Explaining the whole smudge-stick thing would not have been easy. I guess I was lucky that Sophie didn’t even ask. She just kept opening windows and told Zack, Renee, and me that it was time to go home. When I tried to say something, she pushed her palm toward me, which is pretty much the international sign for I don’t want to hear it! My dad wanted to know, though, so I had to tell him that we lit a candle and it fell over. Fortunately, he launched into a long lecture about fire safety, and by the time it ended, he didn’t even think to ask why we needed a candle at four in the afternoon. Also, he said those magic words: “Let’s not mention this to your mother.”
Not long after that, though, I had a real problem because Henry got sick again. Really sick. I was afraid that maybe it was all the smoke from the smudge stick, but my dad said that had nothing to do with it. He told me that it’s caused by either a virus or bacteria, depending on what kind you have. Pneumonia. That’s what Henry had. And, for obvious reasons, the sound of that word terrified me. As soon as I found out, I wanted to go and check on him, but apparently hospitals have some ridiculous rule about how old you have to be to visit—which is why we had to sneak in instead of just going there like regular people, which, by the way, children are.
Zack understood right away that we should go and make sure that Henry was all right, but Renee put up a fuss as soon as I mentioned it.
“Oh, no,” she said. “I do NOT do hospitals. I can’t even stand the smell. Besides, you’re gonna get in trouble, Barbara Anne. We all are.”
I would have argued with her, but she sounded serious. And I could see how Renee might be scared; it was probably because of her mom. So I turned to Zack.
“Where is he?” Zack asked.
“Pacific Lutheran,” I said.
“Oh, great,” Zack said.
“What?”
“That’s where my mom works.”
“That’s perfect,” I said. But Zack wasn’t so sure.
In the end, though, he went along with me. Who knows why? Like my grandmother says, “People are complicated.” Zack took a chance. He helped me get to Henry when nobody else would.
When Zack and I decided to visit Henry, I was part excited, part scared. In my daydream, I pictured escaping from my bedroom in the moonlight—out the window, hand over hand, using a ladder that I’d made myself from bedsheets. (This was never very realistic because I still hated the new gym teacher and had not been persuaded to “work” on my upper body strength.) Imagine my disappointment, though, when I was able to walk right out of the house after dinner without anybody even noticing.
My dad went into his office to work on his computer, and my mom was getting Rachel ready for her bath.
“Well,” I said. “I have a lot of homework, so I guess I’ll just get to it.”
“Okay,” my mom said. “Sounds good.”
You’d think she would have had a few questions, but no! Not this time! She just closed the bathroom door—right in my face! I was one hundred percent sure that she had not heard a word I said. I could have told her, “By the way, Mom, there’s a sea monster in Green Lake, and I spotted him on my walk home.” Or, “Gee, Mom, you don’t mind if I grab your keys and teach myself to drive now, do you?” And she would have had that same answer: “Okay. Sounds good.”
I have heard of people, people with observant parents, I suppose, who have to come up with all sorts of cover stories and excuses. (I had a few ready.) There are people, I am told, who even leave a note behind to misdirect anybody who might be looking for them. (I had one written and ready to go.) But there was no need. Nobody cared where I was or what I was up to. No reason to tiptoe room to room, eyes darting around like a cartoon cat burglar. I just strolled out and walked over to Zack’s house. Hiding all those pillows under the blankets in the shape of my body had been a big waste of time.
I could see Zack through the front window when I got there. He was sitting at the dining room table with an older kid, like high school age, and he looked really cute. Not Zack. The other one. He had wavy brown hair that was just a little bit long, sort of Disney prince length. Not that I cared. I’m just reporting the facts. Who cared, really, what he looked like? But also, why was he there, and how would I get Zack out of the house now? It was the first interesting difficulty—the first step on my quest to get to Henry. And I had an idea. I saw some tiny stones on the ground near the door, so I grabbed a handful and tossed them at the window. Then I ducked behind a bush. I was pretty proud of myself until Zack answered the door.
“Barbara Anne!” he hollered. “We can see you!”
This forced me out from behind the bush, so he did not need to continue, but he decided to anyway. “Why don’t you just ring the bell like a normal person?” he asked.
“Well, I…”
“Oh, never mind,” Zack said. “Just come on in.”
He motioned toward an empty chair at the dining room table. They were eating sandwiches.
“This is Doug,” he said.
“Aren’t you going to offer her a sandwich?” Doug asked.
“Dude, you’re not my mother,” Zack said.
“Hi,” I said. “I’m Barbara Anne. Klein. I’m Zack’s—”
“She sits across from me,” Zack said. “At school.”
“Good to meet you,” Doug said. “I live across from him. Used to be his babysitter before he got so polite and mature.” He smiled, and I noticed that he had very blue eyes and long eyelashes. “I should go,” he said to Zack. “Behave yourself. Nice to meet you, Barbara Anne.”
After he left, Zack said, “You can stop staring at the door, Barbara Anne. He’s not going to reappear.”
“I was not staring at the door!” I said. But I was. I totally was.
“He’s a pretty nice guy,” Zack said.
“How long have you known him?”
“Since third grade. He was the only one my mom could get to babysit me when I was in my ‘acting out’ phase.”
“What’s that?”
Zack shrugged and kept chewing on his sandwich. “I don’t know. That’s what my counselor called it. My parents weren’t getting along with each other, and I wasn’t getting along with anybody!” Zack laughed.
“That’s not funny!” I said.
“No,” Zack said. “It really wasn’t. I used to break stuff. Major temper tantrums. But, you know. My parents settled down, and so did I. So now Doug and me are just neighbors.”
I was sort of surprised, almost impressed, that Zack told me all that. I would have asked him more, but the doorbell rang. Zack hopped up to get it, and there was Renee. I looked out the window and saw her father waving goodbye from behind the wheel of his car.
“I thought you didn’t want to come,” I said to Renee.
“If you’re worried about Henry, then so am I,” she said.
“Enough jibber-jab,” Zack said. “It’s getting late.”
“Jibber-jab?” I asked, but Zack just ignored me. He wrote out a note to his mom, left it on the table, and started talking about what bus we had to take.
You would think that if we were going to get lost, it would be because we took the wrong bus, got off at the wrong stop, or made a wrong turn on the way to the hospital. But none of that happened. We found our way to the hospital like we’d been going there every day of our lives. Once we got inside, though, it was a different story. We went through the big lobby toward the elevators, and then I looked at Zack.
“Now what?” I asked. “Which way do we go?”
It was clear from the look on his face that he had no idea.
“You’re kidding me!” I said. “Didn’t your mom ever take you around? Give you a tour? Introduce you to people?”
I was thinking of the time my dad took me to his office on Take Our Kids to Work Day. Maybe it was different, though, if your parents were doctors. I guess you wouldn’t just get to hang around gawking in the middle of somebody’s operation. What are your parents going to say? “Hi, this is my younger son, Jimmy. He’ll be handing me my scalpels today”? I don’t think so. Still, this was a setback.
“Pick a floor and get in,” I said, because standing in front of the elevator like a litter of lost puppies seemed like the surest way to draw attention to ourselves.
So we started. There were signs, kind of a lot of them, but they were confusing, and the hallway was just blank white walls, more elevators, and strange doors with high, small windows. There were labs, miniature gated-off coffee shops, a gift shop with scarves and a teapot in the window. The place was huge. More like a small city than a building. It was already starting to seem that we might be here all night, wandering around like mice in a maze.
“I don’t like it here,” Renee said.
“We just got started!” I yelled.
I know. I should have been more sympathetic. I could have offered to help her find her way back to the lobby and told her to wait there. I could have told her that it would be okay, or maybe even promised that we would leave soon. But I didn’t do any of that because I was too mad. It was infuriating how easily she was willing to give up.
“Don’t be such a baby, Renee!”
“But this place is creepy,” she said.
Zack was ignoring us both. “Let’s try the next floor,” he said.
And so we did.
Things were even worse on the next floor, because instead of lots of emptyish hallways, we finally found the rooms. That was progress, I guess, but peeking into them was awful. The rooms were mostly white with curtains hanging down the center, and there was lots of coughing and machines beeping and sometimes someone moaning. Also, there was the sound of sniffling, which was my fault because it was coming from Renee, and I was the one who had made her cry.
“Are you guys lost?” a nurse asked us.
“Oh, no,” I said. “She’s just upset because our grandmother is leaving. Dying. I mean, we were just leaving.”
“Really,” she said.
She wasn’t stupid. We ran toward the elevators.
“This isn’t working,” Zack said. “Let’s just go.”
“One more floor,” I said. “Please! We came all this way.”
And on the next floor, my persistence paid off. We found Henry. We found him because I would not give up and because Henry would not eat orange Jell-O. His half-eaten tray was outside in the hallway, and I saw the little card with the number and his name:
322, Bed A
Davis, Henry
And then I saw something else: an exact rerun of Henry’s dream about Edgar’s mother. In the dim light of Henry’s hospital room, a woman was perched on the edge of the bed. She wore a white blouse and a longish skirt. Her hand was outstretched; she was running her fingers gently through Henry’s hair. Then she turned her head and looked at me, and I could see that the lower half of her face was covered by a surgical mask, just as Henry had described. She rose and walked toward me.
I screamed, and I’m not even ashamed. It was a big scream too. A real shriek. It lasted a couple of long seconds. It went on the whole while that she got up and crossed the room. It lasted until I ran out of breath, really, which was almost exactly the same moment that I realized she was solid and real.
By then, I had drawn a crowd: Renee and Zack plus a couple of nurses, all looking petrified.
The woman reached me, lowered her mask, and extended her hand. “I’m sorry I startled you,” she said.
“It’s okay,” Renee answered for me. “She’s always like this.”
The woman laughed. “I’m Christine,” she said. “Henry’s mother. And you must be the famous Barbara Anne.”
I shook her hand. Over her shoulder I could see that Henry’s eyes were open. He was alive and smiling.