“And look what happened!” Amaranth said. “We needed you, and you—you just went away. You left us.”
She was right, of course. I’d abandoned them over and over, ever since the beginning, when I’d left them at Maeve’s house and found Piper in the grove.
“Well, was it?” Beatriz asked.
“Was it what?”
“Fun.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Sort of.”
I skipped that part, though; I didn’t think they were old enough for it. And I didn’t tell them how Ned and Ms. Burden had forged Philip’s will. If they knew about that they might realize that Ms. Burden had caused Philip’s death, and I wanted to keep them ignorant of that a while longer. They’d had enough unhappiness already.
It only remained to tell them Craig’s story, how he had met Ms. Burden in Greece, how she’d trapped the muses, how she’d realized she could use them even though they terrified her. As I spoke I looked at Beatriz, trying to bring her with me into our shared past.
I’d lost her, though; I’d lost all of them. Now that they’d escaped the warehouse they were only interested in putting as much distance between themselves and her as they could. They didn’t care how she’d worked everything out; they wanted to forget all of it, everything they’d had to endure.
I sent an email to Craig, telling him about the escape from the warehouse. “That’s fantastic,” he wrote back. “And pretty brave, I have to say. Do you think you freed the muses or did Kate have time to trap them again?”
I hadn’t even thought about that. I wrote him back, saying I didn’t know, but that I was pretty sure they hadn’t gotten away.
“It would be good if Claudio was free again, and the others with him,” his next email said. “I’m going to go to Greece and see if they’re back at Mount Helicon. Do you want to come with me? I have enough frequent flyer miles to pay for your trip.”
Of course I wanted to come with him, to visit Greece, see the Valley of the Muses Craig had talked about, the pool and the temple. But I had to stay with my sisters, and I said no, reluctantly.
A week later I got another email from him. “They aren’t at the grove, unfortunately. Even worse, two of them have died since the last time I was there.
“I don’t know how much you know about them, so forgive me if I’m telling you things you’ve already heard. They have children very seldom, so whenever two of them form a pairing the rest of the grove rejoices, because they’re more likely to have a child if they stay together, do what we would think of as settling down. The muses here had hoped for a long time that Claudio and Talia would find each other again, and now that both of them are gone, along with so many of the others, they seem to have lost heart.
“Their deaths aren’t like ours—they can somehow will themselves to die, if they want to. I think that’s what happened here. And I think—I fear—that there will be more deaths. Their population has been dwindling over the years—fewer and fewer people know about them and seek them out. And what will happen if they’re gone?
“So it’s more important than ever that we find Claudio and free him, and that he joins Talia again. Claudio told me once that he and Talia never had children, but that doesn’t matter so much—their union had animated the others, and that seemed to make them more fertile.
“Maybe we can figure something out together when I get back.”
For the first time I wondered how the muses had worked throughout history. They couldn’t have helped everyone who’d written a book or composed a symphony; there would have to be thousands of them to do that. But some people had soared so high above the rest that they must have been inspired: Shakespeare and Bach and Dante and Tolkien, maybe. And the presence of a grove would explain why geniuses sometimes ran in families, and why creativity had flourished in some places, Renaissance Florence and Elizabethan England, for example. Had Lennon and McCartney each recognized the muse in the other?
I remembered the book Maeve had lent me, the Theogony , and how the muses had appeared to Hesiod while he was shepherding his lambs. No one back then had thought how strange it was that a mere shepherd had started chanting poetry about the gods; maybe people knew more about muses in those days. And of course there had been all those poets and artists and playwrights in ancient Greece.
I read Craig’s email again. He seemed so sure I’d help him, and he’d certainly put enough pressure on me to do so: if we couldn’t find her we’d only be responsible for the loss of genius around the world. But I couldn’t do anything about that; my focus had narrowed down to staying home with my sisters, and keeping Ms. Burden from finding us.
And I was far too busy to do anything else. I bought beds and towels and clothing, and I moved things around so we all had places to sleep, Maeve in her bedroom, my sisters in her study, me on the couch in the living room. I learned how to make dinners for more than two people, and got up at night when I heard Semiramis cry out. I got them to a doctor, wanting to make sure they hadn’t suffered any physical trauma along with all the mental ones.
Every so often I’d come across my sisters sitting together in silence, each of them staring with unfocused eyes at a different spot. It had horrified me at first, seeing them like that, but after a while I almost got used to it. I had to let them be, at least for a time: they were retreating into their own worlds, afraid to walk the paths back to reality in case those paths disappeared beneath them.
I’d asked Maeve again if she minded having us here, and assured her that we could leave as soon as we found somewhere to go. “No, it’s all right,” she said. “I enjoy having you, all of you. It reminds me of when I was young, when your grandparents came out from Albany, and what a great help they were to me. The authorities had found me wandering naked in the streets, you know.” She saw my expression and laughed. “Don’t worry—I won’t do it again.”
I hadn’t been worried about that, though. What I’d thought was, Damn, so Dr. Chapman had been right all along.
“Well, but we’re spending a lot of your money,” I said, wanting to make sure she knew what she was getting into.
“Oh, that’s all right. I certainly have enough. And the work you’re doing for me would cost me twice as much, if I had to hire someone.”
She didn’t really understand her finances, though. She had a lot for one person, but the four of us would cut things very close. Still, I thought I could make our life here work, if we were careful.
There were other problems I couldn’t solve as easily. One day I came home from grocery shopping to find that someone had torn through the study, ripping the bedsheets, breaking vases, emptying out all the drawers and throwing everything on the floor. Pages from different books were scattered across the room, some of them lying in puddles of water from the vases.
I’d seen my sisters in the living room, sitting and staring at nothing, and I went back there. “Did someone break into the house?” I asked.
Beatriz wrested her eyes away from her spot and looked at me. “What?” she said.
“Did someone break in? Because the study’s been completely trashed.”
“Oh, yeah. Rantha did that.”
“Rantha? Why?”
Now it was Amaranth’s turn to break eye contact with whatever she was looking at. “I don’t know,” she said.
“What do you mean, you don’t know?” I said. “You must have had a reason.”
“Okay. Because I felt like it.”
I didn’t know what to do. Should I punish her? But I wasn’t her parent, and she had already been through enough . . .
“She was screaming when she did it,” Beatriz said. “Really loud.”
I actually felt encouraged when she said that. She was tattling on her sisters again, a good sign.
“Well, go clean it up,” I said to Amaranth. “And don’t do it again.”
She sighed and stood up. Another good sign—a few weeks ago she’d ignored me completely.
Why had she done it, though? Had she want
ed to reassure herself that the things around her were real? Or had she just gotten so frustrated she couldn’t think of anything else to do? They’d been in the warehouse for so long . . .
How long had it been? Enough time had passed that I thought I could ask Beatriz, but she didn’t know. Ms. Burden had told them she was taking them for an outing and they’d piled in the car, and the next thing they knew they were back at home with our parents, or so they’d thought.
That was all she could remember for a while. Slowly, as we talked it over, we figured out that they’d been taken to the warehouse sometime in June, after school ended. The “girl” Maeve had sent to visit the house had gone there in August.
They’d been there for nine months, then. Nine months of hope, of coming home to Philip and Jane, and then crushing disappointment. Over and over, until finally they came to disbelieve everything, reality itself. I couldn’t imagine it.
The mention of school reminded me that they’d have to go back when they felt up to it. How would I explain their long absence? Would Ms. Burden be able to find them somehow, if the school had a record of them? And what about college? Even if they wanted to go, I knew we couldn’t afford it.
Then I remembered that we did have money for college; Philip’s lawyer, Mr. McLaren, had told us so. And I realized that I was about to turn eighteen at the end of this year, and might be coming into my inheritance.
So I made an appointment and set out for his office. I knew this could be dangerous, that he could still be in contact with Ms. Burden, but I wasn’t planning on giving him more information than I had to.
CHAPTER 20
MR. MCLAREN seemed wary of me at first, and I couldn’t really blame him. We sat around the small table, and he asked, “How is Ms. Burden? Are you settling in with her?”
“She’s—well—she isn’t our guardian anymore,” I said. “In fact, I don’t want her to know I was here.”
He frowned. “I don’t know about the legality of that. Your father’s will was very clear—”
“The will was a forgery.”
He sat back, clearly disappointed in me. “I know you were unhappy with the choice of Ms. Burden as your guardian, but I doubt very much it was forged. I showed you those signatures, didn’t I, your father’s and the witnesses?”
“I met the man who forged them, actually.”
He took his glasses off, put them on again. “You did? Can you produce him in court?”
“Well, no. I mean, of course not. If he admitted to the forgery he’d go to jail.”
“I see.”
I felt sorry for him, a bystander caught up in something he wouldn’t understand, or even believe. “Look,” I said. “I’m not here to talk about that. What I want to know is, well, last time you said that Ms. Burden would be my guardian until I came of age. So when is that?”
He had our folder in front of him, and he took out the will and shuffled through it. “So the inheritance comes to you when you turn eighteen, it says here,” he said finally. “A fourth of the money in the account.”
“Great. Do you know how much it is?”
“I’m named as an executor of the will, so I could find out if you like. Though it’ll be less than it was—Ms. Burden had access to that money for necessities, the upkeep of the house and your clothing and education and so forth.”
“Yeah. Please.”
He went to the desk and dialed a number, the bank probably, and spoke on the phone for a long time. I couldn’t get much from his side of the conversation, only that he was being shunted from one employee to another, and growing increasingly angry. “Do you have records of those transactions?” he said. He paused, then said, “Yes, well, I hope you held on to everything you have in connection with this account. I’m going to want copies of every email, every record, every piece of paper.”
He hung up. He’d written something on a legal pad, and he brought it with him to the table and sat down. “So the amount in the account is now forty-seven dollars and fifty-six cents,” he read.
He looked up at me. I think he expected me to become outraged, or hysterical, but this didn’t even seem as bad as some of the things Ms. Burden had done.
He took off his glasses. He put his elbows on the table and pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes, and he sat without moving for a long time. “Oh, God,” he said finally. “Oh, my God.”
“I’m not blaming you,” I said. “That’s what she’s like. I did try to warn you.”
“Oh, God,” he said again. He lifted his head from his hands and looked at me blearily. His mustache was trembling like a frightened animal. Then he seemed to think of something, and his expression brightened. “There’s one positive thing, though—this ends her guardianship for good. So that solves your problem, doesn’t it? You never have to see her again.”
“Not really. She’s still looking for us.”
“What? Why?”
I shook my head. “I can’t tell you.”
“Look, Ivy. She’s committed a crime here, and I have to report her to the authorities. So the more I know about this the better.” I said nothing, and he went on. “Or, well, you could report her.”
I felt briefly optimistic at that. Then I remembered her cleverness, her ability to get people on her side. She would lie about why she’d had to spend all that money, and they would believe her.
I probably looked miserable, so he continued, explaining what was going to happen next—or what would have happened if we were a more normal family. “And when she’s gone, the court will appoint a new guardian. Not for you, because you’re eighteen, but for your sisters.”
They already had a guardian, of course—Aunt Maeve. But I couldn’t tell him that either: Ms. Burden was looking for us, and I couldn’t give him or anyone a way to find us. Well, I’d worry about that when it came to it.
Then I remembered that we were looking for her too, or Craig was, trying to find Talia. I decided to take a chance. “Do you have Ms. Burden’s address?” I asked.
He hesitated. Had I asked him to do something illegal? “I have to find her if I’m going to report her,” I said.
“Oh, what the hell,” he said finally. He took a page from the folder and showed it to me, some official paper she had signed to become our guardian.
I shook my head. “That’s our house, that address. She isn’t there anymore.”
He rifled through the folder. “That’s all I have. I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right.”
“So I’ll look into what you have to do next and get back to you. Just leave your information with my secretary.”
I tried not to show my relief. He’d given me a way to disappear again, to break loose from the whole sticky web of the law. Of course I wasn’t going to tell his secretary where we lived.
“Sure,” I said. “And thanks a lot.”
“Well,” he said. “I wish I could have done more for you.”
I left the room, sauntered past the secretary, and waved her a cheery goodbye.
I felt more pessimistic when I got outside, though. I hadn’t found out where Ms. Burden lived, and now we were hundreds of thousands of dollars poorer. I felt more upset about not having gotten her address, though. You could always make more money, but I’d wanted to tell Craig where she was.
Then I remembered something Craig had said, a comment I hadn’t paid attention to at the time: that he had found her by looking up property records. Somehow she had gotten a hold of our house, along with everything else. I could sue her for that, maybe . . . But all I wanted was to live a peaceful life, and stay as far away from her as possible.
A few days later, on April first, I got a letter telling me I’d sold my first poem. I remember the date because I thought it was an April Fool’s Day prank at first, but also, and more importantly, because it marked the day that I got validation from an editor, that I became a writer.
I’d used a pseudonym on the unlikely chance that Ms. Burden read obscure poetry magazin
es, and I’d gotten a post office box near Maeve’s for my submissions. They offered me ten dollars for the poem, and I had the rueful thought that I’d only have to sell tens of thousands more to make up for what we’d lost. I didn’t tell my sisters anything about our finances, though. I didn’t want them to worry, just rest and recuperate.
We went out to celebrate at a restaurant in Woodbine, spending far more than the magazine had given me for the poem. For once I didn’t care. It was an exciting day for me, as I said, and I wanted to indulge myself.
My sisters still seemed a little shaky, looking around them with worried expressions, stopping in the middle of sentences. For the most part, though, we appeared to be a normal family, talking and . . . well, they weren’t yet laughing, but they’d smile every so often, especially Semiramis. Even Maeve had come out with us, and seemed to be enjoying herself.
Then everything in front of me skewed somehow, and I had the horrible thought that none of it was real. The people around us, the food we were eating, the music playing in the background—all of it was an illusion. A waitress called out to someone in the kitchen, and I waited for her to vanish, for everything to drop away like a mask and reveal the reality of the warehouse beneath it.
Nothing happened, though. I reached out for my soft drink and held it tightly, feeling the cold condensation on the outside of the glass. Beatriz said something, and everything seemed normal again.
Mostly normal, anyway. Amaranth looked sullen, though I couldn’t remember if she’d been that way all through the meal or if it was a response to something someone had said. Of all my sisters she seemed to be having the hardest time returning to life outside the warehouse. She rarely spoke, and when she did it was one or two words only, mostly answers to questions.
The next morning at breakfast she seemed more civil, actually talking to the rest of us. After a few minutes of conversation, though, she got to what she really wanted. “Can we go see that grove?” she asked.
Ivory Apples Page 19