Child of a Rainless Year

by Lindskold, Jane

  These were the points where desire had become so strong that it bogged down the traveller, drawing her into dreams, swallowing her ability to perceive the difference between reality and phantasm. Here, then, was how Colette had lost her way. In her fury at being thwarted, she had set forth, thinking not of where she was going, but where she wished to be. The road she took led her there, giving her satisfaction but robbing her of direction until she was irretrievably lost.

  I reached out and touched the web, running my finger along various strands until I found one that vibrated with regular motion. I led myself by those vibrations, an Ariadne in a labyrinth without walls, a labyrinth no less binding to the one who ran ceaseless through its confines.

  I travelled only as long as my own needs demanded, gathering up my courage for a confrontation I dreaded nearly as much as I longed for it. Had I been less determined, I might have vanished into an infinity of indecision as Colette had done into an infinity of rage and indignation. But I was determined.

  Colette’s daughter I might be—even her reflection—but I was also the daughter of Maybelle Fenn. Aunt May had taught me to press on, to slide through the cracks between expectation and ability. I slid through the cracks now, emerging at last beside a dirt road where a beautiful woman with long black hair drove a horse-drawn gig toward some unseen goal. Her plum-colored dress was as fresh as the day she had donned it, her jewels sparkled as brightly, her skin was fresh and supple, but for all Colette externally seemed unwearied by her long drive, the eyes that met mine as I stepped out of my jungle onto her road were branded with each of the thousand thousand roads she had travelled.

  Colette did not rein up the carriage, and her gaze passed through me as if I were not there. Shooting Star shied as she had not during my other encounters with them. By this sign I knew I was somehow present, that this was no vision, but the confrontation I had sought.

  “Colette!” I called. “Colette Bogatyr. Stop a while. I would like to talk with you.”

  Her imperious gaze now rested on me, but I was of no importance to her, therefore, she did not register my existence. So it had been when I was a child and she was infuriated with me, so that she denied me. I felt a renewed pang of that child’s fear, but I was not that child any longer. Moreover, I recognized that here there was no wish to personally reject me. Colette was being Colette, and anyone she did not have a use for was unimportant, unessential. It was only when she saw someone in relation to herself that this person became real—and then, as lovers, friends, and bosom companions had learned to their pain, when she no longer had need for them, they simply ceased to exist.

  As a child I had never been angered by this behavior. It was simply the nature of my mother as it is the nature of the sun to be hot or of water to be wet. But I was no longer that child. Now I saw the persistent egocentrism of that pose. Fury I had not known was mine to feel raged within me. The air around me flashed hot and orange, heat lightning veined with thin green that I knew for envy and pale blue I knew for shame.

  “Colette!” I snapped in a voice perfected in dozens upon dozens of classrooms, a voice that could command attention from middle-schoolers who viewed art period as free time, not a privilege. “Colette Bogatyr! I want to speak with you!”

  Colette turned her face in my direction, but she did not slow. I would have had to run to keep pace with the horse. I did not wish to allow her to subject me to that indignity, but I also recognized Colette would not slow her endless journey even to speak with the one person to demand her attention in all these years of wandering.

  I leapt astride a green-eyed lion and steadied myself with hands wound in the great cat’s thick black mane. The lion easily paced the carriage, even when Shooting Star broke into a faster trot. Now that I could look Colette in the eye and speak without gasping for breath, I found I was at a loss for words. Then I glimpsed my reflection in the mirrored locket she wore pinned to her bodice and words came without bidding.

  “Don’t you know me, Colette?” I asked, and I fear my tone was mocking. “Don’t you see yourself in me?”

  “Why should I?” she said, drawing herself up straight and folding her gloved hands over the reins a bit more tightly. “I have never seen you before in all my life.”

  “But you have, Colette,” I said, and the mocking was gone, replaced with sorrow and a touch of fear. “I am Mira, Mira Bogatyr, your daughter.”

  “Mira,” she said, but there was no recognition in the word. “My daughter.”

  She said the last phrase over again slowly, repeated it a few times as if trying its taste in her mouth. Then she shook her head.

  “I have no daughter.”

  “True,” I said. “You had no daughter in the usual sense, but there was someone who for nine years you called your daughter. I am she.”

  Colette looked at me, and I saw no recognition in her eyes.

  “You cannot be that Mira. You’re too old.”

  “Even children grow up, Colette.”

  She shook her head. “No. There was that Mira, but I put her back. She could not have grown up.”

  I had felt the web. I had seen where the tightly twisted thread ran, and I knew this for one of the junctures where the thread had met and split, running on in two directions.

  “No, Colette.” I couldn’t make myself call her “Mother.” “No. You may have dreamed that you did this, but you did not. You went into the past intending to draw forth your reflection once again, but you found you could not.”

  She looked at me blankly for a moment, then nodded as if only now remembering. “That is so. I hadn’t realized a reflection couldn’t be harvested more than once. Perhaps it was because the baby was so young. Still, I needed the baby to be young, otherwise there would be questions. I put the other back and drew a new one forth.”

  I shook my head. “No. That is a dream. You never made it back to Phineas House. The one was not put back, a new one was not drawn forth. You have been lost for forty years.”

  “Why have you come here?” Colette said.

  “To ask you why you would have put me away,” I answered honestly. Then with equal honesty I said what I had never voiced before, even to myself, “and to bring you home again.”

  She looked at me quizzically, and I saw my reflection again in her mirrored locket and did not wonder that Colette did not see her pale, colorless child in the half-century old woman who rode a lion alongside her carriage. I might have the hair and eyes of that child, but I was far from colorless. There was a brilliance to my gaze, a flush to my cheek, a lift to my head that gave dimension to my pale hues.

  “I had to put the first one back to draw forth the new one,” Colette said.

  I recognized a bartering note in her voice. She had not admitted it aloud, but she knew she was trapped in this place between places, and she wanted very much to find the true road back.

  “What was wrong with the first one,” I asked, carefully not reminding her of my identity with that child, “that you needed to replace it?”

  “I would have kept it,” Colette said in a conciliatory tone, so that I knew she had not forgotten my claim to be Mira, “but I could not draw the second one forth without returning the first.”

  “So why did you need the second one?” I asked. I kept my tone level, clinical, though my heart screamed “Why didn’t you need me? Why wasn’t I good enough?”

  “The first one was difficult to teach,” Colette said, “and by the time I had learned how the teaching must be handled, she had learned things that she should not have. I wanted to begin again, afresh, so that everything would be right for her.”

  “Right for her,” I repeated numbly, but what I thought was Right for you, you mean.

  “That’s right,” Colette said, and her tone was bossy now, the one she used for ordering the silent women about. I think she was beginning to forget who I was, so that I was one of the many phantasms who must have appeared to her on this long road of rationalizations. “She had learned
to play with color, and that would make her useless. Color is not to be externalized, but internalized. She was wasting a valuable ability. I wished to start over and make sure she was taught aright.”

  “Internalized?” I managed to ask, but I knew what she meant. I had sensed it on that day long, long ago.

  “The first one,” Colette said, “was already gone into drawing, to externalizing. That attenuates color because the world around you holds color and competes with your own. The real power of color is internalized—it is the glow that makes you the sun in every gathering, the fire that warms … or burns. I wanted my child, my heir, to have the power of color as I do. This first one would not, therefore, I must have another.”

  She said this as reasonably as I would discuss the need to change socks or sharpen a pencil. Replace one with the other, that’s all. That’s how it’s done.

  I didn’t like to think what might have happened to little Mira if Colette had managed to draw forth another image and the House had maintained its bond with the first child. Doubtless, Colette would have disposed of a nine- or ten-year-old child as coolly as she had her father. Would she have felt more or less regret because that child was in some way herself? I didn’t know, and I certainly wasn’t going to ask.

  As these thoughts went through my mind I felt a thickness in the air, a heaviness. My lion leapt with less power, the surrounding colors dimmed, just a trifle. I recognized what was happening in time to shake myself from my thoughts and concentrate on where I was. Too nearly had I fallen into the same trap as Colette had done. I had begun to live in might-have-beens rather than what was, to let my imagination build fantasies that could replace reality so thoroughly that I would never know when exactly I had been lost.

  If Colette had seen the ripple in my personal reality, she did not comment. She continued to drive the carriage along the twisting dirt road, facing me as if we were chatting over tea and shortbread in the formal living room at Phineas House.

  “Do you wish to come back?” I asked.

  “Of course,” she replied with a scornful laugh. “Isn’t that why I’m driving this cursed nag along?”

  “Things will have changed,” I said. “More than forty years have passed since you rode out last from Phineas House.”

  “Forty years? Surely not!” She smiled a thin, contemptuous smile. “But then I forget. You claim to be my daughter grown old.”

  “I am,” I said steadily. “Believe as you will, I am Mira, whom you called your daughter. What must I do to prove it to you? Shall I tell you things only an inhabitant of that house would know?”

  Colette said nothing, but neither did she turn away. I began telling her. I told her things about herself, for she would not have noticed anything else. I described her private rooms, some of her favorite gowns, how she twisted her hair up and secured it with pins of amethyst and pearl. She listened as a cat is petted, luxuriating in the detail, knowing herself a worthy center of attention. She liked hearing what I said, but I could tell I was not convincing her.

  So I switched the cadence of my tale, telling her instead some of Phineas House’s secrets. I told her about the silent women and where they dwelled. I told her of the family tree in the Bible, and of the additions made to it in her own hand. Lastly, I told her of the kaleidoscopes and teleidoscopes: where they were hidden, and some of their powers. For final emphasis, I lifted my hand and showed her the teleidoscope I carried, cousin to the one she still held in one hand.

  Now indeed did I have Colette’s attention, and her gaze sharpened as she looked at me. I felt that now she saw me for the first time, and that her gaze was sorting through appearances, looking for correspondences between the child she remembered and the woman who rode alongside her carriage on a green-eyed, black-maned lion.

  When she spoke, her tones were coaxing, but beneath the coaxing note was one of command. This was the voice she had used when she had some use for me, when she might trot me out like a warm-blooded doll to impress some caller with her maternal achievement.

  “Come back with me, then, Mira, for I see now that you are indeed my daughter—my sweet reflection. Come back with me to the Phineas House of old, and we will make everything right again.”

  I looked at her, and am shamed to admit that I was tempted, though I knew what she was offering me was dissolution. Still, would that be so bad? I could forget everything that had gone before, and there would be a fresh start, a new beginning in a world where I would not live for decades with the vague sense that I had failed my mother.

  “Come with me,” Colette said soothingly. “In and out again we will go, then drive to a time when we can start afresh. The old world will vanish, a lesser probability, and we will make everything right.”

  I rose then on the lion’s back, moving perhaps to join Colette in her carriage, in her mad dream, but I glimpsed my reflection in the mirror on her locket and saw myself. Vitality was draining from me, color fading. The vibrant woman of fifty was become a dull thing I hardly recognized as me.

  Shooting Star shied. Colette grabbed the reins, and I looked around to see what had disturbed the placid bay. Wildcats were emerging from the dusty fringes of the road: spotted leopards and jaguars; tigers with erratic, zigzagging stripes; lions maned in night; lynxes with tufted ears; pumas with gold plush fur; cheetahs weeping dark tears. All of them had green eyes, eyes that glittered like emeralds and peridots, eyes like nothing in nature.

  With them came memories. Balancing on a ladder, brush in hand, paint stippling the back of my hand as I shared a joke with Enrico. Standing beside Domingo, hearing the scratch of his pencil on paper as he made notes as to what colors we should next bring to the carousel brilliance that now adorned Phineas House’s deep green sides. Sitting in the walled garden, looking at climbing roses that may have been old in my grandmother’s day. The taste of coffee and a sweet roll heavy with pecans and mesquite honey.

  Laughter in Domingo’s eyes as we shared some joke. The gentle pedantry in his voice as he told me something of the confusing history of this bifurcated town he loved so much. The calm command as he set his little band of painters about their varied tasks. The respect he engendered, the trust. In them. In me.

  I saw now that the green-eyed wildcats were in some way Domingo’s gift to me. He had encouraged me to be the artist I had hidden from, hidden from, I thought because I feared who might find me through that talent, find me and make me go away as someone had made Colette go away.

  Now I saw differently. I hadn’t been hiding from an anonymous someone. I had been hiding from the same person all my life. I had been hiding from Colette, Colette who loved me best as an extension of herself. I didn’t want to hide any longer.

  With that realization Colette’s hold over me dissolved as does sugar in a glass of boiling water.

  “Color is the great magic,” I said aloud. “You taught me that years and years and years ago as you sat before your mirror.”

  Colette looked frightened now, and slapped the reins across Shooting Star’s back. The already terrified mare bolted, fleeing as she had fled for over forty years. My lion loped alongside, easily pacing the carriage. The flood of wildcats joined us, rippling fur in shades of golden brown, toasted tan, honey warm, and the fluffy white of clouds. The dusty road was beaten to oblivion under this host of velvet paws, and I welcomed relief from the drought stricken landscape.

  “Child of a rainless year,” I said aloud. “That’s what you called me. I never understood why the rains didn’t fall, not until now. Shall I tell you?”

  Colette tensed, and said nothing, but I knew she listened.

  “Rain washes away artificial color. Water, too, was the first mirror, the first thing in which any living being glimpsed its reflection. You have an affinity for mirrors, for reflections, don’t you? So in learning of them, you learned also of water.

  “But water is unpredictable; water washes away what you would keep. Standing water gives back the sky, but the falling droplets make the
rainbow, splitting white light into color. You wanted the mirror. The rainbow you feared. Some say there’s a pot of gold at the rainbow’s end, but it’s also a bridge by which gods come to earth—a guide to unimaginable riches, but full of unpredictable power.

  “You don’t like anything that’s unpredictable, as living things are, and when you drew forth a child from the mirror, you sought to make it predictable—a child without water, child of a rainless year.”

  I knew I spoke nonsense, but I knew also that what I said was right in a fashion that had nothing to do with logic.

  “You lock things within your mirrors. I can set them free. Ever since I knew the manner of my birth I have feared that I am you. I’m not, am I? I’m your reflection, your opposite. Therefore, if you bind the color, I exist to set it free.”