Green Mountain Academy, page 16
Grace, Carmen and Lindsay had just come back in laughing and trying to hide the snowballs they carried. The happy, open look on Grace’s face reminded me of what she’d said. This was her only family. Carmen pitched a snowball into the nest of blankets. Then the lights went out again.
“Hey!”
“What the heck?”
“Oh brother, not again.”
“That’s it for me. I’m going to bed,” Ms. B said.
Danny and I decided it was warm enough to sleep in our room. My body ached from being cold and sleeping on the ground. I wanted my bed. We carried our sleeping bags, still toasty from being near the fire, and piled them on our beds.
It was good to be safe and warm again. It was good to have everything in its proper place. Almost everything.
Lilac had followed us into our room and now she jumped onto the end of my bed and kneaded her paws against my blankets. I couldn’t bear to think of Jasie waking up alone in the hospital, that she might cry for Lilac. But it was even worse to think she might not wake up at all.
In the middle of the night, I opened my eyes suddenly to find our alarm clock had come back on and was blinking a beam of red light into the darkness. The power was back.
“You awake?” Danny’s voice came from her bed.
“Yeah.”
“I can’t stop thinking about the pilot. Maybe if I hadn’t tried to stop you from going, if we had got there sooner—I was just being selfish. I could hear my uncle scolding me. I was just afraid.”
I reached over and punched the button to stop the time from blinking.
“There’s no way the pilot could have survived,” I said. “We wouldn’t have saved him.”
“Do you think so?”
“I’m sure of it. It’s not your fault,” I said.
It was the same thing I’d said to John-Lee, and it was true. But somehow we all had a way of telling ourselves stories that could bloom like flowers or spread like weeds. And once those stories started to grow, it was hard to stop them.
chapter twenty-eight
Worry was written on Lucy’s and Lill’s faces like the long blue shadows of the aspens falling on fresh snow in the yard the afternoon they finally arrived home. Flights had been delayed in the clean-up after the storm. We were so happy to see them drive up, we all spilled into the yard, kicking up snow in arcs that showered down, sparkling in the sunlight. They handed off their bags to Grace and Lindsay, hugged Ms. B, and laughed with us.
“It’s good to be home,” Lucy said, smiling.
“It sure is,” said Lill.
“I saved you chicken stew,” Ms. B said, leading the way to the porch.
We would have dinner together around the big table and hear their stories and tell them ours. But the dark shadows in their faces were impossible to ignore. A cloud had descended on Green Mountain Academy and all our usual activities felt heavier, like we were moving through an invisible gray fog, just waiting for the raincloud to burst open.
Then their brother Larry arrived.
* * *
“You came all the way from Toronto. We’re not going to spend your whole visit inside behind closed doors having gloomy discussions.” I heard Lill talking to him as I came into the kitchen the morning after his arrival.
Lill poured coffee into two mugs while Larry buttered toast.
“Well, it’s not exactly party time around here,” he said.
“You know what I mean. Your last visit was so short. When’s the last time you were out in the woods?”
“It’s been a while,” he admitted. “It’s such a hassle to get out of the city. And I work pretty much twelve hours a day, sometimes more. When I get a moment to myself, I’m too tired to go anywhere. I just sit on the couch and watch football or basketball, or whatever is on.”
“You used to love the woods.”
“I know. I still do, I guess. It feels good to be out here again.”
I reached around him to get the cereal bowls down.
“You’re the girl who found the plane, aren’t you?” he said.
I didn’t answer.
“I heard you knew where to look. You went out there all by yourself.”
“This is Francie Fox,” said Lill.
“I heard it was out in the Giant’s Lair,” he said. “How did you know it would be there?”
“The Giant’s Lair?” said Lill.
“That’s what we used to call those caves.”
“I’d forgotten about that.”
I stood there holding the cereal bowls as Larry waited for me to say something.
“I…,” I began. There was too much to explain. It hadn’t been like that. I’d gone blindly, stupidly. The plane had led me to it, not the other way around. I’d put everybody in danger. Like Grace said, we’d been lucky; I’d been lucky. But somehow it had turned into this story where I actually knew what I was doing.
There was an awkward silence as I struggled to find the words.
“Well,” Larry said, breaking it. “It must have been scary. I’m impressed.”
He stuck out his hand to shake mine, and there was another awkward moment as I put down the bowls to shake his hand.
“The Sasquatch Caves,” I said. “We call them the Sasquatch Caves.”
“Ah!” he laughed. “Remember those aspens with the big claw marks grown right into the bark? I wonder if they’re still there.”
“We’ll hike out there,” Lill said. “The girls can come.”
We hadn’t been out there since the RCMP had come to secure the area and take the pilot out.
“I would like to see the crash site,” said Larry.
It was hard to dislike Larry, as much as I wanted to. I was sure he was bringing bad news. But at breakfast he told us stories about when the school was a lodge that his family ran. If a guest was mean to the kids, Larry and his younger brother, Luke, used to catch a frog or a toad and release it into the guest’s bedroom. Then they got to play the hero when they were called to remove it. Their parents never guessed.
“They had all sorts of theories about how the frogs got into the rooms—in a boot, or on the firewood, or in the laundry.”
Lill, Lucy and Larry, all three of them suddenly looked younger, their faces open with bright smiles.
“Have you been tobogganing yet this year?” Larry asked.
“Not yet,” said Lucy. “We’ve been too busy.”
“Let’s go tobogganing,” Lill said. “We’ll make a fire and have a picnic.”
“Egg salad sandwiches, hot chocolate and marshmallows,” said Meredith, jumping up. “I’ll boil the eggs for you.”
“Well, I guess I can’t say no,” said Larry.
After breakfast, Lucy and Meredith were driving into town to spend the day at the hospital with Jasie. John-Lee was still there, too, but Diamond had been released the day after they arrived and she was at a hotel waiting until it was safe to move John-Lee.
“I have a view of the lake,” she wrote in an email. “I’m writing songs! Jasie looks good. She’s sleeping peacefully. When she wakes up, she’ll find a room full of flowers—tiger lilies, for her fierce heart.”
I tried to keep a picture of that in my mind.
* * *
We spent the day on the tobogganing hill by the creek. It was good to be outside, our leg muscles burning from the trudge up the hill pulling the toboggans and our cheeks warm from the fresh air.
Larry and Grace packed snow into a chute at the bottom of the hill so that the toboggans shot out onto a flat frozen part of the creek. We took turns shoveling snow to clear an area that we’d use for skating if it stayed cold.
Lill built a fire and as the setting sun shone a golden orange path down the creek, we settled next to it with hot chocolate steaming up into our faces. We sat quietly watching the flames. But in the quiet, my mind went back to the same place. I didn’t know about Larry, but for the rest of us, I was pretty sure there was only one thing on our minds: Jasie.
* * *
Later, after dinner, I went to our room and discovered Danny already there, seated at the desk with her head bent over several pages covered in numbers and calculations.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
She whirled in her chair, her face bright.
“I have an idea!” she said.
I kicked off my shoes and climbed onto my bed. “Okay.”
“I’m going to call a meeting tomorrow with everybody. Not the sisters, not yet.”
“Can you tell me now?”
She held up a page of notes and numbers, neatly arranged in rows. “It’s the Green Mountain Academy Outdoor Survival Weekend Workshops. If we could hold outdoor camps on the weekend for kids from town, we could earn probably a couple thousand a month for the school. We could teach them to set up a camp, build a fire, use a compass…” She stopped.
“You don’t seem all that excited,” she said.
“No, I am. It’s a great idea. It’s just hard to think of anything right now. All I can think about is that it’s my fault Jasie is in a coma.”
“No one said coma.”
“Well, why won’t she wake up?”
Danny put down her pencil and turned so that her eyes met mine.
“I’m going to tell you something my grandma told me.” She took a deep breath. “You’re not that important.”
“What?”
“That didn’t come out right. I mean, you’re important, you’re my best friend. But you’re not so important that everything is because of what you did. Not everything is your fault. Your dad, Jasie. They made decisions too. Grandma would say you’re as important as our bent pine tree. The rocks. The rain, the stars. That’s pretty important. No less than them, but no more either. Does that make sense?”
It was starting to. I could feel something in my heart letting go, like a fist loosening.
“Each of us has a part. Each of us needs each other. It’s not all on you.”
Tears I didn’t even know I’d been holding in spilled over and ran down my cheeks.
Danny sniffed back her own tears.
“It’s not like I always remember it either,” she said. “I needed the reminder myself.”
“Your grandma sounds like my grandma,” I said.
Then we both cried as the night outside our bedroom window grew darker.
Danny got up and went for glasses of water and brought back cool cloths for our tear-streaked faces.
“Do you think Larry might change his mind?” she asked. “He had such fun today, maybe he sees…”
“I was thinking that too. And with your idea to bring in extra money…”
“I can’t wait to ask the other girls what they think.”
When the moon rose beyond our window curtains like a luminous, fragile shell, it felt like a familiar friend watching over us.
chapter twenty-nine
We tried to pretend we weren’t waiting.
Meredith and Carmen practiced a piano duet they’d been trying to learn. Grace went outside to chop kindling, her way of relieving stress, and amid the chords and melody of piano came the rhythmic chop of the ax and hollow clop of wood being tossed in a pile.
Ming and Lindsay played canasta at the dining room table, their murmurs rising and falling behind the fans of their cards. At the other end of the table, I played solitaire with a snap of each card I laid down. And at the middle of the table, Danny’s pencil crayon scratched across her sketch pad. She’d drop a green pencil and pick up a brown one, drop the brown and pick up green. Snap, snap, plink, chop.
All of these sounds of waiting echoed and hung there in the great room like a fog that wouldn’t clear as we waited for another sound: a door to open, footsteps on the stairs. Over an hour ago, Lucy, Lill and Larry had gone upstairs to the room that served as Lucy’s office. We knew that this was the meeting that had been temporarily delayed while Lucy was in town at the hospital. It was the reason Larry had flown all the way from Toronto, rented a truck and driven out to the school. No one thought his visit was for fun and no one thought it didn’t matter.
Danny had called all of us together for our own meeting after breakfast and she told everyone her idea for the weekend workshops. Everyone, even Grace, liked the idea. But no one thought it would be enough to save the school.
After a while the sounds melted into the background and one sound I’d never noticed before became the only thing I could hear—the tick, tick, tick of the clock on the great room wall. Danny crumpled up her paper and tore off a new one. I couldn’t concentrate either.
Finally, there was a click from the door upstairs and a squawk of hinges. We all looked up from what we were doing and searched each other’s eyes, as if we’d find answers there. Steps on the stairs. One person. Then the vacuum suck of the back door opening and a quiet thud as it was pulled closed.
Meredith and Carmen stopped playing. Ming and Lindsay laid down their cards. Danny’s pencil hovered in mid-air.
Who had left and where were they going?
An engine roared to life in the yard.
“Who was that?” said Meredith, jumping to her feet to check at the same moment that Grace came bursting through the front door, still holding the ax.
“Where is he going?” she said. Her eyes swept the room wildly.
“Larry?” said Meredith.
“There is only one ‘he’ in this house,” said Grace.
“That can’t be good,” Lindsay said quietly.
But my brain wanted to find a way to make it fit, to make it still okay, to find some reason that Larry sneaking out the back door without saying goodbye could be a good thing.
* * *
It was at least ten minutes before we heard more footsteps on the stairs. During that time, it seemed we’d barely breathed. My hands began to sweat as the sisters came down the hall.
Their faces said it all. I had never seen Lucy look so defeated. Her skin had lost its normal rosy glow and instead looked gray and drawn. Her eyes were downcast, her hands in her pockets. Lill went to the fireplace and turned her back to us, drawing a handful of kindling from the box and arranging it in the grate.
Lucy just stood in the doorway. Finally, as we stared at her, she took a deep breath.
“We have to talk,” she said. “Let’s sit down.”
Everyone was sitting already except for Grace, Lucy and Lill, but we got up and followed her to the couch and chairs by the fireplace. Grace stood very still.
“I’m afraid I have some bad news,” she began. “We’ve looked at every option, but…”
She swallowed, struggling to go on.
Lill said nothing, still half turned away.
“The school will have to close by Christmas.”
Grace dropped the ax to the carpet.
“What’s going to happen to me?” she said. “Everyone has somewhere to go except me.”
She ran out of the room before she could hear the answer.
If I could have opened my mouth to speak, I probably would have said the same thing. But I couldn’t speak. My whole body had tightened—my jaw, chest, lips, brain—like it was folding in on itself.
* * *
That night felt like one of the longest nights of my life. During dinner, none of us could look at each other. Even Meredith, who could usually be counted on to cheer us up or at least annoy everyone by trying, was quiet. Lill talked about driving to town to see Jasie the next day and she and Lucy worked out the seating arrangements for the SUV: Lucy and Meredith, who’d already seen her, would stay home to make room for the rest of us. In flat, quiet voices, they went through details they didn’t need to, just so that, I thought, maybe we would not notice that there was absolutely nothing they could say to make this better.
chapter thirty
Pine and cedar scented the air as we sat knee-to-knee in the SUV. The road had been plowed and sanded; sun brightened a blue-blue sky and lit up puffs of frothy white clouds. It was a perfect day.
A plane crossed the sky high above the trees and disappeared. On any other Sunday, we’d be in the woods exploring, gathering wood, walking the trails and making new ones. Today we’d only gone far enough to gather boughs and sprigs to make forest bouquets for Jasie.
On any other drive to town, which took between an hour and an hour and a half, depending on the road conditions, someone would play music on her phone and we’d all sing along. Meredith and Carmen had the best voices and assigned us various parts—high harmony, low harmony, melody. Sometimes we sang without the phone music.
Today we rode along in quiet. Lill concentrated on her driving. In spite of the sanding, there were some slippery sections. The road dipped and rose, rounded bends and straightened out again, snow-covered pines lining both sides. As we got closer to town, cell service blinked in briefly, some of the girls’ phones beeped with their incoming messages, then it dropped out again. I wondered where Aunt Sissy had been when she’d gotten the call from the sheriff about Dad.
We came into town and drove right past my old school—and the playground where Carly and I used to hang upside down on the monkey bars waiting for her mom. I missed Carly a little, but she was part of my old life. I didn’t want to try to go back to it. Whatever happened, I decided then, I would not move back to Penticton with Grandpa. I couldn’t.
For Christmas I would be in Vancouver with Aunt Sissy. We’d go see Mom and she might be able to go for a walk around the hospital grounds. After that…I couldn’t picture anything after that.
