Child of a Rainless Year

by Lindskold, Jane

  Even as I accepted this, I came to the realization that though I had made no effort to do so, I was keeping up with the gig. I had resumed my point of view slightly ahead of the gig, watching it come on toward me, never reaching.

  Periodically, Colette would scan the landscape through her teleidoscope, but she did not seem to find whatever it was she was seeking. At least she never paused nor changed her course, but continued riding on.

  I don’t really know how long I stood there alongside the road and watched. All I know is that I had been watching for a long time when I noticed something strange. Hadn’t the gig passed that field before? I was certain I remembered the colorful if rather tattered shirt that adorned the scarecrow. It had caught my attention, not only for its color but because I wondered why a scarecrow was set up so early in the season, and had decided it must have remained from the summer before.

  Alert now, I glanced about me, certain that a house, a heap of stones at the roadside, a patch of straggly wild flowers were all familiar. At last I thought to glance up at the sun. It had changed position, and stood exactly opposite where it should be in the sky. That last confirmed it. Somehow Colette had reversed her course without my ever seeing her turn the gig. She was no longer heading away from Las Vegas, but back toward it.

  I had no choice but to accept this, spending my energy instead on looking for other alterations in my surroundings. I found them almost immediately. When I had first encountered her, Colette had driven through a living landscape. What she travelled through now was more a semblance of one, an extraordinarily vivid painting, a film that continued to unwind but without sound other than what Colette and her assemblage made. The steady sound of the horse’s hooves had fooled me, but there was no birdsong, no insect chatter.

  When we passed a field where a farmer was mending the fence that protected his field of greening crops, there was no sound though he was busy with hammer and nails. There was no scent either, though there should have been that of crushed herbage and maybe even the rank odor of male sweat.

  So Colette has passed into some liminal space where she’s paralleling the real world, moving alongside its borders. I wonder if I am in some similar state in relation to her? I wonder if I could bridge the gap.

  I tried, but I was like a child trying to drive a car. Just as the child knows the car should move, even knows what the gas pedal and brake do, how the steering wheel is used, even that the key turns in the ignition, still this is not enough.

  And I don’t even have the car keys. I guess I’ll just have to watch to see where she goes, then see what happens to her there.

  That’s what I did, letting my point of view draw me along through this land on the edge of a land I almost knew. That almost became increasingly important as I watched, especially when we reached town. That what I was seeing was Las Vegas, New Mexico, I was certain—although I’ll admit it took passing several landmarks and reading a dozen or more street signs for me to be certain. Las Vegas this certainly was, but it wasn’t the Las Vegas I knew.

  Which Las Vegas it was was not easy for me to decide. There were cars, but these were older models, older even than the cars I remembered from my childhood. I noted details, figuring I could sketch them later. Mikey would probably know their types, and if he didn’t I could check at the library.

  The attire of the people walking on the street was also old-fashioned, but I wasn’t enough of a clothing historian to be certain just how old-fashioned it was. Again I made mental notes. Seeing a man walk by with his nose buried in a newspaper gave me the bright idea of going to check the date printed on the paper, but I found I was limited to the vicinity of Colette’s gig. I could stay slightly in front of it, draw alongside, or trail a few paces behind, but that was my range.

  After a bit, I recognized the neighborhood into which Colette was turning her carriage as the very one in which I was currently residing. Many of the houses were recognizable as ones I knew, but very few resembled their modern counterparts. They were painted different colors, window treatments weren’t the same, plantings were arranged in different patterns. In a few cases I saw young trees where in my day towering giants stood. In other cases, the trees that shaded street or yard were long gone in my day.

  I was not at all surprised when Colette drew her gig to a stop in front of Phineas House. This was neither the wildly colored House of my present, nor the paler one I remembered from my childhood, but instead it wore a color scheme that was somewhere between the two. The background color was a pleasant sunny yellow, the shutters and window casements were a darker harvest gold. The numerous carved details were neither ignored as they had been during Colette’s tenure, nor accented as they were in mine. Instead they were brought out just a bit, often in shades of ivory or lighter yellow. The effect wasn’t as dramatic as my “Fairground Midway style,” but it worked.

  As Colette drew her gig to a stop and gracefully dismounted from the driver’s box, all sound but Shooting Star blowing and shaking her trappings ceased. Then Colette dismounted the box, and went to the gate. She didn’t walk through it as I thought she might, but when she opened and closed it, there was no sound.

  The same routine was followed at the front door, which, evidently was unlocked. I expected my point of view to follow Colette inside, but I was stopped at the front door, unable to penetrate further. It wasn’t as if I was anchored to the gig, but rather as if a strong wind—one that politely didn’t muss my hair or stir my garments—pressed me back.

  I remembered that Mikey had said Phineas House had been created to channel the currents of liminal space, and that while the channelling had greatly benefitted Aldo Pincas and his family, it had not benefitted other liminal travellers in the least.

  “But why can’t I get through?” I said to myself. “I’m a member of the family. Could it be because I haven’t been born yet? Colette could get through, though. Does this mean that she has returned to the past—for certainly this is the past—but within the span of her own life?”

  That made sense. Paula Angel had told me that Nikolai Bogatyr had held but the lightest of holds on Phineas House, and that upon Colette’s birth, the House had bonded with her. Therefore, unlike earlier heirs who had taken over upon their parent’s death, Colette had the bond from her birth.

  I kept trying to get in without success. Had Colette gone into the past and been killed there? That would explain why she hadn’t returned, and why there was no record. Nikolai and Chantal Bogatyr would not have recognized their daughter in this elegant woman dressed, even for their time, in out-of-date styles.

  I began to think that I would keep a fruitless vigil right up until midnight when, presumably, Saturday’s kaleidoscope would cease to show its vision and I would be thrust back into the front parlor in the Phineas House of the present day. With a long wait in mind, I’d taken a seat on the high curb, leaning back against a tree that wasn’t there in my time, but here and now provided fine shade from the late-spring sun.

  I’d gotten comfortable, and my feet—which felt like I’d been on them all this time, for all that I must have been here only in spirit—had lost their ache, when Colette came back out the front door and made a beeline for her gig.

  Although Colette moved with her usual grace, there was no doubt that my mother was furious. Her hands in their kid gloves were clenched into tight fists, and her mouth pressed in a line so thin that her full lips became a slit. She mounted the driver’s seat with abrupt jerking motions, and when seated slapped the reins across patient Shooting Star’s back so that the mare looked back at Colette in equine rebuke before breaking into a trot.

  Leaving Phineas House behind, Colette began to retrace her way through the streets of Las Vegas. When I saw her lips moving, I brought myself alongside the gig in case I might overhear something interesting or useful. Most of what she said was inarticulate, little hisses and snorts, punctuation in an internal dialogue to which I was not privy. Only once did she say something aloud.

&nbs
p; “I suppose I’ll need to return the one before I can have another. What a bother! I’ve made the trip twice now, and hoped never to risk a third.”

  Colette said nothing further to clarify this. Over time her supreme self-control reasserted, so even the indignant hissing ceased and her mouth resumed a semblance of its usual lines. Only her eyes narrowed with calculation showed she was anything but a well-born lady out for a drive.

  I think I noticed before she did that something wasn’t right, but I could be wrong. Self-control was always one of Colette’s strong points. In any case, before long we both had registered that the gig was no longer travelling either through the streets of Las Vegas or through the surrounding countryside.

  The landscape was familiar, yet it was not. There were mountains in the right place, but they weren’t quite the right mountains. Key features looked just the littlest bit off. The dirt road was the same, but the flowers that grew along the edge were too far advanced for late April. These were the sunflowers and asters of late summer. The fields showed signs of harvest, cut to the ground in some places, bailed hay waiting to be hauled to shelter.

  There were other indications, but they all came down to the same thing. Colette Bogatyr was lost somewhere between the past and her present. Belatedly she pulled out the forgotten teleidoscope and sought to chart her course back to familiar ground. Although I understood nothing of what she was doing, I could tell she was unsuccessful.

  My mind filled with the image I had encountered in various forms in dreams and visions, Colette travelling further and further down a road that fragmented with possibilities, growing more and more lost with every choice she made.

  When a swirling of sunflakes heralded my return from vision to my own time and place, Colette still had not found her way back. Her expression was becoming increasingly frantic, the hand holding the teleidoscope was beginning to shake.

  For the first time in this mad venture I was glad I couldn’t speak to her. I felt shamed and yet relieved that I did not have to be the one to tell her that she would never make her way home.

  27

  Surrealist artists were fascinated by psychological meanings of colors. Oddly, each hue has both a positive and negative connotation in most cultures. For example, consider the following: White: innocence and ghostliness; Black: restful strength and depression; Yellow: nobility and treason; Red: ardent love and sin; Blue: truth and despondency; Purple: dignity and grief; Green: growth and jealousy.

  —Betty Edwards,

  Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain

  INSIDE THE LINES

  I came out of my trance to hear the grandfather clock on the upstairs landing chiming the strokes of midnight. Mikey Hart sat, or rather slouched, half-asleep in one of the comfortable padded chairs. To my surprise, a much more wide awake Domingo Navidad sat in another, and when I lowered the kaleidoscope from my eye, he was across the room and taking it from my hand, setting it on the table, pressing my hands between his own.

  “Mira? Mira? Are you all right?”

  Sunflakes still spotted my vision, like the afterimage of a camera flash or a bolt of lightning. The room reeked of strong coffee, undertoned with male sweat.

  “Coffee,” I said weakly. “Water. Aspirin. Bathroom first.”

  I tried to get to my feet, but I felt wrung out. Unfairly, for someone who had been sitting for the last several hours, my feet hurt, just as they had in my vision. When I tried to stand, my left ankle buckled.

  Domingo caught me, his arms around me feeling very good. I restrained myself from an impulse to giggle, knowing full-well I was overtired and punchy, not wanting to say or do anything that I would regret later.

  By the time he had escorted me to the bathroom, I was steady enough that I gently pushed him back.

  “Thank you,” I said, “but I think I can handle this.”

  He nodded, but as I closed the bathroom door, I noticed he watched very carefully to make sure that I didn’t fall. I managed to pee, then drank several glasses of water and swallowed two aspirin. When I opened the bathroom door again, Domingo was waiting at a polite distance. Mikey stood beside him, a mug of coffee in his hand.

  At the smell of the coffee my head pounded harder and my stomach roiled. I waved it away when Mikey would have brought it over.

  “No. Sleep. I’m sorry. So much to tell … Too tired. Too damn tired.”

  I was nearly asleep on my feet, and I didn’t even want to protest when Domingo came and helped me into my bedroom. I know that he and Mikey were there when my head hit the pillow. After that, I don’t remember anything except for a host of odd, golden-hued dreams.

  I slept ten hours, and I’m not sure I even rolled over once. When I opened my eyes, Domingo was waiting in a chair by my bed. I grinned weakly at him.

  “Making a habit of this?”

  “I hope not,” he said seriously, “at least not quite this. How do you feel?”

  I yawned, remembering belatedly to cover my mouth, and as I did so ran a mental check through my body.

  “Pretty good,” I said. “No headache. Starved though.”

  Domingo smiled. “Mikey Hart slept at my place last night— so did I, in case you wonder. The silent women escorted us out, but they let me come back in this morning. Mikey hasn’t gotten moving yet. He’s not young, and though he hasn’t said anything, I’m sure this hasn’t been easy on him.”

  “Go check on him,” I said, “while I shower and get respectable. Then come back over for breakfast. Oh, and tell Mikey he should check out of his hotel and come stay here. The silent women won’t throw him out if he’s a guest, and I’d feel safer with someone in the House.”

  Domingo quirked the corner of his mouth. “I hope you’re not afraid of me. Even the silent women know I’m harmless.”

  “Harmless?” I teased. “I hope not. That would be too boring. You can stay here, too, if you want, but you have a perfectly good house within shouting distance. Look. This will all make sense when I’ve had a chance to explain what I saw last night.”

  “Do you know, then, what happened to Colette?”

  “Sort of,” I said. “Not quite. It’s very strange.”

  “What about this hasn’t been?” Domingo said. “I will do as you say, but first …”

  He leaned down and kissed me squarely on the lips, and though he made no effort to prolong the contact, there was nothing brotherly about it. Lightning shot right through me at the contact, and I know I blushed right up to the roots of my hair.

  “I’m very glad you’re feeling better, Mira,” Domingo said, and then he made his way briskly, but not hurrying, out of the room. I lay there listening to his feet on the stairs, thinking of falling daisy petals.

  Then, practical soul that I am, I got up and headed for the shower.

  I told Mikey and Domingo about my vision of the night before over a very substantial breakfast.

  “These car models,” Mikey said, looking at the sketch I’d drawn. “Late twenties, early thirties.”

  “Colette was born in 1928,” I said. “That would be about right then, at least if my guess that she could enter Phineas House without resistance because it was, effectively, her house. The House has intelligence, in its own way, but I’m not sure it has enough to sort Colette from Colette.”

  “Wouldn’t it sense two Colettes?” Domingo asked. He’d made no comment about that kiss—and well, neither had I—but insisted on doing most of the cooking, and had hovered over me until it was quite clear that I was feeling fine.

  “Maybe,” I said, “but I’ve been thinking about that. Maybe the signatures, well, sort of blend, like if you add ocean water to ocean water. It’s not possible to sort it.”

  Both Domingo and I looked at Mikey, but our expert only shrugged.

  “Time travel through liminal space has always been theoretically possible, but I’ve never tried it, and I’ve never known anyone who has successfully done much more than retrace a couple of seconds. The farther back you go,
the more possibilities there are, complications that make it … the best word I can find for the sensation is dizzying. The times I tried I felt sick, disoriented, with a touch of vertigo thrown in.”

  I nodded. “But you did say that Colette had learned to use routes most people never dared. I think that’s what she was trying to do here—and that she’d done it before, made it there and back successfully. What messed her up this time is that she was so angry she forgot to plot her course, and when she realized what had happened, it was too late.”

  “But what happened in the House,” Domingo asked. “What did she see that upset her so much?”

  “I wonder if she witnessed her father’s death?” I suggested, then I shook my head. “That can’t be right. This was the middle of the day. Didn’t that happen at night?”