Hush Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  PART ONE

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  PART TWO

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  PART THREE

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  PART FOUR

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Acknowledgements

  IF I WAS BRAVE, I COULD BELONG SOMEWHERE.

  My name’s Toswiah, I’d say. Toswiah Green. Have you ever heard of me?

  But my name is Evie now. And I’ve never been brave.

  I can never tell anybody the real truth. But I can write it and say this story you’re about to read is fiction. I can give it a beginning, middle, and end. A plot. A character named Evie. A sister named Anna.

  Call it fiction because fiction is what it is. Evie and Anna aren’t real people. So you can’t go somewhere and look this up and say Now I know who this story’s about.

  Because if you did, it would kill my father.

  OTHER BOOKS BY JACQUELINE WOODSON

  Behind You

  The Dear One

  The House You Pass on the Way

  I Hadn’t Meant to Tell You This

  If You Come Softly

  Lena

  Locomotion

  Miracle’s Boys

  SPEAK

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

  345 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Group (Canada), 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2

  (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland

  (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)

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  Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Registered Offices: Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published in the United States of America by G. P. Putnam’s Sons,

  a division of Penguin Putnam Books for Young Readers, 2002

  Published by Speak, an imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 2003

  Reissued by Speak, an imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 2006

  Copyright © Jacqueline Woodson, 2002

  All rights reserved

  THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED THE PUTNAM EDITION AS FOLLOWS:

  Woodson, Jacqueline.

  Hush / Jacqueline Woodson.

  p. cm.

  Summary: Thirteen-year-old Toswiah finds her life changed

  when her family enters the witness protection program.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-15726-8

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  FOR

  Carrie Heath

  AND FOR THE

  STUDENTS AT

  Beginning With Children

  The mother’s dark brown fingers move quickly through a rise of white dough. On the stove, chicken pieces, seasoned and dipped in flour, sizzle. Afternoon sun falls softly over the kitchen. Two girls—one twelve and the other thirteen—are hunched over homework assignments. Dust streams in lines of sun, and the youngest remembers a long time ago when her sister said It’s made of bits of skin mostly. I swear. Skin that’s dust, the youngest thinks. Dust that’s sun. Sun that’s heat that burns the skin. She shakes her head to stop the avalanche of thoughts from coming.

  After a while, she turns in her chair to watch her mother. Watches her knead the dough twice, then pat it down—gently, though, the way she seems to touch everything.

  “Are you making biscuits or just plain old bread?” the youngest asks. The mother’s hands freeze above the dough. She smiles. She has a pretty smile—her face opens up around it and her dark eyes dance. She is a teacher and her students do all they can to make her smile because it warms them, makes them feel safe even if they’re doing division, which many of them haven’t yet and may never master. She is brown—all-over brown—hair, eyes, skin. So brown the youngest daughter used to say, “I can eat you like a chocolate bar, Ma,” which made the mother laugh. Her mother’s brown reminds her of everything she loves: Chocolate. Dark wool. The smell of earth. Trees. The girl and her sister’s own skin is coppery—somewhere between their mother’s deep brown and their father’s lighter skin.

  “Biscuits,” the mother says. The girls exchange looks and grin. Soon there will be fresh-baked biscuits, fried chicken, a salad of dark leafy greens sprinkled with grated cheese. Coconut cake, left over from the younger one’s birthday—her favorite, and the kind she requests year after year. Soon the father will come home, sit at the head of the table, still dressed in his policeman’s uniform, and say, “So, what’d my copper pennies do today?” And the older one will say “Dad!” annoyed that, at thirteen, he is still using this name for both of them. The younger one she can understand—after all, the youngest is still a flat-chested whiny child. But her—she’s nearly as tall as he is!

  The oldest opens her hand, then closes it again around her pen. Some nights she is afraid her father will never come home. That he will never again walk through that door, take off his hat and his badge, unfasten his holster and place it beside everything else on the table in the mud room. She reads the papers. She knows that cops get killed all the time. Even at her own school she’s heard kids say they hate cops. People who don’t know her dad’s one and people who do, too. The light coming in the kitchen window is yellow-gold, dusty. Years and years of her own family’s skin and hair and who knows what. Sometimes she gets so afraid that this will be all that’s left of her father. But soon she hears the click of her father’s shoes on the porch stairs.

  Then he is there, standing tall in the doorway, grinning. “So, what’d my copper pennies do today?” he asks. For the hundredth time. For the thousandth time. For the hundredth thousandth time. And the oldest, Cameron, shakes her head and smiles. The youngest runs to him, jumps up into his arms. Her long legs dangling past his knees.

  Later, with the coconut cake still resting in her stomach, the youngest rises from her bed and stares out into the night—the moon is bright yellow, the sky blue-black, the shadows that are the Rocky Mountains. She sniffs, inhaling the scent of pine and cedar and air that is warm still—but with winter at its edges. The beauty of it all stops her breath. When it comes again, her breath is shallow and loud. She has never lived anyplace else and can’t imagine it. Doesn’t have to because, tonight, this beauty seems to be hers forever.

  Her name is Toswiah.

  Some mornings, when the sun is bright and the birds are going wild, she wants to hug something, hard—the whole world of it she wants to put her arms around. When she tells he
r older sister, Cameron looks at her with one eyebrow raised. I have one word for you, Cameron says. Freak.

  So she remembers not to tell her sister this—that the world outside her window tonight is perfect. So perfect that sometimes it all seems too much. Too much beauty in one place. All mine, she whispers, wrapping her arms around herself and laughing. This world is all mine.

  Gone. It is all gone now.

  PART ONE

  1

  THERE IS A SONG THAT GOES ALL THAT YOU have is your soul. The singer has this tragic, low voice—like the way someone sounds right after they’ve been crying for a long time—and she sings the line over and over again until way deep in your heart you believe it’s true.

  It is true.

  When it comes down to it, every single other thing can be taken clean away from you. Or you can be taken clean away from it. Like home. More and more and more, Denver feels like a dream I used to have. A place I once belonged to.

  When the memory of Denver gets too blurred, I pinch myself and say, Your name is Toswiah. There was a time when the Rocky Mountains were just outside your window. But my name isn’t Toswiah anymore. And now, this tiny apartment in this crowded city is supposed to be my home. At night, the building echoes with emptiness—the apartments below and above us are empty. When I ask my father how come no one else lives here, he tells me they will come. That eventually someone else will move in, that the Feds thought it’d be best to move us into a building that was empty. I don’t believe my father, though. My father is losing his mind. Maybe all of us are.

  Yesterday, I saw a girl who looked like a girl I used to know in Denver, and I got so scared and happy all at the same time that my head felt like it was going to lift straight up off my shoulders. As she got closer, I wanted to scream her name. I wanted to say It’s me, Toswiah Green! Then the girl got closer and I realized it wasn’t who I thought it was. She smiled and I smiled back. That was all. Two strangers being nice. She probably didn’t even remember it an hour later. But I did. And hours and hours after that, too, even though I was relieved I didn’t know her. Relieved, but sad. Is sad the word I’m looking for? No. It’s not big enough. What happened inside of me is much stronger than sad. Sad is stupid. It doesn’t hurt like this. It doesn’t tell even a little bit of the truth—that this missing is like someone peeling my skin back each time—peeling it back and exposing everything underneath to air. Hollow? Empty? Frustrated? Lost? Lonely? There’re so many words, and none of them work.

  Some mornings, waking up in this new place, I don’t know where I am. The apartment is tiny. The kitchen is not even a whole room away from the living room, just a few steps and a wide doorway with no door separating it. Not even one fireplace. Daddy sits by the window staring out, hardly ever saying anything. Maybe he thinks if he looks long and hard enough, Denver will reappear, that the cluttered corner store filled with canned stuff, racks and racks of junk food, beer and cigarettes will morph into the hundred-year-old cedar tree at the end of our old street. Maybe he thinks the tall gray buildings all smashed against each other will separate and squat down, that the Rocky Mountains will rise up behind them. I want to say Daddy, it’s never gonna happen. But I’m afraid he’ll break into a million pieces if I do. Become the skin-dust floating around the room. I want to say Daddy, you did the right thing.

  But I don’t know if that’s true.

  When Daddy looks over to where me and my sister, Anna, sit watching TV, he looks surprised, like he’s wondering why we aren’t downstairs in the den. No den here, though. No dining room. No extra bathrooms down the hall and at the top of the stairs. Just five rooms with narrow doorways here. Floors covered with linoleum. Walls all painted the same awful shade of blue.

  At night, the sounds outside are unfamiliar. Cars honking and people yelling. Fire trucks and ambulances. Anna in bed across the room from me is too close and strange. Every morning, I wake up expecting to see the mountains outside, then sit on the edge of my bed and force the memories to come. I try to push back what is true—that this place is not that place. That we are gone from Denver. Everything about who we were is gone—our names, our pictures, our old clothes and old lives. All that we have is our souls. If a soul is the way you feel deep inside yourself about a thing, the way you love it, the way it stops your breath, then mine is still in Colorado.

  Close your eyes and imagine the floor beneath your feet—cool hardwood maybe. Or softly warm and carpeted. Sit down and lift your feet up off of it and imagine you can never put them down on it again. Ever. See how quickly the feeling of that floor fades? See how much you want to feel it again? How lost you feel with no place solid to put your feet?

  It’s okay to put your feet back down on it. Maybe in your lifetime that floor’s not going anywhere.

  IMAGINE YOUR BEST FRIEND’S SMILE, HOW YOU remember it from its front-teeth-missing days till this moment. A year after the braces have come off and she’s finally learned how to comb that mass of hair. The boys falling over themselves for her. Her name is Lulu.

  Toswiah—we have to get the same outfit. On the first day of school, we’ll say we’re cousins.

  Imagine Lulu in second grade and third grade and fourth and seventh. The way she shot up past you last year and got beautiful but had her same silly Lulu laugh—even when boys were watching. Lulu in a black turtleneck and jeans—except on the first and last days of school and on our birthday. Then it was something amazing—a long metallic-blue dress made out of silk, shoes with mile-high soles, or a hundred yellow ribbons in her thick black hair and a retro tube top with TONY ORLANDO AND DAWN embroidered across it, halters and miniskirts, a blue leather coat soft as butter falling to her ankles, bright pink lipstick and blue eye shadow. Lulu with her mama’s dark skin and her own beautifully slanted eyes, pressing her bleeding finger against mine, whispering Now our blood’s all mixed up. We can’t ever leave each other.

  Imagine yourself whispering back I’m not going anywhere. I’d never leave here in a million years!

  And Lulu laughing, throwing her head back like a grown-up. And Lulu’s warm head on my shoulder—the day so perfect, we’re speechless.

  Lulu. My friend.

  My name is Evie. From the jump-rope game. Maybe you’ve heard the little kids singing Evie Ivie Over. Here comes a teacher with a big fat stick. I wonder what she’s got for arithmetic! One and one? Two! Me and you. Who?

  It came to me as I lay in bed one night—in a half-dream—after me and Lulu had spent the afternoon jumping rope and eating ice-cream sandwiches from a jumbo box of them Lulu’s mother had bought, one right after the other until we both swore we’d never eat another one as long as we lived. That night, my father had sat down at the dinner table and told us he was going to testify. It might mean us leaving here, he said. Changing our lives, our names. Everything. And the ice-cream sandwiches sat heavy in my stomach for a few minutes, then slowly circled around and came back up again.

  My name is Evie now. I am tall and skinny and quiet. I’ve never kissed. Sometimes I think about it, about how it would feel, how it would happen. But maybe it won’t ever happen. Not here. Not now. The boys here call me Neckbone, say that’s all I am—lots of bone and a little bit of meat. They collect in circles on corners and pass bottles of bright, nasty-looking liquids around. When I walk by them, I feel like a third leg grows out of my butt—my walking gets strange and my body feels all wrong. Hey Neckbone, one of them always says, making the others laugh. If I was brave, I would look full at them and say I’d like a little taste of that. Then I’d take that bottle and put it straight up to my lips, take a long, hard drink of that stuff and wipe my mouth with the back of my hand. If I was brave, I’d slide one of my hands past the waistband of my pants and just stand with it there like they do—holding on to whatever.

  If I was brave, I could belong somewhere.

  My name’s Toswiah, I’d say. Toswiah Green. Have you ever heard of me?

  But my name is Evie now. And I’ve never been brave.r />
  When we lived in Denver, we skied and snow-boarded. Cameron wasn’t afraid. She’d go up to the expert slope and take off. Sometimes I’d stand all bundled up at the bottom of the mountain watching my sister moving toward me. As she got closer, I’d see that she was smiling. Smiling with the snow flying up around her. The sound of her snowboard swishing toward me always made something inside me jump with love and the beauty of it all. Cameron was the brave one. Popular. Smart. If you try really hard, she used to say, maybe a little of me will rub off on you. And although I stuck my tongue out at her when she said this, I did try because I wanted to know what it felt like to come down that mountain—grinning and beautiful and free.

  Hey Neckbone, one of those guys always says. Show a brother some love.

  I CAN NEVER TELL ANYBODY THE REAL TRUTH. But I can write it and say this story you’re about to read is fiction. I can give it a beginning, middle and end. A plot. A character named Evie. A sister named Anna.

  Call it fiction because fiction’s what it is. Evie and Anna aren’t real people. So you can’t go somewhere and look this up and say Now I know who this story’s about.

  Because if you did, it would kill my father.

  Summer. Mama’s making pork chops and singing at the top of her lungs. She sings the words over and over: “We come from the mountains, we come from the mountains. Let’s go back to the mountains and turn the world around.” It’s Cameron’s tenth birthday, so Mama just laughs when Cameron stands up on a chair and says, “I am in my two-digit numbers now!” Cameron’s hair is wild around her head. One of her side teeth looks like a fang, and the two front ones stick out past her lips. Mama and Daddy are threatening braces. When Cameron hears them talking about it, she closes her mouth tight and runs. Outside, the sun has gone down but the kitchen is still hot. Mama looks out the window and her eyebrows knit up, but she keeps on singing even though it’s already late and Daddy’s not home. Sometimes she says “I wish I wasn’t married to a cop!” She smiles when she says it, though—like maybe she’s both sorry and proud.