The Long Way Home

  “Your mom said you had news but that you’d probably want to tell me yourself. What is it?”

  Dana clasped her hands together. “Dad is starting a new book and it needs illustrations. Guess who’s going to draw them.”

  Adele raised her eyebrows. “You?”

  Dana nodded. “I’m going to get paid! I even had to sign a contract. The book is called Father, and the cover will say, ‘By Zander Burley, with illustrations by Dana Burley.’”

  “Honey, that’s wonderful!” exclaimed Adele, and she put her arms around Dana. “What kind of illustrations does the book need?”

  “I think Dad said they’re called spots. Some of them are more like decorations. They’re small. I’m going to do them in pen and ink. I’m not used to pen and ink, though, so Mrs. Booth is going to give me private lessons over the summer. But all the art in the book will be mine, with no help from anyone. The book will be a family affair — that’s what Dad said. A book called Father with illustrations by the author’s daughter. Get it?”

  “I do. You are an amazing person, Dana.”

  “Thank you,” said Dana, who could feel her cheeks flaming but was pleased nevertheless.

  “I swing now?” asked Peter, who had been sitting placidly on the bench next to Adele.

  Patty and Marian turned away from the string game. “Please? Can we go play?”

  “Sure,” Adele replied. “Go ahead.”

  “Let’s play freeze tag,” said Julia.

  “Oh, look. The swings are free!” cried Patty. “Come on!”

  Dana took Peter by the hand and followed Patty and Marian to the swings. She glanced over her shoulder at her sister. “We’ll play freeze tag next,” she said kindly. “I promise. Come on. Swing with us.”

  Two regular swings and one baby swing were free, all in a row. Patty and Marian claimed the regular swings, and Dana helped Peter into the baby swing. He was too big for the baby swings now, but he had fallen off the other swings several times, and Abby and Zander had proclaimed that he would have to use the swings with the seat backs and the bars until his balance improved.

  Dana slid the bar down the chains until it was just above Peter’s lap. “Hold on,” she told him. “Hold on tight.” When she noticed that Peter’s brown oxfords were dragging in the scuffed, dusty earth below the swings, she added, “Pick up your feet.”

  Peter obliged and Dana began to push him slowly.

  “Faster,” commanded Peter.

  Dana pushed harder. At the edge of her vision she caught sight of the mother and her boy.

  “I want to swing,” said the boy.

  “All the swings are taken,” his mother replied. She raised her voice. “Those swings are for little children,” she called to Dana. “Get him out and let him wait his turn for the other swings.”

  Dana ignored her. She pushed even harder, and Peter began to laugh. “More!” he called.

  The woman watched, hands on hips.

  Dana had pushed Peter twice more when she realized that he was suddenly very quiet. “Everything all right?” she called to him.

  Her brother let out a groan.

  “Peter?”

  Nothing. And then, as the swing began its arc back toward Dana, Peter groaned again and a long, slobbery trail of vomit whooshed from his mouth as he barfed up his ice cream bar.

  “Gross!” shrieked Patty and Marian, and they jumped to the ground, out of barf range.

  Dana caught the back of Peter’s swing and brought it to a stop.

  “Oh no,” she said as Peter leaned over the side of the swing and vomited again.

  The mother, who had been waiting nearby with her little boy, said, as if finishing a conversation she had begun with Dana, “And that is exactly why children like him should stay at home, where they belong.”

  Adele was at Peter’s side in an instant. She glared at the woman, and Dana could see her mouth working, but then her aunt turned away and helped Peter out of the swing instead. “Come on,” she said to the girls. “Time to go.”

  “Just a minute,” said Dana. She walked under the swing set and stopped a few feet from the woman. “My brother couldn’t help getting sick. He didn’t do anything wrong. He’s just a little kid. And I think you are very rude to say something like that in front of him. He can understand what you say, you know. I thought adults weren’t supposed to be rude. Especially not to children. My parents taught my sister and brother and me not to be rude. But I guess nobody taught you that.”

  Dana sensed she might have gone a bit too far (she hoped she wasn’t being rude, after all), but she would not apologize for her words. The woman needed to hear them. She waited until the woman had turned away and led her son quietly in the direction of the gate to the park. Then she ran to Adele, who was wiping Peter’s face, and she took her brother’s hand and held it tightly.

  Dana was awakened from a deep and luxurious sleep by a knock on her door. She groaned, rolled over in bed, and peered at her alarm clock. Six thirty.

  “What?” she called. “It’s six thirty.”

  “Time for school!” came Peter’s voice.

  Dana groaned again. “No. There’s no school today, Peter. I told you that last night. Today is Thanksgiving.”

  “But it’s Thursday.”

  Dana was impressed with her little brother. “How do you know that?” she called, interested in spite of the early hour.

  “From my teacher. Can I come in?”

  “Sure.” Dana sat up, stuffed her pillow behind her, leaned against it, and flicked on her lamp.

  The door opened and Peter entered her room. He was dressed in corduroy pants, a white shirt, a yellow sweater, and his brown oxfords, the laces untied. “See? I’m all ready.”

  “You look very nice, but there’s still no school today. Just like on Saturday and Sunday.”

  “Today is Thursday. Thursday. Yesterday at Circle Time my teacher said it was Wednesday. So today is Thursday.”

  “I know. But remember the paper turkey you made? And the story your teacher told you about the Pilgrims?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s because of Thanksgiving. Which is today. And Thanksgiving is a special holiday.”

  Peter considered this. “Is tomorrow Friday?”

  “Yes, tomorrow is Friday. But there’s no school then either. Not until Monday.”

  “I like school,” Peter declared, and left the room.

  Peter did indeed like school. He was seven years old now, and enrolled in his first year at Wings Academy, which was a private school for children with mental retardation. Dana’s mother had worried that Peter wasn’t ready for this big step, but on September 16th, he had walked through the doorway to his classroom for the first time, waved briefly to Abby, taken his teacher’s hand, and entered the world of school. He was learning the days of the week, how to count, and the names of colors, and he came home at the end of each day with paintings and large sheets of widely lined paper on which he practiced writing the alphabet with a fat blue pencil.

  Peter knocked on Dana’s door again and stuck his head back in her room. “It’s snowing!” he announced. “Snow is a kind of weather.”

  Dana peeked outside. It wasn’t just snowing. It looked like a blizzard. She could barely see across the street. She threw back her covers and ran barefoot down to the second floor, passed her parents’ bedroom, and continued to the first floor and into the living room, where she found her parents side by side, watching the storm.

  “How much snow do we have?” asked Dana.

  “Too much,” said her mother, shaking her head.

  “Six inches,” said her father.

  “That’s not so bad.” Dana sniffed the air. “You’re already cooking,” she said to Abby. “I can smell the turkey.”

  Abby held up crossed fingers. She had been preparing food for days, with help from a part-time cook. The refrigerator was jammed with vegetables and olives and cranberries and mysterious foil-covered dishes. Adele was comin
g for dinner, and so were ten guests, and the affair was to be very fancy. Dana and Julia had new velvet dresses with lace collars (Dana’s dress was black, Julia’s was red), and Peter had a new suit.

  “I just hope everyone can make it,” said Abby.

  “They’ll make it,” said Zander. “They can always take the subway. There’s no blizzard underground.”

  That may have been true, but by eleven o’clock, the two women hired to help Abby in the kitchen that day were an hour late. Dana’s mother began to wring her hands.

  “We can help you,” said Dana, shutting her sketchbook.

  “We’ll all pitch in,” added Zander. “What do you want us to do?”

  The Burleys gathered in the kitchen and Abby assigned them tasks. Ten minutes later Dana and Peter were setting the table in the dining room with silver and fine china, when the doorbell rang and the two women hustled inside, apologies trailing behind them with their snowy footprints.

  Dana’s mother breathed a sigh of relief.

  The guests had been invited for a two o’clock dinner. Adele arrived at one thirty, which Dana took as a good sign, but then an hour passed and the bell didn’t ring again.

  “Is it very slippery outside?” Abby asked. Dana, Julia, and Peter put their outdoor clothes on over their fancy ones and stepped outside in the fog and snow and wet air. They made their way to the sidewalk and tried sliding on it.

  “It’s only a little slippery,” Dana reported, a few minutes later, as she and her brother and sister stood dripping slush in the front hall.

  “And the snow is stopping,” added Julia.

  Half an hour passed and the first guests finally arrived, trailing apologies of their own behind them. By three thirty everyone was gathered in the living room with drinks. Dana, Julia, and Peter passed around plates of hors d’oeuvres (which Peter called “orders”), and Dana dutifully curtsied each time anyone said “thank you” to her. The guests (not counting Adele) were five women and five men, and three of the men and one of the women were famous writers of books for grown-ups. Dana wished her father knew Eleanor Estes or Dr. Seuss, who wrote books for children, but he did not. Still, she felt pleased, as she always did, to chat with people who had written novels that she saw stacked in the windows of bookstores. And her cheeks flamed with pride when Ben Thomas, who wrote great fat books about scandalous families, said to her, “I hear you’re going to illustrate your father’s next book. Would you share some of your work with us?”

  Dana was on the way to her bedroom to retrieve the box containing her drawings when she heard a shriek from below. She turned and ran back downstairs to find half the guests hurrying into the kitchen.

  “What happened?” she asked Julia.

  “I don’t know. Something in the kitchen.”

  This was when Dana saw a plume of smoke puffing out of the kitchen door and winding through the dining room. “The turkey’s on fire!” she heard Ben Thomas exclaim.

  Dana felt her heart begin to pound, even though she realized that several of the guests were laughing. She stood on tiptoe to peer through the small crowd of people at the kitchen door and saw the flaming turkey sitting in a basting pan on the table. One of the women who was helping Abby was fanning the turkey with a dish towel, and the other was trying to douse it with a teacup full of water.

  “Stand back!” ordered Dana’s father, just as if he were a character in one of his own books. He grabbed a fire extinguisher from the cupboard and aimed it at the turkey.

  “No!” cried Dana’s mother.

  She was too late.

  With a whoosh of white foam, the flames disappeared.

  “It’s out,” said Ben, looking at the dripping, ruined mess in the pan.

  “Zander!” Dana’s mother exclaimed. “What —” Her voice was drowned out by more laughter. “I really don’t see what’s so funny,” she said.

  “Come on. It is a little funny,” said Zander.

  Dana looked from her mother to her father. “But what are we going to eat? We have to have turkey on Thanksgiving.”

  Her father smiled. “Not this Thanksgiving.”

  Dana felt a hand on her shoulder and turned around. Adele drew her away from the crowd at the doorway. “It’s okay, honey. There’s plenty of other food. And the guests have a sense of humor about what happened.”

  “But Mom is upset, and I just know she and Dad are going to have a fight —”

  “Dana?”

  Dana turned to see Peter standing at the foot of the staircase, tears running down his cheeks. She rushed to her brother and put her arms around him. “It’s okay,” she said. “The fire is out.”

  “Fire?” Peter frowned. Then he said, “I can’t find Tail.”

  “What do you mean? When was the last time you saw her?”

  “I don’t know. But I can’t find her now. I looked and looked.”

  “Did you look under your bed?”

  “Yes.”

  “In Julia’s closet?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you look on the chair in your dad’s study?” asked Adele.

  Peter sniffled. “Yes.”

  “We’d better have a search, then,” said Julia, who had left the group of people exclaiming over the turkey. “Maybe all the excitement scared Tail.”

  “Everyone choose a floor and search carefully,” said Adele.

  Fifteen minutes later, when they met up on the first floor, there was still no sign of Tail, and Peter was crying noisily. “She’s gone!” he wailed.

  “I’m sure she isn’t actually gone,” said Dana’s mother reasonably. “Nobody would have let her out of the house. She has to be here somewhere. Let’s look again.”

  “But we looked everywhere,” sobbed Peter.

  “No, we didn’t,” said Dana, brightening. “I know one place we didn’t search. The kitchen.”

  Peter made a beeline for the kitchen, with Dana, Julia, Adele, Abby, and Zander at his heels. From the living room came the clinking of glasses and more loud laughter, so Dana knew the guests were entertaining themselves. The Burleys and Adele peered under chairs and into improbable places, such as the tiny space behind the refrigerator, but there was still no sign of Tail.

  At last Peter opened a cupboard. Dana was about to say, “Peter, how could Tail have gotten into a closed cupboard?” when her brother exclaimed, “Oh! Oh, here she is! But there’s . . . Uh-oh. Come here.”

  “What’s wrong?” asked Zander.

  Everyone crowded around the cupboard. There, nestled on a pile of dish towels, were Tail and four tiny, damp kittens.

  “Kittens?” said Abby. “Now, how did she . . . I mean, when —”

  “She has been looking kind of fat,” said Julia.

  “I know, but I just thought we were feeding her too much.”

  “What do we do now?” asked Dana.

  “Let’s find a basket,” her father replied.

  Tail was remarkably calm about being moved from her hidden bed to a basket in Peter’s room. Dana’s parents and Adele returned to the guests, but Dana, Julia, and Peter remained crowded around the basket until finally they were called downstairs to a Thanksgiving dinner, which consisted of vegetables and bologna with all the trimmings.

  “I don’t even mind about the turkey now,” Dana told Adele. “Not since we found the kittens.”

  “And I thought the snow was going to be our biggest problem today,” said Abby.

  “The kittens aren’t a problem,” Julia replied.

  “You know what I mean. This isn’t quite the Thanksgiving we had planned.” Abby looked around at the guests. “I remember another Thanksgiving that didn’t go as planned,” she went on. “I was eight years old.”

  Dana turned to her aunt. “Were you born yet?” she asked.

  “Nope. Not for another five years or so.”

  “What happened, Mommy?” Julia wanted to know.

  “Snow again,” Abby replied. “There was a blizzard and the power went out and the
phones, too. We lived in a very rural area, so our guests — they were our cousins — weren’t able to travel to our house. We had to eat all that food by ourselves.”

  “That was in the olden days, right, Mom?” asked Dana.

  “It did seem like the olden days. We had kerosene lamps and a potato bin and an icebox that kept food cold with blocks of ice.”

  “Your mother is actually four hundred years old,” said Zander, and everyone laughed.

  Dana cut up a slice of bologna. She thought about the turkey fire and about Tail and her kittens, and she decided that when she was grown up, she would tell her children about this Thanksgiving Day, and about the story her own mother had told of another Thanksgiving, which was so long ago, it might have taken place in a different world.

  Dana stood before her closet and surveyed the clothes hanging in it. She pulled out a red jumper and a white blouse and considered them. She hung them up again. She pulled out a red-and-pink-striped dress and considered it. She hung it up again. Why, she thought, hadn’t she chosen her outfit the night before? Today was Valentine’s Day and there would be a party at school. She wanted to look perfect for it.

  “Dana?” She heard her sister’s voice from the hallway. “What are you wearing today?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “Could we maybe be samesies?”

  Dana sighed. “What do you want to wear?”

  “The red dresses that Mommy bought us at Best’s.”

  Dana let out a sigh of relief. “I got ink on mine,” she reported truthfully. “I’ll have to wear something else.”

  Dana pulled out the jumper and blouse again and put them on in a hurry. She didn’t want to be late for school on Valentine’s Day. This was one of her favorite days of the year. She and Julia had spent every evening that week making Valentines for their classmates. And in school the day before, their teacher had allowed them to close their arithmetic books half an hour early in order to make heart-shaped pouches to hang on their desks. Into these pouches would be delivered their Valentine cards, and during the party, the twins would open the cards and read them while they ate cupcakes and tried not to look at Abby, who was one of the room mothers that year.