.

  He ignored Brandon Sheringham's glares, dressed, and went to Thwaite—Why did it always smell of meat loaf?—where he watched Sanborn and the rest of the debate team finish haggling over the future of nuclear power. Then he and Sanborn waited outside for Henry's mother to come pick them up.

  "I've got a dog," said Henry.

  Sanborn looked up from his note cards on nuclear power's danger. "Your parents let you have a dog?"

  "Yes, my parents let me have a dog. Sort of, anyway. I guess it depends on what she does to the house in the next few days."

  "What kind?"

  Henry shrugged. "Black."

  "Does your dog have a name?"

  "Of course she has a name. Black Dog."

  Sanborn raised a single eyebrow crookedly. "Black Dog? So she's a pirate, right? Billy Bones. Long John. Black Dog. Like that."

  "If you're going to make fun of someone's name," said Henry, "shouldn't you be pretty sure you have a decent one yourself?"

  "If you're going to name a dog," said Sanborn, "shouldn't you use a little more imagination than 'Black Dog'?"

  "She likes 'Black Dog,'" said Henry.

  "Oh, she came up to you and said, 'I really like this stupid name you gave me, and it doesn't matter that it sounds like something out of a first-grade reader.'"

  "It doesn't sound like something out of a first-grade reader."

  Sanborn looked at him sadly. "Here comes a dog. It is black. It is a black dog. 'Let's call it Black Dog,' says Sally. 'Oh, yes,' says Jane. 'Here, Black Dog. Good, Black Dog.'"

  "You know, I think I'm going to beat you up right now," said Henry.

  Sanborn laid his still unorganized nuclear power's danger note cards on the ground. He reached into his pocket and pulled out two dimes. "You better make some calls to get help."

  Henry and Sanborn were testing to see if any calls were necessary when Henry's mother came to pick them up. They brushed themselves off, found their scattered books, picked up the now very unorganized nuclear power's danger note cards, and nodded when they got in. She nodded back—like Mr. DiSalva—and they didn't say a single word while they drove home. Henry figured she had been in the hospital all day, and what was there to say after that? He wished she would turn the radio on.

  When they got to Sanborn's house, he punched Henry lightly on the arm and got out. "Thanks, Mrs. Smith," he said. She nodded and put the car in gear. But before they could pull away, Sanborn's mother was out of the house. Henry heard his own mother sigh as she rolled down the window.

  "How are you, Mary?" said Sanborn's mother. She held her cigarette away from the car window.

  "Fine," said Henry's mother. "We're all doing fine."

  "I've heard that they're thinking of charging that Cambodian boy with attempted murder. Is that true?"

  "I don't know," said Henry's mother. "I suppose it could be true. It was an accident."

  "Well," said Sanborn's mother, "that's not what some say. Those people." She shook her head. "Someone has to do something. And how is Franklin? Is there any more news?"

  "Franklin is doing fine," Henry's mother said. "All the doctors have high hopes."

  "Isn't that fine," said Sanborn's mother.

  "Yes, fine," said Henry's mother.

  Henry thought he might start laughing out loud.

  They pulled away. Silence, except for the sounds of the road.

  "Fine?" said Henry.

  "Well, what should I tell her?" his mother said quickly. "That I sat in my son's hospital r
oom for six hours and he didn't move once? That when Dr. Giles opened his eyelids and flashed a light into his eye, the pupils didn't dilate enough to measure? That the sounds my son makes ... are like none that any boy should ever make? You want me to tell her that the bloody stump is still oozing? You want me to tell her that the nurses come in every two hours to change him because he can't even use a bedpan? What do you want me to tell her, Henry?"

  "That he woke up and said, 'Katahdin.'"

  His mother shook her head. She was trying not to cry. "It didn't mean anything," she whispered.

  But as they rode home, and as Henry laid his head heavily against the window, his heart would not believe that "Katahdin" didn't mean anything. The heart knows what it knows.

  When he first saw her at Longfellow Prep, her eyes swept past him as if he were nothing, another student, someone she didn't know or care to know. But then her eyes had come back, and she put her hand up to her mouth, and she walked over to him. "Aren't you ..."

  He nodded.

  "This is the first time I've seen you on the ground."

  He wasn't sure that he still was.

  "Welcome to Longfellow Prep. Ignore all the jerks. Just because this is Longfellow Prep doesn't mean we don't have our share of idiots."

  He felt as if he had come to shore after a long voyage.

  4

  THE TOWN OF MERTON was only half as old as Blythbury-by-the-Sea, but those dwelling in Blythbury now had called Merton a ghost town all their lives. And they were almost right.

  It wasn't always that way. Merton had been blessed with two fast-flowing rivers, and so was about as fine a town in which to build a water wheel as Massachusetts could offer. Huge brick mills went up, and canals between the rivers, and then more mills, and boarding houses to support the mill workers, and homes for the mill managers, and stores for the boarding-house managers, and libraries for the girls who worked in the mills, an athenaeum, and churches. For the two generations that spanned the Civil War, the textile looms clanked and clattered and shook the iron frames of the brick mills.

  But the day came when waterpower was no longer needed, and the sounds of the mills became little ... less ... nothing. And then the dim ghosts came, living quietly in the mills and in the boarding houses, moving slowly past windows at night, sounding their whispers into the lonely winds that drifted over the canals and up into the abandoned shafts of the mills.

  The stores and mills and libraries and churches all went quiet, and only the occasional horse and cart rode the streets past the empty buildings; and then the occasional Lizzie; and then the occasional finned car. Governors and senators swore for a hundred years to resurrect Merton. But the houses that held on outside the mill district fell into lonely decay, and the schools that the state built with noble design grew gray and sullen.

  And the dim ghosts laughed their breathless laughs.

  Until a people who knew something about ghosts began to come. They came from places with names strange in a New England mouth: Phnom Penh, Kompong Cham, Battambang, Siem Reap. They came with almost nothing and were amazed to find in Merton what they thought they had lost in the whirlwind of war: Hope. And with hope, they began to build. First the streets were cleaned and the broken store windows began to gleam with new glass. Markets sprang up in the shadows of the old boarding houses, offering vegetables never before grown in New England soil. Restaurants served foods that Massachusetts had not tasted, and their scents filled the evening air, while from the houses a music with new harmonics twisted with the scents, and children played by the cool stoops, speaking a tongue with new words.

  The dim ghosts fled and the newcomers came out at night and walked the streets, and they looked at the strange stars and felt that, though they had come far and though they would always remember Cambodia as home, this new place was good.

  The old mills were opened and dusty rooms cleaned and remade, and businesses moved in: camera shops, food markets, restaurants and delis and clothing stores and hardware stores. New carpenters found work in the rebuilding, and plumbers and electricians and plasterers joined them. The Chouan family founded Merton Masonry and Stonework on the first floor of one of the old boarding houses, and father and sons began to build stone walls and hearths and luxurious patios for homes all the way east to Marblehead and west to Amherst. One summer, they spent two weeks repairing the slate roof of the Smith house in Blythbury-by-the-Sea, hardly able to stop watching the waves of the strange sea they had never seen before.

  People in Blythbury-by-the-Sea said that you could drive down some of the streets in Merton and you'd never know you were in Massachusetts. Why, every sign was in Cambodian! And maybe that was all right for people in Merton. Probably they weren't complaining, because the town needed the tax revenue. But can you imagine all of your neighbors speaking that indecipherable language! And their food! And those gaudy temples!

  Sometimes, members of the rugby team from Longfellow Prep would drive over to Merton late on a Saturday night. They would drive slowly down the streets, their windows wide open, the bass of their music loud. They would holler and hoot at the scents and the clothes and chiming music—at the people who walked the streets beneath the resurrected mills. And the words they used to holler and hoot were as Anglo-Saxon as their names. It was great, Franklin told Louisa and Henry. You should see them scatter.

  When Louisa's eyes told Franklin that his sister couldn't see why that was great, Franklin reminded her that those people didn't belong in Merton, anyway.

  When Henry's eyes told Franklin that his brother couldn't see why that was great, Franklin told Henry what he already knew: He had no guts.

  The sky changed as Henry and his mother drove home from Sanborn's house after Henry's first day back at Whittier—which he might have pointed out to his mother, except that she was so full of Franklin that she wouldn't have heard him. The clouds had been thick all day long, but now high winds came out of a single quarter and pulled at their fleecy undersides. They began to move quickly inland, though when Henry got out of the car to watch, he felt no wind at all.

  He wondered whether Franklin could see this out his window.

  Black Dog was not in the carriage house. She had shoved aside three boxes of Funk & Wagnalls encyclopedias in order to get at the door latch, which she had apparently opened without any difficulty at all. And she hadn't had any difficulty with the back service door to the house, either; it was open again, too. They did not find Black Dog in the kitchen—and neither did they find the four chicken breasts that Henry's mother had left out to thaw. They followed the trail of shredded chicken packaging upstairs and into Henry's room. Black Dog was nested in his down quilt. Asleep.

  But she bounded up as soon as she saw them, leaping in one not graceful movement from the bed, through the air, and into Henry's arms, and since it is no easy thing to catch a leaping all-kinds-of-a-dog dog, Henry staggered back against his mother, so that in the end, they both caught her and she began right away to lick their faces.

  "She certainly is a friendly dog," said Henry's mother.

  Black Dog nodded and grinned. She certainly was. She licked Henry's mother's face again.

  "... even if she did eat our dinner."

  Black Dog lowered her ears to show her sorrow.

  Who could not like a dog like this? Which is what they told Henry's father when he came out from the library for supper.

  "Hmm ..." he said, considering whether he could not like a dog like this. But when a dog is up on her toes and gamboling around your feet and doing her very best to show that she is good and loyal and true and blue—and fun, besides—you can't not like her.

  "We'll see," he said.

  They ate a salad for dinner that night.

  "Don't you usually make this with grilled chicken?" Henry's father asked.

  "It's much healthier as a vegetarian dish," said his mother.

  And it all seemed so normal, so absolutely normal, so absolutely right. It was suddenly as if Trouble h
ad never come, after all, and as if Franklin's missing Haviland plate and his empty chair meant nothing at all. And as if Louisa's unfilled Haviland plate and her empty chair meant nothing at all.

  But in the fork-clinking-against-plate silence that followed, Henry remembered that Trouble had come. How could he have forgotten it, even for a moment? And then he thought, How sweet it is to have forgotten it for a moment. And then he was so mixed up that he just ate the crescents of yellow bell peppers and tried not to think at all.

  That night, Black Dog went up with Henry and slept on his bed, since she was so used to the down quilt. Henry figured that this was all right; the wounds on Black Dog's snout were scabbing over again, so there wasn't any more blood to wash up. Still, it wasn't easy to sleep with Black Dog on the bed. She kicked and panted and breathed and sometimes even barked in her dreams. Four times she woke up to rearrange the quilt, which meant a lot of digging and pawing. Twice she fell off the bed, and both times she jumped up and licked Henry's face to let him know that he didn't have to worry. She was fine.

  Fine.

  Through all of this, Henry watched the dim suffusion of the moon illuminate the clouds from behind. He couldn't see a single star, but the pale spread of light caressed his window until the clouds thickened so deeply that they hid the moon completely.

  In the morning, the sea was wild and rough and green. The clouds were still running fast, but the wind had slanted down and was snatching the froth from the whitecaps and throwing it up high onto the shore. Henry and Black Dog climbed down into the cove to tie the kayak farther up, and the wind was so strong that the salt spray spat into their faces.

  Henry's father decided to stay home again that day, so Henry's mother drove Henry, again, to Whittier.

  They stopped at the hospital before school. Franklin was very quiet. Henry's mother took his hand and held it, but it was limp. Indeterminate activity.

  Everything is so white, thought Henry. The sheets. The bandage around Franklin's stump, folded in triangles like a linen napkin. Even Franklin's skin—white. It was as if he had never been out in the sun, as if he had never scrambled on a rugby field.