Harriet Wolf's Seventh Book of Wonders

by Julianna Baggott

  I need more hearts.

  I’m in Ruthie’s bedroom. I shouldn’t be. She’s out. But the doggies are with me, and it’s their room too so I’m an invited guest. One of the dogs has very wet eyes, one of which is winky. It has a shorter snout, legs, and tail, broader ribs. I call this one Pim. The other has a more fully fanned tail and head fur, more closely cropped ears. I call that one Pom. Both cock their heads when I make birdcalls. They understand that language better than English. It’s clearer, more urgent, more honest.

  I open one of the windows and look out, knowing that my mother would have a fit if she saw me at an open window. She was almost eaten by a window. But that’s not true. That’s just what it seemed like. It was her heart attack. If one of my hearts was attacked—or attacked itself, that is—I would have a spare. If they attacked each other, I would be a goner.

  Am I at this open window because I want to get back at my mother because she’s a liar?

  This window is directly over the roof that protects people who knock on the front door in the rain. But no one knocks on our door in any weather except an occasional low-level political candidate or two girls from the local high school dressed in band uniforms, selling submarine sandwiches so they can go to Ontario for a competition.

  I wonder what it would be like to go to Ontario in a band costume.

  Ruthie climbed out of this window, onto that roof, and ran away in the night at sixteen. I could never do this. I’m sickly and weak, with lacy skin. I’ve had many illnesses: fevers, vomiting, coughing, sneezing. Sun can redden my skin. It can even blister and peel. I’m allergic to most greenery and animals, but not these doggies. I don’t have enough body fat to float, much less swim. Milk gives me gas. I’m asthmatic; I get all breathy sometimes. Bee stings make the affected area swell. Mosquito bites too—my body overreacts and there’s itching and puffiness.

  I touch the tar shingles, warmed by the sun and wet from a fast rain. I lift each doggy so it can look out.

  You know what’s true? I ask the winky one.

  She doesn’t know.

  Ruthie left us, I tell the dog. My mother didn’t lie about that.

  And here is the Eldermans’ youngest son, Benny. I describe him this way: head of moderate size, oblong; neck long; arms and legs lanky; kneecaps bony, protruded; hair shaggy, dark, wavy; eyes blue with dark lashes; nose high at bridge, knotted; ears inconspicuous; lips nice. It’s 3 p.m. He’s stretching in the yard. He’s one year older than I am, but he looks older. Maybe living in the world ages you—sun and weather—like a deck chair. He wears a visor—red, white, and blue, like a proud American.

  As I lean out the window, I wonder if he’ll notice me.

  He does. He squints and puts his hand above his eyes, shading them. He then waves his hand, which seems loosely attached to his lanky arm.

  I flip my hand up and back down and then dip back into the window and lean against the wall.

  That was true. It just happened.

  I’m thinking of my two hearts, beating wildly. The trip I took with you, Wee-ette, out to the museum was true too. My mother was agitated. You hadn’t been out of the house in ages! Why now? Why this place? Why with Tilton? Tilton is only a seven-year-old! My mother had many whys—legitimate questions, she called them. But you didn’t answer, Wee-ette. You used to say, It’s my job to write the books, not to explain them. You got used to not explaining things, including yourself.

  Since you couldn’t drive and my mother wasn’t invited, we took the bus. This was before I stopped doing things like public transportation. I was still in school. I was still almost normal.

  The bus launched us through space into the country, which appeared, at first, like a filmstrip of fields and trees stuttering through the rows of windows. I felt loose in the bus’s vinyl seat. It seemed possible to simply drift up, weightlessly gliding around in a test rocket. I offered to hold your pocketbook because I wanted the enormous weight to hold me to my seat. Sometimes I wondered if you carried a bowling ball around in your pocketbook. It was shiny and fat as a bee’s rump. It seemed to be part of your body, with its straps clamped in the lock of your elbow. No matter how much lotion I rubbed into your elbows, they were calloused knobs, and one jutted out protectively, and the straps disappeared into that fine inner white skin of your arm, so delicate with its pucker of blue veins.

  The bus’s brakes barked lonesomely. We waddled down the rubber-matted aisle. You know this is why it’s hard for me to go out, Wee-ette: everyone was waiting—their faces perched in our direction—and I took each face in, which is how I am. The faces were: shiny, dull, flushed, sad, hopeful, destitute. I held on to each for as long as possible. My mother doesn’t understand. She knows only that it’s too much for me. And it is!

  Right this minute I am here in this room looking at the box marked Ruthie—Random, and I still remember one face on the bus, fatter than the rest, with a jubby chin that jiggled due to the bus’s throbbing motor.

  See how it is, Wee-ette? You know how it is. My mother says that my memory is one of my greatest burdens. But it’s more than that too. Better and worse.

  The bus doors opened, and we climbed down the big steps. The bus doors shut. And with a groaning cloud of dust the bus abandoned us at the end of a long road. It was late spring and everything smelled like honeysuckle—a version of sweetness I associated with my teacher Mrs. Blaskow, and her stiff hair and liver spots.

  I’d never been in the country. Its wide-open spaces were unsettling. The grass rose up green and vicious everywhere. The buds of bristly, thick-necked roadside flowers gaped at me. My mother would tell me not to get close to greenery. It could be poison ivy. But there were birds. Warbling, fluttering.

  We walked until there was a house. It wasn’t a museum at all. Wild peacocks in the yard, their dusty feathers all knit together. Dogs howled near a statue of Saint Francis that was stained with brittle bird droppings.

  A small white clapboard sign read, Welcome to the Isley Wesler Museum of Antiquities. Free to the public.

  You knocked on the door, Wee-ette, while we blocked our crotches from the dusty dogs.

  Isley Wesler was old and lispy. One arm clamped to his chest, he said the museum wasn’t appropriate for a child my age. She won’t understand, he said. His skull was dotted with liver spots.

  She understands everything, you said back to him. Don’t you, Tilton?

  I do, I said.

  Something was going on. The air had shifted. Wee-ette, I could tell you wanted something from Isley Wesler. We were there for a reason.

  Isley Wesler took us around his house, half shuffly and half knee-buckly. He pointed out paintings of dead Weslers looking withdrawn. He pulled ancient curios from behind glass-front hutches, including a set of wooden teeth that his great-grandfather had worn. He was proud of a photograph of a Wesler wearing jodhpurs and a netted helmet like a beekeeper, holding someone’s head—just the head. Above the photograph hung a sword that had supposedly done the job of removing the head. This Wesler wasn’t bored. I figured that it took a lot to keep a Wesler’s attention.

  There was a small pantry-sized room filled with unopened letters.

  Why don’t you open them? I asked.

  Oh, I’ve let it go. That’s history.

  Wee-ette, your eyes went wild over those stacks.

  He hobbled upstairs. We followed him. Isley Wesler said, This is the bed in which my parents had relations and I took root in my mother, growing inside of her until I was a mere four pounds two. This is also the spot of my birth. I was pushed out of her and into the world. I was so small that they configured an incubator of sorts, surrounded by bricks that were alternately warmed in the oven and replaced. This is also where Weslers come to die.

  I wanted to know if he was the last Wesler alive. Was the bed waiting for only one more? And what if he died while on the toilet or in the tub? I didn’t ask. I’d said that I understood everything, so I kept my mouth shut.

  The death room w
as small, with a double bed draped in mosquito netting that was swooped up and tied to a ceiling hook. I imagined Isley Wesler dying there. I imagined myself dying there too.

  He pointed out an eight-legged calf in a glass case perched in the corner. I imagined it staring at me while I died. But I was thinking of conception too, Wee-ette. And that’s when I blurted, What does that mean, had relations?

  The old man glared at you, Wee-ette, like he meant, I told you she wasn’t old enough! And he rolled his eyes.

  Then, Wee-ette, you turned to me and said, Oh, it’s nothing, Tilton. A man gets with a woman. He becomes herky-jerky like a mechanical pony in front of an old department store, grunts a bit, and a baby begins to grow.

  Wee-ette, this is still just about all I know on the matter.

  You make it sound so tempting, Isley Wesler said. His tone was filled with static electricity.

  And you turned to him and you stared at him, leaning forward, nearly tipping over, and said, Eat your heart out, Mr. Wesler.

  I don’t know what you meant, except I knew it was part of the reason we were there. You’d known Isley Wesler before we’d arrived. This was part of your past. At that moment his eyes got overly large, and you looked at him like you knew that he knew exactly who you were. You and Isley Wesler were locked together and unable to come up for air.

  I thought about all of this later, when I replayed it in my brain. Because in that moment I only existed below you two. I was thinking of eating a heart out. Was that where babies came from? Was that where I’d come from? Had my mother eaten a heart? Was my father, George Tarkington, now heartless?

  Is that how it’s done? I said. Is that how there’s a mother and a father?

  Your attention fell to me.

  Yes, hush, you said, and you tightened your grip on my hand and hurried me out of the room and down the stairs.

  Wait! Isley Wesler said. Don’t go just yet!

  And this is where it becomes strange and misty in my mind.

  You paused, Wee-ette, at the foot of the stairs and turned, because you still wanted something from Isley Wesler.

  And he said, One more thing: my heart!

  I was thinking, A heart? It couldn’t just be a coincidence, Isley Wesler pulling a heart out at this very moment.

  He shuffled past us down the steps and into the parlor. Follow me! he said, and we did. He pulled out a silver box, gray from lack of polish, from a bottom dresser drawer.

  Regardez! he said, which is French. Isley Wesler held the box out with his good hand because the other was wizened and tightly pinned, his curled fingers covering his frail chest protectively. He opened the box and whispered, The heart of a mongrel king!

  The heart was a leathery prune sitting on velvet.

  While tombs were ransacked, Mr. Wesler said, one of my ancestors absconded with the heart before it was lost in the tumult.

  You started to back away, Wee-ette. This wasn’t what you wanted, but I stood still. I didn’t know what a mongrel was, but I wanted a father. I’d heard you tell the man to eat his heart out, and when I’d asked if that was how a mother and father came to be, you’d said yes.

  And here was a heart.

  I thought it would be better for my mother to eat the heart. But she wasn’t here. It was up to me. Before anyone could stop me, I reached inside the box, popped the heart into my mouth, and hoped for a father.

  The heart was nearly tasteless and very dusty, if you’re wondering.

  You gasped. Tilton, spit it up! Tilton! You slapped me on the back and rattled me by the arm. Tilton! Tilton!

  But I gulped it as fast as I could—oh, the tight press as it made its way down my throat.

  Mr. Wesler could barely breathe. Who, who would do such a thing? he shouted. How reckless!

  But you pulled me to your bosom like a baby, although I was much too grown-up. How dare you offer such a thing to a child? You are a sick man! To offer a heart to a young child like it’s a candy! You glared at Isley Wesler and said, You have been reckless, Mr. Wesler. You have been reckless with someone else’s heart!

  And that seemed like the reason we had come. You needed to say those words and here they were. You knew Isley Wesler because you had a whole big fat life. I don’t know how I know this. I just do.

  You didn’t lie to me like my mother has, but you’ve withheld the truth. It’s like a life is a pact that gets wound from the hands of one generation to the next, but if you don’t tell your life, if you don’t hand it over, you’re cutting the string. Then the next generation has no tether. They float off like an astronaut, alone.

  We have a pact. Only give them the book if there’s an emergency. If all’s going well, don’t. But it’s not going well. Maybe it never was.

  This is what I remember: you marched me out of the museum, my head still clamped tightly to your chest. I could only see out of one wide terrified eye—the gaping flowers, the deathly honeysuckle, the greenery grasping at me, the dogs, the peacocks.

  Isley Wesler appeared at the door, gasping, He’s alive! Do you know that? He’s still alive!

  The mongrel king? I asked. His heart was beating inside of me—alive!

  Eppitt! he shouted. Eppitt Clapp!

  Is that the name of the mongrel king? I asked.

  He still loves you! Isley Wesler said. It wasn’t my fault! I saved his life!

  The mongrel king loves you? I asked. I wondered how Isley Wesler had saved the mongrel king’s life. By keeping his heart in a box all these years? Was I now the one to keep him alive—within me? Would he be coming for us to get his heart back, once and for all? Eppitt Clapp, I said to myself. Eppitt Clapp, the mongrel king.

  You didn’t say a word. Your breath was raspy. Your lips were crimped shut. I’d never heard the name Eppitt Clapp before, but I would hold on to it—my brain holds on to so much.

  We walked down the driveway and waited for the bus, a half hour of silence. It appeared in a new whirling cloud of dust that I followed you into. And we returned. Right back here to this house.

  I could follow my sister out onto the roof, jump to the grass, disappear down the street. Stranger things have happened. I’m not allergic to my sister’s dogs. Benny Elderman waved to me and I waved back.

  The book has stayed hidden, but it doesn’t have to.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  A Confessional in Wildwood, New Jersey

  Eleanor

  I sit in front of the television, the one that almost killed me. It’s a big ugly box with a wide placid face that flickers at me, all bluish. With its rabbit ears perked and cockeyed, it talks and sings and praises itself, joyfully. This entertainment doesn’t require an audience. But these past three days, it’s not been bad company. I suppose because it doesn’t need an audience. I can listen or doze. It needs no praise, no gentle reminding, no scolding glares. It doesn’t have hair to brush, doesn’t require feeding, doesn’t look at me like I’m a disappointment—oh, the deflation in Ruthie every time she looks at me!—or like I’m a criminal, as Tilton does, like I’m suddenly untrustworthy, a suspect in an ongoing investigation.

  On television, a woman judge who’s very irritated with her work yells at people. Why does she work in petty disputes if she hates pettiness? What would the judge say about my lying to Tilton about broken toaster ovens and commissioned poems? Guilty as charged, heaven knows.

  I lied to Tilton for her own good. It wasn’t a crime until Ruthie deemed it so. Mrs. Devlin could have had a broken television. She could have wanted it fixed. Her daughter is already married, but she could have divorced and remarried. None of this was intentionally harmful.

  Ruthie keeps inviting Tilton to join her on trips to the grocery store, the drugstore, the dog park. (I held my tongue, but Lordy! Dogs have their own parks now?) Tilton always says no, though I can tell by the way she looks at me that she’s waiting for some encouraging nod, a blessing. If Ruthie knew what could happen, she’d stop pestering the girl! Still, Tilton proves her allegianc
e to me each time she declines. Tilton wants to be good. This desire doesn’t seem to cross Ruthie’s mind. Not now and not ever.

  What’s parenting really about, anyway, if they’re born one way or another and stuck like that? I wish I’d been given a memo at the very beginning stating that all children are born more or less in a fixed condition. I wouldn’t have tried so hard to mold Ruthie. I’d have left her alone, let her be more George-like. I would have cajoled less and shrugged more. My own mother didn’t try to mold me. She shrugged plenty. I resented the lack of attention, but maybe my mother had received the parenting memo I missed.

  Ruthie is out on one of her errands with the little dogs. Tilton is upstairs. Normally she would be doing things she loves, reading bird books, practicing birdcalls, drawing pictures, maybe even still writing poems or tinkering with appliances. These things contented Tilton before Ruthie came. But now Tilton takes long baths. She stares out the windows and taps the glass, like she’s trying to get the attention of fish in an aquarium. She follows Ruthie around the kitchen, asking her strange questions. “Have you ever been in an earthquake?” “Do you believe in Mormons?” “Do you move around in your bed in summer to find cooler parts of your sheets?” Some of these questions embarrass me. I was responsible for Tilton’s education. Surely I covered Mormons.

  Tilton asks Ruthie about their shared childhood. Tilton’s voice—the little bell of it—rings out in the kitchen. “Do you remember the worm hospital we made?” “Do you remember how our socks came wrapped in stickers and were hooked over little black plastic hangers?” “Do you remember lipstick samples in tiny white tubes?” They sing songs that aren’t even vaguely familiar to me. It’s as if Ruthie and Tilton had a different life together, one that didn’t include me at all. Is this how sisterhood works? I wouldn’t know.