Green Mountain Academy, page 4
Grace also had crazy good carpentry skills. She’d built a copy of the desks in the bedrooms of the old wing for her room in the new wing, complete with the two drawers and legs that were as graceful as fawn’s legs. I thought hers was nicer than the originals. Lindsay said Grace had added a secret compartment in hers. She’d also built a miniature gazebo for the mice that sometimes scurried along the porch railing. She left little pieces of cheese and peanut butter crackers in there for them. No one could be sure if mice ever used it, although something ate the food she left. And she’d built a bench, for one person, in the front yard with a roof over it and a bird condominium a few feet away on a pole, so when she sat on the bench, she could watch the birds. Technically, anyone could sit on the bench. But no one else ever did.
Grace said she couldn’t build something unless it came from her own mind. She turned down requests for bookshelves. Too boring, she said. She liked a challenge. She had, though, retooled the winter sleds so that a set of wheels could be attached to them, or taken off, depending on the trail conditions. In October, we’d used those sleds for hauling the wood that Lill had cut up when she cleared trails.
* * *
“Who wants popcorn?” Ming called now.
“I’ll help you make it,” Danny said.
We kicked off our boots and put them to dry on the rack by the woodstove.
“Is it too warm in here?” said Ms. B, fanning herself with her knitting instructions.
It was warm, with both the woodstove and the fireplace fully stoked. But the heat and the light they threw was comforting against the deepening cold and howling wind outside. I checked the thermometer: minus eight degrees Celsius. It would get colder through the night. A good supply of wood lay stacked neatly near the fireplace, but we would burn through that quickly.
The original two-story building had had two additions over the years: first the great room and kitchen, then the new wing with classrooms and more bedrooms. Without power, all the heat came from the woodstoves in the kitchen and great room. The rooms in the old wing, where Danny and I had our bedroom, would be drafty and cold. The upstairs rooms weren’t used for sleeping anymore; one was a storeroom and the others had been stripped of their plaster, with a middle wall knocked down. They were going to be made into a big art studio, eventually. The more I got to know the school, and the sisters, the more I realized that a lot of things were going to happen “eventually.” Lucy and Lill had plans, but, apparently, not money. I knew that the trip they’d made this weekend had to do with trying to find a way to keep the school going.
“Oh, listen!” Ms. B suddenly cried. She turned up the radio.
“Search and rescue crews are looking for a small aircraft that took off from Penticton Airport this afternoon and disappeared on its way to Seattle, according to Canadian Coast Guard officials. The plane was expected to land in Seattle at 5 p.m., but it never arrived. Three people were on board the single-engine Piper Cherokee aircraft. A search for the white plane with red and navy striping has been temporarily called off, due to deteriorating weather. Search officials believe the plane may have been en route back to Penticton airport due to weather conditions at the time of its disappearance.”
“How awful!” said Ms. B. “On a night like this.”
I felt the curious gazes of the other girls slowly swing and land on me. My cheeks flushed under their stares. By now, they all knew the story of my dad, who had walked out to get help when our truck broke down and we got stranded on a road in, as Mom called it, “the middle of nowhere.” It was actually a logging road in Oregon, and technically, we knew exactly where we were. The road just wasn’t on our map.
Our story had ended up in newspapers all over the United States and Canada. A big picture of me, looking like a startled raccoon, flanked every story. A newspaper reporter had snapped it when I came out of the hospital with Aunt Sissy on a warm sunny day in May, a beautiful day, except for the fact that my life had changed forever. The newspapers and even TV stations, when they told the story, usually showed that picture of me, along with one of our old red truck, what was left of it, on Red Fox Road. If you do a Google search of my name, Francie Fox, you can find those photos in newspapers from Fernie, British Columbia, to Florida.
Aunt Sissy wouldn’t let reporters interview me. “It’s disrespectful,” she said. “Under the circumstances.”
Actually, when we’d first gotten stranded, I had daydreamed about being on the news, for some heroic thing I’d done—fixing our truck with a coat hanger and duct tape or something like that, and then driving it out myself, taking everybody to safety. They say be careful what you wish for. I say, be specific.
* * *
Danny had gone to our room and brought back our sleeping bags and pillows. She spread them out side by side, next to Ming and Jasie. Ms. B, who seemed sorry she’d listened to the news, had turned the radio off and sat knitting in the candlelight. When we were all lying in our bags—the bigger girls, Grace and Lindsay and Carmen, on their elbows staring into the crackling fire—Ms. B said, “Aren’t we lucky? Safe inside on a night like this. Tomorrow the power will come back on and everything will go back to normal.”
We were all quiet for a minute and then Grace said, “Or it might not. Last year when the power went out, it was off for three days. The generator didn’t work then either.”
“Well okay,” said Ms. B. “Anyway, we’re safe here. We’re well-equipped for any eventuality.”
I stared up at the ceiling beams and tried to think of what “normal” would be like now. No one was living in our house in Penticton. Grandpa went by every week to check on it, pick up any mail, and turn on different lights so it looked lived in. I couldn’t even imagine how weird it must be—the sunlight slanting through the side door and falling across the bare dining room table. There would probably be dust, although Aunt Sissy paid someone to dust and vacuum once a month. How dirty does an empty house get? I pictured the glow-in-the-dark stars I had glued on my bedroom ceiling in the shape of the Big Dipper.
Suddenly the loneliness that had been lapping at the edges of my heart welled up and threatened to knock me down. I shook off my sleeping bag and got up. Danny gave me a look that said, “Are you okay?” but she didn’t say anything.
I took a flashlight and went down the hall to our bedroom.
Under my bed, I stored a box of things from our house that I’d wanted to keep with me—a shimmery stone I’d found on a hike at Gem Lake and that Dad said might have gold in it; Dad’s blue-and-red Canada Post toque; an amber necklace that had belonged to Grandma; a framed picture of Mom and me and Phoebe, Mom in the middle, holding our hands, on our first day of kindergarten. It had hung on the wall in my bedroom at home, but I couldn’t bear to hang it on the wall here and be reminded every day.
My twin sister Phoebe was gone. She was dead, a word I still found hard to say sometimes. If I didn’t think too hard, I could remember the smell of her, sweet and milky, like clover. I could remember the way she could make me laugh so hard I’d pee my pants, and how that made us laugh even more. Once, I laughed so hard, I threw up. We’d been sitting under a curtain of grape vines eating purple grapes, so it came out pink. But if I thought too much, I remembered things I didn’t want to remember, like the pale bluish color of her eyelids as she lay on the grass at Gem Lake and how her eyes wouldn’t open, though I shook her shoulder. And then, if I wanted to feel even worse, I could remember Mom shaking me, yelling at me that she had warned me not to chase Phoebe because of her heart condition. It was that day our family began to unravel, first one thread, then another, pulling apart the world I’d known so well.
I took out the photo album. I had learned to look at the photo album only when I was already so homesick, it wouldn’t matter. I sat on the bed and turned to a page near the beginning—a picture of all of us—Mom, Dad, Phoebe and me. Phoebe and I were about six years old. We’re sitting at the picnic table on the beach at Gem Lake, where Grandma’s cabin was—still is, though no one goes there anymore. The sun is sparkling on the lake in the background. All of us are smiling, but Mom is laughing, maybe at something the person behind the camera has said. It’s the best picture I have of Phoebe, the one that looks like the Phoebe I remember. It’s also the best one I have of Mom—the way I’d like to remember her. It would be a long time before Mom smiled again.
That was our family. Was. A shiver ran through my body. I reached for a corner of the quilt and pulled it over my shoulders. It was already getting cold in this wing. I noticed a sound that had been there for a while, but that my brain hadn’t quite made sense of. Something was banging repeatedly in a room above ours.
I put the photo album back in the box and shoved it under my bed. Then I guided myself down the hall with the flashlight.
We weren’t allowed to go up to the second floor rooms in the old wing, because the rooms were being renovated and the sisters said there were exposed wires and other hazards. Lucy sometimes went up there to work, and the older girls said you could get internet up there, so I guessed that some of them had sneaked up.
There was only one other room where you could get internet in the school, a classroom in the new wing. Lill made a schedule every Monday after supper for our hour of time by drawing names from a hat. Having no internet most of the time was part of the school’s philosophy; that’s what Lucy and Lill had explained to Aunt Sissy and me on our first visit. If we wanted, we could look things up in the big set of encyclopedias and dictionaries or the many other reference books kept on shelves in the classroom.
“Old-school. Literally,” Lill had said and winked at me.
“What about emergencies?” Aunt Sissy had asked.
“We drive out,” Lucy had said. “It’s important that parents—um—guardians, understand that. We both have extensive first aid training. But we’re an hour’s drive from medical help.”
“What do you think, Francie?” Aunt Sissy had asked.
I’d only been half-listening. I’d been staring out the window at a path I could see curving into the woods. Bright green leaves shimmered in the sun and cast shifting shadows on the earth. It looked so inviting and mysterious. I wondered what was around the bend.
“About what?” I said.
“About no internet.”
“It’s okay with me,” I said. “Mom and Dad don’t let me have a phone.”
Danny and I had planned to sneak upstairs to the second floor ourselves some night. We thought we might be able to send signals using a flashlight from the fire tower to one of the upstairs windows, but so far we hadn’t found the opportunity to get into the rooms up there.
In the hall, the wind whimpered like a small, trapped animal, coming from everywhere and nowhere, sighing through the nooks and crannies of the old wing. I started up the stairs. They creaked under my feet. In the stairwell, the whimpering was even louder, rising to a cry, then dropping again. I hesitated, then took another step. It was only the wind. But shadows danced on the walls in the light cast from my flashlight. My own shadow looked like a hunched old woman creeping along.
As I reached the room over our bedroom, I felt a gust of cold air scurrying along the floor. It whistled under the closed door. I turned the door handle and shoved the door open.
Bang! The sound made me jump, even though in my flashlight beam I could see what it was—a window was swinging on its hinge, being caught by the wind and then slammed shut every few seconds. I swept the beam of light around the room. A polished wood floor shone in the light. Against one wall, below the window, was a desk with a laptop computer on it.
Papers had been blown all over the floor. At the far end of the room, chairs were stacked on top of round tables. Several folded-up cots leaned against the wall. They were probably left over from the time when the school was a lodge.
Snow had sifted in on the windowsill and the desk. I went to the window. As I reached out to pull it closed, a blast of wind slapped snow in my face. Three people were lost out there in the billowing snow and deepening cold. Could they have landed their airplane somewhere to ride out the storm? How much space did a small plane need to land? This area was just miles and miles of forested mountains.
There was a small weedy lake a few kilometers to the east that we called Swamp Thing Lake. The sisters had named it when they were younger. A rough untended trail led to it. All of us girls had hiked there on a hot day in September with Lill. Some of us had waded into the lake to cool off, but only Jasie had picked up about twenty leeches, clinging to her ankles and twined between her toes. “I’m hopeless,” she had said.
I didn’t think Swamp Thing Lake would be big enough to land on, at least not without hitting a lot of trees first. If I were the pilot, what would I do? The only clear area in all that bush might be a road. Yes, I’d aim for a road, I thought, try to use it as a little runway. If they landed somewhere, they’d be in for a long, cold night. There could be injuries, too. But if they didn’t land…I shivered.
The window latch was broken, but I fastened it as well as I could and hoped the wind wouldn’t pull it open again. Then I bent to gather the papers that had been scattered across the floor. As I bent over, an eerie blue light suddenly illuminated the polished floor. A squeal escaped from me before I could help it. But as I stood, I saw that it was only Lucy’s laptop screen that had lit up. It would be running on battery. I must have knocked the mouse and woken it up.
Stupid to be so jumpy. There was nothing to be scared of.
I stacked the papers neatly and put them on the chair. Then I used my sleeve to brush the snow off the desk. The laptop was open to an email message. Obviously, I shouldn’t look at it. Reading someone else’s email was not okay, as Mom and Dad had reminded me when I read Mom’s once, from the principal at our school. Dad, who is—was, I guess—a mail carrier for Canada Post, had said that reading email was just like picking up mail off someone’s porch and slicing it open, which I didn’t think was a fair comparison. It was more like reading a letter that was already open and had been left lying in plain view on the kitchen table.
The thing was, a word in Lucy’s email had caught my eye: irresponsible. I could just close the laptop, but then she might wonder why I’d done that. Or I could just walk away.
I snuck another look.
It’s really irresponsible for you and Lill to hold us hostage to this crazy scheme of yours. It’s been crazy from the start. It’s a money pit. A black hole of expenses. Did you really think girls would want to go to school in the middle of nowhere? And you realize, I hope, that Grace is part of the problem???
Three question marks. Even if I hadn’t been able to see the name on the screen, it was obvious who had written this. Larry Larsen, Lucy and Lill’s brother. They had another brother, too, named Luke. The two of them had been at the school last month and there were a lot of triple question marks then, too—angry voices behind closed doors.
We had first heard this story from Meredith, who’d been at the school since it opened.
“The brothers live in Toronto,” she’d said. “All four of them inherited the lodge, but only Lucy and Lill wanted to live here. The brothers want to build a luxury resort out here, with multiple buildings, a spa, a tennis court, a swimming pool and a heli-pad. We’ll be lucky if the school lasts until the end of the school year. They’re deep in debt.”
“What’s deepindebt?” Jasie had asked, and the older girls laughed.
“Debt is when you owe a lot of money,” Meredith said.
“It means you can’t pay your bills,” Ming added. “Sometimes people lose their homes.”
“Would that mean I could go home?” Jasie said.
“Why would you want to leave us?” Meredith said. “We’re like your sisters now. The big sisters you never even knew you wanted.”
I could see part of what Lucy had written, too, in the message before Larry’s: You know Mom wouldn’t have wanted that. We’re looking for ideas to bring in more students. We’ll know more after this weekend.
To read any more, I’d have to click on something or scroll down. I felt guilty enough already. It wasn’t a secret that the school was in trouble. Meredith had said, “Let’s face it. There aren’t that many girls who think it’s a great idea to spend ten months of the year in the middle of nowhere with no boys and no phone.”
“It’s just a crazy few!” Ming added. She had grinned, thrown an arm around Jasie and flipped Jasie’s thick braid.
I stared out at the snow swirling across the yard, and at the tall trees tossing and bending. Then I made my decision. I put my finger on the mouse and scrolled down a little more. Larry’s message carried on: This is your last chance. At the end of this year, there’ll be no more money. I’m not putting a penny more into this fiasco. It’s time to close this operation down and send the kids home in time for Christmas.
I couldn’t believe it. By Christmas? It was already November. I couldn’t go home, not now. Danny was the best friend I’d ever had. Nobody got me like Danny got me. And if I left now I’d have to live with Grandpa and his moods. Or worse, I’d have to move to the city to live with Aunt Sissy. I couldn’t survive if I couldn’t get outside to the woods every day. I’d go crazy.
The panic swirled inside me like the storm, kicking up all my fears. I had a flash of what it would be like to be inside that small airplane, tossed around in the storm, unable to find a safe place to land.
