Bigger than a Bread Box Page 14

  I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know what I had done. What had happened to her? How could I help? I felt like I should comfort her, but I was scared to touch her.

  “I was only trying to—” I started, reaching out a hand.

  Miss Adda jerked her head up, and her eyes opened wide. “Cruel!” she shouted. “You horrid girl. You … grave robber!” Then she reached up and raged at me with her bony little arms, the way Lew does when he’s having a temper tantrum. She was almost like a baby, helpless, waving her arms in the air.

  Even so, I was scared. Her arms scared me suddenly, those twiggy, pale, helpless arms. I didn’t want them to touch me and I panicked. I leaned away from those spotted, tiny hands, stretching back, back, back—and fell.

  The green curtain brushed lightly against my back, and then cold air whipped past me, enclosed me, as I felt myself falling and tumbling, clattering down a flight of stairs my feet couldn’t seem to find. My knees banged against a step and then another as the side of my face slapped into a wall. I managed to twist myself, grabbing wildly, and I caught hold of a splintery railing, stopping myself from falling any farther. Then I knelt like that. Just like that, clutching the railing, halfway down the stairs. I just needed to hold on to something. I could feel my nose bleeding. I could taste blood. My arms were scraped. I felt like one big bruise. What had just happened?

  I looked above me, squinting up the stairs. I saw Miss Adda’s thin body silhouetted in a rectangle of light, holding aside the curtain. Her voice sounded witchlike as she called down at me, “You can just wait there!”

  A door slammed shut and I was lost in total darkness. It was like something from one of the mystery novels I’d been reading.

  All I could think was, Grave robber?

  CHAPTER 20

  I sat there on the step and felt at my legs and arms. I clenched and unclenched my hands. Nothing was broken. Nothing hurt badly enough to be serious. So I sat there in the pitch black, tilting my head and pinching my nose and trying to figure out what had just happened.

  “Grave robber?” I whispered. That didn’t make any sense at all. Maybe Miss Adda was just plain bonkers. Maybe I’d stumbled into the home of a truly sick person. Maybe she had Alzheimer’s. Maybe she had multiple personalities or something scary like that. She had changed her mood so suddenly! I thought about the dead bird and what she’d said about “seeing all the greens.” She wasn’t okay. I could see that now.

  But crazy or not, even though I was banged up pretty badly and I wanted out of that basement, I still felt sorry for her. Poor old lady. Waving her arms and screeching, she seemed so lost and wild and sad. I thought about her shuffling through the broken teacups, the dusty silk flower in the vase, the powdered milk.

  Still, I had to get out!

  I pushed myself to standing and inched my way back up the stairs. I kept one hand on the rough wooden railing and the other hand flat against the cement wall beside me, trying to find a light switch. Instead I found that the wall beside the staircase was hung with heavy metal tools. I felt a big wrench and a shovel. I knocked something small, like a screwdriver, loose and listened to it fall down the steps in a series of clunks and thunks. I’d been lucky in my fall. I could have easily smashed my head into a rusty saw.

  Reaching the top, I felt the kitchen door against my shoulder. I grabbed for where the doorknob should have been, but there wasn’t a doorknob to grab on to, just a wedge of wood. I pushed against the door with all my strength and it shook, but the latch didn’t give way. It was dead bolted or something. I was trapped.

  I ran my hands along the wall all around the door, thinking there had to be a light switch somewhere, but when at last I found one, it clicked uselessly. I guess Miss Adda wasn’t tall enough to change the lightbulb. There were an awful lot of things someone like Miss Adda probably couldn’t do.

  It had been horrible, watching her shift from a nice old lady into a crazy person. She hadn’t seemed violent, but she was so old. Maybe the shock of seeing that spoon had just pushed her over the edge. I didn’t think she’d meant to hurt me or trap me in the dark. She was like a cat or something, lashing out with her little claws.

  Finally I did the only thing I could think of—I knocked at the door, as though it were a normal door, the front door of a house, as though I were starting over, paying Miss Adda a regular visit.

  “Miss Adda?” I called out. “Hello? Miss Adda?”

  It felt bizarre to knock from inside that dark cellar.

  When she didn’t respond, I put my ear to the crack of the door and pushed gently with my shoulder. The door didn’t budge.

  On the other side, Miss Adda was sobbing quietly. She sounded like some kind of old, broken machine. Her cries were tiny jerking sounds, little tugs and chokes.

  “Miss Adda?”

  “What do you want now?” she called out.

  I thought that was pretty obvious. I wanted out. But I didn’t say that. Instead I said, “I want to apologize. I’m sorry, Miss Adda. I really am.…”

  She just kept crying.

  I tried again. “Please? Let me out?”

  This time the crying stopped. “You have to wait,” she said. “For the police.”

  Had she really called the police? “But … I’m scared down here,” I said. “It’s dark.”

  “So? What isn’t?” asked Miss Adda.

  “Please,” I said. “Let me out. You don’t need to call the police. I didn’t mean to steal anything,” I said. “It was an accident.”

  “How can that be?” cried Miss Adda with a sad little laugh. “How do you steal something by accident?” Miss Adda blew her nose, then continued. “How do you accidentally rob a casket?”

  It was my turn to be bewildered. “Casket?”

  “I buried that spoon with him myself,” she said. “Slid it into his pocket just before they closed him up, just before I kissed him goodbye.” She started to cry again, shuddering through the words. “Before they slid him into that cold, cold ground forever.”

  Then I understood, and shivered. I remembered the cold, thin metal of that spoon the first time I held it. I remembered taking it out of the bread box and pressing it against my cheek. I could almost feel it between my fingers now, and I wanted to throw up in the darkness, knowing where the spoon had come from: a dark, cold place in the earth.

  Miss Adda kept talking. “It was the finest thing he ever gave me, for our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. You might just think it’s a spoon, but it isn’t. It’s very rare. Valuable. A special spoon. It was his mother’s to begin with, but he had it engraved for me. So then I gave it back to him, when he left me. To keep. Until I could join him.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “And you took it from him, just like that! So now I’m going to call the police on you, like I would for any thief!” I heard her pick up a phone, heard the faint sound of a bell as she lifted the old-fashioned receiver. I wondered what on earth the police would do when they came. Would they believe her? And even if they didn’t, how would I explain any of this to my mom when I came home in a squad car?

  “Please, just let me out,” I said. “I’ll try to explain.”

  “No!” said Miss Adda. “You can wait for them to come and take you away—you can wait down there in the dark. Alone. Like poor Harlan. Besides, how can you possibly explain?”

  I shivered. I couldn’t tell if she’d hung up the phone.

  “I … didn’t mean to,” I said quietly. “It’s so complicated. I did steal it, I guess, but I didn’t know I was doing it. I made a mistake. I was wrong. I was selfish, and I’m sorry. But I wasn’t trying to take your spoon.”

  I was sorry. I shouldn’t have taken the spoon. I shouldn’t have taken anything. I regretted it all now. The magic only made everything worse. Wishes were curses. I took a deep breath. Miss Adda didn’t understand, and she never would unless … Should I tell her everything? The truth was all I had left, and maybe, maybe she’d let me out if she understoo
d what had really happened. Was there any chance she was crazy enough to believe me?

  “Would you believe me,” I asked, “if I told you it was magic?”

  She didn’t answer me at first. So I knocked at the door again and said, “Miss Adda? Did you hear what I said?”

  “I … I might,” she said at last. “I might believe you.”

  So I told her. I told her everything. It all came tumbling out, the whole mess of a story. I told her about the fight and the move, about hiding in the attic and finding the bread box, about the seagulls that first night, and everything after …

  It took a minute before Miss Adda said, “I don’t … know. I don’t know if I can believe that.” She took a deep, shuddery breath, the kind of breath that means you’re done crying. “But I’d like to.”

  I heard her return the phone to its cradle. Had she been holding it the whole time?

  “It’s true,” I said. “I don’t understand it myself, but it’s all true.”

  “I want to believe you. I do,” said Miss Adda. “Because maybe if I can believe you, if I can believe in magic, the way I believe in other things—trees, or rocks, or pancakes, or my tired body, or anything else I know is real—maybe if I can believe in magic, I can believe all the other things I see. Does that sound crazy?”

  It did sound crazy. Totally nuts. But I could tell she was standing just on the other side of the door now, inches away from me. I could hear her breathing between sentences. I thought she might still open the door.

  “No, it doesn’t sound crazy to me,” I said through the crack. I tried to make my voice sound as kind as I could. “It doesn’t sound crazy at all.”

  Miss Adda kept talking. “Have you ever lost someone you loved?” she asked me.

  “I have,” I said. For a moment I could smell my father in the dark stairwell, the smoke on his shirt, though it was probably just the lingering smoke from the cab on my own clothes. “I have.” I knew it wasn’t what Miss Adda meant, but it felt true.

  “I’m so alone,” said Miss Adda. “And it’s so hard. Waking up each day. Knowing that I’ll never see him again in this world. That all the things I never said to him are inside me, waiting, and they will just have to live there forever, unsaid. Thinking of all the things we can never do again together. The cup of coffee I’ll never bring him. The umbrella he’ll never hold over my head in the rain.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. I didn’t know what else to say.

  “I am too,” came the sad voice from the other side of the door. “I am too.”

  Then Miss Adda got lost in her memories, I guess, the coffee and the rain, because she started to cry again. Her weeping got fainter and fainter. I could tell she was walking away. I heard her shuffling again in the shards of china.

  “Miss Adda?” I called out, panicked. “Hello? Are you still there?”

  It was too late. She didn’t answer me this time. Maybe because she didn’t hear me, or maybe because she was drowning in the past, lost in her memories.

  I stood there in the dark at the top of the stairs, waiting. Then I realized there was nothing to wait for, and I started to yell. “HELLLLLLLLLP!” I called out as loud as I could. “HELLLLLLLLLLLLP! Please, let me out!” But as loud as I was, nobody came.

  Finally my voice got hoarse and I gave up on Miss Adda. I made my way back down the stairs to where I’d felt the wrench hanging on the wall and I took it down. Then I went back to the door and began to hit at the old wood near the dead bolt, right at the crack where the door met the frame. At first I was tapping more than pounding. The wrench was so heavy I was almost afraid I might throw my weight too far back and fall down the stairs again. But the more I tapped, the more confident I got, until I was really banging at that door. I could feel splinters and flakes of paint chipping. I could feel the door heaving. Small bits of wood began to fall to the ground. At some point I realized that I would eventually break through, unless Miss Adda got sick of hearing me bang and let me out.

  I thought about everything that had happened. BANG! About the bread box and the spoon. BANG! About my dad. BANG! About my mom. I thought about what I’d say to Mom and to Dad, about the things I wasn’t mad about anymore and the things I still was.

  I started to get hungry, so then I thought about how I wanted a hamburger. BANG! It must be dinnertime by now. BANG! I thought about making my hamburger a cheeseburger.

  I wondered how long I’d been gone. I wondered what my mom was doing. BANG! Maybe she was still mad enough that she didn’t care. BANG! BANG!

  I was banging so hard I didn’t hear what was happening on the other side of the door. Suddenly the door flew open.

  Light flooded into my eyes, and I squinted in the bright glare, my wrench raised. I almost pounded into the chest of a very tall man in a police uniform. He stared down at me in surprise as I dropped my wrench. We studied each other in silence as the tool thumped down the basement steps behind me.

  “Who are you?” the policeman asked. His teeth were very white in his dark face, even in the shadow of the basement stairwell, and his voice was gentle.

  Behind him, another officer, a woman with a blond ponytail, was struggling to walk Miss Adda away. Miss Adda was crying.

  I looked back up at the cop in front of me, confused.

  “Who are you?” he asked again.

  Still I didn’t answer.

  “You okay?” he asked kindly.

  Then I started to cry. I couldn’t help it. I didn’t even try to help it, not this time. I just fell apart. He was so big and strong-looking. I was, well, a kid who’d fallen down half a flight of stairs and then been locked in a strange basement. I lost it.

  The policeman seemed to take everything in—my bloody nose, my messy hair, my tears—and he leaned forward and scooped me up, as easily as if I were Lew, and carried me out of that awful house in his big arms, through the green kitchen and the gross hallway, past Miss Adda arguing with the other officer on the front steps. I remember his badge scratching my arm. I closed my eyes and let myself be carried.

  The policeman set me down on the sidewalk, next to his squad car, a little ways from the house. The sunlight was almost gone. It was cold outside, and I’d left my jacket in the kitchen, but it felt good, all that cold, fresh air. I sucked it in and looked around. The officer who’d carried me out was hunting around in the car for something, so I just waited.

  Behind me, I could hear the policewoman wrestling Miss Adda away, through the yard and down the street. I didn’t want to see Miss Adda, so I didn’t turn around until she really started yelling. Then I looked down the block and saw the policewoman was trying to get her into another squad car.

  Everything was happening very fast, too fast. I watched Miss Adda, in her blue dress and soggy slippers, slap at the officer. She looked different outside her house. She looked worse somehow, more crazy. Her bun had come loose, and her hair looked like the fake spiderwebs people decorate with on Halloween.

  It was my fault, this mess, whatever was happening to Miss Adda. None of this would be happening if I hadn’t come here and scared her. I noticed her skinny legs sticking out of the car door after the rest of her was pushed inside. I could hear her manic voice, from a distance, yelling, “No! No! She’s the one. Take her. She took my spoon! With her magic! My spooooooooon!”

  The other squad car drove off with Miss Adda, leaving behind a sad old slipper on the sidewalk. I didn’t want to look at the slipper, so I turned to stare at the nice policeman who was climbing back out of his car. He was holding a gigantic blue sweater, which he handed to me.

  “How did you know to come here?” I asked, wiping my nose with my arm before putting on the too-large sweater. “How did you find me?”

  “Actually,” he said, “we’re not exactly sure what happened. Someone—I guess Mrs. Tompkins there—dialed nine-one-one from the house and then hung up. So we made a routine stop. When she came to the door, we heard you banging, and it all just seemed way too funny not to tak
e a look. When we tried to come inside and she hit Officer Griggs in the face with a spoon, we decided she needed to go to the station for a while. We’ve talked with Mrs. Tompkins before, about other matters, but they were always little things—nothing like this has ever happened.”

  “She didn’t mean to lock me down there,” I explained. “She was in shock. I didn’t want for this to happen. What will you do to her?”

  “That’s really for a doctor to decide now,” said the officer. “But that lady needs some help, any way you look at it. She was saying some nutty things.”

  “Yeah,” I said. I could imagine what she’d been saying.

  Then it was like the policeman realized that he was talking to a kid. His tone changed and he asked me, “Now, what’s your name, honey?”

  “Rebecca,” I said. “Rebecca Rose Shapiro.”

  “Well, Rebecca Rose Shapiro, I’m Officer Johnson. What say we get in the car, where it’s warmer, and then see if we can’t get you home to your parents. They’ll need to help you decide what to do next. Whether you want to press charges or not.”

  “I don’t,” I said.

  “Let’s just get you home,” he insisted.

  I nodded and slid into the car, thinking, Home. If only he could.

  CHAPTER 21

  I expected Officer Johnson to have a clipboard or a computer. From TV shows I’d seen, I thought he’d want to take a statement. I figured he’d have to call someone on a CB or a radio or something. But none of that happened. In fact, he didn’t do anything but put the key in the ignition and ask, “Now, where do you live?”

  “Baltimore,” I said right away. Then, because I didn’t want him thinking I was some kind of runaway, I added quickly, “But I’m staying with my grandmother right now, on a street called Woodland, kind of over near the zoo. Do you know where that is?”

  He turned back to look at me. “Are your parents staying there with you?” He looked a little concerned.

  “Well, my parents—they aren’t exactly together right now,” I said. “We’re staying—my mom and brother and me—with my grandmother while Mom … um … figures things out. Just the last few weeks, I mean.” I took a deep breath. “I guess they’re … separated.” As I said it, I realized I hadn’t said that word to anyone before. I didn’t think I’d even said it to myself.