Authors: Kathleen Van Cleve

Drizzle (27 page)

BOOK: Drizzle

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I want to be mad at him. Lester and Spark have disappeared this week, even after I called their names, searching for them, asking them for help. But I’m too desperate. Instead, I look at Lester and talk to him as if I just saw him yesterday.

“Hi,” I say. “Just trying to figure this out.”

Lester jumps up on the mantel. I pick up the emerald ring and put it back on my left hand.

“See what I found? It was in the slugs,” I tell him. “But you probably knew that.”

I tilt my head back against the cushion, closing my eyes.
What am I missing?

When I open my eyes, I find I’m staring at the portrait of my great-grandmother Enid. She has an emerald ring on her finger too.

My eyes flicker over to Lester. There’s something about the way he’s watching me that makes my heart start to race.

I look back at the portrait. Enid’s emerald ring.

Lester picks up his front leg and points to the portrait. Then he points back to me. He does it again and again, back and forth, back and forth.

In the portrait, Enid isn’t smiling. She’s composed, hands folded on her lap. Her emerald ring is on her right hand, the same hand as her crooked finger.

My eyes widen. I look at Lester. He nods, then points to the portrait. To Enid’s hand. To Enid’s right hand.

It’s so obvious.

I switch the emerald ring from my left hand to my right.

Instantly, a sensation that my lungs are expanding, taking in more and more air, overwhelms me. My heart pounds. My brain seems to be exploding.

As quickly as I put it on, I take it off.

Then I put it on again. The same
whooshing
feeling, as if I’m propelled by a greater force than myself. I take it off. Everything slows down again, returning to normal.

I remember something else, from Dad.
All gems are minerals at heart.
Patricia called Grandmom’s diamond sprigs “naturally occurring.” Beatrice yelled at me because I didn’t consider that emeralds are “minerals squished together in the earth.”

I stare at the ring.
Nature does nothing in vain.

Suddenly Lester leaps from the mantel down to the coffee table. He rubs his two feet together.

“I don’t understand leg rubbing. Is that supposed to be a word?”

Lester just looks at me. I check my watch. It’s late, after ten. He leaps on my chin.

“Yuck!” I swat at him, but he’s too fast. He jumps back to the coffee table.

“I need to go outside, right?”

Lester moves his head up and down
.

I’ve become an expert at sneaking out of the house. I’m outside in a matter of minutes with my book light in the pocket of my jeans. I wait for Lester, shining my light on him because he’s as dark as the ground. As we walk to my spot under the cherry blossom tree, I spot Spark’s brothers and sisters and friends, still at work on the mist. In the black night, each of their movements leaves a sparkling trail, so that teeny, tiny pinpricks of color glitter on top of the lake.

I spread apart the branches and walk over to the water’s edge. Lester jumps up on the same rock where Spark ate his mosquito.

“Okay,” I say. “My turn.”

I’m about to put the ring on my finger when a dragonfly swoops by my shoulder.

Spark.

“Perfect timing!” I say. “But where have you been?”

Spark bobs up and down before he zooms back into the sky to spell his answer.

H . . . O . . . M . . . E.

“Home?”

I watch as Spark zooms up to the top of the branches of the weeping cherry tree, then back down again, hovering above the water. When he’s sure I’m watching, he dives in the water, now about three feet lower than it was when the mist first appeared.

It’s my night for sudden realizations. I understand.

Ever since I’ve begun to communicate with the bugs, I’ve understood that bugs, like people, have different ways of communicating. Not just the language itself. The meaning. As I watch Spark dive over and over again into his water, I remember that Grandmom said dragonflies are made up mostly of water and that water is their home.

That’s it. It’s so simple. The lake is the dragonflies’ home. Just like the farm is mine.

The dragonflies aren’t building a shield. Not even years ago, when Grandmom died. They were building their own water-drenched net—not to take water
from
the lake, but to give water
to
the lake when it was needed. They started early because they knew Aunt Edith’s plans. They built the mist under my tree, and it was all packed together tightly, like wet cotton. Then they pulled the strands apart, spreading it out over the lake. They wanted to protect the water underneath.

But there’s been too much heat, and the mist can’t release enough moisture to replenish the lake. No matter how much they spin. It’s not enough.

“I understand,” I whisper to Spark. “You’re just like me. You want to save your home.”

Spark flies over to me, bobbing up and down.
Yes
.

“Okay, then.” I hold up the emerald ring so he can see it. “Here goes.”

I ceremoniously put on the ring. Again that
whooshing
feeling, power surging from head to toe to finger. Specifically my
crooked
finger. Then I dip my hand in the water.

Instantly, there’s a difference. My finger throbs. New energy flushes through me—I feel as if I’m vibrating.

Grandmom, is this right? Is this what it’s supposed to feel like?

I turn to Lester. “You really have to start talking,” I tell him. “This could have saved a lot of time.”

Lester leaps down from his perch to my shoulder. We watch the water surrounding my finger swirl into a bigger and bigger whirlpool. Pain shoots through my arm and out my fingertips—the emerald the motor for this new response.

It’s a massive change. Tonight, when I shine the light onto the column of rising vapor, it seems wide, a bold white stripe intensifying as it goes up and up and up. I take my hand out of the water and sit back along the shore, balling my hand into a fist and covering it with the palm of my left hand. I tilt my head far back to look up to the sky. The vapor is climbing through the air and then fading. The stars are out, pinpricks of light, but the vapor has disappeared.

“Do you think it’s going to be a cloud?” I ask Lester.

I watch as he lifts his leg straight up, extending it like an arrow above his head. I look back to the sky.

And I see it. Far above me, a soft trail of white gathering in the dark night sky, the beginnings of a cloud.

I can’t help it. I kiss Lester. At least, I think I kiss Lester. Slimy and kind of strange for kissing. Anyway, he hops away. I think he’s offended.

“Sorry,” I call after him. “I’m just really excited.”

I look up at Spark. “I’d kiss you too, but you’re too little.”

My finger still aches, but I don’t even mind. At this very second, above our own very farm, a cloud, a small cloud, has been formed by Polly Peabody.

I am very proud.

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 27

A Cloud Moves

Before I even look outside my window, before I even brush my teeth, I run down the hall and bang on Patricia’s door.

“Go away!” she yells. But I push the door open and run to the side of her bed. “I promise, this is not a waste of your time.” I must look serious, because she swings her legs around the bed and puts on her sandals.

“What is it?” Her scar is healing, although I think she may always have this thin red line at the very top edge of her cheekbone.

“You’ll see.”

“Eww!” she grumbles. “You didn’t brush your teeth.”

“I will. Come on!”

Patricia trails me down the stairs. The house is very quiet; it’s early, before six o’clock. I’m so excited, I feel like I can float up to the sky. Everything will change today. I know it.

Patricia looks over and sees me grinning. She glares. “This better be good,” she says. “I haven’t been sleeping well.”

“Trust me.” I probably should have woken up Basford too. He would love to see the cloud. There are still questions, of course. I don’t know when clouds decide to make it rain—when the cloud gets too heavy, I think, but even if it doesn’t rain, the presence of a cloud should change
everything.

Dunbar.

The Juice Company.

Freddy.

I push open the side door. Patricia’s got a slight little smile on her face too. My giddiness is making her excited. I swing open the door and run to the center of the driveway.

“Look!” I yell. “Look!”

I lean back and look up to the morning sky. Patricia looks up too.

But it’s just blue. There are no clouds. Nothing. I’ve never been so disappointed in my life.

“What am I looking for?” Patricia asks, her eyes still trained on the sky.

“A cloud,” I whisper.

Patricia tilts her head back down and scans the sky with her eyes. “Did you see one?”

I blink. Do I tell her the truth? That I made one? Suddenly, I hear Aunt Edith’s words in my head.

You don’t need to brag about it, you don’t need to try to get credit for it, because it is you, who you are, who you are meant to be

Patricia is staring at me. “Polly? I don’t see any clouds.”

“There was one,” I insist. “I saw it.”

“When?”

I’m stuck again. “This morning,” I say. But where did it go? It’s been only four hours.

“Do clouds move?” I ask Patricia.

She shrugs. “Sure, with the wind, air pressure, whatever.”

I’m miserable. “My cloud must have moved.”

I ready myself for Patricia’s insults, for her to yell at me for waking her up for nothing, but she surprises me. She reaches out and touches my shoulder. “It’s okay,” she says. “I wish I could imagine clouds.”

“I didn’t—”

She keeps talking. “I can’t imagine anything. Scratch that. I can imagine the farm going into bankruptcy, and I can imagine that Freddy dies.” She looks back up to the sky. “You’re lucky.”

“Lucky?”

“You keep thinking the sky will open up and gold or diamonds will rain down.You’re sure that if we find the right magic potion, Freddy will drink it and get better. You think that if you pay enough attention to the plants that they’ll talk to you.”

“They do talk to me,” I say. I look over to the dragging, dying plants. “Well, they
did
talk to me.”

She steps toward the door to the castle. “You live in the clouds, Polly,” Patricia says. “That’s why you think you saw one.” She sighs. “As if a cloud could solve all our problems.”

“A cloud
can
solve all our problems,” I insist.

“I’m going back to sleep. Wake me if it rains.” She pauses. “And brush your teeth.”

After she leaves, I scan the sky for my cloud. I think I see it finally, far off, away from our property. I need to know how to keep the clouds together, how to keep them over our farm.

I look around for someone or something to help me—a plant, a bug, anything. But the entire farm is asleep or dead. I scowl at the ground and tramp back inside.

Things get worse at breakfast. I’m the last one there, and they’re all eating silently, turning over scrambled eggs and grapefruit slices with their forks and spoons, not really eating.

“I checked it over,” Dad is telling Patricia. “It’s okay.”

She pretends to brighten up. “More clothes for me.”

Basford just stares at Dad with the sorriest expression I’ve ever seen. Mom’s back is turned.

I sit next to Chico. He grunts. I look over at Dad, who has one hand on his baseball cap and one hand on the handle of his coffee mug.

“What are you talking about?” I ask.

“Promise me you won’t overreact,” Dad warns me. He looks over, leaning down across the table.

I glance over to Patricia, who avoids my look by chomping on her carrot. “Overreact about what?”

“Well.” Dad gives me one of his weak smiles. “We’re going to be rich.” He pauses, reaching over and grabbing one of my hands. “I’m going to accept the offer from Aunt Edith.”

I whip my hand back. Dad’s face falls, his eyes clouding over.

“No. NO!”

“Polly, we don’t have a choice—”

I stand up, ramming my chair back so hard it falls over. I feel Mom’s hand on my shoulder.

“No. You have to give me more time.”

BOOK: Drizzle

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