Eleanor knew she needed to buy more time to execute her plan to lure out Fat Jagger and get him away from the city, to head north up the coast where he’d be less likely to get spotted. She had seen enough movies to know that a colossus running loose in San Francisco would not end well. She could already envisage Fat Jagger chained up and on display as a part of some sort of travelling freak show. Or even worse, swatting at fighter jets as they swooped in to destroy him.
“I’m sorry, sweetie, there’s no time!” Mrs Walker said, crushing Eleanor’s hopes. “Things have changed and we need to move into the apartment tonight. The moving truck is waiting for us. We’re leaving right now.”
The Walker kids looked at each other with expressions that ranged from complete despair to outright panic. Their looks said:
Now what would they do?
How could Fat Jagger possibly stay hidden throughout the night?
Man, I could really use a Lunchable.
But they had no choice. Mrs Walker clearly wasn’t going to allow any debate on the matter, and she already looked harried enough as it was. So they slowly followed their mother up the hill towards their street, Sea Cliff Avenue. Or, more accurately, their former street.
As they trudged up the steeply sloping hill, Eleanor took one last look back at the bay. That’s when she saw a disturbance in the water out near the centre of the bridge. At this distance, it looked like a small ripple, perhaps just a swirling current, or a seal or dolphin. But she knew better. To her, the ripple had looked more like a pair of pronounced colossus lips poking out of the water to get another breath of air.
As they followed Mrs Walker back towards Kristoff House, the three kids lagged a few feet behind. Brendan and Cordelia were surprised to see Eleanor smiling.
“I just saw Fat Jagger poke his lips out of the water to breathe,” she whispered to them. “Which means I think he knows that he needs to stay hidden. If he can just stay out of sight until tomorrow morning, I have a plan to lure him out.”
“But what are we going to do even if we get Fat Jagger to shore?” Brendan asked dubiously. “Invite him over for a slumber party? Play Twister, make microwave popcorn and then spill our most embarrassing secrets?”
“We could bring him to school!” Eleanor said excitedly, totally missing her brother’s sarcasm.
Brendan imagined Jagger rolling up the school bully Scott Calurio between his thumb and forefinger like a booger and then smashing him to the side of the school building.
“That would be pretty cool,” Brendan admitted. “Plus, he would absolutely crush it in lacrosse.”
Cordelia glared at Eleanor and Brendan, but before any of them could say anything else, their mom interrupted the conversation.
“Kids, there’s something else I have to tell you,” Mrs Walker said, looking a bit nervous. “It’s certainly not going to be easy – but it’s for the best. It’s the reason we need to move tonight instead of tomorrow.”
The Walker kids stopped and waited anxiously for her to deliver the news.
“I know this will be hard for you, and it is for me too,” Mrs. Walker said slowly, her eyes looking red and tired. “But tomorrow morning, your dad is going away for a few days, or maybe even a few weeks. To a gambling addiction treatment facility.”
“Wait, Dad is a gambling addict?” Cordelia asked.
Guilt began to stir inside her as she realised that her first thought was how this was going to affect her – what would people think? Would all the prestigious colleges she hoped to get into somehow find out that her dad spent time in treatment? Cordelia had always focused on her future, doing everything the “right” way and trying to be the best. But now she saw her dreams quickly fading in the face of this news. Did kids with addict fathers actually get into places like Harvard and Yale and Stanford?
“Dad is going away?” Eleanor asked, her voice breaking. The thought of potentially losing Fat Jagger and her dad in one night was more than she could stomach.
“Don’t worry, baby,” Mrs Walker said, pulling an arm around Eleanor and trying to force a smile. “It’ll just be for a little bit, and we can visit him this weekend. And when he gets back, everything will be so much better. I promise. You kids are so strong and independent, you always have been. I know you’ll … we’ll get through this, together.”
“But what will we do for money?” Brendan asked.
“Brendan!” Mrs Walker said, glaring at her son. “Is that all you can think about right now?”
Brendan hesitated, perhaps a moment too long, before finally shaking his head no, feeling bad that he was more worried about family finances than his own dad’s mental health.
Of course, there was always the Nazi treasure map they’d brought back from the book world. But that was a long shot. According to the red X on the map, the treasure was hidden somewhere in Europe. Which, the last time Brendan had checked, was a long way away from San Francisco. Plus, they still had no idea if the treasure would even be there in the real world at all. It might only exist inside one of Denver Kristoff’s fictional books.
“In the meantime, I am more than capable of taking care of our family,” Mrs Walker continued, struggling to sound positive. “Which is why I will be starting a new job in the shoe department at Macy’s tomorrow.”
Just a few weeks ago the family lived in a beautiful Victorian home overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge and had a ten-million-dollar bankroll. Now they were moving into a tiny apartment with virtually nothing to their name. Well, except the embarrassment that their father, Dr Walker, had brought by losing his medical licence and then gambling away all their money in just a few short months. The family still had that to their name, of course.
Brendan suddenly felt horrible giving his mom such a hard time about money. None of this was her fault, after all. She was the one Walker who was probably least responsible for any of the family’s recent and ongoing problems.
“Well,” Brendan said, “if you need your first customer, I’ve got some birthday money saved up. I always wondered what I’d look like in a pair of red heels.”
In spite of the sombre mood, all of the Walkers laughed. The sound of their laughter almost seemed to lift some of the darkness draped across Sea Cliff Avenue that evening. As if the moon had suddenly switched to a higher setting.
“I think I would actually pay to see Brendan in heels,” Mrs Walker laughed, hugging them all. “I love you guys, you know that? No matter how bad things get, you always find a way to make me smile. Anyway, you won’t have time to shop for shoes tomorrow.”
“Why not?” Cordelia asked.
Mrs Walker then delivered what Brendan and Cordelia thought to be the worst news of the evening so far.
“Because you’ll all be going back to your old schools tomorrow morning.”
Later that night, Eleanor tossed and turned in her tiny bed inside her tiny room that she shared with Cordelia in the tiny apartment they had moved into.