The Atomic Weight of Secrets or The Arrival of the Mysterious Men in Black (30 page)

OR

WHAT HAPPENED IN THE MEADOW

Each child had received a similar note. All said, basically, the same thing:

Dearest Wonderful Child(ren),

We (I) miss you so very much and we were (I was) so excited thinking we (I) would see you this weekend. Unfortunately, things require that we (I) stay here a bit longer. We (I) hope to get home by Saturday afternoon. Or possibly Sunday morning. Perhaps late morning. Or evening. Or perhaps the following weekend.

In any case, we (I) will do our (my) best to see you.

Our (my) everlasting love,

Father (and Mother)

Wallace, upon reading the letter from his father, again reached his hand into his empty pocket and, in that giant oyster
of despair, felt a tiny grain of relief that his father had the lucky coin and, therefore, something that belonged to Wallace. He felt a surge of joy to know that his father had taken the time to write, and that he would be home soon. Or probably soon. Or, at least, home sometime.

However, once Wallace had settled in, eaten, and really scrutinized the letter, he realized that, unless his father had gone to a finishing school these many weeks, he had not, in fact, written this letter with his own hand. Wallace’s father was left-handed, and wrote in a kind of chicken scratch, on a slight angle to the page. This letter was written in perfect script—no scratch, no slant. Could his father have dictated the letter? Did Wallace believe that?

Wallace’s face burned with embarrassment for having felt so excited.

Faye did not have to read much of her letter to throw it onto the floor in disgust. Then she picked it up again and threw it down with even more force. Once was not enough. She wanted to keep throwing it as hard as she could.

Noah, too, tossed his aside. He was not furious like Faye or hopeful like Wallace—he just saw it as some silly way to make him believe his father planned a return. But his father had never before used the phrase “everlasting love.” This was not his father’s writing.

Lucy and Jasper were no different. They knew their mother’s voice, her writing, and her language, and they knew instantly and without a doubt that this letter was not from her. And their father simply did not write letters at all.

“Do they think we’re idiots?” Faye asked soon after, standing
with the others in the meadow. “Leaving us generic notes clearly mass-produced for our benefit?” She took her crumpled letter and threw it at a tree. “What a load of hogwash. If my father wrote this, he would have called me his little
marmelo.
This is not from him. It proves they have him captive. If he was able to write, why didn’t he just write to me? If our parents were not held hostage, they’d have the freedom to write, to visit, to take us with them. My father is in trouble, and we’ve got to find him. We’ve got to find all of them. If you can’t see that these notes aren’t even in our parents’ handwriting, they aren’t even—”

“We know that, Faye,” Jasper said. “We all know that. You think we can’t tell these notes didn’t come from our parents or that—”

“Not right away. Wallace didn’t even—”

“Leave him alone,” Jasper said.

“But you don’t understand—”

“What? Don’t understand? What does that mean, ‘You don’t understand’?” Jasper’s voice cracked. “No matter how different we are from each other—no matter if we even like each other—there are things we certainly share. Things that no one else shares but us. How dare you put yourself on a pedestal of understanding! Of course we bleeding understand.” Jasper’s face was red. How could she accuse them of not understanding?

Faye opened her mouth. Then shut it. Then opened it again.

“I... I didn’t mean... I mean, I know... well, you know.” Faye couldn’t say it. For the first time, Jasper seemed truly to be angry with her. He hadn’t let her rant and rave—he had told her off. She didn’t know how she felt about it, but she did know he was right. Of course, they bleeding understood.

Wallace stood back as Jasper and Noah attached the wings to the cockseat. Noah’s engine weighed more than they had hoped, but calculations confirmed it was still within the desired weight, and with twelve horsepower, there was no question this was the engine they needed. Once they found that the balance was right with the engineless model, powered by a twisted rubber band and Jasper’s propeller, Noah would work on the placement of the engine for the real prototype—the child-size, but not doll-size, version of their flying machine.

All the while, Faye could feel the chill coming from Jasper. Somehow, she was aware of his detachment. She could feel something and she didn’t like it. She didn’t like him being cross with her. Her emotions flipped back and forth from being furious with him for his anger to being hurt that, after all the times she had been awful to him, he’d suddenly decided to shut her out. She had always trusted he’d never turn his back on her.

“Look, Jasper,” she said, “the way I feel is—”

“I don’t care how you feel, Faye,” Jasper said coolly. “It doesn’t matter.”

“What does that mean?” Faye felt herself flush, her cheeks burning.

“For you, it only matters what you feel. You don’t care what anyone else feels.” Jasper looked right into those frosty green eyes and, with all the strength he could muster, said, “You don’t need anyone else to care, Faye, because you spend so much time caring for no one but you. I’ve got other people’s feelings that concern me
now.” And he turned away.

She didn’t want it to happen, but tears threatened to fall like tiny wet soldiers ready for battle. She feared the worst, turning away so no one would see her soldiers march down her cheeks.

F
AYE
T
AKES
H
ER
S
EAT

OR

WALLACE FINDS THE MISSING WORD

T
he following weekend, in the meadow, the children were ready to launch a properly weighted, rubber band-and-propeller-powered paperboard aeroplane model. It was about the size of a very large blackbird with a slightly wider wingspan.

To simulate a real pilot, they used one of Lucy’s porcelain dolls, balanced with a sandbag, so that it properly compensated for the weight of a real person and the weight of the engine relative to the weight of the aeroplane. Faye could not help but silently bemoan the fact that she was too big to be the test pilot herself.

“Is it fine with the rest of you if I set it off?” she asked politely. Jasper finally nodded when the others agreed.

“Thank you,” Faye said, her eyes coming to rest on Jasper. He offered her a nod and, perhaps, she hoped, the tiniest of smiles.

Faye knew she had to watch what she said and try to be more considerate. In the middle of all the excitement of trying to fly the model aeroplane, it would be quite a challenge. Taking a deep breath, she reminded herself that launching it was the closest thing to actually being on the craft and being the pilot.

Because it needed to be launched from a reasonable height,
Faye climbed the elm tree in the middle of the meadow and stood on a thick, firm branch. She drew back her arm, her finger holding down the rubber band to keep it from unwinding.

Lucy leaned over to Jasper. “She’ll have to watch out for
them,”
she said.

Then, in a sharp rush, Faye drew in her breath and nearly fell off the branch. There she froze, arm in the air.

“What is it?” said Jasper, worried she was about to fall.

“It’s
them!”
she cried.

“Them?” The others looked around the meadow, but no one was there.

“It’s them,
them,
patrolling the streets. We can’t launch this. What if they see it?”

The children looked, but they couldn’t see the street. The trees and the houses blocked the view.

“Patrolling in the daytime? How could we not know?” Jasper asked.

Lucy raised her hand. “I knew.”

“We’ve never left the meadow,” Wallace said.

“We never needed to,” said Lucy. “We get lovely treats and the meadow is jolly good fun.”

“How did you know, Lucy?” asked Jasper.

“Because I saw them and I counted when I was in my bedroom,” Lucy explained. “My room is at the front of the house, upstairs, and I can see the street. When we spent the day in our rooms, when we were cross with Rosie for telling us the man in the tall velvet hat was Mummy and Daddy, I saw the black carriages and bicycles and riders riding down the road. It’s all right, though,” she added quickly. “It’s not like at night. It’s more like Fridays at
the farm when they hardly patrol at all. Or Sundays here. During the day, they only pass every nine and a half minutes.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” asked Jasper, surprised by all the information his sister had kept to herself.

“Tell you what?” Lucy asked, equally surprised.

“That there were patrols in the daytime!”

“Why?” she said, eyebrows raised. “Was it important?”

Jasper opened his mouth to answer, but couldn’t. So he looked up at Faye and asked, “What do we do?”

Faye was still silent, still poised with her rather tired arm, frozen in the air.