by Rob Smales
A flash of gold at the man’s chest caught the detective’s attention, some kind of oval pendant peeking out from Billy’s open collar. There was an inscription of some kind, a single long word scrawled across the surface, but before Gantry could lean forward to try to make it out, the old woman spoke, drawing his eyes away.
“Is there anything more, Officer? I’m exhausted, and I’d like to go lie down, if you don’t mind.”
“Of course not, ma’am,” the detective said, rising. “If we need anything more, we’ll be in touch.” He held out a card. “And if you think of anything more, please, don’t hesitate to call me. I can see myself out.”
Agatha Harper took the card with an “I will, thank you,” and turned to make her way across the kitchen. Gantry looked down at Billy Spavington just in time to see the big man rise with sudden, sinuous grace, and without offering a handshake or a nod, turn to follow his mistress.
And though the cats scattered about the floor flocked to the old woman, writhing and twining about her legs as she walked, wherever the man with the golden eyes stalked, little bodies moved out of his way, slipping and rolling aside before him, only to flow closed behind him as he passed, as if responding to instinct, or some inaudible command.
MA LIANG’S CRAYONS
The house was filled with people. Black suits, dark skirts, and solemn voices. People sipping from clear plastic cups, or carefully holding undersized paper plates to their chests, trying not to make a mess with the pasta salad, or let little deli meatballs roll off onto their shirts and ties. She didn’t even know half the people currently occupying her living room, and most of those she did know, she hadn’t seen in years. Especially not the past year, when she could most have used some help, or even just a shoulder to—
“When’s Daddy coming home?”
Julie looked down, surprised. Pearl stood in the kitchen doorway, looking strangely adult in her formal dress, a string of faux pearls around her tiny neck. Pearls for the Pearl, Connor had said, making the little girl laugh when he’d given them to her. He’d always been a hit with Pearl, always been the fun uncle. And that had helped: someone else to distract Pearl when Danny had gotten sick. Someone else to shore her up when Danny had taken a turn for the worse, and Julie had needed to focus on caring for her hus—
“Mommy?” The voice was small, but insistent. “When’s Daddy coming home?” Julie heard things in her daughter’s voice, things that shouldn’t be in the voice of a six-year-old. There was fear in that voice, and sadness, and confusion, and an impending sense of loss, but on top of it all was the tone—the over-careful enunciation—of a young woman trying to ignore all that, and act as if everything was fine, just spiffy, tip-top, business as usual.
As if a little girl burying her father could ever be usual.
Julie heard these things in her daughter’s voice, and knew that her heart should have broken to hear them—shattered like a wine glass assaulted by a high C. And it would have, had it not already been broken. She looked over Pearl’s head once again, to the people out in the living room, the strangers, and friends so recently in absentia, who had come to eat her food and celebrate the life of her husband, though not one of them had been willing to help him though its ending, the cancer consuming friendships as readily as it had consumed Danny himself, only faster.
She glanced back down at the little girl standing in the doorway, the woeful child demanding an answer. Pearl deserved an answer, Julie knew, but what was she to say? This was her daughter—their daughter—and she’d been through a lot, even more than she understood yet. Julie should be helping Pearl to understand what was happening, what had been happening for the past year—and more—and console the little girl in her grief. She knew she should do this. She knew.
But the words wouldn’t come from her dishrag heart, wrung out with saying goodbye to Danny after so long, and her head was filled with confusion about Connor, missing for the past ten months, and not even making it to his own brother’s funeral. And so her answer, poorly chosen for nothing but its honesty, came out flat, and matter-of-fact.
“Never, Pearl. Your daddy’s never coming home again.”
The words took a moment to register on the small face, but when they did, the oddly adult expression, the rigid mask Pearl wore to help hide her fear and uncertainty, crumbled like a house of cards tumbling down. Disbelief flashed across her daughter’s countenance, almost too fast to see, before her soft little features settled into an expression of sorrow so deep it almost frightened Julie. Sorrow, tinged with something Julie couldn’t quite recognize—at least until Pearl spun away, wailing as she pelted across the packed living room.
“I hate you!”
Shrill words degenerated into sobs as she ran, colliding blindly with some people, clumsily avoiding others, until she disappeared into the hallway. The slamming bedroom door cut off the sounds of her sorrow, leaving the crowded room filled with awkward looks and silence.
“You all should go now.” Julie’s voice was quiet, but none of her guests had difficulty hearing her, and her tone brooked no hesitation or rebuttal. A muted murmur rose as plates and cups found perches about the room, and coats were collected, but the voices never rose up into intrusiveness as the people, those she didn’t know and those she did, filed out without offering their goodbyes.
The package arrived two days later.
Julie had spent the intervening day trying to make up with her daughter, to patch the rift she had torn between them with her thoughtless words. She’d been a kind of automaton after sending everyone from her house after the funeral, numbly cleaning up in the wake of the reception. Putting away the food—and there was plenty left over—collecting and disposing of plates and cups, wiping everything down, even breaking out the vacuum cleaner; it all gave her something mindless to do that she, nonetheless, put her mind to. Focusing on making the house cleaner than it had ever been—this allowed her to push all of her terrible emotions into the background, and kept her from having to think about what had gone on that day. And the day before that. And the day before that . . .
She had woken the next morning with a kind of emotional hangover, pounded by her own grief and sorrow, but horrified at the way she had handled Pearl’s. The girl hadn’t spoken when Julie had gone in to put her to bed the night before, merely faced the wall, either asleep or shamming; Julie hadn’t cared which. The next morning, though, Pearl’s last words to her had rung through Julie’s head as she approached the bedroom door.
I hate you.
Pearl had woken unsmiling and remained that way through breakfast: peanut butter pancakes slathered with Cool Whip, and chocolate milk, her absolute, number one favorite. Julie had kept a light tone and a smile on her face, but it took an effort. They had spent the day on the couch together, watching Pearl’s movies (Julie was sick to death of My Little Pony: The Movie, and The Care Bears Adventure in Wonderland, but watched every scene as if rapt), eating Pearl’s favorite foods for lunch and dinner, and watching Pearl’s preferred nighttime TV. Julie had remained bright and smiling all day, though her heart shriveled, slowly but surely, as her daughter’s expression remained unswervingly grim.
She has been through a lot, she’d thought, putting Pearl to bed that night—not perfunctorily this time, but with all the back-pats and cheek-kisses she could fit in. And I wasn’t any help. If anything, I made it worse. She’d paused at the doorway to look at Pearl, curled against the wall and offering her back to her mother once more, rather than making her usual pleas to stay up for just five more minutes. But if I give her time, she’ll come around, right? I mean, I can’t make her forgive me. But, God, I do miss her smile . . .
The next morning the postman arrived with an express package for Pearl. Julie signed for it, then carried the cigar-box-sized, brown-paper-wrapped parcel back toward the kitchen, marveling at the sheer number of foreign postage and border stamps, most of them in illegible script and eastern characters, though she recognized the words Hong Kon
g, Cairo, and Mumbai.
“Hmm,” she muttered. “Express, by way of everywhere.”
She ground to a halt in the kitchen doorway as, seeing past the road grime and official ink, she took note of the handwritten address for the first time. Suddenly all the foreign border markings made sense.
Connor.
Ten months ago, just as Danny was starting what was to be his last downhill slide, his brother, Connor, had come charging into their house, fit to bursting.
“The brush,” he’d said. “It’s the answer. You get it? The brush—I can’t understand why I didn’t think of it before!”
Julie had tried to get the story out of him, but the man was nearly unintelligible in his excitement. As always when it was her uncle Connor, Pearl had gotten caught up in his emotion, dancing after him as he bounced about the house like a pinball, words spilling from him in a confusing flood. There was something about a brush, and a trip, and then he’d been holding Pearl by the hands and saying, “When I get back we can use it on your father, Pearl. Won’t that be great? The brush’ll make him just as good as new,” and that was when Julie’s heart fell.
Connor was a minor archaeologist who saw himself as Indiana Jones, traveling to the far corners of the world to find items thought lost—though he hadn’t actually found one yet. The problem wasn’t that he lacked smarts, or drive, in Julie’s opinion: he lacked sense. While his Hollywood hero, Indiana Jones, had been portrayed as a skeptic, locating things mentioned in ancient scholarly writings, her brother-in-law was a believer, who chased after things found only in legends and folktales.
The blade of the shovel Hercules used to clean the Augean stables—that turned out to be made in Taiwan. The wooden wheel from Thor’s goat cart—that actually started life attached to a milk wagon in Scotland. The Sword of Attila—somehow forged from 220 stainless steel, smelted right in good old Detroit. If Miss Cleo had been an historian too, instead of just a fraudulent psychic with a 1-800 number, she could have made a bundle off Connor.
And now here he’d been, running off on some wild goose chase after the Caduceus of Hermes, or Hippocrates’ stethoscope, maybe a tongue depressor made from a splinter of Christ’s cross, some kind of magical doodad from antiquity that was probably “handmade by monks” in a factory in Boston. They’d just gotten the word that Danny was in the home stretch—but not because he was cured and coming home. Medicine had failed: he was heading to a hospice, not home, and there would be no happily ever after. This was going to be the hardest part, for herself and for Pearl—and for Connor, too, she understood that—when they all should have been leaning on each other, helping each other get through this thing. But Connor had dashed about making promises to Pearl, promises the girl would take as gospel, Julie knew, but that he just wasn’t going to keep, and then run out the door.
“I’ll see you in a month,” he’d called over his shoulder. “Two, tops!”
And then he’d just dropped off the face of the earth. She’d sent a few letters, mainly outlining Danny’s decline, because she knew Con was having his mail forwarded, but she hadn’t known where it was forwarded to, and there had been no reply. Not for ten months.
Not until now.
Swallowing her anger at the man, knowing the almost worshipful way Pearl felt about her uncle, she held out the package to the small, slumped back sitting at the kitchen table. “Pearl, this is for you. Looks like an early birthday present from Uncle Connor.”
The effect was immediate, and all Julie could have hoped for. The little back straightened in surprise, and the face that turned her way bore a bright, broad grin.
“Really? Where? Can I have it?”
“Here,” Julie said. “Just be careful, we don’t know—”
But it was too late. Pearl was already sitting on the floor, tearing at the brown paper wrapping like it was Christmas morning. Which made sense, when Julie thought about it: after ten months, she wondered whether Pearl remembered her uncle at all, or if she merely thought of him as someone akin to Santa Claus, who showed up occasionally, bringing her cool presents from around the world. She had a shelf of them in her room, and knew where each of them had come from: the doll from Nicaragua, the top from Botswana, and a half-dozen others. Those things would now be joined by . . .
“Cool!”
It was a hinged wooden coffer, about the size of a cigar box. The light wood had a dark pattern inlaid in the lid, some kind of eastern characters Julie couldn’t read, and the whole thing was polished to an almost mirror-like sheen.
“Oh, that’s beautiful,” Julie murmured. “Honey, let me try—”
She was again too late: Pearl’s clever little fingers had found the simple catch, and she was levering the box open. As the lid rose, it pulled with it an internal layer, cleverly designed to unfold into an upright rack within the box, a rack containing—
“Crayons!” The girl rocked on her little bottom in excitement, though, to tell the truth, Julie was more impressed with the box than its contents.
It doesn’t look like there are any metal parts at all, and that moving rack is beautiful. That is some serious craftsmanship—seems a little silly to do all that work just to hold a set of Crayolas.
But as she got a closer look at the crayons Pearl was pulling from their holders, she saw she was mistaken. These weren’t Crayolas at all—not unless the company had drastically changed their labeling policies. For one thing, the wrappers for each crayon were blank, without the familiar logo; for another the wrappers themselves were unlike anything Julie had ever seen. She couldn’t tell what color they were, as each looked different depending on what angle she saw it at. A wrapper might appear blue, but then, as Pearl twisted and turned her new toys, that same wrapper would shift to green, or even red. A couple of them flashed white. Julie thought there must be some sort of metallic wrap, or maybe one of those holographic films, but when she bent to touch one she found it soft, almost like cotton cloth.
Jesus Christ, she thought, this paper feels handmade. And the colors! Between this and the box, these must be worth a fortune.
“Pearl, honey?” Julie looked up to find herself alone on the floor. She’d been so engrossed in the toy in her hand, she’d been blind to Pearl’s collecting the rest of her present and bringing it to the table, where she now sat, crayon poised over a piece of paper.
“Oh, honey, wait.” Julie scrambled to her feet, cradling the special crayon as if it were made of glass. Pearl’s wide smile faltered before she’d made it halfway up, and Julie realized she was making another thoughtless blunder. Smiling wide, she threw as much cheer into her voice as she could muster. “Sweetheart, these are from Uncle Connor, and you know what that means: he always brings you something special. Before you start wearing them down, why don’t we put them in your room with the rest of your special things? That way they’ll still be new and pretty when your uncle gets here to tell you where they’re from, all right? I bet he’d like that.”
Just the thought of her special uncle describing the exotic locale where he’d found her new present put a smile back on Pearl’s face. Julie puffed a mental sigh of relief, considering this a disaster narrowly averted. The two of them put all the crayons carefully back in their slots and closed the box, then Julie followed Pearl into the little girl’s room. Pearl placed the wooden box on the shelf with her other treasures, right in front where she could see it easily, then spun back to her mother with an excited grin.
“I’m going to draw Uncle Connor a doggy,” she said, clapping her hands lightly. “A special doggy, with my special crayons!”
“Okay.” Julie was just happy to have her smiling girl back again: keeping her from using the expensive crayons was a worry for when Connor came back. If he came back. “That’s great! What kind of doggy?”
Julie spent the rest of the day hearing about the masterpiece her daughter was planning for Connor. In Pearl’s telling, the dog became a princess, then a bird, a horse, her father, a unicorn, her father riding
a unicorn, and finally a dog again, each with its own embellishments along the way. Julie smiled at each new twist in the plan, not so much listening to the words as enjoying her daughter’s happy smile, not caring that it had taken her absentee uncle to put it there. Pearl was happy, and, in the manner of all six-year-olds, her anger toward her mother appeared forgotten. As far as Julie was concerned, that was all that mattered.
The dog in the sketch was yellow, with a black nose and fluffy tail, and he stood in the middle of a green expanse—Pearl’s version of their kitchen floor. Scattered about the drawing were several crayons in special paper tubes that seemed to be all colors at once, and the open wooden box lay, half empty, in the center of the kitchen table. Small fingers were just reaching for another crayon as Julie came into the kitchen, slippered feet whisking over the floor, still sleep-groggy and in the throes of a serious case of pillow-hair.
“What are you doing?”
The words came out more harshly than Julie had intended, and the little fingers flinched, sending the crayon rolling across the table. The eyes her daughter turned her way were filled with guilt.
“I’m drawing a doggy for Uncle Connor,” she said. There was a touch of defiance in her voice, but most of what Julie heard was fear: Pearl had done something wrong, and knew it. But Julie remembered the smile that had broken out on her daughter’s face at the gift, as well as the day she had just spent wishing for that smile’s return, and made the very conscious decision that wherever this set of crayons had come from, whatever they had cost, it was worth it. She let out a breath that blew away her first reaction to her daughter’s willfulness, then took another.
“Well, they’re your crayons now, I guess you can use them if you want—especially to draw something so special for Uncle Connor.” She pointed to the yellow dog on the page. “That’s really good, honey. I’m sure Connor’s going to love it.” Pearl’s smile returned, though it was a tentative thing, as if unsure of its welcome.