Windfall Read online

  Windfall

  Sara Cassidy

  orca currents

  ORCA BOOK PUBLISHERS

  Copyright © 2011 Sara Cassidy

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Cassidy, Sara

  Windfall [electronic resource] / Sara Cassidy.

  (Orca currents)

  Electronic monograph in PDF format.

  Issued also in print format.

  ISBN 978-1-55469-851-6

  I. Title. II. Series: Orca currents (Online)

  PS8555.A7812W55 2011A JC813’.54 C2010-907993-0

  First published in the United States, 2011

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2010942077

  Summary: Thirteen-year-old Liza, grieving the loss of a local homeless man and her family’s apple tree, seeks healing through gardening.

  Orca Book Publishers is dedicated to preserving the environment and has printed

  this book on paper certified by the Forest Stewardship Council.

  Orca Book Publishers gratefully acknowledges the support for its publishing programs provided by the following agencies: the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Province of British Columbia through the BC Arts Council and the Book Publishing Tax Credit.

  Cover design by Teresa Bubela

  Cover photography by Dreamstime

  ORCA BOOK PUBLISHERS ORCA BOOK PUBLISHERS

  PO BOX 5626, Stn. B PO BOX 468

  Victoria, BC Canada Custer, WA USA

  V8R 6S4 98240-0468

  www.orcabook.com

  Printed and bound in Canada.

  14 13 12 11 • 4 3 2 1

  In memory of Richard Walters, 1952–2006.

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Titles in the Series orca currents

  Chapter One

  Ri-i-i-ing. Ri-i-i-ing. Ri-i-i-ing. Ri-i-i-ing. I lift my head from my pillow. The downstairs floor squeaks. One of my brothers shuffles across their bedroom.

  “Hullo?” It’s Leland, who is six years old. After a long pause he says, “Do you want to speak to someone bigger?”

  “I’ve got it, sweetheart.” Mom picks up the phone in her room. She speaks quietly for a few minutes.

  “Kids!” she calls. “I need to talk to you.”

  The three of us bound to her room. The boys are wearing flannel pajamas with pictures of robots and snowboarders. Their hair is stormy with sleep. Silas has eight little circles indented on his cheek. It looks like he slept on a piece of Lego. I’m wearing the knee-length soccer shirt that Dad sent from England.

  Mom smiles at us, but when she blinks, tears slide from her eyes.

  “Sad news,” she says. “Richard died last night.”

  “Outside?” Silas asks, horrified.

  “Yes, dear,” Mom says. “In the park.”

  “Alone?” Leland asks in a wobbly voice.

  “I guess so,” Mom says gently. “Richard slept outside and alone for many years.”

  “Was it rainy and cold?” Leland’s chin trembles.

  “It was a lovely night,” Mom says. She shoots me a look. Mom and I played Crazy Eights last night after the boys went to sleep. Rain pelted the roof, and the wind was so strong that the branches of the backyard apple tree scratched at the window.

  Still, maybe Richard was warm and dry. Maybe in his dreams angels rocked him into that weird final sleep. You never know.

  “He was probably dreaming beautiful dreams,” I say to comfort Leland.

  “Probably?” Leland challenges.

  “Maybe probably,” I say.

  “Maybe maybe,” Leland says.

  “We brought him a coat not that long ago,” Silas says. “And socks. He would have been warm.”

  “We gave him money every time we saw him,” Mom says airily. She looks out the window at another gray Victoria day.

  She’s right, we did. But we never invited him for supper, or for a shower, or a night in a warm bed. We have an unused bedroom in the basement he could have lived in.

  “We won’t ever, ever see him again, right?” Leland asks.

  “That’s right, except in your memories.” Mom starts making her bed. “There will be a funeral in a few days.”

  Leland goes rigid. He clenches his teeth. “I’m not going to a funeral!” he says, staring Mom down.

  “Me neither,” Silas mutters, his eyes on the floor.

  “Liza?” Mom looks surprised. “Surely, you’ll go?”

  “No way,” I declare. I picture Richard, wax-white and unmoving on his bench. I imagine rain on his lifeless face. What was I thinking—angels? Warmth? He was just as alone when he died as he was in life.

  Mom sits again on her bed and studies our faces. She opens her arms to Leland. He resists at first, but then melts into her lap.

  “Look, you guys,” Mom whispers. “This is sad. Even a little frightening. We didn’t know Richard well, but we loved him. He was sweet. Gentle.”

  “Yeah,” Leland sniffles, raising his head from Mom’s shoulder. “His gentleness was more important than his smelliness.”

  Silas and I both snort. We try to stifle our laughter.

  “Maybe you’ll change your minds,” Mom continues, ignoring us. “A funeral is a chance to say goodbye.” She grins, then singsongs, “You’d miss a bit of school.”

  A bribe? How can she be so cold? Richard is dead, and we’re supposed to get excited about missing school?

  “Yeah, that’ll make it worth it,” I say bitterly as I leave the room.

  “Liza, I didn’t mean it that way. I’m sorry. We’re all upset,” Mom calls after me.

  At breakfast my food tastes so dry, it hurts my throat. My orange juice stings. The yellow kitchen walls, normally cheerful, are dull. It’s like the light’s been sucked out of the house.

  Neighbors keep calling. The phone sounds robotic and shrill. I hear Mom refer to Richard as being “gone” or “passed on.” Once, she says he’s “crossed over.” Crossed over to where? Some sunshiny happy place? I’ve seen police shows. I know Richard is in a steel drawer in a frosty room with a numbered tag around his big toe.

  Between phone calls, Mom makes the boys’ lunches. She spreads peanut butter on slices of bread and fills Tupperware with grapes and animal crackers as if it’s just another day. The boys hunker over their Lego as if nothing remarkable has happened. Nobody cares that an entire person has gone—poof!—out like a light. Shouldn’t we all be bawling? Shouldn’t the world stop spinning for a moment?

  Or maybe it doesn’t matter that Richard is dead. Did it matter that he was alive? All he did was sit on a bench and sleep in the bushes of Meegan Park. We passed him nearly every day on our way to school or to the store. He never held out his hand, but Mom always gave him a fistful of change. She always asked how he was. Richard always replied in his warm thick voice, “Good.”

  Was he good? He was dirty! His hair was a pile of knots, and his clothes were stained and torn. He was always bundled in layers of coats, pants, shirts and sweaters. He even wore woo
l hats in the middle of summer. You’d know him from a block away. He was rumpled and baggy, like a hulking pile of laundry.

  “Check it out!” Silas shouts as we enter Meegan Park on our way to school. He’s pointing at Richard’s bench. Someone has laid a huge sunflower and a framed photograph of Richard there. In the photograph, Richard is sitting on the very same bench. His warm bristly face looks calmly at the camera. A hand-printed note is propped against the sunflower’s thick stem. It says Rest in Peace, Richard.

  Leland swings his backpack to the ground and pulls out his lunch kit. He takes an apple and places it on the bench between the jar and the picture.

  “There,” he says, his chin wobbling.

  The apple gleams in the morning sun. It seems to swell against its taut red skin, bursting with life. We continue on to school. We’ll be late now. Maybe the world did stop spinning for an instant. As I turn away from Richard’s bench, the nearby bushes rustle. A few fall leaves scatter to the ground. I get a strong feeling that Richard is watching us. It’s spooky, but it’s not scary.

  Chapter Two

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  I got walkie-talkies last month for my birthday. I wanted a cell phone, but Mom is too cheap. Well, that’s not how she tells it.

  “Cell phones mess with your brain,” she says. “Radio waves equal radiation. Radiation spells tumors.

  Experts predict a brain-cancer tsunami in ten years. No one under eighteen should use cell phones—except in an emergency.”

  Olive is my neighbor and best friend. It’s a cool September evening, so I throw a jean jacket over my sweater as I head out to the tree house. These are the best weeks of the year, because I can reach out the tree-house window and pick apples straight from the branch. I’m munching one when Olive straggles up.

  “Bad news,” Olive puffs. “I looked everywhere for batteries. We’re out.” She gives me a look. What she’s really saying is that our walkie-talkie days are over.

  “I can get some,” I say.

  “No,” Olive says gravely. “That would be cheating.”

  Three months ago, Olive’s family decided not to buy anything new for a year. Except food. I started it. I’d learned that an oil company was polluting farmland in Guatemala and not compensating local farmers. I formed Girls for Renewable Resources, Really! We protested and got the company to pay up.

  Olive joined GRRR!, but her parents didn’t want Olive getting too involved. When she couldn’t come to our protest, Olive got her parents to watch An Inconvenient Truth, a movie about global warming. They were so freaked out about carbon levels that they decided Olive had to be in GRRR! They vowed to reuse, reduce and recycle with a vengeance.

  So, if Olive is out of batteries, our walkie-talkie days are over.

  “Morse code?” I propose. “Telegraph?”

  Olive giggles. “How about semaphore flags?”

  “Carrier pigeon!” I say. “Smoke signals.”

  “We could just yell,” Olive points out. “It isn’t that far.”

  “We could put a string between our houses, and zip-line notes to each other.” I’m serious this time.

  “A laundry line would do the trick,” Olive muses.

  “No.” I grin. “I’ve got an idea. Let me surprise you.”

  “Okay.” Liza plucks an apple from a branch and takes a noisy bite. She frowns. “Sad news about Richard, huh?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “It’s weird. He just sat there and never talked. You would think you wouldn’t miss him. But it feels so big, so loud, that he’s gone.”

  Olive nods. “I know. Mom says he made us anxious in a good way. He reminded us how lucky we are to have a warm home.”

  “Maybe,” I say. “I just wanted him to be warm, in a little apartment somewhere, and not always on public display.”

  “Well, he’s not on public display now,” Olive deadpans.

  “That’s for sure,” I say. “He has vanished. Disappeared.”

  I remember the feeling I had in the park. “Where do you think he is?” I ask.

  “Nowhere,” Olive says. “We’re just a mass of electrical impulses, Liza. Without our bodies, we’re like a DVD without a DVD player. There’s no picture, no sound, no story. The only life after death is the worms that feast on your body and the plants that shoot up as you rot away.”

  “Ugh, Olive! Fat worms and a crop of tulips? That’s life after death?”

  “What do you think? That Richard’s an angel, floating around looking down on us? Or that he’s”—she puts on a spooky voice—“a ghost?”

  I try to think up an answer. Then the tree house groans. It sways, and then boards tear from each other with a screech, leaving raw edges and bent nails waving in the air.

  Olive and I freeze. We stare wildly into each other’s eyes. We’re half smirking, as if it’s funny, and half terrified. Suddenly, the entire tree house skids down the tree trunk, scraping off bark and snapping branches. I protect my eyes with one hand and grab the windowsill with the other. Olive screams.

  Then—whomp—it stops. My tailbone throbs. Olive moans and rubs the back of her head. We sit for a few moments. Then, slowly and without a word, we ease ourselves out the little doorway and leap to the ground. We run like mad, yelping and laughing. We fall onto the lawn, clutching each other.

  Chapter Three

  There’s a wide circle of yellow caution tape around the apple tree. Actually, it’s a yellow streamer. My enviro-mom doesn’t like plastic, but she didn’t want to pay for biodegradable caution tape. You have to buy it in bulk. “Let’s hope we never need five hundred feet of caution tape,” Mom told the hardware store clerk.

  Silas made a sign: Tree Ailing: Do Not Climb. The entire tree is on a slant.

  “Like the leaning tower of Pisa,” Silas comments at breakfast.

  “Tilting,” Mom says, launching our family game.

  “Listing,” I say.

  “Lurching,” Silas says.

  “Diagonal?” Leland says.

  “Sloping,” Mom says.

  “Off balance,” I say.

  “I’m off balance.” Leland pouts as he sadly stirs his cereal.

  I am too. Our apple tree was the first tree we climbed. Every fall, the kitchen shelves fill with jars of applesauce. If our generous tree is going to tilt, then our lives will too.

  “Our tree has had a long life,” Mom says. “It’s been growing for over a hundred years, long before this house was built. I asked John Allans.”

  “The dude with the top hat who gives ghost tours?” I ask.

  “That dude,” Mom chides with a smile, “is a local historian. He says our apple tree was part of a huge orchard. This land was once all farmers’ fields. I’ve called an arborist to come over and give a diagnosis. And when I’m in Duncan next week, I’m taking some of our apples to a pomologist.”

  Mom’s going to Duncan to help the museum put a dollar value on their collection. There’s a pile of butter churns, chamber pots, saddles, even tractors from a farm that is being razed to make room for apartment buildings. Mom is an art historian. She helps museums and auction houses figure out what they’ve got and what it’s worth.

  “How’s a palm reader going to help?” Silas asks.

  “Pomologist. Think pomme. French for apple,” Mom says. “A pomologist studies fruit. She’s going to tell us what kind of apples we’ve been eating all these years. The arborist—her name is Imogen—is a tree doctor.”

  “She’ll say it has to be cut down,” Silas says gloomily.

  “Yes, she might,” Mom agrees.

  “That would leave a big empty space,” Leland grouses. He is stirring his cereal into sodden
mush.

  “Yeah,” I say. I feel close to tears. “You might as well yank my heart out.”

  “Hey!” Leland cries. “An apple is probably the same size as your heart. It’s even shaped like a heart.” Then he goes quiet. We all do. None of us finish breakfast.

  Chapter Four

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  The “lovers’ phone” works! I made it with two tin cans and some fishing line. Now, that’s technology! I hammered a hole through the bottom of each can, poked the line through and knotted it. If we hold the line taut and it doesn’t touch anything, the vibrations of our voices travel down the string. They enter the can on the other end and swirl into our ears. When I want to talk, I just yank on the string. Olive hears her end clang against her windowsill and “answers” her tin.

  Making stuff helps me relax. I mend the broken, rescue the forgotten and invent what’s needed. I’ve turned T-shirts into pillows, stitched juice Tetra Paks into wallets, and made a self-watering plant pot from a pop bottle. It’s called DIY— Do It Yourself.

  Imogen, the arborist, leaps down from her battered pickup truck. She is wearing faded jeans and work boots. I guess she’s in her twenties. Her long reddish hair looks alive. Her T-shirt proclaims God is just an abbreviation for Goddess.

  Imogen goes straight to our tree and climbs it with ease. Olive, the boys and I perch along the top of the fence and watch her poke at the bark and cut off a few twigs.

  “You guys are sure glum,” she says after a while.

  “I’ve been climbing that tree since before I could walk,” Silas says. “I even talk to it.”

  “Me too,” Leland admits. “I lie on the ground and look up through its branches at the sky.”

  “Trees make great friends,” Imogen says. “They’re wise.”