The Elementals

by Saundra Mitchell

  “And I’ll pretend to think about it. ‘Oh, my, D.W., I don’t know. Mabel Normand is doing such visionary work at Keystone right now . . . ’”

  “Don’t be absurd,” Mollie-as-D.W. roared.

  Then she cried out, because Handsome spread his wings wide and roared back, “Nevermore!”

  “Stop it,” Kate said, shushing him as she shed the cover. “You’re making my star nervous.”

  Pressing again, Mollie put on her most frail voice. “He really is, Kate. Please, let’s leave him.”

  There was only so much daylight; they’d already missed the morning on account of a silvery blanket of fog. It was lovely to look at, but without the sea and the sky, and enough light to capture every flicker on Mollie’s face, their film would be ruined. Mollie made certain she looked as nervous as she felt.

  Kate relented. Opening the window, she nudged Handsome into flight. “Go to your home, darling. Go on. I’ll treat you later with a bit of steak.” Nudging again, she braced herself when he took off, both for the clutch of his claws and for Mollie’s little scream.

  “Better now?” Kate asked.

  Lit with a dazzling smile, Mollie threw herself at Kate. Nearly tipping them over, she flung her arms around Kate’s neck and hugged her expansively. Mollie’s foil circlet fell off, and the silver charms on her wrists sang merrily. “You’re marvelous! You’re the best director in the world!”

  “You can’t say that yet,” Kate mumbled, blushing.

  “I can! I do!” Mollie kissed her cheek, then whirled away. Sweeping the circlet from the floor, she danced into the hallway, then turned back, beckoning. “Hurry, before we lose your precious light.”

  Kate grabbed her camera and satchel, and ran after her. It was brilliant, Mollie thought as they broke free across the sea grass and into the distance, that they got along so perfectly. With everything arranged, they’d be famous, beyond famous, hand in hand.

  And if not hand in hand, then they’d each have someone to fondly remember from the balconies of their penthouse apartments, wouldn’t they?

  Seven

  Draped in white paper, the kitchen resembled a hospital room. A terrible one, with a white-aproned madwoman presiding over a table full of cubed flesh. Zora used the back of her arm to brush hair from her face, then smiled when she saw Julian approaching.

  “Perfect timing, baby sunflower. I need someone to crank for me.”

  His expression sullen, Julian moved to help with the grinder all the same. With a quick twist, he fastened the vise tight to the table. Once it was fixed in place, he turned the crank; it spun easily. Inside the grinder, metal teeth gnashed in anticipation.

  Zora fed bits of pork and fat into the thing, matching her pace to Julian’s. It was quiet, gory work, occasionally made exciting when Zora dipped her fingers a little too close to the workings of the grinder. She feared no machine on the farm and had the scars to prove it.

  “You’ve been quiet today,” Zora said.

  Answering with a shrug, Julian turned the catching bowl so it wouldn’t overfill on one side. He moved automatically, his hands trained in the art of making sausage. He knew when to tighten the vise, when to reverse the crank to retrieve a bit of bone before it ended up in the casings.

  “Is something bothering you?”

  Julian shook his head.

  “You can talk to me,” Zora said. She rounded the table, mostly to see if she could catch his eye from the other side. She couldn’t, but she continued anyway. “About anything.”

  Mostly, she meant about Elise: She wanted to know why Elise had left the party early, what she’d said to put Julian in such a black mood. When he finally decided to answer, Zora expected a bit of romantic agony. What she got was something else entirely.

  “Henry said I used to play with dead birds.”

  Slow to reply, Zora kept working. “They weren’t dead long. I suppose you realize that.”

  “I don’t remember anything.”

  Zora gathered herself, then sighed. “Your father and I made you stop. The fits you have when you do it . . . they frightened us.”

  For no good reason, Julian bristled at her choice of words. “They’re not fits. It gets dark, that’s all.”

  “No. You die.” She covered the mouth of the grinder with her hand and waited for him to stop cranking. Once he raised his head, she said, “With the bugs, it was nothing. A blink. The birds, a moment, and that was awful enough. Then I found you dead in the yard, guarded by a dog we’d buried that morning.”

  Outwardly, Zora was steady. She was always steady: broken bones and accidents in the field, a fire in the feed house, the creek flooding the back forty—steady. Whatever the disaster, she stared at it, decided how to conquer it, and briskly went about the business of doing so.

  She told this particular story the same way. It was over and done with now. At the time, she’d clutched Julian to her chest and, with bared teeth, dared anyone to take his body from her. The half-moon bruises she’d left on his arms took weeks to fade.

  “You woke up when the funeral director knocked on the door. And after that, we kept you very close. Kept the yard clean as we could, and yes, we hoped you’d forget entirely.”

  Julian cranked again when Zora nudged him. “I didn’t.”

  “We still had to try to protect you from yourself.”

  There was a darkness to his quiet, something beyond contemplation. His shoulders hardened. Still, he kept his voice low, as if he were ashamed to talk back to her. “You’re only afraid because you don’t understand.”

  “Oh, do you think?”

  Stubborn, Julian muttered, “I know.”

  Picking up a measured cup of water, Zora said, “Look at me.” When he did, Zora threw the water into the air.

  Before Julian could dodge, the water exploded into thousands of individual beads. They swirled around him, crystalline and catching the light from outside. Hands folded, Zora admired the rainbows that flickered across Julian’s dumbstruck face.

  Water came so much more easily these days. Sometimes at night, she dreamt of slipping into it. She liked it when Emerson sat by the aluminum tub, because every so often, she thought if she were left alone in the water, she might melt into it. Disappear into it.

  Only once, last winter, she admitted that. And in reply, Emerson said, “There’s times when I think the earth wants me back.” Zora remembered it as clearly as she did Julian’s half-moon bruises, as clearly as the silver streams running beneath the prairies.

  Silent, she turned her head ever so slightly, and the water exploded again. Beads became mist, a swirl of fog that hung improbably over the table.

  Meeting her son’s eyes, Zora raised her brows and watched him. The fog swirled. Like a raincloud, it grew denser. Then, abruptly, it spun, a hurricane summoned, a delicate typhoon.

  Glittering flecks of water clung to their hair like a liquid veil. The kitchen cooled; it tasted clean, like an afternoon after rain. Zora again raised the measuring cup, and the storm drained into it.

  “I understand so much more than you can imagine, Julian Thomas.”

  Wonderstruck, Julian stared at the measure as his mother put it on the table. It was half-full now, the rest of its contents still misting his skin, his hair. Unsteady in spite of his crutches, he found it took more than a moment to compose his thoughts.

  “I got it from you? Why didn’t you tell me?” Scrubbing his face dry with his sleeve, he bobbled. “What else are you keeping from me?”

  Weary, Zora brushed him aside to work the grinder herself. She still tasted the water in the air; it called from the pump and the spring and the stream. It called from everywhere, whispering sweetly, trying to entrance. Focusing on the work in front of her, Zora fed the grinder with one hand and cranked with the other.

  “Nature demands a balance. It won’t let you disturb the proper course of the world.”

  Now frustrated, Julian asked, “What does that mean?”

  “You don’t
create life, duck.” Zora leveled her cool blue gaze at him. “You trade it.”

  And then, while Julian’s mouth still hung agape, Zora went back to making sausages. Dinner couldn’t wait for dramatics or confessions. Once he recovered, she told him about the water that flowed through her and the earth that bound his father.

  It was his birthright. No matter how fervent their prayers otherwise, it wasn’t going away.

  ***

  The set was perfect. The restless sea clawed at a darkening sky, and Mollie was a gem on a greens-laced planter. It was made of concrete, big enough to water a horse in—or to bury the Lady of Shalott. Heaps of fragrant lilac made her bed, set off by handfuls of creamy honeysuckle.

  The costume was the same: a long white gown made more interesting with bits of gold foil and beads. They’d brushed Mollie’s hair until it gleamed like liquid sunset, and let it pour over the sides of the makeshift boat.

  Kate bit her own lips to keep from crying. She advanced the film steadily, turning the camera on its tripod to take in the entirety of the scene. But grief poisoned her; it cracked her open and left her wounded.

  Her father was right. He was awful and horrible and right. When she was done, all she’d have would be a shadow play: ghosts caught pretending at life.

  Without color, without the palette of gilt ornaments and gold hair, skin pale as death, and the endlessly grieving sea, no one would see the truth. Regal and still, a spray of flowers clutched beneath her chin, Mollie had truly become the Lady of Shalott. She had died for want of Lancelot before Kate’s stunned eyes, and no one would ever know.

  “How is it?” Mollie asked, her lips barely moving.

  “Terrible.” Kate swallowed her sobs, but the tears freely marked her cheeks. “You can get up. We’re done.”

  Mollie combed fingers through her hair. “What’s the matter? Didn’t you get what you wanted?”

  “It’s not you,” Kate said, camera cradled in her lap as she unscrewed it from the tripod. Miserable, she tried to ignore the stone in her chest, growing and growing by the moment. Mollie lifted her hems and came to sit beside Kate. “Did I move and ruin it? I thought I felt a spider on my cheek, but I did try to stay still.”

  Mournfully, Kate lurched to the side and dropped her head onto Mollie’s shoulder. “No, you were wonderful. It’s me. I want something that’s impossible. Nothing ever looks so amazing on my reels as it does in my head. It’s like . . . I don’t know what it’s like.”

  “Knowing there’s cake and you can’t have any?” Mollie smiled crookedly. “That always makes me cross.”

  “No, it’s more than that. Or less than that. It sounds ridiculous, trying to explain it. But I’ve got so many feel-ings inside me: I imagine such glorious things. But I can’t make them real.” Trying valiantly for a careless smile, Kate shrugged. “It’s no one’s fault I’m ordinary.”

  Mollie gasped. Hopping to her feet, she grabbed Kate’s hand and dragged her to standing. “If I thought you’d stay there, I’d make you stand in a corner!”

  “I—” Kate said, but Mollie cut her off.

  “No! I’m going to wash your mouth out with soap.” Mollie balanced the tripod on her shoulder and pointed toward the house imperiously. “Right this instant. March.”

  Slipping her camera into its satchel, Kate laughed faintly. “You’re mad.”

  “Then we’re all mad here.” Mollie poked at her. “How can you say you’re ordinary? You’re remarkable! Maddeningly unique!”

  “You haven’t seen any of my developed film yet,” Kate protested.

  “I don’t mean that.” Mollie waved a hand, ignoring Kate’s fallen expression. “That ‘something’ you can do, Kate. You can stop time, and you think you’re ordinary?”

  With a sigh, Kate turned toward home. “You can’t do anything with thirty seconds. It’s entirely useless. I know people who can . . .”

  Mollie’s eyes grew round as she waited for Kate to finish.

  The familiar strings of secrecy tightened round Kate’s throat. Her gifts, her parents’, were no secret at home. True enough, Mimi never sat sunsets anymore. There was too much pain in seeing the future, she said. What little pleasure she could find in her clairvoyance was never enough to risk its torments.

  But Daddy was forever whisking them away on the wind. It was a useful gift, and his best plaything, too. He’d carried Kate to the tops of the pyramids and into the boughs of the tallest trees. It was impossible to win a game of catch with him, for he could blink away at any moment.

  What’s more, in all the years they’d traveled, meeting artist friends at the fairs, flinging themselves to the far corners of every known map, Kate had met hundreds of people gifted by the elements.

  There was a French woman in Virginia who could make the wind speak with any voice she chose. She would have gotten on brilliantly with the old grandfather in Prussia—he could make fire’s embers carry messages for him across the miles.

  Two black-eyed twins in Cyprus witched water together: the girl leaned toward heat and steam, the boy toward cold and ice. They taught Kate to ice-skate on a white-sand beach and to kiss beneath an olive tree, which made for a lovely summer indeed.

  But it was a private society. Kept quiet, discussed only among those touched by it. And even to them, Kate was an oddity. She’d been explained away as aether, a fifth element made from the other four.

  Heaven, or space, or air to breathe: aether simply was. Like her gift—it existed. Stopping time for thirty seconds at a time was good for nothing but sneaking out of the house or catching a dropped cup before it shattered on the floor.

  “Who can what?” Mollie prompted.

  “ . . . Bend their arms and fingers the wrong way,” Kate finally said. “Pound spikes into their eyes and survive. And eat fire! You really haven’t lived until you’ve spent the night with fair people. The ones in the attractions, not the ones attending. You’ll never know nicer folk than the Wolf People of the Sierra Madre.”

  Whirling round, Mollie nearly took Kate’s head off with the tripod. “You’re making that up.”

  “I’m not, and I can prove it. I’ve got films. You’ll see. Come on.”

  Clutching her satchel with both arms, Kate broke into a run up the path. Her mood soared like mercury in glass—there was a reason she wanted to paint with light and motion. She didn’t need color! Or scent, or sensation! Sometimes it was enough to see. With her camera she could prove impossible things, record beautiful things, create perfect things. She could slip past disbelief and into truth.

  Suddenly giddy, Kate wanted to leap and spin. She settled for scrambling across the grass with Mollie at her heels.

  But she stopped short when she saw a man with a handcart taking away an armoire.

  “Oh no,” Kate murmured, and hurried for the back door.

  In a single afternoon, her parents had transformed the house. Sheets covered the furniture and mirrors; they belonged to the house, not the Witherspoons. The movers were taking away the extras they’d hired, like the armoire and the blue velvet chair Daddy liked to nap in, even the whimsical place settings embossed with images of the sun.

  Amelia turned when Kate stepped inside, her awareness unerring. “Did you finish your movie, sweetheart?”

  Ignoring her question, Kate peeled off her satchel. “You said we weren’t going yet.”

  “We’ll have one last night here. Mollie can celebrate with us.”

  “She’s got nowhere to go!”

  “She does,” Amelia smiled brightly. “Your father and I had breakfast with Mrs. Collins. You know her. She owns the theatre by the boardwalk. She said if Mollie needed a place to stay, there are apartments above the stage, and of course plays that need actresses all the time.”

  Trembling with rage, Kate wanted so badly to throw things. To break things. She wanted to kick holes in the floor and throw rocks through the window until her mother’s awful smile shattered along with the glass.

  But instead,
she ground her teeth together and forced a smile when she looked to Mollie. “How exciting. You’ll be an independent woman of means, Mollie.”

  Pale eyes darting between Amelia and Kate, Mollie found a smile and played along. “An apartment of my very own!”

  “Please don’t be offended,” Amelia told Mollie, taking her by the elbow, “but Kate’s father and I took the liberty of paying the first month’s rent. We couldn’t stand the idea of Kate’s dearest friend sleeping on the beach.”

  It was lies, Kate thought. The smile stung to hold; she positively ached, trying to pretend this was lovely and wonderful and not an absolutely deliberate attempt to separate the two of them. “I’ll send you reams of letters, Mollie.”

  Amelia smoothed her hair back with fluttering hands. “Why don’t the two of you freshen up for dinner? We’re dining downtown tonight. Won’t that be fun?”

  “Oh yes,” Kate said, already backing toward her bedroom. “Ever so much.” Then, as soon as she and Mollie were closed up tight behind her bedroom door, Kate dropped her false front and said, “I’m not going.”

  Mollie frowned. “To dinner?”

  “No. Away.”

  Whirling around the room, Kate plucked a music box from her dresser. A few warbled notes played when she turned it over. Manipulating the base, she revealed a hidden drawer.

  Kate produced a roll of bills tied with ribbon. She’d been saving for ages, waiting for exactly the right time. Holding it up for Mollie’s inspection, Kate smiled again. But now it was genuine.

  “I think they’re waiting for us in Hollywood, don’t you?”

  It was easy to get lost in Clune’s, Caleb discovered.

  Behind the canvas screen was a labyrinth of halls and cubbies, as well as iron stairs that swirled into the old catwalk. A cache of crosses and altars stayed polished, but locked in a room used only for storage.

  Old green rooms and costume rooms and sitting rooms filled the attic space. No one dressed or painted themselves there now. The stage plays and church services had been replaced by a projector and a single bright light.