Meeting

by Nina Hoffman

  “We can bring that back to you,” Gwenda said, fingering her bracelet.

  Oma smiled even wider. She cocked her head and looked at Maya. “How does one get adopted by those Janus House people? I’ve never heard of such a thing.”

  “By accident. A portal person attached to me, and they’re making sure I’m taken care of.”

  “A portal person,” Oma said. “Which species? I only met the ones who breathed air. I imagine this is one of those?”

  “Sissimi,” Maya said. Her stomach churned. She was regretting her lost silence now. Oma had to be trustworthy enough to tell a secret to; she’d kept all her Janus House secrets for a long time, even from Travis, but Maya still felt a little uncomfortable talking about it.

  “Never heard of that one,” said Oma. “Was the detachment painful? Once a jinjin suckered onto my arm, and getting it off hurt a lot.”

  “You met a jinjin?” Gwenda said. “I’ve never even seen one, just heard stories.”

  “I think the Council restricted portal access to them sometime in the seventies,” said Oma. “They had too great an appetite for any kind of flesh they could sucker onto. The diplomatic incidents!” She rolled up the sleeve of her robe on her left arm and showed them a ring of red on her upper arm. “Isaac didn’t believe me when I told him an octopus left this mark. That was probably one of our worst fights. He wanted me to stay home after that, if I was going places and tangling with dangerous octopi, or anything else that could hurt me. But I wouldn’t stop being a giri.” She put her hand on Travis’s and smiled. “Now I’ll have to worry about you, but I’m happy for you, too. So many worlds will open up for you now.”

  He smiled, then smiled a little wider. “No lie. I hadn’t thought much about it. I’m going through portals. Cowabunga.”

  “Oma, back here on Earth,” Gwenda said, “we want to know what you need and how we can help. Travis hasn’t told us much about what’s going on for you, but we know he’s distressed—”

  “Now, wait just a danged minute,” Travis said.

  “Concerned? Busy?” Gwenda suggested.

  Travis frowned.

  Oma patted Travis’s hand. “Yes. I know. I hate being such a burden. I’m used to being the one who helps, and this is painful for me. Travis has been so good to me. I hope you know how much I appreciate it, Trav. Oh, dear. If you’re going to be a giri, you’ll need to get away more—”

  Travis said, “I’ve told you before, stop it with the burden thing, okay, Oma? Anyway, they say I don’t have any giri duties until I get some training. I’m getting training in my free period after school, except when Artemis has to take off early. But it will probably take a while.”

  “Ah.”

  “We have several family members studying elder care who would like to practice on you,” Gwenda said.

  Oma’s brows drew together in a frown. “Practice what?”

  “Caring.”

  “Oh, I couldn’t—it’s not a thing you share with strangers—oh. Well, no, I suppose I could,” she said, looking sideways at Travis. “It would help if there were people to spell you, wouldn’t it?”

  “I never asked for that,” said Travis. “You know I love you, Oma.”

  “Love doesn’t stop you from burning out. I hate to be a charity case.... I guess that’s arrogant of me, isn’t it? If you’re telling me true, Gwenda girl, then I say send them on over and let’s get to know one another.”

  “It’s not charity if you’ve earned it, ma’am,” said Benjamin. “You’ve been a giri for a long time. We owe you.”

  “You’d be helping them learn, too, Oma,” Gwenda said.

  Oma smiled. “When you put it that way—I’d be churlish to refuse. Thank you.”

  Maya stood up. “Oma, do you paint?”

  “Yes, I do,” said Oma.

  “Did you do the art in the hallway?”

  “Indeed I did. Isaac used to trouble himself about my imagination. ‘You know you’ve given that sheep too many horns,’ he’d say, or, ‘Those folk are too thin to be real.’ I’d tell him it was a place I’d visited in my imagination. It worried him a little, but he put up with it.”

  “Do you ever teach art?”

  “Teach art? I’m self-taught myself. I don’t want to train other people to make my mistakes.”

  “Oma,” Maya said.

  Show her your sketchbook, Rimi thought.

  Maya pulled her sketchbook out of her backpack and opened it to her most recent drawing. She had drawn Kachik-Vati yesterday, with Rimi’s help, when they were in the hideout in the woods with Travis. She held up the picture to show Oma.

  “Oh,” Oma said. “Oh! Oh, you’re very skillful! And—there’s something—” She held out her arms, and Maya laid the sketchbook across them. Oma frowned down at the picture. Gwenda and Benjamin stood to look over her shoulders.

  “That’s the mrudim you met yesterday?” Gwenda asked.

  “Kachik,” said Maya, and then she pointed to the extra arm. “Vati.”

  “There’s something about the technique,” Oma said. She tapped her index finger on the fur. “I don’t understand how you got the swirls in the fur here.”

  “Oma, you asked me about the portal person who attached to me. This person, Rimi, is still part of me. She drew the swirls, and I did most of the other work on the picture. Both of us want to learn more about art. If you would teach us, we wouldn’t have to worry about being sneaky. When Rimi draws, it’s—not what people expect to see. Could you help us? Could we come here for art lessons?”

  “Well, I don’t—” Oma said. She looked at her work table, then at Travis. He smiled at her. “I don’t—” She paused, took a breath. Set Maya’s sketchbook on the table. “I don’t see why not,” she said at last. “Except that I don’t know I have anything to teach you.”

  “It might be enough if I could come here and draw for an hour or two without worrying about having to hide the pictures, or the way Rimi and I do them.”

  “Rimi is still attached to you.”

  “I think we’re bonded for life.” Maya retrieved her sketchpad, got out two pencils, and opened to a fresh page. “Here.” She started outlining a picture of Travis’s face. Rimi picked up the other pencil and roughed in his hair, a bit shaggy and shoulder-length, touching down lightly to keep the color bright instead of shady. Maya put ovals for his eyes to get their placement, then worked on drawing one eye while Rimi drew the other. Both she and Rimi kept glancing at Travis until he got nervous. She put a line where his nose went and another for his mouth, and Rimi drew his jaw line, and then they both worked on adding the details that made Travis uniquely himself.

  Oma stared at Rimi’s pencil, working without a visible agent.

  Maya and Rimi dropped their pencils at the same time, and Rimi lifted the sketchpad from Maya’s hands and turned it so Oma could see the picture.

  Travis blushed and put his hand over his face.

  Oma drew in a breath. “May I have it?”

  “Sure,” said Maya. Rimi pulled the picture out of the sketchbook and gently placed it in Oma’s hand.

  “Rimi?” Oma said.

  Rimi patted Oma’s cheek.

  Oma smiled. “Thank you, dear.” She closed her eyes. Rimi patted her cheek twice more and withdrew. Oma sighed and opened her eyes. “I don’t know that I have anything to teach either of you, but you would be welcome to come and spend an afternoon doing art with me.”

  “Have you worked with oils?” Maya asked.

  “Not successfully. I’ve had fun with acrylics, but mostly, as you saw in the front hall, I work in charcoal, pastel, and watercolor.”

  “I’d like to try all those things,” said Maya. She mostly worked with pencils and crayons, occasionally trying watercolors. Her teacher in Idaho had been working with Maya on her pencil portraits of people. Before she’d found her Idaho teacher, Maya had worked on her own mostly, although she and Peter had had some classes from a friend of their mother’s who had given them
stacks of things to make collages out of.

  Tell her it doesn’t matter what we work on, as long as we can work, Rimi said, so Maya repeated that. “My parents will pay you,” Maya added.

  “Bless you, child, I don’t need money.”

  “They’ll want to, though, because then it will make sense that I’m coming over here. Oma . . . this will be great for me. Is it something you’d like to do?”

  Oma looked at the sketch of Travis, then studied Maya with her head cocked sideways. “Yes,” she said. “Very much.”

  “Could I come to class as well, Oma?” Gwenda asked.

  “Why—” Oma sat back and laid her hands in her lap. “Yes.”

  Benjamin raised his hand. Travis did, too. “Oma, I wish I’d thought of this before,” Travis said.

  “You’re going to have to help me with supplies,” Oma said.

  “We can all do that,” said Benjamin.

  Oma smiled. “So are you thinking Tuesday afternoons?”

  Maya exchanged glances with Travis, Gwenda, and Benjamin.

  “We don’t have training on Tuesdays and Thursdays,” Travis said, “so Tuesdays would work for me.”

  “Me, too,” said Maya. “I have piano lessons on Thursday.”

  “We have to talk to our teachers,” Gwenda said.

  “And Great-uncle Harper. Or maybe Aunt Noona,” said Benjamin.

  “Aunt Noona.” Gwenda nodded.

  “All right,” said Oma. “Let me know who can come. The first thing we’re going to need is a sketch pad for each of you. Then tools of choice. Let’s put together a list.”

  SIXTEEN

  Maya told her parents at supper that she had found an art teacher.

  “Who is it?” asked her mother.

  “My friend Travis’s grandmother.”

  “Travis is the tall, good-looking one who isn’t from Janus House, right?” Candra said.

  “Right,” said Maya.

  “We’ll need to meet her,” Dad said.

  “Sure,” said Maya. “She lives about three blocks away.”

  “This is exciting, honey,” said her mother.

  “Yeah.” Maya smiled.

  Someone knocked at the front door when Maya and Peter were washing up after dinner, and Candra went to answer it. Maya heard murmurs, and then Candra came back to the kitchen, where Mom and Dad had settled at the table with homework they needed to check, and Candra had set out her math homework.

  “Evren’s here,” Candra said. “He wants to go for a walk with me. Is that okay?”

  “How nice of you to ask,” Dad said. Maya couldn’t tell whether he was being sarcastic.

  Mom stood up. “Evren. Evren. A faint bell rings. Could you ask him to step in here?”

  Candra turned to talk to the person behind her. “I told you they’d want to see you,” she said.

  “And I said that’s fine,” said Evren, stepping past Candra into the kitchen. “Evening, Mrs. Andersen, Mr. Andersen.” He wore jeans and a blue windbreaker, and his shoulders were hunched. He looked beautiful.

  “Evren Janus,” said Mom. “Now I remember.”

  “I’ve got a forgettable face.”

  “I wouldn’t say that,” Mom said, “but you keep a low profile.”

  Forgettable face, Rimi thought. Ha! He makes people forget his face.

  Let’s draw him, Maya thought. She dried her hands on a dishtowel and grabbed the current sketchpad out of her backpack, which was waiting by the kitchen table for her to finish the dishes and get to her homework.

  “Maya,” Peter protested. There were still dirty dishes in the dishpan. He was drying the dishes after she washed them, so he was stuck if she left in the middle.

  “In a minute.” She sat at the table, opened to a blank page, and sketched in the basics of Evren’s face, then added detail. When she glanced up at him again, he smiled at her and worked his fingers in a pattern she didn’t recognize. When she looked down at the page, the drawing she had started was gone.

  Evren winked at her.

  How did he do that? Maya asked Rimi.

  Let me see. A faint shadow moved over the page. Spinners and shifters! So elegant! Little buzzers came and lifted the lines off, but the push-down is still here.

  Maya touched the page through the shadow. She could still feel the depressions left by her pressure on the pencil. If she shaded across the page, the way people always did in mystery movies to get clues, she was pretty sure she would find the picture again, only it would look like a negative.

  “It’s a school night,” Dad said to Candra and Evren. “You can go out for a little while, but I’d appreciate it if you were back by ten.”

  “Sure,” said Candra.

  “No problem,” said Evren.

  “Later,” said Candra, and they both headed out, with a brief pause by the front coat closet for Candra to grab her coat. The front door slammed with a puff of cool air moving through the house.

  I can untwizz this, Rimi thought, focused on the disappeared drawing. Her shadow grew thicker across the paper; glitter sparkled in it, and then silvery grains filled in the lines Maya had drawn, and Evren’s image was there on the page again, shinier than before.

  Thanks, Rimi! What is it filled with?

  I polished the pencil stuff a little. Rimi thought a smile.

  Nice.

  “So that’s probably a good sign,” Dad said to Mom. “She’s found some kind of boyfriend. I would have thought it would be someone from high school, though.”

  “Someone from next door,” Mom said. “Might be easier.”

  “Maya, you spend a lot of time at Janus House,” Dad said. “We see them every Saturday night, and I have to admire their musicianship, but I feel I don’t know much else about them.”

  “Dr. Porta is a terrific baker,” Mom said.

  “Well, there is that.” Dad tapped a pencil against the table a few times. “If this thing with Candra gets serious, though, I want to see where Evren lives. Does he have parents? If he does, who are they? Maya, do you know anything about his family?”

  Maya shook her head. She closed her sketchbook on Rimi’s rendering of her Evren drawing and went back to the sink. “I don’t remember much about him,” she said. “We met him when we went over to see Gwenda’s closet.”

  “Is he related to Gwenda?”

  “Same last name,” Maya said. “A lot of people over there are related to each other.”

  “Is he Gwenda’s big brother?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Well, it might amount to nothing,” Dad said, and he and Mom bent back to their work.

  Maya tested Rimi’s alarm clock capabilities the next morning. Rimi shook her awake, not just on the shoulder, but all through her. Maya felt like a bowl of jiggling Jell-O. She snapped her eyes open. “Ow?” she said, experimentally.

  Did I hurt you? I was careful!

  “It doesn’t hurt, it just feels weird.” Maya sat up and looked at the clock. “It’s fifteen minutes before I wanted to wake up.”

  I didn’t want to wait any more, Rimi thought. It always takes you longer than you think.

  “Okay,” Maya said. She got up. Rimi had already put her homework and art supplies in her backpack. “Whoa. Thanks, Rimi.” Maya dressed, pulled on her pack, and headed out into the hall. She almost collided with Peter.

  “So you were always talking to Rimi,” he whispered.

  “My shadow,” she whispered back. “Were you listening at my door?”

  “No, just on my way downstairs.” He had his school backpack on, too, and his shoelaces were untied.

  “Hey, you could trip—” Maya said, and then Rimi tied Peter’s shoelaces.

  “Oh, wow,” he said.

  She put extra knots in the laces.

  “But I won’t be able to get them off,” he said.

  Ask me and I’ll untie them, Rimi thought.

  Maya relayed the message.

  “Yeah, but you’re not at my school.
I’ll need to change for P.E.”

  Rimi paused, then undid the outermost layer of knots.

  “What are you guys talking about now?” Candra said, breezing past them on her way to the stairs.

  “Peter’s shoelaces,” Maya said. “Hey, how’d your walk with Evren go last night?”

  “Wouldn’t you like to know?” Candra was gone down the stairs.

  “Yes!” Maya yelled, following her. Peter was on her heels. They all headed for the kitchen.

  It was Cold Cereal Day. Mom and Dad were already sitting at the table drinking coffee. Candra grabbed a box of cereal from the lineup on the counter and poured some in a bowl, added milk, and started scarfing. Peter poured a pile of ChocoNut Bits into a bowl. Maya got honey-nut cereal for herself.

  “What happened last night?” Maya asked Candra again.

  Candra just smiled and ate. Then she said, “Live in ignorance, the way you made me live all these weeks.”

  “Candra, where did you and Evren go?” Mom asked.

  “Just around a few blocks, Mom. There were streetlights all the way.” She hunched her shoulders. “This is our neighborhood now. I don’t want to be scared of it. I don’t have to, do I?”

  “No,” said Dad. “As far as we know, this is a safe place to live and wander.”

  “Good.” She finished her cereal and rinsed out her bowl, then stuck it in the dishwasher.

  “Did you kiss?” Peter asked.

  “What? Of course not,” Candra said, blushing. “All we did was talk.”

  “What about?” Peter demanded.

  “That is seriously none of your business, squirt,” she said, then relented. “We mostly talked about me. I didn’t notice until after we said good night. I had so many questions for him, but somehow, he sidetracked me into talking about me. Next time I’m going to change that.”

  “There’s a next time?” Maya asked.

  “There will be.” Candra settled her messenger bag over her shoulder. “Dad?”

  “Sit down, Candra. I’m not leaving until I’ve finished my coffee.”

  Candra frowned and sat down, but her posture was tense. She jiggled one leg.