The Hole in the Wall Read online

  Table of Contents

  Also by Lisa Rowe Fraustino

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Copyright Page

  Also by Lisa Rowe Fraustino

  Picture Books

  The Hickory Chair

  Novels

  Ash

  Grass and Sky

  I Walk in Dread:

  The Diary of Deliverance Trembley,

  Witness to the Salem Witch Trials

  Anthologies

  Don’t Cramp My Style:

  Stories About That Time of the Month

  Dirty Laundry:

  Stories About Family Secrets

  Soul Searching:

  Thirteen Stories About Faith and Belief

  for my son,

  Dan

  “Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil

  set off a tornado in Texas?”

  —Edward Lorenz

  Prologue

  When he got the idea that would change his life, the boy was lying on his back in the cave near his home. He was staring up with his eyes crossed and waiting for the stone colors to show themselves again.

  Months ago he had seen them for the first time. He was playing with his toy soldiers, and as he twisted his head to survey the dramatic battlefield, the colors blinked at the edges of his vision. When he tried to look straight at the bursts of color, they disappeared. It was maddening. He wanted to see them again.

  Day after day he returned to the cave, hoping to glimpse the colors. He found that when he read there and his mind was involved in the world of the book, the colors sometimes flickered in the corner of one eye. If he stayed perfectly still at that moment, the colors would linger briefly, bright and pulsing in beautiful shapes that looked like ferns, or maps, or fields of broccoli.

  One day he fell asleep in the cave, and as he awoke, before he remembered where he was, he thought he saw the colors everywhere in the walls, every color imaginable, swirling in three dimensions, making patterns like his mother’s crocheted blankets. He thought he saw threads of color crocheted down to the middle of the earth.

  After that he found he could best call up the colors when he let his eyes float out of focus and turned his mind to daydreams. Today his mind wandered to a story he’d just read about dragons, and he imagined himself inside a dragon’s lair, trying to rob its hoard of jewels while the beast slept. As he reached for a ruby that had fallen away from the pile, the bold colors whirled in the rock overhead like wings flapping. For an instant he thought he could hear something—a musical ringing. The air suddenly smelled sweet.

  “Beautiful,” he said in awe, though nobody else was near. He sometimes allowed a neighbor friend to join him in the cave, but only to play games or read joke books. He never told his friend about the colors he saw and his friend never saw them. That was his secret pleasure.

  And now they were gone again, the dragon’s wings buried in lumpy gray stone. The colors always disappeared as soon as he became aware of them, and he was never able to revive the same vision. Each sighting felt like a gift and a loss at once. If he could only make the colors stay longer and hold their beautiful shapes.

  While he lay wishing he could conjure up the dragon again, he decided that the next time he’d try to get the memory down on paper, perhaps make a painting. But where could he ever find colors like that? None of his pencils, markers, or paints would be the same. The colors in the rocks had depth, dimension, and motion. How could he capture that spirit on a flat sheet of paper with his schoolboy art supplies?

  And then he realized. The colors existed in the rocks. Well, he could get them out! Yes, he’d chip away some stone exactly where the dragon wings had flapped, and he’d grind it down to find the pigments. Surely he could figure out how to turn the pigments into paint.

  The boy ran straight home to find a chisel.

  1

  The first strange thing I noticed that cloudy Thursday morning was my brother’s cat jumping up on me like a dog when I opened the henhouse door to feed the chickens before school. A cat acting like a dog wasn’t the strange part. He’s always done that. Which is one reason Pa started calling him Jed’s Stupid Cat instead of the name on his collar—Fluffy Kitty.

  Stupid had been missing since Jed ran away from home. Back in the fall. I was surprised to see the old furball, but that wasn’t the strange part either. Pa had never allowed the cat inside the house. He came and went as he pleased, sometimes disappearing for weeks or months. But this time Stupid had reappeared inside the henhouse. Inside?! That was strange.

  Unless . . . did this mean Jed had returned? Excitedly I ran out to the miniature stone castle in our backyard and flung open the door, calling Jed’s name. But his room remained as he’d left it six months ago: neatly made bed without him in it, neat piles of books on the floor making a shelf for his neat piles of clothes, guitar under the bed, space heater under the single window. A dozen cuckoo birds stared forlornly from the collection of clocks covering the walls, their weights resting on the floor with nobody to reset them every eight days.

  Just then Ma’s clunker SUV chirruped outside. She left real early for work at the dress factory in Exton. That’s why her chickens were my chores now. Jed used to take care of them.

  Suddenly I remembered something. Ma was supposed to sign my homework! I started running down the driveway waving my arms behind the car, but then I ran back to the henhouse before she saw me. Because I suddenly remembered something else. I’d actually sort of forgotten to do my homework. Which happens a lot. Which is the reason Ms. Byron asked me yesterday to get it signed. Ms. Byron was going to have my wild rumpus in detention if I went to school without that math again.

  For about the gazillionth time I wished Jed hadn’t run away. Jed used to help me with homework.

  As I tossed feed to Barney the rooster and his harem, I planned a desperate plea to my grandmother. Grum just had to let me stay home from school, because . . . because I was the victim of a mysterious debilitating illness! Hadn’t I grown thin lately even though I ate everything Ma served, no matter how overcooked or underdelicious? Now that I thought about it, I ached all over. My stomach ached, my head ached, my insides ached teeth to toes. Little twitching pains crawled sincerely all along my skeletal system.

  I screamed in horror, collapsed and rolled in agony on the straw, then lost consciousness as the ambulance sirens approached. I awoke alone in a hospital bed, my lungs grabbing desperately for air. With possibly my last breath in this life, I croaked, “Nurse!”

  The nurse came flying in, crying, “Cock-a-doodle-doo!”

  Whoops. There went my brain making things up. Again. Barney was flapping his wings at me while I reached under a chicken for an egg. And that was when I noticed the second strange thing in the henhouse that morning.

  The bird didn’t move. It sat very still like Grum in church, only its eyes followed my hand as I stole its baby. This was not very henlike. In fact, so not henlike that it creeped me out, and the egg fell out of my hand in shock. My shock, I mean. I dove to catch it before it went SPLAT! but only caught the floor with my face.
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  Instead of going SPLAT! like a decent egg should, the freak went BUMP! and wobbled off like it was hard-boiled. Okay, was my unique brain imagining things again? Always a concern. I smacked myself in the head to check. My head hurt, and when I kicked the egg it didn’t crack. This was real.

  Not good. Every penny counted around our place, and the first things to go when the egg dollars didn’t come in were the fun things. Like Saturday roller skating at the Skate Away.

  This situation wasn’t natural. It needed attention. With the hard egg in hand, I ran to the house and jumpkicked the door open. The door didn’t like to open unless you gave it a good kick or yank, depending on which side you were on. Just one of the many warps in our house A.O.—After Odum Research Corporation bought up all of Kokadjo Gore to strip-mine it. Our place was practically falling apart from soaking up runoff from across the street. Sometimes I swear the water ran uphill just so it could get into our basement. Really!

  “Shish! Grum! Look!” Shish is what I very affectionately call my twin sister Barbara, short for Shish Kebarb.

  “Oh, shush yourself,” she said. She was born seventeen minutes before me but always acted like it was seventeen years. Everything I could do, she could do first. She’d always been taller than me—taller than everyone in our grade, actually. Her eyes were darker brown than mine. Even her feet were bigger. But my hair was blonder and curlier and that drove her insane with jealousy. As opposed to just driving her insane.

  “What’s gotten into you kids, raising your voices like that?” Grum rolled her eyes toward the ceiling, warning us. The cobwebs dangling from the light fan were vibrating with Pa’s snores. Pa snored like a jackhammer. It was never a good sign when he stopped jackhammering before 9 AM.

  Jed used to say that one good reason Ma raised hens was so we’d always have plenty of eggshells to walk on around Pa.

  “But, Grum!” (That was me.)

  “Drink the rest of your milk, Barbara Arleene Daniels,” Grum added.

  A few years ago Grum had broken both of her wrists carrying too many plastic grocery bags. The doctor said it happened because she had bone loss due to osteoporosis. Ever since then she was a lunatic about everyone getting enough calcium and Vitamin D.

  “I got an emergency here!” (Me again.)

  “Aw, Grum, I hate milk when it’s all warm.” Barbie can make hate sound sweet.

  “Drink it all when it’s still cold, Missy, and you won’t have that problem. Don’t drink it now and you’ll have worse problems when you’re old like me. You’ll be Miss Now-I-Walk-with-a-Cane-and-Should-Have-Drunk-My-Milk-When- I-Had-the-Chance of the Universe. Young women have to put bones in the bank. And sit up straight while you’re at it. Slouching leads to—”

  This could go on forever. “But the chickens!” I yelled, stomping my feet.

  Grum peered at me in her sneaky way, eyes snooping above her glasses as she looked up from the snarled ball of string that she untangled hour after hour because she liked to keep her hands busy, and, “Waste not, want not.” I knew I was in for one of her lessons of the day.

  “But the chickens? But the chickens! Is that what passes for a complete thought nowadays? The chickens are a lonely subject in search of a predicate.”

  “They have a pox! Look!” I held my hand out and dropped the egg.

  “Seb!” squealed my perfect sister.

  The egg went BUMP! wobble-wobble-wobble and stopped against Grum’s slipper. She put her string ball down and made clickety noises with her false teeth as she poked at the egg with her toe.

  “Why, it’s like a rock! I’ve never seen anything like it. Were there others?”

  I made a face and shrugged. I didn’t recall encountering any other eggs in the hospital.

  “Well, pick that egg up for me, please, then go back out and finish your chores. While you’re at it, send up a prayer for Jesus to lift the burdens from those hens.” She started humming a hymn, and I was out of there.

  I used to love every minute with Grum, when she had her own place across the road in Kokadjo Gore and I could visit her whenever I wanted. But after she moved in with us it was too much of a good thing. Worst of all, she took the room I used to share with Jed, so I had to move into the upstairs foyer with Barbie. Jed moved into the stone playhouse us guys had built in the backyard. That was back in the days when Pa got up at 6 AM and had a charming personality. When I used to follow him around and “help” him be a fixer-man.

  Finishing my chores in the henhouse turned out to be impossible. I kept looking and looking, but I didn’t find enough eggs to refill a carton for the Dogstars, our regular Thursday customers. Finally I realized the reason was that the eggs just weren’t there. And neither were some of the chickens. They must have gotten out when Jed’s Stupid Cat let himself in. I certainly would never have left the door open after all the times Ma reminded me.

  I’d have to look for the escaped hens outside, but not now. I barely had enough time to get ready for school.

  As I ate my cereal, I stared at the eggs in the basket, wondering if they were hard like the one that went BUMP. I didn’t dare try the drop test, for obvious reasons. While I was staring, my arm started aching again with those twitching pains along the bones. I screamed and grabbed my elbow.

  “Oh, puh-leeze, Sebby. Cut the melodrama. Just give me your dirty rotten dish so I can wash it before we miss the bus.” It was Barbie pulling on my cereal bowl, which was still attached to my arm.

  Grum hushed us again and said, “Your sister’s right, boy.”

  I moaned sincerely to prove my pain. It hardly had anything to do with the fact that I didn’t have my homework. Signed. “But, Grum, I honestly don’t feel good. I ache all over. Even in my teeth.”

  “That so?”

  I nodded.

  “Well, open your mouth and say ah.”

  I did a real good job of that while Grum shone a flashlight down my throat. “Hm, I wonder . . .” She stuck a finger in my mouth and probed my gums in the back.

  “Ow!” (She’d definitely hit a sore spot.) “Ow! Ow! Ow! See? I’m in agony, Grum. I can’t possibly go to school today.”

  She removed her finger, put down the flashlight, and pronounced, “You’re getting your twelve-year-molars is all. You’ll be fine. Congratulations.” She patted my cheek.

  “What? That can’t be! We’re only eleven!” Barbie grabbed the flashlight and ran into the bathroom to look for molars in the mirror.

  Ha! It killed her that I’d finally gotten ahead of her at something. But this was no time to gloat. I still had a mission. “Grum, what about the rest of my aching body?”

  She lifted her head and eyed me under her glasses this time, stopping at my ankles with an Aha! smile. They stuck out under my frayed jeans like white bed knobs beneath a short bedspread.

  “You’re an inch taller today than yesterday. They’re just growing pains. Now go change into your school clothes, young man.”

  But it was too late for that. The Rust Bus already sat at the end of our driveway, flashers blinking. I grabbed my bag and raced Barbie for the good seat.

  2

  B.O., or Before Odum took over Kokadjo Gore, a regular big yellow school bus used to take us to school with a bunch of kids from there. Now that all those families had moved, we rode in a rusty blue Ford Escort with a yellow sign in the back window that said SCHOOL CHILDREN ABOARD. The driver lady, Miss Rosalie, worked as a cashier at WalMart and picked us up in her own car on her way to and from work.

  “Hey, now, Sebastian, quit mauling your sister and let her in the car,” Miss Rosalie greeted me fondly. “You rode shotgun yesterday. Plunk yourself down back there in the middle to save room for Cluster. And fasten your seatbelt.”

  So I gave Barbie a shove into the good seat and grumbled my way into the back next to the car seat that held Miss Rosalie’s drooling baby. He grinned and bonked me on the head with his rattle.

  Little Rico wasn’t the problem with the back, though. I sat next
to him gladly on the way home in the afternoon. The problem was the ugly view out the window on the left side of the car when we drove across Kettle Ridge in the morning. From that high up, the strip mine looked like a skeleton with scabs and tumors. The graveled backbone road was nicknamed “The Gash” because that’s what it looked like in the scarred land. Rib roads ran down between slag piles and stagnant water holes.

  One time Jed brought home some girl he’d met at a rally for peace or the environment or the protection of animals or something. She asked us what strangers to these parts always ask: “Kokadjo Gore? What kind of a name is that?” And Grum answered as always: “A gore is a triangular piece of land that got left out somehow when the towns around here were surveyed, back in the Colonial Days.”