Chapter 1
On the day her father died, Alice had updated her list of treasures.
From her earliest years, Alice was a child who liked ritual. Every year, the day before her birthday, she took the opportunity to look over the wooden shelf above the bookcase her father had made, upon which sat the treasures.
They were all tiny, no bigger than her thumb.
The china animals looked like real animals, glossy, glazed, fixed in time.
The rest were trinkets acquired by her father in different places – county fairs, antique shops – or relics from her parents’ past. Some of the animals were decorated with gold paint; some, like the cats, had painted human faces, curling Betty Boop eyelashes.
The elephant, with his smooth, glistening quartz body, or the black bird were her favourites – probably the black bird.
He was slightly larger; he had come from England, in the war, and had a chip off his wing, which was how she knew the animals were hollow inside.
Their house, Alice’s home, was not theirs. It was owned by another family, and so the treasures were more important because of that. They told the story of her family, of Alice, Betsy and Bob Jansen, where they had come from, and where they were going.
That morning, when Alice woke up, she looked out the tiny window in her little bedroom down at the apple orchards that stretched to the river.
Her dad was already walking among the trees, hands on hips, gazing up at the gnarled branches where the small tight apples were scant amid the leaves.
He was staring, glassy-eyed, as though not really seeing them.
She wanted to shout down at him, a joke, or something, to make him see the beauty of the scene, and to forget the worry of the letters from the bank.
But something stopped her; she didn’t know what. Afterwards she always wished she had.
It was her birthday tomorrow: she would be sixteen.
She wanted a deer for her collection, another bird like the black one, a pair of leather thong sandals, the new Beatles album and some money, because everyone else seemed to have money.
After school, she was going for a sundae at Mackie’s with her dad, as she always did, and she would be asking him for a birthday favour.
Until it happened, for the rest of the day, in fact, it was a good day.
Mr Fitzgerald, the sweaty, tweed-jacketed, elbow-patched history teacher, had let them off a test on the Civil War.
Diane Hendricks, who had been so mean lately, ever since she started ironing her long, already-straight hair, wearing a kaftan and calling herself Sky, had invited her over on the weekend to listen to all the Beatles’ back catalogue in preparation for Help!
, which Diane’s dad had heard (because he worked in advertising and had once met Dusty Springfield and was therefore a reliable source) was the name of the new Beatles album.
And, out of the blue, there was a new girl in their class.
Attending now would help her to settle in before school went back in the fall, which perhaps explained why she did nothing but gaze out the window, chewing gum.
She was called Dolores Delaney. Her parents were divorced, and her mom had moved them back to her hometown of Orchard from Chicago.
Diane hadn’t invited Dolores to her house, she said, because her mom said Dolores was trashy.
At recess Alice found herself walking out with Dolores. ‘Hi,’ she said.
‘Oh, hi,’ said Dolores in a cheerful, Chicagoan accent, still chewing her gum. ‘I gotta say, I love your outfit.’
‘Really?’
‘Sure. It’s cool.’
Alice knew she was pretty, or what other people thought of as pretty, because she had long pale gold hair, and green eyes, and was slim, and tall.
It alternately amused and annoyed her that she was rewarded for it – she saw it in the way people looked at her, now she was almost sixteen.
As if she was worthy of praise for genetics beyond her control.
However, she knew she was not cool. And she wanted to be cool, as much as other girls wanted to be slim, or blonde, because, whatever you were, you weren’t enough – all of them had that in common at least.
She looked down at her green shirt-waister dress, which she had painstakingly dyed over the weekend to match the checkered knee-high patterned stocking-socks in brown and green, and her brown loafers. Her mom had had to help her, after the dye got everywhere and Alice had given up in despair.
‘Oh, this,’ she said, shrugging, feeling a glow of pleasure at this unusual peer-to-peer praise. ‘Thanks, that’s real nice of you.’
‘It’s true. Bye, Alice. I gotta go,’ said Dolores, pushing past her and waving, stomping off down the hallway. She wore all black: black boots, a curvaceous black dress and a red scarf around her neck. She fell into step with Jack Maynard, and Alice watched them walk away together.
Jack Maynard was the cutest boy in class, in the whole school, in fact. The previous week he had asked her, Alice Jansen, to the senior prom. He was a senior, but had asked her, a sophomore, and she had still not asked her dad if she could go.
The Maynards lived in a big house, Crossings, on the same side of town as Alice, and sometimes she and Jack would meet and walk the trail through the woods by the Hudson into Orchard together.
He had long, long eyelashes, clear bright blue eyes, thick dark blond hair that fell in his face.
Alice had even seen her mom staring at Jack Maynard; she was amazed everyone didn’t stare at him.
She was amazed too that, in all the thousands of books she had read in her almost sixteen years on the planet, writers constantly talked about how beautiful this young woman or that was, and didn’t write about how beautiful young men were.
She knew it was hypocritical to think this about him, when she found other people’s appraisal of her based on looks boring, but there was no getting away from it – he was a dreamboat.
He liked books too. He wasn’t into that California pop; he loved Bob Dylan, and the Kinks, and talking about stone circles in England.
Alice wanted to go to Stonehenge more than anywhere else.
Jack did too; he liked The Once and Future King and Lord of the Rings and he even had a small metal figurine of a wizard he’d got in a playset for Christmas one year.
He carried it around with him for good luck.
She knew because he’d dropped it a couple months ago coming back from track, and she’d found it, and he’d thanked her, and that’s how they’d first gotten talking.
‘Hey: please don’t tell anyone else about Merlin,’ he’d said.
‘Merlin?’
‘This guy.’ He’d opened his palm to show her the figurine.
Most of the paint had worn off. ‘It’s kind of a comfort thing.
I know if he’s there in my pocket, nothing bad can happen.
’ And he’d smiled at her, and his golden hair had fallen in his face; she noticed it was getting longer, like a lot of other boys’ hair in Orchard that summer.
His cheeks were pink, burned by the sun, fading into his tanned face. ‘Don’t you have anything like that?’
‘I do,’ she said, laughing, and his face relaxed.
‘You do?’
‘Yeah. I call them the treasures. Different ornaments and special … things.’ She felt herself going red. ‘It sounds lame.’
‘It’s not.’
‘They’re like … my good-luck charms.’
‘That’s cool. What’s your favourite?’
Alice thought for a moment. ‘I like the black bird. He’s mean-looking. But he’s beautiful too. And he’s got a bit missing where someone dropped him. He’s from England,’ she added.
‘Where do you keep them?’
‘On a shelf my dad built for them. My dad gives me a new one every year for my birthday. I never know what it’s going to be. He takes me to Mackie’s for a sundae, then gives me a clue and I have to find it.’
‘So you don’t carry them around?’
‘I don’t want them to get damaged. Or maybe I don’t think anything bad’s going to happen.’
He’d laughed. ‘I think that all the time.’ And he slipped Merlin back into his pocket, and they’d smiled at each other.
The following week he’d caught up with her again and asked her to the dance. ‘It’s cool if you can’t go,’ he’d said. ‘I thought it might be fun.’
‘Yes,’ said Alice, nodding furiously, smiling at him. ‘I’ll ask my mom but I’d love to come with you.’
‘No, absolutely not, you’re too young, and he’s a senior,’ her mother had said. Alice, normally easy going, pliant even, had slammed her bedroom door and shouted, once inside, ‘You never let me do anything !’
This had been six weeks ago. She’d told Jack yes, though, the following week at school. She was definitely going. She thought the best way was to ask her dad when he was around, and the birthday sundae at Mackie’s was the perfect opportunity.
Sometimes her dad wasn’t well and had to stay in their bedroom, at the top of the tall, thin gatehouse where they lived.
Once, he was in bed for a long time, and then he went away for a whole week, and when he came back he was real strange, like something from those zombie movies Mom hated.
But soon he was back to being kind, and fun, and making plans.
He was always making plans, her father. For the orchards he’d taken over, and where they’d live, and what Alice might want to do with her life, and what pies to bake; he was a good cook, making the apple pies, the apple sauce, the apple butter and cider and juice that had given him the idea to buy back the orchards from the Kynastons that had been in his family in the first place.