Glimmering
Page 19
“What?”
“Oh, never mind. So are you, uh—what? A runaway? Or something?”
“Something.” Jack waited for her to go on, but she only inched closer to the fire, strands of lank hair falling across her cheeks. The girl extended her bare toes onto the hearth.
“Nice and warm at least,” Jack suggested.
The girl yawned. Watching her, Jack wondered how he could have ever mistaken her for the child from his dream. She was obviously older, and obviously female. There was a piquant, almost hungry sharpness about her features: hollow cheeks and small pinched nose, black slit of a mouth. No jewelry save a simple gold ring. There was nothing remotely pretty about her, save those deep-set slanted eyes, so deep a blue as to be almost purple in the flickering light. Even now, crouched safely on the hearth, she twitched and glanced suspiciously over her shoulder, as though willing him to leave.
Keeley’s voice sounded from the entry room. There was the thump of her walking stick. A moment later she appeared in the doorway.
“Now, dear.” Jack looked up obediently, but his grandmother was staring at the girl. “Larena said she found you some clothes? Let me see if they fit.”
The girl glanced up but didn’t move. “Stand up,” commanded Keeley. “I want to see, she said they were too big.”
The girl got to her feet. The sweater’s sleeves dangled almost to her calves. Keeley shook her head.
“We’ll have to do better than that,” she said flatly. “Did Larena get you something to eat?”
The girl shrugged. “No.”
“Larena!” Keeley turned and pounded her walking stick on the floor. “Larena—”
From upstairs came a shrill reply.
“Larena will make you something.” Keeley swung back around. She reached to tug at the sweater and scowled. “Why ever did she give you that? Mary Anne would have made three of you.”
Keeley regarded her with icy blue eyes. When Larena entered, she turned away.
“Larena dear, see if there’s any of that soup left.”
“Well.” Jack stood. “I guess I’ll check the furnace.”
He headed downstairs, stopping in the basement bathroom to get a surgical mask from the box Emma had given him. Then he went to the coal cellar, a room the size of a big closet, and started shoveling.
It took forty-three shovelsful and the better part of an hour. Once he could have done it in fifteen minutes. Now the effort exhausted him. After a few minutes he had to pause between loads, turning his face from the rising cloud of black dust. He thought of the vial of Fusax on his nightstand. Had it been only yesterday that he felt so much better? He coughed, imagining the girl upstairs: a stranger’s mouth to feed, a stranger’s body soaking up warmth while Jack struggled in the mansion’s bowels like some medieval lackey.
Finally he was done. Sweating, he trudged back upstairs.
He found his grandmother in the living room, sitting in her wing chair with a tumbler of whiskey on the table beside her. No lamps had been lit. The fire had burned down to embers. “How was the furnace, dear? Did it bother your lungs?”
Jack removed his mask and stuffed it in a pocket. He jabbed ineffectually at the embers with a poker, then settled into a chair. “Fine. No trouble this time.”
“Is there enough coal?”
“Plenty. And it will be spring, soon…”
His voice died as he gazed at the window behind his grandmother, whorled with the pulsing greens and purples of an early sunset. “Well, it will be May, anyhow.”
His grandmother nodded and reached for her glass. “Your father was so set on taking that furnace out, back when he put those solar panels in. I don’t remember now how James talked him out of it.”
Jack shook his head, stifling a yawn. “He didn’t. It would have cost too much to remove it, so they decided to just leave it.”
“Lucky thing.” Keeley tugged at the mohair shawl draped across the back of her chair.
“Where’s the girl?”
“Larena put her to bed in Mary Anne’s room. Where did you say you met her?”
“I met her in the backyard. Under the hydrangeas.”
“Under the hydrangeas! How did she get in?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t ask—she just looked so miserable—”
“Of course, of course.”
“I’ll call someone tomorrow. Emma will know somebody.”
“Have you talked to them? How are they?”
Jack nodded. “A week or so ago. They’ve been busy—well, Emma’s been busy at the hospital, and I guess Jule’s got a few clients in the city. I think it’s hard for them right now—there’s not a lot of work for him…” His voice trailed off.
“Well, doctors are always busier than lawyers,” Keeley said loyally. She loved Jule, who had lived at Lazyland while attending law school at Fordham twenty years before. “People are always getting sick. Especially now.” She sighed. “Did they say when they could come visit?”
“Maybe before too long, if the rain keeps off,” Jack lied. “Emma used all her time off to come take care of me. Every time I talk to them, they want us to move up there with them—”
Keeley shook her head determinedly. “Too far away.”
“I know. They just worry, that’s all.”
“Well, I hope they can find her parents.”
Jack stared at her. “Her parents?” He realized she was talking about the girl. “Oh! Right—”
“She said she lived with someone in the city,” Keeley went on. “I think she was lying. Who would raise a child in the city?”
They sat in silence for several minutes. Then, Jack asked, “What was that Irish word you used before, Grandmother? Like ‘banshee’—?”
Keeley tilted her head, as though listening to faraway music.
“Lunantishee, you mean? That’s what your grandfather used to call me. They were fairies of some kind, I don’t remember. Pretty girls. That’s all I meant.” She looked at him. “Why don’t you go check on her on your way upstairs, dear. Thank you.”
He was being dismissed. “All right. Maybe I’ll try calling Emma tonight—the phone was up a little while ago.”
“Very good, dear.”
He stood and stared out the window. Beyond the line of the Palisades a molten glow lingered, sending ruddy flourishes across the rain-swollen Hudson. Jack felt the strange blurry sensation that overcame him sometimes, when some bright fleck of his childhood surfaced and the terrible weight of the poisoned sky momentarily lifted. Almost he could imagine the sun bulging red upon the western horizon; almost he could see the first stars showing through, and the glitter of electric lights in distant skyscrapers. A spark of gold leapt across the darkness and Jack’s heart with it, as upon its promontory overlooking the Hudson the skeletal arches of the Sparkle-Glo factory blazed with sunset.
And then it was gone. A blast of wind shook the window as a rain squall swept through, bringing with it sheets of coruscating yellow and acid blue. The sun disappeared, swallowed by brilliant gouts of green. Day had ended, but there was no night, only a tumult of hail against glass.
“Good night.” Jack kissed his grandmother’s cheek and left.
On the second-floor landing a candle burned within a glass mantle. There was the creak of a shutter that had gotten loose, the tired exhalation from a hot-air register. Jack debated going straight up to bed, but then he heard a small sound from the bedroom that had been his aunt Mary Anne’s. He peered inside. A hurricane lamp cast its glow across the huge old four-poster. He could barely make out a lump beneath the spread.
“Knock knock.” He rapped softly at the door. “Can I come in?”
“Okay,” a muffled voice replied.
“Uhumm.” He cleared his throat. “Are you—how are you feeling?”
The bed loomed before him, an eighteenth-century cherry four-poster complete with white chenille spread and canopy. An alpine array of pillows marched across its head; at its foot a down comforter waited like an immens
e nougat to be devoured at need. Somewhere in between was the girl. He could hear her breathing, uneven and noisy.
But it was another minute before he could pinpoint a bulge beneath the worn chenille, neither long nor wide enough to form a decent bolster, with a faint feathering of silver where her hair tufted from beneath the blankets. He could make out her slanted eyes staring at him with a ferocity that might have been fear or just fatigue.
“I feel like shit,” she snapped.
“I’m sorry,” he said, immediately aware of how un-sorry he sounded. He asked in a gentler voice, “Can I get you anything?”
“No.”
This time the voice sounded distinctly like a sob. It would have been nice if the sound had torn at Jack’s heart, but in fact it annoyed him—everything about this girl annoyed him—and that in turn made him feel guilty.
“I’m sorry,” he repeated. He traced a raised diamond on the bedspread, trying hard not to stare at the sharp little face an arm’s length away. “Can’t I get you something? Some milk maybe?”
“I hate milk.”
“Oh. Well, that’s good, because there isn’t any. But—are you hungry? Did Mrs. Iverson get you anything to eat?”
A small shudder beneath the blankets. “Some soup. And some crackers.” The shudder extended into a snaky sort of motion that ended with the girl sitting up. “Actually, do you like have a Coke or something?”
“Actually, no. I think there’s some tea, chamomile tea? No? Okay, let’s see, there might be—”
With a dramatic sigh the girl flopped back against the pillows. She pulled the covers up to her chin. “Oh forget it.”
Jack took in her fierce wedge of face, that voice so inflated with childish annoyance: the butterfly that stamped. Unexpectedly he laughed.
“What?” she demanded.
Jack shook his head, moving aside the hurricane lamp so he could lean against the nightstand. “Nothing. Just, I think it’s customary under these circumstances to say ‘Thank you.’”
“What? Oh.” The face shrank still deeper into the bed, like a currant in bread dough. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.” He toyed with an old electric lamp, clicked the switch experimentally a few times. “Marzana Candry. Is that your real name?”
“I already told you.”
“I mean your real last name. It doesn’t sound Polish.”
Hostile silence. He could see her eyes glittering. After a moment she hissed, “Yes.”
“Marzana Candry.” At her baleful look Jack corrected himself. “Marz Candry. Where are you from, Marz? Where in Poland?”
Silence.
“Let’s try again: where were you before you came here? New York? New Jersey?” Her eyes squeezed shut. “Connecticut? Long Island?”
Still nothing. Jack’s momentary good humor vanished. He thought of going through all fifty states, and then starting on individual cities, but before he could the girl said, “My parents are fucking dead, okay? And I’ll fucking kill myself before I go back to Poland, and I’ll never tell you where I came from so forget it, okay? Okay?” she ended in a near shriek.
“Okay,” Jack agreed, startled.
“The only reason I even came to your stupid house was by mistake. I was—I was with my friends and we got, like separated, okay? And I got lost, it was night and raining and I didn’t know where the fuck I was going and if I did I wouldn’t have come here to your stupid fucking house, all right?”
Jack looked beyond at the wide dormer window, its panes slashed with blue and gold.
“Your friends. Fellahin?”
The girl snorted and rolled her eyes. “What, you get that from the web? Some subway hippie Scientologist? Fuck that. They were my family. We were living down by the river and the fucking cops blew us out.”
“What happened to the rest? Your friends?”
“I dunno. Wasted, I guess. Who cares? You care?” She fixed him with a defiant stare. “Huh?”
Jack stared back. “No. I guess I don’t actually give a fuck.”
That shut her up. An odd look played across her face. She sat up and made a small gesture with one hand.
“So what is this?” she asked, a little hesitantly. “A museum?”
Jack laughed. “A museum? Yeah. And I’m the mummy.”
The girl frowned. “Really—is it a museum?”
“No—it’s my house—my grandmother’s house, actually. My family’s.”
Her eyes widened. “You live here?”
“Sure. If you can call this living,” he added. “Why?”
“It’s just so…”
Her voice trailed off. Jack looked around and tried to see it all as she must. The worn oriental carpet, its threadbare pathways trodden by generations of bare feet; the marble fireplace with its carved wooden screen and dried hydrangeas; the monolithic Victorian furniture, caparisoned with doilies and antimacassars and bits of velvet patchwork. A Chatty Cathy doll that had been his aunt’s; a Marymount College mug filled with pens and eyebrow pencils; a corner where a brass incense burner and peeling plastic daisy decals were all that remained of a shrine to The Turtles.
“It doesn’t look like my house,” Marz said at last, very softly.
Outside the wind tore at the dormer window. Shadows washed across the floor, scattering the carpet with dark roseates. An odd sort of peace came over Jack: how long had it been since he’d sat in this room? As a child he’d slept here, as he’d slept everywhere in Lazyland. But this room had always held an unspoken sadness after his aunt had run away. When she had left Yonkers, hitchhiking cross-country to disappear in the winter after the Summer of Love, she had been scarcely older than the sullen girl before him.
He thought of what a terrible grief his family must have gone through, his father and grandparents and uncles. And he had sensed it only as a child senses death, as an inexplicable absence that has less to do with the disappearance of the dead themselves than with the empty places left in those who mourn, the empty places left in the house itself.
“Mmmmm…”
Jack looked up to see the girl yawning, her defiant expression softened by weariness. He made an awkward little bow.
“I guess I’ll say good night, then.” He waited for the girl to say something, but she only stared at the ceiling. “All right. Good night.”
At the door he turned. The girl lay in the enormous bed like a shipwrecked child in a battered lifeboat. A profound uneasiness pierced Jack, to gaze into that familiar place and see a stranger there. He closed the door and hurried upstairs to his own room.
CHAPTER NINE
What the Storm Said
Spring came late to Mars Hill. Even before the glimmering, the season had always been a slow sputtering fuse: ice-out on the lakes in late March or early April, followed by the first few sparks of green amidst lichen-covered stones and the sloping shoulders of the Camden Hills ten miles to the south. What most people recognized as spring didn’t come to Maine until the end of May, or even June. And of course the chimerical weather of the last two years had changed even that.
This spring, ice-out didn’t occur until the morning of April 19. Martin knew when he saw the first loons flying overhead, making their way inland from the bay to Swan Lake. Somehow the loons always knew, and would arrive at their summer homes within an hour of the final thaw. Martin Dionysos (né Schuster) stood on the porch of his tumbledown cottage, the hairs on his neck prickling as he watched them arrow overhead.
Tears sprang to his eyes and he let them come, weak and shivery with gratitude—it had not been so very long ago that he had been terrified he would never be able to cry again, just as he had been certain the loons would not return, or the peepers in the marsh. But while there was nothing that could keep the broken sky at bay, or the terrible weather, enough magic resided still in the bones of this place that Martin could lie awake at night in his bed, haunted by the song of frogs. Now he clutched the decrepit porch railing and watched the loons fly past.
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“There they go.” From a neighboring cottage wafted the voice of old Mrs. Grose, one of the three year-round residents at the crumbling spiritualist community. “Magic birds.”
Martin smiled. “Magic birds.” That was what the Abenaki Indians had named them. “I guess spring’ll be here someday, too.”
“Perhaps,” Mrs. Grose said, hugging her windbreaker tight around her ample chest. At her feet wheezed her ancient pug. Martin’s son, Jason, and Jason’s wife Moony had once figured that the pug must be well over two hundred in dog years. Even Jason resisted the temptation to try and calculate Mrs. Grose’s age. “But spring isn’t really spring anymore, is it? My primroses, they were so sickly last year. And the lupines…”
Her voice died as she turned, staring past the other toy Victorians nestled on the hillside to where Penobscot Bay sparkled blue and gold and violet in the early-morning light. Martin felt his initial burst of joy ebb.
“I know.” He stared down at the first blades of dandelions thrusting through the earth, a pallid brownish yellow. “Mine too…”
Last spring, after years of watching his friends and lovers die, Martin himself had finally succumbed to his illness. At Jason’s urging, he’d left his apartment in San Francisco and moved back to Mars Hill for good. The virus had gone into remission almost immediately. But his weakness remained, the damage done to his lungs by pneumonia, lesions on his arms and calves that even Mars Hill’s singular magic could not heal. And the ceaseless gnawing at his heart that was grief for not just lovers and friends but for an entire world that had been destroyed: books that would never be written, songs never sung, children never born, tracts of the heart and soul that would remain unmapped. Martin himself terra incognita, the undiscovered country; because who was left now to love him? He had Mrs. Grose for company, of course. And his son Jason and his wife, Moony, came up as often as they could, but flights to Maine were all but nonexistent unless you chartered a plane, and Jason couldn’t afford that.
So Martin spent his days indoors, priming canvases with his failing reserves of linseed oil and turpentine, or scouring the beach for usable things: driftwood, salt-sodden telephone poles, plastic milk cartons, beer bottles. The bleak loneliness of the Maine winter left him depleted and depressed. He did no painting. The stretched canvases were left standing about the cottage like so many blank windows and doors. His online columns faded to bi- and then trimonthly, not because of the lack of power (fitful, but you could usually count on at least one day in the week to bring electricity) but because he had lost all heart. This caused webwide speculation as to whether he was still alive. Martin of course knew more people now who were dead than not, and spent mordant hours in bed devising new addresses for himself: timormort@acadia.com. He moved the photograph of his dead lover John deMartino from the bedside table, because some nights it seemed to speak to him. He read the same lines of poetry over and over again, as though tracing the lineaments of his lover’s cheek—