They’d gotten halfway across the beach when Skye spotted her aunt tottering down Birches’ steps, on her way to find her missing niece. Seconds later, crutches were flying this way and that, and Skye was enveloped in a hug almost big enough to squash out all the awfulness. But not quite.
“Oh, Aunt Claire, what have I done?”
Aunt Claire stroked her hair. “You haven’t done anything wrong. Do you think you’ve done something wrong?”
“I’m not sure.” She pulled back to see her aunt’s face. “I just don’t understand. Does Alec think he’s Jeffrey’s father?”
“Yes, and he’s gone to Arundel to find out for certain.”
Cold crept up Skye’s spine. “But if he is, how could he not know? None of this makes sense.”
“When he and Jeffrey’s mother split up, she might not even have known she was pregnant.”
“But then she should have told him when she found out, right?”
“Theoretically yes, but we won’t know the whole story until Alec talks to her. There could be another explanation. Jeffrey could have a different father, or he could be adopted, or—I don’t know. There could be two Brenda Framleys, even.”
“No, no, no.” One was much too awful. There couldn’t be two.
Skye helped Aunt Claire back up to the deck and sent Hoover into the house to see Hound, all the while thinking furiously of matters she didn’t want to think about, not for years and years. Rosalind wouldn’t shrink from all this. Rosalind would know exactly what to do. But Skye knew nothing, nothing. No, that wasn’t true. She did know one thing very well—that she couldn’t keep this secret for twenty-four hours.
“Aunt Claire, I’m going to tell Jeffrey what’s going on.”
“You can’t, honey. That’s not right.”
“None of this is right. And even if Alec isn’t his father, he was married to Jeffrey’s mother. I can’t pretend I don’t know that.”
“Yes, you can, because you have to. It’s not fair to Jeffrey to give him half the story, then leave him hanging. You’ll have to be brave and patient.”
“Patient!” Skye had never felt less patient in her life.
“And it’s only fair to let Alec tell his own story. You know that.” Aunt Claire brushed Skye’s hair off her forehead, just like she had years ago when Skye was small. “We’ll manage this together. I’ll make sure Jeffrey and Batty spend most of their time with Alec’s piano, and if Jane starts getting curious, distract her by asking about Sabrina Starr.”
Inside the house, Hound was starting to bark, and it wasn’t his Hoover-is-here bark. No, this bark meant that Batty had been away from him for too long and was now on her way back.
“They’re coming!” said Skye. “The sale must be over already.”
Aunt Claire lowered herself onto a chair and picked up a book. Seeing her, Skye would have thought that nothing out of the ordinary had happened for hours, for days, for weeks. I can do this, too, she thought, sitting down in another chair with what she hoped was languid nonchalance.
“How do I look?” she asked Aunt Claire.
“Like a bomb that’s about to go off.”
“I can’t do it,” wailed Skye, straightening up again.
“Yes, you can. Think about prime numbers, or those black holes you love so much. Think about black holes!”
Black holes, thought Skye, black holes, black holes, and here came Batty running around the house, waving the Mouette Inn box and shouting about a piano, and then came Mercedes, Jane, and Jeffrey, with empty buckets and no golf clubs or even a bag left—and Skye’s battle had begun.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Answers, and More Questions
BY MIDNIGHT, most of Birches was asleep—Jane and Jeffrey in their beds on the sleeping porch, and Batty, Hound, and Hoover all piled happily into Batty’s bed. Only Skye and Aunt Claire were still awake, feverishly working on yet another jigsaw puzzle. It had been a good-bye gift from Turron, but instead of Paris or Venice, this one showed a close-up of a dog that looked just like Hoover.
“I’m sorry,” said Aunt Claire when Skye complained for the tenth time about staring at Hoover’s face. “Turron said it was the only puzzle left in the store.”
“Turron was teasing you.”
“Probably. Here’s a piece of dog leg.”
“No, that’s an ear, I think.” Skye yawned hugely, knocking several pieces of Hoover onto the floor.
“Go to bed, Skye.”
“Not until Alec calls. I can’t sleep until I know the truth about you-know-what.”
Not that she wasn’t worn out, wrung out, tired through and through. Never in her life had Skye spent so many hours acting calm and carefree, while all the time her brain was spinning like an out-of-control merry-go-round. Was Alec truly Jeffrey’s father? No, it was too bizarre to be true. But that photograph—how alike they were! So then Alec was his father—he had to be. No, no, even Mrs. T-D couldn’t be that selfish, to keep a boy from his father. Well, then, who was Jeffrey’s father? Would Mrs. T-D tell Alec that? Probably not. She wouldn’t tell him anything unless he himself was Jeffrey’s father. So was he? And on and on Skye’s brain would spin.
Alec had called once already, after dinner. While Skye created a diversion by tickling Batty, which made her shriek and Hound and Hoover bark, Aunt Claire was able to slip off to talk to him without anyone noticing. She’d told Skye later what Alec had said—he was an hour away from Arundel, nervous out of his mind, and he’d call them again after he’d talked to Jeffrey’s mother. And how was Jeffrey, he’d asked three or four times, even though each time Aunt Claire told him that Jeffrey was doing great and spending most of his time playing the piano.
Since then it had been as though an evil genie had gotten into the phone line. All evening it rang. One person looking for Rieke, whoever she was, one man asking for donations to a political party that Aunt Claire despised, and two calls from Turron, to whom Alec had told everything and was now as on edge and looking for news as Skye and Aunt Claire. Rosalind had called, too, and chatted with Aunt Claire about wind surfing and saltwater taffy. Of all the calls, this had been the hardest on Skye. For almost two weeks, she’d avoided Rosalind because of stupid pride and wanting to manage all by herself, and now that she would have given anything to talk with her about Jeffrey and Alec, she couldn’t because it was secret. How sick Skye was of secrets. And being the OAP. And telephone calls with people who weren’t Alec on the other end.
“Is this his eye or his tooth?” asked Aunt Claire, waving around another puzzle piece.
“Tooth, I guess. My, what big teeth you have, Hoover.” Skye, who in her right mind would have scorned such an infantile joke, was convulsed with giggles and knocked even more of Hoover to the floor.
“Only the better to eat—”
The phone was ringing. Aunt and niece stopped laughing and stared at each other, neither ready to answer the phone. This time it had to be Alec.
“Do you want to talk to him?” Aunt Claire asked Skye after the third ring.
“No. You do it.”
So Aunt Claire answered and Skye watched as she went pale, then red, then pale again, as she nodded and listened. By the time she hung up, Skye knew the truth. But still she had to ask.
“Alec really is Jeffrey’s father, isn’t he?”
“Yes.”
It was a strange experience for Skye to cry that much. She hadn’t done so for a long time, longer than she could remember. It helped that Aunt Claire was doing it, too. They clung together and cried and cried—for relief and worry and exhaustion, and for that boy asleep on the porch whose past and future had been tossed into the air and juggled around, with no one knowing what would happen when it all fell down again.
But even in times so burdened, tears eventually dry up, and after a lot of tissues had been used to clean noses and eyes, Aunt Claire filled Skye in on the details. Mrs. T-D had admitted everything to Alec—that she had kept their son a secret from him for all the
se years and would have kept that secret forever if she’d had her way.
“But why? Why would she do such a thing?”
Aunt Claire pushed doggish puzzle pieces around for a long moment. “It seems that she didn’t want to share Jeffrey. She wanted him all to herself.”
“That’s horrible!”
“Yes.”
As for right now, Aunt Claire went on, Alec was in a hotel in Massachusetts somewhere, too drained to make it all the way back to Maine that night. But he would be there in the morning as soon as he possibly could—and would call a few minutes before he arrived—and he asked them to please, if they could, keep his secret until then, so that he could tell Jeffrey himself. And then he’d hung up.
After all that, Skye and Aunt Claire felt even less like sleeping than they had before. And because crying is hard and hungry work, they each had a piece of strawberry-rhubarb pie from Moose Market, plus big glasses of milk, and while they ate, they talked quietly of this, that, and anything but terrible mothers, until the conversation drifted to good mothers, and soon Aunt Claire was telling Skye stories about Skye’s very own mother, Elizabeth Penderwick, or Lizzy, or Mommy. Most of the stories Skye had heard before, but not the asparagus one from when she was three. Aunt Claire couldn’t remember why the asparagus had caused such a problem but suspected that Jane was somehow involved. What she did remember was how Skye had screamed until her face turned purple, at which point Lizzy, desperate, stuck the asparagus up her own nose, and Skye had been so surprised that she stopped screaming and had loved asparagus ever since.
“I never screamed that much,” said Skye, doubled over with laughter. “And I don’t love asparagus.”
“Every word I say is the truth. Believe me, you were a screamer,” replied Aunt Claire. “And I’ve seen you eat asparagus plenty of times—you adore it.”
It felt so good to laugh! But Jeffrey showed up then, woken by their hilarity, and at the sight of his untroubled face, Skye’s laughter was gone, her sorrow back, and she was afraid it would be days before she had another chance to laugh like that.
“Why are you both staring at me?” he asked. “Do I have toothpaste on my face?”
“No, you’re perfect,” answered Aunt Claire.
“Right.” He yawned. “Is all the pie gone?”
“Yes—go back to bed,” said Skye, and watched him stumble off. “I can’t stand it, Aunt Claire.”
“You have to. We both have to.” Aunt Claire rubbed her eyes. “We should get some sleep now, too, honey. Big day tomorrow.”
After one last long hug, each went off to her bed to collapse into a troubled sleep … and too soon it was morning.
Getting sucked into a black hole is a spectacular way to die. The author of Death by Black Hole, Neil deGrasse Tyson, had explained the process clearly, which Skye appreciated, since the chances of her ever getting close enough to a black hole to watch any thing fall into it—she wasn’t so bloodthirsty as to want to see an actual person fall into a black hole—were pretty slim. It was intriguing to think about, though, especially for someone who desperately needed to continue holding on to a ten-ton burden of a secret. Alec hadn’t yet come back, and Skye, clinging for her life to black holes, had come up with this scenario:
She and Tyson were on a spaceship thousands of light-years from Earth and just far enough away from a black hole to escape its lethal pull. They were about to launch tons of space waste—mostly broken-down satellites—at the black hole, giving them the opportunity to observe sucked-into-black-hole behavior while also being ecologically responsible.
SKYE: “Ready for launch, Captain Tyson?”
TYSON: “Just a few last-minute calculations, Lieutenant Penderwick.”
SKYE: “Making sure the addition of space waste to the black star doesn’t increase its size enough to suck us into it, too? And obliterate us?”
TYSON: “The leader of the heartbroken girls spoke: He had only one request before we stranded him on the island—that we inform you he was out there, just in case you were willing to rescue him. Not that we want you to rescue him, but we’re not cruel.”
SKYE: “Excuse me, sir?”
TYSON: “Sabrina Starr was appalled that the Heartbreaker thought she’d rescue so low a lowlife. After making a mockery of the love and poetry of perfectly wonderful girls, and also teaching them never again to fall for an empty shell of a boy who cared only for his skateboard and stealing kisses. Sabrina scorned him! Let him rot on his island!”
SKYE: “Jane!”
She slammed Death by Black Hole shut and glowered at her sister. They were in side-by-side chairs on the deck, and Skye was finding that the only way she could talk to Jane was rudely. Because keeping Alec’s secret from Jane was almost worse than keeping it from Jeffrey. Lying to Jane was like being mean to a puppy. No one deserved it less.
So Skye had to be as mean as possible. She glowered even more fiercely.
“What?” Jane asked.
“Do you have to talk out loud while you write?”
“I guess not. Why are you so grouchy?”
“Sorry. My head hurts.”
Skye’s head did hurt. Her head and her heart, and her thumb where she’d chewed the nail down past the quick, though she’d stopped chewing her nails years ago. And she was exhausted, beyond exhausted. Her short sleep had been full of dreams she didn’t want to remember. Now Jane was saying something about foreheads.
“What?” Skye asked.
“Do you want me to bathe your forehead, you know, because of your aching head?”
“No! I mean, no, thank you.”
“You’re welcome. And, Skye, you’re absolutely positive that I shouldn’t answer that note Dominic passed to you yesterday? About meeting him at French Park? What if he wants to apologize to me? Is it dishonorable not to give him that opportunity?”
Skye now gave Jane a look so evil that her earlier glower seemed beatific. “Here is what I’m positive about,” she spit out. “If you ask me that one more time, or even mention Dominic’s name, I will throw you and your blue notebook into the ocean.”
“Okay,” answered Jane. “Be that way.”
Skye leaned back in her chair—relieved that she’d managed to keep the secret for another few minutes—and prepared to launch herself back into space with Captain Tyson.
SKYE: “Making sure the addition of space waste to the black star doesn’t increase its size enough to suck us into it, too? And obliterate us?”
TYSON: “That’s right, Lieutenant. Obliteration is so final these days.”
SKYE: “Aye, aye, sir.”
TYSON: “Calculations complete. Release space waste on my count, and brace yourself, Lieutenant. Three—two—”
Inside, the phone was ringing again. Skye froze, trying to stick with Tyson and his black holes, but moments later, Aunt Claire was at the sliding door, quietly asking her to come inside. So this was it. With her head about to explode, along with all the rest of her, Skye dragged herself out of her deck chair and into Birches.
“Is Alec coming?” she asked her aunt.
“He’ll be here in about ten minutes and wants to talk to Jeffrey right away. I said that he’s already next door, playing the piano.”
“Not knowing what’s about to hit him. Oh, Aunt Claire, I feel sick.”
“I do, too, but we have to bear it. Batty’s with Jeffrey, right? Send her back to me, and I’ll explain to her and Jane what’s going on.”
“And I saw Mercedes heading over there a while ago. What should I do with her?”
“Mercedes seems to have adopted us, for better or worse. She can hear what’s going on, too.” Aunt Claire gently poked at Skye with a crutch. “Now go to Jeffrey.”
Skye needed most of those ten minutes, first to shove Jane inside, then to run next door, pry Batty off the piano bench, Mercedes off the couch, and Hound from his spot next to Hoover under the piano, and send the three of them scurrying back to Birches and Aunt Claire. But at last they we
re gone, and Skye was left—with no memory of what excuse she’d used to get rid of them—alone with Jeffrey. Through it all, he’d stayed at the piano bench, where he’d been teaching Batty about harmonic intervals.
“You’re a little strange today,” he said, his fingers still running over the keys. “Unless you’re just desperate to get me alone.”
“That’s it.” She sat down beside him. “Anyway, we won’t be alone long. Alec is coming home any minute.”
“Great! I’ve been working on a song I want to ask him about. I’ve transposed it into a different key, which shouldn’t make any difference, but it doesn’t feel quite right. Listen.”
He launched into a melody full of loneliness and despair, diving so deeply that he didn’t hear the front door open, or even Hoover’s ecstatic yaps as he flew across the room to his master. Alec held the dog close, whispering soft greetings, but he had eyes only for the boy at the piano, devouring him. Skye saw that he wasn’t at all impatient to interrupt Jeffrey, to be noticed, to start explaining, and she could also see how scared he was. She wanted to soothe Alec, to tell him it would all be fine. But she wasn’t sure it would be, and besides, her first loyalty was to the son, not the father. She put her arm around Jeffrey’s shoulder—a gesture unusual enough to make him stop playing and look up.
“Alec, you’re back!” he said, then grinned at Skye. “You’re very strange today.”
“Hello, Jeffrey,” said Alec quietly. “How are you?”
“I’m …” Jeffrey stopped, struck by Alec’s hesitation and his obvious exhaustion. “You look terrible.”
“Yes, I know,” he said, and looked at Skye, who shook her head no—she hadn’t given up his secret. “It’s been a long twenty-four hours. I’ve missed you, Jeffrey.”
“We’ve missed you, too.” Jeffrey’s hands started wandering the piano keys again, picking out nervous spurts of notes. “And now you’re both being strange.”