Child of a Rainless Year

by Lindskold, Jane

  INSIDE THE LINES

  And almost as soon as Aunt May had made this decision, her doorbell rang. With that cascading chime, not only did her plans change, so did the journal. Up to that point, I’d been reading it with a certain detachment, but with the first two paragraphs something odd happened. I felt pulled inside, and read without awareness of the words, seeing the scene before me with all the vividness of life.

  OUTSIDE THE LINES

  Dear Mira: I’ve been writing this journal to you all along. Today was the first time I realized it. I felt a fierce temptation to go back and tear out those earlier pages, but I’ve decided to leave them in. It’s best that if you ever read this—as I plan that you will—that you don’t have any illusions about what set me on what I did, and maybe even more importantly, what I’m planning on doing, though more than good sense tells me I should not.

  You’ve read what comes before this. If you haven’t, go back and do so. Now you can go on with everything straight.

  Yesterday I put a deposif on a train ticket from Tucson, Arizona, to Las Vegas, New Mexico. Midday today, around ten o’clock, when I’d stopped to have a cup of coffee and a sweet roll and glance over the newspaper, the front doorbell rang.

  I was surprised, but not too much. Salesmen are something of a fact of life, and they’re just about the only people who use the front door. Friends come around to the kitchen.

  Finishing my coffee, I went to the door, but I didn’t find a salesman standing there. I found a man I recognized, and if I tell you my heart leapt into my throat, well, you’ll just have to believe me.

  He was about my age, short, plump, and fair-haired. As every time I’ve seen him, he was impeccably dressed in one of those suits that you know is expensive, even if it doesn’t look all that different than every other suit you’ve ever seen. I know him as Michael Hart, and he’s one of the trustees of Mira’s estate—the youngest of the three, I think.

  I opened the door to him immediately.

  “Mrs. Fenn?” he said politely. “May I come in?”

  I couldn’t quite make myself talk yet, so I nodded and motioned him in. I thought he’d sit in the living room like he has always done before, but he moved past me into the kitchen and sat across from where I’d left my coffee cup. Somehow this made him a little less frightening, but I was still plenty nervous as I went in after him. I offered him coffee. He accepted, then added about half the contents of the sugar bowl. He got right to business.

  “Mrs. Fenn,” he said. “It has come to my attention that you are planning to make a trip to Las Vegas, New Mexico—in direct violation of the agreement we made when you and Mr. Fenn took in Mira Bogatyr.”

  I nodded. I didn’t see any sense in lying, and I wasn’t about to ask Mr. Hart how he knew. It occurred to me that I’d been stupid using a travel agent here in town. There aren’t that many. I should have made the arrangements once I was in Tucson.

  This flitted through my mind, even as I listened to his next words.

  “It also has come to my attention that you have sent various letters to Las Vegas, letters inquiring after the fate of Colette Bogatyr.”

  I didn’t even nod this time, just stared, and as I waited for him to continue his accusations something in me grew white hot.

  “I know the terms under which we took Mira in,” I said, and my voice shook, but it wasn’t because I was afraid. I was furious. “If you’re going to take her because I’ve broken them, well …”

  I trailed off, not certain what I was threatening, but knowing that if my impulsiveness had lost me my daughter, I was going slit my wrists—if Stan didn’t do it for me. Mr. Hart seemed to understand my desperation.

  “Mrs. Fenn,” he said, “why were you trying to locate Colette Bogatyr?”

  “I want to know what happened to Colette. It’s like I’ve already said. If something happens and Mira is taken from us … I don’t know what I’d do. I wanted to find out if anything had been learned about what happened to her. I wanted reassurance that she wouldn’t come and take my little girl.”

  The smallest hint of compassion mingled into Mr. Hart’s professional severity.

  “Do you swear that is all?”

  “What else could there be?”

  “Mira has an inheritance coming to her. Perhaps you are interested in securing that. This would be difficult to do if her mother returned.”

  I was so shocked at being taken for a gold digger that I didn’t say a word, and my silence apparently made a better answer than any words could have done.

  “I see,” Mr. Hart said. “If I assure you that Colette Bogatyr is not likely to return and take your daughter from you, will you stop your prying? I am pleased with how the child is thriving in your care, and so am reluctant to have her removed from your home. My colleagues might feel otherwise.”

  “Can you really swear Colette won’t be coming back?” I said. “Is she dead then?”

  Mr. Hart’s expression became vague and I don’t think he even saw where he was for a moment, so intent was he on an inner vision of some sort.

  “She may be or she may not be, but though Queen of Mirrors she certainly is, and Mistress of Thresholds as well, she knows less than she could wish of color and of light. That is why she had a daughter.”

  I heard the titles, but shaken by the oddness of those words all I said was, “What?”

  Mr. Hart shook his head, as a dog might shake water from its coat. “Trust me. Colette Bogatyr will not return to take your daughter from you. If you wish to keep Mira safe, let her grow here in this quiet place, let her find her strengths in her own time. That is the best thing you can do for her. Now. Do I have your word you will not go to Las Vegas, New Mexico, and that you will cease writing letters to those involved with the disappearance?”

  What else could I do? I swore.

  “Do not tell anyone of my visit. My leniency would be misinterpreted, and not only would you lose Mira, you would lose one who thinks well of how you care for her.”

  Mr. Hart rose from my kitchen table, and I walked him to the door. As he was about to leave, he handed me an envelope.

  “Your deposit,” he said, and without a further word of parting, he went down the walk. I glanced down at the envelope in my hand, and when I looked up again, he was gone.

  Mira came home today with her folders stuffed with drawings from her art class. To this point, I had looked at them mostly to see how her skills were developing. Now for the first time I saw the riot of color she used. Not even a simple daisy was drawn in the white and yellow more usual for a child of her age. It was white and a dozen shades of yellow, from deep gold to the lightest lemon, petal edges touched with green, and given depth with shadow.

  Color. Somehow my Mira has more than an artist’s eye. Something in her ability to use color is key to her relationship with Colette. There’s more here, too. Mr. Hart seemed to think I was interested in getting control of Mira’s inheritance. I thought at the time he meant the money and property. Now I wonder. Could this “inheritance” be some ability? Maybe her artistic ability. I keep thinking about what Mr. Hart said: “She knows less than she could wish of color and of light. That is why she had a daughter.”

  Weird, but no stranger than anything else to do with Colette.

  I have promised I will not do any more research regarding Colette’s life in Las Vegas, but can I find out what those strange titles might mean? They sounded like something from a fairy tale, but I have heard that fairy tales often are watered-down versions of older stories, stories that have their roots in truth. Maybe there is some tiny country or Masonic lodge or something where these titles belong.

  It seems like a safe enough thing to do, and not even Stan will find anything odd in a new mother who suddenly becomes obsessed with storybooks.

  INSIDE THE LINES

  And so began Aunt May’s search for the meaning behind those words, a search that I had seen the traces of in her interest in every religion, philosophy, and occult
tradition of which she could learn. I had thought her interest a curiosity, an odd hobby, later even an attempt to compensate for the limitations inherent in the life of a suburban housewife.

  Now I knew it for what it was, a quest as noble as that on which any of Arthur’s knights ever rode out, more noble even, for while they sought the Grail for the honor it would bring to their king’s house and to themselves, Aunt May sought knowledge so that she might use it to arm herself—and her daughter—against a danger she could not understand but knew nonetheless was there.

  That night, reading her words, and knowing the end of that quest as Aunt May herself never could have done, I bent my head and wept over the handwritten pages, my tears the rain that never fell in the year that I was born.

  Maybe it was because what I read in Aunt May’s journal forced me to confront what was going on more directly than I had before, but the next morning I realized I was awakening more than the silent women. Something was coming alive, something that had … I struggled to find a word that would explain what I myself only nebulously understood. Slept? Been suspended? Been held in abeyance? Slept seemed easiest, but in that ease I recognized the danger of oversimplification.

  Something that had slept, then, for forty years, ever since Colette had vanished.

  I’d like to say that what was awakening was the House, but just as the term “slept” was a dangerous oversimplification, so was this. It was more like what the House stood for was coming alive. No. That wasn’t quite right either. It had to do with the nature of the House itself.

  Can something be alive and yet not? Aware and yet unaware? If so, that was the nature of the House.

  The House was not a person but a place, a living place. There are long traditions of sacred sites, of places sanctified due to some nearly forgotten event—or perhaps the original event has mythologized almost beyond recognition of what originally happened. Myth might tell of how a god of war came to earth riding upon a flaming horse. The original event might have been an iron meteor falling to the ground.

  There are other occult traditions that touch on the idea of living places. In the lingo of the New Age they’re called “ley lines” or “alpha vortexes.” There are those who claim to sense “vibrations” or “emanations,” from the living earth. These terms are all right, but still limited in their ability to express what’s really going on.

  It’s like a tone-deaf person trying to sing Handel’s Messiah a capella, or an artist trying to draw a rose with one red crayon. Semblance is there, but not substance, not dimension. If you know the Messiah or have seen a rose, you’ll recognize what is being attempted, but going the other way around and trying to discover the original from these distorted representations is harder—if not completely impossible.

  But nonetheless I knew. I knew that this house I had inherited from my mother was not just a house—even as it was indisputably and inarguably a house. All the things I had been doing since my arrival in New Mexico—the cleaning and dusting, ordering Domingo and his crew to complete the exterior painting, even the finding of Colette’s hoard—were playing their part in this awakening, but these weren’t the only things.

  It was as if the research I had been doing into my past and into Colette’s past, the reading I had been doing in Aunt May’s journals and the transformation this had worked on my settled images of my childhood and of the people who had raised me, had reshaped my mind. I felt as if I was being reworked, made into the key that would unlock the puzzle that was Phineas House.

  If this were the case, I was no linear shape of metal, but something more fluid and irregular, more like the final amoebalike shape that completes a jigsaw puzzle, transforming it so that everything seen before as little individual, unrelated scraps of color becomes a whole.

  I was not the only one aware of the awakening of whatever potential it was that Phineas House held. Domingo Navidad may have been aware before I was, for Domingo had ever been the House’s acolyte. Perhaps the relationship had begun when as a boy he had assisted his father about the grounds. Children’s minds are more plastic than those of adults, and, if the evidence of the presence of the silent women can be taken as anything, the House was awake and alive then.

  Perhaps when the House was being pushed back into sleep it reached out and touched Domingo, wrapping a tendril into his awareness, and through him maintaining a touch on the waking world. When this thought first occurred to me, the image was gentle, a green-hazed climbing vine setting a gentle hold on a support. Later, when I knew more, I came to think that what the House had done was crueler—more akin to the setting of sharp-hooked thorns that roses employ when they climb, digging into whatever is soft and yielding in their surroundings.

  But this later image had no part of my initial reaction when I realized that of all the people I knew there was one, at least, who would not think I was insane, as Colette had been thought insane. I think Aunt May not only would have believed, she would have welcomed Phineas House as an answer to many of the puzzles whose edges she had discerned in her research, but whose inner logic remained frustratingly incomplete.

  OUTSIDE THE LINES

  Mirrors. I decided to start there, not only because the title “Queen of Mirrors” is a lot more promising than “Mistress of Thresholds,” but also because I remembered a strange comment that Mira made when she first came to live with us.

  “There’s only five mirrors in the whole house,” Mira said, plopping into a chair in the kitchen. “One in each bathroom, one in your bedroom, one in mine, and one in the front hall.”

  I remember laughing. “Do we need more? Just how often do we need to look at ourselves?”

  Mira didn’t answer, but there was a thoughtfulness in her expression that stayed with me.

  Very well. Mirrors. Well, the first one that came to mind was the one in Snow White, the one the Wicked Stepmother uses to spy on the young princess. I checked, and it’s in the original Grimm’s Fairy Tales, not just in the Disney movie.

  I read the story through, end to end, thinking about it, not just reading it. It’s a strange and nasty story really—about envy and vanity. I think those are two of the deadly sins—or is the one pride, not vanity? At the end, strangely, I found myself feeling pity for the old queen. True, she was willing to commit murder, but her tools were poison. Being forced to dance until dead in red-hot iron shoes … Brr …

  And I couldn’t help but think that Snow White was a bit of a twit, for all her goodness and beauty. I mean, the old queen tries to kill Snow White repeatedly, and the dwarves keep warning Snow White, and still she eats a slice from the apple!

  But I’m getting away from mirrors. It seems to me that there must be more than this example.

  I’ve read so many fairy tales that my mind is alive with princess and princesses, wise fools and foolish wise men. I dream about them at night. Strangely, many of them bear Colette’s face.

  I’ve learned more about mirrors. One thing is for sure. They’re definitely considered magical. In several stories they’re used to create illusions, usually of a great pool of water or a flashing fire.

  Mirrors are magical in myths as well. Perseus defeats the Medusa using the mirror-bright reflection in a shield. Narcissus fades away because he is obsessed with his own reflection. It seems it is dangerous to look at oneself too closely. At least it was for Medusa and Narcissus.

  And it seems that spying on others through mirrors wasn’t restricted to the old queen. Sometimes a pool of water is substituted for a mirror, just like for Narcissus. I bet if I was to search around for other references I’d find that pools of water came first, then mirrors, and that our gypsy crystal ball is a relative latecomer.

  Mirrors and water seem to be closely related. Mermaids are often depicted with a hand mirror and comb, combing out their long golden hair as they lure sailors to their doom. I bet at first they didn’t bother with the hand mirror, just looked down into the water.

  I came across a passing reference in some scho
lar’s turgid opening to a collection to seven mirrors used in cabalism. That’s some sort of Jewish magic, I think. But that’s all I know. I’ll have to look further.

  The more I look, the more I see. I feel like Alice in Looking-Glass Land!

  INSIDE THE LINES

  Domingo and I had acknowledged our shared perception of the House as somehow alive for quite a while before we actually discussed it openly. That awareness had been implicit in his earliest statements to me about Phineas House. Only later, as my own perceptions began to unfold and broaden, did I accept that Domingo was speaking more than artistically.