by Anne Nesbet
Why was he hesitating? Not just hesitating, but holding back. Maya could feel the rest of her patience evaporating.
“Please,” she said. “I just came to see the Cabinet of Earths.”
He had spoken almost in a whisper, but Maya spoke aloud. She could speak to him. She could speak here. She could say what for some reason she couldn’t say anywhere else. It was like part of her had been in a tiny, tiny cage all this long time, and now was finally free.
She took a step toward the inner door, just to see what the Old Man would do. He looked uncertain. He looked unhappy. And, at the same time, full of expectation: thrilled, somehow. It was a very disconcerting combination. It made no sense.
“Of course you have,” he said, and even his words seemed to be wrestling with each other, as if YES and NO had gotten into a mortal battle in his head and his mouth. “Of course! And the Cabinet of Earths wants you, my dear! I just would like to ask: What do you want?”
“I want to see if I got it right.”
She was almost glaring at him now.
He looked at her another second or two, and then gave a little nod, giving in.
“I’m afraid I have not been very strong,” he said. “It seems quite possible, my dear—it is my hope—that you will be stronger than I have been.”
And he led her into the other room, where the glass-fronted Cabinet rose up very tall and bright in its corner. She had remembered it well, she saw right away, and still there were things she had not remembered or had perhaps not noticed the first time: the brass berries peeking out from beneath the phoenix’s spreading wings; the words etched into the curving line of the frame. She stepped forward another pace or two to look, while the old Fourcroy knelt down to set her little cabinet on the ground.
“I didn’t see the writing before,” she said, turning her head to follow the line of text as it sidestepped the small brass feet of the salamander and began making its way back down the Cabinet’s other side. What did it say?
“Nothing is lost.”
Well, that didn’t seem quite right. As far as she could tell, there were in fact altogether too many lost things in this world: friends too far away, pretty green rings that you got on your sixth birthday and accidentally dropped down the drain the same day. Not to mention everything in the past. The feel of Boofer’s soft puppy ears under your hand, the mint ice-cream cone you ate at the beach last summer, the voice of your grandmother on the phone—all as lost to you now as that poor plastic ring. Weren’t they?
She turned to the old man, who had lumbered back up to his feet, his eyes traveling fondly between the big Cabinet and the little one, the little cabinet and the big one.
“Why does it say that?”
“Ah, well,” he said, as if abashed. “They took one part of the truth, you see, and made a spell of it. Because they loved beauty, I think. You see how beautiful it is.”
The Cabinet was beautiful, that was true. The way the frame wound so tenderly around the glass, the way the earths shifted, restless and lovely, in their bottles: It was not just beautiful, but truly perfect, the sort of object you might reach out to in a dream but could never ever hope to find standing against a real wall in a real room in your real life.
“Yes,” said Maya, all the little wrinkles of doubt beginning to fade away in her brain. “I see that. It’s beautiful, and it’s real. Why should things always get lost? Why shouldn’t some really beautiful things be kept forever?”
The brass salamander on the top of the Cabinet turned its head to look back at her. And smiled.
“Well, yes,” said the old man with a sigh. “There is that. There’s always that.”
She lost track of his words, then, because the Cabinet was moving.
Moving? No.
The glass was melting.
No.
She turned her face away in alarm, and saw the old man looking at her, his worn face full of kindness and awe.
“How much you look like her!” he said. “Ah, oui! I saw it right away!”
“Something’s wrong,” said Maya. It was hard to speak. “Help me.”
If she looked back at the Cabinet, the swirling glass would pull too hard. It would eat her up.
“You’re the one it wants, my dear,” said the old Fourcroy. “It wants to have you. Not whatever stupid young thing he might care to put in charge.”
It was so hard to look away from the glass. Her neck ached. Her shoulders hurt. She had to force her head to stay turned in the Old Man’s direction.
“I was even younger than you,” said the old Fourcroy. “So much younger, yes. My grandmother led me to the glass. Oh, I didn’t know! She was so sad, my grand-mère. The earth spilling out of her mouth! I was frightened! The glass in my soul! I was too young to understand.”
Maya was filled with the strangest jumble of thoughts. She knew, for instance, that she should really be very afraid, but for some reason the Cabinet drowned out that fear. It could do that, apparently. It could open its great glass mouth, and a person could be falling into that maw and still be almost not afraid.
But Maya hung on, all the same. Not out of fear, exactly, because she really was almost not afraid, but out of something like stubbornness. Even the Cabinet could not just swallow her up that way, without her knowing what she wanted to know.
“Your grandmother shouldn’t have done that to you,” she said. “Without you even knowing. She should have made the Cabinet leave you alone.”
“Ah, well,” said the Old Man. “I was too young, but she was in despair. She had lost her son, you see—my father. I think the Cabinet would have come into his hands, in time. That was how it was supposed to be. But instead, my uncle betrayed him, during that terrible war, and my father was killed. The curse of the Fourcroys, ma fille! They betray their brothers.”
“He was jealous,” she said. The plain truth, but to say it she had to fight very hard. Even just opening her mouth was hard, with the beautiful, hungry Cabinet pulling at her that way. “Your uncle was jealous, I guess. That’s how it must have happened.”
She did know something about jealousy, after all.
The Old Man looked at her.
“My father hid people here,” he said simply. “During the war. People the Nazis wanted to find. Some of them just children, if you can imagine! His very own cousins, at one point. Here and at the Alchemical Theater. There are hiding places there. And then my uncle found out and was angry. No, not just angry—”
The old Fourcroy shielded his face for a moment with his hand.
“He was furious. It was risking the Society, risking all their work—that was what my uncle said. Too much risk—so he turned in his own brother. That’s how it happened. And my grandmother despaired. She no
longer wanted to live forever, not in a world where one son could kill another.”
“To live forever?” said Maya. That was about how many words she could manage. She was still trying to listen only to the Old Man. She was still pretty stubborn.
“Well, yes,” said the Old Man. “She had learned to put death away. She had made the Cabinet, after all! She was a true Lavirotte, like you—”
“Davidson, actually,” said Maya, because it fed the stubbornness in her, and only stubbornness kept her from turning her head toward the swirling glass of the Cabinet, where the beautiful, precious earths hummed to her from their bottles and jars.
The old Fourcroy didn’t hear her, though, or was too caught up in his thoughts to understand what she was saying.
“But then she despaired and took her bottle out. I saw it all, ma fille. Your earth comes finding you, once it’s out of its bottle. It will crawl across half the world if it has to. It moves very fast. I was frightened then, believe me! I cried and cried, but she had despaired. The Cabinet must not go to my uncle, she said. I must be Keeper, though I was really too young.”
He looked at Maya, all that sad history, layer after layer of it, deepening the lines of his face.
“
Ah, how much you look like her! They made a statue of her to gaze down at the world from above the door of that house they built, the year my uncle was born. My terrible, beautiful uncle. How long ago it all is now. And now the Cabinet comes to you.”
Maya gathered her strength together as best she could.
“Why to me?” she said. “Why should I agree?”
But she knew at the same time that she already had the answer to that question, too. Why else would she make a little cabinet and bring it here? Why would the call of the earths in their bottles be so compelling, if she wasn’t meant to respond? Of course she belonged to the Cabinet of Earths! Of course! Not James! Her! And yet this tiny knot of stubbornness remained in her.
“Do you have a grandmother?” asked the Old Man suddenly.
“Not alive,” said Maya.
“Ah, sad,” said the old Fourcroy. “Because you could have saved her, if she were still living, you know, and you were the Cabinet-Keeper. The earth of her: mortality. Extracted, bottled, kept safely away. They do that, you know, in their Society, extracting the earths. They have an hourglass there—a wonder. And then they bring their bottles here, to be kept. Forever and ever, always the same. An immortal grandmother, you could have had. I had one once.”
His eyes were distant now, like lakes on a foggy morning, when the shore fades into the gray all around. But even as the old Fourcroy became mistier around the edges, clarity and strength began to return to Maya’s mind. The Cabinet had caught her off guard, with its swirling glass, but now an idea was growing in her, a larger idea than she had expected to find in herself. The dizziness was almost gone. She still kept her face turned away from the Cabinet, but it was easier now to look where she wanted to look, and to open her mouth and speak.
“Even someone who had been very sick?” she asked. “Could we bottle up the earths of someone who used to be sick? Or might still be sick? And then she would not be sick anymore?”
“Life!” said the old Fourcroy. “That’s all that’s left in them, the immortal ones. They cannot be sick. How could they be? No mortal part left in them to wither or fade.”
Oh! Maya’s heart filled right up and spilled over. She held her head high and stood up again, tall and strong against the pull of the swirling glass.
“Then I’ll do it,” she said. “Yes—”
The Cabinet roared in triumph behind her, roared and reared up and came rushing over her head like a great wave breaking on a rocky shore—
“—Just, not yet.”
The wave froze, wavered, melted away again into a tangle of angry whispers. Maya turned around to face all that rippling glass.
“Not yet,” she said again, still very strong.
The Cabinet was so beautiful. Nothing so beautiful had ever chosen her, out of all the people in the world, to be its Keeper. She put her hand on the glass, which was glass again, and not liquid, though it was warm under her fingers and still vibrating very slightly with the echo of all that it had so very recently been.
“For her, I’ll do it,” said Maya. “You know. For my mother.”
At that the spell seemed to relax its hold on her, or at any rate the Cabinet of Earths, having more or less gotten what it wanted, sank down quietly into its corner and rested, and the old Fourcroy looked at it and at Maya with the oddest mix of expressions on his face. And then he shook himself as if waking up and went into his little kitchen and made them both cups of tea, which they drank at one of the worktables in the studio, with the ordinary light of day spilling over them from all those many windows.
“You’ll have to tell them about my mother,” said Maya, a little shyly. “They have to take the earth out of her. You’ll tell them that, right?”
He looked very puzzled for a moment, and then his eyes sagged a little at the corners with worry.
“Maya,” he said, giving quick, watery glances to the left and right, almost as if he feared that someone or something might be hiding among the decorated boxes, listening in. “Maya, my dear. Come outside a moment. Come this way, right outside—you can bring your tea!”
Outside! She felt foolish, standing in the courtyard with a teacup in her hand, but the Old Man was so anxious, his hand so full of tremble, that she worried most about him. And whether, perhaps, he might actually be a little bit mad, after all.
“Listen, Maya,” he said in a whisper, his fingers gesturing back toward the place where the Cabinet stood. “Forgive me, dear girl, but the nearer I am to it, the more I find I forget certain things. Important things!”
His hand went anxiously through his wisps of white hair. For a moment he looked quite stymied.
“What things?” said Maya, to help him along.
“About grandmothers,” he said, with a tiny gasp. “I mean, immortal grandmothers. I understand! I do! Of course we want our grandmothers to be immortal!”
“My mother,” said Maya firmly. “Not my grandmother. My mother goes into the Cabinet of Earths. Or her earth does, anyway. In a bottle, like the others. That’s the deal. She gets to live. Like it says: Nothing is lost.”
“Ah, yes,” he said. “Of course, of course. But it’s just—are you sure? It may not be—it seems to me—just to think about it some more, my dear. I mean, ‘Nothing is lost’ is perfectly fine, as far as it goes. But also: Everything changes. They cut that bit out, the Fourcroys, when they started mixing magic into their science. I’m just trying to say—”
And he was trying very hard! There were little beads of sweat on his pale forehead, and his fine tufts of white hair were beginning to sag.
“—I’m just trying to say, it may be hard, my dear, for the poor grandmother, being immortal.”
“Not my grandmother,” said Maya. She was beginning to lose her patience with him. “My mother.”
He had paused for a moment, gasping for air, so Maya forged on.
“Just tell me what I have to do, to get her earth into a bottle. Because that’s the deal: She gets to live. If the Cabinet wants me to be its Keeper—all right. Whatever. I will. But she’s saved. You tell them that.”
“It’s you who must tell him, Maya,” said the Old Man, in a thin, watery echo of a voice. “Of course you will! You’ll tell him that, the head of the Society, the Director, the foremost Fourcroy, the Henri I was named for: my beautiful uncle. Brave girl!”
“Who? Who? Who do you mean, the foremost Fourcroy?”
Maya nearly kicked the wall in impatience. How many people with the same strange name could there be in one single city? Did she have to go looking again for some ancient, unfindable Henri de Fourcroy?
“Even the young one in the Salamander House is a Henri!” she said. “That man with the purple-blue eyes. And now you’re saying there’s another one, too?”
“Ah, ma fille,” said the old Fourcroy, his eyes fading again into mist and distance. “My poor, dear girl! But that Henri de Fourcroy is not another one at all: It is he! Himself! He, my dear, is my terrible, beautiful uncle.”
Chapter 12
An Unlucky Family
It happened three times in a single day: Maya reached to open a shop door, and a frowning face loomed at her from the glass. Her own face. Maya Davidson, future Keeper of the Cabinet of Earths. By the third time, she was so rattled by it, she just slouched right away without buying anything at all.
Because you’d think that a person who had just more or less arranged for her mother to be saved from death would be in a pretty good mood, wouldn’t you?
Well, no.
Instead a terrible restlessness had gotten into Maya’s bones. She sat down in a chair, and then it felt like time started pouring past her, a flood of wasted time, and she would leap right back up again, while her mother looked up from her book in surprise. It was like she’d forgotten to do something, and then forgotten that she’d forgotten it. Like there was a list somewhere of things she urgently needed to do, and time was running out, and she had lost the list.
“Maya!” said her mother, puttin
g the book she was reading down on the table. “You’re acting like a trapped cat!”
At the same time she was happy: That was the odd thing. Like right now, looking at her mother, her face, her warm and loving eyes: to think she was going to be all right, after all. Forever and ever. Well! All those fancy doctors hadn’t been able to manage it, had they? They hadn’t loved her mother nearly enough, that was the thing.
You had to be able to love things, to save them. You had to see the beauty in them, the way the brass vines of the Cabinet wound their way across the glass, the bottles curled so tenderly around their dark handfuls of earth—
“Speaking of cats,” said her father, looking up from the letter he was reading. “The neighbors say Boofer thanks us for the lovely shirt. Why is our dog thanking us for articles of clothing? Did we send Boofer a shirt?”
“Boofer’s not a cat,” said James.
“I didn’t say he was,” said their father.
“You said, ‘speaking of cats.’ ”
Impatience sent the pen in Maya’s hand skittering to the floor.
“All right, that’s it,” said her mother, laughing a little. “No more homework! You need a break. And for your information, Greg, I did send Boofer a shirt. Why not? An old shirt of Maya’s. It had a hopeless snag in it.”
They were all looking at her now, but Maya’s mother was smiling that particular smile of hers, the one that meant she had done something nobody else’s (sane) mother would ever do, and was not embarrassed to admit it. On the contrary: was rather pleased with herself, and enjoying the joke.
“Well, I was going to throw it out. But then I thought: a postcard! For Boofer! All the lovely smells of Paris! Maya’s school, the bakery, our apartment—I’m sure for a dog it’s all there. So I stuffed it into an envelope and mailed it off.”
“Cool,” said James.
Boofer! That hollow homesick place in Maya’s heart contracted for a moment—and then she thought about Mrs. Johnson, in the house next to theirs, opening an envelope from Paris and pulling out Maya’s dirty old shirt, and all the impatience and irritation came flooding back over her, and her chair made an angry scuffing sound against the wooden floor.