Word After Word After Word

  PATRICIA MACLACHLAN

  Word After

  Word After Word

  For Craig Virden.

  With love,

  P.M.

  I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.

  —Joan Didion

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Also by Patricia MacLachlan

  Author’s Note

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Chapter 1

  Some things happen in fours.

  On the fourth day of the fourth month after the winter holiday vacation, a famous writer came to our fourth-grade class. Her name was Ms. Mirabel. She liked the “Ms.” a lot. She hissed “Ms.” like Evie’s cat, Looley, hissed. I looked over at Evie and she was smiling. She had thought of Looley, too.

  Ms. Mirabel had long, troubled hair and a chest that pushed out in front of her like a grocery cart.

  “Did you always want to be a writer?” asked Henry.

  He smiled at me. Hen carried a notebook with him at all times, sometimes stopping in the middle of soccer practice to pull it out and write something.

  “No,” said Ms. Mirabel. “I wanted to be a stage performer or an electrical engineer.”

  “How much money do you make?” asked Evie.

  “Evie,” warned our teacher, Miss Cash. “That’s not a proper question to ask.”

  “That’s all right,” said Ms. Mirabel cheerfully. “I make enough to send my children to camp in the summer.”

  Evie frowned. She hated camp. She had once said that only cruel and uninterested parents sent their children off to camp in the summer. Evie knew firsthand. Her parents had sent her off to Camp Minnetuba the summer that they separated. When Evie returned home, her mother had moved out; her father lived there with Evie and her little brother, Thomas.

  “Temporary,” said her father and mother. “It has nothing to do with you.”

  Evie thought it had lots to do with her. From time to time her mother visited, but she never stayed very long.

  “Is what you write real?” asked May.

  Ms. Mirabel brightened. She liked that question.

  “Real or unreal. They’re just about the same,” said Ms. Mirabel. “They are both all about magical words!”

  She said words with a soft hush in her voice.

  “Do you write with an outline?” Russell asked.

  Ms. Mirabel laughed loudly. It was a sudden, startling laugh; and we all laughed, too.

  “Of course not,” she said. “Outlines are silly. Once you write the outline, there’s no reason to write the story. You write to participate . . . to find out what is going to happen!”

  Miss Cash frowned. This is not what she had taught us in creative writing class.

  “Actually, I loathe outlines!” said Ms. Mirabel with great feeling.

  Miss Cash closed her eyes as if her head hurt.

  And then Hen asked the question that made all the difference to us.

  “Why do you write?” he asked.

  Ms. Mirabel sighed. There was a sudden hush in the room, as if Ms. Mirabel was about to say something very important.

  As it turned out, she was.

  “I, myself, write to change my life, to make it come out the way I want it to,” she said. “But other people write for other reasons: to see more closely what it is they are thinking about, what they may be afraid of. Sometimes writers write to solve a problem, to answer their own question. All these reasons are good reasons. And that is the most important thing I’ll ever tell you. Maybe it is the most important thing you’ll ever hear. Ever.”

  “Some writers write to earn money,” said Evie.

  “They do,” said Ms. Mirabel. “But that is only one reason to write. And usually not the most important.”

  “What if we have nothing to write about?” I asked. “And how do we change life by writing?” I added.

  Miss Cash smiled.

  “Lucy doesn’t think her life is very interesting,” she said.

  My life wasn’t interesting. Unless you counted my mother’s cancer. Her cancer filled up the house these days. Sadness filled up my house. Sadness was all I knew. How could I change that?

  “Well, she’s wrong,” said Ms. Mirabel. She walked over to stand in front of me.

  “You have a story in there, Lucy,” she said, touching my head. “Or a character, a place, a poem, a moment in time. When you find it, you will write it. Word after word after word after word,” she whispered.

  The school bell rang. Ms. Mirabel jumped slightly. No one moved. Then, after a moment, Miss Cash took Ms. Mirabel’s arm and they went out the door. We all picked up our notebooks and went off to try to change our lives. Word after word after word.

  Chapter 2

  We sat under Henry’s huge lilac bush next to his house, the four of us: May and Henry, Evie and I. In a month or two, the smell of lilacs would fill the air.

  “So, what do you think?” I asked.

  No one said, “What do you think about what?” Everyone knew what I meant.

  “I like her,” said Evie. “Even if she sends her pathetic kids to camp all summer long.”

  “I think I love her,” said Henry. “She tells the truth.”

  “Or maybe not. Maybe she lies,” I pointed out.

  “Right,” said Hen, smiling. “Real and unreal are the same thing. So she says.”

  “What do you suppose that means?” asked May.

  No one answered.

  “Do you think she is happily married?” asked Evie thoughtfully. “She might be very good for my father.”

  “Evie, you can’t just pick out some woman for your father,” I said.

  “Why not?” said Evie. She turned and looked at me, her face fierce. “Why not?”

  Then her face crumpled and she began to cry.

  I put my arms around her.

  Henry’s mother, Junie, put her iced tea glass on the windowsill and leaned out.

  “Is everything all right out here?” she asked.

  “Fine,” said Henry.

  Junie, who knew better but didn’t say so, backed away through the window. Junie was the only mother we called by her first name because Henry did. And he called his father Max. Max worked at home because he loved Junie, and spent his time working on the computer and looking at Junie.

  “They are like kids,” said Hen once. “Sometimes I am the grown-up. I don’t mind.”

  The steam from a pie on the table rose out the window. I watched a drop of water slip down the glass of iced tea as Evie cried on my shoulder.

  After a while Evie stopped crying and leaned back. I could feel the sudden wet coolness the tears had left on the shoulder of my T-shirt.

  “I’m a big, fat crybaby,” said Evie loudly. “Big, fat crybaby.”

  “No,” I said at the same time May did.

  “You’re not fat,” said Henry.

  Evie began to laugh then; and we all laughed, leaning back under the lilac bush, getting leaves and bits of dirt in our hair.

  “Not fat at all,” repeated Hen, making us laugh harder. I could almost see the laughter as it rose up and wound around the branches of the lilac bush, touching the blooms before lifting up to the sky. I took out my noteb
ook.

  Sadness is

  Steam rising,

  Tears falling.

  A breath you take in

  But can’t let out

  As hard as you try.

  —Lucy

  Chapter 3

  The class was quiet—no coughing, no rustling of papers—at the sight of Ms. Mirabel. She wore a bright pink jacket trimmed with what looked like feathers. She wore long earrings that had feathers, too. Maybe she would fly around the room, words falling like bird droppings on all of us.

  “I am going to sit in the back today,” said Miss Cash. “It will be Ms. Mirabel’s class. Think of her as your teacher. She will be visiting us for six weeks, sometimes on a daily basis. At times she’ll be in charge of the class. Sometimes I will be.”

  The windows were open, and the breezes rippled the feathers on Ms. Mirabel.

  “I’m going to read some things to you,” said Ms. Mirabel. “Words. Some I hope you will like. You may not like some of what I read. You don’t have to like everything.”

  We all looked at one another. Miss Cash had never told us we didn’t have to like the things she read. I looked quickly at Miss Cash, but her face was still and stony.

  “Some words may make you happy, some may make you sad. Maybe some will make you angry. What I hope”—a sudden gust of wind made Ms. Mirabel’s hair lift—“what I hope is that something will whisper in your ear.”

  “What does that mean?” asked Russell.

  Miss Cash sighed loud enough for me to hear. Russell always asked questions that made Miss Cash sigh.

  Ms. Mirabel didn’t sigh. She smiled brightly.

  “You will know,” she said.

  Surprisingly, Russell grinned back at Ms. Mirabel as if they had a secret pact. Quietly, Miss Cash got up and opened the door at the back of the room and was gone.

  Ms. Mirabel looked at us. “First, a place.

  “The barn was very large. It was very old. It smelled of hay and it smelled of manure. It smelled of the perspiration of tired horses and the wonderful sweet breath of patient cows.”

  “Charlotte’s Web,” someone whispered excitedly.

  “I knew that,” said Russell.

  “Now, a moment, a time, a place,” said Ms. Mirabel.

  “The road that led to Treegap had been trod out long before by a herd of cows who were, to say the least, relaxed. It wandered along in curves and easy angles, swayed off and up in a pleasant tangent to the top of a small hill, ambled down again between fringes of bee-hung clover, and then cut sidewise across a meadow.

  “Characters,” said Ms. Mirabel. And she began to read.

  “‘Did Mama sing every day?’ asked Caleb. ‘Every-single-day?’ He sat close to the fire, his chin in his hand. It was dusk, and the dogs lay beside him on the warm hearthstones.

  “‘Every-single-day,’ I told him for the second time this week. For the twentieth time this month. The hundredth time this year? And the past few years?

  “‘And did Papa sing, too?’

  “‘Yes, Papa sang, too. Don’t get so close, Caleb. You’ll heat up.’

  “He pushed his chair back. It made a hollow scraping sound on the hearthstones, and the dogs stirred. Lottie, small and black, wagged her tail and lifted her head. Nick slept on.

  “I turned the bread dough over and over on the marble slab on the kitchen table.

  “‘Well, Papa doesn’t sing anymore,’ said Caleb very softly.”

  I smiled. I knew that story.

  “Now a memory,” said Ms. Mirabel.

  “The memory is this: a blue blanket in a basket that pricks her bare legs, and the world turning over as she tumbles out. A flash of trees, sky, clouds, and the hard driveway of dirt and gravel. Then she is lifted up and up and held tight. Kind faces, she remembers, but that might be the later memory of her imagination. Still, when the memory comes, sometimes many times a night and in the day, the arms that hold her are always safe.”

  Ms. Mirabel smiled. “And a poem,” she said.

  “A nut

  My poem.

  When cracked you’ll find inside

  Words

  Whispers

  People

  Place

  That tuck in snugly to make

  Story.”

  Ms. Mirabel read on and on, some things I’d heard before, some things I hadn’t. The breezes came in and around us like the words Ms. Mirabel spoke. No one moved, even when the bell rang for lunch.

  Ms. Mirabel stopped.

  “Maybe tomorrow some of you will bring your writing. You don’t have to read it if you don’t want to. I can read it for you. When we talk about it, we will be very kind. We will talk about what we like, and we will ask questions.”

  Ms. Mirabel waved her arm toward the door, her bird feathers rippling. “Go,” she said.

  And we went.

  Hollow boned

  Birds

  Sing!

  Until the sun falls down.

  They tuck themselves under the

  Green leaves of trees

  And sleep until the sun calls

  them to

  Sing again!

  —Henry

  Chapter 4

  We sat in Evie’s bedroom, Evie hiding behind the curtain, looking across the yard to the house next door. A woman was moving things inside.

  “A new neighbor. She looks healthy,” said Evie. “She has short, curly, yellow hair. Actually, she’s beautiful.”

  “Not that it matters,” reminded Henry.

  “Of course,” said Evie. “My father doesn’t need a beautiful woman. Just a woman.”

  May and I laughed.

  Evie’s cat, Looley, came in, saw us, and hissed before he began to frantically lick himself.

  Evie’s brother, Thomas, came, too, carrying two empty pots from the kitchen. He sat them down and began stirring each with a wooden spoon. The light came in the window and touched his blond hair. He was short and stocky like a rain boot.

  “Hello, Thomas,” said Henry. “What’s up?”

  “Soup,” said Thomas seriously.

  “Two pots of soup?” asked Henry.

  Thomas nodded as he stirred.

  “One is good. One is bad,” said Thomas.

  “Which is which?” I asked.

  Thomas looked up and smiled.

  “Guess.”

  We laughed. Evie smiled as her father came into the room to scoop up Thomas. He leaned down to kiss Evie on the top of her head.

  “We’re going for a bike ride,” he said.

  “Look, Papa,” said Evie. “An interesting woman is moving in next door.”

  Her father leaned next to her to peer out the window.

  “Ah, yes,” he said.

  After they left, Evie smiled at us.

  “He said ‘ah’—did you hear?”

  “Your father always says ‘ah,’ Evie,” I said.

  Outside, her father rode down the driveway, past our window, Thomas sitting on a seat behind him wearing a helmet.

  “I don’t have one thing in the world to write about,” said May. “My life is the same, day in, day out.”

  “You’re lucky,” said Evie.

  “You could make up something drastic,” said Hen.

  “Drastic?” said May. “Like what?”

  Hen shrugged.

  “Disaster. Violence. Alienation,” said Henry promptly. “I read those words on the back of an adult novel the other day.”

  “I don’t have any of that,” said May.

  “How about this,” said Henry, frowning. “How about I push you. A little violence.”

  May laughed.

  “Do you see any kid stuff? Bicycles, toys?” I asked Evie, knowing that is what she was looking for.

  “Nothing!”

  Evie came out from behind the curtain and looked at us.

  “She’s single,” she announced matter- of-factly. “I know it!”

  “Evie,” said May, “what if your father doesn�
�t want a new woman?”

  May’s voice was so quiet that we all looked up. There was silence. Evie’s face was still and thoughtful. Finally, she picked up her notebook. She opened it.

  “I have a character anyway. Like Ms. Mirabel says.”

  She wrote something down.

  I looked out the window and watched the woman next door carry a box into the house. A cloud passed over the sun, darkening the grass and trees for a moment.

  “Her name is Sassy DeMello,” said Evie.

  “Sassy DeMello??!” hooted Henry. “What kind of a name is Sassy?”

  “Do you mean your character’s name or the name of the woman next door?” I asked.

  “Both,” said Evie. “I like Sassy. She looks a bit like a Sassy.”

  We burst out laughing, but Evie ignored us. She put down her notebook and walked to the window to look out.

  “What do you think?”

  “I think you are a very funny girl,” said Hen. “And probably you will be an amusing writer.”

  Evie turned to grin at Henry. She hadn’t smiled much lately, and we all smiled back at her. Then she got serious. It was a little like the cloud passing over the sun again.

  “But Henry,” she said. “This isn’t funny.”

  “I know,” said Hen.

  She has come here after a sad time. Sassy has left much behind: her home, her life, the friends who made her smile. The sun lights up her loneliness. But she won’t be lonely for long. I will save her.

  I will save my father, too.

  —Evie

  Chapter 5

  The next day May came to school with a grim look, and Russell came with his writing.

  “May? You look thunderous,” said Henry.

  “Hen, you’ve been reading the dictionary,” I said.

  “I have.”

  “My very, very, very dumb mother is going to adopt a very, very dumb baby,” said May.

  “Too many verys,” said Hen.