The house was as gray and unrevealing as the face of a cliff. Windows pocked the dark surface at regular intervals, but there was no sense of depth behind them. They were like unimportant chinks in a block of stone. In fact, it was the weight of Sara-Kate’s house that Hillary felt more than any other thing at that moment, as if the place really were made of rock so dense that it had tipped the land it stood on. Down, down, it plunged into the black trough of Sara-Kate’s yard, while behind Hillary, her own house was lifted up, bright and light as a feather, toward the starry sky.
Hillary shook her head and sighed. Her father must have been wrong. The Connollys’ house was as deserted as it had been these past two weeks. In a way, she was relieved. Now she could climb the slope of her own yard, slip back inside her own house, and go to bed without anyone ever guessing she had been away. And tomorrow, perhaps, the snow would come, enough to go sledding this time. Her mother would make hot chocolate, and her father would tinker with the snow blower, which was always breaking down just when it was needed. There was a long-standing family joke about it. And who knew? she might invite Alison and Jane to go to a movie with her tomorrow afternoon, or to build an igloo.
A black figure came out of Sara-Kate’s house and sat down on the doorstep.
It came so quickly and unobtrusively that Hillary felt no surprise. The door made a tiny sound and then the figure was seated, slim and shadowy, on the step. Hillary leaned forward and held her breath.
Sitting motionless as it was, the figure was all but invisible. If Hillary hadn’t seen it move before, she could never have picked it out now against the house. Was it Sara-Kate? Hillary strained her eyes at the shadow. She thought she detected the shape of a head turned away from her. She thought she saw an arm. Or was it a leg? She could see pieces of this shadowy person but she couldn’t put it together into a whole.
She whispered, “Sara-Kate?” but so timidly that the name hardly left her lips. The shadow didn’t move. Was something really there? Had she imagined it?
Then the shadow moved. It stood up and sauntered out into the yard. It was small, and thin as wire, and it was not wearing a coat. A dry crunching sound came from under its feet, which seemed heavier and bulkier than the rest. With its hands in its pockets, the shadow ambled across the yard toward the elf village. It made a wispy noise as if expelling breath. It bent over briefly to look at something, then righted itself. It moved on toward the fallen Ferris wheel.
“Sara-Kate!”
Hillary stepped from the bushes as she said the name a second time. But once in the open, she stopped.
“Hillary?” The shadow turned with what seemed to be a hint of eagerness.
“Sara-Kate? I wasn’t sure it was you.”
“Of course it’s me. Who else would be walking around in my yard in the dark?” Sara-Kate leaned over and picked up the Ferris wheel.
Hillary approached her warily. The figure in front of her looked like Sara-Kate and talked like Sara-Kate, but something made Hillary hang back.
“I thought you were gone,” she said. “I thought you moved away. You were never at school. You were never here.”
“I was gone,” Sara-Kate said. “But now I’m back. For a little while, anyway.” She regarded Hillary through the complicated wires of the Ferris wheel she was holding up for examination. “It’s not broken,” she said about the wheel. “It can work again. Maybe you should come over tomorrow and help me clean up this mess.” She waved her hand around the yard, ending up with the battered elf village.
Hillary followed the arc of that wonderful sweep of hand with hungry eyes. She wanted to come more than anything. She wanted to fling her arms around Sara-Kate’s thin shoulders and hug her. But still she was suspicious.
“It’s supposed to snow tomorrow,” she said. “I don’t know if I can come.” She looked Sara-Kate in the eye and added, “The elves are back, too, aren’t they?”
“Yes,” Sara-Kate said. Hillary glanced away. She didn’t need to be told what she could already feel. All around her, the yard was starting up again. She heard a faint humming noise coming from the overturned washing machine. She heard an infinitesimal clicking in the dead grasses, a rustle among the bushes.
Sara-Kate had leaned over to lift the Ferris wheel back onto its two cinder blocks. She centered the great wheel upon the metal rod and straightened some wires that had bent under the impact of the fall. When they were fixed, she stepped away to admire her work from a distance.
“Watch!” Sara-Kate commanded. Her hand swept the air again. Directly overhead came the sharp cry of a bird. It seemed impossible on this wintry night, with the temperature steadily dropping and a storm on the way, but there it was.
And then, more impossible still, the Ferris wheel began to turn. Slowly, haltingly, as if pushed by invisible hands, it moved around, once, twice. It picked up speed and started a more methodical spin. Though there had seemed to be little light in Sara-Kate’s dark yard, the wheel’s spokes were illuminated. They flickered past Hillary’s eyes, faster and faster, until the wires and spokes were spun together into a silvery tapestry, and the Popsicle-stick seats flew out like golden rockets from the rim.
Then silently, by degrees, the Ferris wheel slowed. The wires became visible again. The Popsicle sticks drew in. The spokes separated themselves, and the big wheel wound down, darkened, and finally stopped.
Up above, wind churned the leafless branches of the trees, then blew past. Hillary blinked.
“Now will you come tomorrow?” Sara-Kate demanded in her ear.
Hillary nodded. She couldn’t take her eyes off the wheel.
“Was it the elves who made it spin?” she asked. “It was the elves, wasn’t it? But, for a minute, it looked as if ...”
She turned in wonder to the thin figure beside her.
“Sh-sh-sh,” whispered Sara-Kate. She beamed her tiny eyes on Hillary. “It’s better not to talk about it. ”
Ten
How Hillary, in her excited state, got back inside her house, out of her coat, and upstairs to bed without her parents seeing, she hardly knew. She nearly ran into her father coming up the cellar stairs, muttering to himself. But she dodged into the kitchen and he passed on to the bathroom, which gave her time to race up the front stairway and into her room.
It was ten o’clock exactly and she had just slipped under the covers when her mother looked in sleepily to see if she was still awake.
“What an independent child you are,” Mrs. Lenox said, coming over to give Hillary a hug. “What did you do all evening? I never heard a sound, and now you’ve even put yourself to bed. You won’t need a mother at all by next year. I’d better start interviewing for a new position.”
“Silly,” Hillary said, smiling up at her. “I’ll always need a mother.” But she offered not a word of explanation, and after her mother had gone she lay awake thinking wild and dazzling thoughts that made her feel quite separate from her parents and their ordinary lives.
For Hillary had seen an elf that night. She was sure of it. To lie still in bed and think everything through only made it clearer. All those days of peering into bushes, all those afternoons imagining faces in the leaves seemed ridiculous now when the real thing had been walking around in plain view the whole time.
How stupid she had been to suppose that elves must have pointed feet and little caps. How idiotic to think they must always be tiny. These ideas were held by a world that knew nothing about elves, by people who had never really looked, who were afraid to look, maybe, Hillary thought, remembering how she had pushed Sara-Kate’s appearance in the upstairs room from her mind because it seemed so strange and frightening. Not that seeing an elf was easy even when you did want to look. Hillary had been looking at Sara-Kate Connolly for two solid months and only tonight had she finally begun to see.
Sara-Kate had thick skin not because she was “like an elf” but because she was one. Sara-Kate wasn’t miniature or green but she had the elf’s thin body and the elfin quickn
ess. (“I’d never seen a person that small run so fast,” Hillary’s father had said.)
Sara-Kate ate elf foods like berries and mint leaves. She hid herself inside the sagging folds of her old clothes in the same way the elves hid within the junk and disorder of the Connollys’ backyard. And how had she come to know so much about elves in the first place except by knowing them from the inside, by being one?
The elves in Sara-Kate’s yard had not come to live there by chance, Hillary now saw. Sara-Kate hadn’t simply found them one day outside her back door as she pretended. The elves were there because Sara-Kate was there. She was their leader and protector. She kept their small community safe from the outside world. When Sara-Kate went away, the elves went with her. And when the weather grew too cold for even the thickness of an elf, she brought the precious magic beings inside to live in her empty house—an elf house, it must be—with her strangely sick mother.
Hillary lay in her bed shivering with the force of these thoughts. It seemed that her mind had become ten times sharper, ten times brighter, and that it could go into dark places that had confounded it before. Such was the energy of her imagination, that she wondered if she were becoming a bit of an elf herself. Was it possible to become an elf by associating with one?
Hillary stayed awake for hours that night. When she slept at last, she entered dreams that were filled with magic and the impossible possibilities of things, dreams that, oddly enough, were not so different from what was happening to her in her real waking life at that moment.
Hillary woke the next morning to a world in silent frenzy outside her window. Armies of snow-flakes swirled before her eyes. The round outline of her father’s garden was already erased and the birdbath had collected an odd-looking drift on top. It rose in the basin like a lop-sided white flame, giving the birdbath the unexpected look of an Olympic torch.
“A foot of snow fallen and another foot predicted,” Mrs. Lenox informed Hillary when she arrived in the kitchen for breakfast. School was cancelled and “The snow blower’s broken, of course,” her mother said.
“Of course,” Hillary replied.
“See that white mound crawling on its knees out there on what used to be our driveway?” her mother went on, gesturing out the window.
Hillary nodded.
“That’s your father. He’s dropped the screwdriver.”
However, this snowstorm, like many of its relatives, had no intention of being cast in the role of predictable, and shortly after ten o’clock it tapered off to a sprinkle, then stopped. The sky cleared. The air warmed. Sara-Kate’s house, which had been hidden all morning behind curtains of falling snow, came into view before Hillary’s anxious eyes. She’d been half afraid the place would vanish during the storm, whisking Sara-Kate from her grasp again.
She was out the door tramping eagerly toward the Connollys’ yard before her father had finished plowing the front walk. But then, seeing that Sara-Kate was not yet there, she hung back by the hedge. After all that had happened, she felt shy about entering without an invitation. The snow rose over her knees in places and had changed the appearance of everything. It lay in an unblemished white blanket over the yard, concealing all but the trees and the largest bushes, and giving the open spaces a virtuous, barren look.
The rusty washing machine had become a gentle rise and fall in this soft-rolling landscape. The piles of car parts, the tires, the glass, the rotten wood and tin cans were smoothed away. The house itself looked more respectable surrounded by such tidiness and dressed in snow garlands along its gutters and windowsills. And finally, as if these gifts of cleanliness and order were not enough, the sun came out suddenly from behind the last snow cloud and hurled a dazzling light upon it all.
Hillary stepped back into the shade of the hedge and hooded her eyes with one hand. She was not impressed by the snow’s transforming powers. Where, she wondered, was the elf village? Had it suffocated under all this heavy beauty?
While the yard shone with the brilliance of diamonds, Hillary’s thoughts plunged like moles under the snow to the dirty, junky places she knew and trusted. And she had just about figured out where the Ferris wheel stood, invisible though it was, and the approximate location of the little houses, when Sara-Kate emerged and issued the invitation she’d been waiting for.
“Why are you standing there staring like an idiot?” Sara-Kate yelled in a most irritating and un-elf-like voice. “Come on. Let’s get started!”
These words set what was to be the disconcertingly ordinary tone of the morning, for not once did Sara-Kate reveal a flicker of elf-ness. Though Hillary longed for another sign, though she dropped hints about “elf magic” and finally asked Sara-Kate point blank if the Ferris wheel would spin again, the thin girl did not respond. She pretended to have forgotten everything about the night before. It was a great disappointment until Hillary reflected how “elf-like” even this behavior was. How could Sara-Kate be expected to cast her invisibleness aside all at once? Naturally she would find it safer to appear and disappear like her smaller relatives, to show only parts of herself until Hillary had proven trustworthy.
“Which I will,” Hillary murmured with determination. “I will.”
After this, Hillary stopped looking for signs. And indeed, Sara-Kate continued to play her role so convincingly that the whole issue began to seem rather silly in the light of the day, so snowy and free from school. And there was so much to be done! The village had literally to be excavated, house by house, stone by stone, like the ruins of Pompeii. Everything was there somewhere, but where? And how were they to find it without stepping on it first?
They divided the area into four sections and worked each section carefully and thoroughly in turn. Once a house was discovered, the gentlest fingers were needed to free it from the snow. This was slow work. Even Sara-Kate’s hands turned numb and achy and had to be thawed out with warm breath, and then held in her pockets for a while.
After a house was unearthed, its yard could be dug out more quickly with mittened hands. Sara-Kate borrowed one of Hillary’s mittens. But the stones in the little stone walls were always getting in the way and being knocked around.
“Let’s just put them in a pile for now. Then we can lay them down in the right places when the whole village is cleared out,” Sara-Kate suggested. “Also, all these leaf roofs have fallen apart and I was thinking that the elves might like wooden ones instead. There’s a pile of wooden shingles under the back steps. Shall I get them out?”
Hillary nodded. She was working on a different problem.
“According to our calculations, the water well should be right about here,” she said, pointing to a patch of snow she had been probing with a stick. “But, it’s not. What could’ve happened?”
They found out a moment later when Sara-Kate stepped back from the house she had been working on. A muffled crunch came from under her boot.
“Oh, no!”
“It’s a house!” cried Hillary, rushing over to look.
“But how could it be? There aren’t supposed to be any here.”
“And here’s another!” exclaimed Hillary, just saving herself from putting her own foot on it.
Sara-Kate looked thoroughly alarmed.
“Wait a minute!” she said angrily. “Has somebody been building more elf houses in this yard while I wasn’t here?” She gazed at Hillary, who shook her head.
“Then how could...”
“I know what it is,” Hillary said. “We’ve figured the village out wrong, that’s all. Look, the rest of the houses lie under the snow in this direction, not up there where we were looking for the well. And that means the well must really be just ... about ... here.” She probed a patch of snow and nodded at Sara-Kate.
“It’s here,” she confirmed.
Sara-Kate seemed relieved.
“Whew!” she said. “I thought maybe these houses were multiplying by themselves during the night.”
“Well, I suppose there’s nothing to keep an elf fro
m building more houses if she needs them, is there?” Hillary couldn’t help saying. She sent one more meaningful look in Sara-Kate’s direction but the older girl took no notice. She put her head down and started excavating the house she had stepped on. For the next half hour, no one spoke as the laborious work continued.
At last, however, the village began to emerge again. On all sides, dramatic peaks of snow towered over the little houses as a result of snow-removal operations. The peaks gave the village the cozy look of a hamlet nestled in the foothills of the mountains, though what the serious-minded elves would think of this, Hillary was not sure. Certainly, they would have more difficulty coming and going over the snowy terrain. Would they provide themselves with cross-country skis?
Hillary smiled at this thought. She was about to ask Sara-Kate for her views on the matter when she noticed her standing rigidly beyond the village, her face turned toward her house. She was looking at the window on the second floor, Hillary saw. Its shade had been drawn up. Some commotion was underway up there, a silent flutter behind the glass.
Hillary stepped forward and caught sight of Sara-Kate’s face. It was as tense as a knotted fist, wholly absorbed in the action above.
Hillary took another step forward.
“Is it your mother?” she asked softly.
“Yes.”
“Is she still sick?”
“Yes.” Sara-Kate stared up at the window. “She wants me to come in.” She sounded tired.
“It’s all right. Do you want me to go home?” Hillary asked her.
“I guess so.”
“All right.”
Sara-Kate sighed and turned to look at Hillary. There, in Hillary’s face, she seemed to see something that interested her, something new and rather amazing if her expression told the truth.
Sara-Kate blinked. She folded her thin arms across her chest and examined the younger girl again.
Afternoon of the Elves Page 6