The Second Life of Abigail Walker Read online

  “Oh, let’s talk about something more interesting, why don’t we,” Abby’s mom said in her peacemaker’s voice. “Gabe, have you decided what you’re going to wear for Colonial Day next week?”

  Gabe had a mouthful of pizza, but that didn’t stop him from answering. “You know what would be cool? A musket. Like, if I wore a sort of army uniform from back then and carried a musket.”

  “You’re kidding, right?” John asked. “They’re not going to let you bring a gun to school. Even a fake one.”

  “What if I made it out of a stick or something? So no one would think it was real?”

  “No way,” John insisted. “No weapons, period. They’ll expel you.”

  Abby’s mom’s eyes widened. “From second grade? For a stick?”

  “Yeah, Mom, for a stick. They’ll expel you for anything. Like if you brought some aspirin in your backpack and your teacher found it? Automatic expulsion.”

  Abby’s mom shook her head. “I don’t want Gabe bringing a stick to school, but that seems so extreme to me.”

  “I don’t make the rules,” John said, reaching for another slice of sausage pizza.

  Abby was taking tiny bites of her pizza, trying to eat it as slowly as possible. She had one eye on the bottle of Thousand Island. It was within her reach, but could she grab it without anyone noticing? No, she shouldn’t grab. Grabbing would definitely get her noticed. But maybe she could reach over casually, like it was no big deal. That was it—she would ask Gabe a question, get him talking, and while everyone was listening to him, she’d just sort of quietly move the Thousand Island closer to her. And then she’d really nonchalantly put a little bit on her salad—

  “Hey, Ab,” her dad said, interrupting her strategizing. “Did you get any exercise today?”

  Abby sucked in her stomach, thinking of Mrs. Benton. “I took a walk,” she said. “It was nice.”

  “Walking is good,” her dad said, but Abby could tell he didn’t mean it. “How about jogging? Great for your heart, and it really burns the calories.”

  Abby’s mom shook her head. “Oh, let’s not talk about calories at the dinner table,” she said lightly. “That’s no fun.”

  “Well, look at her, Susan. Someone should talk to her about calories.” Her dad turned back to Abby. “Calories in, calories out. That’s the formula, Ab. You have to burn more calories than you take in. That’s all there is to it.”

  Abby looked at her pizza. One-third of her slice was left. She knew it was getting cold and she should hurry up and eat it since she didn’t like cold pizza, but suddenly there was a lump in her throat and she thought she might not be able to swallow right now.

  “Hey, Dad, did you lift weights when you were in high school?” John asked. “Because Coach was saying he didn’t think we should really get into lifting until sophomore year. It might do some damage if we start earlier.”

  Good old John, always changing the subject.

  When dinner was over, Abby helped her mom clear the table. She tried to remember to keep her gut sucked in. She liked how it made her feel taller. She wondered if holding in your stomach burned extra calories. And did you have to hold it in all the time? She’d have to ask Mrs. Benton if you were allowed to let your stomach out every once in a while.

  “Hey, Mom,” Abby said, dumping out leftover salad into the trash. “Do you have any books on Lewis and Clark?”

  “I’m sure I do, down in the basement.” Her mom glanced over at Abby from the sink. “Do you need them for school?”

  “For a project,” Abby told her. “I thought I might get started tonight.”

  Drying her hands on a dish towel, Abby’s mom said, “I’ll go see what I have.” She sounded excited. “I think I have that book that won all the prizes. It’s wonderful.”

  Abby’s mom disappeared down the basement stairs. Abby looked around. She was alone. Her dad and brothers were in the family room watching a college football game on TV. There were three pieces of sausage pizza on the platter on top of the stove. Abby stepped softly over to the paper towels and pulled off two sheets. Quietly, she crept to the stove and wrapped two of the pieces in the paper towels. They were still warm. She could smell the sausage.

  The trick would be sneaking past the family room without her dad seeing she had something in her hand. Because if he noticed her carrying something wrapped in paper towels as she headed toward the stairs, something that might be food, he would definitely want to know what it was.

  Her left-hand side would be toward the family room, so she should carry the pizza in her right hand. Could she put it in a book? No, she’d get pizza grease all over the pages. Abby looked around the kitchen. The newspaper. She could put the paper-towel-wrapped pizza in the newspaper, and then if anyone asked, she could say she was taking the paper to cut out articles for a current events assignment.

  Brilliant.

  Abby ate the pizza sitting at her desk. She took bite after humongous bite, the sausage and cheese and crust filling up her mouth and making her whole body hum. Why did food taste so good? Abby wondered about this a lot. Because if food didn’t taste so good, she wouldn’t have a problem. She would get this lovely, filled-up feeling from something else. There were books that almost made her feel filled up the way pizza did, usually books she wasn’t supposed to read, celebrity biographies her mother called “trashy,” and books she was officially too old to read, like Junie B. Jones. Candy books.

  She was halfway through the second piece when her mom knocked on her door. “Abby, I found it! Undaunted Courage—that’s the title. May I come in?”

  Abby scrambled to wrap the remaining pizza in the newspaper and throw it into her trash can. She sniffed the air around her desk. Could you still smell sausage?

  “Come in,” she called, trying to sound innocent. “I’m just doing some homework.”

  “You are so good to do homework on Saturday night,” her mother said as she walked into the room. “I always used to wait until the last minute, and it made Sundays so depressing.”

  She stopped, cocked her head to the side. “It smells funny in here. What is that?”

  “I know, it’s weird!” Abby exclaimed, jumping to her feet. “My shirt totally smells like pizza! Isn’t that weird?”

  “It’s the sausage,” her mom said, nodding her head in agreement. “Whenever I cook sausage for the pizza, the house smells like sausage for the rest of the night. Well, anyway, here’s the book.”

  She handed it to Abby, who nearly dropped it. “Sort of heavy,” Abby said, putting the book down on her desk. “Thanks, though. I thought I’d see if I could find some interesting facts.”

  To Abby’s dismay, her mother sat down on her bed. If she hung out in Abby’s room much longer, she might sniff out the pizza wrapped up in newspaper. “Oh, the Lewis and Clark story is fascinating. Thomas Jefferson sent them out West. He was a genius, Jefferson. Remember that trip we took to Monticello?”

  “It was fun,” Abby said, though mostly what she remembered was how obsessed the tour guide was with the beds, which where built into the walls of the rooms. “We should go back sometime.”

  Abby’s mom smiled. “We should. It’s only a few hours away. And now that Gabe’s class is studying colonial America . . . That reminds me! Costume! I think there might be something in the back of John’s closet from a play he did—”

  With that, Abby’s mom was up and out of her room. Abby staggered to her bed and plopped down. Whew! That was close! She could just imagine what she’d have to go through if her mom had found the pizza. A lecture from her dad about being a big fat pig, that was for sure. And then maybe they’d put her back on an official diet instead of just bugging her about what she ate, and there’d be low-fat yogurt at every meal. And packaged turkey slices. Abby hated packaged turkey slices.

  She got up and dug the half piece of pizza out of her trash can. It was cold and the fat was starting to congeal on the sausage. But the crust? The crust still looked good. Abby tore it o
ff and started to chew. She reached under her bed and pulled out Junie B. Jones Is Not a Crook. She thought about crying, but she decided to keep chewing instead.

  that night, when the fox woke up from yet another dream of bombs exploding, she made her way through the yards, across the street, and down to the creek. No fish, unless you counted the swarms of tiny minnows, which the fox did not. Minnows! When once she had dined on red-and-orange cutthroat trout.

  She’d been in the long-ago story of the grand expedition, on a narrow boat floating westward on the lazy river. Everything had seemed so new, even the sky. The wind like God laughing softly in the next room. She’d folded herself into a bundle behind the boxes of supplies and piles of blankets, and when she got hungry, she reached a paw over the side and grabbed a fish from the water.

  Tall tale! Crow had cawed when she’d told him about it later. Tall tale!

  But birds fished the river all the time. Why not a fox, so much smarter than a bird in every way? Yes, all I had to do was reach a paw out, the fox had insisted to Crow, who’d flown away nattering like a cranky old man.

  The old story soothed the fox, even with the echoes of Crow’s disbelieving cries ringing in her ears. Really, she had to do something about these nightmares. Who’d ever heard of a fox having nightmares? Preposterous! What if that silly raccoon found out, the one that had set up shop by the trash bins next door to the fox’s field? The fox could hear its snitty laughter. Raccoons always sounded like they were choking when they laughed. Disgusting.

  When she reached the creek, the water was cool, and it calmed her as she drank from it. When she was done, she lifted her nose to a familiar scent and realized she could smell the girl she now knew was named Abby. She looked around and saw a small cooler a few feet away from where she stood. Too small for Abby to be inside. She must have touched it, carried it, left it here on the way to somewhere else.

  “Abby,” the girls had called out when they came into the fox’s field that afternoon. “Oh, Abby,” in sickly sweet voices, like the voice a raccoon might use to woo its poor, pitiful excuse for a mate. The fox didn’t think the girls—sallow-faced, scrawny things—should be there in the field, but she decided to give them one chance to prove her wrong.

  They screamed when they saw her. Of course. One even scrambled wildly for something to throw, and so the fox had pulled back her lips to reveal her sharp incisors, which—of course—sent the girls running.

  Abby. The girl’s name was Abby, and these two scrawny raccoon girls were after her. The fox had followed them to the edge of the field, watched them hop onto their bikes, calling to each other, “Don’t worry, we’ll find her, and then she’ll be sorry!”

  Well. Best not to think of that. Better to think of the long boat, and the grasses that lined the river, redolent of fish and mud. Think of the young men, who built fires at night when they stopped to camp and sat in a circle around them, singing. One man played fiddle, and the others called out the songs they wanted to hear, “Soldier’s Joy,” “Bonaparte’s Retreat.” And one man—a very young man—kept getting lost. But he was found, again and again, and each time he returned, the men sang louder and laughed harder, the world around them new and theirs for the taking.

  abby hadn’t planned on going back to Anders’s house on Sunday. Oh, she’d go sometime, she’d thought, but not the next day. It seemed too soon, almost like if she showed up at the Bentons’ on Sunday afternoon, she was agreeing to help them with their Lewis and Clark project, and she didn’t know if she wanted to help them. She didn’t even know them.

  So, on Sunday morning, she lay in bed and started reading Undaunted Courage, about the Lewis and Clark expedition. It wasn’t the sort of book she usually read, with its ten million facts and official-sounding sentences, but she found if she skipped around, there were good parts hidden behind the dates and weights and treaties, parts that were more like a story and less like homework. She wished there were more girls in the book, though she knew if she kept reading, Sacagawea would show up sooner or later.

  She was trying to decide whether to keep slogging through or get dressed and see if her mom would make her French toast for breakfast (“It’s just bread and eggs, Mom,” she would argue, “bread and eggs have hardly any calories”), when she came across the story of George Shannon. What first got her interest was the fact that George Shannon was only seventeen. There was a famous actor Abby liked who was seventeen, and she imagined George Shannon with the actor’s high cheekbones and scruffy brown hair and the way he had of looking at people through half-closed eyes. Picturing George Shannon this way made Abby want to keep reading, which was how she learned the amazing fact that George Shannon had gotten lost two times on the Lewis and Clark expedition—once for sixteen days without food or water—and that each time he’d found his way back on his own.

  Now that, Abby thought when she finished reading about George Shannon, is a good story.

  So after breakfast she put on her shoes and her jacket and headed across the street to her field, and after she’d looked to see if any new birds were around, she climbed over the fence and walked down to the creek, where Wallace was waiting for her.

  What surprised her about this was that she wasn’t surprised at all.

  Anders was sitting on the front porch when she came around to the front of the Bentons’ house. “My dad’s here!” Anders greeted her, standing. “I told him all about you. He’s really excited to meet you!”

  “How did you know I was coming?” Abby asked.

  Anders shrugged. “I just knew you would.”

  “Hey, Matt,” Anders called as he led Abby into the house. “Abby’s here!”

  Anders’s father was sitting at the round table in the kitchen, writing on a piece of loose-leaf notebook paper. He looked up when they entered the room, and Abby took a step back, startled by his face, how handsome it was, and how he seemed frightened. He had dark circles under his eyes and a couple of days’ worth of stubble on his cheeks. His hair and eyes were black as crows’ wings.

  “This is Abby,” Anders explained to him. “She’s the girl we told you about.”

  Relief, then a smile bloomed on the man’s face. “Wallace brought you.”

  “I guess you could say that,” Abby agreed, and then wondered if that sounded stupid. Suddenly she felt fumbly and tongue-tied. Anders’s dad was so handsome! “He led me down to the creek yesterday, and that’s where I met Anders.”

  “On this side of the creek,” Anders put in. “Don’t worry. I didn’t cross it.”

  “Wallace is my dog,” Anders’s father told Abby. “Or he was. Now he’s more Mom’s than mine. I got him right after high school, taught him how to track. He knows the woods around here better than anybody.”

  And then suddenly, without warning, he pounded a fist on the table and said in a strangled voice, “I have to write, I have to write.”

  Anders tapped Abby on the arm. “Why don’t we go find Grandma? Matt, you call me if you need me.”

  “Your dad is really good-looking,” Abby whispered as they went through the hallway to the front room. “It’s sort of amazing.”

  “He used to look a lot better,” Anders informed her. “Before he went to Iraq. Iraq kind of took a lot out of him.”

  Mrs. Benton was sitting on the porch swing, reading a newsletter called Riding Instructor. “This thing is written by idiots,” she declared in way of a greeting. “It’s all about dressage and tail braiding. Complete waste of time.” She slapped the newsletter to the floor, then looked at Abby. “You survived to live another day, I see. Anders told me about your troubles. Girls can be rough, but you’ll be fine.”

  “I’m okay for now,” Abby assured her, sitting down in a rocker. “I’m good.” She studied Mrs. Benton’s face, looking for any resemblance to her son. They both had the same dark brown eyes, the same little dimple in their chins, but Mrs. Benton’s features were sharper than Matt’s, her nose pointier, her lips thinner. She had deep worry lines et
ched into her forehead, which Abby found interesting—Mrs. Benton didn’t strike her as the worrying type. She sounded so sure of herself all the time, like she could take care of any problem that came her way. But then Abby thought about Matt, the way he’d looked so afraid when she’d walked in the kitchen, and she guessed there might be some problems that Mrs. Benton couldn’t do anything about.

  “Grandma, did you remind Matt to take his pills?” Anders asked his grandmother, taking a seat next to her on the swing. “’Cause he’s acting a little aggravated in there.”

  Mrs. Benton looked pained. “I told him to take them, but I can’t force them down his throat.”

  “He’s got to take the pills, Grandma! Just give them to him like he was a kid. Put them in a spoonful of peanut butter.” Anders shook his head. “You act like he’s going to take care of himself, but he won’t.”

  He turned to Abby. “My dad has got some problems, the main one being that he doesn’t really want to live anymore.”

  Anders’s grandmother winced and then made a strange sound from deep in her throat, the sort of sound Abby woke herself up with when she was having a nightmare.

  “Our job is to make sure he doesn’t do anything stupid,” Anders went on, shooting his grandmother a look. “Our job is to keep him alive.”

  Abby rocked back and forth for a moment without saying anything, without having any idea of what to say. Finally she asked, hoping it was okay to ask, “Where’s your mom?”

  “Virginia. Springfield,” Anders said without a trace of expression in his voice. “She lives there with her sister.”

  “Anders’s mom and dad aren’t together anymore,” Mrs. Benton informed Abby. “It’s complicated.”

  “Not really.” Anders wriggled in his seat, clearly agitated. “My dad did two tours of duty in Iraq, and me and my mom stayed in Virginia, and when my dad came home the last time, my mom decided she didn’t want to be married to him anymore because the war had changed him so much.”

  “Well,” Mrs. Benton said, and Abby could tell she was trying to be diplomatic. “Well. Yes. But she’s young, and she didn’t plan on”—she waved her hand around in a vague sort of way—“this situation, I guess is one way you could put it.”