Ivory Apples

by Lisa Goldstein

  “What grove?” I said.

  “You know, the one you told us about. Where you met Piper.”

  I’d never gone back to the grove, not since that first time. I’d had a lot of work to do, of course, but there was another reason for not returning, one I didn’t like to think about. I still had a vivid memory of Maeve swimming naked in the lake, all these years later. I was afraid that I’d be taken by the same compulsion, that I’d strip off all my clothes, all my decorum, and dive headlong into the water. I’d finally come to a solid place after years of living like Piper, and I no longer wanted to give myself up to every impulse.

  And, I had no desire to expose my sisters to the muses. I didn’t want to take the chance that one or more of them would find themselves taken over, their lives utterly changed.

  “Maybe later,” I said, hoping she’d forget about it. “When I have some free time.”

  “Why not now?”

  “Because I’m busy. Maybe you haven’t noticed, but someone has to clean up around here, and shop and cook for you, and—”

  “You know what I think? I think you don’t want any competition.”

  “What?”

  “You want to be the only writer around here, the only one who does anything fun.”

  “Fun?” I said, disbelieving.

  “Maybe someone else wants to be creative too. Ramis told me she wants to be a painter.”

  “You do?” I asked Semiramis.

  Semiramis nodded. She seemed about to say something, but Amaranth spoke over her. “And I want to be a dancer,” Amaranth said. “And I want to go to that grove.”

  “Later, I said.”

  Her face turned hard, and I knew she was about to say something hurtful. “Did you ever think that you don’t really have any talent at all?” she said. “That the poem you sold wasn’t even yours, that Piper wrote it for you? That you wouldn’t be anything without him?”

  “It doesn’t work like that,” I said. How could I explain to her about breaking in, breaking through, stealing divine fire? “I write those poems, and I work damn hard on them. A muse takes your strengths, the things you can do, and shows you how to go beyond, how to see—”

  “So you admit that the poem wouldn’t have been as good without his help,” she said. “That you might not have sold it without him.”

  “I never said anything like that.”

  “Yes you did, you said—”

  “I’m not going to discuss this. And you’re just going to have to wait to go to the grove, until there’s time.”

  “What if I look for it myself?”

  “Go right ahead,” I said. “Don’t fall in the river.”

  After that conversation I began to think more and more about the grove. One afternoon I left the house without telling anyone and took the path through the woods. I was worried that I wouldn’t remember the way, but of course Piper still knew it and could lead me there.

  After all these years it seemed barely changed. It was still autumn there, the leaves fluttering like a shaken cloth of gold. The sprites—the muses—still capered through the trees, still made music on their pipes, still spun down the waterfall into the lake. Several were running and laughing, their hair and scarves trailing out behind them.

  I had no desire to take my clothes off, or to go swimming in the lake. It takes everyone differently, Maeve had said. I sat down on a rock and looked out across the water. The others looked at me sidelong from their long eyes, even seemed to approve of my presence, but they kept to what they were doing.

  “Is Talia here?” I asked Piper.

  He shrugged. Did he know her by another name?

  One of them came closer to me, looking shy. Her skin was a greeny-brown, like tree bark, and her dark hair shone green where the sun touched it. She wore a tight red cap dotted with white, the colors of a mushroom, and a necklace of leaves and red berries hung from her neck.

  Craig had said he’d talked to them and so, feeling foolish, I said hello.

  She looked sidelong at me, then laughed and said, “Hello.”

  “Should I bring my sister Amaranth here?” I asked.

  She laughed again, and skittered away like a leaf blown in the wind. But she pushed someone else closer, and I repeated my question.

  “Well, does she meet the qualifications?” this new one said. It might have been male or female; it wore a green and yellow striped knitted cap, like a nightcap, that fell to its feet.

  “What qualifications?” I asked.

  “Does she like strawberries?” one of the others asked. Her pointed ears lifted, like an alert animal’s.

  They crowded around me now, shouting out questions. “Does she have a cat with six toes?” “Has she ever dreamt of a train station?” “Can she touch her nose with her tongue?”

  I gave up. But now that I’d started them talking they kept on, making more suggestions and laughing. The subject changed and changed again, to the music, to something that had happened a year ago, or a hundred years, to whether there was a word for a leaf that had changed overnight from green to bronze.

  I listened to them, fascinated, hoping to learn something more about who they were and how they chose the people they did. They never said anything serious, though, and after a while I thought about my chores and headed home.

  I went back to the grove a lot after that, whenever I had a free moment, always making sure that no one could follow me. They didn’t seem to talk much among themselves, and sometimes I just sat there without saying anything. It was calming to watch these creatures who lived for the moment, who never worried about what to make for dinner, or how to pay for college.

  One day, when I’d just come into the grove, I heard a branch crack behind me. I looked back into the woods, alarmed, thinking that Ms. Burden had finally found us. The woods stayed as they were, unmoving. Then someone giggled.

  I hadn’t heard my sisters laugh in a long time, but despite that I knew it was Semiramis. “All right,” I called out. “Who’s there?”

  Another, louder giggle. “I know you’re there, Ramis,” I said.

  Some branches shook and a few leaves dropped to the ground, like falling gold. Semiramis stepped out, laughing. “You never even saw us!” she said. “We were behind you this whole time.”

  “Us?”

  Beatriz came out after her, and then Amaranth. “I told you I’d find it,” Amaranth said.

  “Wow!” Semiramis said. “Look at them!”

  Beatriz and Amaranth were staring as well, their eyes wide. One of the sprites was playing a set of bells shaped like flowers, and another stamped his shoeless feet in time to the music. Still others had picked up the rhythm and were dancing.

  And nothing had happened to any of my sisters so far. It might even have been good for them to come here, I thought.

  “So how do you do it?” Amaranth said. “You just stand here and let one of them choose you?”

  “That’s what happened to me,” I said. “Or you could leave them a gift—some people do that.”

  “Well, you should have told me that before I came here,” she said. “I would have brought something. What do people usually give them?”

  “I didn’t know you were going to follow me, did I?”

  One of the muses jumped down from a branch and danced toward us, smiling, her tangled hair streaming out behind her. Her smile grew wider, became a grin that nearly reached her ears, and the circlet of flowers on her head slipped over one eye. I couldn’t help laughing myself as she came, at the giddy joy that seemed to radiate out from her. Piper laughed too, within me.

  She flipped over into a somersault and leapt back to her feet. She landed in front of Semiramis, and they stared at each other, standing as still as mirror images. The sprite reached out cautiously, and Semiramis did the same.

  Amaranth pushed herself between them. “No, wait!” she said. “It’s supposed to be me, not her!”

  The sprite looked at Amaranth. Then she laughed and somers
aulted backwards toward the trees, and soon became lost among the leaves and branches.

  Semiramis blinked as if waking up. “No, she was—she was mine,” she said. “She was going to choose me, she said she’d show me things . . .” She looked out into the trees, searching for her.

  “You!” Amaranth said scornfully.

  Semiramis turned back to Amaranth. “I told you—I want to be a painter. And she was going to do it, she was going to pick me, and then you came over and spoiled everything—”

  “She wasn’t—”

  “I hate you! I’m never talking to you ever again! You ruined everything, just because you’re jealous. And they’re never going to pick you, never ever, because you’re stupid and none of them like you.”

  “That’s enough,” I said, speaking loudly to drown out whatever Amaranth was yelling back at her. “See, this is why I didn’t want to take you—I knew there would be trouble. We’re going home now.”

  “I’m not going anywhere,” Amaranth said.

  “Me either,” Semiramis said.

  “Fine,” I said. “Don’t be late for dinner.”

  Life at home became a maze of difficulties. Amaranth and Semiramis had been very close, but now they each nursed a feeling of betrayal and stopped speaking to each other. Whenever they had something to say they pretended they were really talking to one of us: “Ramis forgot to clean up her room again. It’s really hard living with such a pig.”

  Amaranth went to the grove every day. She took her prized possessions and laid them out on the shore of the lake; I saw them when I visited, looking like the sad remains of a shipwreck. She stole one of the apples someone had given Aunt Maeve, not ivory but wood painted white, with a minutely carved scene of a town hall meeting within it. The muses rejected it along with all her other gifts, and I quietly took it back to the house.

  About four months after they first visited the grove, Amaranth told me she wanted to leave home. “Really?” I said. I tried to treat her gently, to avoid making fun of her, but I failed as often as I succeeded. “Where would you go?”

  “Where did you go?” she asked.

  “Nowhere you’d want to live.”

  “How would you know?”

  “All right. Could you go two or three days without food? Could you sleep out on the street in the rain, with a blanket about as thin as a sheet of paper? What would you do if someone beat you up and took all your money?”

  “Well, I’d be smarter about it than you were. I’d get a job, an apartment.”

  “How? You’re thirteen years old.”

  “That’s almost as old as you were when you left,” Amaranth said. “When you abandoned us. Wasn’t it?”

  “I was fifteen. And even then I could barely get a job.” That had been because of Piper, because he hated to work, and not on account of my age. I didn’t tell her that, though.

  As the days passed, she seemed to drop the whole idea. But I knew she was still thinking about it, and that I had to do something to keep her busy.

  It was nearly September, when the new school year started. I checked the internet and found out that Woodbine had a middle school where Beatriz and Amaranth could go, and a grade school for Semiramis. I sat them down and asked them if they thought they were ready.

  “Sure,” Beatriz said. She had been wandering around aimlessly for a month, grumbling about having nothing to do; out of all of them, she had made the quickest recovery. But even she hadn’t come all the way back.

  “I won’t have to be in Ramis’s class, will I?” Amaranth asked.

  “No, of course not,” I said.

  “Okay, I’m in,” she said.

  “What do you think?” I asked Semiramis.

  She didn’t say anything for a long time. Finally she shook her head.

  “You mean—no? You don’t want to go?”

  She nodded.

  I tried not to sigh. Of course she shouldn’t go if she didn’t think she could. Her encounter with the sprite had changed her—she stayed in her room for hours drawing picture after picture, mostly of the grove—and it looked like she still wasn’t ready to return to the world.

  Everything I had to do seemed more complicated than it should have been. I filled out forms for Beatriz and Amaranth, but they had to be signed by an adult guardian and so, despite the fact that I felt more like their guardian than anyone, I got Maeve to do it, and had the forms notarized.

  They had missed a year, of course, and I explained that by saying they’d been home-schooled. The school gave them some tests and decided that they could be placed with students their own age, which was a relief. I didn’t want them in a class where everyone was a year younger. The other students would make fun of them for failing a grade, and they had enough problems already.

  Most of the forms asked for our address, to make sure we lived in the right district for the schools they were going to. I didn’t want to give it to them, of course, but in the end I told myself that even Ms. Burden couldn’t find us here, in this tiny town at what seemed like the ends of the earth.

  When school started I finally had more time to myself, to sit and write, or just think. Beatriz and Amaranth did well in their classes, though Amaranth’s teachers complained to me that she barely spoke. I told myself I’d talk to her, but somehow I never got around to it.

  Then, a few days after her birthday in April, she ran away from home.

  CHAPTER 21

  I DIDN'T NOTICE she was gone until we were all gathered at dinner. “Where’s Rantha?” I asked.

  “At the grove, probably,” Beatriz said.

  “Well, we’re not waiting for her.”

  But she hadn’t returned by the time we finished, and I was starting to get worried. It was still light outside, but darkness was closing down on us like the lid of a box. I remembered my own homecoming, when I had dawdled in the forest and made Philip so anxious. Had Amaranth finally gotten what she desired?

  It grew darker, and there was no moon to see by. Beatriz and Semiramis and I got out some flashlights and headed to the grove. We called Amaranth’s name as we went, shining the light through the trees. We’d never come here at night, and the shifting shadows made it seem like a different place, a stranger one. Rustling noises sounded, first from one spot and then another. Then we left the woods and came out into the grove.

  Pinpoints of light shone from the trees. I looked at them, alarmed, wondering what they were. Then, as I saw the lights wink in and out, I realized that they were eyes, sprites peering out from between the branches. Other sprites were sleeping, curled up near each other or splayed out across the branches.

  Are they all here? I asked Piper.

  I don’t know, he said.

  Well, count them.

  I don’t know how many of them there are, he said. So I don’t know how many there should be.

  I sighed. All right then—what do you think? Did one of them leave with Rantha?

  I don’t think so.

  That was reassuring, at least. Or maybe not, since we still didn’t know where she was.

  We searched for hours, circling through the woods, going farther than we’d ever been. The creek became a rushing river, with a bridge spanning the two shores. A chilly mist or fog settled around us, working through our clothes and making us shiver, turning the beams of our flashlights to cobwebs. Our voices grew weaker, hopeless, like lost birds peeping for their mother.

  Semiramis seemed apprehensive, and I finally realized that the fog reminded her of the warehouse. We were too cold and exhausted to continue on, anyway, and we headed back to the house. I tried not to think of Amaranth still out here, tired, freezing, maybe lost.

  Maeve was asleep when we got back, so I waited until the next morning to tell her what had happened. “What are you going to do, dear?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Keep looking, I guess.”

  “You’ll have to tell the police, you know.”

  “What? No.”


  “The school’s going to wonder where she is.”

  I was still suspicious of the police, and living with Piper had given me an even deeper distrust of authority. Look how much work it had been just to get my sisters registered in school, for example. Still, I knew Maeve was right, that I would have to go there sooner or later.

  Amaranth didn’t come back the next day, so I put aside my misgivings and went to the police in Woodbine. They assured me that she’d probably just run away, that she would come back when she missed the comforts of home. Still, they asked for some information and borrowed a photograph of her, and they promised to get back to me if they found anything.

  Then I drove on to the school. I asked the officials there to keep her disappearance to themselves; our family had suffered so many gothic tragedies already, and if the kids knew about his new one they could make Beatriz a complete outcast.

  Days passed, and then weeks, and we still didn’t hear from her. I found myself wanting to tell her something, or about to call her for dinner, and I would feel a fresh sadness that she was still missing. And a piercing guilt as well—how could I have forgotten that she was gone?

  I did everything I could think of to find her. I talked to the police as often as I could, and I called her old friends in Eugene, though none of them had heard from her in years. I visited the grove and asked the sprites if one of them had left with her, and their answers, though confusing, seemed to say they hadn’t seen her. I went to other places I thought she might be: our old house, her favorite restaurant, Amazon Park where we used to meet Ms. Burden. I even thought about asking Ned if he’d seen her, but I knew that if I did, her disappearance would get back to Ms. Burden.

  At the same time, though, things around the house seemed to settle down for a while. Beatriz went to school, and worked in the afternoon to save up for college, and Semiramis stayed in her room with her drawings. She seemed to have some talent, but nothing about her work stood out or caught fire, and I wondered how much better she would be if that muse had chosen her. Mostly, though, I was just glad she’d found something to do.

  I was able to sit and write, and I sold more poems. I even had time to go to ivoryorchard.com. I hadn’t looked at the site for years—I hadn’t had a computer when I’d run away, of course, and then when I got to Aunt Maeve’s I’d been too busy. I’d surfed over once to read “The Woman and the Apple,” but that was because Craig had sent me the link.