The Changeling (12 page)

“How come Mom keeps fussing at Gran to come home with us?” Tom asked idly as if he didn’t really expect an answer. But Cath knew why. You could always count on Cath to know a lot about almost anything you’d care to mention.

“You mean you don’t know?” Cath sounded incredulous that anyone could be so dense. “It’s because of that Mr. Millmore. He’s always hanging around, and Mother says he’s planning to marry Grandmother.”

Martha was amazed. Mr. Millmore was a young-old man with wavy silver hair and pin-striped suits who happened to be a neighbor of Grandmother’s in her new apartment. He had called on her two or three times while the rest of the Abbotts were there, and he was very helpful and friendly. But Martha had certainly not guessed that he was part of the magic.

Seen through the cracks in her straw sun hat, Tom looked as astounded as Martha felt.

“Marry her,” he said, and then after a silence, “Did he ask her or something?”

“Not that Mom knows of,” Cath said. “But she can tell that he’s going to as soon as we’re out of the way.”

“Oh yeah?” Tom said. “What do you know.” But then in a minute he laughed. “Well, why not let him?” he said. “He may not be great, but he’s bound to be better than all those garden clubs.”

Cath snorted. “Idiot,” she said. “What about the inheritance?”

Tom sobered. “Oh yeah,” he said. “I see what you mean.”

All the Abbotts knew about the inheritance. It was a large and powerful sum of money that Grandfather Abbott had left to Grandmother Abbott when he died. It was supposed to be left to the rest of the Abbotts someday. But not, of course, if it was left to somebody else.

Martha had thought that Mr. Millmore was rather nice, and she couldn’t help thinking that Tom was probably right about his being better than garden clubs. She’d been to a few with Grandmother, and she had reason to know. However, she also felt that she should just accept Mr. Millmore as a part of Josie’s magic and be glad that he had made it necessary for
all
the Abbotts to return to Rosewood Hills.

So Martha went back to Rosewood Manor Estates, number two Castle Court, where everybody seemed to go right on getting busier and busier according to mysteriously complicated and demanding sets of rules and patterns. All except Martha, of course, who never seemed to be able to find a set of rules that worked for her.

But she also went back to Bent Oaks Grove, where it didn’t matter if you didn’t know the rules because you could always make them up as you went along.

And then, only a few days after Christmas, the Carson family packed up and left with no warning, and Ivy was gone again.

I
T WAS ANOTHER LONG
and lonely time in Martha’s life. She finished the sixth grade and went into the seventh with very mixed-up feelings about almost everything. She was happier, at times, and at others a lot more unhappy than she had ever been before. Everything stayed disgustingly the same—and at the same time changed so rapidly that she sometimes felt there was nothing she could count on as being finally true.

Everything about number two Castle Court was the same, and the people in it were, too, except that Cath became a Junior in high school and Tom a Sophomore and their friends were very grown-up—at least in some ways. Cath’s friends wore crazy beautiful clothes and treated everybody and everything as if they were a part of some huge ridiculous joke. They laughed a lot, very loudly. Tom’s friends were mostly huge football types with crew cuts, and they were even noisier than Cath’s friends, without trying half so hard.

Martha did a lot of watching, and sometimes it all seemed very exciting. And there were times when she almost felt a part of it. Sometimes Cath’s friends included her in their conversation without talking to her as if she were a retarded five-year-old; and once one of Tom’s friends, a very important fullback on the high school team, grabbed her by the hair. She was on her way to the back door at the time, and she had to squeeze through the kitchen, which was practically wall to wall with boys, particularly near the refrigerator. As she squeezed past the fullback, whose name was Grant Wilson, he reached out and grabbed her long hair and held it way up above her head so she couldn’t move.

“Hey, look what I caught,” he yelled, and they all looked around. Then he yelled at Tom, “Is this that homely little sister you used to have? Well, what do you know. She may not turn out so bad, after all.” Martha nearly died of embarrassment, but afterwards she thought about very little else for several days.

Another amazing change, that turned out not to be a real change, was the behavior of Kelly Peters. Towards the end of the seventh grade, Kelly suddenly became very friendly with Martha—at least at times. The times were usually when Martha was at home, and after a while Martha began to realize that Kelly nearly always felt friendliest when Tom was around. Gradually it became obvious that Kelly was crazy about Tom Abbott, who was three years older than she was and naturally thought of her as a little kid.

But even after Martha knew for certain the reason behind Kelly’s sudden change of heart, she sometimes had a hard time keeping it in mind. Kelly and two or three of her close friends were the absolute rulers of seventh grade society. Everybody followed their lead in just about everything, and Martha certainly wasn’t cut out to be any kind of a counter force. So sometimes when she was asked, she made the effort and worked very hard at talking about the right things in the right tone of voice, at squealing with laughter at the right times and at cutting down the right people with the right kind of sarcasm.

But afterwards, or sometimes even in the middle of things, she would suddenly be overcome with a terrible feeling that it was all phony and unreal. She was never positive if the worst of the phoniness was her own or everybody else’s; but whichever, it would suddenly seem just too much of an effort and she would turn quiet and strange and escape to her room and her books, and sometimes to Bent Oaks Grove.

At Bent Oaks she often climbed up to Falcon’s Roost or to the Lookout. Sometimes she took a book along, but at other times she just sat there for a while with her thoughts and memories, often about Ivy.

Thinking about Ivy was almost always good. Sometimes Martha wondered and even worried a little about what Ivy was doing and what it would be like when she came back. But usually it seemed to Martha that nothing, not a single event in her present life, compared to the adventure of almost every day when Ivy was around.

But no matter what else she was thinking, there was one thing Martha never doubted. She never doubted that Ivy would be back. In fact, the feeling that Ivy might show up at any moment was so strong that Martha often found herself looking for Ivy, particularly when she was in Bent Oaks Grove. When she was in the grove, she was constantly looking up along the trail, expecting to see Ivy appear over the top of the hill. But no one ever came.

At least, no one came until a few weeks after school started, the fall Martha was in the eighth grade. It was a very hot end-of-summer day, and after school Martha put on some shorts and picked out a book to read. Then she climbed up to Bent Oaks Grove where the coolness of the ocean breeze almost always flowed over the top of Rosewood Hills and spilled through the branches of the oak trees. There were some little kids at Bent Oaks that day who were playing in the best reading spot in Falcon’s Roost, so Martha climbed higher. She settled herself in the wide fork that had been called the Lookout, and began to read. She hadn’t been reading very long when something made her look up toward the place where the trail looped over the top of the hill. Just at that moment someone was coming into view over the crest. Someone small and dark, who stopped at the top of the hill, looked all around, and then started to run down the trail. Plunging headlong down the steep trail, the figure skipped around the zigzag turns as lightly as if there were no such things as gravity and slippery pebbles. It had to be Ivy. Martha stood up carelessly on a narrow branch, and hanging on with just one hand she waved the other arm wildly and screamed, “Ivy!”

The force of the yell surprised Martha, herself, and must have scared the kids playing in Falcon’s Roost half to death. Martha yelled again, and down below her the little kids sat staring upwards with their mouths hanging open. Up on the trail Ivy stopped almost in mid-jump to listen. Martha waved again, and then Ivy waved back and began to run faster than ever. In only a minute she was in the grove and swarming up the trunk of Tower Tree, right through Falcon’s Roost and the staring kids, and on up the harder climb to the Lookout.

When Ivy had pulled herself up the last few feet to the Lookout, Martha scooted over to make room, and for a minute they just sat staring at each other and laughing.

“Hi,” Ivy said, and the word came out halfway between a gasp for air and a giggle.

“Hi,” Martha said back.

Then they sat for another minute before Martha said, “I knew you were coming. I had a feeling and I just looked up and there you were.”

“I know,” Ivy said. “I knew you’d be here in the grove, too. Do you still come here a lot? Since I’ve been gone, I mean?”

“Sometimes,” Martha said. “Not nearly as much as I used to. As we used to, I mean.”

Ivy nodded and looked down around the grove. “We sure used to come here a lot,” she said. “It looks just the same as always.”

It seemed safest to talk first about the grove and the past and all the things they used to do together, and next they talked about the more recent past and the things they had been doing since Ivy went away. Martha told what there was to tell about the Abbotts, and what it was like at school; and Ivy talked sparingly about where she had been in the almost two years she had been away.

The Carsons had spent almost a year in Texas, and from there they had moved to an apartment house in Chicago. There had been two months in the summer when Ivy had gone back to Harley’s Crossing to live with her Aunt Evaline. Aunt Evaline had felt well enough in the summer to go home to Harley’s Crossing, and she had sent for Ivy. It had been a wonderful two months. Two wonderful free green months after the gray closed-in-ness of Chicago. They had lived outdoors most of the time, and the woods were beautiful. But then Aunt Evaline had to go back to the rest home, and Ivy went back to Chicago.

“Chicago?” Martha asked. “What were you doing there? Did your father have a job there?”

Ivy shrugged. “Something like that. It had something to do with trucks. A guy he met in Texas had something to do with it. There were a lot of trucks, and they were shipping things different places.”

“They?” Martha asked.

“My father and my brothers—Max and Randy. I never heard much about it. But after a while Max disappeared, and I guess he went to jail; so what ever they were doing must have had something fishy about it. They never talked about it, or about where Max went, while I was around; but I doubt if he went on a vacation to Florida.” Ivy stopped and waited for Martha to comment, and Martha saw that it was a kind of test.

So Martha said unconcernedly, “What was it like—living in a big city?” The way she said it meant that it didn’t matter about Max. She had understood what Ivy was asking, and Ivy understood Martha, too. There was nothing new about that. Understanding each other without words was the way it had always been. But Martha felt right way that something was different. The difference was how much it really
did
matter about Max—to Ivy.

“It was horrible,” Ivy said. “We lived in an apartment building on the ninth floor.”

“The ninth floor!” Martha said. It was hard to imagine Ivy living like that, with no place to get away to. “I just can’t imagine you on the ninth floor.”

“Neither could I. I was about to leave when all of a sudden we came back here.”

“You were about to leave,” Martha asked. “You mean all by yourself?”

“Yes, or maybe with Josie. I was going to take her with me. I was planning to run away.”

“Ivy!” Martha gasped. She could see it all too clearly—Ivy with no one except Josie, with a bundle on a stick, alone in a dark canyon of a city street, where strange figures lurked in doorways and the mouths of narrow alleys brimmed with horrors.

“Well, I was going to,” Ivy said as fiercely as if Martha had really argued about it. “I almost did. But I didn’t have to because, just in time, we packed up and left. So now the Carsons are back again on the wrong side of Rosewood Hills, and here I am.”

“Do you think you’ll stay? Very long, I mean?” Martha asked.

“I don’t know. I think we left last time because my father owed somebody a lot of money. I don’t suppose he’s paid it. He never does.”

Martha was beginning to feel really shocked and frightened. Not by what Ivy said about owing money, although being in debt
was
an important sin in the Abbotts’ catechism. It wasn’t any of the things Ivy said about her family—because Martha had always known those things, and worse, about the Carsons. It had more to do with the way Ivy talked about them. Always before, when Ivy talked about the Carsons, it was with a coolness, a kind of distance. It had been almost the same way she talked about the people of the Land of the Green Sky, or Annabelle of the burned-out-house. But now the distance was gone, and Ivy’s face was tight and hot; and suddenly the Carsons seemed much more close and real—and Ivy much more a part of them.

A question leaped into Martha’s mind. “Hey,” she said, “remember how you used to say you were a changeling? Are you still a changeling?”

Ivy laughed, stuck out her lower lip and blew upward to untangle a curly wisp of hair from her long eyelashes, exactly the way she always had. “Sure,” she said. “You’re either a changeling or you aren’t.” She grinned wickedly. “Any day now I’m going to fly off on a broom—or maybe I’ll start sprouting horns and a tail and turn into a monster.”

“You don’t show any signs of it yet,” Martha said. “You look just about the same as you always have.”

Ivy looked at Martha with her head on one side. “Well, you don’t. You’ve changed.” It sounded like an accusation, and Martha suddenly felt guilty.