Straying From the Path (14 page)

Back to the wall, she sat on the sidewalk and hoped.

She didn’t know how long she planned on waiting. She’d told herself fifteen minutes. Any longer, the A.I. program would notice and call the cops. Then she realized that someone calling the cops was about what it would take to get her to leave. The paparazzi were going to have a field day with this.

Two minutes had passed when the gate opened.

Nick leaned out, standing half on his property and half on the sidewalk, hanging onto the bars of the gate. He went barefoot, wore sweatpants and a t-shirt, and his brown hair was ruffled, like he’d been crashed out on the sofa. He looked like a million bucks.

“Hi,” she said, staring up at him.

“Hi.” He scraped a toe on the concrete, and she just kept staring.

“You could have just emailed it.”

“I wanted to talk to you. I’m sorry the movie didn’t work out. I wish it had.”

He made a boyish shrug. “It’s okay. I’ve got a contract on the table for a sequel to
Lunar Wake
. That’s the story we’re going to put out, that the production schedules conflict so I had to quit Nathan’s film. That happens all the time. Career saved.”

“Good,” Cass said. It wasn’t what she wanted to say, but everything else that occurred to her started with
please don’t leave me, please please please!
There had to be a more dignified way to beg.

He looked up into the heat haze of the afternoon sky. “It’s not your fault that it didn’t work out. Working in Hollywood, living like I do, I forget sometimes that life isn’t a fairy tale where all the endings are happy. The real world isn’t like that.”

In the real world, movie stars didn’t date accountants. Cass swallowed a lump in her throat. “We’re not going to have a happy ending?”

“I wasn’t talking about us.” He slid down to the sidewalk next to her and leaned against the wall. “I lost my temper. I’m an ass. I’m sorry.”

She wasn’t going to argue.

“You meant it, what you said back there.”

She nodded. Her tears had started falling. It’d be hours before she got them to stop. He offered his hand. He wasn’t going to take hold of hers; he was letting her choose.

She put her hand in his and squeezed.

“So, I’m just a bluebox actor and you’re just an accountant. We’ve learned our lesson and we shouldn’t try to be anything we aren’t.”

She snuggled against him and leaned her head on his shoulder. “I don’t know. We just haven’t found the
right
glamorous artsy job yet. You know when Nathan said this sounded like a movie plot? I was thinking, maybe we should try writing it down.”

“Write a screenplay—you and me?”

“Sure. How many movies have we watched and thought, I could do better than that? I mean, you turn down how many scripts a year? You must see some pretty bad ones.”

“I’ve
made
some pretty bad ones.”

“So we know what
not
to do, right? Couldn’t hurt to try.”

Her eyes felt round and puppyish. He grinned back at her and kissed her forehead, humoring her.

“All right, but we have to give it a happy ending. Gene Kelly and Debbie Reynolds riding into the sunset.”

“I think you mean Roy Rogers and Dale Evans.”

“Them too.”

That’s what they call a metaphor in our country. Don’t be afraid of it, sir, it won’t bite. If it was my
Carlo
now! The Dog is the noblest work of Art, sir. I may safely say the noblest—his mistress’s rights he doth defend—although it bring him to his end—although to death it doth him send!

—Emily Dickinson, in a letter of 1850

Carlo died—

E. Dickinson

Would you instruct me now?

—a letter of 1866

First thing was to write letters. Make letters into words into sentences into letters. Tell the world—and a letter was how to do it because a letter
stayed
. Even when a person was absent, one could not disregard the page in hand. Immortalize the event, begin to turn the grief into something else, something that would live outside her instead of inside her.

“Emily, come down, please!”

Not supper yet, but still her sister Vinnie called, which meant visitors. Emily didn’t hear. She crouched beside Carlo at the foot of the bed and tied folded packets of paper to his collar with string.

“Take these with you when you go. If you can, bring some back for me.”

He looked at her with clouded eyes half-hidden under his coarse black hair, and his tail thumped the floor once.

From downstairs, Father’s orator voice sounded, and Mother’s soft immovable one, and Vinnie’s over all, shepherding the whole house with a will like a staff. More voices, more visitors.

“Mr. Dickinson! What a fine house—”

“—please, take off your wraps—”

“—how is your son and his lovely wife?”

The front door opened and closed. Carlo raised his head. In his younger days he’d run to greet everyone, tongue dangling and tail wagging the whole back half of his body. She’d have to hold him, leaning her whole weight against him. Carlo was so large, he sometimes scared callers. If she lay down very small, she could hide behind him. Vinnie could come in and not even see her. They’d all have a good laugh about that.

Emily tore a scrap of paper off an old envelope and wrote another note. This one would be to God, how could she forget to send one to Him, along with all the others?

“Another one, Carlo.” After the ink dried she tied the note with the rest. She scratched his ears. Patient Carlo hadn’t moved all day.

Carlo was getting ready to take a very long walk, without her. She remembered every walk they’d ever taken together, everything they’d seen. Every tree and blade of grass, new spring leaves, brown fallen leaves of autumn. Blue skies and gray. They followed sunsets and climbed hills like they were Crusaders’ castles. How much ground had they touched? All of it, everywhere, for dust from the whole country blew in and came to rest in Amherst.

Carlo could not take her with him this time, but he could take part of her, the words. Faithful Carlo could carry her letters.

If she could ask a question of Death, any question at all, what would it be? Emily wrote her questions on scraps of papers and tied them to Carlo’s collar.

“Emily?” Vinnie was calling from the top of the stairs this time. She’d crept up so as not to startle the guests with her shouting. “They’ve come all the way from Boston. They’d like to see you.”

They might as well be visitors from Jerusalem as from Boston. There were so much more interesting places to travel than Jerusalem or Boston. How far could a bee burrow inside an iris before it became lost? How far would Carlo walk this time?

She hugged him, holding her face against his smelly fur. He used to be massive, weighing almost as much as she. But he’d stopped eating, and she could feel his ribs.

No visitors tonight, oh no. She had to wait for Carlo to return.

It had happened late that evening, when the house was still. Carlo slipped out, and she didn’t even hear his clawed paws clicking on the floor. The gardener, Dick, took him away, saying he’d put him in the ground under a nice tree. Nearest thing to a Christian burial one like Carlo could have, he’d said. Everyone was very quiet that night, more careful of Emily than usual. Especially Vinnie, who sat with her a long time and told stories about great good Carlo. Emily contradicted her. Carlo belonged to
her
. All Vinnie had ever done was spoil the beast with pastries or punish him for tracking mud.

Emily clung to her sister until the candle went out, then she curled up in bed alone.

Emily wrote the best condolences. She understood, she took the grief of others into her heart, tugged it and sewed it up to try and make it whole and good, then she sent it back as poetry. Her correspondence was voluminous.

He was my friend!
Easier to express sadness when sadness had a cause. People would understand. They would mourn with her.

And they would say poor Emily, like always.

How to write it? What words? He died. That was all. But that didn’t explain it, not at all. What would she do when the hole left behind was larger? A Father-sized hole? But Father didn’t take walks, not like Carlo. Carlo taught her as much about the world as Father ever had. And Carlo had never begrudged her Keats.

A week ago she had not imagined a hole shaped like Carlo.

Was Death so enticing, that Carlo would walk with him and not her?

A house asleep. A world asleep, so still the maple in the yard groaned. It creaked so loud, as though goblins danced on every bough. They’d break all the limbs if they weren’t careful. There should be a dog to bark at them.

And so it did. A deep rumble, like a saw raking through wood.

Emily sat up. “Carlo.”

He’d come to fetch her, so they could take a walk together.

Wrapping a blanket tight around her, she climbed out of bed and scampered down the stairs, barefoot. The clicking of paws sounded in the foyer.

Skidding to her knees, slipping the rug on the hardwood floor of the foyer, she met Carlo head-on, crashing into him with a hug. He wrestled her over, playing, and she had to clamp shut his muzzle to keep him from barking and waking up the house, even though she was laughing loud enough to do so. But no one woke; they were alone.

There was a note tied to his collar. Just one, thick creamy stationery folded and tied with a black velvet ribbon. Her name, “Emily,” was written on the outside in a flourishing hand.

A reply. She loved receiving letters. Every one with her name on it was an affirmation—here is a world, here is a friend, and I am here too! When her friends didn’t write back it was so easy to think them dead. They frightened her when they didn’t write back.

Climbing out of their wrestle, half-sprawling on Carlo, she eagerly untied the ribbon and unfolded the page. Written in solid black ink, in confident cursive:

In time—

And nothing more.

The paper lay lightly in Emily’s hands. “In time, the carriage stops for all.”

Was that right? It was a riddle, surely, and she must know if her answer was right. In time all happens, armies march, wars are won and lost, the seasons turn endless and eternal. All people are born and die. But what happened out of time?

“I must reply. At once, I must write! And you must carry the letter for me, Carlo.”

But Carlo stood at the door, nuzzling the knob and wagging his tail, like he needed to go out.

“Well, how did you come in, you great beast? Surely you can go the way you came and don’t need the door.”

He wagged his tail, whined a little. He had to go, that was that, and he needed her to open the door this time. If one could predict the rules, there’d be no need to ask questions at all, would there?

When she stood up to get the door, he bounced in place, jumping back on his legs—he was as tall as a person when he did that. He’d run when she opened the door, like a cannonball. He could run again.

“I want to go with you.”

The letter felt cold in her hand. It didn’t answer any of her questions. None at all. Perhaps if she asked them in person—but she had come to dislike visitors, and visiting.

She’d open the door, and he’d run so fast his legs would be a blur. She could never keep up with him when he ran. But Carlo always came home. However far ahead he ran, he’d always come back for her.

She knelt and held his stout head in her hands, looking into his clear brown eyes. “Don’t forget, when you’ve gone far enough ahead, come back and get me.” A kiss on the nose, like she gave him when he was a puppy.

She opened the door, and in a flash he was gone, running into darkness.

“A piece of Immortality,” she said, holding the letter tight in both hands, close to her heart. “That’s what I’ve always thought a letter is.”

Carlo returned to fetch Emily twenty years later.

“This is the Highest Step in the World”

The photo on the back of Craig Ryan’s book
The Pre-Astronauts
shows Captain Joseph Kittinger Jr. plummeting from his balloon gondola at an altitude of 102,000 feet. This has become my favorite story in the history of U.S. aerospace research. It has everything: heroes, suspense, scientific endeavor, impossible missions. The photo is deceptively mind-boggling—he’s
parachuting
from
space
! I wanted to write about the mental state of the person going through this impossible jump. This feat makes anything possible, really.

“Peace in Our Time”

My great-uncle, Francis Pearl, introduced my grandparents to each other. He and my grandfather served together on a converted destroyer in World War II. In early 2000, my mother and I went to his funeral. Two VFW members were there, and they played “Taps” on an old tape recorder. This was before the fact that there aren’t enough trumpet players to play “Taps” at the funerals of all the WWII vets who are passing away started making news. Seeing this, hearing this on the edge of the winter prairie outside the dying farming town of Rocky Ford Colorado, was one of the saddest, most poignant things I have ever seen. I wondered what would happen when there was no one left to play “Taps” for anyone, when the last war veteran passed away, because there was no more war.

“Silence Before Starlight”

I call this my “Elves in Space” story. In his introduction to his book
Good Fairies/Bad Fairies
, Brian Froud writes about fairy stories, and how part of nearly all of them is the idea that fairies and fairy magic are fading from the world, and that there was a time when they were more common and more powerful. Since this has always been a part of the stories, Froud concludes that their magic isn’t fading at all—that such stories will always have a place in culture, no matter how technological we become. We get computer hobgoblins rather than bogeys that spoil the milk. I like this idea, so I took a fairy story, that of the
leannáne sídhe
, the beautiful maid who seduces young men and drowns them in bodies of water, and set it in space. Still, for some reason, my original readers thought it was an alien. Go figure.

“The Happiest Place”

I went to Disneyland in 2006 (in conjunction with Worldcon) and had a really fabulous time. My mom and I went to one of those hokey musical shows, just because it was starting around the time we happened to be passing by. It was aimed at kids, very
lalala
, it had singers pretending to be animators drawing characters, and at the end of the show, the drawings “came to life.” The characters were Aladdin, something else, and Cinderella. Cinderella appeared on stage and I swear to God every girl under the age of ten gasped and squealed in sheer delight, and mobbed the poor actress when she came down off stage to greet them. I thought, what power. The immense power these women who play the princesses at Disneyland have, to bring out such an instant visceral response. So this is a story about that power made real, and about princesses who really can make wishes come true. It’s dark.

“Swing Time”

I had a lot of ideas and a lot of notes about dancing and magic. I’ve always loved dancing, the old-fashioned Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers set pieces and the like. I love a good waltz, I love swing, and one of my greatest experiences in the SCA was learning to dance the pavane to live music, with a whole crowd of other dancers. I wanted to write something about dancing and this is what came out—dancing powers the magical system that allows my two main characters to travel through space and time. The rest of the story is an old-fashioned “I hate you/I love you” romance, which probably also owes something to my love of Connie Willis’ stories.
Swing Time
is also the title of one of the great Astaire/Rogers films.

“The Librarian’s Daughter”

I don’t write many horse stories. I don’t have much patience for reading them because they seldom do the real thing justice. But one day I had a horrifying image of finding my horse dead and deciding to skin her. That was a great image, promising a very creepy story, but in itself wasn’t enough to build an entire story around, so I added the emotional turmoil of a one-night stand. The nightmare burgeoned quite nicely from there.

“The Bravest of Us Touched the Sky”

This is another story that started with a book,
Amelia Earhart’s Daughters
, by Leslie Haynsworth, a succinct popular history of women in American aviation. I was most intrigued by the WASP, their struggles, triumphs and tragedies. The people who insist that women don’t belong in the military and don’t belong in combat fail to acknowledge the thousands of women who have served their country in military capacities, whether or not they were labeled military, and who gave up their lives in that service.

“The Heroic Death of Lieutenant Michkov”

I listen to Colorado Public Radio a whole lot, which is one of the best classical radio stations ever. I like it because they tell you something about nearly every piece they play, and I always learn something. This is where I first heard Prokofiev’s “Lt. Kijé Suite,” a powerful, joyous, moody, evocative piece. The commentator told the story of the film the music was originally set to score in a brief, ten second sound bite: a clerical error results in the creation of a nonexistent military officer, and the bureaucrats scramble to “create” the officer in order to keep from having to admit their mistake, inventing stories of heroism, marrying him off, and even holding a grand funeral for him. What a wonderful story! All sorts of comic potential. To find out more, I went to the original novella,
Lieutenant Kijé
by Tynyanov. There, I found one of the most hard-bitten, cynical, depressing satires I have ever read. Here, the same clerical error that produced Kijé announced the death of another, very much real young officer. And since an imperial document couldn’t be wrong, this officer was “disappeared” by everyone around him simply believing him dead. He ended the story wandering the countryside in rags, surrounded by people refusing to acknowledge his existence. So, I could no longer write my humorous story. I ended up combining the two moods, and I like to think that while “Michkov” is thoroughly depressing, it ends on a note of joy that suggests that hope will never die. Kind of like the music which inspired the story in the first place, in a round-about way.

“Real City”

In a world where all film is done with CGI backgrounds, where the actors are all motion-captured characters, where every film is created from the ground up, pixel by pixel, filming real people in real locations becomes esoteric and artsy. The model for the story is, of course,
Singing in the Rain
. My story is about an actor who’s a star in CGI/motion capture, but can’t seem to get the hang of performing in front of a camera. I’m glad this story sold when it did, because it’s in danger of becoming too close to reality to be science fiction.

“In Time”

Writing this was pure catharsis. The professor of an Emily Dickinson seminar I took during grad school was an affirmed cat person and didn’t want to talk about Emily Dickinson’s dog, Carlo. An amazing number of so-called exhaustive biographies of Emily Dickinson fail to mention her animal companion of sixteen years. At the same time, learning about Carlo is what brought Emily Dickinson out of the realm of icon and into reality for me. So I wrote about Carlo’s death, and at the same time I wrote about my seventeen-year-old dog Snowball’s death. I paid homage to Dickinson, Carlo, and Snowball, and thumbed my nose at the professor.