Coming Apart

  Willow let her breath out but said nothing.

  “Are you okay with that?” her father had asked.

  “I guess I have to be.”

  “No, you don’t. But if you aren’t, we need to talk about it.”

  “I want her to come home. She’s my mother. But … everything’s going to change. And since she left it’s been so, I don’t know, so peaceful here. Cole is happier …”

  “You’re happier,” Mr. Hamilton had said.

  Willow had nodded. “And I can’t even think about the rules, all the things she used to ask us to do. They never made sense. Cole and I couldn’t keep them straight.”

  “But she’s been working on the rules — or her need for them — while she’s been in the hospital. I promise you that when she comes home, things will not be the way they were before.”

  “How can you promise something like that?” Willow had asked.

  “Okay. Fair enough. I can’t promise. But I can tell you that the doctors are very pleased with her progress. And another thing — something I actually can promise: I plan to be at home much more than I used to be. And you and Cole and I will talk more than we used to. Okay?”

  Willow had nodded. And she had tried to feel comfortable with the new knowledge, especially since she truly did miss her mother. But when she thought about April, her stomach lurched and her chest tightened.

  “Hey, Willow!”

  Willow turned from the window, leaving her thoughts outside with the gathering storm, and peered down the hallway. “Hi, Olivia! Hi, Flora!”

  “Ready for the meeting?” asked Olivia.

  Willow held up her book. “Yup.”

  “Walk with us to Mr. Barnes’s room,” said Flora. “We’re going to meet Nikki there.”

  It was hard to miss Mr. Barnes’s classroom. It was the only one on its corridor with a small crowd of students outside the door.

  “There’s Nikki,” said Olivia.

  “Let’s find seats together,” said Willow.

  The girls edged through the door, Flora saying, “Hey, Mr. Barnes, Aunt Allie just sold another book to her publisher. Isn’t that exciting?”

  This piece of information seemed to make Mr. Barnes look flustered, intrigued, and embarrassed all at once, a source of fascination for Willow, who continued to glance at him as she and her friends settled themselves in a row on the window ledge near the front of the room.

  “What —” she started to ask Flora.

  But at that moment Mr. Barnes clapped his hands and said, “If everyone’s here we’d better get started. I’d like to send you on your way before it starts snowing. Who wants to begin?”

  A forest of hands shot into the air.

  “Rachel?” said Mr. Barnes.

  “This was the best book I ever read in my whole life.”

  “Me, too,” said a chorus of voices.

  And Willow added, “I thought that when I’d only read a few chapters and I never changed my opinion.”

  “Why was it such a good book, do you think?” asked Mr. Barnes.

  Another forest of hands. This time Mr. Barnes stepped back and sat on his desk, and the students knew the discussion was now up to them.

  “You get pulled right into Francie’s world,” said a girl.

  “But it isn’t a very nice world,” said Jacob, who had rushed into the room at the last minute and plopped down next to Olivia. “I mean, Francie’s family hardly has any money, they don’t have enough to eat, her father drinks — and still you want to keep reading on and on about the Nolans.”

  “Because you like Francie so much,” said Flora.

  “Because Francie’s mother has so much hope,” said Nikki.

  “Because her world is so different from ours,” said someone else. “Imagine looking out the back window of your apartment and seeing a man taking care of a horse in the yard of his apartment building. And the kids had a lot of freedom. Even little kids. They collected stuff and got to sell it and keep the money and spend it on candy. All on their own. No adults around.”

  “Penny candy actually cost a penny.”

  “Deliveries were made by horse and buggy.”

  “Francie’s mother could make a meal for the whole family out of stale bread and an onion and a tiny bit of meat.”

  “I liked the story because it was about Francie but it was about other people in her life, too, including grown-ups,” spoke up Nikki. “It wasn’t really a kids’ book.”

  “Some things made me uncomfortable,” said Claudette Tisch. “The way Francie and her family talked about people who were Jewish or Italian. I didn’t like the names they used.”

  “But I guess that’s the way things were in a neighborhood like Francie’s back then,” said Willow. “That’s how people really talked. If the author hadn’t used those names, the story wouldn’t have been … what’s the word? Authentic?”

  The conversation continued, but Willow noticed that Mr. Barnes glanced out the window more and more often until finally he said, “I’m sorry to interrupt, kids, but I’m getting a little concerned about the weather. I think we should wrap things up a bit early and get you on your way home.”

  Ten minutes later, the members of the club had chosen the book for their next meeting and were gathering their belongings and emptying into the hallway.

  “Bye, Mr. Barnes,” said Flora as she breezed by his desk. “I’ll tell Aunt Allie hello for you.”

  Willow looked curiously at Flora but held her tongue until she and Flora and Olivia and Nikki were leaving the school grounds and heading for Main Street. At last she said, “Flora? If you don’t mind my asking, how come you kept mentioning your aunt to Mr. Barnes?”

  Flora let a slow smile spread across her face. “I think Mr. Barnes has a crush on her,” she said.

  Well. That’s interesting, thought Willow. You just never know what’s around the corner. She thought about Francie Nolan, who had started her story mired in poverty and managed to rise above it. Maybe, Willow realized, her mother’s return would yield surprises.

  Willow tipped her head up to the clouds, squeezed her eyes shut, and made a wish for her family.

  “It’s here! It’s here!” cried Mae. She turned from the window. “Come on, everyone! Come look outside. You can see snow in the light from the porch.”

  Nikki, Tobias, and Mrs. Sherman joined Mae at the window. Sure enough, the snow had begun to fall, and not just a flake here and there, but fistfuls of snow being hurled from the sky. The storm had held off all afternoon, and Nikki, despite the dire predictions on every single television news show, had begun to think that maybe the blizzard wouldn’t hit Camden Falls after all. But here it was.

  “It’s snowing pretty hard, considering it just began,” commented Tobias.

  “I think we’re as prepared as we can be,” said Mrs. Sherman. “We have plenty of food in case we can’t get to the store for a few days and plenty of firewood in case the electricity goes off. And I don’t have to go into work until Monday.”

  “I left food in one of the sheds for the dogs,” added Nikki, “if they can make their way to it. Where do you think stray dogs go during a big storm?”

  “Honey, don’t worry about that,” said her mother.

  “I can’t help it. Paw-Paw could be one of them. He was one of them.”

  “But he’s here with us now, and you’ve done all you can for the others. I think they’ll find shelter before the snow gets too deep.”

  “How much snow is twenty-four to thirty inches?” asked Mae. “That’s what the weatherman keeps saying we’re going to get.”

  “Two to two and a half feet,” Tobias told her. “That’s about up to there on you,” he added, pointing to her waist.

  “Whoa,” whispered Mae. “I couldn’t even walk through snow that deep.” She paused. “Think of the giant snowmen we can make. Hey, how are we even going to be able to open the front door tomorrow?”

  “It might be hard,” admitted Tobias. “I’m glad
I’m here to help you guys with the shoveling.”

  “This is the most exciting thing that has ever happened to me,” Mae declared dramatically. “I don’t know how I’m going to be able to eat my dinner.”

  “You’d better eat it, though,” said her mother. “It might be the last hot meal you get for a couple of days.”

  “I hope the power does go out!” Mae skipped to the table and slid into her seat. “It would be an adventure.”

  Apparently, Mae didn’t remember the days when the Shermans’ power was regularly cut off because they hadn’t paid their bills.

  By the time dinner was over, more than an inch of snow had fallen. Nikki watched as her sister flitted back and forth between the window and the array of toys her father had been bringing her. Every time he showed up at the Shermans’ house he brought something else for Mae and occasionally something for Nikki or Tobias. But Mae’s treasure was piling up faster than the snow. A board game, art supplies, a pair of cowgirl boots, clothes for her new doll. The gift he’d arrived with the previous afternoon, though, had topped all the others: a completely furnished dollhouse. And not a gaudy plastic dollhouse with stiff plastic dolls and pink plastic furniture, but a large wooden house with a front that opened to reveal the rooms inside, furnished with intricate dressers and tables and beds and chairs and couches — all considerably fancier than anything human-size that the Shermans owned.

  Mae kneeled before the house, opened its front, and gazed at the rooms inside. “Dining room,” she said dreamily, “kitchen, bedrooms, playroom, living room.”

  “In a house that fancy,” said Tobias, “I think you call the living room the parlor.”

  Mae continued to stare at her treasure. “I’m going to switch everything around,” she said. “I’m going to put the bedrooms downstairs and the kitchen upstairs and — hey, this house doesn’t have a bathroom!”

  “You could turn that room into the bathroom,” said Nikki, squatting beside her sister and pointing to the second floor.

  “But there’s no furniture for a bathroom.”

  “We’ll make the furniture. That’s the fun of a dollhouse.”

  “I am not,” said Mae indignantly, “going to make a toilet.” She examined the dolls — a girl, a boy, a mother, and a father — that had come with the set. “But you know what we could do tomorrow when we’re snowed in? We could make some more clothes for the dolls. Boy, Nikki, this is the best present I ever got. Daddy is so nice.”

  Nikki smiled at her sister, but as she stood up she felt an uncomfortably familiar sensation wash over her — a feeling of the world tilting or of the need to swerve out of the path of danger — and a phrase wormed its way into her head: Something wicked this way comes.

  “Mom?” said Nikki. “Can we talk?”

  “Of course,” replied her mother, who was curled up on one end of the couch.

  “I mean, in my room? Now?”

  “Oh.” Mrs. Sherman set her magazine aside. “Nikki? Are you all right?”

  Nikki nodded, but she frowned as she looked at her sister, who was busily removing furniture from the dollhouse. She led the way to the second floor, the words Something wicked this way comes sounding in her head like a drumbeat in time to her footsteps, and closed the door behind her mother.

  “I’m scared,” said Nikki. She threw herself onto her bed and hugged a pillow to her chest.

  “What’s the matter?” Mrs. Sherman sat on Nikki’s desk chair and leaned forward, hands clasped in front of her.

  “I was watching Mae play with the dollhouse,” Nikki began, and then her words slid away from her. “All the presents …” She drew in a breath and started over for a second time. “Mae said this morning that she wants to visit Dad this summer. I think she meant that she wants to go to South Carolina.”

  “But I’ll have full custody —”

  “I hate him! I hate that he’s doing this! He’s bribing her. And why? What does he hope will happen? And why isn’t he trying to bribe Tobias and me?”

  “Honey, your father is complicated.”

  “No, he’s not. He’s mean.”

  “He’s complicated. People are complicated, and a divorce is complicated.”

  “He’s trying to make Mae change her mind so that she’ll want to live with him.”

  “I don’t think so,” said Mrs. Sherman. “And in any case, that can’t happen. We’ve been through this, honey. Your father isn’t in a position to have any of you kids live with him.”

  “Then why is he bribing Mae?”

  “I don’t know that he’s bribing her. Maybe he just wants her to think of him as a good father.”

  “Being a good father isn’t about presents! Dad’s taking the easy way out.”

  “You know that, and I know that —”

  “But Mae doesn’t.”

  “I think,” said Mrs. Sherman, “that because your father is aware of how you and Tobias feel about him, he’d like for Mae to feel differently.”

  Nikki fell silent.

  Her mother stood up, stretched, and joined her on the bed. “I’m not saying that what your father is doing is right, but I think that what he’s doing is human. Nikki, nothing is going to come of the gifts —”

  “You mean the bribery.”

  “— so why don’t you stop worrying? Let Mae enjoy the presents. She’s not going to go live in South Carolina.”

  “Are you sure you’ll have full custody?” asked Nikki. “Are you absolutely positive?”

  “I am absolutely positive. The paperwork has been under way for quite some time. It’s true that it hasn’t been finalized yet, but your father has never asked for full custody, and he can’t afford to have you and Mae live with him. It simply isn’t going to happen. It has never even been an issue.”

  “The presents are making me nervous.”

  “They shouldn’t be. I promise you that they aren’t going to change a thing.”

  That night, Mae couldn’t sleep. Every couple of hours she woke up, pulled aside the curtains, and tried to see whether the snow was still falling. “Nikki,” she would call across the room, “I think maybe the snow is twelve inches high now.” Or, “Nikki, I can’t see anything. It’s too dark! Is it still snowing?”

  Finally, Nikki got up, tiptoed downstairs in the chilly house, and turned on the light over the back stoop. “Now,” she said to Mae as she scooted into her bed again, “you’ll be able to see the snow all night long. Only please don’t wake me up again, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  Nikki closed her eyes.

  “Nikki? When is it supposed to stop snowing?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Tonight?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Tomorrow?”

  “Maybe. I think so.”

  “Nikki?”

  “WHAT?”

  “What do you think it feels like when the snow is as high as your waist?”

  “You’ll have to find out tomorrow. After you’ve had a good night’s sleep.”

  Mae sighed and then looked out the window again. “Hey, the light works really well! I can see the snow flying through the air, flying on a dare, flying without a care. Hey, Nikki, I should write a poem about the snow.”

  “Great. Write it silently in your head now, and tomorrow you can put it on paper.”

  “Okay. Nikki? Is there snow in South Carolina?”

  “Not a flake.”

  “Really? Daddy will never see snow?”

  “I’m not sure. I’ll help you look it up tomorrow, but only if you go to sleep right now.”

  The next morning, Nikki made her way groggily to the kitchen at nearly nine o’clock. The snow was falling thickly, and Tobias, who had slept soundly all night, was struggling with the front door. At last he said, “I guess there’s really no point in opening this until the storm is over.”

  “How much snow do you think we have so far?” Nikki wanted to know. “I’m only asking so that you’ll be prepared fo
r Mae’s questions.”

  “Hey, is she still asleep?”

  “Yes, and whatever you do, don’t wake her up. You’ll be sorry.”

  Tobias grinned.

  Mrs. Sherman, who was watching the Weather Channel in the living room, called, “Sure enough, the worst storm in forty years!”

  Nikki opened the refrigerator and pulled out a loaf of bread. “Tobias, do you think I can get out to the shed to see if the dogs found the food?”

  “What, now? No way. Seriously, I can’t open the door.”

  And at that moment, the power went out. The television turned off with an odd chirp, the lights flickered and disappeared, the refrigerator stopped humming, the voice on the kitchen radio faded away, and the toaster, which had just started to glow red, faded to pink and gray and finally black.

  “Well, Mae will be happy,” said Tobias.

  “Why?” asked Mae, running down the stairs in her nightgown.

  “The power just went out,” replied Mrs. Sherman.

  “Goody! Can we eat everything in the refrigerator? Can I have ice cream for breakfast?”

  Mrs. Sherman hesitated and then smiled. “Yes,” she said. “You may have ice cream for breakfast.”

  Nikki turned her thoughts away from South Carolina and dollhouses and stray dogs. She put the loaf of bread back in the refrigerator. “You know what?” she said. “I’m going to have ice cream for breakfast, too.” And she and Mae sat at the table with dishes of Cherry Garcia before them and watched the snow swirl outside the windows.

  “Hey!” cried Jack Walter, flicking the kitchen light switch up and down. “The electricity’s off!”

  Olivia, who had just woken up and had followed her brother down the stairs, looked at a stopped clock in the living room and paused, listening.

  “Nothing,” she said.

  “What?” asked Henry, and he jumped down the last four steps, landing behind her.

  “I don’t hear a single sound except our voices. No TV, no radio, nothing humming. Nothing.”

  “Mom!” called Henry. “Dad! The power’s out!”

  “It went out a little while ago,” replied Mrs. Walter. She and Olivia’s father were sitting at the table in the dining room, trying to read the previous day’s newspaper by the gray light from the windows.