Ivory Apples

by Lisa Goldstein

  I went back to the others. I was hungry as well, and I thought that maybe we could go to Woodbine . . . Then I remembered that we didn’t have a car, or a phone, probably. “Go to one of the neighbors and call a taxi,” I said to Beatriz, giving her all the money I had on me. “Take everyone to the restaurant in Woodbine. And bring back some food for me.”

  “What are you going to do?” she asked.

  “I’m going to the grove. To see Piper.”

  I headed back through the forest. I worried about leaving Amaranth and Semiramis, but I thought they’d probably be fine with Beatriz. I’d make sure to check on them when I got home, though.

  I saw Piper right away at the grove, as if he was waiting for me. “Um, hi,” I said. I felt strangely nervous, as though we hadn’t shared each other’s most intimate thoughts for years. “Are you—do you want to come back to me?”

  “You said one minute,” he said. “That’s what you said, right? And it wasn’t a minute, it was a million years.”

  “Oh, come on. It was a few months, that’s all.”

  “I know what it felt like. It felt like forever, like—”

  “Look,” I said. “I’m sorry that happened to you. I’m sorry you were so frightened. But we can talk about that later. Right now I just want to know if you’re coming back.”

  “How will I ever trust you again?”

  “What do you mean? You were the one who wanted to do this, not me. I’ve never broken a promise to you, never lied to you. I’ve lied to a lot of people, but not to you. And I never will, either.”

  He couldn’t follow a logical train of thought like that, I knew, and I wondered why I was even bothering to argue with him. We talked some more, mostly him complaining that I had left him, but no matter what I said, I couldn’t convince him to come back with me.

  The house was filled with water in places ad smelled strongly of smoke, and of course all the utilities were shut off. It was obvious we couldn’t stay there, but none of us could bear to leave, either. We got the car towed and fixed up and then bought some tents so we cold sleep near the house, and we drove to Woodbine when we wanted a hot meal. I found out later that a helicopter had seen the flames and called the fire department. We were very lucky in one thing: the firefighters had come so quickly that the flames had barely spread to the forest around us.

  I didn’t want to sell that book I’d found, the first edition of Ivory Apples. But we didn’t have any insurance, and so, reluctantly, I took it to an auction house. The appearance of a signed Adela Madden whipped up a flood of posts on the website, a lot of them wondering who the sellers were. The auction house had promised not to give up our names, though, and they kept their word.

  We got less for the book than we wanted, and I wondered if Maeve might have been right, if interest in the book had waned now that Talia was no longer in Pommerie Town, no longer acting as its guardian spirit. Still, the money was enough to clean out the bedrooms and the study, and to make a start on rebuilding the kitchen.

  Meanwhile, I kept waiting for Piper. At first I felt overcome with loss, worse than when he’d been trapped within Amaranth. Then I’d had hope that I could rescue him, but this time it was his own choice. But as the months passed I grew resigned to his absence. I felt like Maeve, like an old woman mourning the loss of her partner.

  I was sorting through some debris outside when something crashed into me. Someone said, “Ooof,” and all the breath left my lungs. A moment later I felt his presence, the familiar joy rising within me.

  Don’t think I’m here for good, he said.

  After he came back I thought a lot about the advice Talia had given me. She’d wanted me to take risks, to balance my daily work with leaps into the unknown. She might not have been talking about my love life, but with Piper’s help I chanced a call to Judith, holding my breath until she answered the phone.

  “Hi,” she said. “I was just thinking about you guys—the papers said there was a first edition of Ivory Apples up for auction. Was that yours?”

  She always was way ahead of me. Still, she didn’t sound angry, which was all I’d hoped for. “Yeah, it was,” I said.

  “Did something happen? Is your family okay?”

  “We are, yeah. But the house burned down, and we needed the money.”

  “Oh, my God. What happened? No, wait, don’t tell me—if you committed a felony I’d have to report you.”

  My first instinct was to lie, of course. Then I realized that my whole reason for lying was gone; Ms. Burden could no longer hurt us.

  I could come out of hiding now, and I told her the whole story. I didn’t think she believed half of it, but I didn’t really care. It was a relief to tell the truth for once, and I vowed to be as honest as I could from now on.

  The next minute I followed that vow to its conclusion and realized what it meant, that I had to tell her how I felt about her. What if she didn’t feel the same way, what if she wasn’t even interested in women? Though from some things she’d said I thought that she might be.

  I took a deep breath and said, “Look. I’d really like—I’d like to get to know you better. To have coffee, or whatever you want. And I promise I won’t break the law this time.”

  God, I was bad at this. Every other time it had been wordless, a spark, need answering need.

  There was silence at her end for what felt like a year. Then she said, finally, “All right.”

  All right what? “So do you want to have coffee?”

  “Sure. Yeah.”

  We were still awkward when we met, two people who, after all, knew very little about each other. But my new openness seemed to call out an equal honesty from her, and she told me what the past year had been like for her.

  “I wanted to know you better too,” she said. A stupid grin bloomed on my face, and I struggled to uproot it. “But you seemed so, well, so reckless. You kept doing these—these things, illegal things, some of them. You left your family and lived on the streets, and you—”

  I opened my mouth to tell her that it hadn’t been like that. The word “reckless” held me silent, though. I knew words, and this one fit me like a comfortable shirt.

  She raised her hand to tell me she wasn’t finished. “For a while I even thought you were a criminal, especially when you wouldn’t give me your address. And it didn’t help that you said you were going to break into Ms. Burden’s house. And all of that about those—those sprites, or muses, or whatever they are—all that stuff about breaking the rules . . . Well, I’m supposed to live by rules. I’m supposed to protect people. Like a policeman, sort of.”

  I couldn’t deny any of that. Maybe this new policy of truthfulness wasn’t such a good idea after all.

  “And at the same time, I was—well, I liked hearing your stories, all the things you’d done. People think being a private investigator is interesting, but really a lot of it is boring—looking up records, following people around. Your life seemed so much more exciting. I mean, your aunt is Adela Madden, for God’s sake.

  “And I started thinking about you and your family, and how hard you worked. The way you helped your sisters and your aunt, all that responsibility you took on. I even understood why you had to steal that apple, that you did it for your sister. Maybe you weren’t the wild child I thought you were.”

  We kissed when we got back to my car, and then . . . but you know, I do want to keep some things private. One thing I will say, though. I’d thought being interested in women was yet another thing that would make me different, cut me off from other people, but it wasn’t like that at all. It was a joining together, not a separation. An astonishment.

  I wanted her to understand the muses, to see what we’d been through, so I took her to the grove. And she did say she believed me after that, but she rarely talked about it, and she would change the subject when I brought it up. Some people were just inhabitants of Pommerie Town, I thought, ignoring the magic all around them. It became a sore place between us, and we tried no
t to discuss it.

  Now that Ms. Burden was no longer a threat I started publishing under my own name. I took Willa’s advice and wrote about more mundane things, folding laundry, digging up weeds, washing windows. It had been easy to find inspiration in Piper’s magic, more difficult to locate it in everyday life, and I think the poems improved because I had to work that much harder. Poetry was the combination of the two, the strange and the familiar, I thought, a bit pompously—like an ivory apple, something from nature given an unusual beauty.

  I got some awards, and a small press put together a collection of my poems, and then a local college offered me a teaching post. It doesn’t pay very well, but together Maeve and I covered our necessities, though very few luxuries. We did manage to fix up most of the house, and Maeve even went back to her garden.

  Semiramis seemed happier, starting from the day we got back from the grove. It could have been for any number of reasons, but I wondered if the sprite had inspired her, given her a new excitement about her art—though I don’t understand how saying “I like your necklace” could work that sort of transformation. Her drawings have improved, though.

  I came clean with Mr. McLaren too, and he offered to help; it was the least he could do, he said, after everything Ms. Burden had taken from us. I didn’t expect anything, but then one day he called to tell us he’d managed to get our old house back, though I didn’t understand exactly how he did it. I thought about moving back there, but I couldn’t leave Maeve, and she couldn’t leave the grove.

  She would go there to visit Talia, though she never told me what passed between them. She died four years later, in her sleep, at the age of eighty-three. The family discussed it and decided to bury her as Maeve Reynolds and not Adela Madden, and not to send an obituary to the newspapers. Some people on ivoryorchard think Adela Madden is still alive, at ninety years old; one of them recently claimed to have met her in a hair salon in Columbus, Ohio.

  She left me the house and the copyright for Ivory Apples. We had to sell one of the houses, I knew, not least because Amaranth always had some project she needed money for. I called another family meeting, and after some discussion we voted to sell Maeve’s place.

  I’d pushed for selling Maeve’s house, though I knew I’d miss it, and that we’d get less money for it than a house in Eugene. Judith had been pressing me to come live with her, and now I was able to do it. I saw the people who bought the house just once, when I came back to get some things from the garden. They were a young couple with an overactive child, and I laughed to myself, wondering if they might discover the grove, and what would happen to them. But my business with the grove had ended.

  Beatriz finished college that year and became a computer programmer. Semiramis graduated in 2016 and now works as a graphic designer.

  As for Amaranth, well, she continued to think that all she needed to succeed was a muse. She drifted from one thing to another, and barely worked or studied or practiced, and blamed her failure on the fact that no one helped her, while everyone else in the family had gotten all the help they needed. She’s left home and come back a few times now, and each time she’s harder to deal with. I still hope she’ll find her life’s work, though.

  And Ms. Burden? I’d disavowed her when the firefighter had asked if she was family, but in a way she was related to us, our guardian. More than that, though, I felt an obligation to her. I’d chosen her punishment, after all.

  I saw her on the street after we’d moved back to Eugene, her eyes as vacant as the house she was propped up against, and I took her home with me. She was still legally a relative, sort of, so Mr. McLaren got me appointed as her conservator, and I searched the internet for an assisted-living facility that would take her. She didn’t have any money, though, so the place I found wasn’t very good. They had none of those activities you see in places like that, watching movies or playing bingo, and she had to have a roommate, and the caregivers seemed to spend their time doing everything but working.

  Still, it was better than the streets. I visited her a few times, partly, I have to admit, to make sure she hadn’t gotten well enough to cause us trouble, but she never knew me, and finally I stopped coming.

  I hid the ivory apple as soon as I came back from seeing Piper in the grove. It had far too much power to leave lying around, and I didn’t like the way Amaranth looked at it. In the years that followed I took it out every so often and held it, trying to feel my way to its heart.

  As I held it I would sometimes think about the first time I saw the grove, wondering once again why the muses chose some of us and not others. The only conclusion I came to was that we might have sought that chaos, that confusion, that had so troubled Judith. You needed a mind that could shake things up, that could slip past a rule or tradition and steal a new idea from the gods. Beatriz, for all the mess she created around her, knew how to organize her life—just look at her profession. And Ms. Burden had probably been so terrified of the chaos she’d found, the lack of fixed references, that she had retreated into madness.

  As the years passed I felt the apple’s power more and more. Even when it was hidden it radiated an intensity so strong that I was sure other people could feel it as well, and I wondered that they didn’t. It had to do with more than just controlling a muse, I realized. It was about breaking through boundaries, the rules and traditions I mentioned, but other things as well. It showed how to bring something new into the world, something no one had seen or thought of before.

  A few times I almost saw where it led, but I would always stop myself from going there. I didn’t know what I’d find, but whatever it was I knew that it would change things, maybe change everything.

  Still, it continues to draw me. Someday, I think, I’ll figure it out.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks to everyone who helped me with this book: Michaela Roessner, Larry Goldstein, Jayne Valenti, David Cleary, Lori Ann White, Darrend Brown, Gary Shockley, and Susan Fry. To Elisa Sconza, who answered the question “How do you burn a house down?” without turning a hair. To Bonnie the Cute Dog, who sat at my feet and inspired me. To Doug Asherman, for everything.

  And thanks to the publishing folks who made this book better: my agent Russ Galen, publisher Jacob Weisman, and editor Jill Roberts, and copyeditors Rie Langdon and Anne Zanoni.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Lisa Goldstein is the critically acclaimed author of twelve fantasy and science fiction novels, including Dark Cities Underground, The Alchemist’s Door, Walking the Labyrinth, and Weighing in Shadows, and the short fiction collections Daily Voices and Travellers in Magic. She received the inaugural National Book Award for The Red Magician, the Mythopoeic Award for The Uncertain Places, and has been a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy awards. Goldstein has published dozens of stories in magazines such as Interzone and Asimov’s SF, and in anthologies including The Norton Book of Science Fiction and The Year’s Best Fantasy series. She lives in Oakland, California.