The Most Perfect Thing in the Universe Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Author’s Note

  Selected Bibliography

  Acknowledgments

  The publisher wishes to thank Paul Sweet, Department of Ornithology Collections Manager at The American Museum of Natural History, for his expert help.

  Margaret Ferguson Books

  Copyright © 2021 by Tricia Springstubb

  All Rights Reserved

  HOLIDAY HOUSE is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

  Printed and bound in February 2021 at Maple Press, York, PA, USA.

  www.holidayhouse.com

  First Edition

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Springstubb, Tricia, author.

  Title: The most perfect thing in the universe / by Tricia Springstubb.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Margaret Ferguson Books/Holiday House, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references. | Audience: Ages 9 to 12.

  Audience: Grades 4–6. | Summary: Unlike her adventurous ornithologist mother, shy eleven-year-old Loah prefers a quiet life at home with no surprises until her mother’s expedition to the Arctic tundra to study birds turns dangerous and Loah, alone at home, discovers her own courage.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2021003233 | ISBN 9780823447572 (hardcover) ISBN 9780823450596 (ebook)

  Subjects: CYAC: Mothers and daughters—Fiction. Adventure and adventurers—Fiction. | Birds—Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.S76847 Mr 2021 | DDC [Fic]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021003233

  ISBN: 978-0-8234-4757-2 (hardcover)

  For anyone who’s ever longed for a nest, or wings, or both

  It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg.

  — C. S. Lewis

  CHAPTER ONE

  Loah Londonderry lived in a house with three chimneys and one alarmingly crooked turret. Built of mud-colored stone, the house sat in a small, dark forest of tall, looming trees. Spooky was the general opinion. Classmates from town, who no doubt lived in tidy homes with trim lawns, dared one another to spy through the windows. More than once, Loah had looked up from her laptop to see a pair of wide eyes staring at her. Loah would give a timid wave. The child would flee.

  Loah herself was the least spooky person you could imagine. She was short and stout and shy, with curly brown hair and a left eye that wandered. She lived in the house with her mother, Dr. Anastasia Londonderry, and with the Rinkers, who took care of her when her mother was away, which was often. Dr. Londonderry was an ornithologist specializing in birds of the Arctic tundra. Not many species of birds lived there to begin with, and the ones that did were having a terrible time. Ground that had been frozen solid for tens of thousands of years was rapidly thawing and shrinking. Try to imagine helplessly watching your home disappear before your eyes, and you’ll have an idea how the Arctic tern, spoon-billed sandpiper, and gyrfalcon feel.

  Loah’s mother could not single-handedly stop climate change, but she was a tireless, determined woman, and she did all she could to help the birds. She gave lectures. She wrote books. She went on numerous expeditions sponsored by the university where she was a professor. When she came home, she described her adventures to Loah: Navigating thick fog in small, flimsy planes. Sleeping in tents on rocky ground while wolves howled. Scaling cliffs. Eating lichens for breakfast and dried caribou meat for dinner. Dr. Londonderry would describe calving glaciers and fickle winds. Hungry bears. Killer whales.

  Torture, in Loah’s opinion.

  Loah was a homebody. She didn’t take after her mother or her father, who’d died before she was born, in a horrible mountain-climbing accident she didn’t want to hear about, thank you. Loah would never climb a mountain, not if she could help it. Both feet on level ground was her motto. Her favorite activities included knitting, doing home repairs, and watching old episodes of One and Only Family.

  Actually, she didn’t love doing home repairs. Does anyone? Yet she did love her home, the nest she’d lived in for her entire eleven and a half years, and when you love something, you take care of it.

  It was late June, the beginning of summer vacation, which meant she got to be home every day. This morning she woke to hear birdsong pouring through the open windows. Loah’s parents had bought the property not for the house but for the trees, which were home to countless birds. (“We got it for a song,” her mother would say with a warm, wry smile.) The birds serenaded Loah as she walked along the hallway with its peeling wallpaper, to the bathroom with its unreliable plumbing, down the staircase with its faded carpet of cabbage roses (which resembled, if you looked at them the right way, cheery pink faces), across the entry hall with its stag-head chandelier (not a real stag head, thank goodness), and along another dim corridor to the kitchen, where the floor was checkered black-and-white tile and the Rinkers’ E-Z Boy recliners took up much of the space.

  Loah looked out the window. The summer morning was fresh and blue, and the birds were jubilant. Actually, they were always jubilant in the morning, but today they were absolutely fizzy with joy. If you’ve ever shaken up a pop bottle, then unscrewed the cap? That kind of joy. Along with her team, Dr. Londonderry had been on her current Arctic expedition for fifty-seven days (Loah was definitely counting), but she was due home the day after tomorrow. Somehow, the birds seemed to know. Dr. Londonderry was their hero, after all. Their champion.

  Loah herself had mixed feelings about birds. Ask her to name her favorite animal, and she would say cat, which was too bad for her, since cats are the number one predator of songbirds and under no circumstances was she allowed to have one.

  Not to mention, birds were the reason her mother had been away for fifty-seven days and counting.

  This morning, though, Loah and the birds were united in happiness. Soon, she and the Rinkers would drive to the airport, where her mother would sail through the gate in her all-weather jacket and hiking boots. When Loah hugged her, a hug that would go on for a long time, she’d smell of moss and midnight sun. Back home, they’d sit side by side in the house’s library, eating sunflower seeds (Loah had already set them out on a little table) while Dr. Londonderry typed her expedition notes (using nine and two-thirds fingers, since she’d lost the tip of one to frostbite) and Loah worked on a knitting project. They’d eat their meals outside beneath the trees, which Dr. Londonderry always rejoiced to see after the tree-less tundra. She’d twist her little red wooden bird call, and a black-capped chickadee would fly down to take a sunflower seed f
rom her hand.

  At night, Loah’s mother would tuck her in, then sit beside the bed. Outside, the screech owls would call back and forth. Often, Loah would wake to find her mother still there, watching her sleep. Mama would smile and put a finger to her lips, and Loah would drift back into contented dreams.

  Loah had been counting the days. Now she was counting the hours. Her mother had promised not to go away again till next spring. Long, lovely months stretched ahead.

  Standing by the kitchen window, she watched Miss Rinker prowl the yard with her scythe, looking for weeds to chop down. (If you’re unsure what a scythe is, look up the Grim Reaper.) Meanwhile, Miss Rinker’s brother, Theo, tenderly tended the hummingbird feeder. Both Rinkers were old, scrawny, and white as napkins. Theo was as delicate as Miss Rinker was tough. Her dentures didn’t fit right, and when she wore them her upper lip was always slightly raised, as if she had to sneeze. Miss Rinker refused to get new ones, though. Thrift and sacrifice—that was her motto.

  The phone on the counter began to ring, but Loah ignored it. Shy as she was, she didn’t like talking to people in general, and talking to a disembodied voice was even worse. She opened the refrigerator and peered in, hoping to find something good to eat. In vain. Miss Rinker shopped at Bargain Blaster, where the food was cheap and weird. Thrift and sacrifice!

  The phone persisted.

  Was it Loah’s imagination, or did the birds suddenly grow quiet?

  She turned toward the phone and the ringing stopped. When she turned away, it began again.

  It was not Loah’s imagination. The birds had hushed. Only the mourning dove gave its mournful call. Ah-coo-coo-coo…

  Loah crossed the room, recognized the number displayed, and gleefully seized the phone.

  “Mama!”

  “Sweetie!” said Dr. Londonderry. “I’m so glad you picked up.”

  Loah’s heart did a cartwheel. Maybe her mother was about to surprise her! Maybe she’d left the field early and was already at the airport.

  “Where are you?” she asked.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Dr. Londonderry’s voice came and went. It sounded as if she were in a wind tunnel. “Just as we were packing up… something extraordinary… changed everything.…”

  Loah’s excitement began to fade.

  “Are you outside?” she asked. “Is there a storm?” The tundra was not supposed to have storms in summer.

  “This weather… warmest I’ve ever experienced… and the winds…”

  There was a great deal of static. Loah gripped the phone, waiting for her mother’s voice to return. When it did, she could not believe what she heard.

  “Incredible news… your namesake…” Dr. Londonderry’s voice was always squeaky but now it pitched even higher. “. . . hardly wait to tell you!”

  Holding the receiver, Loah crossed the room and leaned her forehead against the window. Miss Rinker vigorously swung her scythe. Theo poured fresh water into a birdbath. They both looked so normal, so untroubled, it was hard to believe they existed in the same universe as she did at that moment. She chose her next words cautiously.

  “Mama, the connection is so bad, I thought you said something about a loah bird.”

  “Yesterday the weather was calm, and I was taking one last reading of CO2 levels on a fell-field of exquisite little sedges and wildflowers, when I heard the sweetest, shyest call. I looked up and to my astonishment…”

  Her voice cut out again.

  “Mama! Mama?”

  “. . . fumbled for my camera… disappeared behind a pingo…”

  Loah spun away from the window. The last reported sighting of a loah bird, by amateur birders on a cruise ship, had been eleven and a half years ago. Before that, nobody had seen one for over thirty years. The cruise ship sighting didn’t count, not with the scientists who kept track of these things. The International Union for Conservation of Nature still classified the loah as in grave danger of being extinct.

  “. . . that unique streak of gold on her alula… not the bright yellow of a goldfinch or the gaudy gold of a meadowlark, but a color deeper and richer…” Dr. Londonderry’s voice squeaked with emotion. “Headed due west, toward the coast. It’s late but still nesting season… clutch always small, no more than three eggs, always so vulnerable, and now with these conditions…”

  If her mother had really, truly spied a loah, it was a mind-boggling discovery. These days no good news came out of the Arctic, which was warming at twice the rate of the rest of the globe. (Loah knew all about this and, if you asked, could also define fell-field, which means a rocky slope covered with low-growing plants; pingo, which is a dome-shaped hill of permafrost; and alula, which is a digit on the upper edge of a bird’s wing used to fine-control flight.) Finding a creature everyone feared was lost forever would be a bright ray of hope in a long dark night.

  “Sweetie!” said her mother. “My heart is singing like a nightingale!”

  Loah’s own heart plunged like a diving duck. She tried to brace for what was coming.

  “It should just be a week,” her mother said. “Well, realistically two, maybe three, but no more, I promise. Thank goodness I have leg bands, the digital scale, and, just in case, my incubation equip—”

  Crash.

  “Mama? Mama, are you there?”

  “One second, sweetie.” There were thudding, scraping sounds, as if her mother were engaged in a great struggle. At last she spoke again. “Not to worry. The Jeep door blew open but I… Oh for heaven’s sake, what’s this in my hair?” She laughed. “Dried caribou dung?”

  You’re supposed to come home. Loah swallowed back the words.

  Her mother was saying how the bird’s survival could provide crucial clues to helping other birds of the biome, not to mention spark funding for more research, not to mention…

  Loah could barely listen. Disappointment overwhelmed her. She sank down on Theo’s E-Z Boy.

  “Are you sure you saw it?” she asked. “Loahs are so small and unremarkable.”

  “Ninety-nine percent sure. Her call—our only recordings of it are faint and scratchy, but I recognized it.” Her mother imitated it. What she described as a sweet, shy song actually sounded more like someone wheezing with a chest cold.

  “Did you get in touch with Dr. Whitaker?” He was her mother’s boss at the university’s Department of Mammalogy and Ornithology. Dr. Whitaker and Dr. Londonderry did not always see eye to eye, to put it mildly, but it was her job to report to him.

  “Whit? That pessimist. I know exactly what he’d say.” Dr. Londonderry pitched her voice low and ponderous. “Didn’t get photos? No recording? Pardon the pun, Ana, but you’re on a wild-goose chase. With our limited resources we can’t—” A burst of static. “Besides, he’s away on his own trek to Costa Rica this summer. I told the rest of the team to go ahead without me. They—”

  “Wait.” Loah sat up straight. “You’re staying on alone?”

  Another burst of static. The only words Loah caught were “increase in predators” and “time… of the essence.”

  “Mama,” she said. “Are you sure this is a good idea?”

  The phone crackled.

  “I think this may be a bad idea. Actually, I’m sure it is. Mama?”

  There was another crackle, a cry of “. . . love… so much!…,” and then nothing. Loah gripped the dead phone.

  “Please change your mind,” she begged. When there was no reply, she whispered, “Please be careful.”

  “Ahem.”

  Miss Rinker stood in the kitchen doorway. How long had she been there?

  “My mother…,” said Loah. She got up and set the receiver back. Outside, not a single bird sang. “She has to… to unexpectedly extend her expedition.”

  Miss Rinker’s upper lip lifted, revealing her oversized dentures. She looked about to sneeze. Or snarl.

  “Your mother is a flighty woman,” she said.

  Did Miss Rinker mean this as a joke? If so,
it would be the first joke Loah had heard her make in eleven and a half years. She tried to reply, but her voice, like the phone, had gone dead.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Loah hated to cry, but when it was absolutely necessary, she preferred to do it in private. The house had one place where nobody would look for her. She was forbidden to go there, and, obedient as she was, she almost never did.

  She stumbled along the upstairs corridor, past the many unused bedrooms. (Miss Rinker and her brother slept in two rooms in the attic, which was uncomfortably cold in winter and unbearably hot in summer. Perfect, in Miss Rinker’s view.)

  A door at the very end of the corridor was shut, as always. Behind this door was the staircase leading to the turret. The turret was a precarious structure. It appeared to be an afterthought, as if the builder had decided to stick it on at the last minute, using inferior glue. Miss Rinker disapproved of the turret. She considered it frivolous, impractical, and probably unsafe, since the stonework was deteriorating. Loah was never to climb its stairs.

  Loah had to tug hard to get the door open, then push hard to close it behind her. The forbidden staircase spiraled up and out of sight. Sinking onto the bottom step, she let herself cry. She was an explosive, messy crier. A water balloon hitting a sidewalk, that’s what Loah’s crying was like.

  Mothers were supposed to come home. Even birds knew that. Birds were wonderful parents, as her very own mother had taught her. Building nests with twigs or mud, lichen or moss, spider silk or snakeskin, or sometimes with their own saliva. Laying their eggs and then sitting on them for weeks at a time, in every kind of weather. Finding their chicks seeds or insects or, in the case of raptors, small rodents, amphibians, or other creatures, which they tore into tiny, digestible pieces, which was so disgusting but also kind of lovable. Birds never abandoned their nestlings, if they could help it.

  Loah’s mother would make a very bad bird.

  Loah rested her head against the cold stone wall and let loose with another loud, messy sob. She understood how important her mother’s work was. She did. She truly did. If anyone in the world was proud of Dr. Anastasia Londonderry, it was Loah.