Blue Window

by Adina Rishe Gewirtz

  At dusk, as the sky bled and the trees gathered shadows round their ankles and knees, the howl of the mist rose, bending with a whistle at the newcomers who dared traverse it. She watched as the girl Nell turned that way, wincing.

  Laysia promised to return with the others and then set out through the falling light, wading through fireflies that rose from the grass to meet the shadows. She returned to the fourth gate in time to find slim figures bent in the dusk. They had just emerged from the fog. Briefly, she glanced at it — a white haze that stained the dark. Then she turned to the children and found herself momentarily tongue-tied at sight of their half-remembered faces. She called the names she had been given: Susan, Max, Jean. But there were only two.

  The older steered the younger toward her as they climbed the last of the rise, stumbling. The older girl raised her head so her eyes caught the faint light of the crescent moon.

  “Do you have my sisters?”

  The thin moon and white stars could not brighten the wood, and so Laysia led them back through such darkness that they were forced to follow like the smallest of children, clutching her skirts. The girl called Jean sniffed and broke into tears as they went, and Susan hushed her. Laysia thought of nothing to say. She had failed to grow wise in the way other women she’d known had grown wise, full of the deep-welled passions of age — passion for children and the future. Instead, she had gained the meek wisdom of solitude. She wondered if Lan had become a father. She doubted it. They were lonely souls, she and her brother. He had been perhaps more lonely even than she, leaving home to give her life. If later he had pushed her away, sent her unknowing to a terrible fate, that did not erase the first gift. It never could.

  Kate strained to hear it. Whatever it was Laysia had heard, whatever Nell heard, she wanted to hear it, too. She stood at the window, chewing a knuckle and watching the fireflies twinkle as the dark erased the lines between the trees and crept over the garden and took the sky. For a long time, she could pick out nothing but the chirp of crickets outside and the sound of Nell behind her, kicking a chair leg as she turned the pages of The Age of Anam, which Laysia had left on the table.

  But a million years seemed to pass, or maybe two million, while she stood there. After a while, she noticed a faint rumble beneath the crickets. It vibrated warningly from the woods, an animal roused from sleep. She glanced back at Nell and saw her hunched down, her shoulders pulled in as she frowned into the book.

  Eventually it receded, and Kate was back to listening to the empty night. She had begun imagining she could pick out the soft, combustive hiss of the fireflies by the time footsteps sounded outside. Nell reached the door first, leaping from her chair and flinging it open.

  “Nell! You’re okay!”

  Susan’s voice, sharp with relief, not dazed, not faint, the way it had been the other night.

  Laysia stepped through the door, and Susan rushed through behind her, grabbing a grinning Nell and swiveling to snatch Kate nearly off her feet. Susan was back! Now everything would be better! Laughter bubbled in Kate’s chest, and she almost shouted. Susan sounded like Susan! Now they were all together. Now they’d —

  “Where’s Max?”

  Nell wasn’t grinning anymore.

  The door had closed behind Jean. And Jean’s eyes were red. Kate’s rising laughter turned abruptly into a stomachache. She saw Susan flush.

  “He didn’t come with you?” Nell asked. “He stayed there?”

  Susan started talking too fast.

  “He doesn’t know! They wouldn’t let us tell him. We went again today, and they stopped us. And we had to come out to look for you and Kate!”

  All Susan’s happy relief had soured, and she scowled down at Kate. “You should have waited for me! Why didn’t you wait?”

  Kate cringed and glanced at Laysia, who had gone to sit in the chair by the fireplace. The woman looked from one to the other of them, a little bewildered. Couldn’t she tell Susan how bad it had been? But Laysia said nothing, and Kate couldn’t find the words, not in front of Nell, who looked now like she might hit somebody.

  Jean burst into tears, and Nell reddened.

  “How could he not know?” Nell said. “He’d know if he wanted to! He’s too in love with his new teacher to know.”

  Laysia cleared her throat uncomfortably, and Susan shot a warning look at Nell. At home, they knew better than to fight in front of strangers. Nell glared at Susan and swung around.

  “Teach us what he’s learning,” she said to Laysia. “Teach us everything.”

  But the fight wasn’t over. Kate knew that much.

  The thundercloud had been hovering from the second Susan and Jean shut the door behind them without Max. It burst the moment Laysia went to bed and the four of them were finally alone together.

  “You’re nuts if you think he doesn’t know,” Nell said, turning on Susan. “How could he not know? Didn’t he hear the gong?”

  Susan grimaced. “It wasn’t like before! They didn’t sound it. Zirri came and told us and Mistress Meva. He’s probably thinking we’re still there, all okay.”

  Nell snorted. “Okay? We haven’t been okay since we got there. He saw you! He saw all of it! Or he should have! Don’t tell me he didn’t know. He should have known!”

  Susan looked pained. Kate slipped between them.

  “He doesn’t know,” she said to Nell. “Otherwise he’d have come, like last time.”

  Jean made it worse by crying.

  “Shh! You’ll wake her! Max’ll come looking for us when he sees we’ve gone!” Susan said. “I know he will!”

  “If he even notices we’re gone!” Nell cut in. “When was the last time he visited? Two days? Three? Maybe he’ll find out next month. Where will we be then?”

  “Don’t exaggerate!” Susan snapped. “He’ll come. I left him a note.”

  Nell rolled her eyes. “A note. Great.”

  Kate listened to them with mounting desperation.

  “A note’s good,” she said. “Maybe they’ll give it to him, like he sends those letters! He’ll come!”

  She looked over at Susan and saw the lines rumpling her forehead again. “Don’t worry, Susan.”

  But Susan looked back in surprise, wincing a little.

  And then Jean wailed, “You said he’d come!”

  “He will!” Susan said in a frantic whisper. “I said it because he will!”

  The fight went on like that, Susan repeating things, and Nell glaring, and Kate trying to stand between them until they were both angry at her, too, and told her to get into bed next to Jean, to keep quiet, to let them think.

  So Kate lay beside Jean, who even in sleep shuddered from all the crying she’d done, and thought she’d never heard such loud thinking in her life.

  We had dreams at home, before we came,” Susan said the next morning.

  The previous evening, in the temporary truce that had followed Laysia’s promise to teach them, Nell had showed her sister the passage of the orchard vision. Susan blanched when she read it, then sat brooding over it until Laysia had gone to bed.

  “At least Kate did,” Susan went on now. “Max, too, I think. Maybe someone was calling us. I didn’t know that could happen.”

  Laysia saw Kate and Jean exchange a glance, and Kate looked worried. At mention of their missing brother, the dark-haired girl, Jean, blinked and drew the back of her hand across her eyes.

  None of them looked steel edged. They seemed too soft to come from the world of iron Tur Nurayim had described.

  “What’s it like, the place you come from?” Laysia asked Susan. She tried to imagine a world of hard lines, of iron-skinned people fenced off one from the next. So many walls! She wondered how one moved in a place like that. And yet the window had opened.

  “It’s different,” the child said. “It’s so hard to describe how, when we use the same words and don’t mean the same things with them. Nobody there can make water from nothing, or peaches, or move the wind. We have tools �
�� machines — to do things for us.”

  It did sound like a leaden place when the girl said that. On the other side of that window, could one could stand on a mountain and see the breadth of things, as she liked to do standing in the sea clearing? Were there seas there?

  The greatest of the sages were the seers who had walked the orchard and seen, perhaps, more than this world alone. To learn to take the clay of life and reshape it, one must see. But Tur Nurayim had also spoken of the heartbeat of the world, and the scholar’s ear to hear it. Laysia wondered if in that other place, there were those with such eyes and ears.

  Laysia had said she would teach them, but in the light of day, with the noise of the mist threatening and four faces out of dreams turned expectantly her way, she nearly lost her nerve, and so decided to lead them as far from the valley as she could, toward the clearing over the sea, where the voice of the mist would not harry them.

  As they walked down toward the seaward path, Kate stayed close beside her, her honey hair lit with the cool sunlight that streamed through the morning wood.

  Laysia had thought her a silent child until now, when she began to ask questions.

  “Do you have to be almost grown to learn to do things?” she asked. “I mean, Nell can do them. Do you think I’ll be able to?”

  Laysia had no answer to that. She doubted it, but she didn’t like to disappoint the child. And after all, what was doubt anymore, when she’d seen such wonders?

  “What’s that? Look at it! It flashes!”

  They had emerged from the break in the trees that signaled the last clearing of the high land. Far off, a great blaze of light flared up.

  “The crystal cliff,” she told the girl. She looked toward the wave of glass that jutted from the mountain range to the south. The morning sun sparked on its facets and ridges to dazzle the southern sky.

  “Is that natural?” asked Susan. “It just grew that way?”

  “No, it was made during the last upheaval, as the scholars fled.”

  They stood and stared at it awhile, that glass wave like a flame, frozen in its leap toward the sky. And yet the water, still alive, flowed beneath that lucent crust. Laysia wondered if that was what the world on the other side of the window was like, beneath its rigid armor. Perhaps it was alive and warm, like these children.

  The wood smelled of moss and dirt and wild mint, and in it, the slight noise of that terrible cloud Kate was learning to hear made walking heavy. Or maybe it was that she herself had grown heavy, Kate thought. She considered that she must weigh at least a thousand pounds this morning. Max had told her once that if she ever took a walk on Jupiter, she’d weigh as much as a young gorilla. Maybe here she weighed as much as an old one. She was very tired after last night’s fighting, and each step through that fuzz of noise made her heavier, heavier than Jupiter, maybe, and two or three grown-up gorillas. So she was surprised when they broke through the line of trees and the tang of the far-off sea washed the weight away.

  Kate looked out toward the water. In the distance, the glass cliff sparked pink and white, a wave frozen as it crested. Below, she could see the blurred line of the beach and the blue haze of the moving sea.

  Susan threw her head back and breathed deep. Kate glanced her way and was relieved to see that her face finally seemed clear of trouble and distraction.

  Laysia, too, stood a little while looking out at the sea. Then she left them standing there and went around the edge of the wood, collecting sticks. She handed one to each of them and sat, cross-legged, in the clover. Kate took a seat next to her, her back to the wood. Though they were well away from the place where the clover petered into bare dirt and the rock of the mountain ended in open air, she felt better keeping an eye on it.

  The others sat, too, and waited for Laysia to say something, but she only stared at the stick she’d set on the ground in front of her. After a second, it drifted into the air and began to rise and fall in a pattern that mimicked the distant waves.

  Jean laughed, startled. Laysia smiled, and Kate watched the woman’s stick flip over, seem to bow, then settle slowly to earth with the motion of fluttering leaves.

  “Now you,” she said to them. “You try.”

  Kate’s chest tightened. She was afraid to ask how to do it. Maybe she was supposed to know how. Nell and Susan didn’t ask. Instead, Nell folded her arms carefully behind her back and fixed her eye on her own stick.

  “You don’t move the stick, right?” she asked. “You move the air.”

  Susan seemed to understand this strange statement, but the look on Jean’s face told Kate that she didn’t get it, either. Move the air? What did that mean?

  Laysia said nothing, but Nell narrowed her eyes, no longer seeming to look at the stick at all.

  In a moment, Nell’s stick jumped, then floated up over her head, bouncing as if on an invisible current. Not to be outdone, Susan put her hands on her knees, gave the twig in the grass a sharp look, and hunched forward, her shoulders hovering over her folded legs. Her stick shot past her face as if it had been blown from the ground by a sudden geyser.

  “How did you do that?” Kate asked her, astonished.

  Susan was looking skyward. Her stick fell into her waiting hands.

  “I pushed the air,” she said. “And it lifted the stick.”

  This made no more sense to Kate than when Nell had said it, but Nell startled her by explaining.

  “Think,” she said. “You can’t see the air, but it’s there. You can feel it. You feel wind, don’t you? It’s all made up of tiny pieces of air — molecules, they’re called. And they move together, and that’s air. If you can see that, and if you push them together — lots of them — that’s wind. And if you push wind underneath the stick, the stick flies. See?”

  Laysia was nodding. For the first time in a long time, Nell seemed happy, letting her stick leap over invisible waves and dip to surf past her eyebrows. Kate tried to see.

  She thought of air, and wood, and the line between them. She tried to see the tiny, invisible pieces Nell talked about. But she thought, too, of the clover and the birds gossiping in the trees, and the dazzle of the sun reflecting off the crystal cliff. Eventually the twig did flip and lurch, but it didn’t rise.

  She glanced at Jean. Jean’s stick rolled over half-heartedly on the ground like a sick dog.

  “It’s hard,” Jean muttered. She had brought her Barbie in her waistband, and now she pulled it out to play, hunching her shoulders so maybe the older girls wouldn’t see.

  Jean was little. That’s what Susan always said. Kate and Jean were little and had no patience. Kate would not be little that way.

  She tried again. And again. On her sixth attempt at forcing herself to see nothing but pieces of twig and air, the stick rose, shakily, and held at eye level.

  Laysia had been watching.

  “Well done!” she said. “You’ve answered your own question, then.”

  She had, but not quite in the way she’d meant it. She couldn’t do what the others could. She watched Nell’s stick do a jig in the air, watched Susan graduate to making pebbles and even rocks move, and, by the end of the day, Kate had gotten her stick to rise steadily and move in any direction she wanted, even as Jean’s still shook haltingly just beside her shoulders. So she was almost satisfied.

  All day they practiced moving things without touching them, until Kate felt shaky with exhaustion. She wondered why she should be so tired, when they’d been sitting in the clearing all day. They walked back through the woods amid the late-afternoon clamor of birds, and she nearly stumbled. But Susan reached for her hand, to steady her.

  Coming from the clearing back toward the cottage felt like walking into a rainstorm. Everyone drooped. To Kate, it was like taking off in a plane, her ears full and popping with a hateful rushing noise. After a while, it receded, like a bad smell that had grown familiar, but it was there just the same.

  Moods turned, too. Susan’s lips pressed into a thin line. Nell stomped.
Jean was worst of all, maybe because she was loudest. That evening, she demanded to know how she’d get her letters when Max didn’t know where to send them and ordered Susan to take her back down so she could get them.

  Susan looked as if someone had punched her. Without a word, she took a book from Laysia’s shelf, went into the bedroom, and shut the door. Nell had some words, none of which would have been allowed back home. Then she barged out to the garden, where Laysia was harvesting vegetables for supper, and yanked carrots from the ground as if she’d caught them doing something bad.

  “Jean, he’ll come. . . .” Kate tried.

  But Jean shook her head and ran outside to sit behind the house, away from the others. Kate followed her. There was no garden in back, only clover and grass and tall trees crowding the edge of the clearing like children pushing to get out the door at the end of school.

  Jean had unfolded one of Max’s letters. She kept the ones she’d gotten all crumpled in her pocket, and the page she examined now was veined with creases and smudged with fingermarks.

  “Which one is that?” Kate asked her, trying to make conversation.

  “The one about teachers and trains,” Jean said in a muffled voice. Her nose was stuffy from crying.

  “Want to read it to me?” Jean had read them so many times that she knew all the hard words now.

  Jean gave a one-shouldered shrug. “You can read it.”

  Kate took the letter and smoothed it as best she could. She remembered this one. Max’s cramped, dark hand sloped across the page in the fading light.

  “‘Dear Jean,’” she read. Kate glanced at her sister, who made an effort to quiet herself so she could hear, despite the fact that she’d heard it twenty times before.

  “‘It’s a good thing I’ve been spending my days here, even if Nell doesn’t think so. You can tell her I said that.’”

  Jean sniffed loudly, and Kate wondered again if Max knew what had happened to Nell. To all of them.