“Want to make a bet?” Alan said. “How about your allowance for the rest of your life?”
Judith Dale came in with a basket of laundry she had taken off the line. She wore her hair caught up in those days, and she favored slacks and cardigans, along with peace and quiet.
“People can’t just get people,” March said. “Can they?” She always turned to Judith to back her up, but now Judith shrugged. She was hazy about details, but she admitted she had made up the guest bedroom with clean sheets and a quilt that was usually stored in the attic.
March went to the window, but she couldn’t see a thing. Alan came up behind her, eating a piece of buttered toast and flicking the crumbs from his chest.
“He’s right there,” Alan said, pointing toward the orchard.
And true enough, there he was, just beyond the gate. He was thirteen and skinny, with long, dark hair that hadn’t been washed for weeks.
“What a prize,” Alan said, with his usual disdain.
The boy must have felt himself being watched, because he suddenly turned and glared at the window. The clouds were thin and wispy that day, blown about by the wind.
When March waved, the boy was so surprised that he just stood there, blinking. March would have laughed at his discomfort if she hadn’t realized, all at once, that she did not want to stop looking at him.
“Do we get to keep him forever?” March could sense, deep inside, that it was better to whisper.
“God, I hope not,” Alan said.
Out in the orchard, the boy continued to stare at her. The grass hadn’t yet been mowed that season and all the daffodils were closed up tight, to protect themselves from unpredictable weather.
“I’ll take him,” March volunteered.
“Get serious,” Alan had said, but when he walked away March stayed precisely where she was.
“I am serious.” she said out loud, although there was no longer anyone who could hear her. Nearly thirty years later she can still recall the way those words felt in her mouth, how delicious they were, how absolutely sweet. “From now on, he’s mine.”
Everything she knew about him, she learned from Judith Dale. He’d been an orphan in Boston, so poor he’d eaten nothing but crackers and whatever else he could steal. Few people would give him the time of day, let alone a dollar for his supper, but March’s kindhearted father had brought him home.
“And that’s all we know?” They were sitting out on the porch on a fine, blue day, filling up the bird feeders Judith liked to hang from the chestnut tree. “What about his parents? His religion? Does he have brothers and sisters? Are we sure he’s thirteen?”
“You are so nosy,” Judith said. “His name is Hollis and he’s here to stay. That’s all you need to know.”
At first, the new boy wouldn’t eat dinner—not even when there were lamb chops and asparagus, then strawberries for dessert. He wouldn’t look anyone in the eye, including Henry Murray, whom he obviously respected, for Mr. Murray was the one person to whom Hollis didn’t talk back. He was certainly fresh enough to most people, but in an edgy, self-contained fashion. It was the way he looked at you that could make you nervous. It was everything he didn’t say.
After three months, Hollis was still avoiding them all. The less he revealed, the more interesting March found him. She kept wishing she’d run into him, but when she did—once when he was throwing rocks at some invisible target beyond the orchard, and again when they all but crashed into each other in the hall one night en route to the bathroom—she was completely mute in his presence. Since March had always been a great one for talking, this behavior was particularly puzzling.
“Speak up,” Judith Dale would have to tell March whenever Hollis was near, but March couldn’t oblige. She even took to drinking rainwater, which she had overheard Mrs. Hartwig, a matron who worked in the school cafeteria, vow was a sure cure for a tongue-tied child.
Still, Hollis and March hadn’t spoken, not even to ask the other for bread and butter at suppertime. And then one day in the summer, she got her wish. It was July, March believes, or maybe the first week of August. At any rate, it was brutally hot and had been for ages. March had been going bare-foot and the soles of her feet were black. She was pouring a glass of Judith’s mint iced tea for herself when she saw the dragonfly pass by overhead. It was larger than the ones you usually saw skimming over the flat surface of Olive Tree Lake, and so blue March had to blink. She followed the dragonfly into the living room, where it perched on the drapes, and there was Hollis, in her father’s chair, reading one of Henry Murray’s textbooks, a complicated treatise which concerned homicide.