The Silent Strength of Stones

by Nina Kiriki Hoffman

  She didn’t say anything, just stared into my eyes, her gray eyes wide, her eyebrows up.

  I tried again. “I didn’t know—”

  She looked at me a moment longer, then shook her head. “You knew,” she said.

  Heat tingled in my cheeks. “I stopped,” I said.

  She sighed and came around the counter. “Go get lunch.”

  I didn’t know if Pop had gone back to the motel office, which was where he spent most of his days, watching movies and the occasional sports event on satellite TV and waiting for customers or Candy, the high school girl who cleaned rooms for him and whom he took great delight in ordering around. If he was still back in the kitchen I didn’t want to run into him.

  For the second time that day, I headed over to Mabel’s.

  “You’re going to give me a heart attack,” she said as I sat down.

  I grinned at her and checked my wallet. I had some money I’d made doing chores for various people around the lake. I hadn’t decided what I was saving for this summer. Last summer I had bought a portable CD​/​radio​/​tape deck with headphones, and it had made the winter a lot more bearable, until the night Pop got mad because I had had the headphones on and hadn’t heard him call me to fix supper. I still had all the pieces. I was hoping Jeremy would be able to help me fix it. He had an aptitude for that.

  Might as well spend money on food, no matter what Pop would say; at least once I had eaten food he couldn’t take it away from me and break it.

  “Why don’t you just give me a cheeseburger instead?” I said.

  “Well, sure,” said Mabel. “You okay, Nick?”

  “I’m not sick, if that’s what you mean.”

  “It’s not,” she said, and walked away before I could think that through.

  Junie brought my cheeseburger to the table. She was two years older than I, and I had always thought she’d leave Sauterelle as soon as she turned eighteen, the way I planned to leave next year. But here she was, waitressing at Mabel’s. “Want ketchup?” she asked as she set the plate down. Golden fries lay like a logjam around the burger.

  “Sure,” I said. I watched her legs as she walked away. Great calf muscles, even in flat shoes. A bruise the size of a quarter behind her left knee, her stockings almost concealing it but not quite.

  I had been thinking about leaving Sauterelle since I turned eleven and Pop made me work more than two hours a day. After Mom took off, I thought about leaving all day, every day. Then the lake would freeze hard enough to skate on, or I would find a bird’s nest and see the gape-mouthed near-bald babies peeping in unison, or catch sight of a dew-laden spiderweb at dawn, or listen to the frog chorus on spring nights. I would lean against a pine tree in the spring when all the branchlets ended in light green bunches of needles, and I would feel the life rising up through the tree like a slow explosion. Places in the forest drew me to them. Stones and earth and fallen logs asked me to touch them. I would dip fingers in the lake in the morning, or press my cheek against Father Boulder, and I would wonder how I could ever leave.

  I remembered what life had been like in the valley for the first half of my life, before Pop packed me and Mom up and brought us here: we had lived in a horrible basement apartment while Pop worked construction and saved money to buy the store. Mom had been afraid to let me leave the apartment by myself, and whenever we walked somewhere together, she was always pointing out trash or broken glass or graffiti, or telling me to avoid people who looked like that or that or that, and tugging me closer to her. At least when we came to Sauterelle Lake she let me go outside by myself.

  I loved everything about the lake, except living at home with Pop. And even that had its moments.

  One really hot summer evening three years earlier, with the sun taking forever to go down, Junie and I had sat on the Salomans’ roof, smoking filched cigarettes, coughing, and talking about where we would go and what we would do when we left. She figured she’d be a movie star, or at least on TV. I thought maybe I’d be a cop or an FBI guy. At that point I hadn’t gotten my spy route set up yet, but I had already started sneaking around and spying on people. I could find things out. I could keep secrets. I figured I had the basic traits necessary to be a good detective.

  We spun dreams and exchanged smoke-flavored kisses and watched as Venus brightened out of the ashes of sunset, the sound of crickets sheeting through the night around us, and I believed my dreams, and I think she believed hers. That was before George found her.

  George worked Archie’s Dock during the summer and pretty much hibernated during the winter, aside from hunting everything when it was in season and sometimes when it wasn’t. He lived back in the woods, and Junie had married him and lived there too now.

  She brought me a red plastic squeeze bottle of ketchup. When I looked up, her gaze slipped sideways, not meeting mine. I watched her walk away, the bruise winking as her knee bent.

  When I looked around again, the small red-haired girl from the back of the black truck stood beside my table, staring at me. I studied her. She looked around eleven, or possibly a stunted thirteen. She had pale, pale skin. The dusty rose of her lips was like a color seen through clouded glass; her eyes were an intense amber. Her off-white T-shirt was smudged with dirt and grass stains, and her pale arms bore the healing scabs of scrapes.

  I tried half a smile on her. “Want a French fry?” I asked, holding one up.

  “Can you see me?” she said.

  I looked behind myself, then back at her. “Huh?”

  “Can you see me? Can you hear me?”

  “Sure. Why not?”

  She slid into the chair opposite mine. She reached out tentatively, then plucked a French fry from my plate and nibbled it. Her brow furrowed. “What is it?” she whispered.

  I blinked. “It’s made from a potato.”

  She licked her upper lip. She nibbled the fry. “Salt,” she said.

  “Yeah. You deep fat fry a chunk of potato, and salt it afterward.”

  “Salt between us.” She looked at me with narrowed eyes.

  I glanced at the salt shaker on the table between us, then up into her face.

  “What’s your name?” she asked.

  “Nick Verrou. What’s yours?”

  She stared at the tabletop. She bit her fry in half, chewed, and swallowed. After a moment, she said, “Lauren Keye.”

  “Pleased to meet you,” I said, holding out a hand.

  She had a tiny smile, just a slight stretching of the corners of her mouth. She gripped my hand but didn’t shake it. Her hand was small and tough and warm. She held on for what seemed like a long time.

  “Nick?” Mabel came over to the table. “Who are you talking to? What are you doing?”

  I cocked my head at Lauren. I wondered if just holding hands with her in public could be misconstrued. It wasn’t like I was doing anything to her. She gave me a wide grin and released my hand, her eyes dancing.

  I flexed my hand and grabbed a French fry. “What does it look like I’m doing?”

  “Well, it was hard to tell,” said Mabel. “You were sitting there with your hand out, like you forgot how to move your arm. You sure you’re all right?”

  I stared at Lauren. She leaned her head back and laughed. Mabel didn’t respond to her at all.

  A paralyzing cold gripped me for a moment, then thawed, leaving me strangely relaxed. I wiped cold sweat off my forehead and upper lip with my napkin. I must be imagining this little redheaded kid. If I could conjure up Willow and a wolf, why not this? I said, “I was trying to think through a yoga exercise I saw in a book.” My voice wobbled.

  “You haven’t touched your burger.”

  I looked at my plate. I looked at my watch. I grabbed my cheeseburger and bit it. “It’s great. Sorry, Mabel, I’m kind of distracted right now.”

  She patted me on the head and went back behind the counter, casting an anxious glance at me before disappearing into the kitchen.

  I stared at my plate for a litt
le while, then, feeling shivery, looked at Lauren. Maybe I was really in bed and almost asleep, and everything that had happened so far today was stories I had made up. But I sure felt awake.

  “Ha!” she said.

  I picked up my cheeseburger and munched. I couldn’t taste it, and it was hard to swallow, I washed it down with water.

  “Oh, come on,” said Lauren.

  I chewed. I looked at her and away. I drank water.

  She took one of my fries and ate it.

  “How does that work?” I whispered. “How come they don’t see a fry floating in the air?”

  “When I touch it, it disappears,” she said, and giggled.

  “But you touched me, and I didn’t—”

  “You’re alive, silly!”

  I wasn’t sure that made the perfect sense she seemed to think it made. I swallowed the last of my hamburger and wrapped the rest of the fries in a paper napkin; Pop was scornful of waste. I checked my watch. Pop had said I could have just a half hour lunch, but I had always taken an hour. Mariah would want to leave as soon as she could, I thought; she hated facing Pop even more than she hated facing me. But I wasn’t ready to go home yet. “Come on,” I whispered to Lauren. I put a tip on the table for Junie, paid for my meal, and left without looking back.

  I walked around back of Mabel’s to the path up the hill, then perched on a rock in the first clearing. Sun struck down through the pines. Lauren jumped up and sat beside me, her hard muscular little shoulder pressed against my arm. “Can I have another?” she said.

  I opened the grease-soaked napkin. We ate silently for a while. For an invisible and possibly imaginary kid she could really eat. Her shoulder felt intensely real, as real as the rock under me. She even smelled like a kid who hadn’t bathed in a little too long. I kept trying to think this through and stubbing my mind on it. The edges refused to match up.

  What would Lord Calardane do?

  Cancel that. What would my science teacher say? Collect data, observe phenomena, come up with hypotheses. Data: something had helped me eat my French fries. I could see this kid, and apparently Mabel couldn’t. That wasn’t very scientific, but just for a little while, maybe I should entertain the hypothesis that this kid was real and other people couldn’t see her. If I thought it through, I could probably devise a test to prove she was real. I would need some other observers for that, though, and I didn’t have time to work on it now.

  I could taste again, even though I still felt terminally confused.

  “Salt between us,” she said when we had finished.

  “What does that mean?”

  She cocked her head. “It means we mustn’t hurt each other in a lasting way. You can’t eat with your enemy.”

  “That’s weird,” I said. I’d heard about food taboos, but I’d never heard about this one before. I shook out the empty napkin, wadded it up, keeping the least greasy parts on the outside, and put it in my pocket. “Lauren?”

  “What?”

  “What are you—who—why’d you come up to me in the restaurant? What do you want with me?”

  “Mama said you could see us even when we were warded, and I just wanted to check it out.”

  “Warded,” I said.

  “Mmm.” She launched herself from the rock, floated through air and landed without a sound on the path below. “Fixed so people can’t see us. You saw Mama and Dad at the house.”

  “And Pop didn’t,” I whispered. I remembered Willow’s morning comfort in the water and her nakedness, the sense flowing from her that she was free of any watchers, even though I watched.

  I looked at the girl on the path below me, and thought, this isn’t happening. N-O, no. No way.

  Or maybe it was. Wine and dine that hypothesis. Take it out to dinner. See if it wants a second date.

  “So I just thought I’d check,” she said. She grinned wide. “Then I had to try that food. Now we have salt between us, Nick.”

  “How come I can see you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “But other people can’t. Other people really can’t?”

  She shook her head. “There are some Domishti people with whatchamacallit, second sight. They’ve been a problem for us in the past. Mama says they’re rare. She’s irritated that you happen to be one, ’cause it can really mess things up for us. Other than that, only people warded the same way I am can see us. And I am warded. I’m not strong in my other disciplines yet, but I know my warding. Light is my friend, and it hides me.”

  I squinted at her. “But you’re right there.” I reached out and touched her shoulder. Solid and warm.

  “Well, yes.” She touched her index finger to her mouth. “For you. Not for anybody else in the restaurant, though, unless I bump into them. Maybe light likes you too. Maybe you see more than light. I don’t know.”

  I thought of my mother, how she had curled my fingers around a green rock. Her hand was so much bigger than mine in this memory, I must have been just a little kid. “Hold it tight. Hold it tight,” she had said, stroking the tips of her fingers along the backs of mine. She had whispered words. Light leaked out between my fingers.

  I blinked and the memory vanished. “Light likes me?”

  “Maybe,” said Lauren.

  Well, it was almost a hypothesis. Coming up with a test for this one would be harder than for the other one, but it would be fun to think about. I said, “This salt-between-us thing. Does that work just between you and me, or does it count for your whole family?”

  “If you make a promise, does it bind your whole family?” she asked.

  I imagined trying to get Pop to honor a promise I might make, like, say, being nice to Lauren, and knew it was stupid to even think of it. “Nope,” I said.

  “Well, it does for my family, unless I forget to tell them. ’Bye.” She turned and ran up the hill, so quickly and silently she vanished like smoke.

  “Ruf.”

  I paused just before stepping from the woods into the parking lot behind Mabel’s, and glanced to the right.

  “Ruh,” said the wolf, poking his muzzle out between bracken and thimbleberries.

  I was already late to relieve Mariah. Pop was probably pitching a fit, and it wasn’t fair to Mariah to leave her there like a horseshoe stake. I thought that, and then I was squatting, holding out my hand to the wolf, who edged out of the brush and nosed my hand and wrist. When we had finished this greeting, I stroked his head. He pushed up and licked me on the face, and I hugged him, feeling very strange, pressing my face against his warm furry neck and smelling dog and a wilderness of crushed herbs and, faintly, manure. He stood still and tense in my embrace for a long moment, then said, “Uff.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, releasing him. The dream was alive in my mind. The wolf and I belonged to each other, and our whole purpose was to explore. We went places without fear, night or day. Even home. Pop might think twice if I had a wolf beside me.

  Pop might think once and go grab his double-barreled shotgun.

  “Ruh,” said the wolf, and licked my face again.

  “If I hear you at night, if you hear me, you’re not going to come eat me, are you?”

  He grinned wide, his tongue lolling between his icicle teeth. A chuckle of air huffed from his mouth.

  “Easy for you to say,” I said. “I bet you’re not scared when you’re running around at night. Was that you howling last night? Who was with you?”

  He closed his mouth and stared at me, then turned and vanished into the underbrush.

  I felt strange. Abandoned and bereft, for the second time in ten minutes. Was it just ten minutes? I checked my watch. Mariah was going to kill me.

  These summer people had turned things around. I was supposed to be the one watching everybody else in secrecy, and here they were, sneaking up on me, watching me when I didn’t even know they were there.

  I hit the parking lot running, touched a finger to my face where the wolf had licked it. A wolf, an ultimate wild thing, had let m
e touch him. Had touched me back. I could put up with a lot for that moment.

  “For that, you’re going to spend the evening doing inventory,” Pop said.

  “We did inventory two weeks ago,” I said. We did it every quarter, and I hated it.

  “Doesn’t matter,” said Pop. “You’re doing it not because it’s useful but because you need discipline, understand?”

  “But—” But tonight was the dance. Friday night. My night off. I wasn’t sure if Willow would ever return from the place she had vanished to, but maybe, just maybe, she was real, and she was planning to stop by and pick me up. Paul might be at the dance—he usually went—and maybe I could find out if we were still friends. Maybe somebody else from Willow’s family would be there, too, and I could try to detect more about them. Maybe I could talk to Kristen…

  Maybe I was going to spend the night in the store, counting tubes of sunscreen and bottles of bug repellent.

  “And while you’re doing it, you be thinking about common courtesy, good business, and keeping your word. I bought you that damned fancy watch for a reason.”

  I stared into his eyes, then lowered my gaze to the floor. It was never a good idea to look Pop in the eye for very long.

  “Now I have to get back to the motel. I heard a car pull up.” He stalked past me and out the door, leaving the sound of bells behind.

  I closed up the store at five, as usual, and made dinner for me and granddad and Pop. We ate in silence.

  After dinner cleanup I went back to the store and started counting things, making hash marks on a yellow legal pad. I had just finished totaling the candy bar rack when Willow tapped on the door’s window glass.

  3

  Conjuring Acts

  I felt a clenching in my throat, and realized I had stopped breathing. I pulled in breath and looked at Willow through the smeared glass. She was completely visible. She had on a close-fitting red dress scooped low in front, with a full, frilly skirt that only came down to mid-thigh. Yellow Klamath weed sat like a twined halo on her dark head. It was a small flower I had never considered pretty before, but on her it glowed. Her eyes were only slightly more orange.