Words of Stone (2 page)

Don't think about it, Blaze told himself.

His dreams were always so vivid during the summer. He might not remember having a dream for months, but come July they would return. It was peculiar the way that worked.

Blaze blinked and looked around. His room focused about him, becoming familiar and touchable. The library book from the night before was now closed and neatly placed on his nightstand, his bedside lamp turned off. Although he had never actually seen Nova or Glenn do these things, he had often sensed a presence—passing as a shadow, removing the book, turning off the light, tugging the bedclothes up under his chin, touching his forehead, pulling the door closed.

Blaze sat up and swung his legs out from under the sheet. It was dawn. A gust of wind caused the loose window screen to flutter and the faded plaid curtains to balloon and collapse. The curtains had worn thin in many places and were at least as old as Blaze. So was the large, multicolored oval rug that covered most of the floor. But nearly everything else was relatively new in comparison. The bookshelf, the bed, the nightstand, the dresser. Blaze could still remember the old blue-striped wallpaper, but now the walls were white. He had picked the paint himself. Snowflake, it was called on the paint chart.

It was several summers earlier that Glenn had urged Blaze to redecorate his room. “I could paint the solar system on your ceiling,” Glenn had suggested. “And we could buy some of those neat glow-in-the-dark stars to stick on.” Glenn paused, tapping his fingers on his chin. “We could redo the walls, too. This wallpaper's not the greatest. We'd have to clean this place out first, though. Get rid of some of this old baby stuff.” As he spoke,
Glenn gestured vaguely toward the toys, knickknacks, and books that crowded Blaze's shelves, drawers, closet, and the dusty space under his bed. Things he had long outgrown. “What do you think?”

Blaze was looking at his prized possession—a plastic Noah's ark replica—perched atop the low overstuffed bookcase. “Okay,” he answered reluctantly, not wanting to disappoint Glenn.

“Great!”

“But can I keep my ark?” Blaze's voice was urgent.

Glenn hugged him. “Of course,” he said into his son's red hair.

Blaze picked the ark off the shelf and clutched it tightly. “And can we just paint the walls and ceiling white? No solar system?”

“You bet,” said Glenn.

Blaze figured that the lighter the walls and ceiling were, the lighter his room would be at night.

Blaze still had the ark. He kept it tucked safely under his bed. Out of sight if a friend from school came over. Now he pulled it out and brought it to the window. Resting one end of it on the sill, he held it in place with his stomach and drew open the curtains to glance at the hill. He did this every morning. But that morning there was something different. Something very strange. Something so strange that Blaze stepped back from the window in surprise, causing his ark to fall. It cracked in half at his feet, little animals scattering across the floor like the pieces of a shattered glass.

A chill hit Blaze in the small of his back and spread to his neck. Written with stones on the broad, mowed stretch of the hillside was the word
REENA.
Blaze felt hazy and anxious. His heart rattled. He closed his eyes and counted to ten before opening them again. Nothing had changed. Squinting, Blaze leaned on the windowsill, his nose pressed to the screen, then pulled back. The word was still there. It seemed to fill the window. The window seemed to fill the room. Blaze was smaller than ever.

REENA.

“Who did this, Simon?” Blaze whispered. His first, thought was to wake Glenn, but something deep and instinctive led him in another direction. Temporarily forgetting about his ark, Blaze slipped into some shorts, a T-shirt, and shoes. His hands shook, fumbling with his laces and getting tangled in the folds of his shirt. But, once dressed, he managed to move quickly and quietly so as not to wake anyone—melting down the stairs, tiptoeing throughout the house, and then pushing up the hill with all his might.

When Blaze stopped, he was gasping for air. He doubled over—hands on knees—and tried to breathe evenly. His breath felt warm on his skin. He lifted his head. The letters were enormous up so close. Impulsively, Blaze shoved stone after stone aside with his feet,
scrambling them so no one else could read the word. A few he heaved with his hands; they tumbled down the slope. A round and smooth stone with green rings on it caught his attention. It looked exactly like the stone he had chosen to mark Ortman's grave. He examined it closely. Recognized it.

“Oh, no,” Blaze said, stunned all over again. The sky and the grass changed places in his vision as he raced for the black locust tree. After stumbling twice, he used his hands in an animal-like fashion to help him move without falling.

He wanted to cry. His stones were missing. All five of them. Whoever had written
REENA
had used them to help construct the letters. Blaze circled the tree a number of times, raising a cloud of dust. Then he sat resting against it, thinking. Waiting. Without the slightest idea of what to do next. A group of crows swooped down nearby. They strutted in a chaotic formation, their calls long and raucous. In a sudden beating of glossy black wings, they took off again. Up, up, up they flew, and Blaze watched, feeling as if he were sinking.

B
alze spent the morning in his bedroom, feeling unconnected. He was fixing his ark with Elmer's Glue. While he waited for the glue to dry, he gathered the small animals he had dropped earlier and played with them—first grouping them by color, then lining them up in a row. He held a memory of doing this with his mother, Reena. He remembered placing the pairs of animals—elephants, giraffes, bears, sheep—on one of the inner braided coils of the rug in his room, following the rug's contour, curving the line of the procession until it formed an oval. Reena and Blaze in the middle. Now there was only one of each plastic animal. When Blaze was five and Reena died, he took one animal from each
pair and smashed them with a brick behind the house. Because the ark was his favorite toy and he wanted to punish himself somehow. Because a pair of anything didn't seem right.

Periodically, Blaze peered out the window, turning his gaze from left to right, checking for another message in stone. He was continually relieved when he found only the remains of the first, still strewn haphazardly across the hill like popcorn on a theater floor. Who did it? He kept asking himself that question. And he kept coming up with no answer. Although Blaze knew in his heart that neither Nova nor Glenn had done it, he toyed with the possibility.

Nova. She rarely left the house or garden, except to go grocery shopping. It was unusual for her to complain, but Blaze knew that by the end of the day her thick legs were puffy and sore. She often had to elevate them with pillows. Once, she said she had the legs of a ninety-year-old woman, even though she was only sixty. Her legs reminded Blaze of maps—bumpy blue veins connecting feet to knees like crooked highways. When he was younger, Blaze had found comfort in running his fingers over the bulging veins. Compared to them, the scars on his ankles seemed insignificant. The pinkish skin on his ankles was rippled, as if tiny worms were trapped underneath. It was as if twisting snakes were trapped under Nova's skin. Her legs didn't stop her from cooking and gardening with a passion, but trudging up the hill and
rolling stones around to spell the name of her dead daughter was surely the last thing she would do.

And Glenn? It wasn't his style. Glenn was a private person. And anyway, it was hard enough to coax him from his studio for dinner or a telephone call on a summer day. Blaze knew he wouldn't take time away from his painting to do something like this.

Who then?

Not his classmates. None of them lived this far out in the country. (Blaze was the first one picked up and the last one dropped off by the bus each school day.) And although Blaze didn't have a best friend, he was treated with genuine fondness by students and teachers alike. He was smart, but not the smartest. Shy, but not the most shy. He was ninth fastest in his class. And he was considered by some to be the best artist in the entire school. He could draw nearly any popular cartoon character upon request.

There were only two fellow classmates that Blaze didn't like—Teddy Burman and Chelsea Kurz—but they both liked him, so they were out of the question. Teddy was a tiresome braggart and Chelsea was a tireless brown-noser.

At Alan B. Shepard Elementary, Blaze was often called Big Red (a nickname that didn't bother him at all), even by Mr. Wiebe, the principal, who'd always try to ruffle Blaze's hair if he spotted him among the noisy throng that paraded past his office on the way to and from recess.

Floy Stark was a possibility, but a vague one. She lived alone on the other side of the hill in a tidy, boxlike house the color of celery. She was about Nova's age, maybe younger. Sometimes Blaze lay on the hill and watched the Stark house. Nothing interesting ever happened. Floy did ordinary things like hang laundry on the clothesline, wash windows, cut the grass, and play fetch with a terrifying German shepherd she called Gary (who was, thank goodness, usually chained safely to the garage). That was about it.

Blaze couldn't think of anyone else. “Help me, Simon,” Blaze said, flopping onto his bed like a fish. Pressed into his hand was a tiny plastic bird, wings outstretched, anticipating flight. He lay on his back, staring at the ceiling, trying to weave a plan. And remembering.

Soon after Reena died, Blaze, Nova, and Glenn went to a therapist together. Blaze couldn't remember how many sessions they had gone to, but he would never forget how uncomfortable he felt at them. “She looks at me like I'm an ant on a stick,” Blaze told Glenn and Nova meekly, after what turned out to be their last session. They were walking across the parking lot toward their car. Blaze inhaled deeply, so happy to be out of Dr. Zondag's office. He sniffed his sleeve; the lemony smell of the office still lingered and he waved his shirttail in the air.

Glenn and Nova shared a long glance.

“It's really important to talk about things, you know,” Glenn said cautiously, leaning against the car, jingling his keys.

Blaze nodded. He waited for Glenn to unlock the door, then crawled into the backseat. The late afternoon sun spilled into the car, creating sharp-edged shadows. Blaze moved his hand in and out of the warm light.

They stopped at a drive-in restaurant on the way home. Before they ordered, Glenn turned in his seat and leaned over toward Blaze. His head was touching the roof of the car, pulling his hair to one side as if he had slept on it funny. “We don't have to go back,” Glenn said slowly. “But you have to promise that you'll always ask me anything you want to. Even if you think it's silly or stupid. I want you to always be able to talk to me.” Glenn ran his hand along the back of Blaze's neck and rested it on his shoulder. “Mom would want it that way.”

Semis and cars rolled by on the highway while they had dinner. Blaze ate nearly half of his hamburger and he almost finished his junior chocolate shake—something he had never done before. He slurped his shake so quickly he got a headache. The pain thrilled him and he tried it again, egged on by his sense of relief.

As they pulled out of the driveway and threaded into the stream of traffic to go home, Glenn said, “Nothing's too big or too small to tell me or ask me. You know that.”

Blaze
did
know that. And yet he couldn't bring himself to tell Glenn about what he had seen on the hill that morning. For several reasons.

First, he was beginning to wonder if he had only imagined it or dreamed it. (That's what he wanted to think.)

Second, if it hadn't been a dream, would Glenn believe him anyway? Considering that Blaze had already jumbled the stones so that the hill looked as it always did?

Third, he was still shy when it came to talking about Reena with Glenn sometimes, even though he knew that he shouldn't be. Sometimes his unspoken words were almost tangible, he was so close to talking. Sometimes he stopped himself because he didn't want to take a chance on making Glenn sad. Blaze had seen Glenn cry once when Reena was ill. It had made Blaze feel as small as a dot and completely afraid. Now and then Blaze heard Glenn and Nova talk about Reena in what Blaze thought were sad, hushed voices. Of course, Glenn said things about Reena to Blaze, remembered things with him, but Glenn always initiated the conversations. That was the difference. Blaze didn't want to ask or say something about Reena if he couldn't be absolutely certain that the time was perfect and that Glenn would want to talk about her. Even at school if Blaze didn't understand something, he'd often try to figure it out by himself rather than raise his hand and ask a question.

And then there was the other reason. The eerie thought he was trying to suppress. The thought that his mother was somehow responsible for writing her name on the hill outside his bedroom window.

It was then that Blaze decided to handle this thing on his own. (With Simon, of course.) Maybe he hadn't been able to ride the Ferris wheel on the Fourth of July. Again. But this was surely a way to prove his bravery. He would get to the bottom of this. Blaze didn't want to be afraid anymore.

J
oselle Stark dried her eyes with the back of her hand. “No, I'm
not
crying,” she called fiercely. She was crouched on the ivory wicker clothes hamper in her grandmother's narrow bathroom. She wound her arms tightly around her knees and rocked back and forth. The hamper creaked and sagged in rhythm.

“Joselle? What are you doing in there?”

“I'm coming, Grammy!” Joselle scooted down and looked at herself in the mirror on the back of the door. I'm a mess, she thought, sniffling. Her dark brown hair hung in tangled strands around her face, one untamed clump falling over her right eye. “I wish my hair would cover my
mouth
,” she muttered, flipping her hair back.
Joselle's teeth were perfectly shaped, but they were sizes too big for her mouth. In fact, her teeth were so big, it took a conscious effort on Joselle's part to keep her mouth closed. Piano keys, she called them. And she had the nervous habit of bringing her hand up to her mouth, pretending to play a tune on her teeth, humming as she did.