by Zoe Chant
He gave her the broad strokes of what money was and what units it came in, showing her some bills and his credit cards.
She refused everything else that he offered to buy, looking thoughtfully at price tags.
Ansel pointed out the sign for the restrooms as they passed it and showed Tadra the map of the mall with its sprawling wings and food court and department store bookends.
Tadra carried a notebook to write on, but in most cases, she could point to items or signs, and they communicated with their improvised language. Ansel only realized how unique it was to them when a deaf woman caught their conversation and tried to sign something to them.
Sorry, he signed and shrugged, when she repeated a few phrases he didn’t know and looked at him expectantly. She gave up quickly; they shrugged at each other and moved on.
Ansel explained his purchases to Tadra as he made them. “This is for Gwen. She really loves to play video games, but her current controller is starting to wear out. The engraved whetstone is for Henrik, who complains that his axe is never sharp enough.” Tadra smirked knowingly and nodded.
There was a mini-karaoke machine for Daniella and Trey, and a loom for Heather. For Rez, a disco ball, and for Robin…
“They change size, depending on how much energy they’ve had to use and if...when...we win the day, I expect it will cost them a great deal,” Ansel explained in the toy store. “They’ll probably outgrow it over the next year, but I thought it would be nice for a while.”
Tadra flashed him two thumbs up and craned to look inside the little house. There were half a dozen rooms in it, all of them furnished with perfect scale Victorian-style items with moving drawers and opening doors. The bed had a springy mattress and miniature bedspread, with tiny pillows and even tinier fringe. The kitchen didn’t have plumbing, but it did have cabinets with minuscule dishes and silverware. Lights in every room turned on and off with wee switches.
Tadra clapped her hands with joy and moved to pick it up and carry it to the checkout.
Ansel stopped her. “We’ll get one in a box, this is their display. They have some packed up that will be easier to take and this can stay out for other people to see.”
Laden with bags and gifts, they left the toy store and moved into a stream of loud people. “Stay close,” Ansel warned, then turned to find that Tadra was gone.
He scanned the crowd for her bright hair, but there were dozens of red-heads, and even more people with knit hats. Leather coats were common. “Tadra? Tadra!”
His call was lost in the Christmas music and hawker’s cries. “Scarf for your girlfriend?” one of the sellers at a stand offered. “Real silk! For your boyfriend?”
Ansel brushed her aside.
“You had one job, idiot,” Ansel told himself in disgust, juggling the multitude of bags and the giant dollhouse box. “Don’t lose the firebird knight. Don’t let the mute fae shifter from another world wander loose in a crowded mall. Great work, Ansel. Brilliant. It’s no wonder they left you home with the dogs.”
He wandered around the area for a while before he gave her up as truly lost and struck out for the rotunda where the line for Santa Claus was longer than ever.
Tadra wasn’t there and Ansel caught the attention of one of the elf helpers. “Is there another Santa here?”
She popped her gum and looked bored. “Yeah, there’s one at the other end by B-Mart, but don’t expect the line to be any less long.”
“Thanks,” Ansel said sincerely.
He walked as quickly as he could, burdened by bags and all of the gifts and hampered by the careless crowds of people, who seemed to be an even mix of shoppers who wanted to get in and out as quickly as they could and shoppers in no hurry who stopped in the middle of traffic to greet people and strike up conversations where they were most inconvenient.
He was just untangling himself from one of the latter, after nearly running over what appeared to be an impromptu family reunion, when he passed the hallway down to the restrooms and he happened to look up and see the castle-themed sign for the restrooms. There was a cluster of teenaged boys anxiously hovering outside the restroom.
Where would Tadra have gone? He paused there long enough to hear a male voice holler, “This is the men’s room!”
Chapter 13
Tadra found the format of the restroom rather strange and wasn’t sure what the sink-like things mounted flat against the walls were for.
There was a picture explaining the curious flushing mechanism in a tiny cabinet with the toilet, though it was much different from the ones in Ansel’s house, so that wasn’t difficult to puzzle out. The toilet paper was considerably coarser than what Ansel stocked.
The sink was obviously a sink, but there was no apparent way to turn on the water to wash her hands when Tadra had finished. As she looked for a hidden handle underneath the spout, it rather suddenly came on, and just as suddenly turned off when she flinched back.
A group of laughing boys entered as she was trying to repeat her initial motion, hoping to coax the water into flowing again.
“Girl!” one of them exclaimed in a strangled voice, and they turned into a tangle of confusion and retreated immediately out of the door they’d come in, laughing loudly and tripping over one another as they pushed their way out.
Had they never seen a woman before? There certainly seemed to be plenty of others wandering the mall. Tadra returned to her task and was able to wash her hands in the intermittent and frustrating flow with some effort. She was turning and wiping her hands on her pants when the door opened again.
The man who barged in didn’t notice her at first and went straight to one of the flat sinks hung vertically on the wall. Tadra watched him curiously, hoping for a clue to the thing’s function, and he reached down and started to unzip his pants.
He glanced her way then and his gaze went from lazy to actively alarmed as he flinched and yelped and covered himself with both hands, nearly jerking himself into the wall. Was he having a seizure? Should she try to get him help?
“This is the men’s room!” he hollered in clear outrage.
Tadra looked around and spread her hands in a signal of peace. She hadn’t seen any signs restricting gender, but she had clearly betrayed some kind of social norm. She backed towards the door while the man fumbled to return his pants to closure, cursing loudly.
“Tadra?”
The door directly behind her opened and Ansel barreled into her. “Are you okay?” he asked. His arms were laden with the gifts they had bought and he barely fit through the door with them. Tadra caught one of the bags that started to slip from his grasp.
“Get your girlfriend out of here, man!” the stranger yelped.
“Sorry!” Ansel cried, herding Tadra back out into the hallway. “The bathrooms in Norway are all unisex!”
The giggling boys from earlier had clustered outside, and they fled as Ansel and Tadra exited the restroom.
“That was the men’s room, couldn’t you tell?” Ansel paused, and they looked back at the offered doors together.
One of them had a silhouette of a knight, the other of a figure in a dress with wings and a strange pointed hat. Tadra had chosen the most obvious of them; she was a knight, not a fable. She pointed at the door and then to herself and shrugged. It seemed obvious.
Ansel made a wheezing noise that turned into a whooping laugh and he leaned into the wall facing the doors, his gifts shaking in his arms. Tadra had to giggle, because his laugh was so infectious. The man that she had surprised stalked out and glared at both as he strode past.
“I didn’t even think to warn you about that,” Ansel said, when his chuckles finally subsided.
Still bemused by his reaction, Tadra shook her head. The people in this world were very strangely prudish about some things. Apparently, the division of gender spaces was one of those things.
“Let’s get out of here before you pick a fight with security or something,” Ansel said. “I think we’ve had enough of t
he outside world for now and the dogs probably need to go out.”
Tadra took her share of the bags and together they wove their way through the crowd towards the exit.
“Here,” Ansel said, glancing at the map as they passed it. “Let’s go out through the department store. It’s closer to where we parked.”
The department store was quiet after the noise of the mall, its music subdued and its space less crowded. It was shiny and spare in a way that the rest of the sprawling building was not, and Tadra stared around in wonder. It was very...white. Everything was white, or shining metal, or glass. It even smelled white.
“Sample?” There was a woman dressed in as much white as the store, and she was holding something in her hands.
The sample in the chocolate store had been Tadra’s favorite part of the entire trip, so she nodded eagerly, extending her free hand just as Ansel started to say, “I don’t think—”
The woman deployed some kind of tiny, poisonous spray weapon at her and Tadra instantly shrugged out of the bags she was carrying, throwing them aside and dropping into a fighting stance as Ansel squawked, “Wait a second!”
The white-clad woman gave a shriek of alarm as Tadra advanced and threw her tiny weapon uselessly. Tadra flung up an arm to deflect it, but realized that Ansel was trying desperately to diffuse the situation before she pressed a counterattack.
Enemy? she signed carefully to Ansel, not taking her eyes off of the woman.
“It’s a perfume sample,” Ansel explained. “She’s trying to convince you to buy the scent.” To the cowering woman, he said, “I’m sorry, ma’am, she’s from...uh...Norway.”
People paid money to smell this way? Tadra relaxed, but signed, Are you sure?
“I didn’t know she was deaf!” the woman protested. “Or Norwegian!” She gathered up her spray device and backed away. It had spilled on Tadra’s feet and she was now thoroughly soaked in the odor.
Ansel was gathering up the bags that Tadra had thrown off and Tadra sheepishly helped him. Sorry, she signed.
Don’t be, Ansel returned. He looked like he was trying hard not to smile. When they had picked up all the bags, they hastened for the exit and finally escaped back out to the car. They unloaded the gifts into a deep, covered compartment in the back of the car and Tadra was successful in reattaching her safety harness.
The car starting was less alarming this time, and she could settle into watching the flow of traffic as Ansel made it go out into the stream of other cars and big trucks.
A driver in another car sped past them at one point and motioned at them with his middle finger up. Tadra started to return the greeting and Ansel quickly explained that it was a rude and derogatory gesture with its roots in self-pleasure. He looked flustered. “It’s called flipping the bird,” he said. “Or flipping someone off. You do it when you’re angry. Robin does it a lot.”
Tadra watched in interest as Ansel did the things with the wheels and knobs and pedals that made the conveyance leap forward and turn and brake to navigate the maze of roads and other traffic. It was a dizzying dance, the way they moved together, and Ansel seemed to be following some kind of insanely complicated choreography.
Even the straps that held her in like a saddlebag were confusing, sometimes holding her firmly back and other times letting her sit forward to crane her head around and look at things.
It was snowing heavily by the time they arrived at Ansel’s house. It was so alien and perfect, with almost painful symmetry and all its straight, modern lines. She struggled with her harness until Ansel released it for her.
She helped him carry in all of his purchases and he let the dogs out into the snow. Vesta sniveled about it until Ansel went out with a shovel and cleared her a path out onto the lawn, muttering about spoiled pets and princess paws.
Fabio, on the other hand, bounced merrily through the deepest drifts of snow and came in with clumps of ice collected in the furry feathers of his feet and tail. Tadra sat with him in the middle of the living room and pulled them gently out as he whined in joy at the attention and writhed with his feet in the air.
Ansel sorted the food and goods from their flimsy bags. “I’ll let you help me wrap these,” he said. “And hey, maybe we can go pick out a Christmas tree. It would be a nice treat for everyone to come home to one.” He had shown her a calendar, explaining where the holidays fell in the boxes that represented days, and they frowned together over the New Year, when the veil between their worlds would be weakest and this world would be vulnerable.
“Do you want a snack?” he offered, wadding some of the bags into the recycling box that he had shown her.
Tadra could still smell the thick scent of the perfume she had been sprayed with and she shook her head, holding her nose and miming being sick.
“You want to take a shower?” Ansel suggested.
Tadra shrugged, not sure what he meant.
Ansel made a show of smacking himself in the forehead. “I never showed you how to work the shower! I have failed as a host. Come, let me teach you how to work the controls. You may agree that this world is actually worth saving once you’ve experienced the luxury that is a shower.”
Tadra had to laugh at his earnestness, and she followed him lightly up the stairs to the bathroom. At the far end of the room, past the sink where Tadra bathed herself and the loud flushing toilet, there was a clear-walled chamber with a metal snake and handles on one wall. She had not been sure of its purpose.
Ansel pulled the round knob forward and showed her the markings that indicated temperature as water began to stream alarmingly from above the chamber. “Gwen’s got some shampoo here. I’m sure she won’t mind if you use it. Ah, just squeeze a little in your hand, only a little, and then massage it into your scalp and rinse clear. There’s some kind of conditioner, but we’re way out of my wheelhouse. I think it’s got instructions on it. There’s soap, that bar there. Your towel is here, hang it up when you’re done with it or Vesta will chew it up or Socks will sleep on it.”
The water was steaming now, and Ansel backed out like he was afraid of seeing more than he wanted to and shut the door before Tadra could sign her thanks. By the sound of it, he tripped over Fabio on his way down the hall.
Tadra stripped efficiently, stepped into the chamber cautiously, then slowly relaxed into the stream of heated water.
Ansel hadn’t exaggerated the delight of the contraption. It was better than a bath, like a hug over her entire body, the pressure from the flow not enough to hurt but hard enough to stimulate every inch of her skin as she rotated beneath it in wonder. She could feel the heat of it soak into her bones, melting away the tension in her muscles. She turned in the stream and tipped her head up into it. It flowed down over her face and washed off the terrible smell of the perfume.
For a long while, Tadra simply stood in the shower, enjoying its decadence. Then she sighed and used the indicated soap and shampoo to complete her cleanliness. It was certainly more thorough than the cloth baths she had been taking in the sink, and the conditioner she applied according to the directions left her hair feeling deliciously sleek and silky. The smell was a great improvement over the perfume.
It took her a moment to figure out how to turn off the curious faucet and she managed to get a bracing shock of cold water as she did so. Then she dried off, dressed again in her clothing, and hung the towel on the rack, mindful of Ansel’s warning.
Fabio was lying outside the bathroom door and he bounced to his feet just as she would have stepped over him. She dodged him easily, skipping down the stairs. Ansel was standing near the window by the front door, his phone pressed against the side of his face.
Tadra wondered how he was able to see anything on the screen, then realized he was listening to it. He held a finger up at her and turned away, saying, “Daniella, hey, it’s Ansel. I know I’ve left a few messages now, but it’s been a couple of days and I haven’t heard anything and I’m starting to wonder if I should, I don’t know, alert t
he Ecuadorian police or something. Of course, that’s going to be kind of hard to explain when they ask about your itinerary and such because you didn’t arrive by plane and half of you don’t have passports, never mind the fable. Anyway, call back when you can. Tadra’s here and Christmas is next week. We’re going to have to get a tree without you guys. So, yeah. Talk to you later. Soon, I hope.”
He pulled the phone away from his ear and poked a button on the screen, then exchanged a long, thoughtful look with Tadra. “They’re going to be crazy happy to see you.”
Tadra made a sign that was a muddle of things ending in pulling her hands to her heart.
Ansel nodded in understanding. “You’ll be happy to see them, too.”
Tadra walked to the whiteboard. Knight, she wrote in the box where they listed words they wanted to learn to sign.
Ansel looked it up, and frowned. “It’s not something that comes up in modern speech a lot, apparently, people have a couple of different ideas of what it should be. We’ve had knights, historically, but it’s not one of those words that has an official sign.”
Tadra erased it and wrote shield instead.
Ansel found two signs for it. The first was a gesture as if she was holding and defining a shield on her arm, which pleased Tadra. The second was the verb for defend, with two fists raised protectively. After studying the tiny portal-images, Tadra raised her arms in the defense pattern, swiping to show the shield front, then finished with her arms crossed across herself.
“Shieldmate,” Ansel said out loud.
Fraud, Tadra wrote, thinking of the woman at the store. This was another word with several options and they settled on one. Tadra touched her head with both hands and brought them out, spreading her fingers.
“Yeah, my head feels full, too,” Ansel said. “I don’t think I’ve strained my brain so hard since I was trying to take calculus three by correspondence because the class conflicted with my business theory schedule.” He signed as he spoke, any of the words that he knew signs for.