Eclipse Three

by edited by Jonathan Strahan

  After that, Mama Strong never again seemed as interested in Norah. Chloe hadn't learned yet to hold still, but Mama Strong was up to the challenge. When Norah was seventeen, the gift she got was Chloe.

  One day, Mama Strong stopped Norah on her way to breakfast. "Follow me," she said, and led Norah to the chainlink fence. She unlocked the gate and swung it open. "You can go now." She counted out fifty dollars. "You can take this and go. Or you can stay until your mother and father come for you. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe next week. You go now, you get only as far as you get with fifty dollars."

  Norah began to shake. This, she thought, was the worst thing done to her yet. She took a step toward the gate, took another. She didn't look at Mama Strong. She saw that the open gate was a trick, which made her shaking stop. She was not fooled. Norah would never be allowed to walk out. She took a third step and a fourth. "You don't belong here," Mama Strong said, with contempt as if there'd been a test and Norah had flunked it. Norah didn't know if this was because she'd been too compliant or not compliant enough.

  And then Norah was outside and Mama Strong was closing and locking the gate behind her.

  Norah walked in the sunlight down a paved road dotted with potholes and the smashed skins of frogs. The road curved between weeds taller than Norah's head, bushes with bright orange flowers. Occasionally a car went by, driven very fast.

  Norah kept going. She passed stucco homes, some small stores. She saw cigarettes and muumuus for sale, large avocados, bunches of small bananas, liquor bottles filled with dish soap, posters for British ale. She thought about buying something to eat, but it seemed too hard, would require her to talk. She was afraid to stop walking. It was very hot on the road in the sun. A pack of small dogs followed her briefly and then ran back to wherever they'd come from.

  She reached the ocean and walked into the water. The salt stung the rashes on her legs, the sores on her arms and then it stopped stinging. The sand was brown, the water blue and warm. She'd forgotten about the fifty dollars though she was still holding them in her hand, now soaked and salty.

  There were tourists everywhere on the beach, swimming, lying in the sun with daiquiris and ice cream sandwiches and salted oranges. She wanted to tell them that, not four miles away, children were being starved and terrified. She couldn't remember enough about people to know if they'd care. Probably no one would believe her. Probably they already knew.

  She waded into shore and walked farther. It was so hot, her clothes dried quickly. She came to a river and an open air market. A young man with a scar on his cheek approached her. She recognized him. On two occasions, he'd put her in restraint. Her heart began to knock against her lungs. The air around her went black.

  "Happy birthday," he said.

  He came swimming back into focus, wearing a bright plaid shirt, smiling so his lip rose like a curtain over his teeth. He stepped toward her; she stepped away. "Your birthday, yes?" he said. "Eighteen?" He bought her some bananas, but she didn't take them.

  A woman behind her was selling beaded bracelets, peanuts and puppies. She waved Norah over. "True," she said to Norah. "At eighteen, they have to let you go. The law says." She tied a bracelet onto Norah's wrist. How skinny Norah's arm looked in it. "A present for your birthday," the woman said. "How long were you there?"

  Instead of answering, Norah asked for directions to the Pelican Bar. She bought a t-shirt, a skirt, and a cola. She drank the cola, dressed in the new clothes and threw away the old. She bought a ticket on a boat—ten dollars it cost her to go, ten more to come back. There were tourists, but no one sat anywhere near her.

  The boat dropped her, along with the others, twenty feet or so out on the sandbar, so that she walked the last bit through waist-high water. She was encircled by the straight, clean line of the horizon, the whole world spinning around her, flat as a plate. The water was a brilliant, sun-dazzled blue in every direction. She twirled slowly, her hands floating, her mind flying until it was her turn on the makeshift ladder of planks and branches and her grip on the wood suddenly anchored her. She climbed into the restaurant in her dripping dress.

  She bought a postcard for Chloe. "On your eighteenth birthday, come here," she wrote, "and eat a fish right off the line. I'm sorry about everything. I'm a bad person."

  She ordered a fish for herself, but couldn't finish it. She sat for hours, feeling the floor of the bar rocking beneath her, climbing down the ladder into the water, and up again to dry in the warm air. She never wanted to leave this place that was the best place in the world, even more beautiful than she'd imagined. She fell asleep on the restaurant bench and didn't wake up until the last boat was going to shore and someone shook her arm to make sure she was on it.

  When Norah returned to shore, she saw Mama Strong seated in an outdoor bar at the edge of the market on the end of the dock. The sun was setting and dark coming on. Mama Strong was drinking something that could have been water or could have been whiskey. The glass was colored blue so there was no way to be sure. She saw Norah getting off the boat. There was no way back that didn't take Norah towards her.

  "You have so much money, you're a tourist?" Mama Strong asked. "Next time you want to eat, the money is gone. What then?"

  Two men were playing the drums behind her. One of them began to sing. Norah recognized the tune—something old that her mother had liked—but not the words.

  "Do you think I'm afraid to go hungry?" Norah said.

  "So. We made you tougher. Better than you were. But not tough enough. Not what we're looking for. You go be whatever you want now. Have whatever you want. We don't care."

  What did Norah want to be? Clean. Not hungry. Not hurting. What did she want to have? She wanted to sleep in the dark. Already there was one bright star in the sky over the ocean.

  What else? She couldn't think of a thing. Mama Strong had said Norah would have to change, but Norah felt that she'd vanished instead. She didn't know who she was anymore. She didn't know anything at all. She fingered the beaded bracelet on her wrist. "When I run out of money," she said, "I'll ask someone to help me. And someone will. Maybe not the first person I ask. But someone." Maybe it was true.

  "Very pretty." Mama Strong looked into her blue glass, swirled whatever was left in it, tipped it down her throat. "You're wrong about humans, you know," she said. Her tone was conversational. "Humans do everything we did. Humans do more."

  Two men came up behind Norah. She whirled, sure that they were here for her, sure that she'd be taken, maybe back, maybe to Mama Strong's more horrible someplace else. But the men walked right past her toward the drummers. They walked right past her and as they walked, they began to sing. Maybe they were human and maybe not.

  "Very pretty world," said Mama Strong.

  A Practical Girl

  Ellen Klages

  Can I watch Howdy Doody when we get home?" Carolyn Sullivan asked. She pushed the cart down the canned foods aisle of the Shop-Rite while her mother added creamed corn and green beans to the basket.

  "May I. And what's the magic word?"

  "May I please watch Howdy Doody?"

  "All right, if there's time after we make the beds. We have guests coming."

  Carolyn sighed. The Institute for Advanced Study was holding a conference over the weekend, and they were expecting a visiting professor to arrive the next day. The house on Mercer Street had been in the family since the end of the Civil War. When Ensign William Sullivan's ship was torpedoed late in 1943, all hands lost, his widow transformed it into a guest house, to support herself and her baby daughter.

  Einstein lived a block away.

  Mrs. Sullivan wheeled the cart into a check-out line. "Would you like to play the register game?" she asked. "It'll be good practice. School starts next week."

  Carolyn nodded. Her mother thought the game was a kind of homework—good for her—but she liked trying to add up all the groceries in her head as fast as the check-out girl could use the keys. She was the best in her class at arithmetic.
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  She put the cans of corn on the belt and watched as the white tabs jumped up at the back of the machine with a soft ka-ching, like ducks in a shooting gallery. Twelve cents, four times, which was easy. Then the beans. The first one was 13 cents, and she smiled, because there were four of them too, and that was 52 cents, which made the dollar rectangle in her head whole again. 48 + 52 = 100.

  It made her happy when the numbers meshed together with nice, even edges.

  The girl was fast, and Carolyn lost track, a little, when the roast went through—$2.37—because it was a big number and it ended with a seven. They were the hardest because they almost never made nice shapes. But when the girl hit TOTAL, Carolyn was only 68 cents off.

  "Pretty good," her mother said as they loaded the bags into the back of the station wagon. She pulled a Tootsie Pop out of her purse. "I think that deserves a reward."

  Carolyn made the candy last, sucking, not biting, and still had a tiny nub left when all the groceries had been put away. But by the time the last pillowcase had been fluffed and placed just-so, it was too late for Howdy Doody, so she went out to the backyard with her book. Newly cut grass clippings clung to her bare legs like jimmies on an ice cream cone, and her hair hung damp on the back of her neck in the August heat, but discomfort was the price of freedom. Next week it was back to plaid uniforms, memorizing and eagle-eyed nuns.

  She sat against the stone wall that separated their yard from the woods, grateful for the shade of the elm. Four pages into Johnny Tremain, she heard the solid thwack of a bat hitting a baseball, and a second later a white missile whizzed over her head and landed in the underbrush beyond with a swishing of leaves and a soft thud.

  Silence, for a moment, then a babble of boys' voices. She stood up and looked across the manicured lawn of the Taylors' house next door. On the far side, she saw a trio of crew cut heads above the wooden fence. New kids, moved in last week.

  "Do you have our baseball?" one of them yelled.

  Carolyn cupped her hands around her mouth and called back. "It's in the woods."

  "Okay."

  He headed for the chain-link fence at the back of his own yard, and had one sneaker wedged a foot up before she could warn him, "You won't get through from there. Blackberry bushes. Big thorns."

  She watched him shrug and leap the fence anyway.

  "Ow! Shit!" came through loud and clear a moment later.

  The urge to yell, "I told you so," was strong, but she hadn't met that boy yet. He swore, so he might try for payback. She watched him climb back into his yard, rubbing his knee, then made a bold decision.

  "I'll get it."

  Her mother always warned her about the woods. Besides the blackberries, it would be easy to get lost among the acres of trees. "You're all I have," she'd say. So Carolyn had never explored beyond the wall, mostly because, up until this summer, she hadn't been tall enough to climb over. But she was now.

  She looked behind her to see if she was being watched, then scaled it and surveyed the ground on the other side. A soft verge of grass and dandelions grew at the base, and the blackberries seemed to peter out midway behind the Taylors'. She jumped down.

  The ball had left a trail through the undergrowth, and she found it soon enough, too pale and too perfectly round to be part of the natural chaos. She recovered it from underneath a clump of damp leaves, disturbing a legion of rolly bugs and one fat salamander.

  She'd planned to walk down the verge to the Wallers' house, on the corner, and return the ball from the sidewalk side. Then she saw three flat stones, piled one on the other, the topmost painted with a faded red crosshatch, like a tic-tac-toe game waiting to happen. That wasn't nature, either. She squatted down. The stones marked what looked like a path leading deeper into the trees. It might be nothing, and it might end in more blackberries, but, except for the market, she'd been cooped up inside all day. Chores and more chores. Everything had to be tidied up, "neat as a pin," when guests were coming.

  Carolyn scuffed her feet in the leaves as she walked back to the stone wall, leaving her own trail, and threw the baseball as hard as she could across the Taylors' yard, shouting, "Ball!" It landed next to the birdbath and knocked over a garden gnome. She headed away from the sudden clamor.

  No one had used the path in a while. Saplings blocked her way and sprang back, hard, across her arms as she pushed through. Twigs snagged at her ankles, and her white socks were soon covered with a carpet of tiny green burrs that would take forever to pick out. But it was a path, and every hundred yards or so she found another pile of rocks. Some of them had tumbled over, but one stone always had the same mysterious crosshatch.

  The woods were cool and shady. Carolyn could smell the earth, almost sweet from decomposing logs, with a bitter undertaste of autumn after autumn of fallen leaves. No breeze, and except for the sound of her feet crunching along, all she heard were birdcalls and the occasional rhythmic knock-knock-knock of an unseen woodpecker.

  The path paralleled Stony Brook for a little while, then veered off to the left and ended at an old wooden fence with a narrow stile, its boards warped and moss-covered. Carolyn put one careful foot on the bottom step. It creaked, but held her weight, and she climbed up and sat at the top, looking into the ruins of what had once been a large and elaborate garden, not just a backyard.

  Rosebushes taller than her surrounded stone benches and a sundial. The edges of a gravel walkway were blurred with weeds, and wildflowers grew knee-high. A dozen bees droned lazily in midair.

  The walkway led to the back of an old barn. A huge maple tree, still thick-leafed with summer, blocked her view of all but one wing of the house—a single story with a bay window below a magnificent stained-glass peacock. She sat on the stile for a few minutes, savoring the discovery of a new place and debating about exploring further.

  She had come this far, and didn't want to turn back now, but entering the garden wasn't just being in the woods. It was trespassing. If anyone still lived in the house—which didn't look too likely—she'd get caught. They'd call her mother and then she'd really be in trouble. She'd spend the last week of summer doing laundry and dishes and ironing. Inside.

  After several go-rounds with herself, curiosity won and she clambered into the garden. Gravel skittered and the bees flew off to a safer distance, but nothing else happened.

  The walkway continued around the barn. She turned the corner and barely stopped an out-loud gasp. The house on the other side of the wide drive was enormous, with gabled windows and a cupola, every inch covered in ornate Victorian gingerbread that needed painting.

  She still thought the place was deserted—until she saw the round-fendered Buick, parked with its nose just inside the "barn," which turned out to be a four-car garage. The Buick had a Princeton sticker on its bumper, and New Jersey plates, 1952, just like her mother's car, all legal and up-to-date.

  Carolyn stepped into the shadows and scrunched down. She eased around the corner of the house, planting each foot carefully so her Keds were almost silent. The wide porch held a line of peeling Adirondack chairs and wrapped all the way around to the front. That was even grander—stone pillars and more stained glass, green-limned copper letters over the entrance that said THE BRAMBLES.

  It was a mansion, the biggest house she'd ever seen outside a magazine. But, except for the Buick, it would be easy to believe no one had been here for years.

  "Hullo. Have you ever seen a giant turtle?"

  Carolyn gave a little yelp and jumped back, whacking her elbow on a drainpipe. Cradling her arm, she looked around to see who had spoken.

  It took her a moment to notice that the massive front door was open, just a crack, a foot in a leather oxford wedged into the gap.

  "How giant?" she asked. Her brain was full of other questions, but that was the one that came out of her mouth.

  The oxford moved and the door opened to reveal a boy about her age, sitting cross-legged on the floor. He made a circle with his arms, wider than his body. "Like thi
s."

  "Wow." Carolyn climbed the steps and stood on the porch.

  "He's very old," the boy said. "Grandaddy sent him from China for my daddy's birthday. He's magic."

  "Sure he is." Carolyn tried not to laugh, because the boy sounded serious, but she was a practical girl. She didn't believe in magic and fairy tales and all that baloney. Her family? Not so happily ever after.

  The boy shook his head. "Not Daddy. Lotion."

  "Lotion?" Was that what he'd said?

  "My turtle."

  "Funny name for a turtle." Even an imaginary one.

  "He's Chinese." The boy stood up and pushed the door all the way open. He had short brown hair and was taller than Carolyn, by a couple of inches, but she could tell right away that there was something wrong with him. One side of his head was shaped funny, and his eyes didn't look straight at her, just a little beyond.