Child of a Rainless Year

by Lindskold, Jane

  “And here I thought you were just interested in your own genetic heritage,” Mikey chuckled, though his shock was still visible.

  “You forget,” Domingo said. “I know my family for many generations, but I could see why you did not wonder about my questions, and that suited me.”

  “Beware innocent questions,” Mikey said. “They may hide devious purpose.”

  “Who said that?” Domingo asked.

  “I did,” Mikey said. “Doesn’t make it less true, does it?”

  I listened with half an ear, aware that the men had prolonged their banter to give me a chance to recover from my shock. I stared down at the pictures of Nikolai Bogatyr, found several more below the first two in the pile. There was no doubt. The man who the kaleidoscope had shown me was Nikolai Bogatyr. As much as I wanted to believe the instrument had been in error, that it had shown me my grandfather, not my father, I knew this was not so. There was a simpler explanation—and it wasn’t incest.

  “I’m her?” I said. “I’m really her?”

  It was too much like my childhood nightmares to be believed easily, yet ironically, that earlier suspicion was at heart the truth.

  “You’re not Colette,” Mikey said. “You’re her reflection, her reverse, not her.”

  Domingo reached out and touched my hand. “Mira, however you started, you have lived your own life, had your own experiences. You are not your mother—no matter what your origin.”

  “But why?” I whispered. “Why did she do this? Is it because Phineas House demands continuity?”

  Mikey’s comment seemed a non sequitur. “It would be very interesting to know Colette’s medical history. I wonder if she ever had an abortion.”

  I shook my head and looked at him. “What?”

  “It is well-known that Colette had many lovers, but as far as we know, you are her only child. I wonder what her medical records might show.”

  “But an abortion?”

  “Colette’s adventures took place before there was reliable birth control,” Mikey explained. “The likelihood that she would have become pregnant is high, but you are her only child.”

  I nodded, understanding, now. “You’re wondering if Colette might have been sterile, aren’t you?”

  “That’s right,” Mikey said. “It is far from impossible. She was her parent’s only child. We’ve speculated that Phineas House might have indulged in some special selection, but the answer might be easier—inherited low fertility.”

  “Or she might have suffered an illness or injury,” Domingo said. “My Tia Maria had a high fever when she was a young woman, and after that …”

  He shrugged, too polite to go further into such personal detail. I looked back and forth between the two men.

  “I suppose,” I said slowly, “I might ask at the State Hospital to see if Colette’s records are still on file. They might tell something. There might be copies of her medical records somewhere in the files in the House, too, but does it matter? We know what she did—or at least we can guess.”

  Mikey heaved himself out of his chair. “It will matter to you, Mira. Let’s go look inside. If we fail to find anything, then we’ll try the hospital.”

  I didn’t have the energy to protest. Mikey was right. I needed to know—or rather, I wanted to know. I wanted to know anything that would help me understand the enigma that was my mother—although, as with everything else about Phineas House, it seemed the more I knew, the less I understood.

  But that isn’t true, is it, Mira? I asked myself. Finally, you are beginning to understand how the jigsaw puzzle fits together. The truth is, you don’t like what you are learning, so you pretend to still be confused.

  The three of us went inside, but though we methodically searched through files, desk drawers, books, and even a few boxes we found at the back of a closet, we found nothing related to Colette Bogatyr’s medical history.

  “Shall we call the hospital then?” Mikey asked, his hand half-reaching for the phone book.

  I shook my head. “No. In the end, it doesn’t matter—and we’d only be guessing anyhow.”

  “It doesn’t matter?” Mikey asked. “I think it does.”

  I shook my head again. “I’ve been thinking about it all this time. It doesn’t really matter whether or not Colette had a medical reason she couldn’t bear a child. If she wanted to solidify her claim to Phineas House and the heritage of Aldo Pincas, there were other ways. She knew her relatives, remember. It wasn’t like with me. She knew them—had reason to be grateful to them, especially to her trustees. She could have adopted a child, maybe had a series of children come through and see how Phineas House reacted to each one. You’ve said that the talent happens outside of the family, occurs even at random. Colette had lots of options, both within and without the Pincas bloodline—but she chose this.”

  I waved my hands in front of myself, as you might to draw attention to a new outfit.

  “She chose this,” I repeated. “We can guess why, but only she knows for certain why she did it.”

  Domingo looked from where he stood, a dusty file folder he was restoring to its place still in his hands.

  “So, you are still going to try to find her, are you?”

  I nodded. “Now more than ever I need to resolve this. Did I ever tell either of you that when I was a very small child I thought I was my mother’s reflection? I thought that if anything happened to her, I would vanish away? It took me years to overcome that belief, and I think it haunted my nightmares long after I thought I had forgotten. I have to find her, to see her, to make sure I’m … well … real.”

  The two men listened, each perfectly still, as if they were the images, not me. I went on, hearing myself articulate thoughts as they took shape in my mind.

  “Don’t you remember what Colette said? That bit about having to put the one back before she could draw out another? Something went wrong with her experiment, something severe enough that she risked another trip into her past in an attempt to fix it. I’m what went wrong. I want to know what went wrong.”

  Mikey frowned. “Mira, no child ever is what their parent imagines they will be. Sometimes they achieve more, sometimes less, sometimes merely different things. Have you forgotten that your mother was insane?”

  I rose from my chair and brushed dust off my skirt. “I’m waited on by women who don’t exist. I talk to my house and let it pick its own colors. I expect there are psychiatrists who would happily write me a prescription for something to ‘calm my nerves.’ Colette may have been no more insane than you or I, just less fortunate.”

  “Mira …”

  I shook my head, interrupting whatever reasoned argument Mikey wanted to offer. “I’ve made my mind up. The only thing left is for you to make up your own.”

  “Make up my mind?” Mikey replied, his expression blank and confused.

  “Are you going to help me?” I asked. “Or not?”

  Yet for all my requesting Mikey’s help, that very night I went through the looking glass. In what other fashion would I travel to find Colette, the woman who had lived so much in a looking-glass world that she finally sought her daughter there, an image of herself.

  I went alone through that looking glass, with no waving of wands or reciting of spells, nor even a prince’s favor tucked in my sleeve. I left that same night, leaving Mikey, my good teacher, asleep in his bed, and Domingo Navidad alone with his dreams. If he dreamed of me, I don’t know, but I do know I thought of him as I left.

  Let Domingo be my heir should I fail to return, I said to the House that surrounded me. He loves you and has cared for you all his life. He will do well by you—and unlike me, he is not too old to sire an heir to carry the tradition onward.

  Why did I leave with such certainty I would not return that I made this bequest? Why didn’t I wait and study under Mikey’s beneficent guidance a few days longer? After all, forty-some years had passed since Colette had vanished. What would a few more days matter?

  Wa
iting was my intention when I went up to the room I had made my own, and slept in the bed in which I sincerely doubted any of Colette’s lovers had ever passed a night, for all the room had been “theirs.” I had washed and slipped naked between the clean, lavender-scented sheets, listening to the night sounds outside the partially open window. Sleep, for all I was tired to the bone, would not come.

  Eventually, I rose, put on loose trousers and a tee shirt, slid my slippers onto my feet, all with the intention of going down to the kitchen and making myself a cup of mint tea with plenty of honey. Mikey was sleeping in one of the other guest rooms. When I saw light from under the door of Colette’s room, I thought he had violated my hospitality and gone snooping.

  I strode across the landing, at first with purpose, but then my footsteps began to falter. The light coming out from under the door was the wrong color. It was neither the glaring gleam of electric lighting, nor the dimmer, warmer flickering glow of candlelight. Nor did it have the furtive, shadow-producing quality of a flashlight.

  This light had a cool, bluish glow. For a moment, I thought someone had turned on a television in there, but dismissed that immediately. There were no televisions in Phineas House, certainly not in Colette’s private room. I thought then of a computer monitor. Had Mikey carried a laptop with him?

  Again, that didn’t seem right. In the end, I stopped puzzling, kept moving, and put my hand on the doorknob. It turned easily, startling me, for I knew perfectly well that I had made a practice of keeping both Colette’s room and the upstairs parlor locked. I turned the knob, though, and went inside, still half-expecting to surprise Mikey, already framing responses to his probable excuse that he had been doing it all for my own good.

  But when I opened the door and crossed the threshold, I found the room empty. The bluish light held touches of purple and red, oddly coloring the white and gold with which Colette had decorated her boudoir. Its source was neither lamp nor lantern nor candle, but the three mirrored panels that framed my mother’s vanity.

  The light thrust forth at an angle, refuting those rules that say light must always move in a straight line. A straight line would have touched one of the few walls on which a mirror did not hang. I suppose Colette did not like to see her back reflected when she sat at the vanity.

  This light extended for about a yard, then turned at an acute angle so that it illuminated the full-length portrait of Colette. I turned to look, and saw the picture had changed. No longer was it Colette in her archaic finery. Instead it showed the scene I had viewed repeatedly in both nightmare and kaleidoscope vision: Colette and her elegant gig, patient Shooting Star between the shafts, trotting forward along a road that twisted and fragmented, hardly a road any longer, but rather the potential of many roads, all evident, all manifest, each fragmenting the traveller as she sought to make her way home.

  I stood staring at the painting for a timeless stretch of time, viewing every detail. Then I turned toward the threefold mirrors. I knew enough now not to be deceived. The painting might seem to be the image, but I knew this was not the case. The image was the reality, the painting a reflection of a reflection.

  My hand dipped down into the drawer where the teleidoscopes were stored, moving as if it had undone the secret compartment hundreds of times, rather than a half-dozen or so. I fished one of the smooth wooden cases out at random, trusting that I would not choose wrongly. Then I centered myself in the light and walked forward, directly into whatever it is that lies behind the looking glass.

  29

  It is said that the sunlight reflecting off their armor as they [the Valkyries] ride on the gods’ errands causes the shimmering colors of the Northern Lights.

  —Jeannine Davis-Kimball, Ph.D., with Mona Behan,

  Warrior Women

  INSIDE THE LINES

  I found myself in a realm of translucent silver and frosted chucks of broken crystal, interconnected by a fine network of spiderweb cracks.

  The piece of crystal on which I stood bobbed slightly beneath my weight, as if I stood upon an iceberg, but when I knelt ever so carefully to see what the crystal floated upon, I found no break between it and the next piece. Silver and crystal were one flexible entity.

  I looked side to side, up and down, and back behind me, but I saw no change in the landscape that surrounded me. Nor was there any sign of Colette and her horse-drawn gig.

  “Now what?” I said aloud, and the sound of my voice flattened out as sounds do in vast areas where there is nothing for them to reverberate from.

  Then I remembered the teleidoscope I held in my hand. I raised it to my eye and gasped at the transformation.

  I had expected the translucent landscape to be duplicated and reduplicated, perhaps into snowflake patterns. I had not taken into account the color I myself would bring to the landscape. The string trousers I had pulled on were pale yellow, my loose tee shirt eggplant purple, my slippers sheepskin brown, trimmed with wool. Then there were the colors of my skin, my hair, even my eyes and lips. These intermingled with the silver and crystal, seeming to bleed in between the cracks, giving dimension to the patterns formed by the inner mirror chamber, transforming cool ice into a richly glittering garden.

  Did I walk through that garden? Over it? Beneath it? I really cannot describe what happened next. I know I moved, but the form of my locomotion was like nothing I had known before. It was something like the flitting of a butterfly from blossom to brightly colored blossom, something like the manner in which a prism splits light.

  I was everywhere at once and yet there was no sense of dissolution or division. I was one as the rainbow is one and yet seven. I arched through the sky and yet was firmly rooted in the earth. The bobbing beneath my feet was no longer unsettling. I felt as if the surface on which I stood danced with me, sharing my delight.

  Eventually, I lowered the teleidoscope, but to my immense delight the colors remained with me. I continued my exploration, chuckling as purple split into blue and red, as yellow blended with the blue and sparked forth stars of pale green, as red and yellow gave forth laughing orange that fountained up like jets from a roman candle, and came down again touched with violet and crimson teardrops.

  In time I became aware of a thread that held within its twisted strands gold and white, black and bloodred, warm brown and shining chrome. I followed that thread for no reason at all but that it was different from anything else around me.

  My movements as I followed it were sinuous. I lacked bone or body, swam on currents that were warm and welcoming, unfamiliar yet unfrightening. For the first time in my life I felt both graceful and beautiful, my blood humming within my veins, a song with music but no words coming from my lips.

  The thread moved among my colors, tightly twisted, giving nothing to the panorama of marvels that shifted and surrounded me, encompassing me and making me a part of it without ever robbing me of a sense of self. The colors in the thread remained undiluted, yet they did not gain in vividness from this lack of dilution. Instead they were flat, dull in their solidity, enervated in their perfect containment.

  Where at first I had followed the thread from curiosity, I continued out of a growing awareness that it would lead me to what I sought.

  In my joy in joining with the dance of color the teleidoscope had revealed to me, I had temporarily forgotten that I had any purpose for being here. Indeed, I think I had forgotten that there was anything other than this place.

  Now I remembered, but fear or hesitation did not come with that remembering. Confident as I had never been before, I paced though the tangle, tracing the thread. Green-eyed wildcats paced with me, darting in and out, pouncing the bending fronds of the multicolored jungle and the tips of each other’s tails.

  The thread met with another of its type, neither growing thicker or thinner at the juncture point, but fanning out from that point to continue wherever it was they went. I followed one at random, saw it touch another, then bounce away, touch another and go on. I wondered where these many threa
ds went, and with the desire my perspective altered and I was looking out in all directions, up and down and to all sides. Now I saw the thread was not a thread at all, but warp and woof alike of a chaotic web, a network of roadways that might have been spun by a spider on LSD.

  And in that moment I knew that I looked upon the wheel tracks cut through the space between space by Colette’s forty year journey through trackless wilderness, a journey that left a road behind it, because she insisted there must be a road, and so trapped herself in the maze of her own confusion and conceit.

  And here, too, I saw the dangers that Mikey Hart had warned me were there for those who treated too lightly with the thresholds between possibility, probability, and reality. These were not monsters or terrors—nothing so concrete. Rather they recalled sinkholes, mires, thick quicksand, sucking mud, drugged sleep, and fanatic fantasies.