“DON’T look at me like that. I didn’t write this obvious little script,” said her mother. When once she might have taken a long drag on a cigarette, and then for emphasis have released through a thin-slitted smile a hostile plume of hot roasted carbon dioxide, now she merely bounced her shoulder on the doorframe of Eleni’s room. Bounced twice, rested, bounced again. Her arms were bolted tight across her bosom. “Save your resentment for the weatherman. Or the weather. Or your father and his brave little experiment.”
By which Martha Lester meant her former husband’s new family. The fun wife. The readymade son.
“I didn’t say a word,” said Eleni. “Did I say a word?”
The thunder said a word for both of them. Martha Lester waited for it to be done, and added, “You can’t blame me for five days of rain. If you must blame someone, you can blame Mr. Spontaneous for planning poorly. They got a late start, he said—who knows why, some novel scrap of life happened to them last night and they tumbled into bed at all hours, the dears. By the time they got going at quarter-past-late, the interstate north was constipated with traffic. The bypass had been closed due to an accident, he guesses, and all that overspill funneled onto the main road. They were crawling, he complained, crawling at best, when they weren’t actually standing still. It would be close to dark by the time they got here, and anyway, the rain is supposed to hold on through the whole weekend. So he sends his regrets.”
“I’ve never known what to do with the regrets he sends.”
“You might have come to the phone and told him that yourself. You should have come to the phone.”
“I didn’t have anything to say,” said Eleni. “I could tell by the way the phone rang that it was Daddy bailing. Who could blame him?”
“Why not blame him? Give me a little rest for once. I didn’t order up this storm for our week at the lake, Eleni. I know you were looking forward to seeing your new …” She bit her lip, thinking of a word other than brother or stepbrother. “Your new relative. What’s his name—Tyler?”
“Taylor. And I hardly know him. I was just looking forward to. You know.”
“A little change from Mamma Mia. I know. Well, in my own sick way, I was anticipating a little diversion myself.”
The rain pummeled the small windows with such ferocity that Eleni imagined the putty on the old weather-beaten sash would just give way, and the squares of glass fall in upon the painted floorboards. At this hour, there wasn’t much to see; the falling dusk and the rising mist and the rainstung surface of the lake made of the view a kind of undifferentiated gray.
“If they’re not coming,” said Eleni hopefully, “is there any good reason we have to stay?”
“You know that Saturday is the Brister County Fair, darling. I do better business there every summer than I do at any other venue. You may think I enjoy leaving the cottage every day, trawling through people’s disgusting garages and basements and attics. It’s a wonder I haven’t died of asphyxiation years ago. But it’s my work. And someone has to put food on the table.”
The angle of her mother’s pouting lower lip made Eleni unclear who was more at fault: Eleni herself, for having a bothersome appetite for food, or her father, for leaving both the marriage and the kitchen.
“But there’s nothing to do in all this rain. I’m sick of neatening up this little prison cell.” Eleni looked around her attic room. It was tent-shaped, windows at both ends, no dormers. “This is supposed to be a vacation.”
“This is supposed to be a family,” countered her mother. “Amputated though we are. You have got to do your part, Missy Sweet-pea.” She turned and stopped at the top of the steps. “Now I shall go try to throw some supper together. I had been counting on them arriving from the city with something edible. The trials, Eleni. Someday you’ll understand.”
“There isn’t even anything to read. I’ve already gone through all the library books I brought.”
“You know what I say to that.” And Eleni did know. Try the growing stack of mildewing children’s books. The ones accumulating at the dryer end of the porch, stored under the blue rain tarp with the rest of the tchotchkes that Martha Lester was going to do her best to unload on the unwitting public at the Brister Country Fair.
Descending, her mother called over her shoulder, “You may have gone through them once or twice, but I’ve added a few new things from that church rummage sale I picked over yesterday. Have a look.”
At first Eleni just sat and thought about Taylor. She had no intention of liking him, particularly, but at the very least it would have been fun to have someone new to irritate. And who knows—companionship with an accidental stepbrother wasn’t the least likely thing ever to happen to a human soul.
Downstairs, her mother began to bang cupboards and curse in dramatically inappropriate language. Didn’t she realize that there was no insulation between the floors? The wood of the kitchen ceiling was the floor of Eleni’s bedroom; the cottage was that old and decrepit. Eleni could picture her mother lunging about the kitchen, trying to light the burner, cutting her hand while opening a tin of tomatoes.
As much to escape envisioning that little kitchen drama as anything else, Eleni crept down the steps and wandered out onto the front porch. She peeled back one corner of the tarp with pinched fingers, her nose wrinkling. A reek of compressed, moldy air escaped.
She had looked at the old books before. They had barely survived hearty readings from children who themselves were now probably surviving on social security. The books were almost Harry Potter thick, but had creamier thicker pages and darker, more insistent type. Usually there were black-and-white chapter drawings, and sometimes color plates protected by onionskin guard sheets. But all the hype was rarely worth it. Even when there was something interesting, a marauding army or a sea serpent or a towering genie, the four (inevitably four) children brave enough to take on the enemy were too pretty to be true. The girls wore pinafores and ribbons. The boys all looked as if their names must be Cedric or Cecil or Cyril or maybe Cynthia. The only solo child in any such adventure that ever showed up in these old books was stolid aproned Alice, who wandered through Wonderland more or less alone, with only her own hydro-encephalitic head to keep her company. That is: Alice slowly going mad. Who could blame her?
Eleni pawed through the pile as quietly as she could. Her mother heard the noise of stealthy movement, though. “You might find some puzzles in one of the piles of books,” she said. “I haven’t finished organizing everything from yesterday’s haul. I don’t mind if you play with one. Just don’t lose any of the pieces.”
Grunting, Eleni kept looking. She located the three or four boxes of puzzles, all in the same-size box, all from the same manufacturer, presumably. The cellophane sleeve, once a tight-fitting shrink-wrap, had aged poorly. It came apart in brittle chalky strips as she handled the top box. She rubbed the dust off and looked at the picture. All she could see was a kind of dragon head, brow down, eyes up. It appeared to be looking out at the viewer, as a dog who has fouled the carpet might. But a dog would cower, and the dragon wasn’t cowering, but waiting.
“Supper in half an hour or when it burns, whichever comes first,” called her mother. Eleni heard the liquid gulp a bottle makes when it is turned upside down and its contents are emptied greedily into a glass. She didn’t reply but darted back up the steps to her dusty, ill-lit aerie, the dragon puzzle under her arm.
As a rule, Eleni found puzzles idiotic. What was the point? The picture on the cover told you what to work for, so the act of fitting the pieces together was only a way to waste time. You might as well peel a strip of wallpaper off the side wall (it was coming off anyway), rip it up, then fit it back together. You knew no more at the end of finishing a puzzle than you did before starting it. You had only yourself to blame.
Still—the chink of ice in the glass below, the clatter of a wooden spoon dropped on the floor and not, Eleni winced to admit, rinsed off—well, Eleni had heard that people in prison take up cr
ocheting to pass the time, and when they’re done with a piece, they pull it all out and start again. Same principle.
There was a card table and a floor lamp, and she moved the table closer to the wall so she could lean the cover of the box against the wall. Then she proceeded like any mathematician or scientist trying to solve a problem efficiently. She turned over all the pieces so their colored sides were up—coppery oranges and purpley grays, the amber of teeth and talons, little else—and then sorted the edges and found the four corners.
The picture on the box top showed a fairly well articulated background, some sort of a woodsy hill and a lake, and ominous clouds, and, mercifully, no priggish schoolboy with a sword or lisping schoolgirl with a fistful of flowers or a whip. But perhaps this particular puzzle had been printed late in the run, as the color of the pieces themselves seemed less distinctive than the cover art. That would make finding the image harder. For this, Eleni was grateful.
“She-vipers from Missoula, Montana,” seethed Martha Lester. The pan clattered in the sink. Only then did Eleni smell the scorch. She rolled her eyes.
“I’m okay with peanut butter,” Eleni called in a snarkily cheery voice, adding, sotto voce, “again.”
“You’ll eat what I make and be glad of it,” snapped her mother.
Eleni bent her head down toward the puzzle.
Sheer unhappiness. Was that like sheer curtains?—unhappiness you could see through?
I’m not unhappy, she said to herself. I just love making puzzles night and day. Don’t I?
The easiest bit, the edge, came together almost at once. No surprises there. The border was almost all dark, though, so on the card table, when you stood back, it resembled a rectangular window, oozing oil from the outside in. Pooling and pocketing in those little teeth and sockets that individualize each puzzle piece.
She went to work on the dragon form next. The spine was the most obvious place to start, as Eleni could tell from the picture that the spine took up the largest part of the picture. The creature arched taller than it did wide, like a cat spiking its back almost into a point. And the scales on the back of the dragon all flowed in the same direction, a kind of ceaseless pattern of coppery waves frilling toward the tail. She could fit them in fairly easily, and the dragon took shape in its frame, though as yet unconnected by even a single umbilical isthmus to the dark border.
She paused once, her hand suspended over the table, and was studying the region near where the rear leg came up into a kind of haunch and hip, and was about to pull the next piece from the bank of golden choices, when a slam of the screen door startled her. Martha Lester was striding out in the rain to try to keep from lighting up an emergency cigarette that Eleni knew she kept in reserve in her purse. Smoke yourself to death, thought Eleni, shrugging theatrically, as if someone could see her. She returned her hand to its level position, floating eight inches above the tabletop in a holding pattern until her eyes had quite carefully taken in the clues that would identify the next bit, when she noticed that her hand went warm and cold as it moved back and forth in suspension.
What was this all about?
Maybe the light on the table reflected more easily, more warmly, from bright pieces of paper than from dark ones?
She tested her thesis and picked at random a piece near where the warmth was greatest. Sure enough, the piece was nearly white-gold. It wasn’t the piece she wanted, though, not the hip: it was a bit of the long, ridged snout, nearly to the flared nostrils where a curl of smoke was emerging.
“Bizarre,” she said aloud. She knew her mother couldn’t hear her, not in the rain, not in the noise she was making striding back and forth on the porch. Who was she talking to, then?
“Myself,” she replied, “I’m going bonkers due to living a week in my total-isolation cell.”
Again, she tried to pick a puzzle piece based on the warmth it emanated, without looking down; again, she found an orangey bit, which turned out to be the hip joint she was looking for.
Enough of the spine was in place now so that the arch showed up. It seemed a more aggressive pose than the picture on the box. Almost as if the picture on the box had been an artist’s rendition, but the actual dragon had kept moving in the same direction after the sketch had been completed. Its front left leg farther forward, its head, if this was its eye, and it was—it looked up unblinking at her—cocked more perpendicularly to the ground. As if the sharp ears had heard the sound of the artist’s pencil on paper, and the head had swiveled so the eyes could pin the voyeur in its sights.
What a canny eye, what a bitter bejeweled thing it was! The black of the aperture was neither round nor slit, but triangulated, like a chevron, imitating the shape of the skull itself. And the iris was an icy violet.
“What you lookin’ at?” said Eleni. She felt stupidly brave until she had found and secured the second eye, and then the look of the dragon seemed to pin her with its binocular vision. “It’s not me standing eight feet off with my Faber & Faber number two pencil,” she told it. “Don’t look at me like that.”
Then, because she was creeping herself out some, talking to a puzzle, she tried to concentrate on the background for a while. But if the dragon looked subtly different from its representation on the cover of the puzzle box, the background was even more imprecise. On the box, you could see whorls of mist, curls and shavings of dragon smoke entwining with the rising mist from the rustic setting. In actuality, the background was indistinct and even, she realized, contradictory. She would pick up a piece with two curves of smoke, like nesting parentheses, ( (, and by the time she had moved the piece to the left edge where she thought it would fit, one curve had reversed itself and the second one disappeared. ). It was as if the smoke was still rising and floating, insubstantial as actual mist.
Though maybe it was just her eyes that were tired. She rubbed her eyes with the heel of her left hand and jabbed down the piece where she had originally intended it to go. It fit, too. And now the single curve of smoke made sense, though it seemed slowly to be lifting out of the margin of the original piece and into the margin of the piece above it.
She thought perhaps she would stop for supper. But her mother was busy loading things into the car, despite the rain, getting ready for the Brister Fair. To have something to do, to feel less ineffectual, probably. Eleni knew how she felt.
Two more pieces, she told herself. Then two more. Then she got caught in the mystery of how to make all these flashing bits of talon fit in—you’d think there were a dozen dragons in this picture—or that the artist had shown the dragon in time-lapse photography, and the same bared claw was caught in a time-motion exercise. Somehow, the claws all fit, and once the legs were finished, there didn’t seem to be quite as many knuckled ivory scythes as had seemed earlier.
“Maybe I’ll stop for now,” said Eleni, sounding stagy to herself. Sounding falsely brave. Putting it on. As if the dragon were waiting to pounce and she could evade it by the cheap trick of pretending to have to go the bathroom.
There wasn’t very much left to do, though. Only twenty more pieces, best case. How keen the temptation to finish so that she could have the satisfaction of breaking the frame up and dumping the whole puzzle back in the box.
A highlight above the tip of the tail. A moon that showed through the cloud, though by the time she got the piece in place, the moon had disappeared, and so, looking back, had that highlight.
“You are one mean old tease-cat, you are,” she told the dragon.
It didn’t care. It batted its eyelashes, which came in and out from the sides like elevator doors, and regarded her with interest.
“You think you can scare me with those cheap theatrics?” she asked it.
A little hiss of smoke escaped its nostrils and filtered up, disappearing into the fog. So this is why the mist kept rolling. The dragon’s furnace was stoked up good.
“As if I care,” she said to it.
Fourteen pieces left, nine, six.
A pi
ng as of talon on stone, or several talons, ping ping ping.
Five pieces, then three came all together.
The last piece was in her hand, and she bent to put it down—a little knob of a knee on a rear leg. But the last piece wasn’t the last piece, actually, because now she could see that the very tip of the tail, which was to have curled right up beneath the monster’s closed mouth, was missing.
“No wonder someone was giving this away,” she said. “Not all there, are we, dragon?”
Yet the box had been shrink-wrapped, after a fashion. So how could a piece have gotten lost?
She looked on the floor, and shook the box again, and even went so far as to kneel and check under her bed and dresser in case it had fallen and she had kicked it away without noticing. But she couldn’t find it anywhere.
Was it her imagination? The dragon looked as if was sneering.
“What a cunning little trick,” she said. “Until you are finished, though, you don’t have any power. How could you?”
A scritch, a scratch, as of a mouse running along a baseboard, or a talon itching against a stone.
“You are hiding that piece somewhere, aren’t you?”
The dragon made no comment. Its nostrils flexed and the small stream of white plume lifted its head, curling at the top, looking like nothing so much as a question mark.
“You are curious to see if I can find it? I can find it. I will find it.”
She looked again at the floor, the box, even feeling the inside in case somehow the piece were there, but invisible. Then she ran both hands over the surface of the nearly completed puzzle, thinking perhaps she had built up a section of the picture right over a hidden piece without noticing it. The dragon was warmer near the nose, and rippled along its spine; she could faintly feel the waves of its muscle groups. She thought she felt it stifle a breath, or even a purr, when she came near to the part of the nose between the nostrils.
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