The Long Way Home

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  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

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Also by Ann M. Martin

  Copyright

  The smells drifting through the wide-open window of Dana Burley’s bedroom weren’t exactly pleasant, but they weren’t exactly unpleasant either. She sniffed cautiously. Garbage truck, for sure. She had heard the grinding of gears and the rattle of metal cans and the calls of Howard and Arnold, who got to ride around all day long on the back of the truck, hanging on with just one hand and leaning merrily out into traffic. She sniffed again. She could smell exhaust, too, from the cars and taxis that rumbled along Eleventh Street, but mixed with everything else was the scent of leaves from the maple tree outside her window, and, drifting up from downstairs, various cooking smells — coffee and eggs and something sweet, which might be a birthday cake.

  From across the room, as if she had read Dana’s mind (and she probably had), Julia said, “I think I smell our birthday cake.”

  Dana pretended she was still asleep.

  “Dana? I know you’re awake.”

  This was one of the problems with having a twin sister. Dana had no secrets from her. Well, hardly any. She rolled over and looked across the room at Julia.

  “We’re seven today!” exclaimed Julia. “Aren’t you excited?”

  Dana grinned. “Yes.”

  “How come you didn’t answer me before?”

  Dana shrugged beneath her cotton blanket, then tossed it back. She sat up in bed and looked out the window just in time to see the garbage truck disappear from view, Howard waving to Mrs. Morgan, who was walking her poodle to the corner. Dana turned and surveyed the bedroom she shared with Julia. She thought of a word her art teacher had recently explained: symmetry. Her room certainly was symmetrical. You could see, on one side, Dana’s domain, and on the other side, the reverse image, as if someone had held a mirror up to Dana’s things. This was because every time Dana added something to her side, Julia hurried to add the same thing to the other side. If Dana asked her mother to look for a blue spread for her bed, Julia begged for the same blue spread. If Dana began a collection of marbles and arranged them in a tray on her bookcase, then — surprise, surprise — Julia suddenly became interested in marbles and arranged them on her bookcase on the opposite wall.

  Even worse, most mornings, Julia waited until Dana had gotten dressed and then put on the exact same outfit.

  “We’re too old for samesies,” Dana had said over and over again.

  “But we’re twins. Identical twins. We’re special,” Julia had replied.

  “Mommy, she’s copying me!” Dana would complain to their mother, and Abby would say patiently, “She looks up to you. She just wants to be like you, lovey. You should be flattered.”

  Dana was, after all, nine minutes older than Julia.

  “Hi,” came a husky voice from the doorway.

  Dana patted her bed, and her brother ran across the room and dove onto her pillows. Then he sat placidly next to Dana, his eyes flat, his mouth hanging open slightly. “It’s your birthday,” he said seriously. Actually, what he said was, “It your birfday.”

  “That’s right!” cried Julia, rolling out of her own bed and joining Dana and Peter. “You remembered. Do you know how old we are?”

  “Five?” guessed Peter. His tongue protruded from his mouth and he breathed heavily.

  “No, you’re five,” said Dana. She didn’t want to hurt his feelings, though, so she added, “But that was a good guess.”

  “Party?” asked Peter.

  “Yup, there’s a party today, and a magician is —”

  “Cake?” Peter interrupted.

  “Yes, there will be cake,” said Julia.

  “I like cake,” Peter announced.

  “We know you do,” said Dana. “Come on. Let’s go downstairs. But first, do you need to use the potty?”

  Peter didn’t answer and Dana hurried into his room, pulled back the covers, and saw the wet stain on the sheets. Potty training was not going well.

  “Do you need a diaper today?” asked Dana as she handed her brother a fresh pair of pajama bottoms.

  Peter stepped into them and headed for the stairs. “I don’t know.”

  Dana passed him. Then, followed by her sister and brother, she hurtled down the stairs to the second floor, ran by their parents’ bedroom, and hurtled down another flight of stairs, jumping over the last two steps to make a dramatic entrance in the hallway.

  “Are those the birthday girls?” their father called from the kitchen.

  “Yes!” cried Dana and Julia, making their breathless way to the breakfast table.

  “And me!” said Peter.

  “And you,” agreed Zander Burley, pulling Peter into his lap. He looked at the twins. “My goodness. Seven years old. What do you suppose is going to happen to you girls this year?”

  Dana slid into her place at the table and watched her mother drop orange halves in the juicer and pump the arm up and down, juice flowing out the other side into a glass.

  “Well,” said Dana slowly, “I’m going to start second grade.”

  “We’re going to start second grade,” said Julia pointedly.

  “And I’m going to keep taking art lessons with Mrs. Booth.” Dana glanced at her sister. This was one claim that Julia couldn’t make. She had no interest in art.

  Abby turned away from the juicer and bent to kiss each of her children on the head. “Happy birthday,” she said to Dana. “Happy birthday,” she said to Julia. “Good morning, lovey,” she said to Peter.

  “Presents!” Peter shouted suddenly.

  Dana’s mother smiled. “Peter knows where your birthday presents are hidden.”

  “Ooh, can we open them now?” asked Julia. “Please?”

  Dana stared out the window at the garden behind their town house.

  “Don’t you want to open our presents now?” Julia prodded her.

  Dana hesitated. “I didn’t ask for anything.”

  “Well, you know you’re getting presents anyhow,” said Julia.

  Dana continued to study the garden.

  Her father eyed her from across the table. “Is there something you haven’t told us?”

  Dana picked up her spoon and saw her warped reflection in it. “There is one thing I want, but it isn’t something you can buy.”

  Now everyone was staring at her.

  “I get the presents?” said Peter, heading for the door.

  No one answered him.

  “Dana? Lovey?” said her mother.

  “I want my own room,” Dana whispered.

  Julia opened her mouth and then closed it again.

  “Please?” said Dana. “I know you think Julia and I want to share a room.”

  “We do!” exclaimed Julia. “We do!”

  “You do. But I don’t. I don’t want everything to be samesies. I want to be just myself in my own room. We could turn the den into my room. Please?” Dana said again. “It’s right next to our bedroom, Julia, so we’d be next door to each other.”

  “No!”

  “We already have a library downstairs, and, Daddy, you have your study on the top floor, so it isn’t like we need a den. It
could be my room, my very own room.”

  Dana saw her parents exchange a glance over her head. She had long ago realized that Abby and Zander could talk to each other with just their eyes. That was how close they were. They had known each other since grade school, which was a long time. True, they had become separated when Zander had gone off to fight in World War II, but after he had come home, he’d tracked Abby down in New York City and proposed to her (for the second time). Now they had been together for ten years, and seemed, to Dana, to live secret, impenetrable lives.

  “This is something Daddy and I need to discuss, lovey,” Abby said to Dana. “We’re not saying no. We just need to talk about it.”

  “And we might not have a chance to talk about it today,” said Zander. “Too much going on. We have party preparations this morning —”

  “Cake!” cried Peter, who had returned, presentless, to the table.

  “Yes, cake,” his father repeated fondly. “And then there’s the party this afternoon and your special evening tonight.”

  Dana’s thoughts, ever since she had begun to eye the den as her future bedroom, had not been on her birthday, but now she began to feel excited. “Pockets the Clown will be here, Peter! Remember Pockets? He came to your fourth birthday party.” She turned to her parents. “Thank you,” she said. To Julia she added, “You’ll have your own room, too, you know. Won’t that be great? You can have privacy and —”

  “I just want you,” muttered her sister.

  “Now I get the presents?” said Peter, heading for the door again. And when he returned with an armload of wrapped packages, Julia brightened. She said no more about Dana’s birthday wish.

  * * *

  Dana’s mother had worried that the day would be rainy or that a thunderstorm would come along in the afternoon. She wanted to be able to hold the party in the garden, although Dana didn’t see why they couldn’t have the party indoors, since their town house was enormous. But the sun shone all day long, and Dana and her family and the twelve guests were entertained in the bright, humid July air of a New York afternoon by Pockets the Clown and Sinbad the Magician. Peter wore a suit and tie and his new brown oxfords, and Dana and Julia wore party dresses that stood out stiffly with crinoline. (Julia had waited to see which dress Dana would wear and had selected the matching one, and then Dana had secretly changed into a different party dress when it was too late for Julia to do anything about it.)

  In the garden Dana sat surrounded by her four best friends, holding hands with her two best best friends, until Julia unhitched Marian Hackenburg’s hand from Dana’s and replaced it with her own. The guests watched, fascinated, as Pockets pulled twenty-five American flags from a pocket the size of a postage stamp, and then pulled fifteen gumdrops from an equally small pocket and passed them out to the children. Later they watched Sinbad turn a bottle of milk into a dove, and make a rose disappear . . . only to turn up later in Peter’s ear. This came as no surprise to Peter, who simply smiled vaguely. Dana realized that this was because Peter didn’t understand enough to know that a rose shouldn’t be in his ear in the first place, but everyone else was amazed and clapped loudly for Sinbad when the show was over.

  Later there was ice cream and cake, and before the twins opened the presents from their friends, they all took turns whacking a stick at a donkey-shaped piñata that Dana’s father had hung from a limb of the gingko tree. Marian was the one whose crashing blow finally broke the piñata open, and then everyone scrambled to gather up the candies and trinkets. Patty Morris gave all of her candy to Peter.

  The party ended, the guests went home, and Dana was in the garden examining her presents — pleased that several of her friends had chosen not to get identical gifts for her and Julia — when her mother called from the back door, “Girls, time to get ready for tonight. I think you’ll both need baths before you put on fresh clothes.”

  * * *

  Peter’s babysitter arrived at five thirty.

  “Can’t Peter come with us, Daddy?” asked Dana.

  “He isn’t quite old enough for Plain and Fancy,” said her father. “He’d get too wiggly. Remember how wiggly he was the last time we went to the theatre? We’ll do something fun together on the weekend.”

  “How about tomorrow?”

  “Tomorrow is Friday. I already took one day off from writing. I need to get back to work. The book is due in a month. Now go change! Our chariot awaits.”

  The chariot was not a chariot and it wasn’t waiting. It was a cab the Burleys caught at the corner of Eleventh Street and Sixth Avenue, and it drove them to the 21 Club for a very grown-up dinner before they walked to the Winter Garden Theatre, where Plain and Fancy was playing.

  “This certainly is different from the birthdays I used to have,” said Dana’s mother as they settled into their seats in the theatre.

  “You didn’t go to any musicals?” asked Julia.

  “Your daddy and I lived in a very small town in Maine. There was only one theatre and it was a movie theatre. And when I was little, we hardly had any money. I didn’t even have a birthday party until I was eleven. Then we had a picnic on the beach. I thought it was very grand.”

  “A picnic? That was all?” said Dana.

  “Well, it was a very nice picnic and lots of people came. And your aunt Rose and I got new dresses.”

  “Were you there, Daddy?”

  “I was. But I hardly knew your mother then. I already liked her, though,” he said, and reached across Dana’s lap to take Abby’s hand.

  “Don’t kiss her!” Dana hissed, and Julia giggled. “Not in public!”

  The lights dimmed then, the orchestra began to play, and Dana settled in her seat, her eyes on the stage as the curtain rose.

  She felt quite grown-up, having eaten dinner at the 21 Club, and sitting now in the Winter Garden, surrounded by dressed-up theatergoers, mostly adults. She had a feeling that this year was going to be very different from any year before.

  The best thing about catching the flu (and there actually had been several good things about it) was that during the long days her mother had confined Dana to bed, Dana had made a vast number of Christmas decorations for her room. Looped over her window was a string of gold and silver stars, and in the center of each, Dana had drawn a different illustration from “The Twelve Days of Christmas” — a French hen (even though she had no idea what a French hen was), a leaping lord, a milkmaid — trying to remember everything she’d learned from Mrs. Booth, her art teacher. Taped to her closet door was a paper tree, and dangling from its boughs were individual paper ornaments. At the top of the tree was an angel with yellow yarn for her hair and tiny brown buttons for her eyes. And draped everywhere — swooping from the ceiling, trailing from bedpost to bedpost, connecting lamp to bookshelf to doorknob — were green-and-red paper chains, the links held together with goopy paste, just like the paste Dana and Julia used in their second-grade room at Miss Fine’s School.

  Now the flu was gone, although Dana was still coughing (so were Julia and Peter), but the wondrous decorations remained. And, Dana noted with some satisfaction, Julia hadn’t even begun to try to make similar ones for her room. The days of samesies were fading.

  Dana glanced out the window of her new bedroom, saw snowflakes falling lightly onto the softened world of Eleventh Street, and tiptoed into the hallway. The doors to Julia’s and Peter’s rooms were still closed, but from the first floor came low voices. Dana started down the stairs, reached the second floor, and listened again. Her mother’s voice was raised slightly; her father’s sounded tired, as if he had been explaining something over and over again. Or maybe defending himself.

  “Could you just please confine it to the evening after the children have gone to bed?” said her mother sharply.

  “Don’t make rules for me, Abigail,” her father replied.

  Dana’s mother said something else, which Dana couldn’t catch, and then her father said, “I didn’t think it was so important.”

 
; “Well, it is. It’s —”

  Her mother stopped speaking as Dana suddenly ran full tilt down the last flight of stairs and burst into the kitchen. “Good morning!” she said brightly.

  Her parents looked up from their coffee. In the lull that followed, Dana became aware that the radio was on and caught the words Rosa Parks and then the words bus boycott.

  “Rosa Parks did a very courageous thing,” her father said into the awkward atmosphere of the kitchen.

  Dana nodded. “She’s the Negro lady who refused to give up her seat on the bus just so a white person could sit down instead,” she said, pleased with her knowledge. “But then they made her pay a fine!” she added indignantly. “That wasn’t right.”

  “It certainly wasn’t,” agreed her mother.

  Dana’s parents loosened their grips on their coffee cups. They looked at each other and held one of their eye conversations. Even Dana could understand this one. Their argument, whatever it had been about, would be continued later, in private.

  “It’s important to stand up for what you believe in,” said Abby.

  “And to think of the other person,” said Zander. “Apparently, the white people on the bus didn’t stop to think that Rosa Parks might need to sit down after a long day at work.”

  “Always be nice,” added Dana.

  She thought of the little boy who had laughed and pointed at Peter in the grocery store the day before and wondered if Peter remembered this. With Peter, it was hard to tell.

  Dana’s mother switched off the radio and opened the Frigidaire. “Breakfast time,” she announced.

  And Dana said, “Daddy, can we get the Christmas decorations out today?”

  * * *

  The decorations were kept in large cardboard boxes stored in the closet shaped like a triangle underneath the staircase to the third floor. For eleven months out of every year, the boxes sat in the dark in forlorn, musty stacks. Sometimes Dana peeked in at them on a sweltering summer day, just to see how they were doing. But early each December, her father hauled the boxes out and carried them to the first floor. This was one of Dana’s favorite days of the year, almost as good as Christmas Day itself.

  That morning, the snow still falling, Dana and Julia and Peter opened carton after carton and exclaimed over all the things they hadn’t seen since the previous January, when the decorations had been put away.