Interim Summer 2012

The summer Wilhelmina was ten and Bee was nine—the summer of 2012—it almost seemed as if Bee was going to be able to come to Pennsylvania with Wilhelmina again. But on the morning they were supposed to leave, Bee's father changed his mind.

Wilhelmina overheard Cleo on the phone to the aunts, calling ahead to report the change of plans. "I couldn't get an explanation out of Cindy," she said in a low, rapid voice Wilhelmina wasn't used to. "I'm sure she doesn't want to admit that his moods rule that house. A summer away would be good for Bee, and now of course, with Wilhelmina gone, we won't be able to check in on him as much. She's so disappointed, Frankie. If you could've seen her face fall, you would've cried. I'd like to break his nose."

It was at that point that Wilhelmina realized why she didn't recognize her mother's voice: Cleo was furious. She'd never heard her mother talking about one of her friends' parents like that before. It made her feel less lonely in her dislike of Bee's dad. She hadn't thought any grown-ups shared it. And Cleo was almost right: Wilhelmina was disappointed. But mostly she was heartbroken for Bee, who'd wanted to go to Pennsylvania badly. Sometimes Wilhelmina wished that Bee were her brother so that her parents could be his parents. Maybe her parents didn't always understand her perfectly, but even that was consistent. They were reliably who they were. She never had to tiptoe around them, not knowing who they were going to be that day.

It was Theo who drove Wilhelmina to Pennsylvania, and for Wilhelmina, it was a confusing drive. She was always so happy to be setting out for the aunts, and she couldn't help feeling that same joy, but she was crying a little bit too. Her father kept pointing out license plates from "interesting" states like Wyoming and Alaska, or trying to get her opinion about the music on the radio, and she wished he would just let her sort out her thoughts. Bee, Bee, she kept thinking. "If Dr. Sloane changes his mind again," she asked her father, "how will Bee get to Pennsylvania?"

"If that happens, honey," said Theo, "your mother and I will bring him to you personally."

"With Delia?" asked Wilhelmina doubtfully. Delia, who was two, always threw up on long car rides.

"Well, yes," said Theo. "We're not quite ready to let Delia fend for herself at home."

"Okay, well, make sure you remind him she's going to puke."

"I promise to remind him," said Theo. "But honey, I don't think Dr. Sloane is going to change his mind again."

When they pulled into the aunts' driveway, Frankie came out of the garden to greet them, wiping her dirt-covered hands on the tails of a long purple shirt. When Wilhelmina heard her happy voice and saw her silver crown of braids and her radiant face, she began to cry in earnest. Frankie took one look at her and held out her arms. Wilhelmina, who had been too old for her mother's attempts at comfort a few hours ago and who'd tried to hide her tears from her father in the car, walked into Frankie's arms and sobbed against her chest.

"I've been thinking it might be nice to send Bee some care packages this summer," said Frankie quietly to Theo over Wilhelmina's head. "We'll send them to you so that you can deliver them to him personally. You can bring the first one back with you tomorrow. Would you like that, Wilhelmina?" she asked, speaking into Wilhelmina's hair while she hugged her. "Maybe we can find ways to share our summer with Bee."

It became the summer of searching for treasures small enough to send through the mail. Some were obvious: a perfect leaf from one of the aunts' many maples. Flowers from Frankie's flower beds or from the wild rose bramble in front of the carriage house, which Wilhelmina lined with wax paper and pressed between the volumes of the ancient encyclopedia that lived in a glass-fronted bookcase in the second-floor sitting room. Facts Wilhelmina found in the encyclopedia, which was from 1924, and had belonged to Aunt Margaret's great-aunt Eileen. "Even when I was little," Aunt Margaret had told her, "that encyclopedia was funny and old!"

"I've been looking up birds," Wilhelmina wrote to Bee. "Listen to this. ‘Hummingbird. The nest of a humming-bird is a tiny cup-shaped affair, such as a fairy might build, and it is made of quite fairy-like material, plant-down, stuccoed with moss and spider-web.' ‘Robin. The robin's friendly trustfulness has won for him the love of all classes of people.' Do you think they made a point of polling all classes of people? ‘Pelican. Mr. and Mrs. Pelican feed their babies from a cupboard which they carry about with them. This cupboard is a sack of elastic skin grown from the underside of the beak.' ‘Penguin. Seen from a distance, a colony of these strange sea-birds of the Southern Hemisphere might easily be taken for an assemblage of little men.' ‘Pigeons and doves. There is not a single living specimen of the passenger pigeon anywhere in the world. The last of the captive passenger pigeons died—an old, old bird—in the zoological garden of Cincinnati in 1914.' I googled that passenger pigeon. Her name was Martha and she was twenty-nine years old. This encyclopedia has like ten volumes. Can you believe people used to buy that many books, just to know things? Then a few years later, they'd be out of date! It smells like…"

Wilhelmina paused in her missive, trying to decide what the encyclopedia smelled like. "It smells a little sweet and a little stale," she wrote. "Like a doughnut you left out too long in the sun." Of course, that wasn't completely accurate, nor did it make much sense. If you left a doughnut out in the sun here at the aunts' house, it would last about three minutes before a squirrel or a chipmunk, or one of Esther's beloved stray cats, or any of about a dozen species of birds picked it apart or carried it away. But Wilhelmina liked how it sounded. Her letters to Bee gave her an opportunity to practice being poetic.

She called him on the phone sometimes too, although she didn't always get to talk to him. "Tobey's at soccer practice," his father would say, or "Tobey's out playing catch." Tobey was playing football. Tobey was chopping wood. Chopping wood? What wood? Wilhelmina wasn't sure whether to believe these reports, partly because Dr. Sloane always sounded too pleased with himself, like he was making a hilarious joke, and partly because it didn't sound like Bee. Bee enjoyed soccer, but he hated football. It was as if his father were reading from a list of "Things Boys Do" or something (chopping wood?), and in the meantime, Bee was probably upstairs in his room watching Princess Mononoke.

"Is this Wilhelmina Hart?" Bee's father asked her once, even though he knew perfectly well it had to be her. "Did you and your aunties make these brownies you sent? Thank you. They're delicious."

Wilhelmina imagined Bee's father eating all the brownies she and Frankie had made for Bee, and began to hate him. She called her parents. "Did you give the last care package to Bee directly?" she shrieked at her mother. "You have to give them to him directly!"

"All right, Wilhelmina," said Cleo, who sounded startled, and also frazzled. Delia was screaming in the background. "We will," she said, "I promise. Honey? I promise. Will you tell me what happened?"

Wilhelmina told Cleo about the brownies, feeling less panicked. She was ten years old and it didn't occur to her that her parents couldn't easily knock on the Sloanes' door with a package, then refuse to relinquish the package to anyone but their nine-year-old son. Nor did it occur to her that her parents were, in fact, already worried about Bee, as much as their busy lives would permit. But she knew that voice of Cleo's. Cleo meant her promise.

After that, almost unconsciously, Wilhelmina switched her focus to treasures that Dr. Sloane wouldn't recognize as treasures. On weekends, the aunts often took her to a small lake nearby. Aunt Margaret loved to swim, and maybe it ran in the family, because Wilhelmina did too. Sometimes Frankie came along, although often she stayed home "for a little time to myself." Esther often came. She was highly suspicious of lake water, but she loved to people-watch while pretending to read. "Plus, who doesn't want the company of two happy fish," she would say, watching in delighted amazement as Wilhelmina set out to swim clear across to the other side of the lake. "Wilhelmineleh! You're a wonder."

Pressed against a thicket of brush and trees on the other side of the lake was a tiny, pebbly beach. On the beach was a scattering of distinctive blue stones. Sometimes you had to search a long time before you found a blue stone. Wilhelmina always did, or at any rate, Aunt Margaret always did—Aunt Margaret had an affinity for finding things—and she always gave what she found to Wilhelmina. She also let Wilhelmina swim with a special little swimming bag she owned that strapped around the waist, so that Wilhelmina could bring the stones back with her. The bag made her feel like an adventurer. The final section of the swim involved swimming through tall grass that felt slick and grabby against her skin, which heightened the feeling. And on the pebbly beach, she and Aunt Margaret were usually alone. Most people didn't bother to swim that far, or turned away when they got to the grass. Wilhelmina liked to believe that no one else knew that the beach, if you achieved it, yielded tiny blue treasures.

She also believed that a soulless person like Bee's father, upon opening a box, wouldn't realize or care that blue stones were treasures, but Bee would recognize them instantly. The summer he'd come to stay, Wilhelmina hadn't been big or strong enough yet to swim all the way across the lake, but Aunt Margaret had brought some back to them.

The weekend after the brownies incident, Wilhelmina swam across to the beach. It was a hot day, and the lake was full of children. Some of them were playing in the water farther out from shore than the rest. When Wilhelmina reached them, then passed them, then continued moving steadily beyond them, one of them, a boy about her age, shouted with obvious admiration, "Are you migrating to Baja California?"

Wilhelmina didn't understand what this meant, but she liked it anyway. Probably it was a reference to some other animal that swam very well, like her.

She stayed on the beach for a long time, because she wanted to send Bee as many stones as possible. At one point, Aunt Margaret swam ashore. "Wilhelmina, dear?" she said, pushing herself up out of the water into the sun, then standing there dripping happily. "Please do remember that a bag of stones will weigh you down as you swim back."

"Oh," said Wilhelmina, startled, because she hadn't thought of that. "How many stones do you think I can swim with?"

"How many have you collected so far?" asked Aunt Margaret.

"Three," she said, holding her palm out to show Aunt Margaret the luminous stones. A lot of stones glimmered when they were underwater, but the blue stones glimmered all the time. Wilhelmina knew, from the three she kept on her bedside windowsill in the aunts' house, that they even caught the moonlight.

"Lovely," said Aunt Margaret serenely. "Let's say five total, assuming the next two are of a similar size. Are you cold or hungry?"

"No, I'm fine."

"All right, I'll leave you to it. You know," she said, pointing to the far edge of the little beach, "I think I see a blue sparkle over there, beside that big, black rock. You see the rock shaped like a bird's nest?"

Wilhelmina couldn't see a blue sparkle, but she did see the bird's-nest rock. "Thanks," she said, moving toward it carefully. Part of the slowness of the blue-stone search was due to the discomfort of traversing a pebble beach with bare feet.

She found two more blue stones near the bird's-nest rock and tucked them into her bag with satisfaction. She wanted to bring one to Frankie, which left four for Bee. Then, slow and steady, she swam back to shore. When she got there, she discovered that she was, in fact, a bit cold and hungry. She ran across the sand to the aunts, who were sunning themselves in beach chairs, and wrapped herself in a towel, shivering. "Hot soup, dear?" said Aunt Margaret, handing her a thermos. Aunt Margaret was the only person who ever seemed to understand that sometimes on a warm summer day at the beach, a swimmer might appreciate a thermos of hot soup. It was her favorite too, ham and bean, made by Frankie. Wilhelmina sipped it, perfectly happy.

The boy who'd shouted the thing about Baja California was sitting on a beach blanket nearby, also eating something. Whatever it was, he kept breaking off pieces and handing them to a man lying in the sun beside him, a thin man with a graying ring of hair who accepted them cheerfully. The man had a rumbly voice and a sweet smile.

"You're a really good swimmer," the boy called out to her.

"Thanks," she said. Sometimes, when Wilhelmina was chilled through but also wrapped in a towel and sitting in the sun, she felt like nothing was wrong in the world. "What did you mean about Baja California?"

"Oh!" he said. "I meant you were like a gray whale. They migrate farther than any other whale. They swim from the Arctic all the way to Baja California! Anyway, that's what I meant." He looked a little sheepish. "Sorry. My sister tells me I boysplain things."

"I asked," said Wilhelmina.

"I guess you did!" he said. "Gray whales are completely marvelous. Oh! But maybe you don't like being compared to a whale."

"I like it," said Wilhelmina, who was ten, and too sturdily built to be called skinny, but had never doubted what he meant. Whales were marvelous. She liked how considerate this boy was. In a fit of generosity, she reached into her bag and pulled out the blue stones. Choosing a nice one, she held it out to him. "Want one?" she said. "I found it across the lake."

"Oh!" he said, clambering to his feet and coming to crouch in front of her. He took the stone and turned it around in his hands. One of his front teeth was crooked, crossing in front of the other, in a way that made his grin kind of cute. He had very dark eyes.

"Blue!" he said. "That's really pretty. Thanks! Do you like doughnuts?"

"Of course."

The boy went back to the graying man on the blanket, then returned, carrying something. "Want one?" he said. "I know it's shaped funny, but it tastes normal. The skinny part might be overcooked."

He handed her a—glazed doughnut? It was stretched into a lopsided oval, way too skinny on one end and too fat on the other. It looked like it had once been an even ring of dough, then someone had hung it on a hook and left it there. "Thanks," she said, taking a bite of the fat end. It was delicious. When she alternated bites of the sweet doughnut with sips of Frankie's savory soup, it was basically the best meal ever. Some days are perfect, thought Wilhelmina.

That evening after dinner, while the aunts cleaned up, Wilhelmina sat at the kitchen table composing a letter to Bee. She felt strange about letters to Bee now, almost as if she should be writing them in code just in case Bee's father was reading them. "I met a boy at the lake today who told me I swim like a gray whale, which was a compliment," she wrote. "I looked gray whale up in the encyclopedia afterward but there wasn't an entry! But listen to this about gravitation. ‘Gravitation. From the beginning of time a very remarkable thing has been happening, and few except very little children and very great philosophers have thought to ask why. That is, things have invariably been falling to the ground, and never in any other direction.' Don't you wish people still talked like that? Anyway, I wished you were there at the lake," she added, because she didn't want Bee to think she'd found a replacement boy.

"Are you sending these stones to Bee, dear?" asked Frankie, stopping by her chair. The three stones she'd chosen for Bee sat on the table above the letter she was writing.

"Yes," said Wilhelmina.

"Good," said Frankie. Then she rested one hand atop the stones, closed her eyes, and took a breath.

"What are you doing?" asked Wilhelmina.

Frankie opened her eyes. "I suppose you could say I'm praying," she said.

"For what?" said Wilhelmina.

"Oh," said Frankie casually, "I suppose for Bee to be well."

A few minutes later, Esther stopped by Wilhelmina's chair and did the same thing.

"Are you praying for Bee too?" said Wilhelmina.

"In a manner of speaking," said Esther, "yes."

When Aunt Margaret came by sometime later and put her hand on the stones, Wilhelmina didn't ask her what she was doing. She just watched. She was having a memory of every time one of the aunts had ever put a hand on her own shoulder and stood there quietly, just like that. After Aunt Margaret left, she put her own hand on the stones and felt Aunt Margaret's warmth.

At the end of the summer, the aunts and Wilhelmina received some good news: when Theo and Cleo came to stay for a few days, then bring Wilhelmina home, Bee was coming too.

But when the car pulled into the drive and her parents climbed out, Bee wasn't there. The only person in the back seat was Delia, who smelled faintly of vomit.

"I'm sorry, honey!" said Theo, leaning into the car, struggling with Delia's buckles. "We meant to warn you. Cleo, did you text Aunt Margaret?"

"I thought you said you were doing it!" said Cleo.

"Oops."

"I'm really sorry, sweetie," said Cleo, coming to hug Wilhelmina, kissing the top of her head. "We saw him last week down at the field. Soccer game. Did he tell you he's been playing goalie? He's good!"

"Tall for his age," said Theo, his head still inside the car. "Good at covering the angles."

"Listen to you, Theo," said Aunt Margaret fondly. "Sounding like you know what you're talking about."

"Hey, I'm a librarian," said Theo. "I either know or have access to all information."

"Hand me that pukey baby," said Aunt Margaret. "I want to give her hugs."

"You're a saint, Aunt Margaret," said Theo, finally extracting a sleepy Delia from the car. "We did change her clothes."

"I don't care."

"Hello!" called Frankie from the porch. "Welcome! Come have iced tea!"

"Can I call Bee?" said Wilhelmina.

But Bee wasn't home.

Then, when Wilhelmina herself got home, Bee and his mom were away. She could tell because when she went to his house, which was a giant one set into a hilly yard a short walk downhill from her apartment, his mom's Lexus was gone; the light his mom turned on in the front room when she wanted to trick robbers was shining through the window; and Wilhelmina found a few days' mail crammed into the mailbox. She had a feeling Bee's father was home. He lived like a vampire when he wasn't at the hospital, so the signs of an abandoned house never meant anything, and he didn't usually go on family trips. So Wilhelmina didn't knock on the door. But she was beginning to feel panicked again.

It wasn't until a few days before the first day of school that she finally clapped eyes on Bee. She was dutifully "playing" outside with Delia, who would yell something garbled, then throw a ball badly while screaming. The problem with throwing a ball outside their apartment was that if it hit the sidewalk or the road, the steepness of the hill was so extreme that only the most headlong rush would prevent it rolling about three blocks.

Unless a soccer goalie was walking up the hill, which one was. As Wilhelmina began to race after Delia's stupid ball, Bee, dark-haired and quiet, familiar and dear, rounded the corner, assessed the situation, and put out one neat foot. Then he bent and picked up the ball one-handed, and Wilhelmina's initial rush of relief, which had changed almost instantly to an irrational rage at Bee for being so calm when she'd been so worried, transformed next into a sick sorrow. He had a purple cast on his left arm.

Wilhelmina began to cry. "What happened to you?" she said. "Does it hurt?"

She knew his answer before he said it. "My dad pushed me down the steps," he said, speaking as matter-of-factly as ever. He looked into her eyes and held them, his chin raised as if he was daring her not to believe him, but of course she believed him. He wasn't crying, but there was something upsetting in the way he was standing there, like he was ready to flinch at any sudden movement. Wilhelmina wondered if he'd done a lot of crying on his own. The thought made her feel a little frantic.

"The stones didn't work," she said.

"The stones?" he said. "The blue stones from the beach?"

"They were supposed to keep you safe," she said. "The aunts prayed over them."

Bee's eyes widened. "They did?"

"Yes."

"For me?"

"Yes!"

"Huh," he said. "No one's ever done anything like that for me before."

Delia was standing in the yard looking down at them, yelling, "Bee! Bee!" delightedly. It was one of the few words she could say well. As Bee carried the ball to her, Wilhelmina followed. She didn't know what to do with herself. She was furious again, but she couldn't figure out why. She was thinking of the gentle hands of the aunts on her shoulder, and hating Bee's father, and wanting to hurl the blue stones off a cliff if there was nothing she could do to make Bee's life less unfair.

"I'm sorry they didn't work," she said.

"It's okay," he said. "It'd take a lot with my dad. Anyway, I love them. They're like family talismans now, right?"

A moving truck was lumbering up the hill. Wilhelmina positioned herself between Delia and the road and Bee shifted too, ready to intercept the ball, should Delia choose that moment to fling it. "Family talismans?" said Wilhelmina.

"You went on a quest to find them, and then your aunts made them powerful," said Bee. "And then you gave them to me."

"Oh," said Wilhelmina. "I guess so." Then, to her surprise, the truck pulled up to their curb and her math teacher climbed out.

"Mr. Dunstable?" said Wilhelmina in amazement.

"Hello, Wilhelmina," said Mr. Dunstable cheerfully, pocketing a giant key and wiping his hands together. "Hello, Bee. Now, don't tell me one of you lives here?"

It was so strange to see her math teacher standing there outside her home, wearing shorts and a Red Sox T-shirt. Mr. Dunstable wore slacks and sweaters normally, and, to her knowledge before this, did not have hairy legs or muscular arms. Math in the World was Wilhelmina's number one favorite part of school. Mr. Dunstable had taught them how a musical piece reached its climax because of the particular mathematical relationship between its notes. He'd taught them the way electoral votes during presidential elections were counted in strange, uneven, state-sized clumps until one of the candidates reached two hundred seventy. He'd taught them that every attempt by humanity to communicate with aliens involved speaking in math, because mathematical concepts were believed to be universal in a way that other concepts, like God or democracy or literacy, were not. Why was this marvelous grown-up standing on her curb?

"I live here," said Wilhelmina. "Why are you here?"

"Because I'm your new neighbor," said Mr. Dunstable, "apparently."

Before Wilhelmina could absorb the revelation that one's math teacher could live in one's own building, a car pulled up behind the truck. A woman Wilhelmina had never seen before got out. Mr. Dunstable was a Black man with dark, golden-brown skin, and the woman looked like she might be Black too. Her skin was pale brown, like Esther's. Then a girl who looked more like Mr. Dunstable came around from the passenger seat, wearing shorts and a giant white hoodie so oversized that maybe she'd borrowed it from one of her parents. Her hair was gathered in a high puff on top of her head.

"I'm Julie," she said, coming up to Wilhelmina and Bee.

"I'm Wilhelmina," said Wilhelmina.

"I'm Bee," said Bee.

"Are you going to be my upstairs neighbor?" said Wilhelmina, her voice ending on a squeak she hadn't planned for. Wilhelmina, who'd been away all summer, hadn't even realized that her old upstairs neighbors had moved out, although now that she thought about it, their cars were gone. This was almost too exciting.

"Looks like it," said Julie.

"That's great!" said Wilhelmina. "Do you like Math in the World?"

Julie rolled her eyes and started laughing, and Wilhelmina started laughing too. Sometimes, when people laughed at what you said, you knew somehow, right away, that it was because they liked what you said. The laughter was like bells inside Wilhelmina, the joyful kind that ring out when something wonderful is happening.

"Want to see something funny?" said Julie.

"Yes," said Wilhelmina and Bee together.

Then Julie eased herself out of her giant hoodie and it became plain why she was wearing it: because it was the only long-sleeved garment that would fit over the cast on her right arm, which was exactly the same shade of purple as the cast on Bee's left arm. She held it out to Bee, laughing again. "Soccer accident," she said. "You?"

When Bee smiled, something cried out inside Wilhelmina. She could feel the sweetness of his smile, and also the sadness behind it. "Great color choice," he said.

"You too," said Julie.

"I also play soccer," said Bee. "Goalie. You?"

"Striker."

"That makes you my nemesis," said Bee, which got another laugh from Julie.

"Want to come inside?" said Wilhelmina. She extended her arms. "I can pour you both drinks."