Riverland, p.25
Riverland, page 25
“I promise.” Pendra’s eyes went wide and she put her palms on the glass ball. Her brown fingers wrapped the blue and green whorls. She closed her eyes and gasped. Whispered, “I see . . . you and me.”
She cradled the witch ball. Behind us, beyond the car’s back window, the storm rolled around the bay. Floodwaters rose up against the perfect house at the bottom of the street. Mike and I, dripping but safe in the Sartis’ SUV, looked back at the house lights as they flickered again. I saw my father’s shadow in one last unboarded window. Then the lights went out.
Fear broke over me. How could we leave? Mrs. Sarti started the car. The dogs barked in the very back of the Subaru. Pendra’s brothers played with their phones, taking pictures of the storm. We were leaving. Mike’s fingers pressed white on the car seat as we watched the darkened house get smaller. Momma had told us to go. We were safe, and that was a different kind of magic.
My throat didn’t hurt much anymore. And the bright spot on my cheek had faded. That was lucky. I didn’t want to explain those things. Not yet. I had my sister, who I’d gone back for. I had more than one agreement with the river, and I was spreading those far and wide to keep them from all getting broken.
We would figure the rest out as we went, but we were done making the best of things.
Back down the hill, I saw two more dark horses pounding across the water toward the house. The witch balls hung in the trees caught the lightning and the horses turned, bewitched. Then the nightmares disappeared, one by one, transfixed into the witch balls. As I watched, a flock of gray gulls teetered in the wind, then descended to the trees. They lifted the floats away, taking them back to the river.
As we pulled away, all I could see were storm clouds. No more nightmares.
When the Sartis’ car reached the middle school, the parking lot and the bus line were already crowded.
Almost everyone who lived near the river had come to the evacuation point. Some were talking about the last storm that had blown up the bay, how they hadn’t left then. Saying, “We’ve had too many close calls before.” And: “The storm might have blown through already, but the surge will flood everything.”
One side of the gym was filled with green cots covered with gray blankets. On the other side, a large television flickered news. On the screen, I saw the Coast Guard rescuing people from houses up and down the bay, and even from row houses in the city.
“They’ll pick up your parents too,” Mr. Sarti said. “If your father doesn’t refuse to go.”
“He might,” Mike whispered.
“He probably will,” I said.
Pendra elbowed me. “You did the right thing.” She’d wrapped her jacket around the witch ball. Now she pulled something from the pocket. “You forgot this.”
A plain brown box, stripped of paper. My birthday present. I took it from her again. “Thank you.”
The box felt solid in my hands but complicated too. A memory of the night before, a promise maybe for the year ahead. “I’m going to open it when things are calmer, all right?” I asked.
Pendra nodded. “All right.”
Mrs. Wunner and Mr. Divner walked the gym, passing through loose knots of families, sharing news and snacks. Mrs. Sarti touched my elbow reassuringly. Mrs. Wunner passed me a bottle of water. “You girls all right?”
I kept my eyes on the screen. The rumble in the room calmed as the rain on the roof and the thunder began to ease. We weren’t all right, but we were better.
“We’ll be able to go home soon,” Pendra’s brother Mo said. He turned to me. “I hope your house is still there.”
“Shut up, Mo! El’s house is magic. They’ll be all right,” Pendra said.
“You should call someone.” Mrs. Sarti nudged me. She handed Mike a dry sweatshirt and me a blanket. We huddled in them like owls. “Who would you like to call?”
I took a breath. “My grandmother.”
She nodded, peering at my face. “She’s a good one to talk to now.”
We walked from the gym to Mrs. Sarti’s office. She gave me the phone and left Mike and me alone.
Mike bit a fingernail and looked at me. “What do we tell her?”
I thought about the silences between people. Between us. About glass paperweights and the witch balls. About how Gran had said sometimes reaching out is the hardest part.
“Everything. We tell her everything.”
Mike stopped biting her nail. “Okay.”
I hoped Gran was right and Poppa was wrong.
The phone rang twice before Gran answered. “I’ve been watching the news! Are you all right? Is Mike? Moira?”
I’d break the last rule of house magic for real if I told her.
I was ready to do it. But I wasn’t sure how to begin.
I took the last witch ball from the bag and put it on my lap. Touched my fingers to the glass. It felt cool and hard, liquid and fluid. Mike rested her hand on it too. I looked at the surface of the sphere. At the space inside, the space outside.
Breathe, Eleanor.
“Eleanor?”
“Gran, I need to tell you a story,” I said. “A true one.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
MEMORY
After the storm, a lot of things happened. Gran didn’t go to Venice. She found a bigger apartment in Baltimore instead. She took the light rail down to the museum.
We framed the map Mike had made when we visited Gran the first time and hung it in one bedroom. Strung the witch ball in the window of another.
The schools rescheduled the science fair for three weeks after the storm. The crowded gym looked different than it had the night of the evacuation. Instead of cots, there were tables, holding posters and screens. But it sounded the same. A lot of people talking all at once. Like a flock of birds.
Pendra and I had been busy.
When I finally opened the box she’d given me for my birthday, I found a gift certificate inside. Clipper Mill Glassblowers: a group class.
“I thought we could go together,” Pendra said.
I couldn’t answer at first and she’d stammered, “If you want to? I mean, you can go with whoever. I just thought I’d ask.”
My smile had nearly cracked my cheeks. I wanted to go. I’d worried we wouldn’t see each other if I was living somewhere other than Riverland. But we would. We did.
At the fair, two glass spheres and three paperweights sat on our table, next to a few long tendrils of glass Gran had made. All different shapes, all catching the light and reflecting our faces. There was a story behind each piece. The time Pendra had blown too hard and the molten glass slumped nearly to the floor, but we reheated it until it was fixed. The time I’d folded and pinched a paperweight until it was more bubble than glass.
We repeated our lampwork example for the fair. Talked to the people gathered by our table about how glass has memory but can change.
Momma came by to watch us, weaving her way among the different schools’ displays until she found our group. She shook Mr. Divner’s hand and admired our second-place ribbon. Smiled at Mrs. Sarti and Mike and Gran, who were standing together near the table.
“I’m proud of you,” she whispered while Pendra was talking to a curious sixth grader. A small gold necklace was clasped at her throat.
“We miss you.” I held her hand.
She blinked tears back. “We just need some time to sort things out, fix up the house again,” she said. “You know your father. You’re doing fine with Gran?”
I nodded. Smiled maybe a bit too much. “We’re fine.”
Gran nodded too. “Both of them are,” she said. “They have their own rooms at my new apartment.”
Momma drew back then, a little. She put a hand to her cheek. “Just for a while.”
Then she hugged Mike and me and left to go back to Poppa. We watched her go. Her jeans and sweater, her dockside shoes let her easily blend with the crowd as she disappeared. She looked so normal.
Mike and I knew that sometimes magic worked this way.
“You okay?”
“Just a nightmare. Can I come in?”
“You don’t need to ask. I’m finished with my homework. What kind of nightmare?”
“The kind that only makes you a little sad. Not really a nightmare at all. More like a friend that’s moved away.”
“Aw, Mike.”
“Can you tell me a story?”
“Okay. But don’t wake Gran.”
“She won’t be mad. She’ll just tell me to go back to bed.”
“How about we tell it together.”
“Once upon a . . .”
“What about someday instead?”
“Someday, two sisters will have amazing adventures, and they’ll travel a lot and . . .”
“. . . they’ll always remember to come back home.”
“Wherever home is . . .”
“That’s simple. Home is where we keep our stories.”
“I like that.”
“Should we say the spell?”
“Do you think we need to?”
“Yeah.”
“You say it.”
“YOU say it.”
“Mike.”
“Eleanor.”
“Okay, fine. Together?”
. . .
“Someday our real parents will come for us.”
“But it’s okay if they don’t.”
“Yeah. It’s okay.”
Acknowledgments
Writing a book like this pushed me far beyond what I thought I could do, and no matter how hard it was, I kept pushing because I knew the story was important. It is my hope that when it’s needed most, it will be right there on the bookshelf for whoever needs it.
If that’s you, I see you. I believe you. You are important.
This is a tough story to tell. There was no way I could make it through writing Riverland without a cast of magical beings of my own:
To Susan, Chris, Tom, and Iris for everything, each step of the way. To Stacey Cunitz, Kat Howard, Aliette de Bodard, Sarah Mueller, Liz Argall, Shveta Thakrar, D. T. Friedman, Michelle Burke Kelly, Sarah Pinsker, Natalie Luhrs, Constance Callahan, A. C. Wise, A. T. Greenblatt, Siobhan Carroll, Stephanie Feldman, Kate Martin, Eric Smith, Will Alexander, Alexander London, Eugene Myers, Tiffany Schmidt, Kate Milford, Katherine Locke, Nanita Cranford, Nancy Caudill, Lauren Teffeau, and Raq Winchester for reading drafts and encouraging words. To my consulting teachers, especially Kathryn Gullo, Harriette Bode, Dan Cunitz, and (again, and always) Stacey Cunitz. To my parents and families everywhere.
Many thanks to the Crefeld School and the Crefeld Glass Studio and especially Josh Cole and Kristy Modarelli.
To my amazing editor, Maggie Lehrman, at Abrams Books—you saw this book for what it was and helped it become what it needed to be. I loved working on this with you. To my agent, Barry Goldblatt, thank you for believing in this strange world, these girls, and this book. To the production and PR staff at Abrams, including copy editor Kylie Bird, cover artist Robert Frank Hunter, and Emily Daluga, thank you for your careful work.
Thank you forever and always to Camp Tockwogh in Worton, Maryland: the water knows why.
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