Child of a Rainless Year (47 page)
Read Child of a Rainless Year Online
Authors: Jane Lindskold
The sandwich tasted wonderful, as if my body was soaking up the nutrients and singing hosannahs as it did so, but even so I was almost too tired to think.
“Okay. I see your point. Can you keep yourself busy for the next couple of hours?”
“Certainly,” Mikey said. “There are any number of novels here, and I’ll probably call my wife and bring her up to date.”
“Good,” I said, forcing myself to my feet. The idea of putting my head down on the table was beginning to seem too attractive. “Remember, if I’m not up by four, you’ll wake me. Promise?”
“Promise,” Mikey replied solemnly. “I promise.”
Mikey not only kept his promise, he had put together another meal, one more substantial than sandwiches and chips.
“This violates,” I said, laughing as I lifted a forkful of breaded chicken in a rich butter and cream sauce to my lips, “every diet out there. And did you have to make a cheese sauce for the broccoli?”
“There is devil’s food cake for dessert,” was Mikey’s response, “with or without ice cream if you prefer. I spoke with my wife about your problems with exhaustion, and she suggested the menu. I,” he added with complacency, “cooked it though.”
“It’s good,” I said, “very good, and it hits the spot. Tell me, is your wife … I mean does she …?”
“Have an awareness of liminal space?” Mikey completed for me. “A little. We met when I was in law school and she was taking teaching courses at the same university. The lecture halls were in the same building and we both had a tendency to arrive early.”
“A teacher?” I asked. “What was her subject?”
“English: grammar and reading. Like you, she taught at the grade school level, so she learned to be a bit of a jack-of-all-trades. She’s retired now, of course, like I am.”
We talked a bit about Mikey’s family, and then Mikey said almost awkwardly. “I called Domingo for help because I wasn’t sure I could find the grocery store. He asked after you, and I filled him in. He wanted you to know he’s thinking about you, and wishes you well.”
“Thank you,” I said, then grew guarded. “You didn’t tell him anything else, did you? Like about fires?”
“Nothing,” Mikey said, making a “cross my heart” gesture over his chest. “He did ask more about the Pincas family, though, and I filled him in where I could. I don’t know a great deal about Fernando’s branch. My interest has always been with Amerigo’s.”
“Makes sense. How’s he taking it? I mean, finding out he’s sort of related to Phineas House.”
“Fairly well,” Mikey said. “Actually, I think the information was something of a relief. He’s felt a connection to the House for so long, finding there was a reason was a good thing.”
“He’s not … well, envious that I own it, not him?” I hated to ask the question, but there was no avoiding it.
“I don’t think so,” Mikey said, “but then I wouldn’t be the one he’d tell, would I?”
“You being my trustee and all,” I said. “No. I guess not.”
When our early dinner was completed and the kitchen tidied, if not cleaned, we adjourned to the front parlor again. I felt good. If the morning’s experiment had been a disappointment in many ways, it had at least banished my fear of using the kaleidoscope.
“Ready?” Mikey asked.
“I’m going to ask,” I said by way of reply, “to have the answer to what happened to Colette. I think that’s better than searching for her as if she’s a lost shoe.”
“Good idea,” Mikey said. “Since no one but Colette knows why she rode out that day, that certainly qualifies as a secret.”
“No one but Colette,” I said, raising the kaleidoscope to my eye, “and whoever she was going to find—if it was someone, not someplace she was seeking.”
“True,” Mikey said, and the single word echoed and reechoed in my ears as I let myself sink into contemplation of the slowly moving golden mandalas.
I lost myself in their shifting beauty, moving deeper among them until they turned like pinwheels on all sides.
“What happened to Colette?” I asked. “What is the secret of her disappearance?”
The pinwheels spun around me, faster and faster, until I could hear the buzz of their edges against the wind. Their patterns vanished, replaced by isolated blurs of golden light that surrounded me like a host of miniature suns. Then the individual suns exploded, their lights overlapping, washing me in a golden tide, overwhelming me.
I closed my eyes, but the light penetrated my eyelids, permeating every cell of my body, searing my optic nerves with a shrill ecstatic cry before ebbing. When I dared open my eyes again, I thought I would be blind, but my sight was perfectly clear. I was standing at the edge of a dirt road, and a stylish gig I knew very well, drawn by a familiar bay horse was coming down the road in my direction.
Colette, teleidoscope in hand as if she had just been peering through it, held the reins.
I stood there on the side of the dirt road, shifting my foot when a bit of gravel dug into my instep. My gaze greedily devoured every detail of the woman driving the gig, finding her both like and not like I remembered her.
One difference was so obvious I almost laughed aloud for not expecting it. Colette was shorter than I remembered. It was hard to judge for certain with her seated, but I guessed she was no taller than my adult self. She also looked younger than I recalled, but, again, that made sense. She had been in her midthirties when she had disappeared, almost twenty years younger than I was now.
Other things were precisely as I recalled them: her elegance, her grace, her haughty arrogance, the angle at which she carried her head, the piercing sharpness of her gaze. There was something else that niggled at my memory, something I could not lay hold of, and I let it go, captivated by the moment.
Colette was drawing closer now. I could hear the squeak and jingle of harness leather. I thought I could catch the scent of Colette’s perfume even over the odor of horse sweat, but that was almost certainly my imagination.
I glanced down at myself. I was dressed in the clothes I had put on after my nap: a loose ankle-length skirt in a silver-shot green, a scoop-necked cotton tee in pale grey. I’d put on earrings, long dangling ones strung from freshwater pearls and jade beads, but no other jewelry. My feet were bare.
I knew Colette. Those bare feet alone would be reason not to acknowledge me, but a style of dress that in the late fifties would have been defined as bohemian at best would also mean her gaze would pass over me as if I were nothing more than a lizard sunning myself on a rock. Colette was not one to nod to passersby.
I must speak first, that was clear, but what could I say? What should I call her? Certainly not “Mother.” If I was indeed intercepting her on the day of her disappearance, her only child was nine year’s old. At best she’d think me flippant, at worst some inmate gotten loose from the mental hospital.
“Mrs. Bogatyr!” I said as the gig drew closer. “Mrs. Bogatyr! I have a message for you.”
Colette raised the teleidoscope to one eye, I thought to look at me, but the slow scan of the crystal sphere passed over me as if I wasn’t there.
Angered at this rudeness, I called again, raising my voice to be heard over the steady fall of Shooting Star’s hooves.
“Mrs. Bogatyr! I need to speak with you. It’s very important.”
The gig drew abreast, but Colette did not pull up the horse, did not slow in the least.
“Mrs. Bogatyr! Colette! Mother! For heaven’s sake, listen to me!”
No pause, but in the gig’s shining metal trappings, I saw the truth. I cast no reflection. I wasn’t there except as an observer.
I should have known. Mikey had confirmed my deduction that the kaleidoscopes were meant for scrying, and scrying was watching, looking. It was nothing more. The gypsy did not slide into the world in her crystal ball. I was not Alice, gone through the looking glass.
Even as I accepted this, I came to the realization that though I had made no effort to do so, I was keeping up with the gig. I had resumed my point of view slightly ahead of the gig, watching it come on toward me, never reaching.
Periodically, Colette would scan the landscape through her teleidoscope, but she did not seem to find whatever it was she was seeking. At least she never paused nor changed her course, but continued riding on.
I don’t really know how long I stood there alongside the road and watched. All I know is that I had been watching for a long time when I noticed something strange. Hadn’t the gig passed that field before? I was certain I remembered the colorful if rather tattered shirt that adorned the scarecrow. It had caught my attention, not only for its color but because I wondered why a scarecrow was set up so early in the season, and had decided it must have remained from the summer before.
Alert now, I glanced about me, certain that a house, a heap of stones at the roadside, a patch of straggly wild flowers were all familiar. At last I thought to glance up at the sun. It had changed position, and stood exactly opposite where it should be in the sky. That last confirmed it. Somehow Colette had reversed her course without my ever seeing her turn the gig. She was no longer heading away from Las Vegas, but back toward it.
I had no choice but to accept this, spending my energy instead on looking for other alterations in my surroundings. I found them almost immediately. When I had first encountered her, Colette had driven through a living landscape. What she travelled through now was more a semblance of one, an extraordinarily vivid painting, a film that continued to unwind but without sound other than what Colette and her assemblage made. The steady sound of the horse’s hooves had fooled me, but there was no birdsong, no insect chatter.
When we passed a field where a farmer was mending the fence that protected his field of greening crops, there was no sound though he was busy with hammer and nails. There was no scent either, though there should have been that of crushed herbage and maybe even the rank odor of male sweat.
So Colette has passed into some liminal space where she’s paralleling the real world, moving alongside its borders. I wonder if I am in some similar state in relation to her? I wonder if I could bridge the gap.
I tried, but I was like a child trying to drive a car. Just as the child knows the car should move, even knows what the gas pedal and brake do, how the steering wheel is used, even that the key turns in the ignition, still this is not enough.
And I don’t even have the car keys. I guess I’ll just have to watch to see where she goes, then see what happens to her there.
That’s what I did, letting my point of view draw me along through this land on the edge of a land I almost knew. That almost became increasingly important as I watched, especially when we reached town. That what I was seeing was Las Vegas, New Mexico, I was certain—although I’ll admit it took passing several landmarks and reading a dozen or more street signs for me to be certain. Las Vegas this certainly was, but it wasn’t the Las Vegas I knew.
Which Las Vegas it was was not easy for me to decide. There were cars, but these were older models, older even than the cars I remembered from my childhood. I noted details, figuring I could sketch them later. Mikey would probably know their types, and if he didn’t I could check at the library.
The attire of the people walking on the street was also old-fashioned, but I wasn’t enough of a clothing historian to be certain just how old-fashioned it was. Again I made mental notes. Seeing a man walk by with his nose buried in a newspaper gave me the bright idea of going to check the date printed on the paper, but I found I was limited to the vicinity of Colette’s gig. I could stay slightly in front of it, draw alongside, or trail a few paces behind, but that was my range.
After a bit, I recognized the neighborhood into which Colette was turning her carriage as the very one in which I was currently residing. Many of the houses were recognizable as ones I knew, but very few resembled their modern counterparts. They were painted different colors, window treatments weren’t the same, plantings were arranged in different patterns. In a few cases I saw young trees where in my day towering giants stood. In other cases, the trees that shaded street or yard were long gone in my day.
I was not at all surprised when Colette drew her gig to a stop in front of Phineas House. This was neither the wildly colored House of my present, nor the paler one I remembered from my childhood, but instead it wore a color scheme that was somewhere between the two. The background color was a pleasant sunny yellow, the shutters and window casements were a darker harvest gold. The numerous carved details were neither ignored as they had been during Colette’s tenure, nor accented as they were in mine. Instead they were brought out just a bit, often in shades of ivory or lighter yellow. The effect wasn’t as dramatic as my “Fairground Midway style,” but it worked.
As Colette drew her gig to a stop and gracefully dismounted from the driver’s box, all sound but Shooting Star blowing and shaking her trappings ceased. Then Colette dismounted the box, and went to the gate. She didn’t walk through it as I thought she might, but when she opened and closed it, there was no sound.
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