Restoring Harmony Part 1

Restoring Harmony.

by Joelle Anthony.

Nevil Shute 1899-1960.

and John Rowe Townsend 1922-.

1.

July 10th-Oaks fall, but bending reeds brave the storm.

-English proverb

WHEN THE PLANE'S ENGINE TOOK ON A WHINING roar, my grip tightened on my fiddle case. We lifted and skimmed across the waves. All I could see through the window was a fine spray shooting out beside us. In one swift motion, the old floatplane was airborne. I squeezed my eyes shut.

If all the big governments hadn't seized the last of the oil ten years ago, I could've simply gotten into a car and driven from British Columbia to Oregon in twelve hours, like my parents used to do in the "good old days," before the Collapse.

Eight weeks ago, we'd received a letter from my grandpa that he'd written almost a month before saying Grandma had suffered a stroke. After the letter came, Mom had tried to reach him on CyberSpeak, but kept getting a message saying his account had been closed. Her letters to my grandparents had also gone unanswered.

The hospital where my grandfather had worked for over thirty years was close to their house and so Mom was sure my grandmother had gone there. It had taken her three weeks of trying during the one hour a day they accepted CyberSpeak inquiries before she finally got a connection.

"I'm sorry," the nurse had said. "We don't have a Katharine Buckley."

"Did she go home?" Mom asked.

The family had all gathered around the computer together, watching the nurse on her video cam. The woman looked up at us, her heavy-framed gla.s.ses reflecting the bright hospital lights.

"You are all all her immediate family, aren't you? I can't give this info out to anyone but the her immediate family, aren't you? I can't give this info out to anyone but the immediate immediate family." family."

In spite of the seriousness of the situation, all of us except Mom cracked up laughing. My parents looked so much alike, with crazy, curly dark hair, big brown eyes, and the same wiry build that strangers had mistaken them for brother and sister a million times. And all four of us kids looked like carbon copies of them, just in different sizes.

"Yes, yes . . . I'm her daughter," Mom had said impatiently. "Brianna Buckley."

"Hang on," the nurse said.

The tapping of her fingers on the keyboard came across loud and clear at first, but then everything changed. The sound began to distort, and the nurse's face turned fuzzy.

"I'm sorry," she said. "Mrs. Buckley is d-"

And then we'd lost the connection and we couldn't get it back.

"Did she say deceased?" Mom yelled.

"I think she was saying discharged," Dad said.

Mom burst into tears. "No . . . she said is is. You say is is deceased or deceased or was was discharged." discharged."

"Brianna," Dad said, putting his hands on her shoulders and trying to sound firm, "calm down. Think about the baby."

"I can't worry about the baby right now," she sobbed.

Mom was forty-two, and my six-year-old brother Jackie was supposed to be the last kid in the family, so even though my parents didn't admit it, it was pretty obvious that this baby had been a surprise. After the initial shock, we were all excited.

The problem was that Mom's blood pressure was sky-high and Dr. Robinson had told her to take it slow, but to her, slow meant making four batches of jam instead of six. Before the call to the hospital about her mother, she wouldn't even consider his advice. She'd ignored our pleas and kept doing all her regular ch.o.r.es. On one hand, we were sad about Grandma too, and hated to see Mom depressed, but it was also sort of a relief that she was finally spending time in bed, even if she was crying a lot. The whole family took turns trying to cheer her up, but she refused to be consoled.

"We never made up properly, Molly," Mom had cried into the fresh spinach soup I made for her. "My mother will never know that I was sorry!"

"What do you mean?" I'd asked, confused. "You've talked to Grandma on CyberSpeak every week for years."

"But not about anything important," she wailed. "We haven't seen each other since 2028! Or maybe even 2027 . . . I can't remember, it's been so long."

My sister, Katie, brought Mom strawberry shortcake, but she pushed it away untouched. James, my older brother, who claimed he was her favorite (although none of the rest of us believed it), tried cheering her up in the evenings on CyberSpeak. He was working in the Okanagan Valley on the mainland for the summer, and he told her silly stories about his days in the vineyards, but she didn't even crack a smile. Little Jackie even brought in a kitten from the barn to perch on her pregnant belly, but nothing helped.

Eventually Dad sent me on my bike for Dr. Robinson, but he couldn't give her a sedative because this was a risky pregnancy.

Dad, Katie, and I held a family conference in the barn and secretly agreed Mom was probably right and that Grandma had died. And if Grandma was gone, then Grandpa was all on his own. According to my mom, Grandpa had never washed a s.h.i.+rt or cooked a meal. She was sure that if she didn't go down and rescue him, he'd die of starvation. If it hadn't happened already.

Before the Collapse, Grandpa could've driven his car to restaurants and hired someone to do his laundry, but now with so many businesses closed, and everyone too careful with their money to employ a housekeeper, he'd probably have to fend for himself. Mom had convinced herself he was living in squalor without anything to eat.

To keep Mom from doing something crazy like going to Oregon herself, I had been elected to make the trip instead. Katie flatly refused to go because she was planning the wedding of the century, but even if she'd wanted to, I doubt my dad would've trusted her. She'd either get distracted by the stores along the way and spend all her money on clothes, or she'd come running home at the first sign of hards.h.i.+p.

It had taken my dad a while to get the money together. The people on our tiny island barter for almost everything, and Dad had to export most of our early lettuce, leeks, and spinach to Vancouver Island to raise the cash. He'd gotten as much as he could, and I think that some of our friends had chipped in to help too, but I was still going to have to be very careful with my money.

The wind tossed the little plane from side to side, and I grabbed at the seat in front of me. The other nine pa.s.sengers held on too, their hands tightly gripping the cracked leather seats, nervous laughter filling the cabin.

"Just a little turbulence," the pilot called from the c.o.c.kpit. "Nothing to worry about!"

Easy for him to say. I had all kinds of things to worry about. Like would my aunt Poppy's American boyfriend be there to meet me when the plane landed? And if he wasn't, how much trouble would I be in?

Aunt Poppy had broken all kinds of laws sneaking me aboard this government flight from Victoria to Seattle, risking G.o.d knows what? Maybe even prison. I wasn't sure what they did to teenagers who broke international law, but I didn't want to find out.

Poppy worked for the Canadian government, and she flew to Seattle regularly for meetings with the Department of Agriculture. She hadn't been available to travel with me because of work, and you have to be eighteen to cross the border alone so she'd bribed a pilot she knew to ignore that my pa.s.sport clearly showed I was only sixteen.

I was also dressed up like all the other pa.s.sengers in business attire to help me pa.s.s for an adult. Poppy had provided me with a white silk blouse, knee-length navy skirt, and high heels. Not only did I feel totally ridiculous, but I also could barely walk in the stupid shoes.

As if the whole thing with my grandparents wasn't bad enough, right before I was supposed to leave, another tragedy struck. Dr. Robinson died in a freak accident in our barn.

Most of the farmers knew how to treat their livestock, so having no veterinarian on the island was not a big deal, but sometimes, if an animal needed st.i.tches, Dr. Robinson would do it. Last week I'd been bringing in the cows and I saw that one of the calves had a nasty cut on its front leg.

I was just going into the house to get my dad when Dr. Robinson came out after checking on Mom. He followed me out to the barn to see if he could help. When he bent down to look at the calf, its mother kicked him in the head.

I'd helped him up, and he'd seemed fine at first. He'd ridden his bike home, had dinner, and gone to bed. Only he never woke up. Mrs. Robinson found him dead when she tried to get him up for breakfast.

I had spent the last week obsessing about this. It had made me more determined than ever to go and get my grandpa because he was a doctor and we had to have one on the island for Mom and the baby. We couldn't wait around for the province to do it, either, because it could take them up to a year to send us one. My grandpa was the obvious choice. It solved two problems at once: him being alone and the island needing a doctor.

The plane dipped hard and my stomach sank after it. "Hang on!" the pilot yelled back to us. "Gonna be rough for a bit."

I looked at the other pa.s.sengers, hoping to see confidence in their eyes. A white-haired man across the aisle smiled warmly at me. "Just pockets of air," he said. "Nothing to worry about."

I must not have looked convinced. Especially when the plane sort of dropped and lurched to the left.

"Little planes move like this," he explained. "It's doing exactly what it's supposed to do."

"Okay," I said, hoping he knew what he was talking about and clinging to my fiddle for comfort anyway.

The turbulence lessened after a while, and we all relaxed back into our seats. Below, I could see the vast expanse of ocean. We flew over an island covered with trees, bisected by a long road. Tiny houses dotted the landscape, and I wondered if our island looked like that from the air. I imagined our farm. The sprawling log cabin that had been added on to twice. The red barn with its solar panels. The chicken coop would be a speck in the dust. And the fields would look like one of Mom's patchwork quilts.

"Beautiful, isn't it?" the man across the aisle asked.

"Yeah."

"Is that a violin?" he asked.

"Fiddle," I said, smiling.

"What's the difference?"

"Nothing. Just how you play it," I explained.

Inside the case, Jewels, my fiddle, was wrapped snugly in a piece of silk, her bow slack so the summer heat wouldn't snap the horsehair. My fingers ached to play because Poppy had rushed me out of the house before I had a chance to do my usual morning practice.

Mom had wanted me to leave Jewels at home for fear she'd get stolen, but there was no way I could go two weeks without her. That's how long Dad said I could expect to be gone. A few days of travel down, a week to help my grandpa get used to the idea of moving up to the farm and to sort out his things, and the trip back.

Even though I'd been traveling for two days already, first on a fis.h.i.+ng boat from our island to Vancouver Island, then on foot to Nanaimo, and on a train from there to Victoria, I was barely out of the country. I still had to take a train from Seattle to Portland and figure out local transportation to a city called Gresham, where my grandpa lived.

Less than an hour after leaving Victoria, the man across the aisle said, "I love this view of Seattle. It still looks like a great city from the air."

Below us sprawled more roads and houses than I'd ever seen. They covered acre after acre. We began to rapidly lose alt.i.tude, and Lake Union came into view. Behind it, the towering skyline of Seattle showed itself, dim and gray in murky afternoon light.

When the floats. .h.i.t the water, my queasy stomach pitched and I had to swallow hard to keep from throwing up. I couldn't believe it. This was the United States, and I was actually here. And then it really sank in. My mission was about to start for real.

2.

I STUMBLED MY WAY DOWN THE NARROW METAL stairs onto the dock with Jewels in one hand and my backpack slung over my shoulder, trying to keep my balance in the high heels.

"Steady there," the pilot said, taking ahold of my arm.

"Thanks."

I looked around hoping to see Poppy's boyfriend, Tyler, but he wasn't there. The other pa.s.sengers dragged small suitcases behind them, their wheels click-clacking on the wooden dock. When they got to the gate, they lined up and I watched the white-haired man who'd sat across from me hold up his pa.s.sport to a scanner while looking into a black box. After a second, the gate clicked open and he went through. The woman behind him waited for the gate to shut, and then she did the same thing.

When all nine people had disappeared out onto the street, I wandered over to it, trying to look casual. Maybe I could just go out that way too. I wasn't sure what the little box did, but I thought it might be a retina scanner. In school we'd learned about how people had fought that technology, saying it invaded their privacy, but the U.S. had gone ahead with it a nyway.

I scanned the docks again, looking for Tyler, but except for the pilot and a boy in a Hawaiian print s.h.i.+rt who had met the plane and helped tie it down, there wasn't anyone around. They were standing by the wing, the pilot smoking and looking out at the water, not at me.

I took my pa.s.sport out of my pack and held it open like the other pa.s.sengers had. There was a little beep, then a whirring sound came from the black box, so I stepped closer to it and looked right in.

Immediately an alarm sounded, flooding the docks with a piercing wail. I jumped back, twisting my ankle because of the heels, and dropped my pa.s.sport. Two men came running out of a tiny shack onto the dock. A tall, thin one was in front, and a round, pudgy one ran behind him holding up a handgun.

"Stop!" he shouted over the siren, waving the gun in my direction.

"Don't shoot!" I yelled. I put my hands in the air just in case.

"Did you set off the alarm?" the first man screamed over the whine of the siren.

"I didn't do it on purpose!" I tried to tell them. "I was on the plane that just landed and everyone else just held up their pa.s.sports so I did too but the siren went off!"

The thin guy was punching b.u.t.tons on the scanner, but the siren continued to scream. He had brown hair flecked with gray, and a goatee. Based on Poppy's description, he could be Tyler.

"Bill," he shouted at the fat man, "could you turn off the siren from the main computer? The code changed last week, and I can't remember it with all this noise!"

Bill started to hand him the gun, but he waved him off. "I think I can handle her."

"If you're sure." He sounded doubtful, but he lumbered away towards the shack anyway.

"Are you Molly?" Tyler asked me.

"Yes!"

"We've got to get you out of here," he yelled over the noise.

"What happened? Why did the alarm go off?"

"You can only use that machine with an American pa.s.sport. You should've waited for me. Sorry I got tied up on CyberSpeak. I meant to meet you." He looked around, and I could tell he was desperate to get me out of there. "Bill will never let a minor into the country; we're just gonna have to break some more rules now."

Mercifully, the siren finally stopped blaring, but my ears were ringing. As soon as the alarm was silent, Tyler started punching more codes into the pa.s.sport scanner.

"What's going to happen?" I asked.

The gate clicked open before he could answer. He shoved a piece of paper in my hand. "Directions to the train station," he said. Then he pushed me through the gate. "Run! I'll cover for you somehow."