The 10 P.M. Question (25 page)

“What are you doing?” said Sydney.

“It’s one of those pictures,” said Frankie. “The eyes looking at you, no matter where you are. How do they
do
that?”

“We had a Jesus of Nazareth picture like that, in my Irish school,” said Sydney. “Spooky.”

“Why do you say Jesus of Nazareth?” asked Frankie. “Like there might be another one.”

“I just like saying
Nazareth,
” said Sydney. “I’ve been there, by the way.”

“Sydney of Nazareth,” said Frankie, and they laughed, but then Frankie had to put his thumbs between his fingers again.

He sat back at the table and tried the truck once more. He entertained himself with the paraphernalia on the deck of the truck, dreaming up unlikely objects (an old armchair, a stack of comics, a rubbish sack with intriguing bumps and bulges), and ignored the actual vehicle. Beside him, Sydney huffed and snorted and clicked her tongue in her odd way, and every so often loudly screwed up a piece of paper.

“I like dogs,” said a little voice behind Frankie. Galway.

She stood slightly to the side of the chair back and pointed to Microsoft with a small pale finger. It was like a white worm. Everything about her was white: her long thin hair, her eyebrows, her small face.

“You hungry, Friday?” said Sydney.

“Meeeoouuw,” said Galway, very convincingly Frankie thought. She stretched her mouth and showed tiny pebble-white teeth.

For the rest of the morning, Galway and Calcutta were kittens. They crawled on all fours. They licked each other and had play fights. They ate all their food from saucers. They were really very adept, Frankie thought; they used their little red tongues with great skill, slurping up cereal, or maneuvering cheese and crackers to the side of the saucer so they could suck them up into their mouths. They ate quartered apples, muesli bars, and raisins that way. They drank chocolate milk from bowls that Sydney placed side by side on newspaper in the corner of the dining room.

“It’s their favorite game,” said Sydney. “It keeps them happy for hours.” She sounded fond and indulgent, like an actual mother — like Chris when she was talking about Jock and Barty. Frankie tried to imagine that sound in Gordana’s voice, but all he could hear was,
It’s his favorite game; he’s a major Freak-Boy.
Still, he
could
remember Gordana making peanut-butter-and-banana sandwiches for him when he was little, and helping him build LEGO towers. He could remember her supervising his bath, too, shaping giant bubble mountains with shampoo.

The little girls played being kittens, and Sydney continued to write and screw up paper and write some more. Frankie sketched and shaded and sneaked the occasional glance at the watchful bishop. And all the while, he was preoccupied with how extremely
odd
Sydney’s life was, how utterly different from anyone else he’d ever known.

She had been to Nazareth and Nice, to Dublin and Darwin and any number of places in between; she lived in a rich person’s house but her mother spent her camp money and suddenly there was no cash. She had a grandmother she loved and a grandmother she wasn’t allowed to meet. She was some kind of independent spirit,
and
some kind of part-time mother. Sitting side by side at the table with her while Galway and Calcutta crawled in and out of the room, Frankie thought that they were, all four of them in this moment, like some undersized, underaged version of a nuclear family. He was kind of the dad. This caused Frankie to blush so much he had to bow his head and absorb himself in his drawing.

At precisely the moment Frankie’s stomach commenced gurgling, Sydney pushed back her chair and stood in triumph.

“
Voilà! Hier is het!
And,
Plikney si tenset!
(Here it is! Here it is,
and
here it is!)” She thrust a sheaf of papers at Frankie.

They had argued for three weeks about whether the ending should be in Anders and Goldberger’s tree house or high on a cliff in the bush. Sydney favored the cliff, the bird-smugglers clinging for dear life and Microsoft nibbling at their fingers; she wanted the satisfaction of saying it was a cliff-hanger, ha, ha. Frankie appreciated the joke but he wanted the tree house because (a) he loved it almost as much as the aral bird, and (b) he wanted to draw Microsoft cornering the two men so that they bulged from the tree house windows like oversized humans in a dolls’ house, like a picture he remembered from
Alice in Wonderland
. In the end Frankie had prevailed, though Sydney declared this was
absolutely
the wrong way around because the writer was the boss of the story.

Frankie read this last chapter now and Sydney put more food in the little girls’ bowls. She put a packet of bread and a block of cheese on the table.

“Cheese sandwiches,” she said. “Make your own.” She did a handstand against the wall in the gap between the dresser and the china cabinet. She recited Chilun vocab softly.

Frankie read and read, and as he read, he grew increasingly troubled.

Finally, he set the papers down. He looked at the cheese and bread. He looked up at the bishop, who faithfully met his eye. He was bewildered — yes, that was the word,
bewildered
. Sydney had set the final chapter in the tree house, just as they’d agreed, but she had written three different endings, three
alternative
endings.

“It’s a Choose-Your-Own-Ending ending,” Sydney said, seeing the look on his face. “The readers get to choose. You can have (a) a completely happy ending, or (b) a half-happy, half-sad ending, or (c) a completely sad ending.”

Frankie looked at the pages and pages of writing, Sydney’s big round letters, the fever evident in her script as she came to the end of each ending.

“But,” he began, and then stopped, not really knowing what he wanted to say.

She continued, “And that way, the reader is part of the story. It’s interactive, like computer games. It’s like the reader makes the story, too.”

“You don’t even like computer games,” said Frankie irrelevantly. “And I thought the writer was the boss of the story.” The idea of three endings not only bewildered him; it irritated him. It was extremely unsettling; it was
untidy.

“Exactly right,” said Sydney, bulging her eyes. “I
am
the boss. So I’m making three endings — no,
we’re
making them. Don’t you think it’s a nifty idea? Especially if we can’t decide. Which, actually, I can’t.” She lifted the lid of the cake container and sniffed it appreciatively, then closed it again.

“You can be like the reader, too,” she said. “You can choose your favorite ending.”

“I don’t want to choose,” said Frankie. He knew he sounded petulant. “I want it to be already decided.
By the authors
. Like a proper book.”

“So, you decide the one you want.” Sydney cut a fat slab of cheese and stuck it between two slices of bread. She took a bite. “And that’s your definite ending.
Voilà!
You want one of these?”

He shook his head. He was too disturbed to eat. “But the ending’s supposed to be good. It’s supposed to be happy,
victorious.
Aral birds safe, baddies go to prison. That’s what we said.”

Frankie had imagined a final drawing like the procession in
Peter and the Wolf:
Microsoft in front, policemen leading the handcuffed Anders and Goldberger, Hank bringing up the rear — and overhead, the aral birds, liberated and joyful,
chirping merrily,
just like the bird in the story.

“So,”
said Sydney, getting impatient now, “that can be
your
ending. What’s the problem?”

In Sydney’s half-sad, half-happy ending, the aral birds were rescued but Microsoft was caught in a possum trap and had his front right leg amputated. In the completely sad ending, Anders and Goldberger were arrested but Microsoft lost his leg
and
the aral birds died of shock. Frankie was aghast. Injuring Microsoft was bad enough, but killing off the aral birds felt like brutal murder. How could Sydney even contemplate it?

“But it won’t be my ending — it won’t
seem
like the ending if I know those other endings are there.” Frankie’s voice climbed, urgent and a little wavery. He knew this was the reason; this was why he found it disturbing. “It’s like the other endings will
infect
my ending, by just being there. In my ending the aral birds will be safe, but somehow they won’t
really
be, because in another ending they will have died. Or Microsoft will have a terrible three-legged life, for heaven’s sake. The other endings will be hovering there, like, like,
poison.
”

He slumped back in the chair. He almost felt like crying.

Sydney stood with the bitten cheese sandwich in her hand, her mouth half open.

“Jeeze Louise,” she said finally.

There was a short, tense silence, and then Frankie giggled. He just couldn’t help it. It was that idiotic exclamation, more ridiculous than
Bonga Swetso
and
hot damn
and somehow always funnier in Sydney’s unplaceable accent. Giggling seemed to send his outrage into retreat.

Sydney giggled, too, and took another bite of her sandwich.

“Is there a fight?” Calcutta and Galway were in the doorway, two-legged now, their white eyebrows knotted in frowns.

“Nah,” said Sydney. “An artistic difference.” Frankie nodded vigorously, and the little girls returned to the feline life. Sydney sat down again and finished her sandwich, chewing thoughtfully. Frankie exchanged a long look with the bishop, wondering what he should say next.

“We’ll just have your ending,” Sydney said. She was making another inelegant sandwich. “I don’t mind. Really. It’s more important to you.”

Frankie’s stomach gave a juicy gurgle as if in thanks.

“Cheese Louise,” said Sydney, and they both laughed again. She pushed the cheese toward him and bulged her eyes.

Frankie cut slices of cheese and positioned them with pedantic care on the square of bread so that the surface was covered edge-to-edge. Now he was embarrassed by his outburst. He was like some lunatic thermometer these days, his mercury leaping and diving in unruly fashion. It was disconcerting how unpredictable and vehement his reactions had become. Hot words shot out of his mouth; his heart ran marathons at a moment’s notice. There really must be something wrong with him. Perhaps he
did
have a cardiac condition. Perhaps he had that syndrome where people shouted and laughed and swore uncontrollably. He stuffed a wedge of sandwich in his mouth to prevent any looming eruption.

“You ever thought of getting a tattoo?” asked Sydney. She was tipped back on two legs of her chair, scooping up cake again, sucking it off her finger.

Frankie tried to clear his head, adjust to Sydney’s swerve. Some things didn’t change.

“Gordana’s got one,” he said, which wasn’t really an answer. “A green sea horse. On the back of her neck. You can only see it when her hair’s up. She had it for two months before Ma and Uncle George even noticed.”

“What would you get?” Sydney asked.

He’d really never thought about it, and secretly the idea of a tattoo needle gave him the “screaming ab dabs,” to quote one of the Aunties’ more outlandish sayings. But now that he
was
thinking about it, he knew exactly what it would have to be.

“Something to do with birds.” Wings? A beak? Claw prints? An actual bird?

“I’d have a word,” said Sydney. “Or words. But I can never decide what.”

He could have a word. He could just have
bird
.

“And I can never decide what language.”

Oiseau. Uccello
. . .

“What’s
bird
in Dutch?” said Frankie.

“Vogel,”
said Sydney.

Vogel. Ave. Fagel.

“Thirty-seven past one,” said Sydney. “Freya’s late. Surprise, surprise.”

Dribski
. That was Chilun for
bird. Dribski
would be good. Maybe a tattoo would be okay. Frankie felt himself warming to the idea. Gordana said it hadn’t really hurt that much.

“You know,” said Sydney, “I actually don’t mind sad endings.”

“What?” He was trying to remember the Polish word for
bird.

“I’m kind of used to them,” she said. “Like, every time I have to leave Holland, it’s a kind of sad ending. And when we move.”

“Half sad, or completely sad?” said Frankie. It came out sarcastic.

“Half sad, I suppose,” said Sydney, appearing to think about it. “Completely sad was when my
opa
died. And when we left Ireland, because Freya said she wasn’t going back there any time soon.”

“But why have a sad ending in a story when you don’t
have
to?” Frankie instinctively stuck his thumb between his fingers. He didn’t really want to hear any of this. Talk of Sydney’s many departures set his spirits on a decline.

“Don’t really know,” said Sydney. She brought the chair back onto four legs and leaned on the table, chin in her hands. “But heaps of books have sad endings. For instance,
Charlotte’s Web.
”

“Yeah,” said Frankie dolefully. He couldn’t bear the end of
Charlotte’s Web
.

“And
The Snow Goose
.”

“Huh.” Mr. A had read them
The Snow Goose
in February. Frankie had hated the end of that, too. At least the bird had been all right. It had survived and
flown in a wide, graceful spiral round the old light . . .
Frankie had memorized the words. And then, on the next page, the old light had been bombed to oblivion.

“And
Seven Little Australians
.”

“Never heard of it.”

“And
Mary Poppins,
” said Sydney. She was on a roll, almost enjoying this, Frankie thought. “Mary Poppins always leaves at the end of the books.”

“That is why,” said Frankie, squeezing his fingers tight around his thumbs. “That is why
Harold and the Purple Crayon
is the best book ever. It has a
happy
ending. And so will
The Valiant Ranger.
”

“You know what?” said Sydney musingly. “All your ma’s books, those Russian ones, they all have
completely
sad endings. She told me about them. They’re totally
tragic.
”