Chapter 2
Dear Dad,
I’ve been looking for that treasure like you said and I still can’t find it. It’s been twelve weeks and three days. I guess I need another clue.
I sat on the porch at Valhalla with Teddy again today. I like it there. The seats, they smell of old warmth, you know? Woodsmoke and polish and fresh air. And you can see down to the river, clear across to the other side. Mavis says Teddy waits for me.
What do Teddy and I talk about? She’s my age, when we talk.
Look who’s back, my partner in crime, Miss Alice Jansen.
‘How are you today, Teddy? I cut the last two classes. Math and History. I like History. It’s Mrs Finkelstein. I think you know her, don’t you? But I didn’t feel like staying. So I thought I’d come to see you instead. I like your skirt, Teddy.’
Alice picked up a piece of candy from the bench. It was root-beer-flavoured hard candy, covered with sherbet sugar. She had bought it for Teddy on the way back from school, but she intended to eat it, of course. Exhilaration at her rebellion suffused her.
Teddy lay back on the porch seat, propping up the throw pillows behind her.
She folded one leg underneath herself. Her hair, short and shining brown, gleamed like metal against the mustard-coloured pillows.
I die slowly of ennui, Alice, that’s how I am.
You’re lucky, having school. One time, there was a meningitis outbreak at school and we were sent home for the rest of the semester.
I taught myself Russian while we were back home.
It came in rather useful, during the war.
I’d give anything to be at school again.
Anything. Wilder hated school, thought it was a waste of his time.
I adored it. That photograph of me in the den, that’s me on my first day at Farmington, Miss Porter’s, you know.
Aren’t I a dear little thing? You must go to school, Alice. It’s the only way out.
‘I don’t care. I hate school.’
When I’m with her, Teddy is clever, sparkling, darned ornery sometimes about being a Kynaston and life here in Orchard.
I can ask her anything, Dad, and she tells me.
Mavis is really kind to her. She’s on her own a lot with her because Mr K is away so much.
I heard her on the phone to her sister. Mavis doesn’t like being there.
She doesn’t like the house, all tucked away in the woods, and now that you’re gone too they hardly have visitors.
She told me you were her friend, hers and Teddy’s.
I like Mavis. She talks to me about you.
Because no one else does, Dad. It’s as though you never existed.
Alice, when did Orchard become so provincial?
I declare, it’s getting worse and worse.
Billboards on Main Street … more and more stores closing …
those ghastly housewives in their station wagons with their small narrow minds and their small, awful kids …
When Wilder and I were little it was a community, you know, of interesting people, the crème de la crème of New York, the writers and artists and everyone in between.
I wish the summer were over. I adore New York in fall. You should go sometime, Alice.
Everyone was angry with Alice, all because her dad had died, it seemed.
Although Alice wasn’t close to Diane Hendricks any more, she was still taken aback when, over the summer, Diane had dropped her, as though Alice had done something terribly wrong by having a dead father.
Diane had told everyone Jack Maynard was going to ask her to the prom because Alice couldn’t go – but he’d asked Dolores Delaney, the new girl, instead.
And Diane was more furious than ever with Alice as a result.
Other people crossed roads to avoid her and her mom: they swerved away in hallways, ignored Betsy Jansen in parking lots when she waved cheerily at someone who’d been a friend for twenty years.
There had been one day a couple of weeks ago, right before Labor Day, when her mother had started wailing in Denny’s Golden Delicious, the grocery.
Just wailing, like a banshee baby, a crazy high wavering noise like the time a goat got stuck in a tree in the orchards:
‘Booooooobbbb, BOBBBBBBB, Bobbbb, ohhhh, Bbbbooobbbb.’
No one had taken any notice. Not one person. The cashier had simply smiled when they got to the checkout.
‘Good morning, Mrs Jansen, it’s Timmy today packing for us, may I have him pack up your shopping for you? Thank you so much!’
Her mother, wet-faced, pasty, deflated by grief as if all the air had been let out of her heart-shaped face, had simply nodded.
At the back of the store, the Byrds were playing on the radio. To everything turn, turn, turn, there is a season …
There were lots of things her father had told her when he was alive – not enough, as it turned out, because she kept wanting to ask him questions twenty, thirty times a day.
Where was the good hammer with the wooden handle her grandfather had made?
What do you do with apple peelings, and was Mr Ford at the bottling place up toward Hudson cheating them with his prices for the apple sauce and the cider?
Where were the last two treasures? (Teddy and Sevenstones.
What kind of clues were those?) And why was Teddy the way she was?
Her dad had told her, but she wasn’t sure she remembered it right.
She wasn’t sure she remembered anything right now.
Finally, how could she help her mom, because she didn’t want her mother to be locked up?
That was the only way things could be worse.
Alice had said, ‘Mom, people are staring –’
‘Oh, Bob,’ her mother said with a small exhalation, and Alice, beside her, felt her heart hurting, and wished she could just vanish, completely disappear. But then her mom had patted her own face, as if someone had pulled a string in her back. ‘Thank you so much, Timmy!’
‘Have a nice day!’ the cashier had told them, nodding as if to dismiss them as they exited, and her mother instantly started crying again on the lonely, silent walk back along the busy road toward the gatehouse.
Alice and her mom had passed other people – Carly Gianotti and her mom, Jane, Mrs Cooper, the mayor’s wife, the Logan twins, giggling on their bikes – as they walked past, eyes down, heads bowed, straggling along the road, her mother still openly crying, but no one said anything to them and Alice knew then no one was there for them.
To Alice, what was strangest of all was that they didn’t know what to say to her about her dad, about the one and only Bob Jansen, who always walked with his fists sunk into his jacket pockets so it looked like he was carrying toffee apples; who, in fact, made the best toffee apples; who served the best punch in town at the town hall meetings, who knew all the words to every musical, especially My Fair Lady and Oklahoma!
and of course The Sound of Music , who had a photo of him and Oscar Hammerstein shaking hands on the mantel above the range in their kitchen, who knew everyone , from Dolores’s mom, Mrs Delaney, when she was Lana O’Reilly, to Griff Cooper, the mayor, to the Maynards and the Olsens and …
everyone . So the idea of Jane Gianotti, Jane Hicks as had been, who had known Bob Jansen all his life and had held Alice as a baby, pretending she didn’t know them, it was, well, it was very strange.
They had been the Jansens, but they weren’t now: it was the two of them, Betsy and Alice. And it never sounded right. Because it wasn’t right. None of it was right.
The sultry, soupy air.
A deer, blinking at them in the clear evening light.
A scream, which, she’d heard afterwards, had come from Mrs Olsen, walking back home, spotting him and realizing what was about to happen.
How had she known when Alice hadn’t? Alice never did find out, because, once again, no one said anything.
But Mrs Olsen had screamed. She had screamed his name, wanting to help. Bob!
Then these dark, muddy images about what had happened next would start to creep into the edges of Alice’s clear, circular pool of thoughts, and when that started she had to block them out.
The apples are nearly in. We have to pick the last of them tonight.
You did a good job, Dad. I wish you were here to see it.
I wish I could ask you about the Beatles’ new album, about what college I should apply to, about what to say to Mom in the evenings.
I don’t have anything to say to her. I’ve got Teddy to talk to, I guess, even though the treasures still haven’t turned up, and she doesn’t seem to know anything about them.
When I was talking to Teddy today, she mentioned college.
She said Mr Kynaston could help me. I wondered if he would.
Teddy went to Vassar, but that was before the war.
She thinks I’d like Barnard. She says Berkeley is too full of commies, but that I might like that too.
I don’t think Mom would approve, though!
Mom doesn’t approve of so many things now, but that was different before you left us, Dad.
I remember her being barefoot a lot when we first moved here, don’t you?
I remember her dancing through the orchards with bare feet the day we moved in.
Mom, in bare feet, outside! She was laughing.
Her hair was longer. Didn’t you two used to get all dressed up and go into the city to dance?
Is that right? I can’t remember, and I can’t ask her, and I can’t ask you.
‘You knew my dad growing up, Teddy, didn’t you?’