by Anne Nesbet
8
THE SUMMER BOX
“I didn’t think it really existed,” said Maya.
She was sitting up now, leaning against the boulder with the old metal box cradled in her lap. The stone was cold against her back, and the box was cold in her hands, and the November air was cold in her lungs, but all her blood was flush with success, and nothing else quite mattered.
“What’s in it?” said Valko. “Why didn’t you tell me we were looking for a box?”
“I didn’t know that was what we were doing,” said Maya. “I didn’t know until I recognized the rock, and I couldn’t have told you any earlier, anyway, because I hadn’t seen those letters until last night.”
She tried to explain to him how that handmade story had made her feel, the mother and little Henri on their adventure together in the woods, the love that had been inked into those pictures, but she knew she wasn’t making very much sense. And Valko was a thousand percent not interested in mushy stories written a hundred years ago.
“So it’s Fourcroy’s own box?” he said. “Um. Do you have a flamethrower or something we could zap it with?”
“From when he was a little kid,” said Maya. “He came here with his mother. They used to put stuff in the box at the end of the summer.”
“I don’t care who he came here with,” said Valko. “I’m just thinking we shouldn’t have come here. You don’t see that?”
“Oh,” said Maya.
She did see that, actually. It looked bad, following compasses given to you by carved ravens belonging to shadows who had very sneakily bound you to bring them back to life. It looked like following instructions. It was following instructions.
But she couldn’t help feeling curious, too.
It had all been so long ago. The little boy and his mother had stopped coming, but no one had found the box, it was hidden so cleverly, and now climbers had been clambering on the boulders above it for a hundred years, not even guessing there was treasure under them. If it was treasure at all, of course.
“Don’t touch it!” said Valko. This made very little sense, because Maya had had the box in her hands for minutes and minutes already.
She looked at him.
“No, really,” said Valko. “If it’s part of his plan. I thought we were trying not to follow his plan. His stupid list from the stupid Salamander House.”
They had been over that list a million times: some kind of physical remnant (that blood splotch Maya had managed to leave behind in the writing desk—the only wiggle-roomish thing she had pulled off so far, really); his memories (left in the stone wall, said the letter: all right, leave walls alone); and Maya, the willing, self-sacrificing apprentice (Maya scowled all over again), all brought to a Suitable Magical Place—
“And it said we would get there if we ‘follow the guide’!” said Maya. Of course! The compass was the guide. And they had followed it. (Clickety-clickety-clickety: billions of little dominoes, toppling in obedient rows.)
So this must be what old Fourcroy thought of as a Suitable Magical Place. Well, yes, that made sense. The place he used to come with his mother, all those long years ago.
“Then what should we do with the box?” said Valko. “I can’t believe you let us just go dancing off after that compass.”
“Get it away from here,” said Maya. She did feel that, very urgently. “If this is the Suitable Place, then we should keep everything away, right? Anything he might need.”
Though she remembered the strange magic spilling through Paris that morning, the feeling in her outstretched hand as the croissants turned into Something Else, and for a sliver of a moment she felt all unsteady again.
“Or leave it alone,” said Valko. “Or—I’m not kidding—find that flamethrower and melt it down.”
That, however, was when Cousin Louise started calling Maya’s name, and Cousin Louise, at that moment, sounded like someone whose nice picnic has been compromised by the rudeness of some young person who could not be bothered to sit down politely with her friends and family and spread some goat cheese on her baguette. She also sounded like she was coming their way, and at a clip.
“Quick,” said Maya. “Your backpack.”
She didn’t give Valko time to protest. She stuffed the box into his bag, and they darted out from behind the Salamander Rock just in time to meet Cousin Louise and (in the case of Valko, who had particular talents of this sort) disarm her with extreme politeness before her full displeasure could be unleashed.
“We are all going to be icicles by the time you’ve finished your lunch” was all Cousin Louise had a chance to say before Valko’s embassy manners had taken full effect. “And we’ve found some interesting things, too, so come along—with rapidity, please.”
The others had found pebbles, and beetles, and a kind of stone hut built into the hillside, where climbers and walkers could hide themselves from a sudden rainstorm.
“How old is this place, do you think?” asked Maya, as she stuck her head into its musty shadows.
It felt ancient. She was glad to duck back out again.
Cousin Louise looked up at the slightly graying sky.
“Time to move on, mes enfants.”
Daylight didn’t last forever, especially not in November. And they had had their picnic quite late.
On the ride back into Paris, Maya sat in the front seat, where the ride would be easier on her stomach. In the backseat, Pauline told James a long, intense story about the violinist Paganini, whose fingers were longer and nimbler than anyone else’s in the whole world, and who was rumored to have sold his soul to the devil in exchange for his talent.
“Which was a very ugly rumor,” said Pauline, but she told the story with no small gusto, anyway.
James was listening with rapt attention. Maya could hear his breath catch when Pauline came to some particularly gruesome bit.
“Pauline, it’s too scary,” he said finally. “You wouldn’t do that, would you?”
“Do what?”
“You know. Sell your soul to the devil, just to be able to—what you said—trill better. Or stuff. To play really fast on your violin.”
There was a pause. The outskirts of Paris were flashing by outside, streetlamps and buildings against a backdrop of darkness.
“It’s just a story,” said Pauline Vian.
It wasn’t just the scariness of Pauline’s violin stories that made James slump back against the seat of the car: he was disappointed because the compass was broken.
Ever since the Rock of the Salamander, it didn’t seem to work like a compass at all anymore. The needle flapped around, pointing this and that way, depending on who was holding it. Pointing in the general direction of Valko’s feet, of course, where the backpack lay nestled, but Maya didn’t think James had figured this out. Pauline was a different matter. She took the compass and looked at it and looked at Valko, and heaven knows what she was thinking.
“A strange little thing,” she said finally. “Bizarre!”
“And now it’s all broken,” said James sadly. “I liked it better when it still worked.”
They had to leave Pauline off at the quite elegant apartment house where she lived with her parents—“who are hyper-busy,” she said with a frown. “They run great big important things, you see, like banks”—and then Cousin Louise dropped the rest of them off at the Davidsons’ building without coming up to say good night herself, because she was eager to get back to her own little apartment on the other side of Paris.
And what was in the Summer Box? Treasure?
“Not even one single pathetic little gold coin!” said Valko, after they had teased the latch open. He really did sound disappointed. “What’s the point of that? A lot of random junk. Looks like my desk drawer.”
What Maya was noticing, though, was that each piece of the “random junk” carried a tag, a slip of paper tied on with string. And on each tag was a year.
The envelope containing one little wisp of baby hair, tied
up in a ribbon: 1901. And the envelope had his name on it, written in the same spidery, loving hand as that little story that had gotten mixed up in Maya’s dreams the night before: Henri de Fourcroy.
Other things, as well: a silver rattle (1902). From other years, a toddler’s cap, and pretty stones, and seashells, and even a miniature spyglass that turned out to make colorful patterns when you pointed it in the direction of the nearest window.
And the 1907 tag was tied to a bunch of long and ragged ribbons.
“Rags,” said Valko. “Who would bother keeping that in a treasure box for a hundred years?”
For a moment Maya was stumped, but only for a moment. Then she smiled.
“It’s the tail of his kite,” she said. “The whole of the kite wouldn’t fit.”
“Huh,” said Valko. “Could be, I guess.”
He was rummaging around in the box still.
“And that’s the last year mentioned,” he said. “No 1908 anywhere. I guess they stopped coming.”
They were both silent for a moment, wondering about that. Then Maya went and got the gargoyles’ egg from its hiding place in her closet. It warmed up at her touch, almost (she thought) as if it had been sleeping away the hours while she was off tromping through castles and forests.
“I like the idea of a Summer Box,” said Maya. “Look how well the egg fits in here, too.”
It looked quite cozy, the egg, dreaming away in the little nest of silk she made for it. There were forests spreading across its surface now, pine woods and trees.
Valko narrowed his eyes.
“I don’t understand why you won’t get rid of that thing,” he said. “Why would someone leave a stone egg on your fire escape? Wish we knew how it works.”
“Very Advanced Technology,” suggested Maya. She was teasing him, but he didn’t notice.
When Valko had left, Maya took the egg back out of the box. She liked the feel of it in her hands. It needed her, she could tell. It appreciated being taken care of. (Did some part of her know she was being strangely foolish about this egg? Oh, yes. But still.) Those messages continued to scribble themselves across its surface, those numbers and words, but more and more it seemed to—how could she put this?—to relax, somehow, right the way out of language and into those flowing, changing pictures she loved.
The piney woods, the little ridges, the extraordinary boulders . . . The egg, warm in her hands, was echoing back at her the very places she had seen that day (but where Cousin Louise had parked her vivid green car, the egg showed an old-fashioned carriage, the horses patiently waiting).
Something had been nagging at her all day. What was it the story had said?
. . . back to the place where he was born.
Really?
It was like she had been sleepwalking, and now suddenly her mind was clear.
She tucked the egg away for the night in the Summer Box, and started more methodically through the oldest of those old letters, looking for the ones with dates around the turn of the century.
The writing was so hard to read.
There were love letters to “dearest little Yvonne,” “my fairy-child Yvonne,” “my wild girl of the woods,” from 1899 and 1900; he had been a chemist or an engineer, hadn’t he, that long-ago Fourcroy? He signed his notes with an illegible scrawl and a quickly sketched Eiffel Tower, so that was probably a clue.
“Fairy-child” was pretty over-the-top romantic lingo for an engineer, thought Maya, still scanning through the notes. It was not the sort of thing she could imagine her own father saying, adorable in his way as her own father undoubtedly was.
It was clear that that Fourcroy fellow had been head over heels in love with the girl from the magical woods.
And then, there it was: part of an ancient newspaper page, tucked in with all the letters. She held it very gingerly, but the edges still crumbled away at her touch.
It seemed to love dramatic stories, this paper, but Maya skipped the details of DREADFUL MURDER IN MALAKOFF!! and BRAZEN BURGLAR STEALS DIAMONDS WHILE ALL SLEEP! because her eyes had seen a third headline that set her heart beating fast:
HAPPY RESOLUTION TO FOURCROY AFFAIR!!
All Paris is agog at the harrowing story of Madame de Fourcroy, whose end-of-summer excursion to the forest of Fontainebleau became an unexpected and terrifying adventure—due to a coachman’s sudden lapse into unconsciousness, an overturned carriage in the unpopulated depths of the woods, and the provocation, through fear and anxiety alone, of that most perilous Labor a woman must perform. “Frightened?” said the brave new paragon of Heroic Motherhood, whose rescue yesterday brought tears of joy to the most jaded Parisian eyes. “No! In our family the most talented and magical babies are always born in the woods—” But here her loving husband, the eminent engineer Gilles de Fourcroy, put an abrupt end to our interview and drew his beautiful wife and new infant most protectively to his side. . . .
Aha! thought Maya. There it was. The family joke, Maya’s own mother had said. So the girl from the forest had run back to the woods to give birth to her possibly magical child. The little Henri!
There were fewer love letters after 1901, she noticed. Perhaps it was a blow to the ego of Gilles de Fourcroy to have become a scandal in the newspapers. People didn’t like that, back in the old days. (Some people still didn’t.)
A little card almost slipped through her fingers, but it turned out to be another piece of the puzzle: a birth announcement for a Robert de Fourcroy, dated February 14, 1908. The summers had gone differently from then on, she imagined. She hadn’t been much older herself when baby James was born. You have a lot of years to get used to being the only child, when there’s a gap like that. Not that she hadn’t loved him right away! James had been the sweetest, most remarkable baby. He had laughed aloud when he was only four weeks old! But however special the little brother is that comes along when you’re as old as six or seven, you know all too clearly what you’ve lost, too.
So that was definitely the Suitable Magical Place: the place where old Fourcroy had been born the first time, so very long ago.
Now he wanted to be born there again. And every step Maya took kept being exactly the step he wanted her to take. It was true. Valko was right.
I’m going to find a way, though, said Maya to herself. It was a promise: she was somehow going to find a way—no matter how bound the shadowy Fourcroy might think she was—to wiggle herself free.
9
ROSEMARY AND HONEY
The next day, however, as soon as James went off to brush his teeth, Maya’s mother leaned across the breakfast table (not that she herself had eaten anything to speak of, Maya couldn’t help noticing) and rested her hand on Maya’s.
“Sweetheart,” she said. “We need to talk.”
Her eyes were dark and kind in her stretched-thin face. She really looked more like a tired, ghostly fairy than like somebody’s flesh-and-blood mother.
Maya could feel her tongue becoming stupid.
“Now?” she said.
“Well, it was your birthday,” said her mother. “And then yesterday you were gone all day. I’m sending James to the Luxembourg Gardens with your dad. He likes the carousel there, all those wooden horses and the grumpy man who lets the rings down for the kids to catch. That will give us some nice private time, before Pauline comes over to practice.”
“Oh!” said Maya in alarm. She remembered the darkness seeping out of the walls. “Should you be doing that? That piece she played was so awful.”
Maya’s mother had one of those smiles that brought every inch of her face to life.
“Poor thing! She needs help, that’s all. She really does. That’s why I offered.”
“But it made you so sick!” said Maya. “I saw your face. Didn’t you notice? And the shadows started coming. . . .”
The smile faded.
“Oh, Maya, you should not have to worry so much about me. It’s not right, the way you worry. That’s why I didn’t—but anyway, let me get Jame
s and your father packed off to the park, and then we can finally talk.”
Here’s what Maya felt then: panic. Her heart was racing and her ears were very cold or very hot—she couldn’t tell which—and if she stayed sitting still at that table one more minute, something terrible was going to happen. She had wanted to know. She had kept asking her mother to be honest with her, to tell her the truth, but now the truth was too close, was waiting at the door, was almost right there in front of her, and she found she didn’t so much want it, after all. Not this morning. Not right now. Right now she just wanted to hide.
The terrible hot/cold worry brought her right to her feet, made her stand there trembling for a moment, on the verge of some kind of precipice, like a newly hatched chick on the terrible edge of its nest.
“What’s wrong?” said her mother. “Maya!”
“I—I forgot,” said Maya, bumbling all of it. “I have to go. Valko—”
“But you just saw him yesterday.”
“Ice cream,” said Maya. “Maybe we’ll have ice cream.”
“In November!” said her mother. She was settling back into her chair now, resigned. Maybe even—unless Maya’s eyes were playing tricks on her—just the slightest bit relieved. It was probably pretty awful for a mother, too, having to have this kind of conversation with her own oldest child. “Well, dress warmly, then.”
“It’s just—they want to make him go back to horrible Bulgaria,” said Maya, all of a sudden remembering. She wasn’t being fair to Bulgaria, probably, but then again, Bulgaria wasn’t being very fair to her, either, was it?
“Oh, Maya,” said her mother. “Really? Not in the middle of the year.”
She did look very distressed on Maya’s behalf. It just made Maya feel worse about the panic in her ears and her head and her feet. A better daughter would not run away from her sick mother and from the truth. But here she was, already grabbing her jacket. She was saying good-bye. She was rushing out the door.
She walked around a couple of blocks’ worth of Paris, shaking the tears out of her eyes and trying not to run into bundled-up little children and their errand-running parents on the rue Cler. The displays of lettuces and squashes and leeks in the market on the corner looked as jewel-like as ever. The women of the charcuterie were already grilling sandwich fillings outside their store and trading jokes with each other, and the outside tables of the corner café were all occupied, despite the chilliness of the air. It all looked so cheerful and normal.