Dangerous Neighbors

by Beth Kephart

  “It is.”

  “Birds don’t know what to do”—he stopped, looked for a reaction—“in weather like this.” The hen sat up straighter. Katherine blinked, gave nothing away, didn’t want him to guess that she’d seen this boy once, months ago—felt, indeed, that she already knew him.

  Now she watched William glancing back into the shop, toward the gleaming display case and the three glass-domed cake trays, the bowl of glacé cherries, the polished register, the pair of metal tongs. She saw him press his face harder against the door so that he might see even deeper into the shop, and now, afraid for what he might see, for how he might expose the sisters and their subterfuge, Katherine tried to distract him.

  “The hen,” she asked, “is it yours?”

  “It was lost,” he said. “I went and found it.”

  “So that’s your game?”

  “My game?”

  “What you do?”

  “I rescue lost things. Horses, cows, pigs, dogs. Dogs, mostly. Doesn’t pay too bad, either. You should try it.”

  He laughed but she didn’t. The hen didn’t stir and William wouldn’t turn. He just stood there, beside Katherine, so close that she could touch him, so close that she saw every inch of what he saw, beyond the bakery door. She leaned forward, despite herself. Felt his sweet breath upon her ear—warm, she thought; she should not have thought it. She took it in, like he did—the row of buttons in the far corner of the shop and how they flared with the sun. The whispering of voices; the rustling of skirts against hands and knees; the single word, “Anna.” Katherine could see her own sister dressed unseasonably in cream, her hair a wilderness, the baker’s fingers low on her neck, the buttons across her chest loose and handled. Bennett was a good head and a half taller than Anna. He had to lean down to take her in, and so she was on her toes, her face spooned up toward him, oblivious to all things but his kisses.

  Katherine felt William at her side turn and assess her differently. She felt her face go hot, her eyes go hard as marbles, her whole self deflecting his questions. Don’t ask me.

  “Come back tomorrow,” Katherine finally said. “Bakery is closed for the moment.”

  “As you please.” He stepped back out onto the walk, took a gentleman’s bow. He said nothing, and he could have; she was defenseless. He doffed his hat and took the hen and the hen’s eggs back to whomever had lost them, and what she felt then, what she registered for later—for now, for right this minute at the Centennial, her last day ever, an hour before her flight—was that he did not walk away in triumph, pleased for her shame, pleased with his knowing. He walked away so that the hen would stay still, so that the eggs in his pocket would not crack. She heard the sound of those eggs in his pocket, moving west, down Walnut Street. She remembered that other afternoon, months before, when the pig was rescued from the Chauncers’—how he had trailed off and left her lonely.

  Wait, Katherine almost cried after him, but he was quick on his feet, and she was alone again, a sentry, condemned to listening to the sounds of Bennett and Anna, within. To the conversation that had, somehow, kicked up furiously between them.

  “I don’t know where she is, how she got out,” Anna was saying. “Katherine will blame me. She’ll say it’s all my fault.”

  “You’ll find her,” Bennett reassured.

  “But I’ve looked already, and Gemma is lost. And she’s such a sweet cat, Bennett.”

  “Cats come home.”

  “I won’t be forgiven. Oh, Bennett. You can’t possibly know what it’s like to have a sister whom you’re forever disappointing.”

  Forever disappointing. It was, Katherine thought that day, the end. It was irreparable—Anna saying such a thing to the baker’s boy. That day, Katherine went home and did not wait for her sister. She marched upstairs and slammed the door. When Jeannie Bea called up after her, asking for Anna, Katherine said, “I’ve no idea where she is, and I don’t care.”

  She thought she’d be able to live with that. From now on. To not know and to not care.

  For weeks it went on like that. For weeks, Katherine pretended that she had no more interest in her twin—their roads had diverged; their futures were separate. At school, Katherine consorted with Libby D. She stayed afterward, or walked home separately. She wouldn’t wait for Anna when she called.

  “What’s wrong with you?” Anna would ask her at night.

  “What’s wrong with me?” Katherine would say. And that was all.

  But then, there was New Year’s Eve, just weeks before Anna disappeared altogether. Katherine was more lonely than one person can survive. That night, when Anna sighed, “Oh, I’d love to see the fireworks,” and Katherine realized that the baker’s boy wasn’t a likely escort, Katherine said, “I’d like that, too,” and they bundled into their coats, and went out.

  Katherine and Anna cut through Rittenhouse Square, where the society people had gathered in their wools and silks, hats on the men’s heads, muffs hiding the porcelain hands of women who left their work to others. The banners strung from the upper stories of Walnut Street snapped whenever a wind blew through. The twins had gone out wearing matching gray coats and blueberry silks. In the gaslight, Anna’s hair shone bright as the flesh of a ripe peach, then faded to a glimmer in the shadows. A mist was either falling or rising; in the amber of the gaslight it wasn’t possible to tell. The air seemed bothered.

  Already the revelers were out. Masked mummers with banjos thrown across their backs, feathers trailing. Gangs of toughs. Children who ran, squealing, one after the other, in the direction of Independence Hall, their parents and neighbors on the streets behind them, beneath the banners and the flickering lamplight, behind a young man who carried a goat in his arms, a sandy-colored mutt following at his heels. The crowd was thickening. The children taunted one another with the promise of dynamite, with the sight of Mayor Stokley, getting ready to raise the flag. Like everybody else, Anna and Katherine went east—their wraps blown open by the wind, the mist at their feet, Anna scanning the crowd for Bennett, Katherine trying to pretend she didn’t see.

  From Ninth all the way to Sixth and north to Chestnut, they went, Katherine trying to tease back Anna’s attention, Anna sometimes unlocking her arm from her sister’s, darting ahead, before Katherine could reach her again. Finally, at Independence Hall, they were stopped with the crowd, and Anna had nowhere to be but beside her sister. One mummer had raised his banjo over his head and was finger-strutting on the strings. An old hag was keeping time with the blunt end of her cane. A boy was daring another with a stick tipped with fire, and the goat in that young man’s arms stayed still. Anna was tied, too, but looking out over the crowd, ready to bolt at any instant.

  Now Mayor Stokley was hitching the flag up the pole. Now the flutes began to play, the drums and banjos, clarinets, piccolos, cymbals—not a song, but bass against fiddle against the cries of the crowd, against the hiss of the fire on the one boy’s stick, a wild din. Then the mayor was making an announcement, and the crowd, all in one voice, cheered, and then, piercing and unmistakable, came the steel whine of the first firework—a white wail through the misted night that burst wide open into suspended sparks of color. Like a spider’s web, Katherine thought, watching the color scatter across the sky. Another cannon went off. The sky was scrambled. Katherine stared skyward and for one forgetful moment thought only of herself and the sky.

  She felt a loosening, a lightening. Her arm went slack, and she recognized, too late, that Anna had fled. She was tunneling through the crowd, running across Fifth and down Chestnut: running. East, under a sky that was aluminum and glittered copper, through a noise Katherine could never describe. East, to the very edge of the city.

  Anna’s blueberry skirt was kicking up above her boots. Her gray wrap was flying out behind her. Where, Katherine wondered, was she going, and why would she not stop for Katherine? Why would she force Katherine to take off running, too, past the banks, past the market, past the rows of brick homes and marble lintels,
over cobblestones and streetcar tracks, past a ravaged horse tied to a thick lamppost? Anna ran. Katherine had to run faster. Bennett, Katherine thought, but it wasn’t him. Tonight, in fact, it wasn’t.

  And it wasn’t until Anna had gone all the way to the city’s edge that Katherine stopped running. Not until then did she understand that the river was here. The wide, black Delaware that hemmed Philadelphia in on its eastern side and that held now, on its slickened face, the mirror image of the sky. Whatever broke open up above was breaking on the river, too, and if you were out on the Delaware, if you made your way past the docks and lowered yourself down and stood or floated, you’d be inside a globe of fizzing color. Anna stood near the edge; Katherine came closer. She reached for Anna as the colors broke over the sky, over the river. But still Anna shrugged her sister off and walked out even closer to the edge. She was breathing hard. By now they both were.

  “Don’t you dare, Anna,” Katherine said. “This is as far as we go.”

  “It’s just a river, Katherine. It’s harmless.”

  “No, it’s not, and you know it.”

  “It’s the New Year.”

  “I know what it is.”

  “I just want to get closer.”

  “Anna,” Katherine warned, and Anna threw her bright head back and laughed, then all of a sudden grew somber.

  “I couldn’t find Bennett,” she said. “All of Philadelphia in the streets, but Bennett wasn’t there.”

  “He was probably out somewhere, searching for you,” Katherine said grudgingly.

  “Oh, Katherine,” Anna sighed. “Do you think so?” She turned at last to look at Katherine, to study her with eyes that were, if full of fierceness, sweet. Then she opened her arm to Katherine, and the sisters stood as the river held its mirror to the dazzling New Year’s sky.

  Anna leaned in close. “I forgive you,” she said.

  “For what?”

  “For caring so much that it makes you mean.”

  “He’ll ruin us both,” Katherine said, but not out of anger this time.

  “Look in his eyes sometime. Try and see him.”

  “I have, Anna. I understand. I know why you love him.”

  “I’ll marry him.”

  “But Father won’t allow it.”

  “Perhaps Mother will, then. Pursuit of happiness. Constitutional and whatnot.”

  “You’re slightly mad,” Katherine said.

  “Of course I am.” Anna laughed. And then she turned toward Katherine and leaned in for a kiss. “Love you,” she said, and Katherine thought, Remember this.

  That night Katherine gave up trying to talk sense into Anna. That night she did not try to argue her twin sister out of her gargantuan joy; she did not try to save her. It was then that Katherine decided to begin to look the other way on purpose, but this time without anger, without the intent to prove a point. She decided to stop protecting Anna, so that she might love her more truly.

  It was a decision she had made. She didn’t foresee the consequences.

  NOW AT THE CENTENNIAL, A BARBERSHOP QUARTET prepares to sing, and whoever has been playing the organ has disappeared. More smoke, Katherine thinks. More mirrors. The afternoon is running on and Katherine knows that if she’s serious about letting it all go, she must begin to move toward her final destination.

  She zags in and out of inventions, finds herself at the telegraph just as a message gets tapped to another corner of the globe. The crowd masses and moves, and Katherine moves with it, like a leaf floating on the back of a wet current.

  The wonders of the world slide past. Parisian corsets cavorting on their pedestals. Vases on lacquered shelves. Folding beds. Walls of cutlery. The sweetest assortment of sugar-colored pills, all set to sail on a yacht. Brazil, she discovers, lives inside its own Frank Furness–designed house with its own flowers made of feathers, its own yams and sarsaparilla.

  “Excuse me.” It’s an old man with a barking brogue—a man with a cane—and Katherine’s in his way. She’s not even sure how she got here, what secret internal engine brought her down one aisle and up another and through vale and hill and plains toward here, between the countries of Holland and Belgium at the entrance to the Moorish palace of Brazil, with its decorative arches and wooden pillars. Everything above is color—yellow, red, green, blue panels of painted wood—and wedged into the color are iridescent tiles that spell the names of provinces.

  More insistently this time, the man pounds the floor with the end of his cane. He clears his throat. “Please,” he says.

  “Forgive me.” She steps aside, into the kingdom of Brazil, where before her now is a bouquet of blooming feathers. Beyond the bouquet is a case of butterflies pinned into false flight and next are insects that will never lose their gleam. Brazil is here in photographs, in maps, in charts, in the native ingenuity of manioc, castor tree, mahogany, laces, and wool hats, in the strong odor of leather saddles and tribal hammocks.

  She weaves back and forth across acres. Past zinc ore and printing inks; a library of blank books; a cabinet of violins; an iron letter box; a woman in a rolling chair, a pink-nosed pup upon her lap. The man selling Centennial guidebooks smiles, inviting a sale. Katherine shakes her head no, for how could a book explain the stuffed Russian bear hanging from his toes, the jars of black powder, the wall of soda ash?

  At the intersection of the main aisle and the central transept is a palace of jewels: Tiffany, Starr & Marcus, Caldwell. If you see nothing else at the Centennial, see the jewels, Katherine had been told. See these cinnamon-colored cameos; this diamond necklace; these perfect solitaires; these black, white, and pink pearls. She waits her turn before sapphire and ruby, before tiaras, before the famous peacock feather with the massive Brunswick diamond nestled within. Precious. It’s the only word that comes to mind, and suddenly she feels terrified of all that will begin today, and of all that will end.

  Behind her, in the open aisle, something is wrong. Katherine senses a low-grade panic, and in an instant, turning, she understands: a child is missing and a mother is blaming herself. “Darcy?” the mother has begun to call. “Honey?” An elderly woman beside the mother says, “Tell us what she looks like, dear. She can’t have gone far.”

  “But she was right here,” the mother insists. “There.” She points to a place by her feet. She turns and takes a few steps west, a few east; she circles back, clearly afraid to go too far, to leave the daughter’s starting spot, and now a small surge of strangers has gathered, now more questions are being asked, now the mother grows increasingly confused. Katherine hears herself repeat the question, “But what does she look like? Your daughter. How old is she? How big?” She repeats herself, until the mother understands that she is only trying to help.

  “Four years old,” the mother says. The hair has fallen out from beneath her hat; her eyes are desperate and black. “In a pink dress. Darcy’s sherbet dress, she calls it. She was right here. I was here. And she was there, beside me.” The mother gestures toward her own shadow again; she raises her arms, bites the bottom of her lip.

  “We’ll find her,” Katherine says, wondering where in the world her sudden confidence comes from. “You stay where you are.” Just like that, as if she knows where a girl might go in a place like this, she takes off in one direction, hearing the mother’s cry at her back: “Darcy? Honey?” Katherine runs, remembering Anna, remembering that day in winter, when she could not move fast enough, when she could not, did not, save her sister.

  When she let it happen.

  Past the Leviathan Ostrich Incubator, past the pyramids, past the tower of wine bottles, past buttons and straw hats and tie silks, past the fire clay and slate, the bandstand, another iron letter box, the faces, and in all that distance, no little girl in sherbet pink. A quarter hour goes by at least, until at last Katherine turns a corner and sees a child alone, at the display of Watson nutshells. A child, tantalized and unafraid. The girl is amazed, Katherine can see, by the dangling oddities, the carved nuts and fruit st
ones that hang as if from the rims of a giant birdcage; Katherine is amazed that she has found her, that rescue remains a possibility. Too short to reach the nearest ornament, the girl is stretching nonetheless, balancing on her toes, not nearly lost in her own mind, not nearly on the verge of being found.

  “Darcy?” Katherine says quietly, so that the girl won’t run. “Are you Darcy?” The girl falls off her balance and takes in the spectacle of Katherine, whose face is flushed, whose heart is high and wild, whose thoughts are seized, again and again, by images of Anna, a memory, now, of Mother, once she came to understand the irreversibility of Anna’s being lost. “Your mother has been looking for you, Darcy,” Katherine says. “I can show you where she is.”

  “Did you see the nutshells?” Darcy asks.

  “I did,” Katherine says, taking the girl’s hand.

  “Do you think they’re pretty?”

  “Very pretty,” Katherine says.

  The little girl nods.

  “This must be your sherbet dress.”

  “It’s pink,” Darcy says.

  “It’s a nice pink.”

  The girl’s hand in Katherine’s hand is small and complete. An anchor in a vast sea.

  Katherine stands and listens to the bedlam noise of the Exhibition Hall. She closes her eyes, for maybe that will help her hear the voice of Darcy’s mother, calling. If not the word, Darcy, won’t Katherine hear the thrash-sound of fear, for she knows how that sounds, what it sounded like that day, when she called out Anna’s name, and Anna did not answer, and Anna would not answer ever again.

  “Let’s find your mother,” Katherine says, and Darcy is content to go on with this ginger-haired stranger, though she glances twice over her shoulder at the glamorous display of nutshells as now the two trace backward, toward the Brunswick diamond. There is the iron letter box—is it the same one? There are the straw hats and the tie silks, and they, at least, are the same, and now beside the towering wine bottles is Darcy’s mother, who is bent forward at the waist, as if every fiber of herself has already been damaged by the possibility of loss.