The Penderwicks in Spring

  When Batty refused to go to school again the next day, Iantha took her to the family doctor, who couldn’t find anything wrong, but drew some blood to make sure. No one likes having blood drawn, but Batty didn’t mind it all that much. The now-familiar fog protected her from the rest of the world, muffling lights, colors, sounds, and sensations. Batty had stopped fighting the fog, wrapping herself in it like a quilt, taking it with her to her room when she got back from seeing the doctor.

  Again, she stayed up there, refusing not only to walk the dogs—thanking Jane politely but distantly for taking over the responsibility—but even to go to her piano lesson that evening. Batty’s parents, confused and desperate, tried to cheer her up by talking about her upcoming birthday and even invited Keiko over to try to make plans. They had no way of knowing they were only making things worse. The more people talked about Batty’s birthday, the more her stomach hurt and the more the fog around her thickened, leaving her alone in her dim quiet.

  Only for Ben and Lydia did it lift a little, though she refused to listen to Ben’s relief about her not making it to Boston. She would listen to anything Lydia wanted to say, grateful for this small sister who knew nothing of dead mothers. But Batty wouldn’t sing, no matter how many times Lydia asked her to.

  The few times Skye appeared, Batty pretended to be asleep.

  Mr. Penderwick and Iantha didn’t want to upset Rosalind, not at the very end of her freshman year of college, not when she was already planning to be home on Saturday. But when Batty didn’t get up for school on Friday, either, Mr. Penderwick called Rosalind, hoping Batty would talk to her on the phone. “No, thank you, Daddy,” she answered, and rolled over and buried her face in the pillow. This sent Rosalind into a frenzy, just what her parents had wanted to avoid. Mr. Penderwick reassured her as best he could, but that afternoon, Rosalind called back.

  Ben answered the phone—he’d just gotten home from school and was about to eat a bowl of chocolate ice cream. He was supposed to have only healthy snacks after school, but no one was watching, and besides, he’d finally gotten rid of those twins, Tess and Nora, so he wanted to celebrate.

  “Ben, it’s Rosy,” she said when he picked up.

  “I know.” He put a giant spoonful of ice cream into his mouth.

  “How’s Batty?”

  “Awful.”

  “What? I didn’t understand you.”

  Ben swallowed the ice cream. “Batty’s awful.”

  “That’s what I heard. Listen, Ben—”

  Ben listened, and what he heard made him forget the ice cream. With Batty in such bad shape, Rosalind couldn’t wait even one more day to be with her. She was coming home that very night—this was good, Ben thought—because Oliver had offered to rent a trailer for his car, pack up both his and Rosalind’s college things, and drive her home.

  This was bad.

  “Batty’s not that awful, not really,” he said.

  “Even if she’s just a little awful, I want to see her.”

  “Can’t Mom and Dad come get you instead?”

  “They’re both still at work, and Oliver’s already on his way to pick up the trailer. Just tell everyone I’m coming, okay? Love you, bye.”

  “How long is Oliver going to stay here?”

  But Rosalind was already off the phone. Ben hung up and went back to the ice cream, thinking furiously. Life in this house was hard enough with Batty acting so weird. And now Oliver was coming back? If he upset Lydia all over again, Ben would end up with two cuckoo sisters.

  There was only one way he could figure out to stop Oliver. Batty had to call Rosalind back, tell her to wait in Rhode Island until the next day, when their mother could pick her up as planned, because Batty had gotten better and wasn’t going to stay in bed anymore, and Oliver should drive his stupid trailer to wherever he lived when he wasn’t staying at the Penderwicks’ house.

  Ben finished the ice cream, marched up the stairs, marched down them again because he’d forgotten the cookies Keiko had sent home with him for Batty—because she was just as upset and worried as all the Penderwicks—marched up again, and used his private signal on Batty’s door. She didn’t answer, but he went in anyway. She hadn’t answered the last four times, either. It was as though she’d forgotten what the signal meant.

  Batty woke up when Ben sat down on her bed. She’d spent the whole day drifting in and out of sleep that gave her no rest, full of endless dreams of searching, searching, searching, sometimes for Hound, but sometimes Hound was with her and they were searching together, weeping, for someone else.

  “But dogs don’t weep,” she told Ben.

  He stared unhappily at this listless and pinch-faced girl who’d stolen his sister Batty.

  “Are you going crazy? Because Rafael says that if you don’t have a hernia or an alien implantation, maybe you’re having a full-out wacko breakdown.”

  Batty shook her head to clear away the dream cobwebs. “No, I’m not crazy. Stop worrying.”

  “Stop worrying!” That was too much to ask of him. “Everybody’s worried. That’s all they talk about.”

  “I’m sorry.” She was sorry. If she could just disappear, it would be so much easier on everyone.

  “That’s okay.” He held up the bag of cookies, hoping they would give Batty the strength she’d need to agree with his plan. “These are from Keiko, and she said she followed a recipe carefully, so you don’t have to make me eat them first. But I ate two on the way home anyway, and they’re regular chocolate chip and really good.”

  Batty took a cookie and ate it slowly. Like all her senses, her taste was dulled. But the chocolate came through with a teeny jolt of pleasure, and she sent out a quiet thank-you to Keiko.

  “They are good,” she told Ben.

  She looked a little better to Ben, but not yet alert enough to hear about Oliver. He’d give her the Tess and Nora update first. “I finally got those twins to stop bugging me.”

  “I didn’t know they were actually bugging you. You said they would just look at you and then you’d run away.”

  “I never ran away.” That sounded cowardly. “I evaded them.”

  “Okay.” Batty finished one cookie and took another.

  “Anyway, I was tired of evading them, so today when they looked at me, I went right up to them and said: ‘Tess and Nora, I’m sure you’re very nice people, but I’m not interested in having a relationship with you.’ ”

  Ben wasn’t going to tell Batty that he’d been repeating what Nick had taught him. It seemed more grown-up if he’d made up that statement on his own. But if she asked, he would tell her how the twins had reacted—agreeing that they didn’t want a relationship, either, and calmly walking away. Which had convinced Ben that girls were even odder than he’d suspected and that he was wise to steer clear of any he wasn’t related to.

  She didn’t ask. But she’d finished the second cookie and was sitting up straight instead of slumping. Time to hit her with the big news.

  “Rosalind is coming home tonight,” he said.

  Batty held on to that information for a while, trying to feel something. No, one extra day of Rosalind would make no difference. Not now. “Why?”

  “Because she thinks you’re dying or something. I don’t know what Dad and Mom told her. But, Batty, because she’s in a hurry to see you, Oliver is driving her.”

  “Oh, no.” More Oliver—and this, too, was her fault.

  “We have to do something about Oliver.”

  “There’s nothing I can do.” All the things she’d done so far had just caused trouble, and she saw no reason for this to change.

  “Yes, there is, Batty, you can call Rosalind and tell her you feel better.” Inspired, Ben expanded his plan. “Maybe you can explain everything to her, too, like how you were trying to get to Boston—”

  “No! And you can’t tell her, either, Ben, you swore.”

  “Then just tell her you’re okay and you’ll get out of bed soon. Tell her that, Batty, plea
se.”

  The news about Oliver had made Batty’s fog denser than ever, and she very much needed to be alone. “I’m going back to sleep. You can eat the rest of the cookies.”

  “Think of Lydia and how much she hates Oliver!” Ben was pleading. “And he could be an in-law and we’ll never see Tommy again.”

  “Ben, you know Rosalind’s much too sensible to marry Oliver.”

  Ben felt like pointing out that he’d always thought Skye too sensible to banish Jeffrey from the house, and Batty too sensible to try to go to Boston, then stay in bed for days, and look where they were now. But the conversation was over. Batty was already lying back down and closing her eyes.

  “I’m sorry, Ben,” she murmured, and buried her face in Funty.

  When Rosalind got home that night, she ran upstairs to Lydia’s room to see Batty. But Batty was either asleep again or pretending to be—she barely knew the difference herself anymore—and Rosalind went away disappointed.

  EARLY SATURDAY MORNING, Ben crept out of his room to make sure that Batty was where she was supposed to be. He didn’t really believe she’d try to run away to Boston again, but he wanted to start the day knowing she hadn’t.

  He pushed open Lydia’s door just enough to see that yes, there was Batty asleep in the big-girl bed, curled up with Funty and Gibson. Quietly, carefully, he closed the door again, went back to his own room, and sat down on the floor with his rocks. Putting them into piles sometimes made him feel better.

  Oliver had returned even more Oliver-ish than when he’d left, still talking about movies no one had heard of, including one called The Discreet Charm of the something—Boogie-Woogies, maybe?—the story of how some people couldn’t get any dinner. Ben had taken himself to bed a half hour early just to get away from it, and to fret over Batty, and to think of the movies he and Rafael would make someday in which people always got plenty to eat, even when under attack by aliens.

  Ben piled his three geodes on top of one another and moved the obsidian into the pile with the rose quartz. He was hungry, and breakfast wouldn’t be for a while, not with the rest of the house still asleep. Maybe he’d sneak down to the kitchen for a bowl of cereal. Except that would mean getting past the living room where Oliver was sleeping on the couch, and hearing that yucky snoring.

  And how long would that snoring be in the house, anyway? Ben still didn’t know when Oliver planned to leave. Soon, he hoped, very soon.

  He was putting his chunks of feldspar into a pile—the pink one, the yellow one, the brown one, the other pink one—when someone knocked on his door. It couldn’t be Lydia. She didn’t try to escape from her room when Batty was in there with her. He crawled across the room to peer through the space under the door. Bare feet, grown-up-size. Definitely not Lydia.

  “Identify yourself,” he said.

  “It’s me, Rosalind. Open up, Ben.”

  “Why?”

  The door swung open with no help from him, knocking over his hanger alarm system, and there was Rosalind in her pajamas, looking very much like the oldest sister who must be obeyed.

  “Just come with me. And without any noise.”

  Cowed, Ben followed Rosalind on tiptoe down the hall to Skye and Jane’s room. This was very peculiar and mysterious. His teenage sisters never got up before Lydia did. And when he got into the room, he saw that Skye and Jane weren’t exactly up. They were both still in bed, yawning, and not exactly pleased.

  “Can’t this wait, Rosalind?” said Skye.

  “No, we have to talk before the whole house is awake. Get out of bed, both of you, and form a circle. Ben, sit here next to me.”

  In this house, the only reason to sit in a circle was for a MOPS or some version of one, and Ben had no intention of undergoing another official meeting, with its swearing and secrecy.

  “No, I don’t think I will, thank you,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  He shuffled his feet and decided to tell the truth, or part of it. “I can’t handle any more secrets.”

  “What secrets are you keeping?”

  “He can’t tell you, obviously,” said Jane. “This is interesting.”

  “I’ll go back to my room now.” Ben started back to the door.

  “No, you won’t.” A quick lunge from Rosalind, who had a surprisingly strong grip, and he was in the circle and sitting beside her. “MOPS come to order. That is, MOOPSAB, Meeting of the Older Penderwick Sisters and Ben.”

  “Second the motion,” said Skye, “though I wish we could have slept longer.”

  “Second that motion,” added Jane.

  Rosalind continued. “All swear to keep secret what we say here.”

  The sisters formed a pile of fists, and Ben reluctantly added his to the top. He was starting to think that secret was the most uncomfortable word in the universe. When everyone had sworn by the Penderwick Family Honor, Rosalind turned to Ben.

  “I’m very concerned about Batty,” she said. “She’s never cut herself off before, not like this. Do you know what’s upset her?”

  So that’s why they wanted him here. Not to tell him more secrets, but to pry out the last secret he was keeping for Batty. They already knew about her Quigley Woods adventure and about her getting on that bus—Nick had told their parents and they had told the older daughters. But no one knew she’d been trying to go to Boston, no one but Ben, and he’d sworn not to tell. Which he wished he hadn’t—that secret was a great burden to him—but it was too late for wishing. And now he had three wily and dangerous sisters trying to get it out of him. He was going to have to be strong.

  Quickly Ben reviewed what he knew about Batty—things she was upset about that he didn’t have to keep secret. He would start there and make it last as long as he could.

  “She doesn’t want Nick to go back to war,” he said.

  “None of us want that,” said Rosalind.

  “Especially since he’s going away on her birthday.” He knew by his sisters’ expressions—Skye was yawning—that he wasn’t convincing them. He took another stab. “Batty misses Hound. We should get another dog.”

  They didn’t fall for that, either. They all just kept looking at him. Ben knew from Rafael, who watched lots of television shows with police interrogations in them, that there were many ways to pry information out of people. Rafael had never mentioned how to behave if you were the one with the information.

  “How’s she doing in school?” asked Rosalind.

  Aha! Batty had never told him to keep the book reports secret.

  “She does have a million book reports to write before the end of the year and she hasn’t done even one,” he said.

  “I hate book reports,” said Skye.

  “Everyone does,” said Jane. “If it’s just book reports, that’s not a problem. I’ll write them for her.”

  “Jane,” said Skye. “Remember the Aztecs.”

  She was referring to their distant past when she and Jane had swapped homework assignments, with disastrous results. Even Ben knew this story.

  “We never swore we wouldn’t do it again,” protested Jane. “I mean, poor, tortured Batty.”

  “Yes, but remember the guilt,” said Rosalind. “We’ll do it a different way. Batty can dictate reports to us while we type. Maybe it will seem more like talking and less like reporting. But not a word to Dad or Iantha—all swear.”

  They swore, even Ben, who had zero interest in typing fifth-grade-level book reports. This interrogation wasn’t so tough, he thought. Rosalind’s next set of questions changed his mind.

  “This is good information, Ben, and maybe the book reports would make Batty cut school, but why did she get onto a bus? Do you know why? Do you know where she was trying to go?”

  He clamped his teeth shut and covered his mouth with his hand, two layers of protection to keep either Boston or Jeffrey from slipping out by mistake.

  “He knows,” said Skye.

  “I’ll bet Batty made him promise not to tell,” guessed Jane. ?
??Am I right, Ben?”

  He nodded. That was true. He was pretty sure that it wasn’t giving away a secret to admit you had one. Honor was infinitely more confusing than he’d ever thought possible. But he knew his sisters. None of them would ask him to break his promise outright. Still, they might trick him with a stealth attack. He had to stay on his guard.

  Rosalind sat for a while, pondering. “What’s our evidence? When did Batty start acting strange?”

  “The day after Skye’s birthday,” said Jane. “She ran off into Quigley Woods and then slept most of the day.”

  “So what happened on Skye’s birthday?”

  “Oliver arrived the day before my birthday,” said Skye. “He happened.”

  “Oliver didn’t happen. He just visited,” protested Rosalind.

  And just like that, Ben saw an opportunity. He felt like a general who spots a weakness in the enemy’s battle plan. If he could keep his sisters talking about Oliver, he would not only steer them away from Batty, he might even be able to figure out how to get Oliver out of the house.

  “Yes, Oliver visited,” he said. “And now he’s visiting again. How long is he staying, anyway?”

  “A few days, probably,” answered Rosalind. “He doesn’t have to be home for another week.”

  “Where is home?”

  “Minnesota.”

  How could such a person as Oliver come from a state with so many great rocks? Would Ben have to rethink his devotion to Minnesota? While he was recovering from that shock, his sisters had gone back to the previous weekend.

  “So Oliver visited,” repeated Skye. “And then Lydia stabbed him with a quesadilla.”

  “Quesadillas are one thing. Getting on a bus is another,” said Jane. “Très beau Oliver wouldn’t make anyone get onto a bus.”

  Ben pulled himself together. He couldn’t let them near that bus.

  “I didn’t stab him with a quesadilla,” he said, “but Oliver upset me, too.”

  “Really?” asked Rosalind, shaken. “You don’t like him, Ben?”