I smile at Mom and Dad, but they look sadder than before.
“What? Wait a minute. Are you saying he
isn’t
going to live for a long time?” A horrible thought blazes up in my mind, a sudden fire I can’t stop. “Is he going to die?”
My dad holds his finger up to his lips, warning me to be quiet.
“We’re doing one day at a time here,” Mom admonishes. “Nothing more, nothing—”
She’s interrupted.
“I’m not going to die.” Freddy’s awake.
He’s speaking so softly, I can barely hear him.
“But—”
“Seventeen-year-olds don’t die,” he whispers. Mom reaches over and holds Dad’s hand, and I realize that we’re all thinking the same thing.
Seventeen-year-olds do die. Rain or no rain, they die all the time.
SAME DAY, SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 20
Heat
My tree weeps. My beautiful, lacy weeping cherry blossom tree sobs in front of me, tears falling from its pink petals as I stand underneath its branches.
There is no mist under here anymore, although I don’t think it’s why the tree is crying.
The tree cries because the farm is dying. We can’t pretend that it isn’t happening. The mist now stretches over the lake, exactly as it did four years ago. If it is protecting the water underneath it, it’s not doing a terrific job. The lake is still shining, still crystal blue, but it looks about half full. If we’re lucky.
The dragonflies have left my tree too, going with the mist over to the lake. Thousands and thousands of sparkling dragonflies still spin their green mist, an army gone to war against the relentless sun. I now believe the mist has good intentions. But it isn’t paying off.
I’m wearing my emerald ring on my left hand because my right hand started to ache as soon as I walked over here. When we left the hospital tonight, Mom tried to hide the fact that she was crying. Patricia and I didn’t say anything either. Now Mom’s back at the hospital, this time taking Basford and Beatrice with her. I came straight over here. I have a theory I need to test. I’ve been thinking about it ever since we got into the car at the hospital.
The whole way home, as Mom pretended to smile and Patricia pretended not to notice, I stared at my crooked finger. Mom was talking about how fun it would be when Freddy returned home from the hospital and how she hoped it would still be warm enough for him to go swimming in the lake. It made me remember that last time I went swimming, with Basford and Patricia, when Patricia accused me of peeing because the water around me was so warm.
Which made me think about the bottle I held during science class, when the water boiled inside the plastic and I showed Owen my crooked finger.
Which made me think about last night, when I pulled out the book light from the slugsand, and the stream of vapor lifted up from the watery muck.
Which is why I’m here, right now, at twilight. With my own scientific inquiry.
THEORY
Hypothesis:
My crooked finger can create water vapor.
Testing:
Put finger in water and observe if heating causes water vapor to rise.
Result:
?
Before I walk to the water’s edge to test my theory, I turn to the weeping cherry blossom tree’s narrow trunk.
“You’re very pretty,” I say, which I know sounds dumb, but I don’t want to lie and say everything’s going to be okay, because I don’t know if it is, and I don’t want to tell it to stop crying, because there’s a part of me that wants to cry right now too. So I do what I think makes sense: I tell my pretty tree that it’s pretty. Which is not a lie, and which is something a lot of things—people, anyway—like to hear.
Then I walk to the water’s edge. Without any hesitation, I kneel down and thrust my right hand, the one with the crooked finger, into the water.
My chest gets tight and my eyes go wide as I feel a bolt of sharp pain strike through my finger, lighting up my arm to my shoulder. I force myself to focus on the water, which has begun to swirl around my hand in small circles, a scant foaming crest appearing on the water’s surface. Another pang shoots through my arm, but I keep my hand swallowed up by the lake, as I feel the water grow warmer, as the water grows intensely hot.
And then, just like last night, I watch something incomprehensible happen, as another electrical
ping
runs up and down my arm.
Very, very slowly, up past my eyes, up to the lowest hanging petal of the cherry blossoms, a trail of vapor starts to rise from the swirling water. I can see it, thin droplets of water smearing into the air, forming a blotted column of water vapor. Just like we learned in science class, the vapor rises, up, up, up, past my eyes—past my head—moving so high that I have to crane my head back to look at it rising up and through the tree branches.
I’ve never seen a ghost, but I think the vapor might look like one: It’s white-ish and thin, and if you look at it a certain way, it could look like a very skinny phantom without a face. I forget about the pain in my finger; I just stare at the vapor continuing to rise up into the air.
Then it hits me.
Water heats to form vapor.Vapor condenses into ice crystals as it rises. And ice crystals form . . .
could it be?
Ice crystals form a cloud. That’s a fact. Ice crystals form a
cloud
. And from a cloud can come . . .
Rain.
At first, I feel a warm sense of triumph seeping through my bones. But just as I’m about to scream from the thrill, from the magic swirling around me—from
my
very own magic—those bright scissors in my mind return, cutting sharply through another curtain, revealing another truth that is terrible and ugly, and true.
Aunt Edith has a crooked finger. Aunt Edith could do this. Aunt Edith
was
doing this. Aunt Edith is deliberately not doing this now because Dad told her no.
Aunt Edith knew I could do this and
didn’t tell me
.
Aunt Edith
wants
the farm to die.
I yank my hand out of the water, falling back on the shore, trembling.
Aunt Edith.
My
aunt Edith.
I can’t help it, I start to cry, and the lacy pink petals of the cherry blossoms start to cry again too. I sob, and my tree sobs, and it feels as if it’s all I will ever do.
But my finger throbs, and it jolts me out of my heartache. My finger. I look back over to the water, watching the tail end of the skinny vapor keep winding its way upward. It is far too skinny to make a cloud. I’m still missing something.
I press my eyelids closed, thinking about Aunt Edith, willing her to tell me this one last thing. Willing her to tell me how to make it rain on our farm again. Willing her to be my savior one more time.
But then I feel myself harden, as if that force from before—the one that propelled me to the bench on the anniversary of Grandmom’s death—has yanked the controls away from Aunt Edith and switched the focus from her to me.
Is it Grandmom? Mr. Emerson? Mother Nature? God?
I don’t know. I just know the message.
Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.
I go back to my scientific process, now feeling like a professional scientist.
THEORY 1
Hypothesis:
My crooked finger can create clouds.
Testing:
Put finger in water and observe if heating causes water vapor to rise and condense.
Result:
Vapor rises. Kind of.
NEW PROBLEMS:
Vapor too skinny to do much of anything. How can I make the evaporation more powerful?
THEORY 2
Hypothesis:
Need to get one.
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 22
Mutations
Last night, after I got back from the cherry blossom tree, I almost told Basford about making the vapor. He was in the playroom, staring at the wall, although as soon as I entered, he snapped open one of his history textbooks and pretended that he was working. I think he was surprised that I was energetic; he was the complete opposite, his long frame sunk into the cushions of the sofa, his eyes downcast and sad. I opened my mouth, ready to tell him why I was so energized, when he cut me off.
“Did Beatrice ever tell you about the devil’s needle?”
“Devil’s needle? No. What’s that?”
“That’s what they call dragonflies in Bermuda.That’s why I stared at it that first day on the porch. Some people think dragonflies find evil spirits and stick to them, trying to ruin their lives.”
“That’s crazy,” I told him. “Grandmom loved dragonflies, which means they have to be good.”
“They bring bad luck,” he said stubbornly.
“What’s the matter with you?”
Then he gave me this sorrowful look like I was the only person in the world who couldn’t see what he was seeing.
“Have you noticed everything that’s happened? All the bad things?”
“It’s not because of the dragonflies,” I said, thinking of Aunt Edith. “It’s because of a person.”
“Exactly,” Basford said, but he looked at me strangely. “That’s what I think too. The dragonflies are just one of the bad omens.”
“No,” I argued. “It’s the person who is the bad omen.” I wondered if he knew about Aunt Edith too but before I could ask him, he said he was tired and wanted to go to sleep.
Since then, Basford hasn’t talked to me. On the way to school this morning, he kept his lips closed tight, staring out the window. When we got out of the car, everyone rushed to me to ask about Freddy, and Basford instantly disappeared. I think I’m going to have a chance to ask him what’s wrong in science, but just as I sit down, Owen enters the classroom.
“Hello, hello, hello,” Owen says. “Please tell me you did the homework, Eve.”
“I’m Pia.”
“Of course you are.”
My thoughts wander back to the vapor. If I could only figure out how to make more of it; generate more heat, perhaps, or maybe make it wider, thicker through some other method I haven’t figured out. I sit back in my chair, my eyes inadvertently locking with Owen’s for a second. I pretend I’ve been paying attention.
“ . . . each of our cells have twenty-three pairs of chromosomes,” Owen is saying. “Half contributed by your mom, the other half from your dad. No choice involved, thank you very much.You there wanted your mom’s big brown eyes? Not so fast! Someone in your family had those green suckers and that’s what you got. But today, everything’s changing. Genetics, the new frontier! You can alter some individual traits. Right? Think about it.”
Wait a second. This is what Dad was talking about yesterday. About Freddy.
I don’t even raise my hand. “Can you change them? Your genes, I mean?”
“Change? Like change, change, make blue eyes brown, without contact lenses? Not exactly. Some scientists are learning how to manipulate genes. And sometimes genes get all willful and manipulate themselves.”
“How?”
Owen notices the worried tone of my voice, but he pretends as if this is all still a normal class discussion. He turns back to the rest of the class.
“It’s called, ladies and gentlemen,
mutation
.”
“What does that mean?” asks Margaret. “Mutating?”
“Come on, Marcia! Have you not seen all those movies with mutants?”
“Mutants have something messed up,” says Charlie. “Something in their chromosomal line. Right?”
“Well, they have something that isn’t typical,” Owen says. “I wouldn’t say it’s necessarily messed up. Sometimes supremely superb things happen.”
“Like what?” asks Charlie.
“Like superheroes,” Owen answers.“I
love
superheroes.”
“They’re not real,” scoffs Jongy.
“But they illustrate the example,” Owen answers. “All mutations aren’t a bad thing. Or rather, all mutations don’t result in something bad, or diseased. Some actually have pretty amazing consequences. Think about it: What is evolution but a series of mutations?”
I sit up straight in my chair. “Is that what a genetic disease is? A mutation?”
“They’re all different. But let’s take the big one. Cancer. Cancer isn’t inherited. An inclination to having a specific kind of cancer can be dictated by the kinds of genes you have, but it isn’t a straight-up inheritance. It’s like having a great relationship with your grandfather, who
may or may not
leave you with a lot of money. Possible, not definite.”