She should never have taken the blasted thing. That’s what Gramps had said.

  Taken it? Like, stolen it?

  Given us no end of trouble.

  Robin shivers and it’s not just the bone-deep, wet cold of the weather. She looks around the yard. It looks so lonesome. And the dread seeps in: a tightening in the chest, panic, despair.

  Her brain thermostat is miss-set. It was something she’d overheard Mom say to her father.

  Is it like that for Gramps? They never talk about it. She just sees in his eyes what she imagines someone sees in hers, when the suspense movie starts rolling.

  She raps on the kitchen door. “Am I allowed back in yet?” she says.

  “Oh, don’t be silly,” says her mother.

  * * *

  “It’s just a phase.”

  She hears them talking when they think she’s asleep.

  “It’s a gateway disorder,” says Mom. “We need to think about seeing someone.”

  “She’s on the brink of her teens — the biggest disorder of all. Everybody goes through that.”

  “I feel like I’m in ‘fix-it mode,’” says Mom.

  “She’ll be fine. She’s great,” says Dad.

  “I didn’t say she wasn’t.”

  “She just needs to pull herself up by her bootstraps.”

  Outside their bedroom door, Robin looks down at her slippers. No bootstraps there. Just as well. If you pulled yourself up by your bootstraps, wouldn’t you just fall over?

  She shakes her head. It’s nothing she hasn’t overheard before. She overhears a lot. And she’s mostly okay and then she’s not. Especially at this time of the year. There’s a girl at school, Wanda, who came up to her once, out of the blue, and said quietly, so no one else would hear, “Me too, chica.”

  Robin must have looked confused, because Wanda held out her T-shirt for Robin to see. There was Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz with her hand up to her open mouth and her eyes wide with panic. Maybe it was the moment when the Wicked Witch stole her dog.

  “It gets scary,” said Wanda. “The anxiety, right?” Robin nodded. “Especially in the winter.” Robin nodded again. They didn’t talk much but it was good to know she had an ally.

  She pads softly down the hall from her parents’ room and listens at Gramps’s door. The BBC is on very low. But if she listens she can hear him talking, as if he were on the phone, except that he’s talking to Dulcie.

  “I know, Dulcie, I know,” he says. “Yes, luv. But it’s like gawm on your boots. You can’t shake it off and it reeks, it does.”

  Robin wonders what gawm is. Mud of some kind, probably. Gramps has a hundred words for mud. She imagines Sussex must be wall to wall mud, considering how many words there are for it. And here he is talking to his wife about it — Dulcie who died not long after Robin was born. She wonders if gawm is the kind of mud that can foul up a steel-trap mind and make an old man go screwball.

  —

  * * *

  Robin dreams of fire. She’s trapped in a cardboard box in a barn of dry old wood that would burn up like tinder. She wakes to a day of brittle sunshine that disappears by the time she’s showered.

  “School today?” says Dad, hopeful as ever.

  “Not yet,” she says.

  “I’ll give you a drive, save you having to take the yellow peril?”

  “Thanks, Dad, but no. I’ve got plans.”

  “But, Rob —”

  “Honey,” says Mom in the tone of voice that’s reserved for Dad when he’s going on the offensive. Robin gives him a quick hug and then ducks under his arm and down the hall.

  “Plans?” he calls after her.

  She nods without turning and slips into her bedroom. She does have plans. She wasn’t lying. She leans back against the door, as if expecting Dad to force his way in for a little heart-to-heart about bootstraps. But he doesn’t come. Still she leans against the door, not to keep anything out but because she’s afraid of what she’s going to do. She tries to talk herself out of it, loses, and then stands up tall and only a bit wobbly. She’ll need some things.

  “Where are you going with that bat?” says her mother. Robin was hoping to get out unseen. “I thought we were going to be looking at British North America after the fall of New France.”

  If there was ever a good reason to do something daring, there it was.

  “We will, Mom. I promise. Can’t wait. But there’s something I’ve got to do first. It’s important.”

  Hands on hips, her mother looks her over, from her headlamp down to her sturdy boots.

  “The whistle’s in case you run into problems?” Robin nods. “If the bat isn’t enough?” Robin nods again. Now her mother nods. “Do you want me to …”

  Go with me? Yes! No!

  “Okay,” says Mom.

  And so Robin goes.

  * * *

  She forces the barn door open as far as she can, which isn’t that far on account of the snow. She holds it open with a sawhorse that’s standing just inside the door. There’s her father’s MG that he’s been fixing up for six years. The tarp covering it is dusty and covered with bird droppings. There are old beehives in the corner, another failed project. The bears got more honey than the humans did. The barn is where hobbies go to die.

  Birds live there. Mice, too. Probably rats, though she’s never seen one. She grips her bat tight, and steps inside, makes her way down past the stalls, where cows were mangered when this was a working farm, a long time ago. There’s nothing left of them but the sweet, dry smell. She breathes in deeply and ends up sneezing her head off. Dust. The place is alive with dust. The bands of light that penetrate the gloom are thick with it.

  There’s a heavy wooden gate at the end of the stalls, tied shut with a length of binder twine. She opens it, steps through and closes it behind her. Then she takes a right and a left and the light of the outside fades to nothing. She flips on her headlamp and immediately wishes she hadn’t. There was that movie — a real one — she hadn’t meant to see, but she was with friends and they all watched it and she’s never liked to see anything by flashlight beam since, except the pages of her book when she’s reading late, safe in bed.

  She turns around, her bat ready. Nothing stirs but the wind. The barn grumbles. A loose board rattles, the tin roof goes slap, slap. The wind dies. Ahead of her is the door to the recording studio. There’s a sign on it that says, “Quiet, please: Recording in progress.”

  She opens the door. There is a deeper, thicker kind of darkness inside. There are no windows, no way out if the door should slam shut behind her and jam, somehow. Or if someone were to lock her in and her headlamp battery died and she fell and tore her leg on a nail and the already low roof started to lower and her voice clogged up with dust so that she couldn’t blow on her whistle.

  Robin takes a deep breath and is glad she can. The air is cooler in here. A tomb, she thinks, and immediately regrets it. “Get a grip,” she tells herself. Which isn’t the same as picking yourself up by your bootstraps.

  You came to rescue a stuffed toy.

  No. To rescue your Gramps.

  There, isn’t that better? She takes another deep breath and finally lets go of the door handle, though she holds her foot against it until she’s maneuvered a heavy box of what she suspects are books into the door’s path.

  There are many boxes. Too many boxes. Not just Great-Aunt Susan’s, either. Boxes of their stuff, too. And old furniture. She turns and looks back where she came. She could march out of here right now and just say she couldn’t find it. And Mom would say, how about we look again after lunch, I’ll help. And so they’d do some history and eat some lunch and come out here and she’d stand there while her mother moved boxes around and found the damned stuffed toy, which, after all, was the only reason she was doing this and maybe there wasn’t even a damned stuffed toy.

  A damned stuffed toy.

  She should never have taken the blasted thing. Again, Gramps’s words come back to her

  The movie starts to roll. She can hear the Cellos of the Damned start to murmur. It’ll be the Violins of the Damned next. She looks at the stacks of boxes. What was that saying? A journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step? “Replace step with box,” Robin tells herself out loud, trying to drown out the film score. With one last fleeting and longing look back to make sure the door to this inner chamber is really going to stay open, she launches in.

  She’s not sure how long it is — ten hours or fifteen minutes — before she finds the Susan cache. There’s a big red SUSAN on every box. And there are only a couple of dozen boxes. Robin is sweaty and cold at the same time.

  Then she opens one box and screams and steps backward and tumbles over on her backside. She takes a moment to gather her courage. By then she knows whose eyes they are and she gets shakily to her knees. Dolls. Robin leans one hand on the cold wall and rests the other on her heart. This is prime horror-story stuff. Dolls. Very old dolls, by the look of them. Susan’s dolls? Maybe even Great-Grandmother Dulcie’s dolls. Porcelain and cloth and wood, in stained white nighties and dresses with tattered, frilly collars. When she’s recovered, she starts to unpack the dolls very carefully, afraid they might fall apart in her hands. One by one, she places them on the floor around her.

  And then, suddenly, there it is.

  Has to be.

  She had no idea what she was looking for, but this must be it. She picks it up lovingly and places it in the palm of her hand. It’s baby Roo. Kanga’s son. One eye is hanging by a thread. His pelt is threadbare. Still, she’d recognize him anywhere. She rests the stuffed doll on a spare piece of tissue paper one of the other dolls had been wrapped in and then, just to be 100 percent sure, she looks through the rest of the box. But there are no more characters from Winnie-the-Pooh. Just this.

  Filled with excitement and desperate to go — but reminding herself to be gentle — she packs away all the other dolls and then picks up Roo and cradles him in one arm. He’s very small and fragile. She gets to her feet and leaves the dark room, slowly, carefully, afraid she might damage him. He could tear in an instant, she thinks. She imagines him disintegrating like a dandelion clock. She closes the door to the studio and heads out. She’s already out the barn door before she remembers that she left her bat in the studio. She doesn’t need it, she tells herself, and then she makes herself go back for it. Just because she can.

  * * *

  “Oh, god. Of course!” says Mom. She’s delicately balancing baby Roo on the palm of her hand, with the other hand cupped nearby in case he should decide to sproing off her hand onto the kitchen counter.

  “What do you mean, ‘of course’?”

  Mom shakes her head. “The fires in the Ashdown Forest. That’s where they found him. No wonder he’s so upset.” Robin is about to burst. “Let him explain,” her mother says and hands the tiny kangaroo back to Robin.

  As she’s leaving the room, her mother calls out to her. “That was brave, Rob,” she says.

  Robin frowns, feels foolish. “Not really.”

  “Was, too. You did something hard. Did it alone.”

  “The barn’s just … just spooky.” That’s all. It’s only a place, a thing. What’s really scary is the unexpected. Things that come out of nowhere …

  What’s really scary is what isn’t anything.

  * * *

  She knocks on Gramps’s door.

  “I’m still not in,” says the bear. “Not to meddling little misses. Now, leave an old man in peace.”

  “No,” says Robin. Then, not waiting for the bear to argue, she goes in. He’s sitting by the window looking out at the bleakness of late winter. “Look what I found,” she says.

  He takes little Roo in his old hands, which are shaking. Oh, he stares at it. Stares in wonder as if seeing it for the first time. He looks at her and she sees that his eyes are wet. Then he looks out at the cold leafless forest and then back at Roo.

  Robin is bursting with questions but she holds them at bay, leaves him the space for his steel-trap mind to digest what she has placed in his hands. After a moment, she turns and finds the hassock that sits in front of his favorite chair, drags it over to the window and plunks down on it beside him. There. Now she can wait as long as it takes. And after several trillion seconds, he tells her a story.

  They were kiddies together, he and Dulcie. Next-door neighbors in Hartfield, Sussex. They did everything together and they played in the Ashdown Forest, never knowing that it would become famous the world over as the “100 Aker Wood.”

  “Christopher Robin was our age. We saw him sometimes, he and his nurse, when the family was down from London. Never really knew the boy. Had no idea his dad was a famous playwright up in’t city. Didn’t know about the Pooh books. Not ’til much later. By then … well, it was too late.”

  He blinks a tear from his eye, takes a huge white handkerchief from his pocket and wipes it away. Robin’s Gramps is never without his handkerchief. When she was little she took one of them to show-and-tell. She explained what it was and showed the class the blue initials stitched into the corner.

  “What do you mean, ‘too late’?” she says.

  “Too late to return it, of course.”

  Robin stares at Roo. “You stole it?”

  Gramps doesn’t answer right away. “It weren’t like that,” he says. “We found it. Found it sitting in the crotch of an old apple tree. We were out exploring, as children do, and there it was. There was no one around. Made it seem as if the wee thing had jumped up into the tree all by itself. How were we to know?”

  He turns to Robin and she can only shrug. “So you took it?”

  “Dulcie did. I was uneasy about it, but then I was always uneasy, like. Dulcie was the plucky one. Got us into scrapes, she did.” He smiles. “I think it wasn’t until I was more your sort of age that I ever saw the books. Winnie-the-Pooh and t’others. And there were Mr. Shepard’s drawings. What a fright that was. There was Roo and there was Dulcie’s stuffed Roo and they were one and the same.”

  “But how do you know it was Christopher Robin’s toy? I mean, there could have been lots of them.”

  “Which is just what I said to Dulcie, she was that upset.”

  Robin is perplexed and it must show on her face because Gramps pats her on the arm and, having handed Roo back to her, laboriously climbs out of his chair and goes to his bookshelf. He pulls out a slim volume and returns to her. His fingers are not shaking anymore as he opens the book and turns the pages. “Here it is,” he says, and hands it to her.

  With her thumb holding the place, she closes the book to look at the cover. The Enchanted Places by Christopher Milne. Oh! Then she looks at the page Gramps has found and reads it, a passage about Christopher — the Christopher Robin — walking out with his nanny and leaving Roo in the crotch of an apple tree, only to find it gone when he returned.

  “Oh!” says Robin again.

  “It was so many years later. We were in our fifties, by then. And Dulcie … well, she wouldn’t — couldn’t let it go.”

  Robin stares at the small stuffed toy. “It’s probably worth a lot,” she says.

  Gramps nods his head in agreement. “Which is why I feared for it when I saw the fires in the Ashford Forest.”

  “But it was —”

  “I know, child.” Gramps tapped his head. “It’s just sometimes I don’t know what I know.”

  “Your steel-trap mind needs oiling,” she says.

  And Gramps laughs and nods again. He stares at her, his forehead wrinkling. He reaches out and taps the lens of her headlamp with his fingernail. “What’s this about?” he asks.

  “I had to go somewhere dark to get Roo,” she says.

  “And how was that?” he asks.

  “Worth it,” she says.

  The Brotherhood of ­Interstellar Dirt

  I was at the bedroom window when Dad came in. The window was open and the crickets were going wild, as if maybe they knew what was coming.

  “How’s Mom?” I asked, keeping my voice quiet.

  He waffled his hand in a so-so gesture, which I could see in the light spilling in from the hall. Then he closed the door behind him and it was dark again, except for the stars. He joined me at the window.

  “Any sightings?” Dad asked.

  “Not yet. Too early.”

  “It’s after eleven.”

  “Oh, that’s right, I forgot, I’ve got school tomorrow. Oh, wait. It’s August, no I don’t.”

  Dad smiled a careworn smile as he craned his eyes up. “Sky’s clear. What’s the forecast for tomorrow?”

  “No rain. No clouds. The moon will set by 8:47, so it’ll be good and dark. Perfect.”

  Dad didn’t say anything, but he had something to say. I could tell even by starlight.

  “Is she really okay?” I asked.

  “She’s fine,” he said.

  “Spill it, Dad.”

  “Okay. She’s having mild contractions.”

  “But she’s not due for another week, right?”

  “Yeah, well. Contractions of thirty to forty seconds, every ten minutes or so, say different.”

  I lurched a bit inside. “So, that’s good, isn’t it? The sooner the better?”

  “Well, yeah. Except for one thing: your party.”

  “What about it?”

  “There’s a pretty good chance your mom will be giving birth by tomorrow.”