Flickering Hope (10 page)

M
onday and Tuesday at school were miserable. Frankie, Ruth, and I tiptoed around conversations that would bring up Andrew, which was difficult. He’d refused to come to the ornament making party at Vivian’s. He just dropped off the tumbled glass at her house. During the day, so none of us saw him.

Meanwhile, our presentations were starting on Thursday, and none of us could find any real answers on why our holidays were important.

“People just celebrate because they do,” Ruth said on our way to Moose Tracks Trading Post after school. This morning, I’d found another clue in the Advent calendar instead of an actual piece of map. It said:
In the shop of mooses, (or is that meese?) find the gifts that fit in socks. There you’ll find what you’re looking for.
Ruth and I had convinced
our parents to let us go shopping that afternoon. Of course, my parents would have known about the clue, so of course they said yes. Also, this gave us time to do our Christmas shopping, an added bonus.

“Like how Hallmark totally invented Valentine’s Day, just to make more money,” Ruth continued as we walked into the store.

The familiar smells of coffee and leather wrapped around me.

“But Valentine’s Day has become important,” I said. “I mean, tell me you’d give it up just because there’s no real reason for the holiday.”

“No. I guess not. I want to get a Valentine for Cameron. Speaking of, what do I do about Cameron and Christmas?”

I examined one of the bear ornaments on the window display tree. “What kind of present do you want to give him?”

I chose three bear ornaments and put them in my cart. One was a bear lying in a boat and fishing, another was a bear bundled up in winter gear from head to toe, and one was a bear caroling.

“What do you mean, what kind?”

“Well, a funny gift, a sweet gift, something practical — maybe you could get him guitar strings. His are always breaking.”

“But what if I get him guitar strings and he gets me something like earrings?”

“So he gets you earrings,” I said.

“Earrings mean something more than guitar strings … Sadie, stop laughing at me.”

I choked back my laughter. “Ruth, don’t you think you and Cameron should talk sometime? Figure out what’s going on with you two?”

“Are you kidding? I’d rather swim in a sea of alligators.”

“Alligators don’t swim in the sea.”

“And you’re one to talk. What are you getting Andrew?”

I winced and turned away from her so she wouldn’t see. Andrew. My ex-friend.

I grabbed Ruth’s elbow. “Frankie.”

Ruth looked around. “What, she’s here?”

“No. We need to get her a present.”

“Why are you so worried about Frankie all of a sudden?”

“I don’t know, Ruth … oh okay!” I blurted. I couldn’t hold it in. I told her everything Andrew had said. Then I sat down on a bench and dug my toes into the floor. I couldn’t explain what was going on with me.

“Sadie.” Ruth sat down next to me. “Andrew overreacted. He’s drastic sometimes. And yes, Frankie has been different lately. But maybe you’re overreacting too? You know how Frankie is. Tomorrow she could decide she hates us, and what then?”

“Lately, I’ve gotten this feeling, this really strong feeling, that I have to do something. I felt that way about going with you to talk to Doug. And I felt that way about bringing Frankie out to the cabin. I can’t explain it, Ruth …”

Ruth stopped picking her fingernail and studied my face. After a long minute, she nodded. “I never thought about other people having that feeling.”

I frowned at her. Were we talking about the same feeling? Just like on Thanksgiving, I felt on the edge of plummeting over a cliff. My real thoughts and feelings were under control, hidden, but if I stepped the tiniest bit further, nothing would be safe. Ruth would see me. The risk was almost worth it, if Ruth felt the same things I did. But what if she didn’t? What if I told her I thought God was asking me to do things, and she laughed at me?

Ruth went back to picking her fingernail. “When I was six, my family went to my grandparents’ beach house in Maine. Grandpa had cancer, but I didn’t know that. I just knew he wasn’t feeling well. One morning at breakfast, Grandpa started coughing, and he couldn’t stop. All the adults flurried around, and someone took him to the hospital. What I remember was running away, out the door onto the beach into a wild, windy day. Sand stung my cheeks, and wind filled my jacket so that my feet lifted off the sand and I literally flew backwards. I fought my way across the sand, ripped off my shoes, and kicked my way into the water, not caring that the bottoms of my jeans were soaked. I couldn’t breathe. I cried and cried and pounded the air with my fists. It felt solid, Sadie, like I was beating on my dad’s chest. I kicked and sobbed until I was exhausted. And then warmth slid across my shoulders. Warmth, Sadie, when my toes were in ten degree water. I opened my eyes and saw that the sky had opened up. Sun streamed through the clouds, so bright the light was almost golden.
Sand glinted in the air, swirling around me. The wind blew, but now I was caught in a whirlwind of warm, golden air. That was the first time I had the feeling, Sadie. I knew, one hundred percent, God was there.”

I hadn’t had to plunge. Ruth had done it for me. “Does God ask people to do things?”

“Sure. I think people just have to learn to listen.”

We sat there, silent, for a long moment.

“Ruth,” I finally said.

“Yep?”

“Thank you. Talking about …” My voice trailed off.

“I know. It feels strange talking about God in public. Like you’re sharing something super-private. It is private, I guess. But when I hear Doug talk about God, or Dad even, or especially Mark or Hannah, I see God in ways I couldn’t see on my own. So I think it’s good. To talk about God, I mean.” Ruth shrugged and then grinned. “So. What would Frankie like for Christmas?”

I couldn’t help grinning back. “Obviously she would want a bear ornament.”

Ruth laughed. “So, are you ready to hit the stocking stuffers?”

“That has to be where the clue is.” I followed Ruth to the stocking stuffer bins near the back wall of the store. We sorted through mini toys, moose keychains, glasses repair kits, colored pencils, Slinkies, and Life Savers Sweet Story Books. No origami shape appeared. We dug for a little longer.

“Maybe someone picked it up,” Ruth said. “We can ask at the desk.”

Ruth settled on a tie for her dad’s Sunday morning collection, one with a very intellectual moose who wore eyeglasses and read from a book. She found wrap-around earphones for her mom, who constantly lost her earphones when she went running.

“For Cameron, I’ll look at The Fray website. Maybe they have a signed something.”

“He’d like that.” I shifted my heavier-by-the-minute basket to the other arm. I’d picked up a mini camera tripod for Dad. Now I had Pips, Frankie, and Ruth, who I couldn’t shop for right now, and I didn’t even want to think about Andrew.

“Lost something, girls?” Henry, Moose Track’s shopkeeper, frowned at the mess we’d made of his bins.

“Did you see my parents come in and leave origami here, by any chance?” I asked.

“No, haven’t seen your parents for days,” Henry said with no hint of a lie in his eyes.

“How about Andrew Baxter?” Ruth dug her elbow into my side.

Henry shook his head. “Nope, sorry.”

As Henry walked away, my stomach churned. Maybe the Advent calendar
had
been from Andrew all along. Maybe after the run-in with Frankie, he’d decided not to drop off the clue.

Ruth shrugged. “Oh well. You’ll be able to figure the map out with one piece missing.”

“Henry would know if any of them came into the shop.” I set my basket down and rubbed my sore arm. “What if the calendar is from Andrew, Ruth? And he’s so mad at me, he didn’t deliver the map?”

“I’m sure someone just picked it up.” Ruth passed me a bottle of green nail polish. “A new color for Frankie’s collection?”

I tried to push Andrew out of my mind. All this time, I’d known he hadn’t given me the calendar, so why was I second-guessing myself now? “What does Frankie like, anyway?”

Ruth shrugged. “I guess we should find out.”

The understatement of the year. How could I have no idea what Frankie liked? I knew so many things about what she didn’t like. Me. Ruth. My family. Bears. Andrew.

“I think this is all for today,” I said. “I need more time to think about everyone else.”

“Me too,” Ruth said.

We paid Henry, and I couldn’t help looking regretfully back at the bins as we picked up our bags.

“Sadie, I’m sure it will show up later,” Ruth said.

I wasn’t sure. In fact, I was almost positive that even the map in the calendar might lead to nothing, like today’s clue. If the map was from Andrew, anyway.

Icy air blew into our faces as we pushed through the door.

“P
ass the blue glass.” Frankie had her tray set out and ready before any of the rest of us.

Vivian had set up a folding table in her cement room that had three bare walls against which she tossed and shattered ceramics. One wall, however, housed shelves and neat storage bins of ceramic shards and the kiln.

The room was the perfect place to work for many reasons. We could easily clean up any spilled glass, and we were close to the kiln. But the main benefit of working in this room was the theatre lights strung across a pole along the length of the room. Pools of colored light streamed down, lighting the glass in amber, red, blue, and green, just like the lights would on the tree.

A space heater blasted dusty air into the otherwise freezing room. Hopefully, soon my fingers would be as warm as my toes.

Ruth handed Frankie the ziplock baggie of blue glass and set the other colors on the table—clear, green, light amber brown, and rich cola-bottle brown.

“Andrew set his alarm clock last night to wake him up at three o’clock in the morning so he could tumble the last set of glass,” Ruth said.

“Why isn’t he here?” Nick passed a baggie of amber glass to Georgia.

I knew, without looking, that Ruth and Frankie were both avoiding my eyes.

“He had things to do,” I answered lamely and reached for the clear glass. I set a few of the larger glass pieces out on my tray. I hadn’t planned what shapes I would make exactly. Just like cloud-gazing, I thought the ideas should come from the actual shapes, instead of the other way around. You can’t decide to find an elephant surfing in the clouds and then choose the cloud that looks most like a surfboard.

One of my shapes was a triangle, rounded on all the edges, and another was an almost perfect circle—how had that happened in the breaking and polishing? The largest piece was wide on both sides and narrow in the middle. I moved the shapes around, considering a tree, a present, and then when I put the circle above the triangle, I knew. An angel.

I laid the body, head, and wings together on the tray, and then sprinkled the finely ground pieces across the forehead to suggest a halo. Many of the glass slivers were long and thin, so next, I pieced together a few snowflakes, breaking
the pieces carefully to make angles and edges in the fine design.

“Leave it to Sadie to make gorgeous patterns,” Ruth said. “I can’t get anything to work.”

I looked across the table at her tray. She had tried to create a Christmas tree out of green glass, but the shapes weren’t cooperating. The small pieces she put on top of the tree weren’t small enough, and the tree ended up looking like a random stack of glass.

Next to her, Frankie didn’t seem to be trying to make the shape of anything at all. She’d pulled larger blue pieces of glass and sprinkled designs on them with the tiny ground pieces. She used a tiny paintbrush and a little water to keep everything in place.

I walked around the table to get a closer look. “Frankie, how did you get this idea?”

She shrugged. “My mom does something like this when she fuses glass in her studio.”

She turned to the sink, but not before a strange expression crossed her face. Raised eyebrows, her mouth slightly open, as though she had surprised herself.

Frankie turned on the water. “She uses glue though, so it probably won’t work.”

“I bet it will.” Ruth stood over Frankie’s creations, examining each one. “Frankie, will you help me with my ornaments?”

When Frankie turned back around, she avoided my eyes. No one could say that Frankie and I were really friends — not yet. A thick wall between us kept each of us safe. Plenty of topics were off-limits, but sometimes, like now, cracks started to show. Frankie hadn’t meant to bring up her mom. Of all the subjects I’d least want to discuss with Frankie, my mom topped my own list, too. Interesting. Maybe we had more in common than I thought.

Frankie and Ruth worked together on ornaments until we had all filled our trays. Vivian helped us load them into the kiln and then we went to the living room to eat egg rolls, chow mein, and cashew chicken.

No one knew what to talk about over dinner. As the silence started to feel awkward, Vivian jumped up and switched off the lights.

“So, my favorite part of this window is the stargazing,” she said. “I figure that if long ago sailors and royalty and astronomers could invent constellations, I can too. I find pictures in the sky and make up stories to go with them. Like there, for instance.” She pointed to a line of stars with a clump at one end. “To me, those stars look like a roller coaster. Maybe a giant amusement park waits for us in outer space.”

“And they serve frozen stardust cones,” Ruth added.

“And the most frightening ride of all is the ferris wheel.” Frankie pointed to a circle of stars near Vivian’s roller coaster. “Because if it stalls out at the top, you have to look down through galaxies and galaxies with nothing beneath you.”

Nick, Georgia, and Ruth took their plates to the window and created ride after ride. I looked over at Frankie who watched them from the couch, eating her cashew chicken.

I went over to join her. “Is your mom an artist?”

Frankie shrugged. “She’s worked with blown and fused glass ever since she moved to New York, but her new ultra rich boyfriend bought her a gallery in September, so she thinks she can make a living now.”

I finished my last bite of chow mein and set down my plate. “Do you visit her often?”

“Not ever. She used to live on people’s couches and stuff, you know, the starving artist thing, so it didn’t make sense for me to come.”

Each answer was like a drip from a clogged faucet. Obviously, Frankie had a lot more to tell, but she wasn’t sure whether to offer me the information. Something, maybe curiosity, or something more, made me want to keep Frankie talking. I remembered what I’d said to Andrew when I’d tried to explain about Frankie. Maybe she just needed a friend.

“What does her art look like?”

“She doesn’t have to stick to one color, you know, because she uses new glass, not old recycled bottles. She does vases and lamps, just …”

When Frankie trailed off, I couldn’t help asking, “What?”

“She acts like she’s some amazing artist, you know, like her art is more important than anything. She and Dad aren’t even divorced.”

Before I could answer, Frankie spoke over me, not stopping now, as though she’d held all these words like a breath, and now that she had started to exhale, she couldn’t stop the rest from tumbling out.

“She sent me home with divorce papers to give Dad, and she wants custody of me so I can live with her and her boyfriend in New York. Dad thinks I want to go, and he won’t listen to me when I say I want to stay here. No one will. Ty and the girls, everyone, they think I want to go, all because of my stupid haircut. As though Mom gave me a choice about the dumb spa day. I’m still the same person, and they act like I’m totally different.”

Frankie’s anger made sense now, her embarrassment over her hair, her designer clothes, her trouble with her friends. I tried to think of something to say, but everything I thought of seemed like a pat on the head, when Frankie needed something more, something that made it clear I had heard her, and even if I didn’t totally understand, I did care.

“I’m afraid I’ll have to move soon, too,” I said. “When I first came, I thought I would love it here, and then I was sure I’d hate it—“

The corner of Frankie’s mouth turned up in an apologetic smile. “That was my fault.”

“But now this feels like home.”

“Won’t the DNR keep your dad around at least until they work out the Patch thing?”

“I guess so. If she lives until spring,” I said, and then stopped, remembering who I was talking to. I’d almost forgotten this was Frankie, and that her dad was Patch’s worst enemy.

Frankie watched me, her eyes searching my face. “Patch is dangerous, Sadie. You haven’t been around the bears very long, so maybe you don’t understand—“

“You don’t understand.” The angry words burst out of my mouth before I could stop them. “People like your dad stalk the bears so they have to run for their lives all hunting season. Now, even when Patch is hibernating your dad is looking for her den. We have to check on her just to be sure he hasn’t shot her in her sleep!”

“So you’ve been hiking out to her den?” Frankie asked.

Her question took my breath away. Why had I said all of that? I tried to make out her expression in the dark. “Frankie, you can’t …”

“Don’t, Sadie,” she said. “Let’s just forget about this conversation, okay?”

But how could I forget when the echo of gunshots filled my head?