Catalyst (14 page)

6.2 Experimentation

Breakfast with the Litch siblings is loud. Mikey spills grape juice twice and Teri burns the oatmeal. She’s pumped about her house, though. Keeps talking about Palladian windows. (I’ve got to look that word up when she’s not around.) Dad tries to get parental about how she should be in school and work on the house on the weekends. I suggest that we talk to the vo-tech supervisor, see if Teri can get credit for what she’s doing. Dad scowls and Mikey spills his grape juice again.

Mikey gets through the security at school without causing a scene. He has not blown out a diaper for forty-eight hours. Progress.

Mr. Kennedy, my guidance counselor, finally sees me fourth period on Tuesday. He tells me my options, the not-quantum ones. Basically, I’m screwed. My father can call MIT to make sure they rejected the right person, but there is no way they’ll reconsider my application. He says if I really don’t want to attend any of the schools that “accepted” me (let’s hope it’s not a sin to lie to your guidance counselor), I can apply to a school with rolling admissions, and hope to transfer to MIT after a year. Or I can I take a year off to “get my act together.” How sixties of him. I leave his office with a stack of brochures that I will give to Mikey to destroy.

When I get home, everybody is down at the Litches’. Teri and Pete are feuding about opening the wall between the kitchen and playroom. Since she’s busy, I put myself in charge of asset management. I am Queen of Lists and I make Mikey my Prince. He and I walk around the house, writing up highly technical documents like this:

A Litch List: Restoration Requirements, p. 1

3 fans from fire company

80 gallons white paint

10 gallons colored paint (Betty said Jesus told her the place needs accent colors)

paintbrushes

3 gallons window cleaner

18 rolls paper towels

13 kitchen ladies, armed with brooms and scrub brushes and Mr. Clean

4 mousetraps

cheese

assorted sledgehammers and crowbars

work gloves for everybody

kitchen cabinets

roofing materials

refrigerator

stove

sink

1 gigantic Dumpster

industrial sander for big things

100 pieces of sandpaper for little things

countless pieces of wood

nails for wood

hammers for nails

Mikey draws cows on the other side of the paper. They look like deflated balloons, but I know they are cows.

I corner Dad before dinner, when Teri is in the shower and Toby is teaching Mikey a video game. He flat out refuses to help me with the MIT appeal. He won’t even consider asking the admissions office why they turned me down, because he thinks I’m being slightly deranged about the topic. As for me driving to Cambridge to talk to the admissions officer face-to-face, well, his response makes it clear he’s been spending way too much time around the Litch family. If Betty heard him use language like that, she’d tell Jesus, for sure.

6.3 Hydrochloric

It’s hard to keep the days straight because whoever is running my life has pointed the Giant Remote at me and pushed Pause. Days just ooze by randomly, one after another.

Breakfast
chez
Malone provides our recommended daily requirement of chaos: lost homework, dirty diapers, forgotten phone messages, crumpled construction estimates, tools on the counter, juice spilled in the refrigerator, broken toys, a tsunami of laundry, chewed crayons, abandoned books, and oatmeal. There is peace in my car, just me and Mikey and the miles to school. We practice singing the elements song and the alphabet, and counting. This kid is a lot smarter than Teri realizes. He can say “Kate” and “Spock” and “atom.” I spend my second period lunches in his preschool class. We build towers.

Classwork and homework are produced by the Kate-a-tron, operating at a tolerable performance level. Everything is under control, with the possible exception of Mitchell “Why Won’t You Answer My Calls?” Pangborn. Sara understands how busy I am with the Litch Invasion. Travis understands. My father and brother get it. Even the dog is giving me some extra space.

By the end of the week I have a few things to add to the Quantum Futures List:

7. Become an Olympic runner.

8. Become a leading childcare expert.

9. Become a construction consultant.

10. Create a new career: Chaos Manager.

11. Rehabilitate the title: Domestic Goddess.

12. Make a movie about why MIT should let me in. Enroll.

13. Reapply to MIT. Pay someone to write my essays. Enroll.

14. Take a year off and chill (as if).

The lines between my days and my nights are blurring. The night is filled with the calls of owls and the smell of daffodils, and I run for miles.

7.0

Nuclear Stability

SAFETY TIP: Develop an accident plan.

I work at the pharmacy until three o’clock on Saturday, then I change into cruddy clothes and hurry down the hill. Dad had more than forty people volunteer to work today, and they had great weather. I can’t wait to see how much they got done.

(40 people + good weather) x motivation = a miracle.

Incredible. All that is left of the barn is a neatly raked rectangle bordered by foundation stones. The roof of the house is patched, the gutters have been fixed, and the shutters all taken down. Every window is open to catch the breeze. The kitchen has walls and a roof, a door, and a bay window that looks out over the pond. The air is filled with the sounds of hammers, saws, and some kind of buzzing noise I don’t recognize. When it dies down, I can hear a radio playing and people laughing, shouting, talking. The smell of smoke has been replaced by the smell of new lumber, varnish, and paint: hopeful smells.

I walk up onto the porch and step inside. The living room is unrecognizable. Everything, absolutely every stick of furniture, has been removed and the rug torn out. The hardwood floor glows. I move down the hall. The kitchen is busy with one guy installing a sink while his buddy sticks tiles in place on the wall where the stove will go. A third guy is sweeping up sawdust. The appliances aren’t in yet, but the cabinets are all hung. Amazing.

The playroom is where the buzzing noise was coming from. A woman with a mask over her mouth is pushing a giant sander over the floor. Two other women wait until she turns it off, then they follow and clean up behind her. The windows are still grimy, but the floor is looking pretty good. Cans of paint are stacked in the corner, along with floor cloths, brushes, and wooden paint stirrers.

With the sander off again, I can hear all kinds of commotion upstairs, including Teri’s voice telling somebody that “a blind man could see that thing isn’t straight.” If she doesn’t lighten up with these guys, they’re going to quit. Teri and I need to have a chat about the concept of team play.

I walk back down the hall, past the parlor, where three guys are busy painting the walls a soft shade of pink. I step through the front door (new doorknob) to the front yard, where the command post has been set up. Betty and Mrs. Litch are crocheting under the new shade of the maple tree. This is the first time I’ve seen Mrs. Litch here since the fire. Mikey is playing with his trucks on the ground in front of them. I don’t have the nerve to ask what they are crocheting. It’s big and orange; could be a car cover, maybe a fishing net.

Mr. Lockheart is scraping paint off the shutters while Dad watches him intensely. Mr. Lockheart knows better than to let my father touch any tools. Dad’s job is to look encouraging and to hum; he’s very good at humming. He carries things, too. He’s not a big guy, but he’s sturdy, and whenever something heavy needs to be moved, they call for the Reverend.

Ms. Cummings is pinning wet curtains to a clothesline strung from the maple tree to the front of the house. Toby is washing windows. The kitchen ladies are scrubbing inside. The choir is scraping old paint off the shutters. Everybody has a job. Hammer. Measure. Saw. Sweep. Scrub. Sand. Paint. Boss around. Play with trucks in the grass. Crochet. Gossip.

Mikey is the first one to notice me. “’Mony, Kate.”

“Antimony to you, too, Mikey.” What a kid.

Betty looks up from her crocheting. “There you are, dear. We were just talking about you.”

I force a smile. “Of course you were. Um, is there anything I can do to help?”

“You missed another spot,” Toby says.

I spray the window cleaner directly in his face. It’s a shame we are separated by a pane of dirty glass. My brother is a tyrant. This is the seventh window we have washed together. For a slob, he is strangely concerned about clean glass. It’s taking fifteen minutes to do each one. If he keeps this up, he won’t live to see number eight.

“No, you didn’t get it yet.” Toby frowns. “Right there. Rub harder.”

“If I rub any harder the glass is going to break.”

“Wuss.”

I rub so hard that paint chips flake off the frame and float to the ground. “Better?”

“A little.”

He moves down to the next window and sprays. It takes me longer. I have to climb down the ladder, move the ladder, check and make sure the ladder is properly positioned, ascend halfway, scoot back down, make a few more safety adjustments, then climb up the seven rungs to the top.

“Could you be any slower?” asks my always-supportive sibling.

“You missed a spot,” I say.

He coughs once and coats the glass with spray cleaner. It looks like a wave hit it. I concentrate on my side. After a while I don’t notice Toby’s face or his hands on the other side. We work in silence until the pane is so clear you can’t see anything between us.

“Looks good,” I say. “Open up.”

He hits the frame, struggles, then slides the window open six inches.

“Last one on this floor,” he says. “We’ll have to get the big ladder for the upstairs.”

My toes try to curl around the rung I am standing on. “It’s getting too late. You have to wash windows when the sun is high enough to see the streaks.”

“Whatever. We could do it tomorrow after church, I guess.” He sits down on the floor so that his chin is even with the windowsill.

“You like doing this?”

“Yeah. It’s kind of fun. Spooky, but fun.”

“Spooky how?”

“They carted out hundreds of beer bottles and a bunch of guns this morning. I heard Pete say some of the walls upstairs have holes in them. Don’t you think that’s spooky—living in a house that has holes in the walls?”

I use a paper towel to brush away the loose paint chips and dead flies from the windowsill. “Yeah. But all that stuff was from Teri’s dad and he’s dead. Good-bye, scumbag.”

“I guess.” He spies a smudge on the glass, sprays it, and wipes carefully. “But here’s what I don’t get. Why didn’t they do any of this cleaning or repair work before? Dad said Mr. Litch died last year.”

“He died in jail,” I remind him.

“Whatever. He was dead. He couldn’t come back and put more holes in the wall. Why didn’t they fix it up themselves?”

I peel off more flakes of paint with my fingernail. Little worms are chewing their way through the wood. “No money, no time, no energy. Remind me to show this to Teri. I bet all the frames are rotting. They’ll have to be replaced.”

“Maybe that’s another reason. Once you get started on something like this, it just gets bigger and bigger.” He stops to cough. It’s amazing he lasted this long with all the sawdust, paint fumes, and mold spores floating around.

“You’re done, Tobe. Time for some clean air. Out of there.”

“Give me a break.”

“Seriously. I shouldn’t have let you stay in there so long. You want to use the nebulizer?”

“Quit babying me.”
Cough.
“I’m fine.”
Cough, hack, wheeze.

“Pizza!” someone calls from the front of the house.

“Yes!” Toby bolts in the direction of the food, hacking all the way.

I descend the ladder slowly, feeling with my toes to find the ground.

7.1 Synthesis

Mitchell A. Pangborn’s Saturn has become the pizza delivery van. He parks it and unloads the boxes from the trunk, handing them to Travis and Sara, who carry them to the side porch. I think I want to say hi to him, but I have to wash my hands first.