Harriet Wolf's Seventh Book of Wonders

by Julianna Baggott

  “What about your father?” she asked.

  “He gave us all of this. The house, some funds. You can’t fault a man for providing!”

  It was a lie. And Eleanor knew it. But what made her angry, I think, looking back, wasn’t that lie or even the fact that her father, wherever he was and for whatever reason, was gone. She was hurt that I was trying to put a positive spin on it. Insulted. She marched off to her bedroom, which is now her bedroom once more.

  I wasn’t a good mother, Eleanor. But you are making up for my lack. I see you being pulled by the tide of these children, and you don’t complain about raising them alone, but I know your struggle. These children, beautiful girls, have gulls in their throats. They caw for you. There is the bludgeoning sun of summer followed by the chill rattle of winter and a cold bed. You press on, exhaustion sewn into your skin. You scrub floors on your knees. You shovel the walk alone in the snow and salt the driveway. You take care of these children as you’ve always taken care of me. Did you ever have a childhood? Perhaps I mistook a daughter for a mother just as my own mother had on her deathbed. Is this my greatest sin?

  I did look for your father once after you asked all those questions. I felt guilty and knew I had to try—for your sake, not my own. We went to Wildwood in winter. It was wet and gray. We cowered under the low sky. Not wanting you to know the purpose of the trip, I handed shopkeepers small notes that inquired after Eppitt, rather than talking about him aloud. But after looking at the notes, they all shook their heads.

  I found instead the lion’s head. Tuffy, stuffed and on display, behind a plate glass storefront window. Dead because some mobster had decided to use him to shake me up. I’d come here out of guilt, and guilt sought me out. I found a church, sat Eleanor down in one of the pews, and went to confession.

  “I wasn’t really married,” I said to the priest, “but I thought I was.”

  “Were you married in the eyes of God, in the church?” he asked.

  I thought of the twin sunlit sheets, a steeple, and the angels on the porches watching on. “Yes,” I said.

  I walked out, holding tight to your arm, Eleanor. A gift from God.

  Hold tight, I thought, hold tight.

  I feel death inside of me now. It’s not far off. But sometimes death feels like the wings of a goose—sturdy, broad, a sloping lawn before me, the possibility of flight.

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Little Knot

  Tilton

  The car stops. I open the door and fling myself onto the lawn, and then I’m up, running as fast as I can.

  In the house there’s a man and a grown boy. Mrs. Gottleib is there and shouts, Tilton! Don’t worry! Your mother is fine! She was just under the dining room table for some godforsaken reason!

  My mother is sitting at the dining room table. I see the shape of her backbone, a knotted column that runs down her back—the shoulder blades where wings would grow if she were winged. Instead they poke out beneath her dress, stunted, skeletal. Our bones don’t breathe, like bird bones do. We’re forever tied to the ground.

  Ruthie is here now with George behind her. He’s breathing heavy.

  Jesus! Ruthie says. What the hell, Ron? What are you doing here?

  I scream, and everyone turns.

  But my mother isn’t shocked. There are my girls, she says.

  I sprint out of the room and up the stairs, and she says, Let her go. Let her get it all out.

  Soon I am in Wee-ette’s room. She told me to release the seventh book only if the family needed it, only in case of emergency. This is an emergency! The new ending is hurtling toward us all! Wee-ette! I call out. Wee-ette! It’s time! Now!

  I run to the windows, grab hold of the curtains, and pull with all of my weight until the rods break from their wall hooks like hollow bird bones. This is what Wee-ette taught me when she read the bird books to me—that every space has a space within it.

  I pull the rods apart. The curtains huff and fall. I pick up a rod and shake it. The pages, rolled up tight, slip from the rod, loose, and shiver to the floor.

  I shake the other rod. Pages, all clumped, hit the carpet. I pick up the bundle and throw it into the air—flight, flight as it unfurls.

  I don’t know what to do next. But there is only one thing, really.

  Leave.

  It’s my turn.

  I rush into Ruthie’s bedroom. I open the window. I climb out onto that small roof. It’s raining now. Cool drops touch my skin. I get right to the edge. If I leave, my mother and Ruthie will be drawn together, knotted. My mother’s need will roam to Ruthie, and Ruthie will be tended to, at long last.

  A light shines in Benny Elderman’s bedroom. His body holds a space, a cavity, that he carries around with him—maybe for his soul. I imagine being with Benny in his room, two side-by-side soul cases wearing fedoras. That’s possible because the book is loose—the seventh book.

  I kick off one shoe. It falls. I kick off the other, and it falls too.

  Bodies fell from the sky.

  I take a deep breath, spread my arms wide—and I jump.

  A human. A girl, but not a girl. A woman. A woman in a blue dress. Not a bird. Then the earth is there.

  The wind is knocked clean from my lungs. I lie there.

  Wee-ette, your words are all free now. And the story can go wherever it needs to go. Like a string was broken but now it’s mended. I’m the little knot. There will be a pact to make all of this new. I gasp as my lungs fill up. I stand on my own two feet and run.

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Acts of Love

  Ruth

  I almost saved your mother’s life!” Ron says. His eyes are roving madly; he’s in the home of Harriet Wolf, after all these years. He crosses his arms on his chest as if trying to contain his heart, or perhaps to restrain himself from reaching to touch things that Harriet Wolf may have once touched. Pim and Pom claw at his pant legs. “You should have seen her!”

  “It was bad,” Justin says, wearing a ball cap twisted to one side. “Her legs were just poking out, all pale and deadly.”

  “I was fine!” Eleanor says. “Hell’s bells! I can lie down wherever I want to. It’s my own goddamn house.”

  “I’m going to wait in the car,” Justin says. He’s not used to being spoken to sharply. Ron gives him a nod of approval, and Justin is gone.

  Behind me, George is half hidden by the kitchen door. “Eleanor,” he says, but no one really seems to have heard him.

  Overhead, Tilton has quieted down. Is she in bed? Crying? I pushed her too hard. In some sense Eleanor was right to be worried. Tilton is delicate, after all.

  I glance at my father. What does he think of this place, its stagnation, its utter frozenness? Does he grasp that the house’s inability to move forward in time has something to do with him?

  Eleanor sits at the dining room table, her back to the kitchen, head bowed, but with one fist clenching and unclenching the tablecloth.

  The tablecloth—white with pale yellow embroidered flowers. My mother found it and spread it over the table. And according to Ron, she was found prostrate underneath it, the same place where I once made my home as a little girl. Was this an act of love?

  Gottleib says, “The whole thing almost gave me a heart attack! I’m next, you know! It’s just a matter of time!”

  I walk to my mother and stand beside her. When she looks up, I see the slightest palsy of her head. It’s just a matter of time. “George is here,” I say.

  “And?” Eleanor says, possibly without registering the information.

  I sweep my hand across the embroidered flowers of the tablecloth, as lightly as if I’m reading Braille. My desires, I realize, are as childish as Tilton’s. I want my family back together again. I am about to say “Nothing,” because I can’t put words to these desires, but then my mother reaches across the table and grabs my hand, squeezing my knuckles. This is supposed to mean everything. It can’t, of course. But in this moment, Eleanor and I bot
h want it to mean everything. That alone—the two of us wanting the same thing—strikes me as miraculous.

  George walks into the dining room. “Shouldn’t we check on Tilton?” he says. “It’s very quiet up there.” And that quickly, the mood is dashed.

  Eleanor stands, her knuckles pressed into the table, and then wheels around, gripping the back of the chair. She glares at George. “How dare you.”

  He rubs his hands together as if they’re cold and then looks at the floor. “I think someone should check on her.”

  “Something’s wrong,” I say, and my heart flutters.

  Eleanor heads for the stairs. “Tilton!” she screams.

  There’s no answer.

  “Is everything okay?” Ron says.

  I run up the stairs and down the hall, heavy footfalls behind me.

  The door to Wee-ette’s bedroom is wide open. Paper lies scattered everywhere—curled individual sheets and clumps like scrolls. The heavy-duty curtain rods have been ripped from their hooks and stripped of the curtains.

  George comes into the room and says, “What is this?”

  “Wee-ette’s book,” I whisper. Tilton knew where it was all along. I rush from the room and call, “Tilton! Tilton!” But I know already that I won’t get an answer. She’s gone.

  I throw open Tilton’s bedroom door. The magazine cutouts of various bird species shudder on the walls. The room is empty. Hearing more voices on the stairs as I go, I walk quickly to my own bedroom.

  George is there already, leaning out the window. “It was open when I came in,” he says. “It’s raining like mad!” He pulls his upper body back in through the window, clipping the top of his head. He rubs the spot. “Do you think she jumped?”

  “She jumped,” I say. “She’s gone.”

  The others have found Wee-ette’s manuscript. I can hear them all chattering. Ron’s voice rises up, admonishing everyone, “Don’t touch it! Don’t touch it!”

  I walk into the hall and find my husband. His hair is wild. He puts one hand on his forehead, the other on his waist. “Ruth, you won’t believe it.”

  I know I’ll leave him. It’s over. I’m not going to a wedding or a Harriet Wolf Society gala. I’ll be on a plane to see Hailey within days. I want to fight for her, and the best way to do that is to go to where she is and hover. Hover with love. Hover madly. Perhaps we’re all doomed to fail as mothers, but if so, it’s better to err on the side of showing too much love, not too little.

  I need to be with Hailey. Soon enough, Ron will just be someone I once knew very well.

  “We found it,” he says, his voice a holy whisper. “And it’s in first person. You have to see this. It’s historic, Ruth. Historic!” He steps back into the room, gets down on all fours, and starts reading a page on the floor at a breathless pace, but he stops and looks up. “Eppitt? Who’s Eppitt?” he says with a quick exhale, and then he answers his own question: “He’s an entirely new character! This is a whole new novel!” Eleanor is turning a slow circle in her mother’s bedroom, taking in the damage.

  “Easy now, Eleanor,” Mrs. Gottleib says, her hands outstretched as if she’s ready to catch her. “Easy now.”

  But after all the years of hating vultures, Eleanor doesn’t even notice Ron or the villain in the only fairy tale that she ever told me: George. For this singular moment she doesn’t even seem to register that the child she’s dedicated her life to protecting is gone. She grabs a bedpost and drops to one knee. She picks up a few pieces of paper—not to read them, no. She presses them to her cheek. “My mother,” she says. “She’s been here all this time.” She holds the pages to her chest like they’re part of a hand-knit blanket. She looks at me, her face streaked with tears.

  On one of the sheets on the floor, I spot that name again, the one that Tilton used for the mongrel king: Eppitt Clapp. “She’s written a love story,” I say. “A true one.”

  “Let’s not rush the interpretations,” Ron says dubiously.

  I kneel next to my mother and put my hand on her back. “Tilton’s gone,” I say, “but I’m here.” My mother lets the pages fall to the floor and she hugs me, both of us still on our knees, and though it felt as if I weren’t ever really here, I am now. “Let’s go find Tilton,” I tell my mother.

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Bloomed

  Harriet

  I only saw Eppitt Clapp one more time in my life.

  I was at a book signing in New York City. It would be my last. Because of him? Yes, but I was tired too—of being handled, of strangers thinking they knew me, intimately, of being a woman writer in a man’s world.

  Two boys came up in the signing line. One was eleven or so, about Eleanor’s age at the time, the other a bit younger, a tagalong. The older boy had already bought his copy and it was well-worn—the kind of thing the bookstore hated to see when there was a stack of new books beside me, for sale. But I had a policy of signing any of my books that made their way to me—new or old. Nervous, the older boy tried to get the book opened to the right page to have it signed.

  “Here you go,” I said. “I’ll do it.” The line behind him was long. “Whom do I make it out to? You?” I was curled over the book, poised to write.

  “No,” the boy said. “Make it to my father.”

  “What’s your father’s name?”

  “Eppitt,” the boy said.

  I froze a moment, my pen bleeding on the page. “Eppitt what?” I asked, unmoving.

  “Clapp.”

  I lifted my chin then, and I looked up at the two of them. The older boy had shiny dark eyes and gave a wide smile, but the younger one, the tagalong, had Eppitt’s buckled nose, his quick eyes, a familiar swirled cowlick. I craned my neck, looking for Eleanor. She often stacked books so they were already opened to the signature page. I spotted her about twenty feet away, opening a new box with a salesgirl. Eleanor loved this work, the efficacy, the adulthood.

  “Okay, then!” I said. “With a C or a K?”

  “What?”

  “Never mind,” I said.

  I wrote, “Eppitt Clapp, Happy reading! Sincerely, Harriet Wolf.” I stared at the page. People shifted in line behind the boys. I added under my name, “Aka W. W.” Wolf Woman. Would he remember? “Is your father here?” I asked.

  “He doesn’t like crowds,” the older boy said. “He’s waiting outside.”

  “Just as well,” I said, but I didn’t hand the book back to him.

  “He wanted me to tell you he didn’t die.”

  Sterbe nicht. He’d kept his promise. “Tell him that I didn’t die either,” I said.

  “And he said he had something for you on page thirteen.”

  My hands were fluttering. I turned the pages. There on page thirteen, nestled in close to the binding, was his half of the piece of string, looped a few times. I placed my finger on it and drew it down the page. I cupped it in my palm. “Thank you. Tell him thank you.”

  “Okay,” the boy said.

  I shut the book, touching its cover for a moment, and then slid it to him. The boy smiled and almost bowed. He grabbed his little brother’s hand and they ran off toward the door.

  The next person in line was a blonde woman. She wanted to know when the next book was coming out and what was going to happen to Daisy. “I don’t know,” I whispered.

  “Excuse me?”

  I stood up, pulled my coat out from under the skirted table, and put it on.

  “Aren’t you going to sign my book?”

  “I’ll be back,” I told her. “I just have to…” And I turned and ran through the stacks, past the cashier, out the door. It had been snowing, but there wasn’t much left, and what was still there was coated in car exhaust. I looked in one direction and then the other.

  I saw Eppitt then, from the back. He was holding the boys’ hands. They were crossing the street. Eppitt held the book under his arm. So he had two sons, one of whom was clearly his own, biologically. He had a wife, a house.

  But
I remembered him under the Duck Porch, giving me a tour of our make-believe kitchen, our dining room, our imaginary plates with blue flowers ringing their edges.

  Now he’d made a real home—without me.

  I wanted to shout his name but I couldn’t. What would come of it?

  As if he sensed me standing there, he looked back over his shoulder. When he saw me, he stopped and turned. His mouth opened. A white cloud of breath. He fitted the book in the pocket of his overcoat. He raised his hands to his chest and, fitting one hand under and then through the other, he opened his hand wide.

  Bloomed.

  Love isn’t how we’re doomed and blessed. It’s how we are bloomed. He remembered that, which meant he remembered all of it.

  The boys stopped and looked back too, trying to discern what had gotten their father’s attention, and from this distance, the little one looked just like Eppitt trapped behind the glass window at the top of King’s Cottage. Before the boys had a chance to spot me—and what must I have looked like, alone and breathless?—Eppitt tugged them forward. They walked on.

  Soon Eleanor was there, panicked. “Why did you run away? Why are you out here? It’s freezing cold!”

  I don’t know what I said.

  But eventually I put my hands on the top of her head, and then down along her soft hair, cupping her face. “I’m right here,” I said. “Right here.”

  And I still am.

  One day I will die, and though my Eleanor saved me and kept me alive, and though Tilton is burned into my mind, into my heart, into my eyes when I close them, and Ruthie is a magnificent force like a silent whirlwind stuffed into a small body—a jar of lightning—I know what I will whisper when I die.