She introduced them to the bathroom and got fresh towels out. “I’ve got to brush my teeth and crash now, but you can stay up if you like. I’ll be able to sleep through it,” she said. “College dorm life teaches you to sleep through anything.”
matt curled up close to Edmund under a down quilt on the futon in the back of his car and pulled her head in under the covers. It was freezing outside, but Edmund was big and warm and comfortable.
He ducked his head under the quilt too, and wrapped his arms around her.
“What are we doing here?” she murmured.
“We found her, That’s all I needed to do. She doesn’t have to come with us, Matt. I’m just glad I got to see her.”
“But there’s something—” She felt an empty space under her heart. She pressed her forehead against his chest, basking in his warmth, and touched her sternum. “I need to collect them.”
“What?”
“They must come back.” She felt very strange. Her voice didn’t sound like it belonged to her.
“Matt.”
“The time has come to try again.”
“Matt? Who’s talking?”
Nobody inside her answered.
Edmund lifted his right arm from around her and did something. A moment, and a little green glowing ball hovered under the blankets with them. “Matt?” Gently he pushed her away so he could look into her face. He touched her cheek. His fingers glistened when he lifted them away. “You’re crying. What’s the matter?”
“I don’t know.” This time it was her own voice. She felt tense and frustrated and scared. “I don’t know who that was. Maybe it was the house. How can the house talk from inside me? I love that house. What’s it doing to me?”
He pulled her close.
“Tell me if you want me to do anything about it. I’ll try to make it stop,” he whispered.
She shuddered for a little while. His hands stroked up and down her back. She clung to him. “Help me,” she whispered at last. If anybody was going to get inside her, she wanted to know beforehand, and she wanted a chance to tell them to leave her alone. She wanted a knock on the door, and the chance to look through a peephole to see if it was someone she wanted to let inside.
This was wrong.
He sat up under the quilt and lifted it so she could sit up too. They huddled under the quilt tent, heads together, legs tangled, the light hovering in the space between them.
“Give me your hands,” he said.
She held them out to him.
He cupped his hands around each of hers, stroked his thumbs down across her palms, then along the insides of her fingers. “Hmm, hmm, hmm.” He lifted her left hand and pressed his lips to the palm. “Something,” he said. “This is the hand that receives, and something has been given.”
“I don’t remember.” But then she did: a dim memory of a gift of food, bread for her journey.
“Something was given. Something accepted. Do you want to return it?”
“Something got inside me.” She fell a faint, feathery presence along her bones, a hidden heartbeat just under her own, an ache, a longing for something lost, something never had.
To understand something completely, you must digest it, the house had told Julio.
Maybe she had eaten something important, but she didn’t understand it yet. “The house,” she said. “Bread.”
“The house gave you something to eat? And it left a voice inside you, and some kind of mission.”
“I think—” She nodded slowly.
“Do you want me to take it out of you?”
“Can you do that?”
“I can try.”
She hunched one shoulder, then the other. She tugged her hands free of Edmund’s grasp and buried diem in her armpits, hugged herself.
The house had given her a shadow second self, one with its own voice. Had she said yes to this? She and the house had shared many dreams in the short time she had stayed there. Maybe she had agreed.
If she hadn’t, she couldn’t stay in the house again. Not without negotiation. She didn’t give people who did things to her without asking a second chance unless they promised, and she believed, that they wouldn’t do it again.
“Do you want me to try?” Edmund asked.
What had this new self done to her so far? Only made her want something she already wanted: to find the people Edmund wanted to find. It hadn’t hurt her. It was important to the house. Should she have Edmund pull it out of her? What if it was shaping her in ways she couldn’t detect, ways she wouldn’t like? What if it was shaping her toward a self she would like better? Maybe it wasn’t shaping her at all. Maybe it was just waiting.
She uncurled from her fisted self and leaned against him. “I think I’ll wait. See what it does. You tell me if I start acting not like myself, though, okay?” she murmured.
“I will,” he said, smoothing his warm hands over her, rubbing his thumbs against the tightest muscles, holding her close.
Gradually her agitation faded and she relaxed enough to sleep.
dawn sparkled, trapped in frost flowers on the car windows. Matt crept out of Edmund’s embrace, slipped from the car, and went into the cabin, which smelled of fresh coffee, toast, and woodsmoke from the Franklin stove, where fire talked. It was nice and warm inside the A-frame. “Hey. You sleep all right?” Deirdre asked, coming out of the bathroom with wet hair. She wore jeans and a T-shirt.
“No. I had a weird dream. Did you sleep all right?”
“Sure. I always do since I got here. Want some coffee?”
“Yeah.”
“Have a seat. I’ll bring you some.”
Matt sat on a chair at the card table. She was wearing a long johns top and bottom, thick socks, and her army boots, added at the last minute. Deirdre set a mug of coffee, the sugar bowl, and the milk pitcher in front of her. “You want some cereal?”
“Do you have enough? We have food in the car.”
“I’ve got plenty. You like that honey-nut stuff? That’s my favorite.”
“Sure.”
Deirdre set bowls of cereal, napkins, and spoons on the table. She brought over the milk and sat down next to Matt to eat. She also drank coffee, and came more and more awake.
“I get confused in my desires,” Deirdre said eventually when she and Matt had finished their cereal. “Sometimes I want to find magic again. Sometimes I just want to go on living without it. Sometimes I think there has to be some middle ground, where you know it’s around, even if you can’t use it. Sometimes I think, what the hell, am I looking for religion? Most of that Christian stuff leaves me cold. Here I get my sunsets and sunrises, and weather, and quiet, and Mr. P.” The cat had come over. It lay on Deidre’s foot, a large furry heap, and purred. “And every small animal in town,” she went on, and leaned over to stroke the cat’s spine.
“I thought you said he doesn’t like being petted,” Matt said.
“He doesn’t like it, but I do. He’ll put up with a small amount of it. You have to know when to stop.” She patted the cat’s head twice more and straightened.
“So I don’t know what I’m looking for, or even if I’m looking,” Deirdre said. “Now I have the coyote, too. Maybe I’ve got everything I need.”
“You don’t want to come back to Guthrie with us,” Matt said. Loss pierced her chest like a thorn.
“I’m glad you came. I’m glad Edmund told me what happened way back when. I didn’t know until last night that I still had this tight feeling in my chest wondering what happened to him, but it eased after he told me, and I feel better now than I have since I can remember. I’m glad you talked to my soldier and let him walk around. I don’t want to go back to Guthrie with you today, but maybe I’ll go back. Will you be there?”
“We have to look for the others.” Now more than ever. Matt felt an urgency to track down the twins. The house’s impulse, she thought. She did want to see Terry again too, though. What would it be like to see Terry if Matt weren’t afraid of wha
t Terry would do next?
Deirdre got a card out of her purse and wrote on it. “Here’s my phone numbers. The clinic and the house. When you get back to Guthrie, call me and tell me. I could use a short vacation. I’d have to make arrangements with my partner and my assistant to take over my cases, though. That will take some juggling.”
“Thank you,” Matt whispered.
A little while later Deirdre hugged Matt and Edmund good-bye and set off to perform surgery on a dog and a cat.
“What now?” Edmund asked as Matt laced up her boots.
“Terry,” said Matt. Time to test Terry and herself.
Chapter Ten
toland sat on the top step in the hall outside his mom’s apartment and watched the graffiti-streaked wall across from the stairs. Last week, he could have sworn he saw his music teacher Lia step right through it when she left.
Lia couldn’t come up the stairs without him knowing. His big sister Zette said leave well enough alone. Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. Zette always said stuff like that. But she liked to rattle Christmas presents before she opened them, same as anybody else.
Toland licked his lips and found a drop of syrup left from his waffle breakfast. Sweetness melted over his tongue.
Gift horse, what a thing to call his teacher. She did teach for free, and nobody knew where she came from, but she wasn’t anything like a horse.
Something clattered on the stairs below. Toland leaned over and peered down the stairwell. Was his music teacher using stairs, like most people?
“Did you practice this week?” his teacher said from behind him. He turned around and there she was, in the hall, small and dark except for her bright green dress, her black eyes sparkling, and in her hand her violin case.
“Where’d you come from?” he asked.
“No questions. Only I get to ask. Did you practice our waltz?”
He stood up and brushed his hands on his pants. “Yeah.”
“Show me.
He led her into the apartment and got out his violin as she took out hers. Lia never said where she came from. He’d met her in the park—she heard him singing, and they talked about music. He told her what he really wanted, and she said she could help him. She loaned him the violin and came to give him lessons.
His mother and his sister had asked questions and watched and argued, but Lia still came every week, and after a month they decided she probably wasn’t going to hurt a ten-year-old boy, and they stopped bothering her.
As Toland and Lia tightened the hair on their bows and set up the music stands, Zette came out and sat on the couch to listen and watch the lesson, the way she always did. She brought her knitting.
Toland played the waltz. He had practiced. It sure made a difference in how well he played, and life was better when guilt wasn’t always gnawing on him. Free lessons. He should earn them somehow.
He had finally decided he really liked and wanted this music. Sometimes he woke up with it singing in him, and he had to jump up and grab the violin and play. Sometimes he’d struggle with math homework and get nowhere and play the violin for a while and then go back and the problems would stop squirming around and behave. Sometimes he heard music in his head and had to play until he could get it to come out of the violin. Sometimes he heard a song on the radio and he could play that.
There was a mute button on the violin so he could play it in his room as much as he wanted and nobody else heard. More and more lately, he played in between everything.
He played the waltz through once, then again. Lia smiled. He played it a third time, and she jumped up and started dancing. So did Zette. That had never happened. Zette was the least dancing person Toland knew. So he played some more, watching them dance, until Zette said, “Stop it!”
Surprised, Toland lifted his bow from the strings. Zette sat on the couch with a thud. “Don’t play that song again,” she said, between gasping breaths.
“Let’s go up on the roof,” said Lia.
“No you don’t,” Zette said. “You’re not leaving my sight. You’re not giving him secret instruction. You’re not—you better not—you better not teach him to be like you.”
Lia knelt in front of Zette. “He has a gift,” she said, “and the drive to learn to use it.”
“A gift to make people jerk around like puppets? We don’t want that here. Any more of that and I will break that violin of his. You won’t be welcome here.”
Lia stared up into Zette’s face.
Ice crystals formed in Toland’s chest. Break his violin! Send his teacher away! No. How could he live without being able to make music, now that he knew what it felt like?
“He’s just little,” Zette said in a softer voice. “He’s not old enough for a gift like that.”
“He already has the gift. If we don’t train it, it might do things he doesn’t even plan.”
Zette and Lia had a staring contest then. Toland hugged his violin. He never wanted to give it up.
“You go away now,” Zette said. “I’ll talk to Mama about this. Come back tomorrow and we’ll tell you what we decided.”
Lia rose to her feet. She nodded. She put her violin in its case, then headed out, but at the last minute she turned and touched Toland’s head with her warm hand. “Mind your mama and your sister,” she whispered. “Choose your songs carefully. Don’t do the hard ones for now.”
He nodded.
friday was a Women-Only day at Terry’s gym in Spores Ferry, so Edmund waited in the car.
Matt wondered whether she should wait in the car too. It was late afternoon by the time they reached Spores Ferry. When had Terry gotten to the gym, and how long would she stay there? Did it take an hour? Two? Six? It looked like there was only one entrance, so they should be able to catch her coming out, but how long would it lake?
They had tracked Terry without trouble using Edmund’s dowsing fishing weight—at least, they assumed they had found her; there was no ambiguity in the signal. It led them straight to the plaza on the south end of town. The plaza consisted of a big parking lot surrounded by a supermarket, a Hallmark store, a RadioShack, a travel agent, the kind of super drugstore that sells shoes, fabric, cameras, and everything else you need except fresh produce, a clothing store, a bank, a restaurant, an espresso drive-thru, and a national video rental chain.
The two-story gym building was right behind a Pizza Palace. A wall of windows on the second floor showed a row of exercycles facing outward, with two or three women pumping away on them and not getting anywhere.
Edmund parked next to the gym. They sat for a while in the car. The weight, hanging from the rearview mirror, tugged toward the gym building.
“I’ll go see,” Matt said.
She had never been inside a gym before, and she had many mixed-up feelings about finding Terry again, but she knew she was going to do it sooner or later, so why wait?
Edmund gripped her hand. “You don’t have to face her alone.”
“I’ll be okay.” She squeezed his hand and let go. “Besides, what can she do in public? Okay, maybe I better not think about that too hard. I just hope she still feels friendly. See you in a few.”
She left the car and went to the glass door. Glowing golden outlines of a perfectly muscled man and woman were stenciled on it. She pushed the door open and walked into a rush of chilled air and chlorine scent. Pop music with a strong beat played over loudspeakers, and she heard the splash and echo of people swimming in an enclosed pool.
A woman sat behind a tall desk that faced the front door. “Hi there,” she said.
“Hi,” said Matt. She went to the desk and studied the woman, who wore a bouncy blond ponytail, a white tank top, and black sweatpants.
“I haven’t seen you here before. Are you a new member?” asked the woman. She looked about twenty, and her arms showed visible muscles.
“No. I’m looking for a friend who goes here. I don’t want to use the equipment or anything, I just want to check and see if she’s here
. Is that okay?” What if she says no? What am I going to do? It’ll be a sign, I guess. I’ll go back outside and wait with Edmund.
The woman grinned. “Just tell me you’re a prospective member, and I’ll have Jayjay show you around.”
Matt blinked and said, “I’m a prospective member.”
“Hey, great. Jayjay?”
A muscular girl wearing a lavender terry-cloth headband in her short frosted hair and a purple sports bra and shorts came out of the office behind Matt and said, ““Hi!” She held out her hand. Matt shook. Good grip. “I’m Jayjay!”
“I’m Matt,” said Matt.
“You want to check out the facilities? The pool’s here on the ground floor—Jayjay pointed through a sliding glass door behind the other woman, and Matt saw that it led to a pool, where several women jumped up and down in the water, following directions from a slim woman who jumped up and down on the poolside walkway—“and our workout room is upstairs. Please follow me.”
Matt lingered a minute to make sure Terry wasn’t in the pool.
In Jayjay’s wake, Matt climbed a staircase to the second floor, passing a large mirror on the way up. People could check themselves out and see why they needed a workout, she thought, or on the way down they could see how much better they looked. Or maybe how much sweatier.
Matt checked herself. It was a Women-Only day. She guessed she looked enough like a woman today to pass. Weird.
The carpeting in the workout room was light brown. Aside from the wall of windows in front of the exercycles, the walls were covered with mirrors. Space seemed to go on forever. Every woman working on a machine was doubled and redoubled in a forest of chrome, gray vinyl, and flesh. The air was cool from air-conditioning and smelled blank. Speakers piped in music, and fans whirred, aiming air blasts at people on treadmills and Stairmasters.
Women of all shapes and sizes worked out on various machines. A universal gym had women pulling ropes, kicking at plates, pulling down on things that looked like bike handlebars. Other machines had strange seats where women sat or reclined or lay on their stomachs and pushed weighted assemblies up or pulled them down with legs and arms. Some women worked in front of the mirrors with free weights and some just sat on the floor stretching.
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