Falling into Place (3 page)

Margaret was so surprised, it had taken her a few minutes to notice the change in Gran. She seemed frail, somehow, not just small, and anxious. She gave Margaret a hurried hug instead of her usual warm embrace, and then grabbed Margaret's hand. “Sign? What sign? Hold on to my hand, Margaret.” Her voice was loud and querulous. “Roy, where are you? Stay close to me now, both of you.”

She clutched Margaret to her on one side and Roy on the other as she pulled them down the platform. The way she kept them clutched so insistently to her side, it was as if there was a huge crowd on the platform and she was afraid they were going to be swept onto the tracks. But there wasn't any crowd. Other than the two people hurrying to their cars at the other end of the platform, they were the only people there.

It wasn't like Gran at all to be so nervous. And it had given Margaret a fluttery feeling in the pit of her stomach. How could she talk to Gran about
her
problems when Gran seemed so worried herself? And even if Gran was all right, how was she ever going to get her to herself?

She would never forgive Roy if he ruined her visit with Gran. Never.

Not only was he almost as big a baby as Claire, but he was uncoordinated. He couldn't play the simplest game of follow-the-leader without hurting himself. Claire followed orders much better than he did, too. When Margaret told him to close his eyes and take a running jump to get over the gap in the stone wall where the walkway ran through, he refused. And now look at him, she thought disgustedly. Another baby, crying.

She jumped down off the wall and walked over to where he sat huddled on the grass. “I never cry,” she said, taking another lick of her Popsicle. “I didn't even cry when I broke my collarbone, and that hurt a lot more than your dumb old knee.”

“How do you know?” said Roy. He squeezed his wound gently. “See that white thing?”

“That's just the inside of your skin,” said Margaret. She made a disgusted clicking noise. “You're a bigger baby than Claire.”

“It stings like crazy.”

“Oh, for Pete's sake, hold still.” She squatted down next to him, grabbed his knee, and started rubbing the tip of her Popsicle back and forth vigorously over his wound.

“Keep it down, would you?” she said, ducking to avoid his flailing arms. “You make it sound like you're being murdered. Hey!” Margaret jumped to her feet and rubbed the side of her head where he'd struck her. “What'd you do that for?”

“You can't put Popsicle on an open wound!” Roy's round face was screwed up into a furious knot. “It's full of sugar!”

“So? Look at that—a perfectly good Popsicle, wasted,” she said disgustedly. See if she ever tried to help
him
out again! She broke off the top, tossed it back over her shoulder, and put what was left of it back in her mouth. “You could have given me a concussion,” she said.

“That's better than gangrene,” said Roy. He pushed himself up off the ground with his injured leg held stiffly out in front of him, and started moving along the wall with jerky, birdlike hops.

Margaret followed along behind him, swinging a stiff leg out to the side in an exaggerated arc, and moaning.

“It's not funny, Margaret,” said Roy. He hobbled faster to put a greater distance between them, and stopped. Like a swimmer testing the water with a fearful toe, he rested his foot on the ground and put his full weight on it. As she came up to him, Margaret heard the sharp intake of his breath.

“It feels better, doesn't it?” she said.

“No.”

“Yes, it does, I can tell. Go on, try walking.”

“I don't know what you're in such a bad mood about,” Roy said to her. “But you'd better stop being mean to me, Margaret, or I'm telling Gran.”

Margaret felt a moment of panic. If Roy went running back to Gran, upset, she didn't know
what
Gran would do. Not after the way she had acted last night, when all Roy did was call the stew she put in front of them “Tad's favorite.” Without warning, Gran's mouth had gone slack and her eyes had gotten a bewildered, lost look. She'd said something vague about having to get the salad, and then turned and made her way back into the kitchen, holding on to the backs of the chairs as if she needed to be shown the way. Margaret and Roy had sat there in shocked silence.

When Gran finally came back into the room, she acted as if nothing had happened. But Margaret couldn't forget the look on her face. She couldn't bear to think of Gran looking that way again.

“We were sent to try and cheer her up, remember?” she said, in a voice far more confident than she felt. “How do you think she's going to feel, knowing her grandson's a tattletale?”

“Then you better stop telling me what to do,” said Roy.

“Okay, okay.” Margaret bit off the last piece of her Popsicle and held the stick up in front of her face. “Want to hear a joke?”

“What?”

“What gets colder as it warms up?”

“I don't know,” said Roy. He started to limp again.

“An air conditioner.” She stuck the stick behind one ear and fell in next to him.

“What'd you do that for?” Roy said.

“I'm thinking about making a Popsicle-stick joke book. If I don't save the sticks, I'll forget the jokes.”

“Your ear's going to get infected, putting that thing back there.”

“All you do is talk about things getting infected all the time,” Margaret said, glad to be on a safer topic.

“I can't help it. My father's a doctor.”

They walked slowly, moving in and out of the shadows of the trees that fell across the road in stripes. There was a row of small white cottages on either side of the street. Each one had a small front yard hemmed in by a picket fence. The shutters and doors were black.

Gran didn't like the houses at Carol Woods, Margaret could tell. She said she got lost every time she went out, they all looked so much alike. But they didn't, really. Each one had something different about it if you looked carefully. The one Margaret and Roy were passing had bright red geraniums in green window boxes on the front. The one next to it had sunflowers that reached to the top of the door.

Margaret thought they were pretty. She thought Carol Woods looked like a little village, and the houses reminded her of the cozy houses in picture books, where neighbors leaned over their picket fences and borrowed a cup of sugar. It would be nice to have neighbors so close in the middle of a thunderstorm, she thought, especially if you were alone. But when she had said this to Gran on the way home from the station yesterday, Gran had said she didn't know any of her neighbors yet and wasn't sure she wanted to.

“All anyone talks about in a place like this is their aches and pains and what medicines they take.” Gran's voice was full of scorn. “It doesn't make for very interesting conversation.”

Margaret had frowned. It wasn't like Gran to be so mean. Especially about people she didn't even know. She was always telling Margaret not to judge people before she got to know them. And on Blackberry Lane Gran had been friends with all the neighbors.

“How do you know if you don't even know them?” Margaret had said insistently. But Gran didn't answer.

That wasn't like her, either.

Margaret gave a nervous little side hop as if trying to get away from herself. Here she was, thinking about Gran again. She whirled around to face Roy. “Want to get some sheets and build a fort when we get back?”

“Maybe. But you can't make all the rules from now on,” he said. “You're only twenty-eight months older than me. You're not the boss of me. We both are. Gran said so.”

“But I have more experience than you,” said Margaret. “I boss the girls around all the time. You don't have anyone to boss.”

“Girls are different. Boys don't like being bossed.”

“Neither do girls,” she said breezily, and then threw her hands over her head, hopped up on one foot, and kicked over slowly from a handstand into a back bend. “The thing about bossing is,” she said, with her dark hair falling to the ground like a beard, “you're not supposed to ask the person whether they like it or not.”

Roy stared at her disapprovingly. “You're going to hurt your backbone, staying like that,” he said. “You could get curvature of the spine.”

“Go on,” she grunted. “Time me.”

He pressed a button on his watch and kept his eye on it until Margaret let out a burst of air and collapsed onto the grass with her legs doubled back beneath her. “Fifty-six seconds,” he said.

“You didn't start on time.” She pulled a strand of hair out of the corner of her mouth and jumped to her feet. “I usually go longer than that.”

They started walking again.

“I
was sent to cheer her up,” said Roy, picking up where they left off. “
You
were sent because they were trying to get rid of you.”

“Rid of me?” Margaret stopped. “You don't know what you're talking about.”

“I do, too. I heard Gran talking to him on the phone before you came. Your dad said you were being a handful and Gran said that must make it hard on everyone. Then she said, ‘Why don't you send Margaret here?'”

There was a hollow feeling in the pit of her stomach. She should have known. Dad had made it sound as if he was trying to be nice to
her
. But that wasn't it at all. All he really cared about was Wendy and the girls. They were probably having a much better time at home without her, sitting together in the family room with the twins on the floor in their usual tangled heap and Claire on the couch between Wendy and Dad, peacefully enjoying being a family. Without her.

“A handful of what?” she said, tossing her hair back over her shoulder as if she didn't care.

“Not a handful
of
anything,” said Roy. He pulled a small notebook out of his back pocket and opened it. “It means you're hard to handle. I looked it up. The first definition is ‘A small amount or quantity,' but that's not what Uncle Matt meant.” He stopped and ran his finger down a page. “He meant, ‘Someone or something that is as much as one can handle.' As in,” here he looked at Margaret with the sun glinting off his glasses, “‘That child is a real handful.'”

“As in?” said Margaret. She was suddenly wildly, amazingly angry. At Roy . . . at Dad . . . at herself. She didn't know where to direct her anger, it was so new and blazing hot.

“Do you know what a nerd you are, writing down words like that?” she said. Her wide mouth flattened into a disapproving line. “Everyone at school must make fun of you.”

“I don't mind.” Roy looked back at her with a friendly, unguarded expression on his face. “Words are interesting.”

As hard as she tried to stare him down, he didn't flinch. “I can't believe this,” she said finally. She turned on her heel and started to walk as quickly as she could. A slight breeze ruffled the leaves overhead, and the faint sound of a lawn mower started up somewhere in the distance. Walking in and out of the shadows of the trees had a regular, calming effect, Margaret thought, like a metronome. She could hear Roy trotting along in companionable silence behind her.

“I don't think being a handful's so bad,” he piped up suddenly. “It must be pretty interesting sometimes.”

She stopped and looked at him in amazement. He was trying to be kind. She had just insulted him and had marched off in a huff trying to ignore him, and here he was, being nice to her. Her anger went up in a puff of smoke.

“Remember when you came to our house last summer?” she said to him.

“That was fun.”

“Remember when I told you I hated you, and you cried?” She shook her head. “That was so amazing.” “I don't think it was amazing,” Roy said. “You hurt my feelings.”

“But I say that to the girls all the time, and they say it to me,” said Margaret. “It doesn't really mean anything.”

“To me it does.”

“No one says it to you because you're an only child,” she said, remembering.

“They don't that much. All I have is my parents.” Roy thought for a minute. “Do your
parents
tell you they hate you?”

“Of course not,” said Margaret. It was true. As many times as she might have thought about hating Wendy, Wendy had never once thought about hating her, she suddenly realized. She didn't know how she knew it, but she did. And it made her feel so glad, she laughed.

“Come on.” She stepped up onto the edge of the curb and held her arms out to the sides. “Both arms out and no looking at your feet,” she said.

“Okay,” said Roy, stepping up behind her. “But no more stone walls.”

“Okay.”

“What do you think the baby will be?” said Roy after a while.

“Are you joking? All Wendy has is girls.”

“Maybe having another girl will be nice,” he said. “It was kind of fun, having them around. When they weren't crying, that is.”

“Which is never.” Margaret started to hop on one foot. “That's easy for you to say. You don't have to listen to Sarah making snurgling noises through the wall every night.”

“Snurgling?” Roy sounded interested. “I don't think that's a word.”

“It should be.”

“What does snurgling sound like?”

Margaret stopped. “Kind of like little bubbles are coming out of your nose, and you're breathing through your mouth with phlegm in the back of your throat.” She started up again, on the other foot this time. “Sarah won't wear anything except her bathing suit, so she always has a cold.”

“Even in winter?” said Roy. He fell off the curb for the second time and gave up, following along behind her in the road.

“That's better than Emily,” Margaret said. “For a long time, she wouldn't wear anything at all.”