“SHE HAS RUN…” WENDELL blurted out, stopping for breath in the middle. “She has run…she has run away!”
“Oh no, not again.” Mr. Padgett opened his eyes and gazed sleepily at his son, who stood at the door of the bedroom in yellow summer pajamas. “What time is it, anyway?” he asked with a squint. The digital clock was a blurry lump on the dresser across the room.
Wendell turned to look. “Six-thirty-one. She’s been gone for an hour at least. I felt her bed. It’s cold.”
Mrs. Padgett rolled over and lifted her head off the pillow. “What’s happened?” she croaked.
“It’s Amber,” Mr. Padgett informed his wife. “Wendell says she’s run away.”
“Oh no, not again.”
There was a pause while everyone tried to think of where she might have gone this time.
“Amber was angry,” Wendell offered at last. “She was really mad—that’s why she left.”
“So what else is new?” his father said. “Amber’s always mad. She’s mad as a hatter at the whole human race. There’s hardly been ten minutes in the entire last year when she wasn’t—”
“Do you think she could have gone up over Goodspeed Hill?” Mrs. Padgett broke in. “Oh dear, I hope she hasn’t gone up over that hill again. We took all day last time finding her in that ravine. Remember how she’d crawled into that cave and decided to—”
“No, she wouldn’t be there,” Wendell said. “She told me she’d never go back there. Snakes.”
“That’s a blessing.”
There was another pause.
“Why was she mad this time, Wendell?” Mrs. Padgett inquired.
Wendell was Amber’s eight-year-old brother. He was the only person who knew anything about her these days. Ever since she’d turned twelve, Amber had been mad.
“She said the world was a sick place,” Wendell answered. He came forward and climbed into bed between his parents, who moved over to make room. “She said she was sick of living in a sick place. She wants to go someplace else.”
Mr. Padgett shook his head. “A sick place. A sick place. That’s what she always says. What is it supposed to mean?”
Wendell shrugged. “Amber says people have started to like killing each other. She says they like having fights. It’s gotten into their blood. Every time you turn on the TV, there’s somebody shooting somebody else, or there’s some war somewhere with people getting blown up. She says she can hardly stand it anymore.”
“That’s a wonderful reason to run away at five-thirty on a Sunday morning,” Mr. Padgett said. “Just wonderful.” He sat up, took his glasses from the bedside table, and put them on. “So what else?” he asked, turning a sharpened gaze on Wendell. “Did she say anything else?”
“That’s all”
Mrs. Padgett sighed.
“She said she knows it’s going to happen here, too,” Wendell said. “Sometime.”
“What will happen?” asked his parents together.
“A war,” Wendell said.
Mr. Padgett snorted.
“She did. She said so,” Wendell protested. “Because it’s in the blood.”
“Well, I’m getting up,” Mr. Padgett announced. “I’m getting up and having a bowl of shredded wheat. And then I’m declaring war on the lawn. It’s grown about two feet in a week. Wherever Amber has gone this time, I don’t care. She can stay there forever. I’m not wasting my Sunday tramping all over town looking for her. She has some strange idea in her head again, that’s what it is. She reads some book or sees something on television, and the next thing you know, she’s off on the warpath, furious because nobody can understand How She Feels. Well, I’ve had it, let me say. This is the last time I—”
“Wait a minute, Leonard.” Mrs. Padgett held up her hand. “Just hold on one minute. Did you and Amber happen to have a…um…conversation about something recently?”
“A conversation is hardly what I would call it.”
“Leonard! For heaven’s sake. What did you say to her? When was this, last night?”
“Nothing!” bellowed Mr. Padgett, throwing back the covers. He leapt out of bed. “I didn’t say anything. She was the one who was yelling. About guns and missiles, some TV program she’d seen. Why do they put that sort of stuff on the air? I told her not to get so excited. She’s just a child. How can she understand what’s happening out in the world? Our government has specialists who study these things. They know what they’re doing when they send our army in to—”
The bathroom door slammed, cutting off his voice.
Mrs. Padgett had also risen by this time. Wendell now occupied the bed by himself. The extreme wideness and emptiness of the sheets gave him a delicious feeling. It was a feeling of freedom and, at the same time, of perfect safety. He stretched his legs far down under the blankets and flung out his arms.
“Look at me! Look at me!” he cried to his parents. Mrs. Padgett turned around to look. Mr. Padgett opened the bathroom door.
“I’m in a giant swimming pool!” shrieked Wendell. “I’m floating around in this giant pool. I’m swimming, and now I’m…going…to…dive!”
Wendell stood up and plunged headfirst under the covers, uprooting the blankets on every side. There came the unnerving sound of a sheet ripping.
Mr. Padgett shot a furious glance at his wife. “Kids! There are times when I could just…” His hands seemed to grope for an invisible neck. “Yes, I do believe I really…could…just…”
A sudden burst of rustling and chattering erupted from the trees beyond the bedroom window, and his voice trailed off.
“What is that? Squirrels?” Mrs. Padgett asked brightly. She raised the shade to peer outside.
Much as Mr. Padgett had sworn and declared that he did not care where his daughter had gone, or whether she ever came back, twenty minutes later he was standing on the sidewalk in front of his own house, looking anxiously up and down the street. Beside him stood Wendell, eating a piece of buttered toast.
“You know you said more to her than that, Dad,” Wendell said with a full mouth.
“I did not.”
“You did too. Remember after you stopped yelling at her about the government—”
“I was not yelling,” Mr. Padgett said.
“Well, after that, anyway, remember how she started talking about that mass murder down in Texas?”
“What mass murder?”
“You know, when that man came in a restaurant with a machine gun and just started mowing people—”
“Wendell! What kind of talk is that?”
“And there were heads busting open and eyeballs popping out and blood pouring everywhere, and some fat old lady got shot in the—”
“Wendell! Will you be quiet!”
“It wasn’t where you think, Dad,” Wendell said in a hurt voice. “It was just in the—”
“Wendell! What is wrong with you? The whole neighborhood can probably hear.”
Mr. Padgett looked around in alarm. Luckily, there was no one nearby, just another bunch of squirrels chasing each other in the trees overhead. He lowered his voice. “And anyway, you shouldn’t be listening to stuff like that.”
“Right,” said Wendell, taking another bite of toast. “That’s exactly what you told Amber. Eggs-zackly. And then you smacked her.”
“I did not.”
“Yes you did.”
“Well, she wouldn’t listen!” his father cried. “What else could I do? Amber won’t listen to anyone anymore. All she does is watch a lot of hogwash on TV that gives her a crazy view of the world. It’s given you a crazy view, too. People don’t normally go around shooting each other, you know. Not educated people. Not civilized people, like us. For instance—”
“Amber says there’s no such thing as civilized people,” Wendell cut in. “She says—”
“Will you stop interrupting?” Mr. Padgett interrupted. He put his hands on his hips and glared at his son. “As I was saying: for instance, here in Forest there’s never been one shoot-out. There hasn’t been a single murder, and no bomb has fallen or ever will. This is a safe town. What I was telling Amber was, she doesn’t need to worry. The only way someone could get shot here is if some maniac came in from outside. And the chances of that happening are about a zillion to one…. Come on,” he said, after another look up the street. “Let’s start walking around and see if anybody noticed her leaving this morning.”
“They didn’t,” Wendell said, trailing his father warily down the sidewalk. “No one sees Amber when she doesn’t want them to. She’s smart. She knows how to get around. She’s got ways of seeing and knowing that you wouldn’t believe. Someday she’s going to be president of the United States. She even told me.”
Mr. Padgett wheezed. “That’s just the kind of thing Amber would say. Give her an inch and she’ll take a mile…. What on earth is going on with the squirrels around here?” he added as another terrific rattling of branches sounded overhead. “Whenever I look up, there’s a big rat pack of them running through the trees. Maybe it’s time to get out the old shotgun and cut back the number a bit. How about it, Wendell? Have you ever been squirrel hunting?”