Better to Wish Read online

  “Happy Valentine’s Day,” he said, “one day late.” He withdrew his arm and loped ahead of Abby and Rose, along the sidewalk and across the lawn to his front door. Abby watched him, thinking that he moved very gracefully for a boy, and noticing that his jaw had grown squarer and his shoulders broader.

  “Abby has a boyfriend!” Rose chanted when Zander was out of earshot.

  “No, I don’t.”

  Later, after Abby had lugged Fred back inside and was taking off his jacket, she heard a crinkling sound and reached into the pocket of her coat. Her hand closed around an envelope. She pulled it out and saw her name in neat printing. ABIGAIL.

  She waited until she was alone in her room to open it, and inside she found a card showing a girl and boy joyfully riding a giant bumblebee, the words Valentine, I’m abuzz over you trailing in the wake of the bee. She flipped the card open. Zander had written BEE MINE, ZANDER in the same neat handwriting.

  Abby frowned, then smiled, and added the card to the ones she’d received from Rose and Sarah the day before.

  She hadn’t dared to give Zander a Valentine.

  “It snowed!” Rose announced. “Abby, it snowed last night!”

  Abby sat up fast, tossing her covers back, and knelt on her window seat. Snow covered the ground and the branches of the trees and the roof of Zander’s house.

  “Ha!” said Rose from the doorway. “You’re using the snow as an excuse to look in Zander’s window.”

  “I am not,” said Abby, which was a lie. She liked any excuse at all to see what might be going on in Zander’s room. Sometimes she watched him writing at his desk and sometimes she watched him lifting weights, which he did because his older brothers told him he was as scrawny as a chicken. This was absolutely untrue. But sometimes, like now, the blind was drawn, and then Abby felt unreasonably shut out and disappointed.

  “His blind is down,” she said, and flopped back on her bed.

  Rose hesitated in the doorway. “Mama’s talking about the babies again,” she whispered.

  “What?”

  “The babies. The ones God took.”

  Abby sighed. “I don’t know what to do about that.”

  “Why can’t she be satisfied with her living children?” asked Rose, twisting the end of one braid around her finger. “She has us, and she has Fred, and she has Adele, who actually is a baby. But she’s been outside, covering up the rosebushes and wondering why God took her babies. Pop saw her and yanked her arm and said, ‘Go in the house, the neighbors are watching,’ because Mama was only wearing her nightie and a pair of boots.”

  Abby closed her eyes briefly and Rose sat on the end of her bed. “Don’t worry. Sheila’s taking care of Fred and Adele,” said Rose cautiously, trying to gauge her sister’s mood.

  “It’s almost Christmas. I thought the holidays would make Mama feel better.”

  “So did I,” Rose replied.

  “Maybe … I don’t know.”

  “I wanted to make gingerbread today.”

  “Ellen will help you.”

  “I wanted to make gingerbread with Mama.”

  Abby gave her sister a small smile. “Sarah’s coming over later. Her parents are going to do some Christmas shopping in town. Maybe Sarah and I will go into town, too. Want to come with us?”

  Rose nodded. “Okay. Thanks.”

  Sarah arrived just before lunch. “Bye, Mother. Bye, Dad,” she called as the Moresides waved from the windows of their car.

  “How long can you stay?” Abby asked her.

  “Mother said they’ll be busy for three or four hours. Let’s go play with the baby first. Please? Can I hold her?”

  “In a bit,” said Abby. “She’s napping now.”

  “You’re so lucky to have a brother and sisters.”

  “Yeah,” said Rose, “but at your house on Christmas morning, you get all the presents.”

  “Rose?” called Pop’s voice from the parlor. “That sounded greedy.”

  Rose looked at the floor. “Sorry, Pop,” she replied.

  Lunch was chicken soup and cinnamon toast served at the kitchen table, Fred kicking his heels noisily against his high chair. Abby’s parents ate in the dining room, much to the girls’ relief.

  “Done!” Rose cried suddenly, drinking the last swallow of soup directly from her bowl. She cast a nervous glance toward the dining room. “Let’s go now.”

  “Where are we going?” asked Sarah.

  “Into town?” Abby suggested.

  “Let’s play in the snow first,” said Rose. “We’ve hardly had any snow so far.”

  This was true. Except for a surprise snowfall in the middle of October, the autumn had been unusually mild.

  “What do you want to do?” Abby asked Sarah.

  Sarah screwed up her face. “Take a walk?” she said finally.

  “Take a walk?!” exclaimed Rose, dismayed. “You sound like the grown-ups.” But when Abby and Sarah bundled up and left the house, she followed them.

  Snow had started to fall again, and Abby and Sarah scuffed through it in their lace-up boots. “Are you going to walk with us or not?” Abby shouted, without turning around.

  “How did you know I was here?” Rose called.

  “You’re noisy. Come on. Catch up.”

  “Are you going to talk about boys?”

  Sarah laughed. “What boys?”

  “Any boys.”

  “No. We’re talking about what we want for Christmas.”

  “I want a dog,” said Rose, hurrying to Abby’s side.

  “A sister,” said Sarah.

  “Poetry books,” said Abby.

  “You just want poetry books because Zander likes poetry,” said Rose.

  The girls emerged from a grove of fir trees at the western edge of town and found themselves at the top of a small hill.

  “Look, there’s Miller’s Pond,” said Sarah, pointing to the bottom of the hill. “Last one there’s a rotten egg.”

  Sarah took off down the hill, slipping in the snow and laughing, her legs pumping faster and faster. Abby and Rose ran after her. At the bottom of the hill, Abby skidded to a stop, Rose running into her, but Sarah kept going and called breathlessly over her shoulder, “I’ll bet the pond’s frozen now!”

  “No, it isn’t!” Abby called back. “Not after one snowstorm! Sarah, stop!”

  “Stop, stop!” shouted Rose.

  But Sarah laughed and sped up, and when she reached the old, ragged stalks of cattails at the edge of the pond, she leaped through them, skidding across the fragile sheet of ice that had formed. Abby could see puddles of water around some of the cattails and she remembered the previous winter when she and Zander and Rose had stood at this same spot after school one day and watched a dog step curiously onto the snowy pond and fall through the ice. He’d made only a small splash and then had struggled and thrashed while Abby and Zander had run to him. Zander had reached him first, just as the dog had heaved himself up the bank and bolted away, stopping to shake himself at the edge of the woods.

  Sarah was far beyond the edge of the pond when Abby heard a low creaking sound, and then Sarah’s feet disappeared, swallowed by the snow and ice and frigid water. Her coat billowed up around her waist like the parachutes Abby had seen in newsreels at the picture show.

  “Sarah!” Rose shouted again. “Sarah!”

  Abby ran to the cattails and placed one boot tentatively on the snow.

  “No, Abby!” Rose called. “Don’t go out there.”

  “She can’t swim,” said Abby. She set her foot more firmly on the snow and felt her boot fill with water. She pulled her foot out. Then she looked to Sarah — but Sarah wasn’t there.

  Rose whispered, “She’s gone.”

  Abby stepped back and stared across the pond. She shaded her eyes from the glare of the snow and the milk-white sky. She heard nothing but the lapping of water under ice.

  “Sarah?” she said tentatively.

  Beside her, Rose began jumping
up and down. “Sarah, Sarah, Sarah!”

  Abby stepped onto the ice again, but Rose jerked her back. “Don’t! You’ll go under, too. The water’s freezing. We have to get help.”

  “I can’t leave her.” Abby’s breath came in short gasps and she felt her throat tighten. “Sarah!” she called again.

  Rose was already running up the hill. “You stay right there, Abby, so we’ll know where she went in the water. But don’t go in. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

  Abby sank into the snow. Then she stood up and looked for a branch. She had read in storybooks about drowning children being pulled from ponds by grabbing on to branches held out to them by rescuers. But there was no sign of Sarah, no one for Abby to pull ashore. She sat in the snow again, waiting for Sarah to emerge, for Sarah to jump out of the water like the dog had, for Sarah to run laughing along the bank and say it was all a joke. After a time, there was a great commotion on the hill above and then a crowd of men, followed by several women and a group of gawking, fascinated children, came running down to the pond. Pop was with the men. When he saw Abby, he folded her in his arms and hugged her to his chest fiercely.

  The people — later Abby could never say exactly who they were; they were just people — shouted and ran along the bank, and then other people arrived with blankets and a stretcher. After Abby and Rose had explained — tearfully and with lots of gesturing — everything that they knew, Pop took a look around and started to lead them back up the hill.

  “I want to stay!” cried Abby.

  “No,” Pop replied quietly.

  “I can’t walk anymore,” said Rose suddenly, and plopped down, sitting in the snow. Abby noticed that her sister had lost her hat.

  Pop said nothing more, but picked Rose up and carried her through the woods and back to Haddon Road, Abby trailing behind. At the bottom of their street, he set Rose down and took Abby by the hand.

  “Do Mr. and Mrs. Moreside know?” she whispered.

  “Someone went to find them.”

  “But do they know?” Abby persisted.

  And Rose said, “Is she dead?”

  “I don’t have the answers,” said Pop, and his voice was gentle.

  Abby didn’t ask any more questions. She stepped dazedly along, between her father and Rose. They passed the Evanses’, where Abby thought she could feel eyes peering from behind curtains, and eventually Zander’s house, where Zander himself was standing on the porch, watching them solemnly.

  “It wasn’t our fault,” Abby wanted to say. But she stared at the ground and watched her boots and Pop’s boots, matched her stride to his, and she and Rose and Pop walked wordlessly into their house.

  Mama met them at the door and said nothing, but she gathered Rose and Abby into her arms. Abby didn’t know how everyone had heard about Sarah, but it was plain that the news had already traveled halfway around Barnegat Point. She leaned back to look at Mama and asked again, “Do Mr. and Mrs. Moreside know?”

  Mama and Pop exchanged a glance.

  “Yes, they know,” Mama said after a moment.

  “Have they found her yet?”

  “I don’t think so,” said Mama.

  “Then maybe she’s still alive,” said Rose.

  No one answered her.

  Sarah’s funeral was held three days later, on Christmas Eve at the little church in Lewisport. The church was decorated for the Christmas service, garlands of pine branches and red bows along the aisle, the Nativity arranged outside by the front door. Abby, Rose, Mama, and Pop sat five pews behind Sarah’s parents. Mrs. Moreside cried during the entire service. Mr. Moreside placed his arm across his wife’s shoulders and stared straight ahead at the minister, from the time the service began until at last it was over. Then he didn’t move until someone — Sarah’s uncle? — touched him on the shoulder.

  The Moresides walked down the aisle, followed by Sarah’s grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins. When Mrs. Moreside passed Abby’s family, she turned and glared at them.

  “It wasn’t our fault,” whispered Abby. “She was my best friend.”

  Mama took her hand and held it until the four of them had climbed into their car and were heading back to Barnegat Point.

  Sometimes when Abby walked, alone, through Barnegat Point to the high school, she imagined that the other girls, walking in pairs or in laughing, noisy groups, were talking about her.

  “Remember Sarah, that girl from Lewisport who drowned in Miller’s Pond? She was Abby Nichols’s friend. Her best friend.”

  “Have you seen her brother? He’s a cripple. He’s four years old and he can’t walk yet. My aunt said he’s an idiot, too.”

  “Her mother’s crazy. There’s something wrong in that family.”

  “And her father is mean! He fired my father just for being late.”

  Abby longed for the days of walking to the grammar school with Rose and meeting up with Sarah and Orrin. At the beginning of eighth grade she and Sarah had felt like queens. The eighth graders were the most important students in the entire school. They could boss the younger kids around and brag about going to the high school the next year. The teachers gave them special privileges — they were allowed to walk into town at lunchtime if they had permission from their parents — and they were in charge of the Christmas program and the spring carnival. Then in June they got to have an actual graduation ceremony.

  All during that autumn, Abby and Sarah had gleefully walked to the drugstore and eaten sandwiches at the soda fountain anytime Sarah had saved enough money to buy lunch. In December they’d been elected co-authors of the Christmas program and together had written a play about a lost lamb and a shepherd and how the star that shone in the sky on the night Jesus was born had cast enough light to help the shepherd find the lamb, which later grew up to save the shepherd’s life. The play had been a big hit. Two days later Sarah had drowned and Abby, without a best friend, without Orrin, had crept through the remainder of the school year, a solitary, marked figure. She had become “the girl whose best friend drowned.” Rose still walked to and from school with her, of course, and occasionally Zander tried to talk to her. But Abby felt as if she were wearing a sign that proclaimed her new sad status, and she didn’t know how to erase the words on the sign.

  What she remembered most about the next few months was the quiet. People tended to be quiet around her, and she was quiet in return. Her teachers were solicitous and forgiving. The other girls in her class spoke to her sweetly and slipped her apples and hard candies and little notes. Until they didn’t anymore. Until they were more interested in seeing who got Valentine cards from boys, and in buying fabric to make dresses for the spring cotillion, and in being elected to the planning committee for the spring carnival.

  Abby walked to school with Rose, sat silently in her classroom, came home, did her homework, then sat at her desk and wrote stories and poems and glued them into a scrapbook.

  On graduation day she won three of the five academic awards: for composition, for history, and for overall highest grades. She smiled at the principal and thanked him politely, walked home with her family, and spent the summer reading and writing, taking care of Adele, and trying to teach Fred to walk. She found that she cared about little else, including Zander, who, at the beginning of the summer, would sometimes turn up on the Nicholses’ porch and sit quietly in the swing, hoping (according to Rose, who seemed to know everything) that Abby would come outside and join him. But Abby watched him from the parlor and discovered that she felt as listless then as she did at any other time, and eventually Zander stopped coming by.

  And now it was autumn again and she was a freshman at the Barnegat Point high school — a lowly freshman on the bottom rung of the ladder. There was no Rose to walk with, and no Sarah or Orrin to greet her at the gathering spot on the lawn.

  “Are you going to spend the entire year mooning around?” asked Ellen when Abby sank down at the kitchen table after school one day, a stack of books at her elbow.


  Abby frowned. “What?”

  Ellen turned from the stove and faced her. “For pity’s sake, honey, Sarah is the one who drowned, not you. You’ve got your whole life ahead. Stop wasting it.”

  “I —” said Abby. Tears sprang to her eyes.

  “Go ahead and cry. Lord knows you’ve been through enough. But then you’d better get on with things. I’m speaking plain because no one else seems willing to. They’re all still tiptoeing around like you’ll break. But I know a thing or two, and you’ll break if you don’t sit yourself up and get going again. Isn’t there something you want to do this year besides schoolwork?”

  Abby shook her head.

  “There’s got to be something. A play or a club? And what about friends? A nice girl like you should have plenty of friends.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “It isn’t easy to find new friends, but you have to make some kind of effort. You’re never going to find friends by sitting at your desk or wheeling Adele up and down the street in the carriage.”

  Abby poked at a cookie that Ellen had set before her. “I saw a sign for the glee club,” she ventured.

  “Well, that’s wonderful. I was in the glee club when I was in school.”

  Abby had a hard time imagining Ellen as a girl, slim hipped and giggling, standing shoulder to shoulder with her glee club friends. “Really?”

  “Yes.”

  “I saw a sign for the school annual, too,” Abby went on. “I’d love to work on the annual.”

  “There you go. Now, tomorrow, when you get to school, you do whatever it is you have to do to try out for the glee club and work on the annual.”

  “All right.” Abby brightened. Not even the sight of her mother in bed in the middle of the afternoon could dampen her spirits. The next day, feeling resolute, if not exactly cheerful, she found a sign about glee club tryouts and decided to sing “Amazing Grace” as her audition piece. And she signed up to work on the Barnegat Point Central High School 1936–37 Annual.