Savvy (3 page)

And I knew I wasn’t the only one—I could feel Fish and Grandpa getting more and more nervous at all the talk of parties. Thirteenth birthdays in the Beaumont family were strictly non-public affairs.

I had only been eight years old back when Rocket turned thirteen, but I still remembered it as fresh and brisk as the crisp sea air. On that years-ago day at our home down south, when Grandma Dollop was still alive and Gypsy wasn’t yet, Rocket and Fish and I had spent the entire afternoon in the backyard helping Grandma with her canning while Momma got the house ready for Rocket’s birthday dinner.

The top of the picnic table was covered in Grandma’s clear glass jars, each one with its own white label and metal lid. She’d given us kids the job of labeling the jars as she filled them. But it wasn’t peaches, tomatoes, or pickles that our grandma canned, it was radio waves. Grandma only ever picked the best ones—her favorite songs or stories or speeches, all broadcast by the local stations—but still, our basement was crowded with high shelves of dusty jars filled with years and years of radio programs. How Grandma Dollop put the radio waves into those jars and got them to stay there was a mystery to me; she just had a way of reaching out and plucking them from the air like she was catching fireflies. Then she’d stuff the invisible things into the jars and tell us what to write on the labels. After that, all anyone had to do was crack the lid on any jar in her collection to hear what was inside. But you had to be careful not to take the lids off all the way or the sounds and songs slipped out and away, lost for good unless Grandma was there and could catch them again in time.

Sitting in the backyard that day, watching Grandma capture her radio waves, Rocket had been crankier than a bear in winter. The sun had almost set on his thirteenth birthday and, so far, nothing had happened; my brother was worried that nothing ever would. Since Rocket was Momma and Poppa’s first child, and Poppa came from an ordinary, everyday family with no special talents except that of losing all their hair before turning thirty, Rocket feared that he’d take after Poppa—and wind up with no savvy and no hair on his head either.

Evening fell and the sun crept down. We had just begun to carry all the jars into the house when Rocket stopped short, standing still as still with his arms full of that day’s canned radio broadcasts. His skin looked pale in the early-evening glow, and he hunched over his armful of glass jars, staggering like someone had just thrown them all at him.

Grandma Dollop had stopped too, her head tilted like she was listening. I felt my hair stand up on end as an electric current ran through the air with a tingling itch.

“That’s funny,” said Grandma, still listening. “Something must have gone wrong at the radio station. I don’t hear anything but static.”

“You okay Rocket?” I’d asked my brother carefully, worried by the pinched look on his face and the way every muscle in his body seemed to tense and tighten.

“I think I’m going to be sick,” said Rocket. Then, in a blinding explosion of brilliant blue sparks, like the Fourth of July without the red or the white, my brother fell to his knees. As the jars he’d been carrying crashed to the ground and shattered, they let loose the noise of nine different radio shows at once, and a chorus of voices and sounds fluttered into the night air. At the same moment, every light inside and outside of the house went out. Streetlamps fizzled and burst in small showers of glass and the neighbors’ homes went dark all the way down the block. A blackout rolled out from our house and didn’t stop until it hit the next town over.

Rocket had got his savvy and it was a shocker.

Climbing into bed on the night before my very own most important birthday, after an evening of Miss Rosemary’s meat loaf and interference, I did not pray for a powerful savvy like Rocket’s. I did not pray for X-ray vision or for the ability to run super-fast or to breathe underwater. I didn’t pray for Grandpa or for Gypsy. I didn’t even pray for Poppa to wake up.

That night, I prayed that no one—no one—would come to my birthday party.

I
woke up early on that Saturday morning of my thirteenth birthday and lay still and silent for a long, long while, just waiting. Nothing felt too different yet. I couldn’t see through the ceiling or turn on my lamp with a blink or a wink. I couldn’t float up off my mattress or make my pillows disappear.

I sighed and drum, drum, drummed my fingers against the pattern of my sheets. Nothing was happening. At least, not yet.

I decided it was safe to get up. Maybe my savvy would arrive at the church with my birthday party, bad timing and all. I rolled out of bed, glancing at Gypsy where she lay in a nest of stuffed animals and pillows. Gypsy always surrounded herself with fluff and fuzz. She liked her toddler world to be soft and smooth, with no hard edges or rough seams. Once asleep, Gypsy was as difficult to wake as a slumbering sloth.

There wasn’t a creak from the floorboards or a groan from the bedsprings, but the moment my bare feet touched the floor and I stood to untwist my nightgown, my sister sat up and rubbed her eyes, staring at me from her own small bed.

“Go back to sleep, Gypsy,” I said.

“No-no-no,” said Gypsy, repeating her most favorite word and rubbing her eyes stubbornly.

“It’s too early to be awake. Close your eyes—it’s off to dreamland for you again.” I crossed the room to nestle her back under her blankets, then left our bedroom quickly before Gypsy could make a fuss.

Pink light filtered through the curtains of the house, filling the hallway between the bedrooms with the faint blush of morning. I was careful not to make too much noise as I stole past the other rooms and slipped downstairs, not wanting to wake anybody else up just yet, wanting more time to myself to see what I could see, feel what I could feel.

In the kitchen, I fixed myself a bowl of cereal and took it with me into the next room to sit cross-legged on the sofa while I ate. No sooner had I gotten myself settled, balancing my bowl on my knee just right, than I heard a thump. Thump, thump, thump. I sat perfectly still, straining my eyes out across the dim room, the morning light shifting orange from pink, casting a pastel glow across Momma’s stacks of paintings and glinting off the glass aquarium of Samson’s dead pet turtle.

Thump.

Thump.

I set my bowl down on the floor with a splish-splash of milk sloshing up over the side and followed the thumping sound until my nose was nearly pressed up against the aquarium. There in that tank, Samson’s turtle was not dead so much as living, trying its unsuccessful best to find a way up the side of the glass.

So, that turtle
had
been hibernating after all, I thought to myself. I knew that Samson would be happy— as happy as his moody broody self ever got, that is. But why had that turtle picked that peculiar, persnickety moment to wake up—there before dawn on the morning of my most important birthday, with me in my nightgown, balancing frosted cereal on my knee? Watching the turtle, I tapped on the glass. Thinking about the turtle and remembering the unusual way Gypsy had woken up as I’d stepped out of bed, a shaky and suspicious feeling started to gnaw down deep in my bones, a feeling that stuck with me the rest of the morning and continued to grow like smoke from a grassfire.

At two o’clock, we all piled into Miss Rosemary’s van to head to the church in Hebron. Fish and I helped Grandpa into the front seat, reaching in to help him with the seat belt and to make sure the car radio was turned off. Ever since Grandma Dollop died, listening to the radio always made Grandpa sad.

With Grandpa settled in, Fish went back inside just long enough to find Samson and separate him from his now active, not-dead pet. Me and Miss Rosemary got Gypsy’s car seat wrestled into the back as the boys climbed in. I was wearing my new special-occasion dress, the one Poppa had picked out for me all by himself at a big department store in Salina.

“I thought my little girl deserved something pretty and new to wear for her special birthday,” he had said the night he handed me a big white box held closed by a thin, round strand of stretchy gold elastic. The dress inside the box was pale yellow with a high sashed waist and a full skirt that was sewn with deep pockets. Double rows of white rickrack zigzagged its way around the hem and around the seams in the short cap sleeves. But the very best part of the whole dress was the big purple flower made from soft silk ribbons that was pinned up high on the shoulder like a corsage.

“I don’t know much about dresses,” he’d admitted. “But I wasn’t about to give up on that account. I didn’t leave that store until I was sure I’d found just the right one.” I pictured my poppa wandering through the store, looking for my perfect dress, and smiled.

Even with no savvy and no hair on his head, our poppa was special: He was good and sweet and had wild black eyebrows that twisted like dancing beetle legs, and a faded tattoo from his navy days—a long-haired mermaid twisting around an anchor on his forearm, just above his heavy silver wristwatch. Poppa kept Miss Mermaid hidden under crisp white shirtsleeves when he went to work in that cement and plaster office in Salina during the week. But when he came home to us at night, Poppa had his sleeves rolled up and Miss Mermaid had her smile on. And we didn’t care that Poppa had no savvy, and he didn’t care that the rest of us did … or would.

The night he gave me the dress was the last time Poppa had come home to us from Salina, the last time we’d all been together.

“Do you like it then?” Poppa had asked, rubbing his knuckles against his jaw as he watched me pull the dress from the box.

“I love it, Poppa!” I’d said, dancing my dress across the living room twice before throwing my arms around him. “Thank you!”

I knew I had the best poppa in the world, and I knew my dress was a party dress to anyone who knew anything—even if my actual party wasn’t turning out the way I’d planned. Climbing up into the van, I could see Miss Rosemary eyeing the big purple flower pinned on my shoulder. I guessed she was wishing that she had a dress just like mine, instead of her straight and shapeless wear.

All buckled into the van, we bumped and jolted up the rutted road toward the highway, on our way to the church for my uninvited party. I pretended not to notice the way Fish and Grandpa kept looking at me like I was some kind of dynamite, ready to blow at the next jerk or jog of the van. I still hadn’t felt any spectacular, gut-wrenching thing grip me good and firm the way it had for my brothers; I knew that my savvy was turning out to be something a bit quieter, a bit less earthshaking—yet something that would be far better for helping Poppa.

When Momma had called that morning to wish me a happy birthday, I’d asked her, “Did you kiss him, Momma?”

“Yes, Mibs. I kissed Poppa,” she answered softly.

“Did he wake up?”

Momma exhaled a long, slow breath, like she was singing the last note of a lullaby, and my heart almost broke with the total sadness of it. “No, honey,” she said at last, “Poppa didn’t wake up. Not yet at least. The doctors say—well, they say we’ll have to wait and see.” At that moment, I knew exactly what I had to do—I just hadn’t yet figured out
how
I was going to do it.

When we reached the church, it didn’t take me long to realize that God listened better to Miss Rosemary than He did to me. The parking lot was full and there were kids everywhere. This wasn’t just a little party. This was a full-on foofaraw.

If I didn’t know better, I’d say Samson disappeared before the van even reached full stop, for as soon as we got out, he was gone. He’d turn up later, I knew, after spending the afternoon in some dusty hidey-hole, under the organ or with the mops in the storage closet. Grandpa Bomba just chewed his cheek and shook his head, mumbling to himself as Miss Rosemary led him and Gypsy toward the church, passing a school bus painted as pink as the bottoms of Gypsy’s feet and advertising the Heartland Bible Supply Company.

Fish grabbed me by the arm as soon as Miss Rosemary had her back turned and steered me away from the pink bus and away from the church.

“You can’t do this thing here, Mibs,” Fish said with a gust of wind that whipped at me like a scolding. “This is no place for you to be today. Y’know it’s not safe.”

“It’ll be all right,” I assured him. “I already know what my savvy is, Fish, and it’s not going to hurt anyone. In fact—”

“You
know
?” Fish cut me off before I could tell him more. He tightened his grip on my arm. My brother’s funk and squall of wind made me doubt myself for a second. But no, I was sure I was sure.

“Yes, Fish, I
know
. Just settle your storming.”

Fish was looking at me expectantly. I was about to explain that I had to be the one to go wake Poppa. It was just that simple—my savvy was waking things up, just like Samson’s turtle. I knew that a savvy wasn’t something you could make happen for wanting, but I had proof that the means of waking up Poppa were there and wrapped up in me, ready to burst out like Rocket’s sparks or Fish’s wind and rain—if I could just find my way to Salina. I was about to tell my brother all of this, but at that moment Will Junior found us.

“Happy birthday, Mibs,” he said, smiling. “Aren’t you coming in to the party?”

“I’m coming,” I said to Will, jerking my arm free from Fish’s tight grip.

Fish let me go, but he gave me a look like the sharp end of a stick, and punctuated his meaning with a smattering of abrupt, uncontrolled raindrops from the clouds overhead. I gave Fish a
look
right back. Then I smiled my own smile at Will Junior and let him pull me into the church, straight into the catastrophe that was my thirteenth birthday party.

S
tepping inside the open double doors of the church, I had the bad luck of running immediately into Ashley Bing and Emma Flint, both combed and brushed and dressed up pretty for the party. I had hoped I would never have to see either of those girls ever again after leaving Hebron Middle School for the last time. But that day what I wanted and what I got were two very different things.