“You can’t trust in wishes. You trust in God. It’s harder to do, but worth it. You become a better person.”
“You want me perfect,” said Dinah. “I get so perfect, then I’m perfectly — lonely. Too good to have friends.”
Her mother corrected her. “I don’t want you perfect. I want you Dinah. The best Dinah you can be. Belief in God doesn’t make you better than anyone else — but with luck, it might make you better than you would otherwise be.”
“With luck?”
Her dad, in the other room, had laughed warmly. “She got you there, darlin’.”
Her mom had replied, “With grace. Have a good mind, honey, but don’t be a clever weasel.”
Dinah heard this all again in the dark, as if her parents were right there with her, hovering, shadowlike and indistinct, protecting her. But what if they were dead by now, and Dinah’s memory was of their ghosts, passing by, blessing her for a last time?
Gage was saying to Zeke, in a peacemaking tone, “Belief in something, anything, may or may not make you a better person, Zeke — depending on what the belief is — but it can make you different. You listen to a story together, though, and your differences can dissolve a little. Isn’t that okay? For a while? In an emergency?”
Zeke didn’t answer, but turned his spine away from the others.
What-the-Dickens tried to think things through. To add things up. (Skibbereen have a hard time at this; the best that the smartest of them can do with adding two plus two is guessing: three plus one. Correct, sort of, but not always useful.)
In his first day of life, he’d gained very little and he’d lost his ambition to become a pet to McCavity. He’d based his hopes on a sorry notion, if being a pet meant prison. Suffocation. Slavery.
So he was out in the wind, out in the wild, with nothing but his drying wings and his loneliness to believe in. And even though he lacked a grasp of basic math, he realized that this didn’t seem to add up to much.
Without a destination, What-the-Dickens flew the way the mama grisset might have done — this way and that, meandering like a butterfly or a bee. A butterfly or a bee in panic mode. He touched down; he lifted off. He looked and then he closed his eyes.
He was not so much aloft as adrift.
He ought to have slept, you know. Sleep is good for anyone in distress. But he couldn’t. He bumbled left, right, up, and down. Like a moth, occasionally he was drawn to the light in some isolated window, but he grew too scared to come closer in case he became trapped again.
The mama grisset has her young, he thought. Maharajah and McCavity are clearly cousins of some sort. Even the shriveled crone in the attic seems to have her family downstairs. Whom do I have of my own? Nobody.
In his terror at this sudden clarity, he entered the hot airspace over the chimney flue of a baker who, in the ancient tradition of bakers, had risen early to knead the dough for the day’s loaves. What-the-Dickens tumbled in the thermal, heel over head and wing tips over heels. The heat made him pass out, but his wings didn’t entirely forget their new talent. Instinct told his wings to break the speed of his fall to earth, and his wings obeyed.
Still, when he fell at last, he was winded, wounded of limb, and shattered of spirit. Crumpled upon himself, he rolled to a stop against the back wheel of the bakery’s delivery truck. GOODNESS BAKERY: THE BEST BAKED GOODS, said the truck, black and gold letters on a red background, though What-the-Dickens was beyond reading anything.
Like it or not, he slept.
And so should I. And so should you. Do you hear me?
“A GOOD PLACE TO TAKE A BREAK,” said Gage. “We really should get some sleep. We’re not doing ourselves a favor sitting up all night, believe me.”
They stood and stretched. Gage cracked his knuckles. First Dinah, then Zeke went to have a pee. Having already taken care of her pee while she cuddled in blankets, Rebecca Ruth slept on.
The man and the two older children gathered in the breezeway to study the weather. Dinah wondered if the storm was losing some strength. The air seemed to move with a more stately progress than before — didn’t it? Or was that wishful thinking on her part?
In a kind of slow-motion anguish, the trees tossed their heads. The sound of ten million leaves palming against each other. The sound of deep night.
“Sounds like a laugh track playing very far away,” said Gage.
“We don’t do laugh tracks, not in this house,” Dinah reminded her cousin. “No TV. Besides, who could be laughing at a time like this?”
“Choirs of angels might,” suggested Zeke. “They know it will come out all right.”
“Even if they knew the future, why should they laugh?” Dinah shot back. “Laugh at our misery now?”
“Oh, answer your own question, if my answer doesn’t suit you,” said Zeke. “I suppose you think the wind sounds more like — like some sort of campfire songfest, with crowds of Juliettes and Brittneys swaying back and forth, going ‘The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out,’ and on and on.”
“Ezekiel Hiram Jehosophat Ormsby,” began Dinah in a murderous tone.
“I was going to go try the generator again,” said Gage, “but I hate to leave you here squabbling.”
“I’ll come help,” said Dinah, wanting to get away from her brother for a spell. “Zeke can mind the baby.”
“I’m the boy. I’ll help Gage,” said Zeke. “Mind Rebecca Ruth yourself.”
Gage had had enough. He left them both behind. “Chew each other up all you want,” he told them. “Just give us a break here, will you? Don’t wake your sister. Please? It took long enough for her to settle.”
Zeke promised nothing, so Dinah wouldn’t either. Seething silently, they cupped their hands to peer through the window, watching Gage with a lackluster flashlight. He flipped switches; he fiddled with wires. He peered at directions printed on the side of the housing, running his hands to sluice off the rain-smear so he could decipher the engineering language. But the secrets of a gas-powered generator remained beyond him.
Dinah sympathized. There was so much of the world that she, too, couldn’t figure out. Or even imagine. Like where her friends Brittney and Juliette might be tonight. Where in the whole world. Or why they, wherever the blazes they were, should have the comfort of their parents, and Dinah only had —
“I like Gage,” she heard herself say, in the wrong tone, brutally.
“Useless,” agreed Zeke.
“He’s not useless.”
“He wouldn’t be useless if only he’d be right once in a while. I should have gone scavenging for supplies today, and you know it.”
“You didn’t, though,” she snapped. “At least when I had a plan, I carried it out. I went downslope to give blessings and hugs to Juliette and Brittney. I didn’t just talk about it.”
“Yeah, and you’d have gotten in a heap of trouble if everything hadn’t gotten so out of control —” said Zeke, but this brought the subject of their parents too close. The sudden panic, the medical questions, their mother’s tears, the quick prayer consultation in the driveway, the departure, as the echoes of distant thunder shuddered down the hills again. . . .
Remembering this, Dinah wanted to reach out and hold Zeke’s hand, just for a moment, but he was a jerk, so she didn’t.
When he returned, Gage looked so dejected that Dinah said, not as convincingly as she would have liked, “Don’t worry, Gage. It’s probably for the best. If you’d gotten the contraption working, the lights would’ve all gone on and woken up Rebecca Ruth. Maybe tomorrow someone will come along and fix it for us. That’s time enough.”
“Huh,” said Zeke, noncommittally.
“Besides,” said Dinah, “whatever food was left in the fridge has rotted already. So we don’t really need a working fridge.”
“We have to get some milk for the birthday girl sooner or later,” said Gage, “and we’re going to need to refrigerate it.”
“Maybe tomorrow will be the time to leave,” said Zeke,
as they returned to the front room on tiptoe. His expression said, We all know that yesterday was the time to leave.
Dinah looked at Gage, to see if he would say, No, the time is past; we can’t get out anymore. But he said nothing for a long time.
“Are you going to sleep?” asked Dinah in a softer voice.
Again, quiet, for so long that the children were sure the answer must be yes. But then Gage opened his eyes and winked. “Just tricking you to see if you’d nod off a little. I mean if I did.”
“You can sleep,” said Zeke. “Be my guest. I’m on duty. I’ll keep watch. It’s our house, anyway.”
“Oh no, he can’t sleep,” protested Dinah. “I want to know about What-the-Dickens.”
“He can tell us tomorrow. His . . .”— Zeke edited his opinions midsentence —“. . . little story will keep.”
“Tomorrow,” said Dinah, “we’ll have fresh worries to bother us, Zeke.”
“Is there anyone else out there?” asked Zeke. “I mean, if the time has come to leave, who will we find out there?”
Dinah clutched her knees. That’s what she worried about, too. That even the looters might have moved on. Moved out. Gotten out while they could.
Gotten out if they could.
She jabbed Gage under the ribs. “Where are we?” she said in a chattery whisper, to keep herself from flying apart.
Gage pulled himself upright again and rubbed both his eyes with the heels of his hands. “I’d rather talk than sleep,” said Gage. That remark is a fiction, thought Dinah. By the hooded look in her brother’s eyes, she guessed that Zeke thought Gage’s remark an out-and-out lie.
Neither of them spoke, though. They just waited, expectantly, in the dark, for the engine of storytelling to turn over and start up again — to do the thing that the blasted generator refused to do — to keep them warm throughout the night.
As the baker stacked his morning loaves and cakes on his truck, What-the-Dickens snored on. He slept until the baker turned the key in the truck’s ignition and the engine puttered to life and backfired. The explosion jolted the skibberee to his senses.
Before he had time to react, the truck pulled away.
GOODNESS BAKERY, said the shiny letters on the side of the truck as it careered away.
“Well, thank goodness,” murmured What-the-Dickens, glad not to have been pulverized. But as he awakened further, the reality of his situation fell heavily upon him. He remembered with shame his quest to find McCavity and give her a gift, and apply for a job as her pet. What a silly dream all of that had been.
He was older now, and wiser. He was a day and a half old. He had to face the facts of his solitude.
He had to find a life, or make one up from scratch.
What-the-Dickens stood and rubbed his thimble-hips. The day was starting out good, and not so good. He hadn’t been crushed by a bakery truck, true — but the same truck was barreling away too fast for him to follow, taking with it the sweet scent of warm cinnamon rolls and raspberry jam coffee cakes.
Though the sky was still dark, a paler grey bleared the eastern horizon. Night was hurrying toward morning at the rate of — is it? — a little more than a thousand miles an hour. But there was still a half hour before dawn.
The dew that had settled on the ground had settled on the skibberee, too. It made his limbs stiff. He stood and shivered for a while, and then he launched himself. “But where to?” he murmured, trying not to think of McCavity. “One hundred years of solitude, here I come.”
He flew as much to warm up as to travel. He wasn’t particularly zippy as a pilot, he discovered. His big feet hung down. Hovering a foot or two above the ground, he meandered like a big old bee bumbling his way home after an afternoon spent hitting the nectar.
At length the skibberee came across a children’s swing set, all rusting poles and creaking chains, and a weathered wooden seesaw, and a slide that went only down. The wind set the swings moving faintly. Among the exposed roots of a lilac hedge nosed an abandoned plastic ball, a sad clown face printed on it.
What-the-Dickens didn’t know what a playground was, but he could recognize its emptiness.
He sat on the swing. The size of a hamster in height, and of a clothespin in girth, he couldn’t move the swing on his own, even when he powered up his wings. When the wind stopped, the swing stopped too.
He tried the seesaw, but as everyone knows, a seesaw is no fun unless there are two of you. It just doesn’t work.
Finally What-the-Dickens flew to the top of the slide. To someone his size, it looked like a Matterhorn made out of titanium. He sat down and slalomed down the slope of it, ending up face-first in the mud at its base. “My life,” he mumbled to himself, a mouth full of grit. “Going nowhere fast.”
Then he found a board on which to balance. The edge of a sandbox, an old-fashioned one with wooden sides, held back sand packed like brown sugar and damp with dew.
In the middle of the nearest dune, What-the-Dickens spotted a footprint in the sand.
“Hello,” he said to the footprint, foolishly.
He couldn’t help it, though. This was a footprint of someone his own size, though someone with a narrower instep, a daintier tread than his. The footprint was pointing toward a second, about an inch or so beyond; and a third, and a fourth.
The little track went to the top of the low-lying dune — What-the-Dickens traced it — and then it disappeared. It just stopped in midtrek.
Who could it be? Is it a sign of that silent fellow with whom I once shared lodgings in an empty can? he wondered. Maybe it was another mouse who had gotten carried away by an owl, and that’s why the path stopped mid-dune. Or could it be a bird, like the mama grisset, who landed in the sand, hunted for worms, and then skittered up the slope and flew off again?
The world, though lonely, wasn’t entirely un peopled. It felt good to remember this. It felt good to feel good.
What-the-Dickens looked around. Beyond the playground crouched a long, low building with automobiles parked in front. It was an old-fashioned motel — a motor court — though What-the-Dickens didn’t grasp the concept.
This was in the country, remember, and it wasn’t an especially prosperous neck of the woods. Air-conditioning was supplied by nature. So most of the windows of the bedrooms were opened for a little air.
In one of the window screens he discovered a useful slit, several inches high. Its edges were folded back. It was perfect for slipping through. So he did.
It took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the gloom.
A pair of beds. In one, a grown-up snored underneath a forearm thrown across the face. In the other, a child breathed soundlessly. The bathroom light had been left on, and the door was open a few inches, so in a moment the room swam into focus.
Next to the adult’s bed was a magazine; the grown-up had been reading before sleep. (What-the-Dickens looked to see if there was a spare smile of teeth in a glass, but no such luck: only a ticking alarm clock.) On the child’s side of the table flopped an open coloring book and three rubbed-down crayons.
What-the-Dickens flew closer. He was drawn to the coloring book. It showed scenes from Peter Pan. I don’t know which, maybe the Disney version — I only heard about this later. Anyway, the page was opened to a drawing of Tinker Bell. Busty, pouty, peeved, and, the way she was dressed, in danger of catching a serious cold. She had wings, though to What-the-Dickens’s eye they appeared inadequate to the task of hoisting her aloft. She looked as if she might be suffering from some lower back strain.
“Wow,” said What-the-Dickens. He looked closer. “Wow.”
“Are you out of your cotton-picking mind?”
He whipped around, half expecting to find Tinker Bell in the flesh. Instead, he came face to face with an enraged little firecracker of a creature. She was hovering off the bedside table with her own set of wings set on ratchet.
His heart wanted to lift up — society! Someone he could talk to! — but she looked pretty steamed.
>
“What the dickens —” she said in a whisper that was more like a hiss.
She knows my name. Extraordinary. But how? “That’s me,” he said.
“What do you think you’re doing in here?”
“I don’t think —”
“Well, that much is obvious!” She waved her arms. “Lower your voice and dim your headlights, you nincompoop. You got no sense at all?”
“I doubt it.” At least my answer is honest, he thought. Maybe she’ll lighten up. “Do you?”
He looked her up and down to see if she might appear to have sense. She looked much like himself, only her sheer wings were yellow and pale purple, whereas his — he noticed for the first time — were a sort of turquoise blue. She sported a backpack of some sort.
“Who are you?” he asked, and added, “And, if I’m not being too forward, what are you?”
“I’m Pepper,” she said, “and if you can’t tell I’m a girl, you’re an even bigger loser than you look like. I’m a —” But she stopped herself. “You don’t get that information out of me, you spy. You interloper. Get lost, before I call in reinforcements.”
“I mean, what sort are you? What tribe? What variety? I’m What-the-Dickens,” he continued. “That’s what my name is. But beyond that, I’m afraid, I don’t know much else about myself. And even less about you.”
“Now look. I don’t care if your name is Saint Wisdom Tooth. This is our territory, buster,” she said. “And it’s my job, and I got to do it right. Don’t try to horn in where you ain’t wanted. I’m doing a simple snatch-’n’-scram. In and out, no muss, no fuss. Giving you the benefit of the doubt, you’re on the wrong job site, you. Worst case scenario, you’re an enemy agent pretending to be a moron. Now get lost before I beat you up.”
He had the sense she was talking big, and that she was alarmed. He didn’t know he could alarm anyone, and the feeling was weird but not entirely objectionable. “I have no idea what you’re yammering about, and that’s the truth,” he said.