Swing Sideways Read online

  DEDICATION

  For my sons, Parker and James—my reason for everything.

  And for Javier. Fight on.

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  Thirty-Six

  Thirty-Seven

  Thirty-Eight

  Thirty-Nine

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  ONE

  Mom’s voice flew back at me from the front seat.

  “Annabel. Did. You. Eat. Your. Sandwich?”

  Staccato, like six birds hitting the windshield, one right after the other. My arm jerked, knocking the foil packet off my makeshift writing desk. I caught it before it fell to the floor and wedged it between my thigh and the oversize suitcase taking up half the backseat. Dad gave Mom the Hairy-Eyeball Look.

  “Vicky, stop.”

  “I only wanted to know if she’d eaten it so I could throw the foil away for her,” she said.

  “She can throw it away herself.”

  Mom turned and studied the dense trees off the side of the highway. “I’m only trying to be helpful.”

  Stop being so helpful.

  Dad reached over and squeezed her shoulder. “She’ll take care of it. I’m pretty sure that’s what Dr. Clementi meant when he said she needs freedom.”

  She dabbed the corner of her eye with a fingertip and kept staring out the window. “I’m well aware of what Dr. Clementi meant. No spreadsheets. No schedule. No Mom. All summer.”

  At our last family therapy session, right before the end of the school year, Dr. Clementi had dropped a bomb on everyone’s plans when he’d said I needed a summer with “minimal structure, no spreadsheets, and lots of independent decision making.” He’d said I needed freedom.

  Freedom.

  Just the way the word sounded made my belly flip.

  I scrunched lower and doodled in my red Story Notebook. Maybe if I slid far enough down they’d forget I was there and talk about something else. Maybe they’d forget I existed and let me be.

  “Come on now,” Dad said. “No one said anything about no Mom. Just not the hovering one.” He winked at her. Dad’s a big winker.

  “I said I would try, Richard. I’m trying.” She pressed her forehead against the glass.

  As far as I could tell, nothing much had changed, and it was already the middle of June. Mom had waited until the last second to strip the final spreadsheet from the fridge door at home; Dad was still dancing between the two of us, trying to make everyone happy; and when I’d looked in the mirror this morning, the image staring back at me was still all angular and bony and hollow.

  I pulled the waistband of my jeans together and stuck my finger in the gap to see if it was getting any smaller, to see if I’d managed to put on some weight. Not yet. Maybe, if I got my promised freedom over the summer, I’d get right in the head. Maybe I’d be able to eat without feeling like my throat was closing. Maybe then I’d look normal again.

  A few miles later Dad tapped the rearview mirror. “Hey, Pumpkin, was the sandwich good?”

  That was his way of supporting Mom and still showing he was on my side. Dr. Clementi said it’s called “enabling,” and apparently Dad’s a master at it. I lifted the packet from the seat and peered inside. The whole thing was a slippery mess. Why would anyone make cucumber-and-mayonnaise sandwiches to eat on a four-hour road trip in the heat of summer? Why would anyone post-1960s make them, period? A white glob seeped out and dropped onto my lap.

  “It’s all hot and gross. I’ll eat something else when we get to the lake house.”

  Mom sighed really loud, so Dad tossed a minibag of Oreos into the back.

  “Here’s something to hold you over. If you choose it, I mean.” He winked in the mirror and put his hand on the seat behind Mom, belting out “All You Need Is Love” loud enough for anyone in the universe to hear.

  Half an hour later we were off the highway, driving on the winding road that ends at the lake, when I saw a girl standing in the corn. Dad eased the brakes going around a big curve right before McMurtry’s farm, only a mile shy of our summer home. People whispered about Mr. McMurtry. They said he was a recluse, that he’d gone crazy and his family had run off, leaving him to tend the place alone. It was hard not to believe them. Except for the manicured acres of emerald corn stalks lined up by the side of the road, I’d never once seen any sign of life on that farm.

  Every year I’d ask what was wrong with Mr. McMurtry. Every year the answer was the same. “He’s a hermit,” Mom would say. Then she’d give me that you-know-what-I-mean look. But I didn’t. So I always asked. “It means he lives alone and doesn’t want to be bothered.”

  My eyes would sweep over the mess of vegetation hiding the house from the road. Tangled bramble bushes, waist-high weeds, and unpruned trees had been left to grow willy-nilly across the property. Seeing it always made me ache to do something wild and crazy, like leap from the car and roll down the hill into the thick of it. An activity, of course, that would never make it onto one of Mom’s spreadsheets.

  “What made him that way? Where’s his family?” I would ask.

  “He doesn’t have any family around, Pumpkin.”

  “But who takes care of his farm?”

  “Apparently no one, from the looks of it,” Mom would snip.

  “Except for the corn.” That was Dad. “He does take care of that corn!”

  But this year there was a girl about my age standing barefoot at the end of the rows, every bit as tall as the corn. She watched us drive slowly past, hands propped on broad hips, and big, naked feet planted shoulder wide. Masses of yellow hair sprouted from the top of her head like a haystack. When she saw me hanging out the car window, my face wilting with envy, she dipped her head to one side and grinned.

  If it had been anyone else I would have yanked my own head back inside, embarrassed at being caught gaping. But something about her reminded me of Dad’s favorite word—shenanigans—like maybe she was getting ready to stir some up. My heartbeat thumped in my throat, and my fingers gripped the open car window. The girl rocked back and forth on her heels, studying me like she was trying to decide if I was up for the kind of mischief she had in mind. In my heart, in my soul, but silently—only in my mind—I screamed, “Yes! Yes! I am!”

  Dad pushed the gas pedal, and the girl turned, watching us drive away. She got smaller and smaller and we got farther and farther until finally, right before we crested the top of the hill, she raised one arm and wiggled her index finger at me.

  Come back!

  TWO

  Dad stopped short just inside the kitchen door. Mom careened into him, and I pitched against her back. All three of us gaped at the fridge where the last spreadsheet, from the last week of last summer, glared at us. No one had taken it down when we’d closed the ho
use on Labor Day. No one had known it would become such A Thing. Now we stood silent, our arms full of pillows and musical instruments and tennis rackets, and no one knew what to say.

  This is what Mom’s spreadsheets looked like:

  And that was for one week in the summer. In. The. Summer!

  “I’ll get it.” Dad lunged forward and stripped the yellowed paper from the door, cramming it under his armpit alongside a can of tennis balls. Mom’s face turned pink, and she moved toward the stairs. A big white mark was left where the spreadsheet had waited all year for us to return.

  “Huh.” Dad swiped his arm across the fridge and blew away the gray dust on his sleeve. “Good thing the cleaning crew comes tomorrow.” Then he followed Mom upstairs.

  I studied the empty white space and swallowed back a one-second panic attack. The missing spreadsheet didn’t make me feel independent and free, like I expected. It terrified me. Missing being the key word. Clutching my notebook and pen, I ran to my room and hid until dinner.

  By the time the sun cracked the next morning open I was already dressed, perched on the edge of my bed, gathering the courage to sneak off to McMurtry’s farm. The idea of showing up unannounced at a stranger’s house was scary enough, especially one like creepy Mr. McMurtry. But if I didn’t act quickly, Mom had the power to suck me back in and make me forget the whole Freedom Plan without me even realizing she was doing it.

  At breakfast everyone acted like it was a normal day in the Stockton household, which, of course, it was not. Mom spread butter and marmalade on wheat toast, her face all scrunched like she was trying to sort out something in her mind.

  “So, Annabel,” she said, with a pleasant voice meant to disguise her real feelings. “What are your plans on this beautiful morning?”

  She was trying to act nonchalant, but I knew what she wanted. She wanted to know exactly where I was going, and she wasn’t supposed to pry. Dad shook open the New York Times and peered at me over the top. I cut my waffle into dozens of pieces and plowed little roads through the syrup—a trick I’d learned to make it look like I was eating—and tried to come up with something that wouldn’t give away my real plan. Freedom or not, no one had to tell me McMurty’s farm was off-limits.

  “First, I’m going outside to meander.” I let my mouth draw out the word meander, then pretended to concentrate on the waffle’s journey, piling pieces into a small hill and smashing them flat so the syrup seeped out the little squares. Eventually the whole mess looked like it had already been through my digestive system.

  Mom stopped spreading and repeated “meander” like she’d never heard the word before. Dad put his hand on her arm.

  “Well, we have tons of errands. Let’s hustle so we can get back before the cleaning crew shows up.” He stood and cleared their plates. Mom was left holding her toast and the butter knife above her placemat. “Come on, Vic,” Dad called from the kitchen.

  Five minutes later they were on their way out the door, waving a list that should keep them busy for hours. Mom couldn’t resist one last little instruction. “Don’t forget the rules—keep your cell phone on, and send a text at noon.”

  I touched the new phone in my pocket, the one thing tying me to them until my noon check-in, and to six o’clock, when I was expected home. It was the only way she would agree to the Freedom Plan. Who was I to complain? I’d never had a cell phone in my life. Things could be worse.

  When I was sure they weren’t turning back, I grabbed the Story Notebook and jogged almost the entire mile to McMurtry’s farm. Across from the orchard, I stopped and leaned against a tree, gulping in air to catch my breath. Other than watching from the car window, this was the closest I’d ever been.

  Dad always said anyone could tell I was a country girl at heart from my bookshelf. The year I turned eight, when all my friends buried their noses in fantasy books, I’d read the entire Little House series—twice. My favorite part was when Pa made a ball for Laura out of a pig bladder. I’d asked Dad if he had a bladder at his biology lab at the college. Two weeks later, he’d slid a clear plastic bag across the dining-room table to me. Inside was a flat, pinkish-gray circle.

  “As you requested.”

  Mom had stared like it was a bag of poison.

  “It’s all sterilized,” Dad had said. “But I’d suggest you do your experiment out of Mom’s sight.” He winked, then cut a slice of roast pork and popped it into his mouth.

  The next year, when I was nine, I’d read another favorite countrified book, Judy’s Journey, about a poor girl whose mother made her a dress from a calico flour sack. I’d asked Mom if she could sew something like that for me.

  “Flour comes in a paper bag, not a calico sack,” she’d said.

  Mom teaches calculus at the same college where Dad teaches biology, which is why by the time I’d read Judy’s Journey, I already understood Fibonacci’s number sequence and the natural division of cells. Still, her lack of imagination withered me.

  “If you buy flour at a feed-and-hardware store, it comes in a calico sack.” I held up my worn, orange copy of Judy’s Journey as proof.

  She’d put down her Architectural Digest. “Annabel, when was the last time you saw a feed store in Manhattan?”

  “See? This is why we should be living in the country. Then we could make our own clothes and pick wild berries for dinner.”

  Mom had scrunched her forehead, which meant she was about to have a worried-about-Annabel moment. “Wild berries have bacteria. They can make you sick.”

  I’d stuffed Judy’s Journey under my arm and stormed from the room. At dinner that night Dad had asked why I was so sulky. I put my chin on my fist and pretended to ignore him.

  Mom had said, “She read a book about a poor girl and asked me to sew something from a calico flour sack.”

  “It’s not only that, Dad,” I’d grumbled. “It’s that we live in a city. There’s nothing good here—no grass, no ponies, no cows to milk or crops to harvest and sell. Nothing.”

  Dad’d tapped my head and smiled. “Pumpkin, you’re the only privileged child I know who wants nothing more than to be poor.”

  “I’m probably the only nine-year-old on Earth who’s never eaten a berry right off the vine.”

  Back then, I was sure it was true. I’d never eaten a berry from a bush; never brushed a pony’s tail; never owned a dog, raked leaves into a pile, made jam, or picked pumpkins out of a patch. For all the years I’d helped Dad with Summer Science Camp at the lake, for all I knew about leaves-of-three and spores and how caterpillars digest themselves before turning into butterflies, I’d never done any of the things country girls in my books did, because I wasn’t one of them. I was a city-in-the-winter/resort-in-the-summer girl. The closest I ever came to “country life” was driving past McMurtry’s farm.

  But all that was about to change, because I’d never had a summer of freedom before. And I’d never met anyone like the girl I’d seen standing in the corn.

  THREE

  Clumps of tiny green apples grew along branches that curled and jerked and reached far across the rows of the orchard, as if the trees were trying to shake hands with each other. Underneath, the grass was so high it fell over on top of itself. Past the orchard, a dirt paddock stood vacant against one side of a two-story red barn. For as long as I could remember, I’d wanted to get inside that barn. And now, here I was, standing across the road from the place I’d drooled over since I was big enough to see out the car window, and I was too scared to move.

  What if everything people said about Mr. McMurtry was true? Or worse? What if he’d tied his family up in his basement? What if he caught me spying and told Mom? Maybe the girl had only been my imagination. Maybe I was crazier than I thought. No, she was real. She’d wiggled her finger at me. Even I wasn’t that crazy.

  I took a deep breath, tugged at my shorts, darted across the road, and walked past the empty paddock, sniffing for any hint of a pony. With a barn and a paddock, there must have been ponies at one
time: fat, snowy ponies with manes that fell to their knees and backs that sunk like cushy sofas. But not even a tuft of hay rolled by.

  At the top of the driveway stood a red mailbox. No name, only a crooked, black number seven. I resisted the urge to straighten it. Spindly lilacs lined a gravel driveway, and a jumble of wheat-type stuff covered what used to be a yard. Peering around the corner of the barn, I squinted and studied the place I’d coveted for so long, listening for the sound of someone lurking nearby. Silence. No sign of a human.

  A path of flat blue stones led to partially buckled wooden steps and a covered front porch. I was so close, a few strides away from ringing the doorbell and asking for the girl, like a normal kid would do—if I were a normal kid. I could navigate the subway to and from school by myself, even in the winter when it’s dark at four thirty, but the idea of walking up to this house and asking for a girl—a plain old girl—had my heart pounding.

  Breathe in, breathe out. Breathe in, breathe out.

  A twig snapped.

  I gripped my notebook with sweaty palms. Dried weeds rustled from across the driveway. I pressed my back against the corner of the barn and held my pen up like a knife. The sound of footsteps moved closer. Was it the old man? Had he seen me? I stood my ground, braced to run, my attention trained on a spot where the weeds crackled and shook. Suddenly, the girl shot straight up from the thick of it all, holding one hand in front of her face.

  “Shhh. Don’t go up there.” Her eyes were as big as dollar pancakes, the color of sugared blueberries. “He doesn’t know I’m outside.” She ducked low, poking only the top of her head above the weeds, and scouted quickly left to right. “All clear—follow me,” and she was gone.

  A man’s voice cracked through the air so sharp it made my knees jerk. “Catherine?”

  The New-and-Improved Annabel sprinted across the driveway and into the brush. I followed her down a path that twisted and turned and finally spilled me into a small clearing where she knelt, peering at something in her hand.

  “He’s calling for Catherine. Is that you?”