Magic hour: a novel (11 page)

“And
America’s Most Wanted.
And the attorney general. By tomorrow this girl is going to be front page news.” Peanut’s face pleated into worried folds. “It won’t be easy to hide Julia.”

This story was going to be a hurricane of publicity, no doubt about it. And once again, Dr. Julia Cates would be in the eye of the storm.

“No,” Ellie said, frowning. “It won’t.”

G
IRL IS COILED UP LIKE A YOUNG FERN IN THIS TOO-WHITE PLACE.
T
HE
ground is cold and hard; it makes her shiver sometimes and dream of her cave. While she was asleep, the Strangers changed her. She smells now of flowers and rain. She misses her own scent.

She wants to close her eyes and go to sleep, but the smells in here are all wrong. Her nose itches most of the time and her throat is so dry it hurts to swallow. She longs for her river and the roar of the water that is always leaking over the steep cliff not far from her cave. She can hear the Sun-Haired Her breathing, and her voice. It is like a thunderstorm, that voice; dangerous and scary. It makes her scoot closer to the end of the place. If she were a wolf, she could burrow through it and disappear. The idea of that makes her sad. She is thinking of Her . . . of Him, even. Of Wolf.

Without them she feels lost. She can’t live in this place where nothing green is alive and the air stinks.

She shouldn’t have run away. Him always told her it was cold and bad beyond their wood, that she had to stay hidden because in the world there were people who hurt little girls worse than Him did. Strangers.

She should have listened, but she’d been so scared for so long.

Now she will be hurt worser than the net.

They are waiting to hurt her when she comes out, but she will be too small for them to see. Like a green bug on the leaf, she will disappear.

S
ITTING ON AN UNCOMFORTABLE PLASTIC CHAIR IN THE CHEERILY
decorated playroom, Julia stared down at the notebook in her lap. In the last hour she’d talked endlessly to the girl hidden beneath the bed, but had received no response. Her notebook remained full of questions without answers.

Teeth—dental work?

Deaf?

Stool—any evidence of diet?

Toilet trained?

Scars—age of

Ethnicity

In the early years of her residency it had become clear to everyone that Julia had a true gift for dealing with traumatized and depressed children. Even the best of her teachers and colleagues had come to her for advice. She seemed innately to understand the extreme pressures on today’s kids. All too often they ended up on the dark, back streets of downtown wherever, selling their thin bodies to pay for food and drugs. She knew how exploitation and abuse and alcohol marked a child, how families lost their elasticity and snapped apart, leaving each member adrift and searching. Most importantly, she remembered how it felt to be an outsider, and though she’d grown up and merged into the traffic of adulthood, those painful childhood memories remained. Kids opened up to her, trusted her to listen to them, to help them.

Although she hadn’t specialized in autism or brain damage rehabilitation or mental challenges, she’d dealt with those patients, of course. She knew how autistics functioned and reacted.

She knew, too, how profoundly deaf children acted before they’d learned sign language. Astoundingly, there were still places in this country—backwoods settlements and such—where deaf/mute children grew up with no ability to communicate.

But none of that seemed relevant to this case. The child’s brain scan showed no lesions or anomalies. The girl under the bed could be a perfectly normal child who’d been lost on a day hike and was now too terrified to speak up.

A perfectly normal girl who traveled with a wolf

—and howled at the moon

—and seemingly didn’t know what a toilet was for.

Julia put down her pen. She’d been silent for too long. Her best hope with this child lay in
connecting.
That meant communication. “I guess I can’t write my way to understanding you, can I?” she said in gentle, soothing tones.

“That’s too bad, because I enjoy writing. Probably you prefer drawing. Most girls your age do. Not that I know your age, exactly. Dr. Cerrasin believes you’re about six. I’d say you’re a little younger, but I haven’t really gotten a good look at you, have I? I’m thirty-five. Did I tell you that? I’m sure it seems old to you. Frankly, in the last year, it’s started to feel old to me, too.”

For the next two hours Julia talked about nothing. She told the girl where they were and why they were here—that everyone wanted to help her. It didn’t matter so much what she said as how she said it. The subtext on every word was
Come on out, honey, I’m a safe place.
But there had been no response whatsoever. Not once had so much as a finger appeared out from beneath the bed. She was about to start talking about how lonely the world could sometimes feel when a knock at the door interrupted her.

There was a scuffling sound under the bed.

Had the girl heard the knock?

“I’ll be right back,” Julia said in a quite ordinary oh-there’s-someone-at-my-door voice. She went to the door and opened it.

Dr. Cerrasin cocked his head to the right, where two white-clad male orderlies stood. One held a large box; the other held a tray of food. “The food and toys are here.”

“Thanks.”

“No response yet?”

“No, and it’s impossible to diagnose her this way. I need to
study
her. Actions, reactions, movements. That damn bed makes it impossible.”

“Whatcha want us to do with this stuff?” asked one of the orderlies.

“I’ll take the stuffed animals. Store the rest of the toys for now. She’s hardly ready for that kind of play. The food can go on the table. And be quiet. I don’t want to scare her any more than she already is.” To Max, she said, “Does this town still have a library the size of my car?”

“It’s small,” he admitted, “but with the Internet, you have access to everything. The library went online last year.” He smiled charmingly. “There was a parade.”

She felt a moment’s connection to him then. They were the outsiders, laughing at small-town customs. When she realized that he’d made her smile, she stepped back. “There always is.” She started to say something else—she wasn’t even sure what, when it struck her.

Move the bed.
How had she missed the obvious?

She spun around and shut the door, realizing a moment too late that she’d shut it in Max’s face. Oops. Oh, well. She went to the nearest orderly, who was just setting down a tray of food, and said, “Take the bed out of here, please, but leave the mattress.”

“Huh?”

“We’re not furniture movers, miss,” the other man said.

“Doctor,”
she pointed out. “Are you telling me that you two aren’t strong enough to help me?”

“Of course we’re strong enough,” the taller man sputtered as he set down the box of stuffed animals.

“Good. Then what’s the problem?”

“Come on, Fredo. Let’s move the bed before the doc here starts wantin’ a fridge.”

“Thank you. There’s a child under there. Try not to scare her.”

One of the men turned to her. “Why don’t you tell her to come out?”

“Just move the bed, please. Carefully. Put the mattress in the corner.”

They placed the mattress where she’d indicated, lifted the bed off the floor, and backed out of the room. The door clicked shut behind them, but Julia didn’t notice. All she saw was her patient.

Crouched low, the girl opened her mouth to scream.

Come on,
Julia thought,
let me hear you.

But there was no sound as the child scrambled back to the wall and froze. She went perfectly still.

Julia was reminded of a chameleon settling into its environment. But the poor kid couldn’t change color, couldn’t disappear. She was all-too-noticeable against the speckled gray linoleum floor and bright yellow wall. So still she seemed to be carved of pale wood, her only sign of life was her nostrils, which flared as if to pick up every scent.

For the first time, Julia noticed the child’s beauty. Though the girl was wretchedly thin, she was still striking. She stared near Julia, but not quite at her, as if there were a dangerous animal to Julia’s left that bore watching. Her expression was both bland and strangely obsessive; it gave nothing away but missed nothing, either. There was no curve to her mouth at all; no indication of displeasure or curiosity, and her eyes—those amazing, blue-green eyes—were serious and watchful.

Julia was surprised by the lack of fear in those eyes. Perhaps she was looking at the other side of fear. What happened to a child when fear had been the norm forever . . . did it melt into watchfulness?

“You’re almost looking at me,” she said in as conversational a tone as possible. Eye contact was important. Autistics routinely didn’t make eye contact until or unless they’d undergone significant therapy. On her pad, she wrote:
Mute?
Her sister had said the girl made noises, but Julia hadn’t heard it for herself. Besides, her sister had also implied prodigious jumping and tree-climbing skills. “I imagine you’re scared. Everything that’s happened to you since yesterday has been frightening. It would make anyone cry.”

There was no reaction at all.

For the next twelve hours Julia sat quietly in a chair. She observed everything she could about the girl, but that wasn’t much, to be truthful. In all those early hours, the child was almost completely motionless. Sometime around midnight she fell asleep, still crouched against the wall. When she finally slumped to the floor, Julia cautiously moved toward her, picking her up gently and transferring her to the mattress.

All through the night Julia watched the girl sleep, noticing how often she seemed seized by bad dreams. At some point Julia fell asleep, too, but by seven the next morning she was awake again, ready to go. She called home to tell Ellie that she’d probably spend the day at the hospital, then went back to work.

When the girl finally woke, Julia was ready. Smiling easily, she began talking again. In her voice, she made sure the girl heard acceptance and caring, so that the meaning was clear even if the words were unknown. Hour after hour Julia talked, all through the breakfast and lunch, which went uneaten. By late afternoon two things had become true: Julia was exhausted and the girl
had
to be hungry.

Julia moved very slowly over to the box that had been delivered yesterday. She was careful to make no sudden moves. She talked in a steady, soothing cycle of words, as if the child’s silence were the most natural thing in the world. “How about if we look through this stuff now, see if you like any of it.” She opened the box. A stuffed gray wolf pup lay on a pile of other plush toys and folded clothes. She picked it up and then went to the next box. Still smiling, she started to unpack it. “The people of Rain Valley sent you this stuff because they’re worried about you. I’m sure your parents are worried, too. Maybe you got lost. That wouldn’t be your fault, you know, and no one would be mad at you.”

She glanced back at the girl, who was sitting up on the mattress now, perfectly still, staring just past Julia.

The window,
Julia realized. The girl hadn’t taken her gaze away from the window. Though the glass wasn’t big and didn’t reveal much of the outside world, there was a patch of blue sky and the green tip of a fir branch. “You’re wondering how to get out there, aren’t you? I’d like to help you get home. Would you like that?”

There was no reaction, not even to the word
home.

Julia grabbed a big book off the shelf and dropped it on the floor. It hit with a loud
thwack
.

The girl flinched; her eyes widened. She glanced at Julia for a heartbeat, then scurried over to the corner.

“So you can hear. That’s good to know. Now I need to figure out if you can understand me. Are you hearing words or sounds, little girl?” Cautiously, she moved toward the child. All the while she was waiting for a flicker in the eyes, an acknowledgment that she was being approached. There was none, but when Julia was about eight feet away, the girl’s nostrils flared. A tiny, whimpering sound leaked past her lips. The tension in her laced fingers turned the tanned skin almost white.