Message from the Match Girl Read online

Walter shrugged. He wanted to go on with the story about his parents. He was frantic to go on. While Poco and Georgina dug into their sundaes, he began to tell them other reasons why his parents might have come to the park that day.

  They were happy; no, they were sad. They were worried; no, they needed exercise. They had something important to talk about. They were just tired of being in the house. They met some friends. They walked alone. They took turns carrying him. When it started snowing, they caught snowflakes on their gloves and let him taste them. He was surprised by the flakes’ coldness and began to cry, so they hugged him until he …

  Georgina and Poco put their hands over their ears.

  “Walter, stop!”

  “We’ve heard enough.”

  “Can’t we talk about something else?”

  His feelings were hurt, and he turned to the window. The Little Match Girl statue was faintly visible through the park gates across the street. He stared in her direction during the rest of their time in the restaurant, forgetting even to eat his sundae.

  Afterward he wanted to go alone to stand by the statue again, so Poco and Georgina agreed to wait for him. They threw Poco’s crackers to the ducks in the pond and then sat patiently on the grass. This was very nice of them, considering how chilly it was. Walter didn’t notice, though. In the distance they heard his voice rising and falling. They knew he was talking about his parents again, inventing more things they might have done on that long-ago day in the park.

  “What is wrong with him?” Georgina demanded at last.

  “He’s hungry for stories,” Poco said. “In fact, he’s starving. It happened to some baby rabbits I met.”

  “Oh please.”

  “It’s true. Their mother got eaten by a coyote, and they grew up never knowing who she was. So they used to sit around making things up. Sometimes they pretended she was a beautiful silver house rabbit, sometimes a famous jumping rabbit from the north. The other rabbits laughed, but they didn’t care. They had to have stories just as much as food, otherwise they would have shriveled up and died.”

  “Good grief!” Georgina said. “You can’t die from that.”

  “Yes you can,” said Poco, who could be shockingly wise at times. “There are things you have to know. You have to know where you came from, or you can’t go on. You have to have stories about yourself.”

  “Then why won’t Walter’s grandmother tell him?”

  “I don’t know,” Poco said. “I think it means that something’s wrong.”

  A nervous swan hissed at them. Poco’s robin seemed to have flown somewhere else. Or maybe he was huddled in a nest. The wind was icy when it blew hard.

  “I think that waitress really did care about squirrels,” Poco remarked a little later. “She kept coming back and watching to make sure we took the nuts. When we left, I saw her spying on us from the back room.”

  “I think she was hoping we’d give her a big tip,” Georgina said. “But I couldn’t remember how much I should leave, so I didn’t put anything down at all.”

  FOUR

  WALTER KEW COULD NOT get used to having, in his pocket, a picture of his very own mother. He could not get used to taking the picture out and looking at it. It didn’t matter that his mother’s face was hidden. The back of her head was fine. More than fine, it was beautiful.

  He looked at it in the mornings when he first woke up and at breakfast while he ate his cereal. He looked at it on the way to school, in the hall between classes, and during lunch. When school was over, he walked to the park, stood near the Little Match Girl, and stared at the photo. No one asked what he was doing there. He stood so still that he might as well have been invisible.

  After dinner—which never lasted long, since there were only two at table, Walter and his grandmother—he carried the photo up to his room and held it under the desk lamp until the surface turned hot and sticky. This brought out mysterious shadows in the picture. He saw a dark shape reflected in the baby’s eyes—in his eyes. Was it his father? Walter’s heart beat faster.

  At night, after his grandmother had tucked him in tight, the way he liked, after she had given him her shy, old-fashioned pat (“What a big boy you are now,” she often murmured), Walter listened to her shoes clump away down the hall. Then a terrible loneliness would come creeping toward his bed. Like a hungry wolf, it would sniff at his shoulder, tug at the sheets. In fright, he would search his mind for a memory: a face, a color, a touch, a sound—anything to connect him to the woman in the photo.

  There was nothing.

  He would hold his breath and listen for his mother’s voice. “Please!” he would pray. Most nights it didn’t come.

  “She never comes when I need her,” he told Poco. “And even when she does, I can’t understand her.”

  “Give her time,” Poco said. “Maybe she’s working things out.”

  Time! Walter didn’t have it. He began to show the photo to other people. To the soft-voiced art teacher at school. To the waitress in the sandwich shop across from the park, where he went to buy candy. The librarian in the public library smiled when he showed her.

  “What a cutie,” she said, taking the photo in her hand. “Is that your new baby brother?”

  Walter had nodded. How else could he explain? Anyway, the baby did seem like a new brother. He was amazingly young and impossibly small, a person Walter might get to know if he stared hard enough.

  He stared mostly at his mother’s head. Sometimes he spoke to it in his room.

  “Who are you?” he’d ask, right out loud. “Do you still love me?” Then he’d cover his mouth. What a stupid thing to say!

  Only later he realized it wasn’t that stupid. From across her dark ocean his ghost-mother must have heard, because not long afterward a message arrived. Eerily but fittingly, it came from the Little Match Girl.

  Georgina leapt straight up in the air when she heard.

  “A message?” she cried. “From the Match Girl? Where?”

  “Right here,” Walter said. While Georgina and Poco watched, he took from his back pocket an ordinary white envelope, rather bent from being pressed into chairs all day. Walter, being Walter, had waited until the very end of school to show them.

  “Good grief!” Georgina practically screamed. “How could you just sit there on top of it?”

  “I wasn’t sure if I should tell.” Walter glanced over his shoulder. “Some spirits don’t like being told on, you know.”

  Georgina snatched the envelope out of his hands. It was addressed to Walter, care of his grandmother, Mrs. Fred Docker, and had come through the regular mail. The stamp was postmarked with the name of their town and the date of the day before. Inside, there was no letter, no note, no signature of any kind.

  “Matches!” said Georgina, peering in. She shook three large wooden matches into her hand and examined them with critical eyes.

  Poco stood up on tiptoes to see. “Oh, Walter,” she said. “Do you think it’s your mother?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Spirits don’t send messages to just anyone.”

  “Of course not.” He glanced sideways at Georgina.

  They had been walking along the sidewalk toward Poco’s house. Now they came to a halt to decide what to do. Poco’s mother had agreed to take them shopping at the mall. Not that they would be allowed to actually buy anything, but they could trail along behind her, looking at things. Mrs. Lambert was not so generous as their friend Angela Harrall’s mother had been. Mrs. Harrall would have bought them magazines, and treated them to orange sodas as well. They missed her terribly—along with Angela, of course. Six months had passed since Angela had moved to Mexico, leaving her cat, Juliette, in Poco’s care. It would be another six until she returned. “And she won’t be the same,” Poco had warned. “No one stays the same in far-off places like Mexico.”

  Now, as Poco held up one of the mysterious match sticks, a wave of excitement passed through the friends, and there was a sense of having found a far-
off place nearer home.

  “What do you think it means?” Walter asked. He tried to take the envelope back from Georgina, but she kept a grip on it.

  “There’s only one thing it can mean. The Match Girl wants to see you.”

  Walter nodded gravely. “That’s what I thought.”

  “I’ll go with you if you need me,” Poco offered.

  “I’ll go whether you need me or not!” Georgina declared. “I think the Match Girl, whoever she is, meant this message for us all.”

  “She did?”

  “Well, there are three matches, aren’t there?”

  This idea was questionable, but there was no time to argue. With her usual energy, Georgina leapt into action. She set off down the sidewalk at a rapid trot, barking back orders at her friends.

  “First we’ll go to Poco’s house. We have to get out of going to the mall. Poco’s mother won’t like it, but that’s too bad. We’ll tell her we have more important things to do.”

  “George, wait! You can’t tell her that!” Poco shrieked. Too late. She had already disappeared around the corner.

  “Georgina is like one of those awful garden peacocks. Whenever anything happens, she spreads out and takes over,” Poco complained as she and Walter raced along behind.

  Luckily, they caught Georgina just before she rushed into the Lamberts’ house. Poco managed to get inside first and talk to her mother. This was fortunate, because Mrs. Lambert was in a touchy mood and had to be coaxed, and promised, and apologized to. Finally she agreed, and Poco emerged from the house victorious, feeling as if she’d just handled a whole herd of peacocks.

  It was a cool but sunny midafternoon when they arrived on foot at the park, and the sidewalks and lawns swarmed with people. The slides and swings were in heavy use. Two miniature sailboats skimmed across the pond. Some teenagers had set up a volleyball net and were playing a rousing game on the grass.

  Thumbelina and the other bronze statues stood in the midst of all this activity, looking smugly as if they belonged. Only the Little Match Girl sat apart on her knoll at the park’s far edge. Not a soul was near her, and perhaps even the park workers had forgotten she was there, because the grass around her was long and weedy with last year’s growth. As they approached, the friends caught a wild smell of underbrush and overgrown bushes. It made them think of her lonely story.

  “Didn’t she freeze to death on New Year’s Eve?” Georgina asked.

  Poco nodded. “When she couldn’t sell her matches, she huddled in an alley and began to light the matches herself to stay warm. She couldn’t go home because her father would be angry.”

  “That’s right. And each match she lit made a beautiful picture, and she could pretend she was inside it, warm and happy.”

  “Except she wasn’t pretending. She was happy,” Poco said. “Then her grandmother came and took her to heaven.”

  Walter, who had been listening with grave attention, suddenly cried out, “Look, what’s that?”

  They all saw it: the Little Match Girl statue had something in its ragged dress pocket, a white envelope like the one the matches had arrived in. Walter rushed forward and took it out.

  “Let me see.” Georgina made her usual grab. This time, Walter’s hand flashed away behind his back.

  “I will open it,” he told her fiercely. “You may look, but I will do the opening.” Poco saw that his elbow was trembling.

  He brought the envelope out and turned it over. There was no writing on the front. At the back, the flap had been tucked in, not sealed. Walter untucked it and took something out. After he had gazed at it privately, he turned toward his friends and opened his hand. On his palm lay a tiny light blue mitten, knit in the smallest purls of yarn. A little blue button was sewn to the cuff. The mitten was smooth and clean, as if it had hardly ever been worn.

  “I think it was knitted with toothpicks,” Poco breathed.

  “It’s a baby’s,” Georgina said, and even she sounded awed. “You button it onto the baby’s snowsuit. Then the mitten can’t fall off and get lost. Except”—she glanced up at Walter—“this one did fall off, I guess. Or Walter fell off and got lost from it, because …” She stopped.

  Walter was having a struggle with his face. Under his baseball cap, his eyes kept opening wide, then narrowing down again. His mouth clamped into a line and quivered. This was strange behavior even for him, and the two friends looked away, embarrassed.

  Then the struggle passed and Walter reached into his jeans pocket. For the hundredth time, he took out the photograph of his mother. Between the tips of his fingers he held it, fluttering a bit in the wind. He brought his other hand, the one holding the tiny mitten, up next to it. He stared at the photo, then at the mitten. Georgina and Poco came around and stared, too.

  “I can’t believe it,” Georgina said, but there was no doubt. The light blue mitten looked exactly like the one the baby Walter was wearing in the photograph. They could even see the button attaching the mitten to the snowsuit.

  “Who left this for you?” Georgina sounded outraged.

  Poco glanced around the park. A feeling had come to her that they were being watched. The wind blew like a breath against her cheek. No one seemed to be near them, though. The volleyball game was in full sway. Some children were feeding a swan in the pond near the Ugly Duckling. Across the way, the Steadfast Tin Soldier had been surrounded by a noisy group of bicyclers entering at the gate. The sandwich shop was beyond, afternoon sunlight flashing in the windows.

  Walter’s hand had risen to his cheek. He had felt something, too. He didn’t look frightened, though. He looked happy. He slipped the photo back into his pocket and, stepping closer to the Little Match Girl, touched her lightly on the shoulder.

  “It’s all right,” he said. “I know who left the mitten.”

  “Who?” asked Georgina, glancing about with sharp eyes.

  “My mother. She’s here.”

  “Here?” Georgina jumped.

  “Yes. I can feel her looking at me. She’s watching to make sure I got her message.” Walter gazed trustingly at the statue’s bronze face. “My mother couldn’t reach me on the regular ghost channel, so now she’s decided to use the Little Match Girl instead.”

  FIVE

  HOWEVER A PERSON CHOSE to believe it was done, the arrival from the past of Walter’s little blue mitten was a strange event. It went outside the normal lines of communication, even ghost communication, and made one wonder what unseen hand lay behind it.

  “I don’t like this!” Georgina wailed the next day after school. “This is not what I like to think about!”

  “It’s queer,” Poco agreed. “And not only that. Someone was watching us. Walter was right.”

  “Could Walter’s mother be rising up from her grave?”

  “Where is her grave? We should find out.”

  Georgina shivered and curled against the couch. They were in Poco’s living room, trying to do their homework. Schoolbooks lay on the floor at their feet, along with Juliette, Angela’s big Siamese cat. Languorous snores rose from her sprawled furry body. Never had anyone seemed so sound asleep. But perhaps this was deceptive because, even as they looked, Juliette’s powerful blue eyes cracked open. She lifted her head and stared at the friends.

  “Stop that!” snapped Georgina, feeling an odd hypnotic tug.

  “Watch out or she’ll charm you,” Poco warned. “Then she tries to control you with her thoughts. ‘Go open a can of sardines and feed me.’ ‘Bring me a live mouse.’ Suddenly, there you are hunting around in some field. It makes you worry what else she might have told you to do.”

  Georgina narrowed her eyes. “Oh, sure. Like what?”

  “Well, anything. Why are you sitting here in my living room?”

  “Because I wanted to come.”

  “Did you really decide that or did Juliette plant some message in your brain yesterday, when you were also here, if you remember. Maybe Juliette has a plan for us. Maybe, in a minute, we’ll
get up and carry it out.”

  “Maybe, in a minute, I’ll get up and leave. Juliette can’t stop me from doing that!”

  “Unless she has already secretly commanded you to. Then you would just be carrying out her orders.”

  Georgina looked very upset at this but got up anyway and stamped into the hall. She went out the front door, slamming it so hard that no one could doubt that she was the one in charge—not some idiot Siamese feline.

  Poco caught the cat’s eye and smiled. Then she stood up and followed Georgina outside.

  After weeks of shyly nosing around the edge, spring had finally decided to burst out into the open that day. The air smelled delicious. The sun blazed. Across the Lamberts’ lawn, masses of tiny blue flowers waved their heads. In the midst of such forthright, open-air beauty, the very notion of ghosts seemed flimsy and unreal. And yet there was Walter Kew, looking paler by the hour, receiving messages from a haunted statue in the park.

  “He was there until dinner yesterday,” Poco told Georgina after, they had resettled on the porch. “And he went back this afternoon. He would spend the night there if he could.”

  “His grandmother has no idea what is happening. She loves Walter, but she’s too old and deaf to notice. Walter is tuning out the real world. Have you seen his eyes?”

  Poco nodded. “Pure white.”

  “Like a spirit’s!” Georgina’s voice fell to a whisper. “Do you think his dead mother is trying to take him away?”

  This was such a cold and horrible thought that the friends sat frozen in silence for a moment. Then Poco spoke.

  “We’ll stay near him,” Poco said. “We’ll go where he goes and keep on talking whether he answers or not. That way he can’t completely tune out. We’ll be there reminding him he’s on the planet Earth.”

  “All right.” Georgina gave a purposeful sniff. “We should also try to find out some facts. I mean about his real mother, who used to be alive. Who was she and why doesn’t anyone know?”

  “There is someone we could ask—old Miss Bone.”

  “Miss Bone!” Georgina cried. “I forgot about her.”