Meet the Austins by Madeleine L'engle

Author:Madeleine L'engle
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR)
Published: 2012-02-02T16:00:00+00:00

Then I heard someone thudding down the stairs and I knew it must be Suzy and she came panting into the kitchen and I heard her demanding, “Mother, did you take my snake?”

“What snake, Suzy?” Mother asked. “I don’t know anything about your snake.”

Suzy stamped into the living room and over to where we were sitting by the fireplace. “Somebody has taken my snake. Who took it?”

“You mean that old snake I showed you?” John said.

“Yes. Did you take it, John?”

“I didn’t do anything with it,” John said. “I left it right on the stone wall where it was when I showed it to you.”

“But I took it,” Suzy said. “I put it in the bottom bureau drawer of the bureau in the guest room—your room. I knew you weren’t using that drawer and Maggy made a fuss about having it in our room, and I thought it would be safe there. And now it’s gone. I went to see if it was all right but it wasn’t there.” Suddenly she turned and glared at Sally. “Did you move my snake?”

“Wild horses wouldn’t make me touch a snake,” Sally said. “It was there last night.”

“You mean you saw it?”

“I saw it indeed.”

“Was he all right?” Suzy asked passionately.

Aunt Elena had come in. “We didn’t examine him very thoroughly, Suzy darling,” she said. “I was unpacking Sally’s clothes and I really didn’t think she’d want them on a dead snake, so after dinner I got your father to remove it.”

“Remove it!” Suzy wailed. “But what did Daddy do with it?”

Mother came in from the kitchen now, too. “Suzy, what is all this? Why were you keeping a dead snake in the guest room?”

“To hatch!” Suzy cried.

Uncle Douglas was the first of us to realize quite how serious Suzy was. “Suzy,” he said gently, instead of laughing as John and Maggy and I were doing, “how was it going to hatch? What was it going to hatch into?”

Suzy had started to cry. “Into a butterfly. A beautiful, big butterfly. You know, like a caterpillar. I know snakes must do something like that because last summer John showed me where a snake had left its skin on the wall, and I thought if I put it in the drawer where it was safe and quiet and dark it would be like a cocoon for it, and it would hatch into a b-but-butterfly.” She was sobbing so hard now that she couldn’t talk, and she ran and flung her arms around Mother.

Mother held her tight and stroked her head and said, “Oh, Suzy, Suzy darling.”

And Suzy sobbed, “It would have been such a big and beautiful butterfly.”

“Darling,” Mother said, “the snake was dead. And snakes aren’t like caterpillars. They shed their skins, but they don’t weave cocoons or grow into butterflies.”

“But it might have!” Suzy cried. “How do you know? It was a scientific speriment. Daddy says you never find out anything except by scientific speriments.” And she began to sob again.

Sally said, “Oh, really!” And even if we’d thought Suzy was silly up to then, we stopped thinking it.

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