The Art of Keeping Cool Page 15

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  There was one other discovery I made during our time in Rhode Island. One evening, about a week after we returned from seeing my father in Washington, my mother called Grandma from the road to say that she and Aunt Nan were broken down in Portsmouth on the way home. She’d started going to work in Newport again. Carolyn and I were back in school. These kinds of breakdowns had happened before. The car was old. Parts were hard to come by. At such times, Carolyn and I bedded down at Grandma’s for the night while Uncle Jake went to pick up the women and deal with the problem.

  I’d be given a blanket and pillow and told to stay up in Elliot’s attic. Usually, I’d sleep beside his bed so we could talk. But that night I didn’t want to. I was thinking about Dad, hoping he’d be okay. I wished he’d write me when he got to England but I knew he probably wouldn’t. He’d be too busy. It seemed I never could get as close to him as I wanted, and that kind of depressed me. I lay down by myself under some low rafters, where I could look up through a skylight and see the moon. In the distance, I heard an air-raid siren go off, and afterwards the rumble of a navy flight squadron passing by high up, heading out to sea. Both were such familiar sounds by then that I was glad to hear them, and felt a little peace come into me.

  It’s a comfortable feeling to know you’re being guarded while you sleep, that your enemies are well-watched and kept at a distance. Not since mid-August had the Germans torpedoed a ship off our coast. The big guns were in place, ready to shoot if need be, but a new confidence was rising in town, an awareness that the ocean was wide and difficult to cross, that our enemy had begun to draw back, that the war would be fought there, in far-off Europe, and not here on our Rhode Island beaches.

  That night, though, as the roar of airplanes faded into the distance, the sound of another motor rose in my ear. Down the driveway it came, and I knew from the way the motor turned off, with a little cough, that it was Grandpa’s car.

  He was coming home late from a visit to a patient. I heard the car door slam, the crunch of his feet on the gravel. I heard his heavy footsteps as he came toward the house, and the slap of his soles on the stone steps going up to the front door. Elliot must have heard him, too, because he rolled over quickly and lay still. We both listened to the front door open and shut, to the muffled tread of Grandpa’s progress through the house.

  A little flame of anger sprang up in me when I heard him get to the kitchen. I thought of what he’d done to my father there, how he still hadn’t owned up to it but went on hiding like a coward and bullying the people around him. It struck me how your enemy can be someone who lives close to you, where you’re most vulnerable, not just on the other side of an ocean. The flame blazed. I got hotter and angrier. I wanted to get up right then and do something. I wanted to fight him.

  The fire began to go sideways. Lying there in bed, I got angry at Grandma for pretending not to know what she really did know all these years. And at Aunt Nan for covering up; at Uncle Jake for being a weakling and not standing up to Grandpa when somebody needed to stop him. My mother wasn’t much better, the way she hid her true feelings from us and wouldn’t talk about things that upset her.

  Elliot must have heard me wrestling around with all this because suddenly he spoke.

  “Don’t let it bother you,” he said. “That’s the trick.”

  “What trick?”

  “The one that works against everything.”

  “Well it does bother me. I can’t help it.”

  “You can help it,” Elliot said. “You’ve just got to figure out how.”

  He rolled over and was quiet. Five minutes later, I knew from the sound of his breathing that he’d fallen asleep.

  I lay awake for most of that night trying to think of how I could go on living in a family that had so much wrong with it. I thought of the secrets we couldn’t speak about, the wounds that would never be fixed, the people who would go on pretending that things were normal and honest when nothing was, when it was all lies and covering up and hiding your real feelings.

  I was still awake at 5:30 A.M. when another squadron of reconnaissance planes roared back toward the base at Quonset. I tried to catch sight of them through the skylight but they passed by. Then, as the sky brightened outside, I saw something carved into the beam near the skylight over my head. I got up to look. There were my father’s initials— K.B.S.—carved deep and black into the wood. I couldn’t believe it at first. I ran my finger over them a few times to make sure it was really true.

  I wanted to wake up Elliot to show him, but he was sound asleep and looked too peaceful to disturb.

  So I lay back down to wait for morning, when I could ask Aunt Nan or someone how the initials might have come to be there. Maybe my father had slept here, too, so he could see the moon like me. Maybe this was his room. Or maybe he just liked to come here to be alone.

  I guess I must have finally dozed off while I was waiting because suddenly a little silver plane was flying toward me and I was back in the dream that had been bothering me ever since we came to Sachem’s Head.

  I saw the plane’s wings flash in the sun and heard the throb of the motor come closer and closer. Inside the cockpit, the shadowy form of the pilot was there, but I couldn’t see his face again.

  This time, I remembered Elliot’s advice. I thought if I could just shout loud enough, really loud, the man in the pilot’s seat might hear me. So I yelled, “Turn your head!” Then, with all my might, I bellowed, “Show me who you are!”

  After this, a hand grabbed my shoulder and I was shaken so hard my eyes flew open. There was Elliot laughing down at me and I was back in the real world with the sun of a new day pouring into my face.

  Also by the author

  The Lost Flower Children

  The Investigators of the Unknown Books:

  The Gold Dust Letters

  Looking for Juliette

  A Message from the Match Girl

  Angela’s Aliens

  Forest

  The Lampfish of Twill

  Afternoon of the Elves

  The Great Dimpole Oak

  Sirens and Spies

  The Dancing Cats of Applesap

  Atheneum Books for Young Readers

  An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, New York 10020

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  The town of Sachem’s Head, Rhode Island, is fictitious; all its inhabitants and their situations are products of the author’s imagination and not intended to portray real people or real situations.

  Copyright © 2000 by Janet Taylor Lisle

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  Book design by Ann Bobco

  Library of Congress Cataloging-m-Publication Data Lisle, Janet Taylor

  The art of keeping cool / Janet Taylor Lisle—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  “A Richard Jackson book.”

  Summary: In 1942, Robert and his cousin Elliot uncover long-hidden family secrets while staying in their grandparents’ Rhode Island town, where they also become involved with a German artist who is suspected of being a spy.

  ISBN 0-689-83787-9

  ISBN 978-1-439-13220-3 (ebook)

  I. World War, 1936-1945—Rhode Island—Juvenile fiction. [I. World War, 1939-1945— United States—Fiction. 2. Family problems—Fiction. 3. Artists—Fiction. 4. Cousins—Fiction. 5. Grandparents—Fiction. 6. Rhode Island Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.L69I2 Ar2000

  [Fic]—dc2I 00-032778

 

 

 
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