by Anne Nesbet
And then her parents both turned and looked at Maya.
And at that moment Maya’s fate was sealed. Because let’s face it, when your mother, your one and only mother, whom you love more than anyone else in the world, has come back from nearly dying of cancer to say that her one great wish has always been to take the family to France for a year—you do not say no.
You say, at most, “Umm . . .” And a few months later all the muscles in your face will ache from trying to form the helpful, positive expressions good sports wear on their faces all the time, and you will find yourself standing on the avenue Rapp in the center of Paris, five thousand miles from your best friends and your bedroom and your dog, and despite all that effort all that time, every mirror you glance into will echo back your miserableness at you.
She blinked away the tears as roughly as she could, and at that moment James yanked himself free from her hand and ran forward a few paces.
“Look, Maya! It’s a salamander on the door!”
James was very into salamanders, because they were amphibians.
“No, it’s not,” said Maya, without even bothering to look, and then she did look.
“Hey,” she said. “I take it back. That is a salamander.”
It was large and made of brass, and its head was turning to look at them. It was, in fact, the handle of the front door of that house, the one right in front of them. What kind of building had a salamander for a door handle? Maya stepped back to look.
It was one of the strangest buildings she had ever seen. It was covered with patterns and carvings—iron phoenixes decorating the edges of the door, a beautiful, melancholy stone woman staring down at them from above the door, a fox draped gracefully about her neck, more people farther up—were those Adam and Eve?—plants, the heads of cows holding up a balcony on one of the upper floors. And almost every line a curve of dark stone. Swirls and curves, like waves breaking or vines coiling.
James had his head pitched at an impossible slant, the better to stare up at that complicated, swirling façade, and then he started to laugh.
“Look, it’s you!” he said. “They put a Maya statue on their building!”
“Don’t be silly,” said Maya. “That’s not me.”
Her head was beginning to hurt. It had been such a long, strange morning. She squinted up at the building, and the sad stone woman gazed right back down at her, her carved eyes full of secret stone thoughts.
“My hair’s not that long,” said Maya, but she almost didn’t finish the sentence. It was true—there was something familiar about that face. Too familiar, almost. She backed away another step or two, taking James with her.
“It’s you,” said James, with total conviction. “Cool!”
Was that really how she looked? Couldn’t be. But then again, maybe she would look something like that, if she were carved from limestone or granite or whatever it was.
A stone mirror, she thought. And felt, for a moment, most peculiar.
“Let’s cross the street so we can see the whole of it,” she said, her voice just a bit too loud in her ears.
The building was not symmetrical; that was part of its oddness: About three floors up, a rectangular window on the left contrasted with a tall, curvaceous oval on the right, as if the building were raising a skeptical eyebrow. And above that, a narrow balcony lined with pairs of pillars in another kind of stone, something green and mysterious. It was another world, that building, and that other world was gazing down at them as they stood on the corner with their heads cocked back.
“There’s a man up there looking at us,” said James, pointing. “See him?”
“Don’t stare,” said Maya, grabbing James’s hand again.
“He’s the one staring,” said James, and then he smiled and waved up at that vine-green balcony, those undulating, gazing windows.
“James!”
Really, it was impossible, trying to keep him under control. She looked up quickly, trying to assess the damage, and caught a glimpse of a dark-haired man leaning over the little balcony way above, something dangling from one relaxed hand: glasses? a pipe? She had had enough. She swung James right around to get him back on track, facing down the other little street, the one his school was supposedly on.
“It must be right here,” she said, her jaw tense. And then: “Oh, whoa!”
Because when they turned into that street, all they could see for a moment was a lacework of iron climbing high, high into the sky.
“It’s the EVIL TOWER!” said James, delighted. “Is this my school? Wow! Look at that! The Evil Tower is right above my school!”
“Eiffel,” said Maya. “It’s the Eiffel Tower.”
The strange thing was it didn’t look like any postcard of Paris she had ever seen. It was much huger than she had thought. It was really, really big. It was immense. And the building on the left really was an elementary school. But James could hardly be made to glance in the school’s direction. His eyes were stuck like glue on that tower.
“Can we go up to the top?”
“Not now,” said Maya. “It’s time to go back, anyway.”
“Let’s go right up to the top!”
“I said, not now.”
She practically had to drag him backward to the avenue Rapp, his head all tilted with longing as the Evil Tower fell away out of sight behind his future school. They had to wait at the crosswalk for a moment then, just opposite that strange house with the salamander on its door. You could not help staring at that door. It was so alive with creatures and curlicues, and when the door swung open, the salamander looked back over its bronze shoulder at you in the most disconcerting way.
No, not just that: It looked right at Maya and flicked its thin, bronze tongue.
Maya jumped and blinked. So that was what jet lag could do to you! Make door handles come alive!
But then the man who had just come out through that swinging door across the street paused to adjust his glasses with his long, pale hands, and for a moment Maya could see no salamander at all.
“Look!” said James. “There he is again. That’s him!”
“Don’t point,” said Maya, her heart still racing a little from the weirdness of the salamander.
“I wasn’t pointing,” said James. “I was waving.”
“Don’t wave either!” said Maya, in some haste. “It’s a rule: You can’t wave at people you don’t know.”
She said that very quietly, bending down over James’s ear and kind of blocking his view with her arm for a second, just because you never knew, with James, when he might start not just smiling and waving but—who knows?—handing around invitations to his next birthday or something.
“It’s green!” said James, unperturbed. He had been peeking under her elbow at the light. “Come on. Did you see his dark goggly glasses? I bet he’s a spy.”
The man couldn’t have heard. He was all the way on the other side of the street, after all. But he paused for a second and turned his head very slightly to the right, just as a person might turn his head to listen to some interesting sound coming from fairly far away. And then he straightened up and walked away, his steps fluid and bouncy. Young steps. He was a very young man, despite the elegance of his clothes.
He strode down the avenue Rapp ahead of them, turned left at the corner, and disappeared.
“Now we can go,” said Maya, giving James’s hand another squeeze. It was the strangest thing: There was something about that elegant young man, about the graceful way he sliced through all this soft Parisian air that made a person want to run along after him for a while, just to see where he might be going. There was something about him that drew you to him, that made you want to see more of him, that might even (if you were James’s age) make it very hard not to smile and wave. Maya could see that was the case. She could feel that call of his in her very bones.
But it made her think for some reason of the magnets they show you in science class, bars of metal all furry with iron filings, p
aper clips, or nails, and the thought made her stubborn all over again.
She and James were not paper clips, were they? She made her feet go extra slowly for a moment, just to give the elegant young man time to get well ahead of them and away.
Just beyond the strange house with the salamander on its door was a little blind court of a street, and more curlicued stone, and what looked like the entrance to a theater, of all things. THE ALCHEMICAL THEATER it called itself in elegant stone letters above a pair of large doors: What kind of theater was that? The smaller letters underneath didn’t make things any clearer: THE SOCIETY OF PHILOSOPHICAL CHEMISTRY, they said.
“Boofer would really like Paris,” said James thoughtfully, eyeing the elegant stone corner of the Alchemical Theater. “There are lots of really great places for dogs to pee.”
And then there was a boulangerie, which Maya knew meant a bakery, and an antiques store, and some other sort of business, and then a café across from the strangest fountain, all stone cherubs and banners, and by that point her feet were moving fast again, eager to get back to her parents and the apartment on the fourth floor in the rue de Grenelle that would never, never, ever quite be “home.”
“First you drag, and then you rush!” complained James. “I wanted to go up to the top of the tower!”
It was just as they swung around the last corner and their own doorway came into view that the strange thing happened.
The door opened and out stepped—
“Him again!” said James, and before Maya could think of anything to say or, alas, manage to grab his hand, James was already erupting into a big smile and a wave—
—at the same elegant young man, his hands once again adjusting the fit of the dark glasses he wore.
They were really very dark glasses.
And at this moment those dark glasses were turning right toward Maya and James.
“Ah!” said the young man. It was the sound of someone rather pleased, for private reasons, by what he now saw. “And here,” he said, “must be the children!
He said it in French, of course, but Maya could understand every word of it. They weren’t very hard words. What she couldn’t understand, however, was why a stranger in Paris would be staring at her and James at all, much less exclaiming as if in recognition, and much, much less coming out of the door of the very building where the Davidsons were going to live.
“Well, well, well,” said the stranger, while one of his long pale hands patted the other in an absentminded way.
“Perfect,” he said. “The boy and the girl!” Pause. “Indeed, most charming!”
And then the man nodded, turned, and walked away so fast that one otherwise unremarkable woman coming the opposite way was nearly bowled right over in his wake.
A cold shiver went flying through Maya’s limbs. What, after all, had the man from the Salamander House been doing here?
“Come on,” she said to James, giving him one last impatient tug.
Because suddenly all she wanted in all the world was to be already up those four flights of stairs and within sight, reach, and earshot of her ordinary, lovable, thoroughly unmysterious parents.
Chapter 3
Our Famous Cousin Louise
Well, there you are!” said their father as he came out onto the landing. The rattly old elevator gave a squeaky shudder and began to crawl noisily back down to the lobby. “How does Paris look? You know you’ve already missed our first guest.”
“The spy,” said James. “We saw where he lives. There’s a salamander on his door. When can we go up to the top of the Evil Tower?”
“Excuse me?” said their father. “Spy? Salamander?”
“That man with the dark glasses,” said Maya. “We saw him downstairs. James thought he was a spy because of the—”
“Oh, I see!” said their father with a laugh. “Of course. Quite logical, James. But I’m afraid he’s not a spy. Some-thing wrong with his eyes, probably. Odd fellow—from that Society, you know. Must be the youngest Director any Society ever had. Seemed very disappointed to have missed you kids. Kept asking about you, and then off he went.”
The elevator clattered to a halt, four floors below their feet, and there were various knocks and bangs as someone sidled into it.
“What Society?” said Maya.
“Actually, he didn’t miss us,” said James. He had sat right down on the doormat to wrestle with his shoes. “He saw us downstairs.”
“They gave me that fellowship, remember?” said their father to Maya as he held open the door. “So that I could bring you all along for the year. The Society of Philosophical Chemistry—I think that’s what they call themselves. Hurry up, James, let’s get off the stairs. And this apartment, too—it’s theirs.”
The creaks and rattles were getting louder again: The elevator was nearly there.
“I bet maybe that’s the spy again,” said James happily.
But when the door of the elevator opened, nobody in particular came out. Not a spy, not a Director of any Philosophical Society, just an unremarkable sort of woman looking for some other door.
“In we go, then, kids,” said Maya’s dad, in a quieter voice than before, and he nodded in the direction of their hall.
There was a nondescript sound from the landing. And then another, but they weren’t the sort of sounds that leave a mark on the brain. And in any case, Maya was still busy with the thought of men in dark glasses and apartments that somehow mysteriously belonged to them and their shady Societies.
A hand was tapping her on the shoulder.
“Excuse me,” said the unremarkable woman, for the third or fourth time. “Would this be the appartement of Madame Sylvie Miller Davidson?”
Maya did turn around then and looked at her, or at least tried to. She was strangely hard to see. No color to her, somehow, just an oddly muted effect, as if there were a curtain of frosted glass between Maya’s eyes and her. Or a kind of haze in the air, almost. Just an ordinary sort of woman, but too vague to be properly ordinary, because ordinary ordinary people become more vivid when you pay attention to them, and this woman—well, you couldn’t quite focus on her, somehow.
Madame Sylvie Miller Davidson! It sounded so strange in the woman’s mouth, so bland and so foreign, both at once.
“That’s my mother,” said Maya.
“May I ask—” said her father.
“I wrote to her,” said the woman. “I said I would be coming, right away. I am,” she added, “her cousin.”
And then she somehow trickled right by them, in through the door, and down the hall.
“My goodness,” said Maya’s father in a slightly weak voice. “At this rate, we’ll have had forty-eight guests by Friday.”
Maya slipped under his arm and through the door.
“Like clockwork, one per hour,” he said, shooing James in after and shutting the latch carefully behind him, without the slightest bang. “But perhaps the pace will slow at night?”
“Shh,” said Maya. What had traveling done to her eyes? The salamander on that strange building had turned its head and flicked its brass tongue at her. It couldn’t really have done that—but it had. And now this woman who had just walked past them and down the hall: How could an ordinary person be so very hard to see?
In the living room, Maya’s mother was already rising from her chair and listening to something the woman was beginning to say in that voice that sounded so oddly like nothing at all.
“How kind of you to come,” said Maya’s mother with great earnestness, as if the vague person in front of her were a Nobel Prize—winning duchess or a terribly famous poet, instead of being—well, whatever she was. Less notable than people usually are, somehow. “We’ve all wanted to meet you for such a very long time. Maya and James, come say hello. Can you guess who this is? This is our famous Cousin Louise!”
James looked skeptical.
He said, “But Cousin Louise was a—”
“Come shake hands,” said their m
other. But James was not to be deterred.
“—baby,” he said with great definiteness. “A baby. That’s what she was! Ouch! You’re pinching me!”
Maya tried to quench him with a look, which didn’t work at all, and then she gave up on subtlety and angled herself in between her brother and the vague figure of Cousin Louise, whose blurry hand was perhaps already reaching out to her, though it was somewhat hard to tell.
She had eyes that were an ordinary dull sort of brown. Her hair was almost no particular color at all. And when Maya took her hand, she felt—all right, this is strange, thought Maya—she felt nothing. Do you know how your cheeks and tongue and lips sometimes feel, after a trip to the dentist? That was what it was like, shaking Cousin Louise’s hand. It was like the little bit of the universe containing Cousin Louise made everything around it just slightly numb.
“Enchanted,” said Maya in at most a wobbly whisper. Enchantée! That was what you were supposed to say when meeting French cousins. Even if they were really quite the opposite of enchanting. That’s how French is.
She was only distracted for a second, but it was long enough. James wriggled by, picking right up where he’d left off.
“You were only three,” he said, with some relish. “And the church crumbled down all around you, and you became famous.”
“Well, now,” said Cousin Louise.
Maya gave her a worried look, but on that plain, unreadable face there was no sign of annoyance, not a trace of pain. No trace of much of anything at all, as far as Maya could see.
In fact, maybe nobody on earth ever seemed less like someone famous than the Davidsons’ famous Cousin Louise. She was exactly the sort of person that when the whole sixth grade is heading off to the old Victorian mansion of John Muir, and there’s going to be an hour-long bus ride to get there, and everybody’s chatting and sorting themselves in that awkward way that happens before you get on the bus—well, Cousin Louise is the kind of person you end up sitting next to, when you’d really rather not. And then it’s up to you, of course, not to let the poor person next to you know how much you are half-listening all the time to the fun the people a few seats behind you are having, and so really the whole bus ride is a bit of a chore.