A Summer to Die. Lois Lowry

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ I did all my packing alone that week. I cried when I fitted my new, unused box of oil paints – a present for my thirteenth birthday the month before – into a box, and I cried again when I packed my camera. But at least those things, the things I cared about most, were going with me. Molly had to give her blue-and-white cheerleading outfit to one of the substitute cheerleaders, a girl named Lisa Halstead, who pretended to be sad and sympathetic, but you could tell it was phony; she couldn’t wait to get home and try on that pleated skirt.

      And all of that was only last month. It seems like a hundred years ago.

      Strange, how the age of a house makes a difference. That shouldn’t surprise me, because certainly the age of a person makes a big difference, like with Molly and me. Molly is fifteen, which means that she puts on eyeshadow when Mum doesn’t catch her at it, and she spends hours in front of the mirror arranging her hair different ways; she stands sideways there, too, to see what her figure looks like, and she talks on the phone every evening to friends, mostly about boys. It took her about two days to make friends at the new school, two days after that to have boyfriends, and the next week she was chosen as a substitute cheerleader.

      Me, I’m only two years younger, and that seems to make such a difference, though I haven’t figured out why. It’s not only physical, although that’s part of it. If I stand sideways in front of a mirror – which I don’t bother doing – I might as well be standing backwards, for all the difference it makes. And I couldn’t begin to put on eyeshadow even if I wanted to, because I can’t see without my glasses. Those are the physical things; the real difference seems to be that I don’t care about those things. Will I, two years from now? Or do I care now, and pretend I don’t, even to myself? I can’t figure it out.

      As for friends? Well, the first day at the consolidated school, when the first teacher said, “Margaret Chalmers” and I told him, “Would you call me Meg, please,” a boy on the side of the classroom called out, “Nutmeg”! Now, three weeks later, there are three hundred and twenty-three people in the Macwahoc Valley Consolidated School who call me Nutmeg Chalmers. You know the old saying about with friends like that, who needs enemies?

      But I was talking about the age of houses. As my mother had said, this house was built in 1840. That makes it almost one hundred and forty years old. Our house in town was fifty years old. The difference is that the house in town was big, with a million cupboards and staircases and windows and an attic, all sorts of places for privacy and escape: places where you could curl up with a book and no one would know you were there for hours. Places that were just mine, like the little alcove at the top of the attic stairs, where I tacked my photographs and watercolours on the wall to make my own private gallery, and no one bugged me about the drawing pin holes in the wall.

      It’s important, I think, to have places like that in your life, secrets that you share only by choice. I said that to Molly once, and she didn’t understand; she said she would like to share everything. It’s why she likes cheerleading, she said: because she can throw out her arms and a whole crowd of people responds to her.

      Here, in the country, the house is very small. Dad explained that it was built this way because it was so hard to keep it warm way back then. The ceilings are low; the windows are small; the staircase is like a tiny tunnel. Nothing seems to fit right. The floors slant, and there are wide spaces between the pine boards. If you close a door, it falls open again all on its own, when you’re not looking. It doesn’t matter much, the doors not closing, because there’s no place for privacy anyway. Why bother to close the door to your room when it’s not even your own room?

      When we got here, I ran inside the empty house while the others were all still standing in the courtyard, trying to help the removal van get turned round in the snowy drive. I went up the little flight of stairs, looked round, and saw the three bedrooms: two big ones, and the tiny one in the middle, just off the narrow hall. In that room the ceiling was slanted almost down to the floor, and there was one window that looked out over the woods behind the house, and the wallpaper was yellow, very faded and old but still yellow, with a tiny green leaf here and there in the pattern. There was just room for my bed and my desk and my bookcase and the few other things that would make it really mine. I stood for a long time by that one window, looking out at the woods. Across a field to the left of the house, I could see another house far away; it was empty, the outside unpainted, and the windows, some of them broken, black like dark eyes. The rectangle of the window in the little room was like the frame of a painting, and I stood there thinking how I would wake up each morning there, looking out, and each day it would change to a new kind of picture. The snow would get deeper; the wind would blow those last few leaves from the trees; there would be icicles hanging from the edge of the roof; and then, in spring, things would melt, and change, and turn green. There would be rabbits in the field in the early morning. Wild flowers. Maybe someone would come to live in that abandoned house, and light would come from those dark windows at night, across the meadow.

      Finally I went downstairs. My mother was in the empty living room, figuring out how to fit in the big sofa from the other house. Dad and Molly were still outside, sprinkling salt on the drive so that the removal men wouldn’t slip on the snow.

      “Mum,” I said, “the little room is mine, isn’t it?”

      She stopped to think for a minute, remembering the upstairs of the new house. Then she put her arm round me and said, “Meg, the little room is for Dad’s study. That’s where he’ll finish the book. You and Molly will share the big bedroom at the end of the hall, the one with the pretty blue-flowered wallpaper.”

      Mum always tries to make things right with gestures: hugs, quick kisses blown across a room, waves, winks, smiles. Sometimes it helps.

      I went back upstairs, to the big room that wasn’t going to be all mine. From the windows I could still see the woods, and part of the empty house across the field, but the view was partly blocked by the big grey falling-down barn that was attached to our house on the side. It wasn’t the same. I’m pretty good at making the best of things, but it wasn’t the same.

      Now, just a month later, just two days before Christmas, the house looks lived in. It’s warm, and full of the sound of fires in the fireplaces, the sound of Dad’s typewriter upstairs, and full of winter smells like wet boots drying, and cinnamon, because my mother is making pumpkin pies and gingerbread. But now Molly, who wants more than anything to throw out her arms and share, has drawn that line, because I can’t be like those crowds who smile at her, and share back.

      Good things are happening here. That surprises me a little. When we came, I thought it would be a place where I would just have to stick it out, where I would be lonely for a year. Where nothing would ever happen at all.

      Now good things are happening to all of us. Well, it’s hard to tell with my mother; she’s the kind of person who always enjoys everything anyway. Molly and Mum are a lot alike. They get so enthusiastic and excited that you think something wonderful has happened; then, when you stop to think about it, nothing has really happened at all. Every morning, for example, Mum puts fresh birdseed in the bird feeder outside the kitchen window. Two minutes later the first bird stops by for breakfast, and Mum jumps up, says “Shhh” and goes to look, and you forget that four hundred birds were there the day before. Or a plant in the kitchen gets a new leaf and she almost sends out birth announcements. So it always seems as if good things are happening to Mum.

      Dad is more like me; he waits for the truly good things, as if getting excited about the little ones might keep the big ones from coming. But the book is going well for Dad, and he says it was coming here that did it.

      He СКАЧАТЬ