Gregor ran lines with her. He didn't mind really. It distracted him from darker thoughts.
"Keep your head in the Overland," he told himself. "Or you'll just make yourself nuts."
And he did a pretty good job of it for the rest of the day. He got through his classes and took Lizzie home and then went over to Larry's apartment. Larry's mom ordered out Chinese food for a special treat, and they went and saw the play. It was fun and Angelina was the best thing in it. When he got home, Gregor gave his sisters a pocketful of fortune cookies he'd saved from dinner. Boots had never seen fortune cookies and kept trying to eat them, paper and all.
They went to bed earlier than usual because it was just too cold to do anything else. Gregor piled not only his blankets but his coat and a couple of towels on top of him. His mom and dad came in to say good night. That made him feel secure. For so many years his dad had been absent or too ill to come in. To have both parents tuck him in seemed like a real luxury.
So he was doing all right, keeping his head in the Overland, until his dad leaned down to hug him good night and whispered in a voice his mom couldn't hear, "No mail."
He and his dad had worked out a system. Gregor's mom had put the laundry room off-limits last summer. You couldn't blame her. In the last few years, first her husband, then Gregor and Boots had fallen through a grate in the laundry room wall that led to the Underland. Their disappearance was agonizing. How his mom had kept the family going both emotionally and financially through all this...well, Gregor couldn't say. She had been amazing. So it seemed a small enough thing to let her have her way about the laundry room.
The tricky thing was...that made checking the grate that led to the Underland impossible for Gregor. But his dad knew how anxious he was for news of Luxa and the others, so once a day he would make a brief visit to the laundry room and see if a message had been left for his son. They didn't tell his mom; she would have just been upset. It was different for her. She had never been to the Underland. In her mind, everyone who lived there was somehow connected to the abduction of her husband and children. But Gregor and his dad both had friends down there.
So there was no mail. No word again. No answers. Gregor stared into the dark for hours, and when he finally fell asleep, his dreams were troubled.
He woke late the following morning and had to rush to get to Mrs. Cormaci's apartment by ten. He went over every Saturday to help her out. There had been times in the fall when Gregor had felt like she was making up work for him to do because she knew his family was hurting for money. But with the weather so bad, Mrs. Cormaci actually did need his help. The cold made her joints ache and she had trouble navigating the icy sidewalks. She talked a lot about falling and breaking a hip. Gregor was glad he was really earning his money now.
Today she had a big list of errands for him to run — the dry cleaners, the greengrocer's, the bakery, the post office, and the hardware store. As always, she fed him first. "Did you eat?" she asked. He hadn't but he didn't even have time to answer. "Never mind, in this cold you can stand eating twice." She placed a big steaming bowl of oatmeal on the table, loaded with raisins and brown sugar. She poured him orange juice and buttered several slices of toast.
When he had finished, Gregor felt ready to face any weather, which was good, since it was ten below not even counting the windchill factor. Following the list, he ran from place to place, grateful to have to wait in lines so he had a chance to thaw out. After he had dropped his purchases on Mrs. Cormaci's kitchen table, he was rewarded with a large cup of hot chocolate. Then they both bundled back up to go to the two places where Gregor could not run her errands, the bank and the liquor store. Once they got outside, Mrs. Cormaci was on edge. She clung to Gregor's arm tightly as they confronted patches of ice, pedestrians half-blinded by scarves, and swerving taxicabs. They had a chance to warm up at the bank, since Mrs. Cormaci didn't trust automatic bank machines, and they had to stand in line for a teller. Then they went to the liquor store, so she could pick out a bottle of red wine for her friend Eileen's birthday. But by the time they had made their way back home, Mrs. Cormaci's fingers were so numb that she dropped the wine in the hall outside her apartment just as Gregor got the door open. The bottle broke on the tile, and the wine splattered all over the throw rug inside the entrance.
"That's it, Eileen's getting candy," said Mrs. Cormaci. "I've got a nice box of chocolate creams, never been opened. Someone gave it to me for Christmas. I hope it wasn't Eileen." She made Gregor stand back while she cleaned up the glass, then gathered up the throw rug and handed it to him. "Come on. We better get this down to the laundry room before the stain sets."
The laundry room! While she collected detergent and stain remover from the closet, Gregor tried to think of an excuse for why he couldn't accompany her. He could hardly say, "Oh, I can't go down there because my mom is afraid a giant rat will jump out and drag me miles underground and eat me." If you thought about it, there was almost no good reason a person couldn't go to the laundry room. So he went.
Mrs. Cormaci sprayed the throw rug with stain remover and stuffed it into a washer. Her fingers, still stiff from the cold, fumbled as she picked the quarters from her change purse. She dropped one to the cement floor, and it rolled across the room, clanking to a stop against the last dryer. Gregor went to retrieve it for her. As he bent down to get the coin, something caught his eye, and he bumped his head into the side of the dryer.
Gregor blinked, to make sure he hadn't imagined it. He hadn't. There, wedged between the frame of the grate and the wall, was a scroll.
Chapter 2
"Are you okay over there?" asked Mrs. Cormaci as she dumped detergent into the washer.
"Yeah, I'm fine," said Gregor, rubbing his head. He picked up the quarter and resisted the impulse to yank the scroll out of the grate. Trying to appear like nothing had happened, he returned the coin.
Mrs. Cormaci stuck the quarter in the machine and started it up. "Ready to grab some lunch?" she said.
There was nothing for Gregor to do but follow her to the elevator. He couldn't retrieve the scroll in front of her. She would want to know what it was, and since she was already suspicious about the stories he used to cover his family's time in the Underland, it wasn't likely he could come up with a believable lie. Shoot, he hadn't even been able to make up an excuse to avoid the laundry room!
Back at the apartment, Mrs. Cormaci heated up some homemade chicken soup and ladled out big servings. Gregor ate mechanically, trying to keep up his end of the conversation, although he was only half-listening. As they were finishing off some pie, Mrs. Cormaci glanced at the clock and said, "I guess that rug's about ready to go in the dryer now."
"I'll do it!" Gregor sprang to his feet so quickly his chair fell over backward. He set the chair back up as casually as possible. "Sorry. I can change the rug."
Mrs. Cormaci gave him an odd look. "Okay."
"I mean, doesn't take two of us to change a rug," said Gregor with a shrug.
"You're right about that." She put some quarters in his hand, watching him closely. "So, how come your family doesn't use our laundry room anymore?"
"What?" She'd caught him off guard.
"How come you and your mother walk all the way over to use that place by the butcher's?" she said. "It's the same price. I checked."
"Because...the washers...are...bigger there," said Gregor. Actually, they were. It was not a complete lie if it were not the whole truth.
Mrs. Cormaci stared at him a moment, then shook her head. "Go change the rug," she said shortly.