by Anne Nesbet
Which was a good way of phrasing it, thought Maya, still rattled after the way that music had started summoning dark shadows and making her mother turn so green. She scowled down at the slightly trembling needle of the whatever-it-was. Valko turned it around, and the needle stayed put, pointing stubbornly in some nonnorthern direction.
“Huh!” said Valko, his interest piqued. “So it is acting like a compass, isn’t it? But since when is there a South-Southeast Pole?”
James looked down at the possible compass and then up through the living-room windows with their slightly wavy glass.
“It’s pointing at the Laundromat!” he said.
“Or past the Laundromat,” said Valko. “Look at the map. It could be pointing at a suburb, like Créteil. Or Fontainebleau, farther out. Or, I don’t know, Lyon or Tunisia or somewhere else in Africa.”
“I want to go to the one with a CASTLE,” said James.
“That would be Fontainebleau, then,” said Cousin Louise. “And why not? Tomorrow even, since it is vacation. I will take all of you young people: you, James, and Maya and Pauline and even Valko, too, if he wishes.”
“There are very beautiful rocks in those woods,” said Pauline, who had put her violin away and wandered over to the table. She was in a distinctly better mood, Maya noticed, after that long discussion with Maya’s mother about how you should really hold a violin bow. “My class went on excursion there, last year. It will be very cold, I think, in October.”
“November,” said James. “It’ll be November already, tomorrow. Halloween is the last day of the whole month.”
“Even colder then,” said Pauline Vian. “Makes no difference: I don’t mind. Will we take the train?”
“No, no train,” said Cousin Louise, and she lit up the room with her radiant, mysterious smile. “I will collect you. I have embraced mobility! That is, I have just recently bought myself a car.”
That was when Pauline’s grandfather came over to say it was time for him to take Pauline away.
“I’m afraid we have tired out your mother,” he said, very politely, to Maya, who immediately craned her neck to see for herself: the chair her mother had been sitting in was empty. How had she not noticed? “She has been so very kind today, to Pauline. Give her our very, very best regards. And joyeux anniversaire.”
“Yes,” said Maya, distracted. “I mean, thank you.”
Valko stayed long enough to fish a small, thin box and an envelope out of his backpack. The envelope was quite elegant, and had a great big shield embossed on it, a shield held up by lions.
“Coat of arms of the Republic of Bulgaria,” said Valko. “Don’t be too frightened: it’s from my mother.”
“Your mother!”
“No, no, don’t look like that. She’s inviting you to dinner at the embassy, some sort of cultural awards thingy, the week after next. Here, open the box.”
It was a flashlight, little and sleek and cobalt blue.
“I figured you have enough shadows around you,” said Valko, and his smile (since he of all people knew how much Maya worried about her mother) was kindness and sympathy, all the way down. “This is for scaring them off.”
There was probably something eloquent a girl should say when a friend has just given her something as surprisingly perfect as that flashlight, but Maya just stood there and was happy. You could bask in that sort of happiness for quite a long time, before you’d want to turn the page and move on.
Then she noticed that Valko was letting the toe of his shoe trace out a little circle or two in the hallway floor, like someone with something else to say.
Her heart did a little tippety-tip.
“You know—,” he said, and then stopped, and laughed at himself.
“What?” said Maya, though she jumped all over herself immediately for saying it. What kind of foolish person says “what?” like that? Really. You would not think she was someone who had just turned thirteen.
“Oh, it’ll wait until tomorrow. Castles with James and Pauline! Hope she leaves the fiddle at home. Happy birthday, Maya!”
Left side, right side, left side.
Nicest boy in the world.
And off he went.
Her father was washing dishes in the kitchen, while James chattered at him about compasses.
Maya peeked into her parents’ bedroom, and for a moment thought her mother must be asleep, she was lying so still on the bed. But the head on the pillow turned toward the door and smiled at her.
“Maya,” said her mother. “I’m so sorry I wimped out. I got so tired and queasy, all of a sudden. Did you enjoy your party?”
Some questions cannot be properly answered at all. There was the little blue flashlight on the one hand and the shadows oozing out of the wall on the other. There was the fabulous chocolate cake, and there were the things you could not throw away, bossy compasses you could never escape. There was, above all, her mother, lying there smiling at her. Who was supposed to be getting better, finally. Right? Who should not be so exhausted that she had to go lie down.
“Look over there on the chair,” said her mother. “Cousin Louise left it for you, when she came in to say good-bye. You know how odd she can be: she said it’s for you, but it wasn’t the sort of thing one should hand over with trumpets blaring over slices of cake, because it’s not really a birthday present at all.”
Maya’s mother laughed weakly.
“That’s what she said! You can just imagine.”
Maya could indeed imagine. But she was quite puzzled, all the same.
It was a shoe-box-sized package, wrapped up in brown paper.
“She said it’s the family archive—well, for the French side of our family, of course—and it came to her, and she finds she just is not interested in old family history, not anymore. But that it might be curious for you. I really have no idea what it is.”
“Old, old, ancient letters,” said Maya, taking a peek in the box. “She should have given them to you, really.”
Nobody liked old letters more than Maya’s mother.
“We’ll look them over together, then, maybe,” said Maya’s mother. Her voice was hoarse. “When I’m feeling a little perkier.”
“Mom—,” Maya started, but it was hard to go on.
Her mother made a little gesture with her thin ghost of a hand.
“Don’t you worry about me, Maya,” she said fiercely. “I won’t have you worrying about me. This is your birthday!”
“Almost not my birthday anymore,” said Maya. It was dark outside already. She couldn’t really see her mother’s face now, the night had so taken over that room. But the opal on Maya’s wrist still murmured with its secret, inward light.
“I’ll tell you one thing,” said her mother’s voice in the dark. “Thirteen years ago at about this hour I was feeling even more tuckered out than I am today. I was so tired I could hardly lift my head off the pillow, when my own mother came to meet you! And you know what she said?”
“What?”
“Such a funny thing: she said, ‘Ah, now this one looks like our family, even if she wasn’t born in the woods!’ Your grandmother always had her own particular way of saying things, you know. When Daddy first met her, he used to actually twitch every time she opened her mouth, he was so nervous around her. But they got to be good friends eventually.”
It’s funny how you can hear a smile in a person’s voice, even when the shadows in the room are already thick as blankets.
“Why the woods?” said Maya.
“Old family joke,” said Maya’s mother. “The most magical children are born in the woods. But then my mother would sniff and say the trees were all wrong in California, anyway, so what more harm could a hospital do? She was born in the woods, apparently! Can you imagine that? I can’t.”
Maya thought about her grandmother, with her raised eyebrows and her crisp French accent and her perfectly ironed blouses, and she couldn’t imagine her setting one polished shoe in a forest, much less lett
ing herself be born there.
“And now I’m truly tired out. Give me a kiss. And then go be happy, birthday girl.”
There must be a trick to that, to going and being happy while your mother lies in her room like a pale question mark in the end-of-October dark. But it wasn’t a trick Maya was very good at.
She carried the box back into her own room and sat on the floor with it for a while, wondering when her mother would be well enough to want to go through those old letters with her.
A small voice hiding out in the darkest corners of her brain said, Maybe never.
She took the top off the box.
All those old papers, some of them clumped together. She ran her fingers through them idly, taking little glances here and there. But the handwriting was hard to read.
Then she saw that at the back of the box was an envelope made of pale yellow silk, held closed by a loop of gold cord. More letters inside it—no, not letters. A little handmade book, its pages stitched together along the spine.
Oh, that made Maya’s heart feel sore! Her mother used to make books for her, too, with pen-and-ink Mayas chasing pen-and-ink rabbits across the fields. This was like that. You could tell the person who had made this book had had an artist’s hand, had made the pen swoop across the paper, calling forth the pictures quickly, quickly.
There was a tiny boy, trustingly holding the hand of a woman in long, old-fashioned skirts. They were walking along a forest path. There was a kite in his other hand. A little bird looked down from a branch. It was very well done.
She had to squint to make sense of the words:
At the end of every summer,
Henri and his mother walk together
into the old, old woods,
all the way back to the place where he was born.
Life is too short, but summers return.
They will leave their summer memories there,
hidden away in the Summer Box.
On the next page, the tiny boy and his mother had come to an enormous rock in their pen-and-ink forest, and the boy was digging in the earth at its base.
“So . . . what’s a Summer Box?” said Maya to herself, full of curiosity and suspicion. More people being born in forests! And all these places memories could be hidden! Stones, letters, boxes.
It was all very well for that little boy Henri, wasn’t it? He had his mother to hold him by the hand and walk with him into the old, old woods.
But here’s the hard, true thing: some of us have to go into those woods alone.
7
THE ROCK OF THE SALAMANDER
She was supposed to meet Valko in the bakery closest to the Bulgarian embassy at 7:45 a.m. the next morning: that was the plan. To get picnic supplies for the trip to Fontainebleau and all that. But when Maya woke up—after having fallen asleep on the floor of her room, where she spent the night dreaming fitful dreams about mothers walking away into the woods—she felt slow and creaky and not at all in the mood to go on some castle-hunting expedition with Cousin Louise. It was that stupid compass, mostly, that was making her feel so grumpy. Because when you looked at the situation clearly, without covering your eyes with your hands or making up fancy explanations, it did not look good: Fourcroy’s own writing desk spits out a compass, right into your own clumsy hands, and then you just let your baby brother and your friends talk you into following that little needle, wherever it points to? Pathetic, right?
But the really scary thing was she was pretty sure, deep inside, that there was nothing else she could be doing, right now. Even merely thinking about not going along on this little expedition made her heart rattle with worry: she had to go. She was bound to go. And then her brain just filled in all the blank places with excellent reasons why she should go: James really wanted to do this! Cousin Louise had made this nice offer, how could Maya back out? Maybe it would be helpful, to see where that compass wanted to take them. Brains are really good at finding reasons for things. That’s pretty much the human brain’s particular talent.
Well, there is nothing like feeling trapped to make a person want to do some groaning and grumbling and dragging of (trapped, bound, clockwork) feet. The foot dragging had worked so well that it was almost eight when she came racing into the bakery, where there was no Valko waiting, after all.
She caught her breath and said, “Bonjour, madame,” as politely as she could, and was about to order a bunch of croissants, when suddenly the world gave a sickening lurch, and Maya could feel the tingle-tangle of strangeness—of magic—spilling into the air. It was happening again! And oh, it was not a pleasant feeling. It was like being ever-so-slightly seasick, watching the waves of strangeness reach that glass case. Right there in front of her own pointing finger, the pastries began to twist and change.
“Five c-c-croissants,” she managed to say somehow, nonetheless, and now the woman behind the counter stared at her with eyes that had fogged up completely, from one second to the next.
“Croissants?” the woman said vaguely. “Are those something you eat? What are those?”
Maya could not look away: the croissants on the tray before her were stretching out their arms, unfolding and remaking themselves, becoming something new. It would have been funny, in a video or a movie. It would have been like little lamps learning to walk or stuffed cats playing the piano—but in real life, it was awful.
“As you can see,” said the vague bakery woman, “we have the vines and we have the flowers, but we have no—what did you call them?—crescents.”
It’s like it was that first time, thought Maya. Like last Friday. Only this time it’s worse.
Maya emerged from the shop with a couple of baguettes, a bagful of vines and flowers, and a pounding heart. It was a relief to see Valko coming toward her, threading his way through a group of dazed businesswomen (again!), their abandoned briefcases around their feet, who were making the strange sounds of people about to break into song.
“Sorry I’m late!” said Maya and Valko at the very same moment. And then they tried to smile at each other, but Maya could see the tension in Valko’s face and suspected he could see the same in hers.
“Look out!” he said.
Maya was about to back right into one of those singing women. She skittered to the side instead.
“Wait, don’t tell me—they’re not supposed to be acting that way, are they?” said Valko.
“No!” said Maya. At least Valko was doing a little better than the last time. At least he had some sense that something was wrong. “Can’t you tell? It’s happened again. Worse, even. Look what’s going on with that car over there.”
Several thin strips of metal had peeled themselves loose from the car’s hood and were weaving themselves into a very complicated floral tangle.
“That’s not normal,” said Valko. It was still pretty close to being a question, though.
“No, it’s not. Let’s get out of here,” said Maya.
“Okay,” said Valko, but he was staring in the other direction, trying to figure something out about those singing women.
“Do you hear them singing? What do they think they’re doing?” he said, the old investigative fire spiking up in his eyes, and he went zipping over to one of the nearest businesswomen before Maya could haul him away.
“Excuse me, madame,” he said, waiting (since he was by nature polite as well as investigative) until the woman had paused in her shrill song to take a breath. “I can’t help but notice you’re singing in Bulgarian. Have you, perhaps, spent time studying that language?”
“Oh!” said the woman, pulling absentmindedly at the string of pearls around her neck. Striking hair, Maya noticed: one brilliant streak of white running through the carefully coiffed brown. “Bulgarian! Is that Bulgarian?”
And she giggled a little, which sounded strange coming from someone in the extremely buttoned-down wardrobe of a bank executive.
“But it is the inspiration that matters, is it not? We are, how do you call it, samodivi,” she
said, but in her very French accent the word sounded like this: samodeeeeev.
Maya raised her eyebrows in Valko’s direction: What did that mean? Maybe she even said that out loud.
“Oh, well then,” said Valko. “Thank you so very much. Come on, Maya.”
“Maya,” said the woman with the pearls. She rolled it around in her mouth as if it was a word she was not tasting for the first time. “Maya.”
The woman next to her turned around to look, too. But that was odd: her hair had that surprising streak in it as well.
“Maya?” she said. Something shadowy in her voice. And indeed over there in the thickest knot of singing, swaying ladies, the shadows were coalescing into a shape, and the shape was turning the top of its shadowy self in their direction—
“Oh, ugh,” said Valko to Maya. “Ugh, ugh, ugh. Gash!”
Which was not as polite as Valko usually was. But by then they were around the corner and halfway down the next block.
“Blech,” said Maya in an unhappy gasp when they stopped again to try to breathe. “Makes me never ever want to hear my name ever again.”
“No kidding,” said Valko, and then a different, more miserable expression came into his eyes. “Oh, rats, I forgot for a moment. The thing I have to tell you. It’s a bit of a problem.”
“What?” said Maya. What could be more of a problem than crazed women with streaks of lightning in their hair hissing your name?
“It’s my grandmother-with-a-mole. She’s threatening to come from Bulgaria and descend upon us in person. To see for herself how I’m doing and then probably drag me away by my hair.”
There was a pause then, while Maya tried to remember how it had felt, a week ago, when it had just been beginning to be all right, being in Paris. But oh, if Valko went away—
That awful, awful thought was interrupted by an urgent murmur from Valko.
“Dang. That thing is still following us. Come on.”
Her blurry eyes could hardly see the pavement before her, much less shadows half a block away. Valko was half dragging her along the sidewalk, and her numb feet complied.