The Peculiar Night of the Blue Heart (9 page)

And his presence there on the floor had helped. Marybeth had not wandered off against her own accord in some time.

This time, it was her own decision to go.

Carefully, she stepped over Lionel's sleeping body. He growled at something in his dream and scratched at his ear. Marybeth waited until he was totally still and quiet, and then she moved down the stairs.

She did feel guilty for going without him. But when anyone was around her, the blue creature was on high alert. Only when Marybeth was alone with it did she have a chance at soothing it.

Sometimes she was able to hum the blue creature to sleep, but for now she was merely trying to keep it calm. She wanted it to show her whatever was in that barn, but she did not want it to take over her body. It was a fragile dance she was slowly learning.

She hummed in her head as she buttoned her coat, and as she pulled on her boots, and wriggled her fingers into her tattered gloves.

It was November now, and Marybeth had vowed to be rid of the blue creature before the first snowfall. The little red house was at the end of a long dirt driveway, at the bottom of a hill. When it snowed, they were stranded there for days. Marybeth suspected the confinement would cause the blue creature to panic, and there wouldn't be a
thing she could do to console it, trapped in a house with seven other children.

By the time the farmhouse appeared in the distance, the sun had begun to rise.

“Stay down,” Marybeth said, as the blue creature fussed about inside her. It was itching to take over. Marybeth understood. After the blue creature sent her running from the graveyard, she knew what it was trying to tell her. It didn't belong there. It belonged here. “If you go about panicking, I'll walk us back home and we'll never get you sorted out,” she warned. “So behave.”

She was bluffing, but it worked. The blue creature could tell her what to think and where to go sometimes, but it could never read her mind.

It was her own heart thudding in her chest as she stepped off the road and onto the large yard in front of the farmhouse.

She took a step toward the barn, which always called to her when she was here, but a sound stopped her.

It was coming from the trees, a loud
whack
. Followed by another, and another.

Slowly, she moved toward the sound, clenching and unclenching her gloved fingers to keep them warm. The chilly air was biting at her nose and cheeks.

Whack!

Whack!

Whack!

Not far into the woods, just beyond the tree line, there was a man in a plaid flannel shirt, loading logs onto a stump and chopping them into firewood.

Marybeth recognized him as the old woman's son, Reginald.

His back was to her, and he froze with the ax over his head as though he sensed her standing there.

“What do you want?” he said. “Why do you keep coming back here?”

“I don't know,” Marybeth answered honestly.

Reginald set down the ax and turned to face her.

The blue creature ebbed inside her arms and coiled around her heart, trying to take over.

Marybeth clenched her fists.
Be still
, she told it. Her temples ached from the strain of trying to maintain control. Her entire body ached at times, and she empathized now with the grunts and groans that came from Mrs. Mannerd when she stooped to pick up something she had dropped or struggled up the stairs with the final load of laundry. Marybeth felt that she also had the body of an old woman, more and more as the days went on. She was forgetting what it was like to be a young girl, and to run outside and play.

Reginald's breath was a cloud in the cold air. His cheeks were flush and red from the work of chopping so
much firewood. He wiped the beads of sweat from his forehead and said, “You walked all this way?”

“It wasn't very far,” Marybeth said.

“That orphanage? It's two miles at least.” He folded his arms. “What do they do to you there? Beat you?”

“No,” Marybeth said.

“Starve you? Lock you in your bedroom?”

“No.”

“What then?”

Reginald was tall and slender, with gray streaking some of his dark hair. He was not as old as Mrs. Mannerd, but maybe old enough to be someone's father, Marybeth thought. And though he appeared perfectly normal, Marybeth was unsure whether she should trust him.

“I just like it here.”

The man canted his head as he looked at her, as though she were some sort of strange creature that had crawled up through the frost-covered dirt.

The way he looked at her caused the blue creature to turn in her chest. It was trying to wriggle itself into her arms and legs—she could feel it. She balled her fists and clenched her jaw.
Be still
, she told it,
or I am taking us back home.

Marybeth worried that he would sense the blue creature that was at that very moment fighting with her. She
swallowed a snarl in her throat and pushed her fists into her pockets.

“Did you live on a farm with your parents?” Reginald asked. “Is that it?”

Marybeth shrugged. She would have liked to say, “I don't know,” which was the truth. She didn't remember where she had lived before she came to Mrs. Mannerd. But her tongue was shaking inside her mouth, because the blue creature was trying to scream.

She clenched her jaw.
Quiet, you foolish thing. I'm trying to help you.

“You're not much,” Reginald said. “I don't suppose you're any good at chopping firewood.”

Marybeth watched him pick up the ax. They had one at the red house, kept jammed in a stump by the shed where Mr. Mannerd had kept his tools and things. The two oldest children did all the chopping. Lionel had tried once, and Mrs. Mannerd threatened that if he tried again, he could say good-bye to all his bird feeders and his bringing berries to the foxes because he wouldn't be setting foot outside again until he was a very old man.

“I've never tried,” Marybeth said, her voice emboldened by the force of overcoming the blue creature.

“I knew a girl like you once,” he said. “Most girls are afraid of axes and sharp things, but she wasn't. She wasn't afraid of anything.” He looked at her, and Marybeth felt,
for a moment, that she had known him all her life. Longer than that, even. She felt that she had confided her secrets in him long ago.

She shook her head. “I'm not afraid of many things.”

“Well, since you're going to stand there gaping, might as well make yourself useful. Come on and take a shot.”

Hesitantly, Marybeth stepped forward. Though the red house was nowhere in sight, she still felt that Mrs. Mannerd would somehow sense that one of her children was this close to a blade and would come running to stop her.

But no one came. There was nothing but a cold breeze that bit at her skin through the holes in her gloves, and the ax being offered.

She took it, and its unexpected heft caused her to stumble forward. Reginald laughed, though not unkindly. “Use both hands,” he said. “Here.” He set a piece of wood on the stump. “Aim right for the center of it. Carry the weight in your forearms.”

Marybeth did her best to hide the effort it took to lift the ax. In the red house, she was not even allowed to use the hammer to hang nails for the Christmas garland.

“What happened to her?” she said. “The girl who wasn't afraid of anything.”

Reginald narrowed his eyes at her, and she couldn't tell what he was thinking. “She's still around,” he said.

The blue creature was a buzzing in her blood. It was as though a beehive had been set loose inside her skin.

He knows something, Marybeth thought. But how to ask him?

She raised the ax, and then, as she was about to strike with it, hot blood rushed through her arms, and she was overtaken by the blue creature. The last thing she saw was the firewood splinter and break apart under the blade, and then everything blurred and she felt herself falling asleep.

CHAPTER

11

“Honestly, you children,” Mrs. Mannerd said, wriggling her arms into her wool coat. If the children's clothing was tattered and old, Mrs. Mannerd's coat was older. She had been a much younger woman when she first acquired it, and much thinner, and by now she had let out the seams more times than was reasonable.

It was after eight o'clock now, and the last of the older ones had left for school. Only Lionel was left, with nothing showing of him but the whites of his eyes as he huddled in the darkness under the stairs.

“Come on, Lionel.” Mrs. Mannerd sighed. “I need you to work with me today. Put on your boots, and your coat, and your gloves. Hurry and be quick about it. It looks like it might rain.”

Lionel crawled across the living room floor, with his belly close to the creaking boards. He was sniffing for traces of Marybeth, who had gone missing the night before. All he knew for certain was that she had taken her coat and her gloves, and thought to close the door behind her. These were not actions of the wild blue creature that had invaded her, but rather they were the actions of the sensible girl he had always known, who braided her hair and said “please” and “thank you.”

Had she left on her own? Without waking him?

After he had gotten dressed, Mrs. Mannerd draped a scarf over his shoulders and wrapped it over his ears and chin to keep out the cold.

He followed her to the Cadillac like a lone gosling. He said nothing as he watched Mrs. Mannerd struggle with the engine, muttering curses and prayers in the same breath to make it work.

She hit the steering wheel with a cry of frustration, and for the first time Lionel began to believe that she needed Marybeth as much as he did. In that little red house with its leaky ceilings and its eight children and its pipes that froze when it snowed, Marybeth was predictable, punctual, always reliable. Without her good behavior, their entire world seemed to be in chaos. It was as though there was no goodness in the world at all.

The engine finally started, and Mrs. Mannerd cleared
her throat with the same sort of rusty sound and sat back to wait for the car to warm up.

Lionel hugged his knees to his chest and tried to make himself small. He did not like cars, especially when it was too cold outside to roll down the window. He felt like a bird in a swinging cage, whose wings still worked but who could not fly.

Finally he said, “Are we going to look for her at the farm?”

Mrs. Mannerd looked relieved and impressed that he had spoken. Without being asked a question, no less. “Can you think of any other place she might be?”

“No.” Lionel squeezed his knees to his chest. “She's probably there.”

He wasn't fretting about where Marybeth would be, but rather who she would be when they found her.

He once thought that he would enjoy it if Marybeth could be wild the way that he was wild. If she growled and burrowed and learned to charm the animals the way that he did, he might not have felt so alone in his strangeness. But with the arrival of the blue creature, the wildness was consuming her, like a snake had opened its mouth and was swallowing her whole. And he wanted her back the way she was, with her spectacles and her kind eyes. He wanted to look up from the grass and find her standing over him, hugging a book in her arms, asking him
what he was up to today. Even if they didn't have very much in common, he liked her that way.

The old Cadillac hit every bump in the road, and when the farmhouse appeared in the distance, Lionel felt his stomach go weightless with dread. The car came to a stop, and Mrs. Mannerd turned to him. “Are you coming with me or staying here?”

In answer, he opened his door and stepped outside.

Mrs. Mannerd was thankful for his agreeable behavior this morning. With the way Marybeth was carrying on these days, the old woman in the farmhouse probably thought that the orphanage was a certified zoo.

They walked to the front door, and even before Mrs. Mannerd knocked, Lionel could smell the toast, eggs, and hot tea. He sniffed the air and could smell hot chocolate, too. Ever since the arrival of the blue creature, Marybeth went through fits wherein she could not seem to eat enough. Other days, she hardly ate at all, and Lionel had begun to suspect that this weakened the blue creature and caused it to sleep.

The door swung open, and there stood the old woman in her robe, looking cheerful as ever. “I suspected you'd be along soon,” she told Mrs. Mannerd. “Come in, come in!”

Lionel moved past them, through the living room and past the china cabinet that shook when anyone walked
by it, and to the kitchen where Marybeth sat at the table eating a pile of eggs and bacon. The old Marybeth ate very little in the mornings, and had never much cared for eggs. But the blue creature made her ravenous as it used up all her body's energy.

He approached her with caution, with his arms at his sides, giving weight to his footsteps so as to announce his presence.

There was nobody in the kitchen with Marybeth, but an empty plate and rumpled napkin suggested that someone had been sitting next to her.

“Marybeth?” he said.

She looked at him, and Lionel was not sure whether it was really her. It was becoming harder to tell.

Though her eyes remained their usual color this time, there were dark bags under them, as though she were a sketch of herself, with her eyes traced over and over again with pencil.

She picked up a piece of bacon and bit into it.

Maybe this wasn't too strange of her, Lionel told himself. Something like bacon was a rare thing back in the red house, and with six other children, neither Lionel nor Marybeth stood much chance of getting a piece to share between them. He couldn't blame her if the sight of it made her greedy.

Lionel was so focused on Marybeth's worn face, trying
to determine whether or not it was her, that the sudden noise outside startled him and he flinched.

He wanted to scramble under the table. But he couldn't turn into an animal here. Not with the blue creature trying to steal Marybeth away. At least one of them had to be a human now.