Hazel's Theory of Evolution Read online

  I shoved the rest of my sandwich in my mouth so I couldn’t say more, gave Arby a last good scratch behind the ears, and backed out of the shack. Arby whined, disappointed to be left behind. But no matter how sweet she was to humans, we couldn’t trust her around the goats. We never knew when her hunting instincts would kick in.

  Even if she were on her best behavior, we couldn’t risk a Pax attack. Pax was our guard donkey. Once, Arby had slipped into the pasture after me, and we’d seen docile, grass-munching Pax transform into a hoof-lashing, teeth-gnashing demon. Arby had barely made it back out before getting kicked in the head.

  The latch to the pasture gate clinked as I opened it, summoning the herd from across the field. First came Kali, her black head level with my stomach, followed by her twin sister, Tiamat. Then came the rest of the does, along with Pax, towering head and shoulders over them all. I shut the gate behind me quickly, before anyone got the clever idea to explore.

  All ten goats wanted attention. Whiskery muzzles tickled my knees. Fuzzy lips nibbled my fingers and shirttail. (Nibbled! Not chewed up and swallowed.) Wide eyes with pupils like sideways keyholes blinked up at me. And there was the constant bleating: maa-aaa, maa-aaa, maa-aaa!

  “Hi, Brigid,” I said. I knew her by her extra-long beard and her way of gently nudging my knee for attention. All the goats had something to set them apart from the others—the shade of their fur, the length of their ears or beards, the set of their eyes and mouths. And, of course, they all had different personalities. “Hi, Athena. Hi, Freya.” I greeted all the does in turn, finishing with a pat on Pax’s soft gray cheek.

  I drew away from the crowd, wading through the tall grass to the half-ton. The 1936 Chevy pickup, so brown with rust it was impossible to know its original color, had come with our property. It was sunk fender-deep in the earth. The goats loved it. They had other things to climb and play on—giant rocks, a picnic table, and even a tree house Rowan had built for them—but the half-ton was their favorite.

  Sure enough, as soon as I climbed into the cab, there was a scrambling of hooves on steel. The goats piled into the bed as if they were going for a hayride. Then came an earsplitting MAA-AA-AA-AA and a heavy thump on the roof. Kali. She wouldn’t let the others so much as think about jumping all the way up. She was a ruthless dictator, the empress of all she could see.

  And maybe I was biased, but it was quite a view. Green and gold grass rippled all around. Now that it was September, most of the flowers were dry ghosts of their summer selves, but there were still sprays of goldenrod, tiny purple asters, and scrubby bushes of mint.

  Around the pasture stood a sturdy metal fence, and past the fence stood the trees, and past the trees lay the train tracks. When a train sped past, I’d see flashes of blue and red and gray between the tree trunks. The whistle would blow as it chugged through the crossing, the bells at the gate clanging so hard my ears heard echoes long after it had gone.

  Those tracks were the main reason I was at Finley. They formed the diagonal on our tiny triangle of farmland—the best Mom could afford with her inheritance from her great-aunt Maud, twenty minutes from the nearest traffic light. Until last year, the train tracks hadn’t been a problem. Then the Tuesday-morning freight started running fifteen minutes earlier, catching the school bus just after picking me up and holding us on the wrong side of the crossing as over a hundred cars rolled lazily by. Meanwhile, all the kids on the other side waited at their stops in the heat, rain, or snow (our three main types of weather) for the bus to show up.

  I hadn’t minded. I loved the predictability of that Tuesday-morning train, which always showed up at precisely 7:31. Our bus driver huffed with disgust every time, but I leaned back in my seat and enjoyed those extra minutes to myself before the other kids piled on with their bumping and yelling and scent of dirty sneakers.

  But nobody had asked my opinion, and whether it was the parents or the teachers or the principal who’d complained, my family got a letter in June telling us the county had been redistricted. Our house used to be on the Osterhout Middle School side of the line. Now it was on the Finley side.

  I reached behind the seat of the half-ton, where I kept my encyclopedias. When I was six, I’d bought the complete set of Grzimek’s Animal Life Encyclopedia from the library sale. It cost ten dollars, which was basically my life savings at the time, and even though it was slightly moldy and more than slightly out of date, it had been worth every cent. I’d spent countless hours in the pasture reading about animals from Siberian tigers to ptarmigans.

  I pulled out Volume 2: Protostomes and flipped to the entry about oligochaeta—also known as earthworms. Earthworms were fascinating. They didn’t have bones, so they’d left no skeletons in the fossil record. Instead, they’d left the traces of their squiggling bodies in the mud, as if they’d signed their names millions of years ago, and you could still read the signatures.

  They didn’t eat dirt like most people thought. They ate decaying plants and other organic material. Grzimek’s didn’t go into detail about the “other organic material,” but I guessed it meant flesh—in which case, why didn’t it just say so? I could have handled the truth.

  There were over four thousand species of earthworm. Some were even endangered, but people only wanted to talk about protecting pandas and whales. It wasn’t earthworms’ fault they weren’t cute and didn’t sing mysterious underwater songs. They did exactly what they were supposed to do, yet where were the “Save the Worms” T-shirts and bumper stickers?

  Yosh had been right about one thing: worms didn’t get nearly enough credit. It was too bad Grzimek’s wasn’t required reading. Everyone ought to read not just about earthworms, but all the animals that got a bad rap through no fault of their own. Then maybe instead of saying ew and making poop jokes, people would properly appreciate them.

  As I read, I blocked out the goats’ stamping and yelling. I blocked out the buzz of a fly that had flown into the cab and kept bouncing against the windshield, too confused to go back the way it had come. I didn’t notice Mimi until the passenger door swung open with a thunk and she hauled herself up beside me.

  “Oof,” she said.

  You wouldn’t have guessed Mimi was my mother by looking at us. Mom was my biological mother, and I looked just like her: tallish and skinnyish, pale-skinned and freckled, with reddish brown hair (though mine always frizzed, and Mom’s, when she wore it down, magically fell in loose waves). The main difference was our eyes. Mom’s were blue. Mine were brown. Plus, I wore glasses.

  Mimi, on the other hand, was petite and curvy, with rich dark skin and black hair she currently wore in short twists. When we were out, strangers often assumed she was my babysitter, not my mom—just because she was black and I was white. She carried copies of Rowan’s and my birth certificates in case she needed to prove she was our mother and her word wasn’t good enough. I hated that she needed to do that. She and Mom started dating when I was two and got married when I was four, which was also when Mimi adopted Rowan and me. I couldn’t remember a life without her. She was as much my mother as Mom was.

  “Didn’t you hear me calling?” asked Mimi.

  “I was concentrating.” I showed her my book. “Did you know successful farming depends on good soil, which depends on hardworking worms? We’d starve without them. Yet all people think about is how slimy they are.”

  Mimi put up her hands. “Not me. Worms are my heroes.”

  It was possible I’d given her the worm speech before.

  “How was school?” she asked.

  “I’m withholding judgment. Why are you home so early?” Mimi was a public defender and was often in court until at least four. Most nights, she barely made it home in time for dinner.

  She shifted in her seat, and the springs under the cracked leather squeaked. “Well. Ah.”

  Immediately I got a bad feeling. Mimi was not one to nervously shift in her seat.

  “I know you’re handling a lot already, with the change in school
s. I wish the timing were different, but we didn’t find out about the redistricting until afterward, and—”

  My stomach knotted tighter. “Didn’t find out until after what?”

  “Technically, it’s both Mom’s and my news, but I wanted to be the one to tell you.”

  “Bad news or good news?” I tried not to yell.

  “Good news! Definitely good.” But Mimi’s smile looked strained, and she hesitated before saying, “I’m pregnant.”

  I lurched backward, as if the half-ton had been speeding down the road instead of stuck in the dirt, and we’d blown a tire. “Oh.”

  She grasped my hand, her thumb stroking a firm circle. “I’m four months along. The baby’s due at the end of January.”

  I didn’t say anything. I was too stunned.

  “Hazel? Did you get that?”

  “I’m okay,” I mumbled, even though that wasn’t what she’d asked.

  “Okay for real?” Mimi said. “I know this is big.”

  My stomach felt like a sinkhole, and the rest of me was crumbling into it. I’d had no idea what Mimi was going to tell me, but if you’d asked, I’d have guessed almost anything but this. “Yes,” I lied. “Okay for real.”

  Mimi squeezed my hand. “I don’t want you to worry.”

  “I’m not worried,” I said loudly. “I’m happy.”

  Smile! I told my face, but it didn’t pay attention.

  “Well, good.” Mimi drew back. “You can be both, you know. I am.”

  “I’m not worried,” I repeated.

  I pulled away, unlatched my door, and slid out of the truck. Kali bellowed indignantly, and the herd leaped down after me with a series of clanks, thumps, and bleats.

  “Congratulations!” I yelled over my shoulder as I raced across the pasture toward the house, ten curious goats and a donkey trailing me.

  I wasn’t jealous. I’d have loved to be a big sister.

  I was upset because this wasn’t the first time Mimi had been pregnant. It was the third.

  I squeezed through the gate, shutting the chorus of goats behind me. I ran past the barn and the soap shack, past the vegetable garden and the herb garden and the compost heap. Past the sycamore tree and the memory garden, with its painted wooden bench where Mimi and Mom liked to sit sometimes, holding hands, and its engraved stones for the people we’d lost. Mimi’s mom, Gaga, had a stone, and our uncle Burt, Mom’s brother, who’d died in Afghanistan.

  And there were two stones, the prettiest ones, for my baby sister and brother. Two stones for Lena and Miles.

  Chapter 3

  The first time Mimi announced she was planning to get pregnant, I knew my whole life would change—and I was glad.

  For almost ten years, I’d been the baby of the family. When we played board games or opened Christmas presents, I got to go first. When Rowan and I fought, I usually got my way because he was supposed to be mature enough to deal with it.

  But I was ready to graduate. I knew how to milk the goats, make soap, identify animal tracks, and do long division. I’d read Grzimek’s Animal Life Encyclopedia cover to cover. I was ready to be the wise older sister who’d teach the baby everything worth knowing.

  Plus, I knew how much Mimi wanted it. She’d been saying when I have a baby for years. She’d been waiting for work to settle down, but it never had. Finally, she’d decided to plunge ahead anyway and start looking for a sperm donor.

  I’d wondered why she didn’t ask Rowan’s and my biological father to donate his sperm, since he probably would’ve done it for free. Mimi had said no offense—she liked Paul—but he was sort of weird. Paul and Mom had been friends since college. When Mom decided she’d better get serious about having kids before she got too old, he was the logical person to ask for help. But he was never listed on our birth certificates. He wasn’t even our godfather. He was just Mom’s old friend Paul.

  He rode a Harley and made his living creating sculptures out of old license plates. Actually, I wasn’t sure how much of a living he made. Once, when we stopped by his house, Paul told Rowan and me we could get pops from the fridge. Aside from the six-pack of Vernors, there was nothing inside but a half-empty jar of horseradish—and cookie-dough ice cream in the freezer. So maybe Mimi had a point.

  Anyway, I hadn’t minded that the new baby wouldn’t be biologically related to me. I’d known all my life that DNA didn’t make a family.

  Mimi and Mom had let Rowan and me help choose the donor. We’d sorted through hundreds of profiles, looking for the perfect one. Dark skin, brown eyes, smart, and, more than anything, healthy. Basically, we’d looked for Mimi’s clone, except with a Y chromosome.

  We’d finally settled on a law student who loved playing piano and basketball for fun. He wanted to travel the world. He had a dog. He was perfect. After a couple of tries at the clinic, the baby was on its way. From the beginning, the baby wasn’t just Mimi’s. It was all of ours.

  I moved out of my old bedroom, up to the spare room across from Rowan’s. Leaving my room was hard at first, but the attic room was bigger and more private, and it had a better view. Besides, my old room would become the baby’s. It was right next to my mothers’, which had been important when I was little, in case I had a bad dream. But I no longer needed to climb in their bed in the middle of the night.

  We painted the attic room a ferny green that made me feel like I was in the woods, moved my furniture upstairs, and hung up my “Wildlife of the Great Lakes Region” posters. Then we painted my old room pale blue and put in an oak crib and matching dresser and changing table, and a rocking chair and bins for toys and baby books. We hung a fish mobile over the crib. Even when the windows weren’t open, the fish swam in circles, their sequin eyes winking in the changing light. I set my old stuffed bunny in the chair, a present for the baby.

  Mimi and I cuddled on the sofa and read her pregnancy book together. It told you how your baby was developing, week by week. At eight weeks, your baby is the size of a raspberry! At twelve weeks, your baby is the size of a plum! We read about its tiny folded-up arms and legs, its tiny fingernails and eyelashes, the tiny bones forming in its ears so it could hear.

  One day I was sitting with my lips against Mimi’s belly, talking to the baby, telling it all about the farm, giving it a head start. The next, Mimi was having bad cramps and bleeding. Mom rushed her to the hospital, but there was nothing to be done. She’d had a miscarriage.

  The doctor evacuated the baby, who wasn’t much bigger than an avocado, from Mimi’s uterus. I hated that term, evacuated, because it sounded like the baby had been rescued from a house fire or a hurricane, instead of taken from what should have been the safest place in the world. When it was over, Mom and Rowan and I gathered around Mimi in her hospital bed as she held Lena’s tiny, blanket-swaddled body to her chest and whispered her name over and over.

  After we got home from the hospital, Mom shut the baby’s bedroom door, hiding the empty crib. I imagined the room getting dusty, the light turning from blue to gray. Part of me wanted to sneak inside and take my bunny back, but I didn’t. That would have felt like giving up. Even after Miles died a year later, I couldn’t do it. I hadn’t checked, but I guessed the bunny was still sitting in the rocking chair, its black eyes growing cloudier each day.

  Instead of feeling hope at Mimi’s news, I felt as sick as I had on the county fair teacups.

  I ran past the dark door to the baby’s room on my way up to Rowan’s. He had graduated high school in the spring and was supposed to be at Stanford, only in July he’d announced out of nowhere that he was deferring. Our moms had flipped their lids, sure that if he took a year off from school, he’d lose momentum and never go back.

  Mimi had been ready to make him get a job and move out, but they’d compromised. As long as he was home, Rowan would help Mom with her business. Since all his friends were away at college, he usually shut himself in his room when he wasn’t milking or mucking out the barn.

  I banged on his door as hard a
s I could. Usually Rowan took his time answering, whether because he didn’t hear me over his music or—more likely—because he was ignoring me. This time he opened up right away, his freckled face anxious. “Mom? What’s wrong?” When he saw it was me, his anxiety turned to annoyance. “What the heck, Hazel?”

  I pushed past him, reaching over the jumble of gears and electronics on his desk to turn off the music. My ears rang with the silence. “Did Mimi tell you she’s pregnant?”

  “Is that what this is about?” Rowan flopped across his bed, grabbing his Rubik’s Cube off his bedside table and spinning the layers. Click. Click. Click-click-click. He could solve it one-handed in under thirty seconds. This was plain old fidgeting.

  “How long have you known?”

  He did the lying-down version of a shrug. “A while.”

  “Why would she tell you and not me?”

  “Relax. She didn’t.”

  “Then how’d you know?” I slumped into Rowan’s swivel chair and kicked myself in a circle. When I put my feet down, the room spun in reverse. So did my stomach.

  “Haven’t you noticed she’s cut way back on coffee? A cup a day, max, and it’s decaf. And she’s eaten basically nothing but rice and noodles for dinner all summer long.”

  “I guess, but—”

  “She’s been sick, dum-dum.”

  “Like, morning sickness? But she was barely sick at all the first two times.”

  “I know. But it’s actually a really good sign. I mean, it sucks for her. But I’ve been reading, and bad morning sickness usually indicates a healthy baby.”

  Considering Rowan’s typical reading material discussed how to build robots from common household items, I had my doubts. “That’s completely illogical. How can sickness be a sign of health?”

  “Just because you don’t understand it doesn’t make it illogical. Look it up. You’ll see. It has to do with hormones. Anyway, things might be different this time. This one might actually, you know . . .” He trailed off, not meeting my eyes.

  After Miles, Mimi had had all sorts of tests to figure out what went wrong, but they hadn’t shown anything. No apparent abnormalities. Nothing in Mimi’s hormone levels or DNA or lifestyle that made her pregnancies especially risky. She was getting older, but she wasn’t that old. Lena’s and Miles’s deaths were chalked up to causes unknown. It made me mad. How could something so terrible happen for no reason—twice?