by Laura Ruby
Except for the one on her phone.
She had a cheap phone and the internet was slower than smoke signals, but she searched anyway. She stood in Finn’s room with the kittens purring and the musky scent of Finn in her nose, fingers flying, lump rising, hot tears threatening to spill over as she followed the threads, found what she never wanted to find. She stared at the tiny screen, trying to make herself accept it for what it was, for what it meant. Then she went back into the living room and opened one of the albums. She pulled a few photos and tucked them into her pocket. She replaced the album, straightening the spines so that no one would be able to tell she had been here, so no one would know how soft she really was, and how easily broken.
Finn
QUESTIONS
AT THE HOSPITAL, FINN WAS POKED, PRODDED, X-RAYED, plucked free of embedded gravel, rubbed down with stinging antiseptic, and swaddled in bandages. Then he was deposited in his own room for observation overnight. Just in case, Sean said.
What Sean didn’t say: You had me scared there for a minute, but I’m glad you’re okay. Or It might have been a stupid thing you did, but at least it was brave. Or You’ll feel better tomorrow. Instead, before he left, he told Finn not to give the nurses any trouble, turned on his heel, and walked out.
Finn tried not to give the nurses any trouble. Without complaint, he ate his dinner—a dry brown sponge that he thought was supposed to be meat loaf and gelatinous mashed potatoes, though he left the hockey-puck roll alone. He took the pain pills he was offered, gulping them down with plenty of water the way he was instructed. He spent most of the evening stabbing at the remote control, trying to find a show that wasn’t too boring or confusing. He settled on a documentary about a lost tribe found living deep in the Amazon, a tribe that had never before had contact with the outside world. The pictures showed the tribesmen, their bodies painted red, pointing bows and arrows at the approaching helicopters. When they saw those helicopters, did they realize what it meant? Did they know that they could never go back to the way things used to be, that their only future was one of flying monsters and strange white men with clipboards and cameras?
After a while, he pressed the power button on the remote and the TV went quiet. Sean had left him some horse magazines, but he didn’t feel like reading. Despite the pain pills, his whole body felt raw, the horseshoe in the center of his chest etched in angry purpling bruises. The mare hadn’t meant to stomp on him, she was just scared. But the idea that it could have been Finn who’d scared her made that mark in the center of his chest throb.
He drifted into a restless, drug-induced sleep. The steamy green jungles of the Amazon morphed into the barren cornfields of Bone Gap in the last weeks of winter. January and February had seen no snow, and March had come in like the world’s sweetest lamb, but that evening—the evening that changed his life and Sean’s—was chilly and gray, the lightest rain falling like glitter, the whole sky hanging low enough to drape the cornfields in gauzy gray fog. But Finn and Roza and Sean were warm as they drove to the festival that marked the approach of the spring, warm as they toured the garden of giant wood sculptures carved from logs with chain saws. Lincoln and Washington plus lions and tigers and bears. Warm as they looked at quilts and handmade furniture in a heated barn. The three of them a kind of family. Roza liked one of the dressers and Sean bargained for it. Finn moved to take one end so they could carry it to the truck, but Roza was faster and more insistent. She and Sean lugged it all the way to the parking lot. Sean asked her if she was an Olympic weight lifter.
“No,” she said. “I am Polish.”
Then, the beep of Sean’s phone. Someone having chest pains by the hot dog stand. Sean raced off, calling over his shoulder that everything would be all right, he would take care of it, he would find them later. Roza wandered back to the sculptures while Finn went to get them cookies and warm cider. But when he returned to the sculpture garden, Roza wasn’t there. He circled Washington and Lincoln, lions and tigers and bears, but no Roza. He went back to the tent with the quilts and the furniture. After that, the maze of stalls. The cider sloshed over his hand, the cookies crumbled in his fist as he jogged, then ran to the hot dog stand, and then—when he couldn’t find Sean either—back to the parking lot.
And that was when he saw her. And him. The man. Tall, thin, gray. He had her arm. He was murmuring to her, he was holding something in his palm. Finn had never seen him before. At least, he didn’t think so.
“Roza!” Finn said.
Roza turned. She was smiling.
She said, “Finn. I am sorry. Please. I go now. Tell Sean . . .” She stopped talking, blinking against the icy rain.
Finn said, “What’s going on? Who is this guy?”
She closed her eyes, kept smiling.
The tall man said, “I’m her husband.”
“What?” Finn said. Roza had never told them where she’d come from, she’d never said what happened to her. “You’re married? Is he the one that hurt you?”
“No, no,” said Roza, smiling even wider. “He not hurt me.”
The man let out a long and heavy sigh, as if he’d been in this situation many times before and couldn’t believe it was happening again. He put a heavy hand on Finn’s shoulder. “You are young, but you will learn. Beautiful women lie, just because they can. It’s a sickness, really.”
Finn said, “Roza?”
Roza swung her head from Finn to the man back to Finn. She opened her mouth to speak, but before she could, the man interrupted her.
“Let’s not toy with this poor boy more than you already have. We don’t want anything to happen to him.” He looked at Finn then, a look Finn could not read. Roza looked, too. The man squeezed Finn’s shoulder, squeezed too hard. Finn tried to knock the arm away, but the man was carved from stone.
Roza said, “Stop.”
The man said, “Do you understand now? Do you see?”
Roza nodded. The man let Finn go. She gave Finn a last smile, didn’t protest as the man steered her away. She didn’t protest as he opened the passenger door of a black SUV parked sideways in the lot.
Finn rubbed his shoulder. He didn’t understand, he didn’t see. The laughing girl, the girl who chopped wood and danced in the dirt and talked to pigs and carried dressers and grew enough vegetables to feed a city would leave? Without a sound? Without an explanation? Without a good-bye? Without Sean?
Finn thought: What kind of secrets has Roza been keeping?
Then: What if she really wants to go?
A wave of heat, of useless rage, rushed over him, for himself, for his brother. The people of Bone Gap were right, he was a stupid moonface, a spaceman, a poor motherless boy, to think that a magical girl could show up in a barn and fix everything, to think a magical girl would stay.
Finn had crossed his arms over his chest and didn’t say a word until the door slammed behind Roza, until she pressed both hands to the glass, eyes wide, wide, wide enough to fall into.
The rage melted like snow in the sun. Something was wrong.
“Wait!” Finn said.
A foot slammed into his gut so hard that the air exploded from his body. Finn dropped to the ground, arching his back, trying to make himself breathe, breathe, BREATHE. The first inhalation felt like a lungful of razors. He gasped, inhaling cold, powdery dirt. He rolled to his knees, the icy rain stinging his skin. The man stood just a few paces away, so still, so unbelievably, completely still, that he barely seemed to be alive. Maybe he wasn’t. Maybe he was a scarecrow. Maybe he was dead. Maybe Finn was dead. Behind the man, Roza slapped at the glass, scratched at the door, trying to find the lock.
The man moved, a series of skittering twitches like a ghost in a movie, his face inches from Finn’s. He was holding a knife, a corn knife, in the moonlight, and he stared into Finn’s eyes for what seemed like hours. The temperature around Finn dropped twenty degrees, and Finn’s skin burned with the cold. The man pulled up, hovering over Finn, darkening Finn’s world with a shadow too big for just on
e man. “She is mine, and she will love me,” the man said, deep voice barely audible over the wind. “And when your brother cries for her, I will feed on his tears.” As Finn fought to breathe, fought to fight, the man was gliding over the dirt, he was sliding into the car, and the car was driving away, disappearing down the long, gray throat of the storm.
Finn didn’t know how long he knelt in the rain, frozen. Sirens flashed, and Sean and Jonas Apple helped Finn to his feet, his legs so stiff he could no longer feel them, the air outside him and the air inside him foggy and thick. Jonas guided Finn to the patrol car. Finn shivered, unable to get warm though the officer blasted the heat as high as it went. At the police station, a cup of hot tea with three long squeezes of Hippie Queen Honey was thrust into his hands. Books were stacked in front of him, books made entirely of faces. “Look carefully at each one,” Jonas Apple was saying. “We’ve got time.” But they didn’t have time, they had no time at all, and Finn knew it. He had to pick out the man from the pictures so that they could find Roza, so that they could save Roza. But he couldn’t find the man in the pictures, the pictures all looked the same, the faces swirling and blending as if every one of them was made of nothing but sleet and wind. When Jonas Apple grew tired of the books and the waiting, and he asked for a description, every detail Finn could remember, Finn couldn’t remember anything about the man. Not the color of his colorless eyes, not the shape of his nose or lips, not even the shade of his skin. Jonas Apple sat back in his chair, and the tapping of his pen on the chipped desk grew louder and louder as the doubts about what Finn had seen, doubts about what Finn had done, doubts about Finn himself, came creeping in.
Soft footsteps, the rolling of wheels. Finn’s eyelids scraped open. The world was still foggy. The pills maybe. Or the memory of Roza. Or both. A face swam in front of him. Finn tried to focus but saw only a beard so thick it reminded Finn of wall-to-wall carpeting.
“Sleepy?” said a deep voice.
“What?” said Finn. It was hard to keep his lids up; they kept falling down like malfunctioning shades. His muscles wouldn’t obey.
“Everybody needs rest,” said the voice. “But you also need to eat.” Cool fingers circled Finn’s wrist and lifted his hand to the table in front of him, to the plate on top of it.
“I ate already,” Finn mumbled. His eyelids weren’t working and his lips weren’t working either; the words sounded garbled even to him.
But whoever this was—a doctor, a nurse—didn’t seem to have any trouble understanding him. “That was hours ago. You need to keep your strength up.”
“Why?”
“Your brother said so.”
“My brother hates me,” Finn said.
“Now, now. You know that’s not true.”
“It is. He does. He hates me because I lost her. I didn’t mean to. I didn’t know. I thought she wanted to leave.” The words were nothing more than mutters and mumbles and strange hissing sounds, but the man answered him.
“But she did want to leave,” said the doctor or nurse or whoever.
“No, I don’t think so. I think she loved my brother. At least, I think she liked him a lot.”
“Hmmm. Why?”
“What?”
“Why do you think she liked your brother?”
“I don’t know.”
“You must have some idea.”
“I . . .” Finn’s brain swam along with his vision. Why did Roza like Sean? Why did anyone like anyone? If he could answer that question, he could go on talk shows and make a million dollars.
“Think,” the man said.
“Everything is blurry. Why is the room so cold?”
“Why did Roza like your brother?”
“He’s big and strong.”
“What else?”
“He saves people.”
“What else?”
“He doesn’t ask the wrong questions.”
“What else?”
Finn racked his foggy brain. “He listens.”
“He . . . listens?” said the man. “He listens to what?”
“To the answers to the questions. Even when he doesn’t understand the answers. Especially when he doesn’t understand. He keeps listening. At least, he used to. And he notices things. Things that other people don’t. Things that I don’t.” Finn’s stomach roiled and his eyelids ticked and the horseshoe burned over his heart. He opened one eye as wide as he could, which was not very wide at all. The walls of the hospital room seemed to be made of stone, the beard on the nurse’s or doctor’s or whoever’s face dense and shaggy as moss. Finn’s eyelid fell. “Are we still in the hospital?”
“No.”
“I don’t like this dream. I’m cold, and that’s a fake beard. Who wears a fake beard in a dream? Why do you sound like you’re talking underwater? What did you give me?”
The nurse or doctor or fake-beard-wearing person said, “So, your brother asks the right questions and you ask the wrong ones.”
“What?”
“This has been very instructive.”
“What?” Finn used cold and trembling fingers to peel back his eyelids, forced his reluctant eyes to focus.
But when he did, there was nobody there.
Roza
THE LAMB
THE SUN TOUCHED HER FACE LIKE THE SOFTEST CARESS. Roza sat up in bed, feeling for the familiar warmth of Rus. He was there, as huge and shaggy and ugly as always, but the castle had vanished. Instead of the cavernous chamber with its oversize hearth and red velvet curtains, the room in which Roza awoke was small, simple, neat, and so familiar.
Roza threw back the covers, flew to the window. She looked out not upon a moat teeming with monsters or guards marching back and forth, but on streets indifferently paved with cobblestones. Long-faced horses and chocolate-eyed cows wandered past houses huddled right at the edge of the road. Beyond the houses and the street, rolling green hills frilled with clumps of trees and flowers brushed up against a brilliant blue sky.
“Here,” Roza breathed. “Rus, we’re here.” But even as she said it, she knew it wasn’t true. The hills were too green, the sky too blue, the cobbles too indifferent. And Rus, dear Rus, was with her, and how could he be if this whole thing had been a dream?
Still, the vision was close enough to the real thing to bring her hands to her chest, to fold them as if in prayer. She turned from the window, went to the wardrobe in the corner of the room, and flung the doors wide. She grabbed a summer dress from a hanger. She didn’t have to check the stitching to know that it had been made by hand, just the way her babcia used to do. Roza changed from the nightgown to the dress, not even caring that there were still no shoes for her to wear, for this was not the place for shoes. Her feet felt fast and light as she slipped from the room and smelled the rich smell of coffee and of bacon sizzling in an iron pan. With Rus at her side, she entered the kitchen. Her breath caught when she glimpsed the old woman with silver hair standing at the stove. It couldn’t be, it couldn’t be . . . could it?
The woman turned.
It wasn’t.
The woman gestured toward the table, told her to sit. Roza slowly lowered herself into the chair. Where is he? she wanted to ask. Did I kill him? And if I killed him . . . ? The kitchen was so much like her babcia’s kitchen, but then, the coffee mug with the red rooster on it was not a mug owned by her babcia, and the plate on which the woman laid the strips of bacon and one perfectly fried egg was beige instead of white. Roza asked for toast and the old woman smiled and cut two large slices from a fresh loaf on the counter. While the woman dug around in the cupboards for a tray, Roza slipped the bacon and egg to the dog. But the toast, when it was pulled from the oven, was delicious, and she was so hungry.
Roza got up from the table, unsure of what to do next. She had gotten used to the rhythms of the enormous castle—the bustle of the cooks in the kitchen, the marching of the guards, the falconers with their swooping birds of prey, the cats chasing the mice along the stone floors, even the rest
less splashing in the moat. The sounds were so different here. Low moos and whinnies from outside, the buzz of gossip, the clatter of heels on the cobblestones. The smells were different, too—earth and grass, flowers and milk. She went to the front door, laid her hand on the handle. She expected the door to be locked, but when she pulled on it, the door opened. Roza stood there, too surprised to move, until Rus nudged her forward onto the porch. The bare wood was comfortable and familiar under her feet. But her feet wanted more than just the sensation of bare wood, her feet wanted to go. Her feet took her down the porch steps and onto the stones already warmed by the sun. She walked down the street past the chocolate-eyed cows and the long-faced horses, unable to keep a smile from twitching at her lips. She didn’t know if she was dying in some hospital bed somewhere or if she had slipped into some dark chasm from which there was no return, but if cobbled streets and cows and rolling hills were the last things she saw, maybe she could bear it.
She sped up to a jog, heading for the green hills filled with wildflowers so tall and thick they waved like new corn. She splashed through a stream and Rus splashed with her, dancing around her, great wet mouth curving up in his own version of a smile. The cows and the horses and the sheep watched her as she ran herself out, as she fell in a heap at the top of a hill. But the flowers and grasses shushed, shushed in the gentle wind and her worlds blended—she could be here, wherever here was, and she could be flinging herself from a black SUV into a vast and endless cornfield, a field that caught her, held her.
The earth had been hard, and she had been hurt—cheek, wrist, ribs, foot—but not nearly as badly as she’d expected. The corn itself seemed to shield her as she ran through it, impossibly growing taller, denser, reaching outward and upward, alive, alive, whispering for her to run, run, not to stop, never to stop. The professor—that madman—must have been chasing her, but the cornfield was so dark and seemed so determined to save her. It was as if she had passed from one dimension into another where no man would ever find her—unless she wanted to be found.