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  “It’s all right, Buddy,” he told the toad. “When Dad comes, you won’t have to hide anymore.”

  The toad blinked. Then it peed. A brownish liquid puddled in Aaron’s hand before it seeped between his fingers and dripped to his shoe. He grunted, shifted the animal to his other hand and wiped his wet palm on his pants before he slid the toad back into his pocket.

  “What’ve you got there?”

  He looked up, startled. He hadn’t heard Gran hang up the phone, and now she was in the hallway.

  “Aaron? What’s in your pocket?” she asked again.

  He shifted from one foot to the other. “Have to go to the bathroom,” he said, starting up the stairs.

  “Aaron Waite!” Gran called out in her doomsday voice. “Don’t take another step.”

  He stopped and turned to stare at his grandmother.

  “Don’t give me that wide-eyed innocent look. I want to know what you’ve got.”

  Aaron pulled Buddy out again.

  TEN

  Right after lunch the next day, Aaron’s Big Brother, Paul, arrived with an empty fish tank and a bag of supplies. He draped his jacket on the newel post and blew on his hands to warm them. “It’s a good thing you called before you put that toad outside. It’s freezing out there. It would have died. The best thing to do is to set up a vivarium and keep it till spring.”

  Aaron watched Gran’s face. She was thinking. He could tell.

  Paul looked at her face too. “Toads are quiet and they don’t take much care,” he said.

  Gran threw up her hands. “All right,” she said, “keep your toad. Just make sure I’m not going to regret this decision.”

  “I’m gonna keep it. I’m gonna keep my toad,” Aaron sang and bounced until Paul placed a calming hand on his shoulder.

  “All right, Aaron, chill,” he said.

  So Aaron stopped singing, but his body kept making little jerking movements as if a motor somewhere deep inside was running in overdrive.

  That morning they turned the empty fish tank into a home for the toad. They filled the bottom with activated charcoal. “To filter the dirt and the air,” Paul explained when Aaron asked what it was for. They covered the charcoal with a thick layer of potting soil and placed a shallow dish for water on one side of the tank. On the other, they put in two plants, some flat stones and a piece of bark.

  “I think it looks good. What do you think?” Paul asked when they were done.

  “It looks great,” Aaron crowed. “Can I put him in? Can I?”

  “Sure,” Paul said.

  Aaron placed the toad in the middle of the tank, where it sat, blinking.

  Next, they went out to dig in the compost bin. Under the frosty top layer, they found dozens of squiggling worms. Enough worms to feed the toad for a good long time. Aaron scooped up handfuls of dirt and worms and dropped them into a large Mason jar. Back inside, Paul showed him how to use a nail to hammer air holes into the lid. Aaron made twelve of them before he turned the lid over and hammered the sharp edges on the inside flat, just in case the worms came too close to the top. He didn’t want them getting scratched on pointy bits of metal.

  When they were done, he peered into the vivarium.

  “Hey, Buddy,” he said. “Are you hungry?” He unscrewed the lid of the worm jar, plunged two fingers into the dirt and scooped out a long, slimy worm, which he dropped in front of the toad.

  The toad’s eyes shifted. Then…FLUP! Its tongue flashed out, and most of the worm disappeared into its large mouth. Only a bit of wriggly tail hung out.

  “Did you see? Did you see?” Aaron said. “His tongue was so fast…so fast. Like Jabba the Hutt from Star Wars.”

  As they watched, the toad used both of his four-fingered hands to shove the last bit of worm into its mouth.

  “Bon appétit!” Aaron giggled as he closed the worm jar again. “Bon appétit!”

  Before he left, Paul helped Aaron make a new list. They taped it to the wall beside the vivarium.

  Caring for the toad

  1. feed twice a day

  2. fill the water bowl

  3. mist vivarium with water

  4. keep the mesh lid on the vivarium

  5. keep the vivarium out of direct sunlight

  6. wash your hands after feeding and handling the toad

  When Gran saw the list, she added with soap and hot water to the last line.

  “Is that cover sturdy enough?” she asked.

  “It’s just a precaution, really,” Paul assured her. “Toads can’t jump high. It won’t get out.”

  “I expect you’re right,” she said. “Still.” She turned to Aaron. “You make sure you remember to keep that tank covered and take care of this creature.”

  “I’ve been taking care of it.”

  “Yes,” she said. “I suppose you have. Now thank Paul for all the time he’s spent with you. If it wasn’t for him, I’d never have agreed to let you keep this toad.”

  Aaron said, “Thank you, Paul.” But he was so busy watching his toad, he didn’t see Paul leave. What he did see was the toad using its long legs to bury itself in the dirt. It sort of backpedaled with its hind legs, and in no time it was almost completely under the soil. If he hadn’t seen it, Aaron might have thought the toad had escaped. But it was there, so well camouflaged that it was hard to see the eyes and the mouth that stuck out just above the ground.

  It would be good…it would be so good if I could hide from Tufan like that, Aaron thought.

  ELEVEN

  When Aaron woke on Sunday morning, everything in his room seemed to be an unusual shade of gray. He lifted his head to peer at the clock on his night table. The red numbers shifted with a soft click as he watched. 6:30. He groaned.

  Outside, the wind wailed. His windows rattled. Something scratched against the panes. Curious, he slipped out of bed and padded across the room. There was a storm outside. The scratching sounds were from all the stuff blowing around. It was white and small and pebbly-looking, more like grains of sand than snow. It filled the air, making the gardens and the houses behind theirs look pale and faded, like crayon drawings washed with white paint. He shivered. Beside him, the curtain swayed, lifted by a wayward draft that slipped through a crack in the window frame.

  Snowstorm, he thought. Snowstorm. Then his stomach lurched. “Gran,” he called, his voice filling with fear as he ran to her room. “Gra-a-a-a-n!”

  She was already sitting up when he reached her bed.

  “It’s snow…it’s snow…it’s snowing,” he gasped. He scrambled across her bed. “What if…what if he can’t come?” His body was shaking now. Not with the “I’m cold” kind of shivers, but the scared kind that made his teeth clack.

  Gran reached for him. “It’s all right,” she said. “It’s all right.” She lifted her blankets to tuck him into the warmth of her bed.

  Most times he didn’t like to be touched, but this time he hardly noticed Gran’s arms holding him close.

  “What if he can’t? What if?”

  “There’s still a week to go. A whole week. The snow won’t last that long. It never does.”

  “Six days. He’s supposed to come in six days.”

  “And he will. He’ll come. He promised. He’ll come.”

  When he finally settled, Gran slipped out of bed and tucked him in. “Stay here,” she said. “It’s early. I’ll go down and turn up the heat. And you know what? I’ll lay a fire. We can have breakfast in front of the fireplace. We haven’t done that for a long time. Today’s a perfect day for it.”

  He heard her steps on the stairs, heard the click as the furnace started, heard the clanging sounds as she opened the screen in front of the fireplace, the thud of a log, and later, water shushing into the kettle.

  He closed his eyes, remembering something Gran used to tell him when he was small. “Your dad’s heart broke when your mom died, and doctors can’t fix a broken heart,” she had said. “But it will mend, and one day he’ll come back. You�
��ll see. And when he comes, he’ll give you a hug and he’ll tickle you like this.” And she had grabbed him and hugged him and tickled him until he screamed with laughter even as he struggled to get free. Hugs made him feel funny, but he knew Gran liked them, so sometimes he let her hold him until he couldn’t stand it anymore.

  When he was small, he used to tell himself, He’ll come back. His heart will mend and he’ll come back. But the years passed and his father stayed away, and he began to doubt Gran’s story.

  From the kitchen came the smell of bread toasting. Outside, the wind was making whistling noises as it rounded the corner of the house. Aaron turned over and pulled his knees to his chest. “Don’t snow. Don’t snow. Don’t snow,” he whispered. He closed his eyes and wished as hard as he could that the snow would stop so his dad could come home again.

  Last year he had found a book in the library all about the human body. He read the part about the heart twice. It didn’t say anything about hearts breaking, so he asked Mrs. Evans.

  “Hearts are not made of glass,” the librarian told him. “They don’t break into pieces. When people talk about broken hearts, they usually mean that they’ve lost someone they loved a lot and that makes them feel sad. Why are you asking?”

  “I was wondering. How long does it take for a broken heart to get unbroken?”

  Mrs. Evans peered at his face, then down at the book in her hand as if it might help her answer his question. “I suppose it’s different for everybody,” she said.

  It made Aaron feel a little better, because he understood that his dad’s heart was just taking longer to mend than most. But eight years? His heart had to be mended by now, didn’t it?

  “Breakfast!” Gran called, and Aaron hurried down. He found hot cereal, toast and tea with lots of milk waiting for him on the coffee table. He settled into the couch beside the fireplace while Gran sat in the big chair opposite. They ate in silence; the only sounds were the wailing wind, the clink of cutlery on the plates and the occasional crackle from the fire.

  When he was done, Aaron pulled down the blue quilt that lay draped across the back of the couch and snuggled into its warmth. He loved that quilt. “It was made by your mother’s grandmother. Your great-grandmother,” Gran had told him. “Your mother treasured it. She’d want you to take good care of it.”

  And he did. It was the one thing he was never careless about. He remembered being wrapped in the quilt, his mother beside him, reading to him.

  Once, he remembered, a stern voice had warned, “Sit still. Be careful. Don’t hurt Mommy.” He must not have been still enough, because strong hands grabbed him and lifted him away. He remembered his mother starting to cry. Her sobs frightened him. They made him cry too, and his cries turned to screams, as, legs flailing, he was carried from the room.

  He was about to ask who had carried him away from his mother when Gran stood up and started piling their dishes onto a tray.

  Aaron knew what his parents looked like. There was a picture of them on the side table beside the couch. He looked at it every so often because he wanted to be sure to recognize his father when he came back. His mother was in that picture too, but she wasn’t coming back. She couldn’t come back. Nobody who dies comes back. He knew that. That’s why Jeremy’s father couldn’t come back. He was dead too.

  He reached over and pulled the picture into his lap to look at it more closely.

  In the picture, his mother didn’t look dead. In the picture, she was on one of those bicycles with two seats. His father was in the front, and she was in the back. They weren’t riding the bicycle. He could tell because their hands were holding on to the grips, but their feet were on the ground. They were smiling.

  “You used to look at that all the time when you were little,” Gran said as she came back. “And sometimes you’d say, ‘Where is me?’”

  “What did you tell me?” Aaron wanted to know.

  “I said you weren’t born yet.” She laughed. “I said you were just a twinkle in your father’s eye.” Aaron didn’t understand. Gran often said things that didn’t make sense. How could he be a twinkle in his father’s eye?

  “You look just like her. Same nose, same forehead, same eyes. You’re the spitting image of your mother.” She pulled a tissue from her pocket and made loud honking sounds as she blew her nose.

  He bent his head to look at the picture. How could he look like his mother when he was a boy and she wasn’t? And why didn’t he look like his dad? He didn’t understand about the spitting part either.

  In the middle of the morning Gran said, “I need you to clean the steps and the walkway today. Do you think you can do it?”

  “I can do it. I can,” Aaron said, surprised that Gran would ask. In the past, she had always shoveled the snow. He’d gone out to help, but mostly he had played while she shoveled. He was pleased that she thought he was old enough to do it on his own. “Of course I can,” he said, and he hurried to get dressed.

  At first shoveling was fun, and he made plans as he cleaned the snow from the walkway. When my dad comes, we’ll do this together. I’ll put it on the list. Things to do with Dad: shovel snow. And build a snow fort. And have a snowball fight. Maybe Paul and Jeremy can come. We could make teams. But as he worked, the wind began to bite into his face and the sound of the shovel scraping against the sidewalk made his teeth ache. He stopped to look around. Gran was at the window, watching. She smiled and nodded encouragement, so he sighed and went on until he was done.

  “You did a great job,” she said when he came inside. He felt good. He felt even better when he saw that she had hot chocolate with marshmallows and two cookies waiting for him.

  TWELVE

  The snow didn’t stop falling, but the icy wind stopped howling, and the small, hard pellets became fat, white, fluffy flakes that fell without stopping. On Monday morning, when Aaron looked out, the garden was white.

  A blanket of white, he thought. He had read that in a book somewhere. That’s what the garden looked like. As if somebody had tossed a blanket over everything. Or like one of those rooms in the movies where all the furniture was covered by sheets because nobody was going to be home for a long time.

  A huge maple tree stood in the back neighbor’s yard. It looked stark and black and bare, except for the snow that lay on its branches and the mound of leaves near the top. The leaves were part of a squirrel’s nest. Even though the squirrel lived in the neighbor’s tree, Aaron thought of it as his.

  His squirrel wasn’t like all the other squirrels. It was different. It had a flash of white at the end of its black tail that made it easy to recognize.

  In the fall he had watched his squirrel chew twigs off the tree, carry them to the top and stash them into a pile in the fork made by three branches. It collected leaves and huge mouthfuls of dry grasses to add to the growing structure. Sometimes he saw his squirrel pop its head out of the top of the nest and look around, just like the periscope of a submarine.

  Sometimes his squirrel chased other squirrels that came into its yard.

  “Don’t fall. Don’t fall,” Aaron had called out once when he saw his squirrel hanging from a twig. The twig sagged, dragged down by the animal’s weight, but the squirrel didn’t fall. It dropped to a lower branch, then made a flying leap to the fence. From there it chased the invading squirrel out of its yard.

  My squirrel stands up for itself, Aaron thought. It doesn’t let anybody boss it around. Nobody. I’m not gonna let nobody push me around either. I’m not. Then he sighed, because he knew that wasn’t true.

  More snow fell. By the time Aaron got to school, everybody was excited.

  “Just a reminder, boys and girls,” Mr. Ulanni, the principal, announced over the pa system before recess. “There will be no throwing snowballs in the schoolyard. Keep the snow on the ground. Teachers on yard duty, please send anyone caught throwing snowballs to the office.”

  That day the snow lay deep. It was wet and heavy, and very sticky. In no time, more than a
dozen snowballs grew to enormous sizes across the field, each one pushed by five, six, seven kids at a time. Other kids, the ones that weren’t pushing, started cheering on their friends, shouting advice and bringing handfuls of snow to pack into cracks and dents to hold the snowballs together and make them evenly round.

  Aaron stumbled from one group to another, checking out the progress of each. He watched and laughed, his laughter feeding on the excitement around him.

  When the end-of-recess bell rang, nobody wanted to go inside. Handbells clanged as the yard-duty teachers hustled kids toward the building. Aaron was the last one in. Outside, it had been cold and bright. Inside, his glasses fogged up and everything looked dark. He stopped. He couldn’t see a thing. He was groping his way forward when he was bodychecked into the wall. “Huh!” he grunted. “Watch it! That hurt!”

  “You wreck our snowball, you die!” a voice hissed.

  “I…I never,” he started, not sure who he was talking to.

  The yard-duty teacher came through the doors. “You’ll be late for class, boys,” he said. “Better get moving.”

  “I…,” Aaron started. The teacher walked away.

  Aaron blinked. There were more footsteps, then silence. It wasn’t until his glassed cleared and his eyes adjusted to the light that he realized he was alone. Relieved, he climbed the stairs, but when he reached the upper hallway, he saw Tufan waiting beside the open door. “Today’s the day,” he said as Aaron approached.

  “Today? What day is it?” Aaron asked.

  “The day you die.”

  “I didn’t…I didn’t touch your snowball.”

  “But you messed up my jacket when you jumped into your stupid puddle, and I got in trouble. It’s gonna cost you. You’re gonna pay.” Then he walked through the door and pulled it shut, leaving Aaron on the wrong side.