Lost Children of the Far Islands (5 page)

“I think it’s a wolf print,” Leo said. Gus was about to argue, but it
was
much larger than any fox print she had ever seen. It swallowed Leo’s spread hand easily. And it was not just one print. The dirt under the kitchen window was crisscrossed with tracks. It looked like several animals had been here, pacing back and forth and then standing in this one spot, where the tracks were deeper.

Gus reached out to the windowsill. Strands of seaweed clung to the edge of the sill where the wood was rough and splintery. “Look at this,” she said to Leo. “It’s still wet. How in the world did seaweed get up here?”

“Gus and Leo—
now
.” Their father was coming back up the yard, and he sounded like he was on the verge of true anger.

“Was it wolves, Dad?” Leo asked.

His father laughed, but his laugh was tight and strained. “Probably a couple of coyotes,” he said. “Let’s all go to bed, OK?”

They followed their father inside.

Leo paused at his bedroom door.

“Gus,” he said, “I saw those tracks in my book. Those aren’t coyote tracks. They’re wolf tracks. I’m certain of it. There were wolves under that window.”

He turned without another word and went into his bedroom. Gus stood for a moment outside Leo’s door. Then she went to her room and got back into bed. It was late, or maybe early—it was hard to tell if the gray light was seeping away or growing.

As Gus curled up in the warm hollow under her
covers, she thought about the night poem. Without quite understanding why, she whispered it to herself, from start to finish, just to be sure that she remembered it. It didn’t make her feel cozy and sleepy, though. It made her feel afraid. She hoped fervently that when she woke up in the morning, things would have gone back to normal. With that wish whistling in her head like a person alone in a dark room, she fell asleep.

The next morning, their mother did not appear, although the children knocked on her bedroom door several times. Leo went to call their dad, who had gone to work as usual. His voice carried up the stairs to where Gus waited outside the closed bedroom door.

“Should we go in?” he was asking. There was a long silence. “OK,” he said, and then again, “OK. But come home soon, Dad, please?”

Leo came back upstairs, pushing his glasses up on his nose.

“He said go to school. He’s going to come home and stay with her. Where’s Ila?”

They opened the door and tiptoed into their parents’ bedroom. Their mother was a blurred shape under the covers, her hair as glossy and smooth as a yard of silk across the pillow. Next to their mother, Ila lay curled up. Gus looked at Leo and raised her eyebrows at him. Wake
Ila up or let her stay? Leo nodded and tiptoed back out of the room to call their father again.

“Mom,” Gus whispered, thinking,
Please, oh please, open your eyes
. But her mother slept on.

“Mom,” she said again, louder. “We need you.”

Neither her mother nor Ila stirred at the sound of her voice.

Leo came back. “Dad says to let Ila stay. He’s on his way home,” he whispered.

Gus nodded. Her last glimpse of Ila and their mother was of the rough red curls of Ila’s hair mixed in with the shining black of their mother’s, as though they were woven together in sleep, both transfixed under the same unwavering spell.

School that day was a mix of quiet, grim-faced teachers and whispering kids. Max Murphy’s dad’s lobster boat was missing. Max’s dad had been in the boat, along with two other men from the town. They had headed out early Tuesday morning toward the Far Islands, and had not come home for supper. Although no one was saying it, at least not the teachers, everyone knew that the boat was gone, and the men with it.

Max Murphy was in Gus’s class, although he was not in school that day. All the kids were talking about it, or passing notes back and forth with guesses about what might have happened, when Max would be back, what it would be like to be sitting at home with your mom and little sister, just waiting. Gus barely noticed. She was so
distracted, in fact, that when Emma Flannery, who sat behind her, tried to pass her a note, it just bounced off her leg and onto the floor.

“Gustavia,” Mrs. Walker said sharply. “Do you have something to share with the rest of us?”

“What?” Gus said, lifting her head and looking around her.

Mrs. Walker sighed. “Throw it away, please.”

Gus got up and threw the crumpled note away without even trying to read it. As she walked slowly back to her desk, she kept her head down and did not look at Emma.

At the end of class, Mrs. Walker asked her to stay behind for a minute.

“Is everything all right, Gus?” her teacher asked, not unkindly. Gus could see that she felt bad for calling her “Gustavia” in front of the class.

“Fine,” she muttered. Mrs. Walker waited. Gus wanted to tell her everything—
My mother’s sick and my father won’t call any doctors and I’m afraid and I’m not old enough for all of
this—but she didn’t say anything.

“Are you worried about Max’s dad?” Mrs. Walker said.

“What?” Gus said. “Oh, um, yeah. Yes.”

Mrs. Walker nodded. “It’s a hard thing, I know,” she said. “There will be an assembly tomorrow with some more information, and some people will be here if anybody needs to talk more about it.”

“I’m fine,” Gus said again. “I’m just tired.”

Mrs. Walker sighed. “When you’re ready to talk,
I’m here,” she said. “And don’t forget we have our first meeting for the Fall Math Olympics coming up. You’re old enough to compete next fall and I want you on the team.”

Gus nodded. Last year she had been dying to join the team and travel to Washington, D.C., to compete. This year she couldn’t even think about the fall. And anyway, if things had not got better by then, she certainly couldn’t leave on a trip. Anything could happen in her absence. She felt heavy with the weight of watching, but it couldn’t be helped. Ila was still a baby, and Leo was too flighty. It was up to her, only she didn’t know what
it
was, or what she was supposed to do.

“Gus,” her teacher said, reaching out to her. “What in the world is going on, child?”

Gus turned and ran out of the classroom.

The hallway was brightly lit and silent. Gus could smell hot food from the lunchroom. She ran down the hallway and up the flight of stairs at the end. Leo’s classroom was at the other end of the hall. Running along the corridor, Gus was filled with a certainty that she and Leo needed to get home. They should never have left their mother alone. And what if Ila got hungry and couldn’t wake her? Gus was suddenly sure that her mother had not gotten up, not at all, and that Ila was alone and frightened in the house.

She reached Leo’s door. Leo was in the G&T class—gifted and talented. As far as Gus could tell, G&T just
meant that the kids in Leo’s class got to choose what work to do and when to do it, and that no one thought it was weird that Leo split his time between reading about obscure subjects and training two box turtles to perform tricks. Leo even presented his box turtle data to the class, a fact that Gus hoped fervently would never be known by the fifth grade at large.

Looking through the small window in the door to the G&T classroom, Gus could see Leo. He was hunched over a thick book that lay open on his desk. One hand held the pages open while the other wrote furiously in the notebook that he balanced on his lap. Gus watched him, feeling helpless. She couldn’t very well knock on the door. It could be hours before Leo looked up.

Suddenly Leo straightened. Turning in his seat, he glanced over to the window in the classroom door. Gus waved frantically at him, and without turning his face away from her, he raised his hand. She couldn’t hear what he said, but she saw the teacher nod and then he slipped out of his seat and came to the door. She felt a rush of relief so strong her knees almost buckled.

“We have to go,” she told him, and was surprised when he agreed.

“I know,” he said. “I felt it too, just this minute. We have to hurry.”

Leo seemed to have a plan to get them out of the school, so Gus let him take the lead.

“What was that giant book?” Gus asked him as they moved quickly down the hallway.

“Physiology of North American Canids,”
Leo said absently. “Here.” He pushed open the door to the gym and they slipped inside. Their sneakers squeaked as they crossed to the door on the far side. Leo tried it. It was open.

“Mr. Gulden always forgets to lock it,” Leo whispered. Once they were on the sidewalk, they ran without speaking. When they reached their house, the last one on a small lane that ended at the ocean, Gus’s fear reared up into full-scale panic. There was an ambulance outside their front door. Its red lights were flashing wildly.

“No,” Leo said as they ran for the door. Before they could get to it, the door opened and a man came backing out of their house. He was holding one end of a stretcher. They could see their mother’s long dark hair hanging off the sides of the white board. From the neck down, she was covered with a blue blanket. Then their father stepped out behind the two men.

“Dad!” Leo screamed just as Gus cried out for their mother. The men carrying the stretcher swept by as Gus tried desperately to catch hold of it.

“Mom,” she said, putting out her hands, but the men pushed by her to the waiting ambulance.

“Still nothing. Move it,” one of them said, and then, after counting to three, they heaved the stretcher up and into the dark hole of the ambulance and hopped in after it. Gus grabbed for the door. She could see the men working quickly, attaching wires to her mother. One of
them put an oxygen mask over her face and the other brought out a box of some sort and paddles.

“Ready?” he asked the other man. Then he turned and saw Gus. “Don’t let the kid see this,” he said to the second man, who nodded and swung the door closed. Gus could hear them shouting “Let’s go, let’s go!” as the door slammed shut.

The ambulance siren began, a rising scream that echoed the one rising in Gus’s chest. The ambulance pulled away from the curb and raced down the street in a blur of red flashing lights and noise. Gus was left standing with her hands held out in front of her, still reaching for her mother. When she turned back, she saw her father and Leo. They were crouching on the sidewalk with their arms around one another. Leo was crying, but what was more frightening was that their father was crying as well, and Leo was holding him up even as their father held him.

Gus stood still as the red lights disappeared, bearing their mother away from them. All that was left was the siren rising and then falling away, and after that the deep sweeping darkness of silence reaching out for her and pulling her to her knees on the cold concrete of the sidewalk.

It was Gus who thought of Ila. As she ran for the house, she saw Mrs. Moore from next door heading for her, but she kept going. The shades in her parents’ bedroom were still drawn, but the room was blazing with electric light. Gus could see paper wrappers from medical instruments on the floor, and cast-off tubes and the cap that she guessed went to a syringe. Trying to sound like herself and not some frightened version of Ila’s big sister, Gus said Ila’s name.

There was no sound in return. Gus turned to leave, but then she heard something, a slight noise from under the bed that made her turn back. She got down on her belly and looked underneath the bed. In the gloom, Ila’s eyes shone oddly, as if they were giving off their own light. Ila was scrunched up on the far side from Gus. Ila was not crying but was watching Gus without blinking.

Gus swallowed. “Are you OK, Ila?”

Ila did not answer, of course. But then she crawled out from under the bed, stretched out her arms to Gus, and said, “Moray.”

Her sister’s speaking voice was tiny but clear, like a small bell being rung very precisely. Gus snatched Ila up in her arms. Staggering a bit under her heavy bulk, she ran down the stairs and into the front hall, where she nearly collided with Leo, who was sitting on the floor.

“Ila talked!” she panted. “Ila said something.”

Leo turned his face to Gus. It was streaked with tears and dirt. His eyes were red. “What?” he asked dully.