Every morning, Roo and Phillip did schoolwork in Phillip’s room, with Violet watching over. In her own way, she was as stern a teacher as Mrs. Wixton; but when the sound of Ms. Valentine’s boat motor started up to make its mail run to Choke Cherry, Violet set them free. They hurried into the passageway and slid down the chute to the garden, though Violet said it was bad luck for live children to go down it.
The garden was changing slowly. One morning Roo noticed a patch of pale green near one of the walls of the atrium. To her delight she found several tiny new shoots, filament thin, pushing out of the earth.
“Look!” She called Jack and Phillip over to show them.
As they kneeled by the young shoots, marveling, Roo stretched herself out against the ground and put her ear to the earth.
“What are you doing?” Phillip asked.
“Shhh,” she told him.
The boys waited in silence as Roo listened.
“I can hear it,” she said. “It’s louder now.”
“What is?” asked Phillip.
“The earth.”
“You can hear the earth?” Jack asked.
“Of course. Can’t you?”
Jack and Phillip shook their heads.
“That’s funny,” Roo said. “I thought everyone could.”
“What does it sound like?” Phillip asked.
No one had ever asked her that before. She listened again. It was like a long fluttering sigh made between closed lips. It rose and fell in pitch, and there seemed to be a song woven through it that never repeated itself. Roo took a breath and tested out a sound. She stopped and shook her head.
“It’s not exactly right,” she said.
“Do that again,” Phillip told her.
Roo gave it another try. She struggled to mimic the lilting rhythm, the way it snaked under and over itself.
When she stopped, Phillip was staring at her, his dark eyes so wide and bewildered that Roo sat up, alarmed.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“That was how it sounded,” he said. “Exactly how it sounded.”
“What?”
“My mother’s humming.”
Day by day, the garden’s ashy haze became interspersed with patches of fresh green. The first plants to bloom were the fragile shoots by the wall—with the most delicate yet complicated flowers Roo had ever seen. They had a slender bell-shaped center, ringed yellow on the inside, and lavender petals with gently fluted edges, like the sleeves of a small girl’s nightgown.
Every day they found new things pushing out of the soil. It felt as if each new flower had convinced yet another one to bloom. Tall spikes of red flowers that looked like Aladdin’s slippers attached to each other at the heel. Slender red-and-yellow flowers that flared out like torches and great papery white flowers with long necks that bent as elegantly as Sir’s; and all around the boulder, forming a crooked wreath, spiked flowers of purple, blue, and yellow grew within the cracks. Bromeliads, Phillip called them. He knew what all the flowers were called, and as they bloomed he greeted them by name, like old friends—blue passion flower, goat’s milk, parrot’s tongue.
Other living things began to find their way into the garden too. Bees hovered over the flowers and ladybugs examined new leaves. Once they found a green snake—exactly like Roo’s glass one—sunning itself on a rock.
“Yesterday, after you left, I noticed a little shoot growing up by the stump of one of the banana trees,” Roo said one morning, as they were waiting for Jack to arrive. “Jack thinks it might be a new tree beginning to grow.”
“Maybe the whole garden will be full of live trees one day, years and years from now,” Phillip said.
Roo had never heard her cousin talk about the future before. She looked at him, noticing that he had lost that withered, pinched look. There was a new quickness in his eyes and the purple smudges beneath them had faded.
“It might,” Roo said.
“How does it sound now?” Phillip asked.
“What?”
“The earth.”
“I don’t know,” she said.
She got down on her belly and pressed her ear to the ground. She had never listened to a garden in full bloom before. There were layers of sound threading out in all directions.
“The whole garden is humming!” Roo cried. “The earth is humming to the seeds and the seeds are humming to the roots and the roots are humming to the leaves and each part is telling another part to stay alive.”
One afternoon, after they had put it in a morning’s work on the garden and Phillip was back in his room, Jack and Roo took the canoe out to see the terns’ shoal. The snowy terns shrieked in protest as Roo and Jack approached the shoal, and others flew into the air and circled above them. Some of the nests had been plundered, with bits of shell littering the dried grass, but a few had clutches of beautiful brown-speckled eggs lying in the patchy nests.
“Who knows? Maybe some of them might make it,” Jack said.
They checked the shoal for the mink, and when they were satisfied that she was not there, they hopped back into the canoe and headed for Cough Rock.
The day had been warm and clear, with thin-skinned clouds raking across the sky. But as they entered the seaway, the air suddenly cooled.
Jack tipped his head back and looked up at the sky.
“Storm’s coming,” he said.
Not a moment later a dark purple cloud swept in above them, low in the sky, and as it unfurled the rain began to fall. It was a hard, furious rain. It whipped the river into confusion. Jack began to paddle hard, though Roo could not imagine how he could see where he was going. A tricky vapor hovered just over the river’s surface, and they sailed blindly into it. Each time the canoe pitched up, Roo sucked in her breath and held it until they crashed down again. She felt a rush of panic, certain that even if the frenzied water didn’t flip the canoe, they would certainly ram it into an island or shoal. The canoe’s bottom was filling—the tops of Roo’s sneakers were underwater. Squinting to keep the driving rain out of her eyes, she looked at Jack. His expression was grim but focused on a shadowy mass a few yards in front of them. It might have been land but it was impossible to be sure. Still, Jack tried to paddle toward it, fighting the currents. Each time the canoe was thrust aside by a wave, Jack maneuvered it back into line with the shadow, closer and closer until Roo was certain that it was an island. A wave sideswiped them and the canoe tilted so sharply that Roo let out a sharp yelp and a second later she felt the canoe’s bottom rubbing against land. Quickly Jack leapt out and held the canoe while Roo scrambled out after him, her legs shaking so badly that she stumbled.
“You all right?” Jack called to her over the sound of the thrashing rain.
Roo nodded.
“Do you know where we are?” she asked as they carried the canoe onto the island and set it down on the bank.
“I have an idea. I’ll tell you for sure in a minute,” he said.
They headed into a thicket of woods that flanked the shore and rose high above the river on a sharp incline. The canopy of leaves helped shield them from the rain and muffled its roar. Bit by bit, Roo could feel her muscles unravel as they hiked up the hill, the smell of pine growing sharper as they went. Quite suddenly the trees gave way and they stepped out into a grassy clearing, in the center of which was a large red boat. It was such an unexpected sight—a boat roosting on top of a hill in the middle of the woods—that Roo stood in the rain, just staring at it.
“Come on!” Jack said, and they both ran toward the boat’s set of makeshift stairs onto its deck and through a metal door that led inside.
“What is this place?” Roo asked, looking around at the paneled walls painted bright yellow, the rows of slatted wood benches, and the wide windows with the arched tops. A hammock hung from the ceiling in the front of the ship, just behind the captain’s wheel.
“It’s an old tour boat,” Jack said, collapsing into one of the bench seats. “No one’s lived in it since forever.”
“Do you stay here?” she asked, eyeing the hammock as she sat down on the bench in front of his.
“Sometimes. I’m careful though. Other people know about it too.” He lay down on one of the benches, his head below the window, and put his hands behind his head. “Want to know my favorite thing about this place?”
“Okay.”
“Lie down.”
She lay down on her seat and turned her head to look at Jack. Between the slats she could see the top of his flaxen head, then his eyes, then his mouth with its scrolled upper lip.
“Now what?” she asked.
“Now look out the window,” he said.
She twisted her head back a little to see out the arched window. The view was of the smoke-colored sky and, around the edges, the tops of the trees rocking in the wind. The dark clouds slowly slid past, making Roo feel like the boat was sailing in the opposite direction. Not sailing, really, but flying in the sky, just above the treetops.
Roo laughed.
“You see it?” he said, one delighted gray eye staring at her through the slat.
“Yes!” But she stopped laughing suddenly and sat up. “Pendragon.”
“What’s Pendragon?” Jack sat up too.
“A flying boat. It’s a story my father told me. The boat was red and yellow and it flew above the treetops….” She stared at Jack.
“Do you think he was here?” he asked.
Roo imagined her father winding through the river in his skiff, restless, fearless. His pale eyes always searching for something new. He would have found this place somehow. In his own way he was as wild as Jack.
“I’m sure he was.”
They both lay back down. Jack slipped his hand between a slat and held it out for her. She slid her hand out and took his, then turned back to the sky. The darkness was lifting. Bands of distilled sunlight were touching down on the wet pine needles, making them gleam silver.
“The rain’s stopping,” Roo said, turning back to Jack. He had been watching her, and now, caught, he blinked and his cheeks turned a deeper red. He looked upward at the thinning clouds.
“Not yet,” he said. But it was unclear if he was talking to Roo or to the sky.
The wind shifted and a purple-gray cloud, thick and mottled, moved across the sky. The light inside the boat dimmed, and Roo and Jack watched as Pendragon flew back into the storm, its hull just clearing the tops of the trees.