Cicada Summer by Kate Constable Page A

Would she get to read Mo’s book one day? Eloise wondered if Mo would ever finish it.

11
    T he next day, Eloise crept toward the summerhouse. She was almost too nervous to close her eyes, scared that the magic wouldn’t work. Last night it had seemed harder to push back into her own time; perhaps it would be harder to get through into Anna’s time today. She walked forward, into the red dark behind her eyelids, through the shrilling of the cicadas. Then the rush of silence washed over her.
    When she opened her eyes, she was in the other time, with the neat summerhouse, the white fence, the cropped lawn. Someone had abandoned a blanket and a book in the middle of the grass. The swimming pool glimmered, diamond-bright in the early morning sunlight. Birds shouted from every corner of the garden, and the tips of the trees were dipped in gold.
    Eloise hurried into the summerhouse. She knew just what she wanted to do for Anna’s present. It was only a small present; maybe Anna wouldn’t even notice it. But Eloise would know.
    She looked at the painting of the swimming girl and her heart expanded. It was good. The swimming girl was fluid as a mermaid, but there was nothing watery about her: she was firm and full of energy. And now Eloise picked up a brush to add the final touch to the picture.
    Inside the bright square of garden she painted a tiny figure: another girl, in a big hat, holding up one hand in a wave of greeting. She didn’t sketch it first, just dabbed it directly into the heart of the painting, a solitary small dark shadow in the sunlit garden, dark inside light inside dark, just as the dark painting was folded inside the bright summerhouse.
    The two painted girls held out their hands to each other, across the frame that joined and separated them, across the light of the garden and the dark underwater, the garden girl in her dark frock and the swimming girl in her pale nightgown. And if they were both Anna, it didn’t matter; it was as if a dream Anna waved to the real Anna, though Eloise wasn’t sure which was which . . .
    Anna.
    Eloise put down her brush. Anna wasn’t here. As slowly as possible, she washed her brush, tidied the paints, took a drink from her water bottle. But still Anna didn’t come.
    Eloise told herself that it was still early; there was plenty of time. But she knew, somehow, that Anna wasn’t going to come.
    She took a deep breath and ducked out of the summerhouse. Then, without letting herself hesitate, she set off round the side of the swimming pool, along Anna’s secret path through the bushes toward the house.
    She kept her head down. The usual noises wafted from the house: a repeated phrase from a piano, someone laughing, a door banging shut. It was so strange to think of the deserted, derelict house she’d seen that first day with Dad full of people and furniture and music.
    She lurked by the back door. Anna’s father couldn’t see or hear her, but maybe other people could. And even if they couldn’t, she didn’t want to experience that horrible feeling when they looked straight through her. Eloise waited till the clatter from the kitchen fell silent, then she pushed the door open a crack and slipped inside.
    The back hallway was empty. There was the same green-felt door, but the felt was bright and new, and the studs that nailed it in place were shining. Eloise pushed through it into the foyer. The piano noise came clearly from one of the big rooms. Everything looked lighter, brighter, with fresh white paint, vases of flowers, bright canvases on the walls.
    Eloise ran on tiptoe across the foyer and up the curving stairs. She’d never been upstairs before. She felt light-headed, almost queasy. Inside the house, she had a feeling that she’d never had in the garden or the summerhouse: that she was in the wrong place, that she didn’t belong here.
    Three corridors led in different directions. Down one of them she heard a buzz of voices; she veered away. Anna had said she