A Little Bit of Spectacular (10 page)

“I came to school one day in eleventh grade,” she said, “and when I got to my homeroom, there was a big poster board taped right up on the wall that said, ‘Cassie Mosely, will you go to East Lake Park with me this Friday?'”

“Did you think it was sweet?” asked Amelia, who was apparently doing a better job than I was of going with the flow of the story.

Mrs. Halley rolled her eyes. “I thought it was tremendously embarrassing. Who asks a girl out with a sign in public like that? I ripped it down and threw it in the trash can. Teenage girls are not the nicest creatures. Try to remember that when some nice boy asks you out for the first time. Even if he's odd.”

“You thought he was odd?” I asked.

She laughed—a very deep laugh to come from such a delicate-looking lady. It made me think of Santa Claus and jiggling bellies and pipes. I wondered if Mrs. Halley smoked a pipe.

“Oh, he was definitely odd,” she said. “At any rate, he never even mentioned having asked me out. A few weeks went by, and he fell into step beside me in the hallway between classes. He asked me if he could walk me home. I didn't want to be rude—I at least had the decency to feel a little guilty about ripping up his sign. So I said I wouldn't mind. He walked me home, and for a while that was all. He'd show up next to me once a week or so, and he'd walk me home. Carry my books, tell me about whatever comic book he was working on—he was always coming up with new ideas—ask me about my day. It got to be comfortable enough.”

“And then he carved your initials in the tree,” I said, feeling like what I had hoped was a mystery story had turned out to be a love story. Love stories were much more boring than mysteries.

“Oh, that was much later,” she said. “After the dance. After the dance, my dear, he carved our initials everywhere. Trees, fences, wet sidewalks, mud puddles, sandboxes. A whole lifetime of carving and scribbling.”

She laughed again, and I expected to see little smoke rings coming out of her mouth. “There never was a man more interested in leaving a record of himself.”

I felt like the story was falling into pieces again.

“No,” continued Mrs. Halley, correcting herself. “It wasn't about leaving a record of himself. He wanted to leave a record of us. He wanted us—him and me, the fact that we loved each other—to be carved in every nook and cranny of the city. He told me one time that long after we were gone, he wanted the trees and the streets and rocks to scream out how he loved me. And that I loved him back.”

She looked at us critically. “You two are too young to appreciate that, but, trust me, it's very romantic. I hope both of you find someone who loves you like that one day.

“He didn't stop once we got married either. Always carving initials or some such everywhere. Carving our names in the sidewalk outside our house. Handprints in the garden wall. That sort of thing.”

She stopped.

“And then?” I asked.

She set her teacup very neatly back in its saucer. “And then he died. A year ago. Pancreatic cancer.”

“I'm sorry,” Amelia and I said at the same time.

“Thank you. I was very sorry, too. A bit lost really. Aimless. I didn't know how to fill up my days. I didn't like being alone in our house, so I just wandered around—shopping, walking, ordering coffee I never finished. Up and down streets, in and out of shops.”

I nodded. When Mom had her operation, she had to spend two nights in the hospital, so it was just Gram and me in the condo. Those were the longest days and nights of my life. I couldn't stop thinking about what if Mom never came back, what if her bed stayed empty and her favorite coffee cup never got filled up and the shoes she'd left by the front door never got worn again. I couldn't stand seeing all her things that seemed so unimportant when she was there using them and holding them and wearing them, but that suddenly seemed so sad and empty when she was gone.

I could understand why Mrs. Halley wanted to get out of her house. I'd made every excuse I could to avoid the condo while Mom was in the hospital. That's when I discovered Trattoria Centrale, when I was desperate to find someplace to kill time. But after dark, when I had to come home, I'd curl up on Mom's bed and slip on her favorite Lucky Charms T-shirt, even though I normally made fun of her for wearing the raggedy thing. I'd slide under her sheets and drink decaf out of her coffee mug, even though I hated decaf, because she liked it. I wanted to taste what she'd tasted, feel what she'd felt.

Mrs. Halley lifted her teacup to her mouth, even though the cup was empty.

“You wrote on the walls because it reminded you of him, didn't you?” I said.

She smiled into her empty cup.

“It started out as a spur of the moment thing,” she said. “Just a lark. Silliness. I happened to be in a restroom, and there was all sorts of boring business—bad words and names on the walls—and I fished through my purse, found a pen, and wrote the first thing that came to mind. And it felt good. It did make me feel close to him. Connected. So I kept doing it. I started carrying a purple pen with me all the time, and, when the mood struck, I'd jot down a phrase in the ladies' room.”

She looked up, seeming self-conscious for the first time since we'd walked in.

“I'm not as creative as Lowell was, though. I just kept thinking about when we were first together. Our time at school. And for some reason the alma mater popped into my head.”

“The alma mater?” I repeated.

“For Plantagenet High.” She scrunched up her face for a moment, peered at the ceiling, and began to sing softly, slightly off-key.

We are Plantagenet.

We are chosen, a unique breed,

Forever striving upward and onward

Always to succeed.

Progress and truth

Are our watchwords.

Every wound we'll soothe.

We walk next to you

But are not one of you.

Our works will be eternal

We will never grow old.

We are Plantagenet

Brave and bold.

She dabbed at her mouth awkwardly when she stopped singing.

“And so on and so forth,” she said. “Forgive my voice. It was a religious school. We were supposed to hold ourselves to a higher standard, I suppose.”

“We are Plantagenet,” I whispered to myself. We'd seen it on the high school sign. It made sense that it was part of the alma mater.

Amelia leaned forward. “So ‘we will never grow old' means . . .”

“We'll live forever because of the deeds we do. The people we help.”

“Oh,” said Amelia. “That's disappointing.”

I knew what she meant—that there was nothing supernatural about it. No eternal life or anything. But Mrs. Halley looked hurt.

“Pardon me?” she said. “I've always thought it was a beautiful idea.”

I was still trying to concentrate on Mrs. Halley's song. Something wasn't quite right. She hadn't sung the most interesting part of the bathroom messages, the part that had gotten me the most interested.

“You didn't sing the part about ‘Our home is in the stars,'” I said.

Mrs. Halley turned to me. “That part wasn't from the alma mater. That was just for me. A little saying of Lowell's. You're clever girls, apparently. Can you guess what he meant? That the two of us had a home in the stars?”

We looked as blank as the white wall behind us. No glimmer of any idea written on our faces.

She smoothed her already-straight skirt. “Does it help if I say in high school people called Lowell by his last name?

“Halley,” I said. “Like Halley's comet?”

“Bingo.”

“Okay,” I said. “That explains him. Cassandra Mosely, though. I'm not sure.”

“Everyone called me Cassie then,” Mrs. Halley said. “Though Lowell didn't. He didn't think it was classy enough. He made up his own nickname, something more, oh, cosmic.”

I stared down at my lap, which was covered in crumbs. Practically a constellation of crumbs.

“Cassiopeia,” I said. “He called you Cassiopeia after the constellation. The one named after a beautiful queen.”

“A beautiful vain queen,” she corrected. “But I choose to think he was focused on the beautiful part when he came up with the nickname.”

“That's it then,” I said. “You were just remembering your husband when you wrote on the walls. None of it had anything to do with the blackouts, the glowing lights, all the headlines in the newspaper.”

“The blackouts and glowing lights?” she repeated.

“I know, I know,” I said. “It was just some glitch with the power company. I thought maybe it had something to do with Plantagenet.”

She folded her napkin. “I'm sorry.”

“No, I'm the one who was making up fantasies—” I began.

“I mean I'm sorry because I
am
the one who caused the blackouts,” she said. “I was trying to make it all work. I didn't realize how much power I was using, and I wound up having to buy generators. I think the glowing lights were me, too. I didn't expect the news people to notice.”

Amelia and I exchanged a glance.

“Notice what?” I asked.

“Oh, my dears, those scribbles were only the beginning,” said Mrs. Halley. “They just got me to thinking. Remembering those early days with Lowell. How he loved to leave me messages. So I decided I would give him one last gift.”

“Well . . .” said Amelia, but she didn't finish the sentence. I knew what she wanted to say, though.

“Um, so, I don't want to be rude . . .” I began. “But he's dead, right? I mean, passed away?”

“That's right. Eleven months ago.”

“And you're going to send him a gift?”

“That's right.”

Amelia and I looked at each other.

“So what do you say?” Mrs. Halley said. “Would you like to see it for yourself?”

Amelia and I looked at each other.

“We've got maybe forty-five minutes before my grandmother's going to come looking for us,” I said.

A HOME IN THE STARS

Even as Amelia and I climbed into Mrs. Halley's Cadillac, I wondered if we might be making a huge mistake. If Mrs. Halley might just be completely insane. That seemed harsh, even inside my own head. She definitely wasn't
completely
insane. But maybe a little nuts. In a nice way.

I'd been having thoughts of craziness ever since we left the restaurant. I mean, first, when she asked us to come back to her house with her, I thought: Of course we can't. She's a stranger. You can't get into a car with a stranger. It's stupid. It's how all those creepy television movies start. Then I thought, hey, the stranger is a lady in her eighties. And there are two of us. If she tried anything weird, we could surely outrun her.

But if she was crazy, all bets were off. Crazy people can have superhuman strength. I read that somewhere.

She'd said her house was only five minutes away. She'd said we could invite Gram to come with us. But I didn't want Gram to come—I wanted the secret, even if it would end up being a dumb secret, to be all mine and Amelia's.

So I sat in the front seat with Mrs. Halley, and I kept my hand on the door handle. Amelia was pressed against the door in the backseat.

“What got you interested in a few lines jotted in a bathroom wall?” asked Mrs. Halley, glancing in the rearview mirror as she pulled into traffic. “I've been leaving notes for months, and no one else has ever answered them.”

“I saw one of your notes in Trattoria Centrale, then the next day I saw almost the same note at our school,” I said. “I couldn't get it out of my head. It seemed like it had to mean something.”

“You must be at Hargrove Academy,” Mrs. Halley said. “The assistant principal is my cousin. We were meeting for lunch one day.”

I was glad I had my hand on the door handle—we were speeding like crazy. Mrs. Halley took a turn and my head almost knocked against the window. I thought old ladies were supposed to drive slow.

Mrs. Halley sped through a yellow light, then she glanced over at me. “You said you thought it meant something. What did you think it meant?”

I rubbed my hand along the smooth leather of her front seat. I didn't know how to answer her. Important secrets? Magical powers? A whole exciting world hidden underneath the normal, everyday world?

“I don't know,” I said. The turns and the speed were knocking the thoughts right out of me.

“I thought this might be about an invasion,” I admitted.

“An invasion?”

“Like aliens.”

There was a long pause, and I wondered if she was suddenly thinking that she shouldn't have invited strangers into her car. Because they could be crazy.

But then she laughed her deep, pipe-smoking laugh. “Oh. Well, I'm sorry to disappoint you. I'm not an alien. I'm not opposed to an occasional invasion, though. You could say Lowell invaded my nice quiet life sixty-odd years ago. Long hair, pants too big. Quiet most of the time, but then he'd let out a laugh like a horse. Like a horse having an asthma attack. Quite a disruption when he started following me around and asking to walk me home. He made it hard to think. And just when I was sure I didn't want anything to do with him, he snuck into my head. Started making me feel differently. Complicated everything. Which was good and bad. But you'd know all about that sort of thing, of course.”

“No one's following me home from school,” I said.

“No, not boys,” she said. “You're too young for that. I hope. But finding my message on the bathroom wall was a bit of an invasion, now wasn't it? Turned your life upside down?”

“I suppose.”

“It can be wonderful to have your life turned upside down.”

I thought of Mom's pale still hands, her knees flopping out of the covers.

“I don't really like it turned upside down,” I said.

Her eyes flashed to me.

“It can go either way. When I saw what Lowell did at the dance, it changed everything. And when Lowell died, it changed everything, too. That doesn't mean having your life shaken up is always a bad thing.”

It felt like maybe I should steer her back to the important parts of her story. I didn't want to talk more about the ways your life can be turned upside down.

“You mentioned the dance before,” I reminded her.

“Right. The dance,” she said, slowing—thank goodness—at a stop sign. There was no one else on the street, I guess, because she just stopped the car completely while she answered me.

“I know I'm a little scatterbrained,” she said, like she'd been reading my mind. “It's just that there are so many strings to the story, it's hard to knot them all together. It's all about Lowell, and
everything
in my life
seems to include Lowell. So it's a lot of material to sort through.”

I looked into her gray eyes—like rain clouds, I thought—and I felt every bit of impatience empty out of me. I thought about what it would be like if I was trying to tell someone the story of me and Mom. It wouldn't have a beginning or end, really. I'd probably have trouble making a tidy story myself.

“No problem,” I said. “Really.”

She reached down and patted my hand before she hit the gas.

“The dance is where the story really starts, I suppose,” she said. “The dance and the supernova. There'd been a supernova my junior year in high school, and it was the first any of us had ever heard of. Do you know what a supernova is?”

“It's when a star explodes, and most of its mass shoots out into space,” I said. “It gets very bright.”

“Oh,” said Mrs. Halley, eyebrows shooting up. “Yes. Very impressive.”

“Olivia knows everything,” announced Amelia “She should be on a game show.”

“Clearly,” said Mrs. Halley. Her eyebrows still hadn't come back down.

“At any rate,” she said, “since there'd been so much interest in the sky that year, the theme of our prom was ‘Going Supernova.' It was supposed to be all about the stars and constellations and such. Lowell had signed up to be on the committee, in charge of decorations. And he'd asked me to be his date months before the actual dance.”

“So you'd been looking forward to it?” asked Amelia.

“Oh, yes. But because I was excited about another boy. I'd turned down Lowell at least three times. With no sympathy whatsoever. I still thought he was an oddball. The night before the prom, he told me that he'd arranged something special for me at the prom. That when I came to the dance, I should be sure to look up.”

“Look up and what?” Amelia asked.

“That's what I thought,” said Mrs. Halley. “But that's all he said. So I showed up in the gymnasium with my date, a lily corsage pinned to my dress, all enraptured by my date's dimples and how much he seemed to know about football—the boy had shoulders as wide as a Buick. When we walked through the doorway, it occurred to me to look up. And then I saw what Lowell had done. There were lights everywhere. All over the ceiling. I cannot express to you how many lights. It positively glowed in there.

“But it wasn't so much the number of lights—it was the pictures the lights made. He'd copied the real-life constellations: the Big Dipper and the Little Dipper, Orion, all the zodiac signs.”

“And Cassiopeia?” I guessed.

“And Cassiopeia,” she said. “Which happened to be right next to a very large, very bright Halley's Comet. Those two were the centerpiece of the whole prom sky. Not astronomically correct, but very sweet.”

She shook her head and shrugged.

I could feel the car slowing down.

“All of a sudden my date's dimples weren't quite as irresistible,” she said.

As she spoke, Mrs. Halley pulled into a driveway. The only light was a streetlight by the driveway, but I could make out a long, one-story brick house. The front yard was wide and full of what I guessed might be azalea bushes.

“Here we are,” she said. “Home sweet home.”

We piled out of the car, and as soon as she slammed her door, Mrs. Halley started walking. I might call it trotting—we had to jog to keep up. But we didn't head toward the front door; instead, she cut through the thick grass and made her way to the side of the house.

“We're not going inside?” I asked.

“What I want to show you is in the back,” she said.

She led us around a side pathway, and we crossed through a tall, ornate iron gate that reminded me a little of my old cemetery in Charleston. The sun was setting, and the whole backyard was in shadows, but I could tell the place was huge, grass stretching out forever. I really hoped she didn't have any dead bodies back there.

As we rounded a corner, passing under a couple of ancient-looking trees, I saw a large building along the edge of the yard. It was about the size of a small house, but it was made entirely of glass. The setting sun reflected off it, and it was blinding to look straight at it.

“It's Lowell's greenhouse,” Mrs. Halley said. “He never was too good with plants, frankly, but the greenhouse was here when we bought the place. He was always trying to do roses or orchids or some such thing. They never really worked, and I've let everything in there fall apart. But we're not coming in here for the greenery.”

“What are we coming for?” Amelia asked.

“You'll see in just a bit,” Mrs. Halley said. “It'll be more fun if it's a surprise.”

Once we got to the greenhouse, she unhooked a latch and opened the door for us. I stepped in, and it felt like summer. It was a good thing we weren't coming for the greenery, because nothing was green. There were beds of dirt with dried-up branches and leaves drooping over the edges. Turned-over flowerpots. Crickets and cockroaches belly-up on the cement. There was a smell that reminded me of when I tried to grow roots on a potato for a school project, but the potato did nothing but turn black and collapse.

The potato smell was when the disappointment really hit. Back in Celestial Realm, I'd realized I'd been wrong about the Plantagenet messages. But only standing in the middle of the greenhouse did I really feel it. Everything I'd hoped for had been ridiculous. It's not like I'd really believed in aliens. But I'd wanted to believe that there was something out there, something hidden and spectacular and powerful, that would make more sense than real life did. I wanted to know that in the middle of dealing with tumors and gravestones and new schools, there was something bigger and brighter than all of it.

I hadn't found any of that. I'd found a sad, sort of charming old woman who missed her husband. And that was it. The end. No magic, no hidden world, no mysteries revealed. All my hoping and wishing had led me here to a dirty, dusty greenhouse that was full of junk and smelled like rotten vegetables.

“I know it doesn't look like much,” Mrs. Halley said, pulling the door behind her. “For some reason I started coming out here at night after Lowell died. All the dust and dark and gloom suited me. It looked like I felt. Then after a while I thought I might change things.”

It didn't look like she'd changed anything to me. The glass panes were so filthy I could barely see the sky. I could barely see anything above me, really, other than a few spiderwebs in the corners that looked like Halloween decorations.

Mrs. Halley pointed toward a wooden bench that looked relatively clean.

“Have a seat,” she said, stepping over to a cabinet that held a fan, a couple of extension cords, and other metal odds and ends.

“Maybe we'll just go on and . . .” I started to say, looking at the floor.

Then Mrs. Halley plugged in an electrical cord, and the entire ceiling exploded in white light. At least it seemed like an explosion at first—it was like someone had set off a giant fireworks display, except that these lights didn't fade away. They seemed to get brighter and more intense, more complicated. Once my eyes adjusted, I could make out loops and swirls of lights draped all over the glass ceiling of the greenhouse. And the more I stared, the more the lights took shape. They weren't just strings of lights—they were pictures. Stories. Stories jammed close together and overlapping like the writing on the wall of Trattoria Centrale.

It was like nothing I'd ever seen.

There was the sparkling white outline of waves with a whale leaping toward a white sun. There were two people waltzing, the woman in a long skirt that nearly touched a fireplace flickering with flames. There was a fish caught on a line, but the man holding the fishing pole was about to topple from the narrow tip of a boat. A baby's foot grazed the side of the fish as the baby's hand reached for a ball. A dog jumped over the baby. Two children slid down a hill on a sled. All these things were side by side, top to bottom, filling every inch of the ceiling. All of it was drawn in the white bright lights, shifting and flashing with the dark blue evening sky in the background.

“I couldn't do it all myself,” Mrs. Halley said, looking toward the sky. “I wish I could have. But I had to get the boy who mows the lawn to come over with a couple of his friends. I can't climb ladders like I used to.”

“You designed it all?” I asked.

“Oh, yes. I drew it all out on paper. Where the lights should go. What these constellations should look like. ‘Our home is in the stars,' you know,” Mrs. Halley quoted, looking up toward the night sky. “I hope Lowell's home is up there now. I hope he can see this from wherever he is.”

I kept staring—it was impossible to look away.

“What's that?” I asked Mrs. Halley. I pointed at a man standing on what seemed to be a table, with a ratlike something standing nearby.

“That's Lowell running away from the neighbor's dachshund,” said Mrs. Halley. “That dog chased him around the house until he jumped on the dining table. I've never laughed harder in my life.”

She must have noticed the look on my face.