I showed it to some kids in my homeroom. “Your animal amigo,” said Ms. Vermette, our homeroom teacher. I liked that. The ermine alive again.

  * * *

  And then Dougal tracked me down.

  “Let’s see your pet weasel,” he said.

  I swung around. He was standing six feet off, rocking on his heels, his hands hanging easy by his sides.

  How did he do it? How did he always know where I was?

  “Word’s out, Mr. Clean. Show me.” The ermine was alert in my breast pocket, its head peeking over the rim, looking directly at him. “Is that it?” said Dougal. He scoffed. “Sure is small.”

  “Stop stalking me,” I said.

  For some reason the words affected him. I watched the expression on his face crack, saw him cross his arms defensively across his chest.

  “I’m not stalking you,” he said.

  “Yes, you are.”

  “You wish.”

  “No, I don’t wish. And you are stalking me. That’s what this is.” He tightened the grip of his arms and his face seemed to wince as if he’d been hit. Don’t back away, the ermine whispered to me.

  “What do you want from me?” I shouted.

  He dropped his arms. “I don’t want —”

  “What?” I said, again.

  “I don’t … I can’t …”

  And it was then, with him not able to explain it, that suddenly I could, sort of. More from the tortured look on his face than from anything he could bring himself to say.

  “Oh,” I said.

  I took a deep breath. And we stood like that, the distance between us being about as long as his shadow. Go, Jack ermine whispered to me. Leave, but don’t run.

  I didn’t run. I walked right past Dougal Ashur, close enough he could have shoulder-checked me, but I was counting on him not doing it. He didn’t.

  I was the length of my shadow past him when he spoke again.

  “I like you,” he said, so quiet no one could have heard it but me if there’d been anyone around.

  I stopped and turned. He hadn’t turned; he was still facing the wall where he’d trapped me.

  “You sure have a weird way of showing it.”

  “I can’t … I don’t want …”

  I sighed. “You said that already.”

  He turned around now, very slowly, and I expected to see anger on his face. I was being a smart-ass and he didn’t like that. But there wasn’t anger there.

  “Don’t make fun of me,” he said.

  I threw up my arms. “You make fun of me all the time. You treat me like —”

  “I know. I know. I’m sorry,” he said. “Really.”

  He was struggling with something. Something big. He liked me and he had no idea what to do with that. Neither did I. But I had my ermine sitting boldly in my pocket, alert, watching, quick, ready. Giving me strength.

  Show him, Jack whispered.

  “It’s not a weasel,” I said.

  “What?”

  I patted my chest pocket. “And it’s not a pet.”

  He stared at my chest and then at my face. He nodded.

  I reached up and took the ermine out and held it out to him. He took it tentatively and looked it over, his eyes fixated on it. And his finger did what mine had done, when Old Man Sunday showed it to me, felt the curve and grace of it, the life of it. Gradually, Dougal’s out-of-control breathing returned to normal. And then, reluctantly, he handed it back.

  I put it in my pocket, patted it. It was then I noticed that the anti-bullying brigade had made it to this farthest corner of the school. There was a poster on the wall: “Be a Buddy, Not a Bully.” Beside the first phrase, there was a big red thumbs-up, and beside the second, a big red thumbs-down.

  “Did you see that?” I said, nodding toward the poster. Dougal glanced at it and then turned back to me. He didn’t do anything, he still seemed sort of frozen. So it was up to me, I guess.

  I gave him a thumbs-up.

  Hesitantly, he gave me a thumbs-up. I’m not sure this meant we were buddies, but it was all I could think of to do. With one last look, I turned to go. Then I stopped and turned toward him, again.

  “Are we good?” I said.

  The Stuffed Toy

  There is a den at the back of Robin’s house where a bear lives. A very old, crusty bear, with yellowing teeth and liver spots on his wrinkly paws. The bear has a name, although he doesn’t always respond to it on account of his ears. They’re clogged up with hair.

  “Eh?” he says.

  Then you have to shout, “Good morning, Gramps!”

  And then you have to wait to see who will answer, the old man or the bear.

  The old man will likely smile a crinkly smile at you and say, “Why, good morning, Mistress Robin.” He might ask you for tea and, if you’re not going to school that day, you might stay, because he has a teapot with a cozy on it and white cups in white saucers, each with thin rings of gold and blue around the edge, and he serves English tea biscuits — not cookies — that are covered with sugar or coated with chocolate or filled with fruit cream.

  If you’re having one of those days where you feel like you’re in a suspense movie, then tea with a chocolate-coated digestive biscuit can sometimes keep the dread at bay. You can look out at the woods behind the house through Gramps’s picture window and say to yourself, those are just woods. That movement in the leaves is just the wind.

  There are no leaves now. It’s the dead of winter, when there’s no sun to charge your batteries and the dread feels near at hand. Hovering.

  Sometimes, when you say, “Good morning, Gramps,” the bear answers you.

  “Gramps? What kind of a foolish name is that?” grumps the bear. “I’ll tell you summit, child, I’m not your gramps, I’m your great-grandfather and a foolish handle that is if I ever heard one. I outlived my wife and then I bloody well outlived both my son and daughter — what’s so ‘great’ about that, I ask you?”

  Except he isn’t asking you, so don’t dare answer. He’s in a “foul” mood, as he’ll tell you if you hang around long enough to hear. And sometimes Robin does because it’s kind of exhilarating to watch his eyes grow all big and roll around in their yellow-tinged sockets, while his bushy eyebrows rise high on his crinkly forehead and his whole body stiffens as if maybe he’s in a suspense movie, too, and has no idea what’s going to happen next.

  Robin is named Robin after her grandfather, who died before she really knew him. Gramps was already ninety-one when his son died. He’s one hundred now and she’s the only Robin he has left.

  She figures he’s allowed to be a bear now and then.

  You want to be careful, when you knock on his door. And Robin, being Robin, is always careful. She worries — worries, sometimes, that it won’t be either Gramps or the bear who is there, but only a century-old body lying in the bed Gramps used to sleep in.

  * * *

  Today, no one answers and Robin fears the worst. She knocks again. Still no answer. Except, when she presses her ear to the wooden door, there’s someone talking with an English accent that’s nothing like Gramps’s East Sussex dialect. It’s the BBC. Tentatively, she opens the door. The TV is on, but Gramps’s favorite chair is empty. He’s nowhere to be seen, but the closet door is open and suddenly a black coat comes flying out like a witch taking off, followed by an umbrella and a suitcase.

  “Gramps?”

  He pokes his head out. “Ah, Robin,” he says. “The very girl I was hoping for.” Then he heads back into the closet and more things fly out: a walking stick, a tweed jacket, a hot water bottle.

  “What are you looking for?” Robin asks from a safe distance.

  He steps out and scratches his head, as if he’s forgotten. But he hasn’t; it just takes him a moment, sometimes. “The stuffed toy,” he says. “You know the one.” She doesn’t. Then he scratches his head again. “Only, I’m quite sure Dulcie gave it to Susan.” He shakes his head. “What was she thinking on to go and do that?” he says, quite bewildered by the thought.

  Dulcie was Gramps’s wife and Susan was their daughter, Robin’s great-aunt. Robin knows these people only as old black-and-white photographs of people standing very still and straight, wearing slightly frightened smiles in case they blinked and ruined the picture.

  “Well?” he says.

  “I don’t know, Gramps,” says Robin. “A stuffed toy?”

  “It’s middling strange,” he says standing there framed in the closet doorway. Then all the oomph goes out of him and he sags so much that his suspenders threaten to slip right off his narrow shoulders. She goes to him then and sits him down in his favorite chair in front of the television.

  She stands at his side, patting his shoulder, watching soccer results on the screen. Except Gramps calls it football and he likes Brighton & Hove Albion who are in sixteenth place but won’t be relegated, he’s explained to her, although she’s uncertain what being relegated means. He’s not watching the scores right now. His eyes have gone all big and he’s in his suspense thriller again. Robin has sometimes wondered if the unseen danger in his movie is the same as the unseen danger in hers. It’s impossible to know.

  “It was the forest fire made me think on it,” he says.

  She looks out the window in case there’s a forest fire she didn’t know about. But it’s February outside and there’s nothing brighter than snow out there.

  “What fire, Gramps?”

  “Why, the Ashdown Forest,” he says. “It was right there, on the telly. In Nutley, not five miles as the crow flies from Hartfield. You know, Robin.” He stares at Robin as if all of this should make sense — as if she were his son, Robin, who died years ago, not his great-granddaughter.

  Only one thing he says means anything to her: the Ashdown Forest. It’s where A. A. Milne, author of the Winnie-the-Pooh books, lived, and where Christopher Robin played. Gramps’s son was named after that Robin, so she guesses she was, too, in a twice-removed kind of way.

  Gramps and Dulcie grew up on the edge of the Ashdown Forest, way back when.

  Robin’s hand has been resting on Gramps’s shoulder and now he reaches up with his big old spotty paw and pats it.

  “Poor little soul,” he says.

  “I’m okay, Gramps.”

  “No, I mean the stuffed toy. Whatever will Susan have done with it, that scatterbrained lass?”

  The weather comes on the BBC. Oh, the presenter only has one arm! Robin leans on the back of her great-grandfather’s chair and watches. One arm is enough, it seems, for pointing out weather patterns, especially in a country as small as the United Kingdom. How strange it would be, she thinks, to live in a country where everyone experienced pretty much the same weather on any given day.

  The whole country is having record-high temperatures for this time of the year, the presenter says. February is bursting into flames all over.

  “Poor wee thing,” says Gramps, shaking his head again as if it was really the fire, not Susan, that was the stuffed toy’s problem. “I fear the worst,” he says, patting Robin’s hand again.

  That’s the thing that joins Robin and her great-granddad together. They both fear the worst.

  * * *

  Robin checks with her father. He doesn’t recall anything about a stuffed toy, but he knows all about his aunt Susan. “She never stayed still, always flying off somewhere or other. Just couldn’t settle. Not someone you’d leave anything of value to, unless it was money.”

  But because she knows her parents well, Robin also checks with her mother.

  “Ah, Aunt Susan,” she says. “What a marvelous woman. Traveled the world, never married.”

  “Is there something you’re not telling me, Mom?”

  Robin’s mother laughs gayly and twitches Robin’s nose. “You’re my world,” she says. “I wouldn’t change you for anything.”

  “Or go away?”

  “Or ever, ever go away.”

  “So the stuffed toy …”

  Her mother shrugs. “Don’t know about that, but Susan left all her earthly possessions here. Out in the barn.”

  The barn. Robin shudders.

  * * *

  That night Gramps calls out in his sleep and as the only other person awake in the vast sleeping farmhouse, Robin goes to him.

  “I’ll find it, Dulcie,” says Gramps. “Have no fear of that. I’ll get him to safety, luv.”

  Robin pats his shoulder and says, “Shhh, it’s all right, Gramps,” which takes an act of courage on her part because it’s dark in Gramps’s flat, but for stray bits of moonlight. “Shhh,” she says again, and this time it’s for herself, too. Pat, pat, pat. And Gramps lies there, his mouth open, breathing hard, looking up at the ceiling through eyes that are open and unseeing.

  “Poor little soul,” he says. “Poor wee thing.” Gradually, his breathing softens and his eyes close and he drifts back to whatever corner of the world of sleep he can get to on his tired old legs. And Robin is pleased with herself, for it was often Gramps who would come to quiet her back to sleep when she was little and had only just become aware of the Bad Thing.

  “Is it the Bad Thing?” he’d ask.

  And she’d nod.

  “Ah, well,” he’d say. “I’ll keep an eye out for it, lass. You sleep, now. I’ll stand watch.”

  She would train her eyes on his tall, lank silhouette against the light from her mostly closed door, while he stood not two feet away from her bedside, his back to her, his hands lightly clenched behind him, like a guard at ease, but vigilant, his head scanning every corner of the room. Eventually she’d sleep.

  So now, Robin stands watch. And when Gramps is truly asleep, she wanders over to his window and looks out through her own breath on the frosted glass at the moon peeking through scudding clouds, and the tree shadows and the shadow of the wood smoke writing on the clean white sheets of snow. And lurking off to her left across the yard, the ramshackle old barn.

  —

  * * *

  “Do you think he’s losing his mind?” she asks her father.

  “Not your great-grandfather,” he says. “Got a mind like a steel trap.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Like the door on an animal trap that snaps shut,” says her father. He snaps his hand together as if catching something in midair. Robin wonders about that, about ideas caught like that, trapped.

  * * *

  For a second night, the old man dreams of the stuffed toy and Robin goes to him. She tells her mother in the morning, who says, “Well, he does have a steel-trap mind, but the hinges need a little oil now and then.” She hands Robin some worksheets of exponents and square roots, and Robin sits to do them at the kitchen island, still in her pajamas, a plate of toast and honey at her side. She doesn’t complain. This is the trade-off: stay home from school, you get a lot of homework.

  “He gets befuddled,” says her mother after a while.

  * * *

  When Robin’s done her math and has read two chapters of Harry Potter à l’école des sorciers, she decides to go and see how Gramps is doing. Only, when she knocks, the bear answers.

  “Not in,” he says in a growly voice.

  “Gramps, it’s me.”

  “Nobody here,” he says.

  “Gramps?”

  “I heard you quite well the first time,” he says.

  She turns to go, then stops and smiles to herself. It’s a line from Winnie-the-Pooh. Rabbit’s line, when Pooh comes to visit … A mind like a steel trap, she thinks.

  But when she knocks again, he’s still growly. She goes in anyway and sees him looking out at the snowy landscape, stretching out his bony fingers and folding them back into gnarly fists.

  “I think the stuffed toy is safe,” she says, to see if that helps ease his mind. It doesn’t. He’s got a sour look on his face and his eyes are very far away. She can almost see the fire in them. He’s somewhere on the other side of the Atlantic, looking out at a fire raging in the Ashdown Forest, where he and Dulcie used to play when they were children.

  “They put the fires out, Gramps,” she says. “Didn’t you see it on the news?”

  He doesn’t answer her. His eyes are big with worry. She reaches out to pat his arm, then draws it back and leaves. But before she makes it to the door, he mutters something under his breath.

  “She should never have taken the blasted thing,” he says, or at least that’s what she thinks she hears.

  “What’s that, Gramps?” she says in her carefullest voice.

  “Given us no end of trouble,” he mumbles.

  * * *

  Her mother makes her go out, even though it’s gray and dismal and Februaryish.

  “Just because we’re doing homeschool doesn’t mean I have to have recess,” Robin says.

  “No, but you need some air,” says her mother, “and I need a break.”

  Robin stands outside in the dismal yard in the soggy air and looks over at the old barn. A piece of its loose tin roof flaps in the breeze. Slap. Slap. Robin shivers and digs her hands deep into her coat pockets. If it were a bright sunshiny day, she might just risk it. The place is structurally sound, even if it is dilapidated. There are spaces between the wood siding so that there are bands of light inside. She remembers thinking of them as music when she was little.

  She could leave the big door open. If she could find the stuffed toy, maybe it would cheer Gramps up, snap him out of his grumpiness. But the problem is, Great-Aunt Susan’s stuff is in the room inside the barn. The room Dad built as a recording studio, but never got around to actually using, except for storage. There are no windows in that room. There’s a low roof. And insulation so that no sound can come in or out. If she were trapped there, no one would ever know. And anyway, there’d be no guarantee that she’d find anything. What stuffed toy?