Electric Velocipede 27
Page 12
Instead Mammana grimly copes, brings hot water and salves that help only in that they make it slightly less awful, and instead of singing there is pain and horrible squelching noises followed by a frail cry. And at the end of it all Mammana puts the little pink weakly wriggling thing in her arms, and all she can think is all that work for this?
It doesn’t even have the charm of a day-old chick.
“She’ll need a name,” Mammana says, stripping off her smock stained with blood and worse. “This isn’t a good place to go without a name.”
“We hadn’t talked much about names,” Cynthia says absently, still trying to see the charm in this—in her daughter. “We thought we’d have more time . . .”
“Then she’s named Ash for now, for the tree she was born in, and we’ll swap it out later.”
The little grub opens its eyes, looks at and past her, gums faintly at the air. Cynthia tries to see some trace of Peter in her, some trace of herself, some trace of flight. She tries, and fails.
#
Long nights follow, broken into too many short spans. The little chirpy cries—the only thing avian about the thing demanding her attention as much as it demands her body—ring out again and again, till Cynthia thinks she will go mad. Mammana approaches it with the same attitude as the birth, swapping out cloth for soiled cloth, neither the silk that is not silk that her sisters wear so finely nor the packs of Pampers that Cynthia had eyed nervously in the supermarket. “You wouldn’t have guessed birth would be the easy part,” she says at one point when Cynthia is in no mood to be encouraged. “It wasn’t that way for me.”
The harsh words Cynthia has prepared fade, the same words that have, lately, been preempted by storms of unexpected tears. “You did it too?” she asks, turning in place to stare at Mammana. “You went outside and—and fell in love?”
“Oh, love, call it what you like. He had a nice set of shoulders. But yes, I went outside, and the same thing happened as always happens to one of us, only in my case he spilled the beans just before I came to term. Twins, too, mind you, and I ended up birthing them both right after a race.” She shakes her head, smiles with a hard edge. “They regretted making me run.”
The grub cheeps and wails again, this time pushing away from her breast, too angry and tired to eat. Cynthia makes another attempt to soothe her, then lets Mammana do so, and this time notices the half-second of lingering gaze that Mammana gives the squawking bundle. “And the twins?” she asks.
“Oh, I left them behind. I expect they had their own lives.” But her smile has a different, broken edge now, and she turns back to the heap of laundry.
For the first time, Cynthia understands why Mammana does this for all the girls who come back from outside heartbroken and heavy. But that understanding draws out a new question, one that slowly comes into focus as she gets more sleep, as the grub becomes less of a sessile object and more of a constantly flailing, goggling creature. “Where are the other children of outside?” she asks, and asks again.
“Gone,” says Mellie, and spits between forked fingers. “Left them with their worthless father, who couldn’t wait two months before finding a nice dry top-heavy girl to cradle his cock.” Blanche says much the same, minus the invective, and adds that they were the one thing that made her spare that old gossip. Lupita tells her a long story that veers into the stuff of horror movies, ending with just the assertion that her son is a good boy, but has a bit of a temper. Kelsey, true to form, doesn’t say anything beyond assuring her that it was just the three times. And Yoko clams up even tighter, her silence heavy as her missing wings.
It’s one of the other close cousins in their fine silks (held out of reach of the waving fingers of a baby who’s recently realized that she can drag things to her mouth) who tells her. “They can’t fly,” she says bluntly. “And they know it. Maybe when they’re little, they entertain thoughts of sometimes getting wings like Mommy, but down deep they know that doesn’t happen. Some of them go back outside where they came from. Some of them—” She shrugs, the gesture as eloquent as a brushstroke. “They can’t handle it. Jump out of the nest.”
Ash shouts with laughter, and the cousin startles as if she’s just heard the hunter’s gun. But it’s only that Ash has managed to catch the trailing end of Cynthia’s sleeve. It’s not the luminous garb of her cousin, but Ash is happy enough to gum at this and stare at the other silk.
Her cousin twitches back, even though she’s untouched. “It’s for the best,” she says, cool as snowmelt again, pretending that her moment of panic never happened. “Not that they fall, not that, but that they’re gone. With their fathers, if they can.”
Unspoken in the question and if they can’t is the assumption that finally blazes through like stray sunlight through an open window: it is easier to come back, to rejoin the sisters and cousins and the forest as a whole, without some child hanging off of her. “How long?” Cynthia asks, the words becoming a whisper.
Her cousin shrugs. “Depends. Not very long.”
She doesn’t understand what that means until after another long night when Ash will not suck and will not sleep and will not quiet. Cynthia huddles on the far side of the nest, hands over her ears, and for a moment everything comes clear. It would be so easy to push her out, say she rolled, trying to fly like her mother. And no one would question it. Crane girls die all the time in the forest, many saplings wither for one tree to thrive, and no one would even think twice or, if they did, no one would bother to condemn her.
It is not quite a rebellion against that knowledge that makes her instead grab Ash and pull her close, so close her cries rattle Cynthia’s eardrums. Ash howls, farts, and finally vomits into Cynthia’s hair, after which the cries come again, but weaker and tired, and this time she does not turn away from feeding.
She can feel the clean white silks of her sisters slipping out of reach. “Ice cream trucks,” she mutters against the little bald head, weariness slurring her words. “Thai iced tea. Street music. Big green fuzzy slippers like monster feet. Apple crisp.” She tries to say aloud, but doesn’t quite do so, that these are all things Ash can have even if she can’t fly.
“Fireworks,” she goes on as Ash roots against her, drowsing as she reaches fullness. “Free Thursdays at the modern art museum. Countertenors.” Even after Ash has finally fallen asleep, after speech is impossible and Cynthia hovers on the edge of dream, the litany continues, all the things that drew her outside, all the things that she loved, with one important exception.
#
She rigs a sling for Ash, unwieldy and with too many buckles but secure, based partly on her memories of the baby-harness thing that Peter had brought home just before everything went wrong. She looks ridiculous wearing it, and even more so with Ash in it, and the first time she attempts flight her wings are so weak they barely bring the two of them to safety on the next branch. Ash sleeps through it, waking only when they return to the nest and Cynthia collapses, exhausted.
But her muscles remember long hours lifting boxes and carting trays of dishes, and she knows the potential for strength is there. So she tries again, taking it more slowly this time, and though the wind fights her at every turn eventually she rises above the treetops, Ash making little warbly noises against her feathers. It’s the first time she’s been properly aloft since the long horrible flight from Peter.
When she lands, just in a treetop this time, Ash fusses even after feeding. It’s not till they’re back in the air that the little girl is quiet again. Cynthia curves her neck around to see her face more clearly, and at the sight of her wide wondering eyes the memory of Peter’s face crashes in on her. How wide his eyes were when seeing her for the first time, how many times he came into the coffee shop before getting up the nerve to talk to her, the joy when she’d said yes and yes again.
It sends a chill all the way to her pinions, but they’re too far from home to walk, and by the time they’ve flown back the memory has settled in, like a glove shaping itself
to a hand.
“You look a proper fool,” Honeychild says when she lands. “She’ll never fly, and you’ll only be able to do that for so long before she’s too big.”
Mellie nods from the stoop of her waterlogged house. “It’s a matter of aerodynamics. Simple physics.” And the others agree, sagely.
Cynthia shifts from crane to woman, unbuckling strap after strap so that she can change a decidedly ripe Ash. More words from outside, like the ones Mellie came away with, and they’re even more out of place than the baby carrier. They brought the wrong things back, she thinks, and shakes her head. “Simple physics says that a human and a bird can’t change shape from one to the other. Simple physics says we’re impossible.” She nods to Mellie. “And simple physics says you should have drowned long ago.”
That shuts them up, but only in the way of the sisters: silent when she’s around, chattering like gulls when she turns her back. Mammana, though, laughs when she hears Cynthia’s response, laughs till the tree shakes.
So she keeps flying with Ash, changing the harness as little baby legs get too long, turning her around so that she can see more than just her mother’s feathers. And yes, it gets more difficult as Ash gets heavier, but Cynthia’s muscles compensate, and she continues. Her white silks are far too impractical, and she switches to the old maternity clothes she’d worn on the flight over, washing them every night till they’re even more shapeless on her frame, bleached paler than fog. And she continues.
Which is what makes it all the worse when, one morning in early summer, the two of them are coasting across the meadows and Cynthia looks down to see a lone figure making his way across the threefold stream. His clothes look like they’ve been chucked out of the bargain bin for being too close to rags, a heavy blindfold hides his eyes, and there are scratches and scabs all along his arms, but she knows his stride anywhere, the straight line of his back.
He’s here. Where he’s not supposed to be.
#
She may be the first to notice him, but rumor flies faster than cranes and certainly faster than cranes with baby carriers. All the women who came to meet her are there to see how her story has deviated from theirs. Mammana’s even there too, in Cynthia’s nest, watching as Peter stumbles over roots and through swampmoss. “He’s got a bit of sense,” she says as Cynthia lands. “Can’t remember when someone from outside even thought of wearing a blindfold.”
Cynthia knows Mammana is fishing for some remark about Peter, whether this sort of insight is normal for him. Instead of rising to it, she changes, her wings shivering as the feathers sweep away, and begins to unbuckle Ash. “How did he find his way here?”
“Oh, there are paths, same as there are paths out. Tougher to get in than out—you know that, even flying it was bad for you—but there are paths. Although,” Mammana says slowly, “usually it’s a princess, come seeking her Brown Bear or phantom bridegroom, and I can count on my hands the number of times that’s happened.” She flicks a glance at Cynthia. “For what that’s worth.”
Below them, Peter trips over a log, catches himself before he goes face-down in Mellie’s stream, shakes mud and slime off his hands as he gets up. One of the cousins, probably the one who moved the log, giggles. He cocks his head just slightly at the sound, then turns away, boots clumping and clanging against the stone. They’re not his old steel-toed ones, and they’ve worn through at the soles.
He’s singing under his breath, she realizes, one of the old songs that he used to play at open mic nights at the coffee shop, maybe even the one he sang the night she agreed to go out with him. His enthusiasm far exceeded any musical talent he had, but that enthusiasm’s now drained to a whisper. She puts her hands over her ears. “Can’t you make him go away?”
“I can’t.” Mammana’s meaning is clear, but still Cynthia keeps her hands up, unable to watch him, unable not to. After a moment Mammana sighs. “I suppose I could always get one of the singers to lead him astray. Not likely he’d find his way back here, but not impossible.”
The stream below bubbles, and with a flicker of scales Mellie glares up at them through the water. “Oh, just give him the girl and let him go. That’s all he wants, something to prove it really happened.” A flutter of white from the trees around them—no more than a ripple, like an errant breath of wind—lets her know the sisters have heard Mellie, and they’re waiting. They miss her.
Cynthia bites her lip, then leaps to the ground. Before he can muddle out of sight, she strips off her old maternity clothes and stands naked as a newborn chick. Drawing on the oldest magic of the crane girls, known as deeply as she knows her own bones, she weaves her white silks around herself, taking the time to make them as new and brilliant as any cloth she ever imagined. She puts a dozing Ash behind a bush and rises to meet Peter.
He knows something’s changed, even if he can’t see it, and his voice keeps faltering, going off-key, losing the words. Hardly a song to lead a bride back from this world, she thinks, and stands in front of him, so close he could touch her if he only raised a hand. Perhaps knowing this, he doesn’t yet, instead questing back and forth like an aged hound.
Instead she is the one who reaches out and tears off his blindfold so violently his head rocks back. He blinks like an owl in sunlight, his eyes going wide as he sees her. And he is seeing her, she knows, her and the forest all at once, and so when he drops to his knees it’s not a compliment so much as a foregone conclusion.
“One thing,” she says, and there’s too much of a crack in her voice. “I only ever asked one thing from you, and you couldn’t give it.”
Peter swallows, unable to look away, as he’d been unable to look away in the workroom, the nursery, the coffee shop. “I know,” he said. “I was wrong. I was an idiot. I’m sorry.”
Is this what she wanted? She’d given him no time, only fled. There was no room in the story for apologies. “Only one thing,” she repeats, looking away and past him, blinking fast.
Peter only nods. There’s a scar above his right eye now, not quite healed, where there was only smooth skin when she left. Like the scratches and the rags and the beard, it’s a change she didn’t expect, and she vaguely wonders whether time is the same outside as here. She’s not sure what she’s supposed to say now, what’s supposed to happen. There’s no precedent, or none that she knows of.
A disgruntled cheep breaks the silence between them, and though the forest is anything but silent, Cynthia knows this sound and turns before thinking. Peter’s eyes widen, and, when she does not forbid him, he pushes back branches. Ash is there, not quite fussing, and she looks up, her dolphin-trill fading. “Hey,” he whispers. “Hey there. Is this—”
“Her name is Ash,” Cynthia says, and Ash decides she’s had enough of this and bursts into a reedy wail. Sighing, Cynthia picks her up, bouncing the harness as if preparing for flight, and that soothes her. Peter swallows hard, the corners of his eyes bright with tears, and without knowing why she does it, she tries to comfort him. “It’s your beard,” she says. “She’s not used to seeing someone with a beard.”
“I’m not really used to it either,” he admits, scratching it self-consciously. At that she smiles, remembering how careful he was about shaving, the jokes about itchy mornings, and before she can stop herself he’s smiled back.
Abruptly she holds Ash out to him, and he takes the girl as if she were made of straw. Ash, still uncertain, garbles a few times but eventually sighs and snorts against him. Cynthia’s arms suddenly feel light, too light. “She likes to fly,” she says to drown out her sisters’ silent scrutiny. “So do I. I’d forgotten—I had missed it so much, and I didn’t have the chance back then—”
She makes herself stop, but Peter is listening, waiting, and though he tries not to let his hope show it’s still there like light under a basket.
“If I go back with you—” she says finally, tasting the words, not sure yet she likes them.
Peter shakes his head. “I don’t want you to.”
“Not like that—I mean—oh, damn.” Ash snorts and butts her head against his chest, and he laughs weakly. “I mean, I want to be with you, but I don’t know about going back. It’s . . . after all I’ve seen on my way here . . .” His free hand goes up to the scar involuntarily, and she feels the same changes in herself, the muscles that aren’t quite right for either a human or a crane. “Couldn’t we . . . is there maybe another place, somewhere you can fly and I can, can keep my promises?”
No, she wants to say, all of her upbringing wants to say. There is the forest, and there is outside, and the rules of one don’t apply to the other. No place in between.
“I don’t know,” she says finally, and it’s an answer to all the sisters she knows are listening. “Maybe. But I’ll go with you for a little while.”
Peter looks up from their daughter, and this time when he holds out his hand she eludes it, stepping into his arms instead. “Thank you,” he says, muffled against her shoulder where the silk is rapidly becoming salt-damp. “Thank you.”
“And I won’t promise anything.” Even that I’ll stay, she thinks, remembering Mellie and Yoko and Kelsey and all the others. Maybe this is the wrong choice. Maybe she’ll be back. And of course no matter what, her sisters will say they’ll never be so stupid, they’ll never do what she did, but this is not their story.