COPYRIGHT

ISBN-13: 978-1-62205-017-8

MUSIC MAKERS

Kate Wilhelm

Copyright © 2012 InfinityBox Press LLC

“Music Makers” was first published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, May 2011.

“Shadows On The Wall Of The Cave” was first published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Oct. 2009.

“Mockingbird” was first published in Northwest Review, 2008.

“The Night Train” was first published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Jan/Feb 2010.

“An Ordinary Day With Jason” was first published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Apr/May 2009.

All rights reserved. Except for the use of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews, no part of this book may be used or reproduced in any form by any electronic, mechanical, or other means in any manner without the written permission of the publisher.

All characters, groups, places, and events portrayed in this book are fictitious.

Cover: Richard Wilhelm

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Music Makers

WHEN JAKE WAS INTERVIEWED for the job at the magazine Music Makers he had admitted that he knew little or nothing about music. The response from the magazine was the only one he had received from a couple of dozen resumés and he knew it was not helping to say that, but he felt he had to reveal his limitations up front.

Marsha, the editor across the desk that day, had nodded. “We have critics and reviewers. I read your stories from that newspaper in-- Where was it? Muncie? Anyway, I like the way you write. What we would want from you are more of the same kind of thing. Profiles of up-and-coming new artists, personal stories, bring them to the attention of a larger audience.”

That had been seventeen months earlier, and six months after that he had started to send out resumés again. What he was writing was no more than filler. A thousand word story hacked to five hundred words, seven hundred, whatever was needed to finish filling a page.

He had stared at Marsha when given the present assignment. “Up and coming artist? The guy was ninety-two when he died!”

“He was a very important figure to a lot of world-famous musicians. He deserves more than a routine obit, which is all he got.”

And that was that, Jake thought gloomily, driving a rental car through a commercial section on the outskirts of Memphis, Tennessee. A strip mall, gas stations, mattress store, a used car lot . . . He slowed down as a white fence, a deep lawn, big magnolia tree came into view. After checking the number, he pulled to the curb, parked, and glanced again at the name in his notes, Luellen Germaine, the old man’s life-long companion or something. An hour, he had already decided, was all he needed here, the rest could be lifted from Google or Wikipedia.

The house was a three-story white frame building with blue trim, surrounded by a lot of shrubs and plants in bloom. The house seemed to be in good shape, well maintained, as out of place in this neighborhood as he was looking for a new up-and-coming artist, or an old one who had died a week before.

He walked onto a wide porch with planter boxes of blooming geraniums. It was eleven, he was right on time.

Luellen Germaine opened the door and said, “Mr. Manfried? I’m Luellen. Come on in.” He was younger than she had expected. Dark hair just a little too long, dark eyes, tall and not at all athletic looking. Strip him down, she thought looking him over, and he probably would be pale and scrawny, plucked chicken came to mind, but since he was wearing a rumpled sport coat and jeans, it was hard to tell. “We’ll go this way,” she said, motioning for him to follow her.

He entered a wide, bright foyer that had several good urns with potted plants. On one side an archway opened to a sunken room, with broad stairs leading down a couple of feet to a room that appeared to be stadium-sized. Passing it, he could see more plants, groups of chairs, sofas flanking a fireplace . . . Another broad staircase led up from the foyer.

She kept walking past the stairs. “I thought we’d be more comfortable in the family room,” she said. “In here.”

She had stopped at a doorway and motioned for him to enter. This room looked out over the back of the property with flower beds and lawn, and beyond them a massive oak tree dripping Spanish moss, and what looked like a meadow crammed with blooming flowers. Modern America out front, turn of the century in back, he thought.

Rattan furnishings with lime green cushions, a pale rose-colored rug, and sheer white curtains at wide windows made the room look like one out of a decorator magazine. The curtains were held back by rose-colored sashes. Jake felt as if he should go back to the porch and wipe his feet, then come in a second time.

Luellen sat down and motioned for him to be seated. She was a light black woman, slender, her face unlined, her hair silver, age impossible to guess. The old man’s faithful lover/companion? Servant? She acted as if she owned the place, he thought uneasily, aware that he had not done enough homework.

“Now, Mr. Manfried, why does your magazine want to do an article about Bob Wranger?”

“We profile people who are important in the music world,” he said.

“But he isn’t, now is he? Maybe at one time, but that was long ago.”

“He influenced many of the great artists, introduced some of them, and that makes him important,” Jake said.

“And most of them are as dead as he is,” she said in a gentle, chiding tone.

Jake knew he was losing this interview and he didn’t understand how or why it had happened, but Luellen had taken control and he was left feeling almost tongue-tied. He pulled his notebook from his pocket and flipped it open in a business-like manner. When he glanced at her again, she was smiling faintly.

“Why don’t you just go ahead and ask me a few questions?” she said in that same gentle tone she had used before.

She had a nice voice, low pitched and somehow intimate. It was her accent, he decided. It was beguiling.

When he didn’t immediately ask a question, she said, “I imagine the first thing we should tend to is whether I was Bob’s paramour, his lover. And the answer is no. He loved Leo Corning and had for sixty years or more. I was the singer of the group.”

“He was gay?” There had not been even a hint of that in any of the obits he had skimmed.

“Homosexual,” she said. “Somehow the word gay diminishes the love people can have for each other. When I was young,” she added, “gay meant happy, carefree, and brought to mind little girls dancing in a meadow.”

“When did he move his group here to Memphis?” Jake asked.

“Times were changing, music was changing,” she said. “The Beatles came along, and Elvis, hard rock, heavy metal. A lot of musicians changed along with the taste, and went to where they could make a living. Fewer and fewer folks seemed to care about jazz and the blues. Bob’s mother died along about the time he was hitting bottom and she left him the house. He grew up here, the baby in a family of four girls, an elderly aunt, a father who was a lawyer, then a judge, and a mother who played the organ in church and who ordered him to keep away from her piano if he couldn’t play proper music. He left when he was eighteen, turned up in New Orleans and found a place where he didn’t feel like a sinner among angels. We, some of the group, came here forty-two years ago. Bob and Leo are still here, their ashes out yonder under the oak tree. When it’s my turn, I’ll be there, too.”

Jake felt his skin prickle with her words. Too quickly he asked, “Did the group play in a club in Memphis after the move?”

“We played right here in the house. Come, I’ll show you.”

She led him through another hallway and down a flight of stairs to a basement room. It was as big as the first room they had passed. One wall had been fitted with French doors and a row of high windows. In the end of the room a grand piano dominated the space. A drum set looked expensive and complete, and two chairs held a guitar and a clarinet. Half a dozen cabaret tables and small chairs were scattered about.

“Wow!” Jake said. “Your own club or something.”

“Beau Billy was with us at first,” she said. “He took sick with cancer and died within a few months, and he told Bob to keep the drums and find someone who could use them.” She nodded toward the chair with a clarinet. “That was Leo’s. He passed four years ago. He could make music with anything he could blow–-clarinet, trumpet, sax, a blade of grass.” She was smiling as she spoke. “The horn stays with the house, too,” she added. “The guitar’s mine.”

“Did he bequeath the house to you?” She looked healthy and vibrant, although she must have been at least seventy, but talking about her ashes going under the tree implied that she would be in this house when that time came.

“Oh no,” she said. “The house now belongs to Bethany Stedman, a great, great, great niece. I don’t really know how many greats should be there, but that will do. Bob left the piano to her daughter Cindy.”

Two more players he had not heard of before, Jake thought. Did it matter for the few hundred words he would be allowed?

“How will she get that piano up and out of a basement?” he asked, glancing at the stairs they had descended.

“Bob had folks in to excavate space out back and put in a ramp to move it from upstairs,” Luellen said. “It was in what his mother called the salon, that first room you see coming in. She held music soirees there. He could never play his kind of music in her salon, you see, and he didn’t intend to start. He had it moved.” She paused a moment, then said, “I’ll play a tape we made before Leo passed, just the three of us. It isn’t studio quality, but you’ll get the idea.” She walked to a cabinet against the wall and brought out a tape player. “While you’re listening, I’ll go make some lemonade. Just push the button when you’re done. If you’d like, you could go out through the door there, up the ramp, and visit with Bob and Leo under the oak tree.”

He gave her a searching look, but she was engrossed with the tape recorder. Visit with two very old, very dead men? Not bloody likely, he thought, glancing at his watch. Ten minutes and he would be out of here. He had enough to fill his allotted space, just another meaningless puff piece.

As the music started, Luellen went up the stairs.

A very simple piano began with the opening phrases of “Blues in the Night.” The melody got more complicated with riffs and the clarinet joined in, with a guitar in the background. A three way uninhibited dialog began, with them interrupting one another, improvising, building, and then Luellen was singing the words in a plaintive voice, a clear, beautiful contralto voice. “My mama done told me, when I was in pigtails . . . .” She was drowned out by the clarinet and a piano that sounded manic.

After a time, her voice cut in, over-rode them, and she had the stage. “She told me, she warned me: Honey, you’ll sing the blues . . . .” She had few more lines before the clarinet drowned her out, and there was what Jake could only think of as a food fight, a three-way jam with first one then the other dominating, improvising.

“That lonesome whistle, dear lord that lonesome whistle . . . .” The clarinet sounded eerily like a train whistle, then overwhelmed her voice. Clarinet and piano dueled, but Luellen refused to be silenced. Her strong voice came through over them both, vehement, passionate, not to be denied. “When the glad eye is done, when the sweet talk is over, you’ll see. He’ll leave you, leave you, you’ll sing the blues.” With anguish and grief she claimed the song. She owned the song.

“My mama told me! She told me, she warned me! Honey, you’ll sing the blues in the night. Oh lord, mama was right. Mama, you were right. Blues in the night.”

A lonesome train whistle from the clarinet, an echo from the piano, and her plaintive opening repeated, eloquent with heartbreak, despair. “My mama told me. There’s blues in the night. Blues in the night. Blues in the night.” Her voice rose in a lament to a higher note than she had reached before, held there, then faded to a near whisper, “Blues in the night.”

Jake didn’t know just when he had sat down, but he was sitting at one of the tiny tables. “Wow!” he said. When he moved to turn off the tape recorder, his hand was shaking slightly.

He looked at his watch and realized that the music had played for almost fifteen minutes. He felt reluctant to go back up the stairs to find Luellen and thank her, to tell her goodbye, to say anything to her, he thought with surprise. Tell her how great she was, how great they all were? He didn’t have the words, he didn’t even know the words to express the impact the music had. Instead, he went to the French doors and out, up a concrete ramp, and along a path that led to the oak tree.

Luellen was also checking the time. Beth should be back any minute and they would have decisions to make about what she had found out. A pitcher of lemonade was on a table and she was taking ham from the refrigerator when she heard the front door open and close. A single glance at Beth was enough to tell her it had not gone well. Cindy ran past her mother and straight to the refrigerator. She was eight years old, very like Beth, the same golden-wheat colored hair, dark blue eyes, a firm little square chin, and she was always hungry.

“Honey, you get your nose out of that refrigerator,” Luellen said. “I’m fixing to make lunch and you can wait five minutes. Why don’t you go wash your hands.”

Cindy made a face, but went to the door where she paused. “Will you teach me some more songs after we eat?”

“Sure I will, honey. Right after lunch.”

As soon as she was out of sight, Luellen turned to Beth and asked, “What did they say?”

“I have to pay the taxes. Thirty-two thousand! No allowances, no exemptions, no delays. Luellen, what are we going to do?”

“We’ll think of something,” Luellen said. “Commercial property rate?”

Beth nodded. When Uncle Bob’s mother died, the property was in the county, taxes low, and no one had given a thought to how it would be swallowed up by a city moving inexorably out in all directions. Now the property was within the city limits, and this was the sole residential tract in a commercial section. Although taxes had increased dramatically, due to Uncle Bob’s age and a long family history at the site, an allowance had been made for him, taxes had been deferred until the property changed ownership. Now they were due.

“We’ll think of something,” Luellen repeated. “You go freshen up. That man came to write his article. We’ll give him some lunch, too, I reckon. He’s out under the oak tree. When you come down, you can go fetch him, and we’ll talk about all this later.”

“No amount of talking will make it work, Luellen. I’ll be down in a minute.”

Beth felt defeated, and despised feeling that way. If they had not come to visit Uncle Bob the first time, she thought, if he had remained a family secret, she would still be in New York, still working for Green America, still unhappy, but not swamped by this new responsibility. Cindy had been two when Beth first entered the house that now belonged to her.

Luellen had opened the door and looked over the man and woman and the toddler that day, six years ago. “Can I help you?”

Beth nodded. “I think so. I’m Beth Stedman, this is my husband Daniel, and she’s Cindy. I’ve come to see Uncle Bob, my mother’s great uncle.”

“Well, for heaven’s sake! You folks come right on in. Bob’s around here somewhere.”

Beth had been hesitant about the visit, but had felt it was a necessary one. “He’s a degenerate, a pervert,” her mother had said when Beth asked about him a few weeks earlier. “The family disowned him decades ago, and hardly anyone even knows he’s still alive, I guess.”

Beth had come across his name in the family Bible, along with hundreds of cousins, aunts, uncles spread across the south. When Daniel said he had to go to Memphis for the group they both worked for, she had made the decision to meet Uncle Bob.

It was an awkward meeting. He was so old, she thought that day, his face crinkled, lined, tanned as brown as a nut, and his hands gnarled by arthritis. She had met Leo that day, too. A little younger than Uncle Bob, she guessed, he was very black, and he was stooped. Everything about him seemed to sag, shoulders, pouches under his eyes, cheeks. He chuckled, and Uncle Bob’s eyes sparkled with delight and he laughed without restraint as Cindy ran around the room touching things. She touched Uncle Bob’s gnarled hand, and Leo’s wrinkly hand, stroked Luellen’s arm, and ran on to a lamp, tables . . . whatever she could reach.

In a low voice Uncle Bob had said, “Little cat, she’s marking her own.”

Before Beth could catch her, Cindy ran from the room, down a hallway, and stopped at a door, trying to turn the door knob. Beth and Luellen reached her together, and when Beth picked her up, she struggled to get down again.

“It’s the basement,” Luellen said. “I reckon we don’t want her to fall down the stairs.”

Back in the family room Beth passed the squirming child to Daniel and turned to Uncle Bob. “I guess she isn’t very civilized yet.”

“She heard the music,” Uncle Bob said, to Beth’s bewilderment. Luellen and Leo nodded. Cindy had heard the music.

Upstairs, washing her hands, Beth drew in a long breath and said in a low voice, “We’ll think of something.”

Beth had not understood what Uncle Bob had meant that day. Now she did. Cindy had heard the music, was still hearing the music, and Beth could no longer deny it.

Jake was already heading back to the house when she went out to invite him to lunch. They met on the path and introduced themselves.

“That’s a beautiful area,” Jake said. “Peaceful and beautiful.”

“We like it,” she said. “Luellen says you should stay for lunch. You’re more than welcome.”

“It’s an imposition,” he said. “I’ve taken up a lot of her time already.”

“She’s pretty adamant,” Beth said. “She always said that no one walks away hungry from her house and she doesn’t intend for you to.”

She was smiling, but there was a forced quality to it. He sensed a worry, a problem, a deep unhappiness even. She was beautiful, young, wearing a wedding ring, and not at all what he had expected when Luellen said she had inherited the house.

“Are you going to live here?” he asked as they walked back to the house.

“We almost have to,” she said. “It’s a lovely piece of property, isn’t it?” she added quickly, as if to change the subject. “Even surrounded by car lots and dollar stores, it’s still lovely. As soon as you step inside, you forget what you had to pass to reach it.”

Almost have to? What did that mean, he wondered, but asked no more questions. They entered the house through a back door and she led him to a small room with a table spread for lunch.

Jake protested feebly when Luellen indicated a chair for him. “Don’t be silly,” she said. “Lunch time, lunch on the table, why walk away from such a deal? Ham and cheese sandwiches, but if you don’t like ham, you can have just cheese, same as Cindy.”

“Ham’s yucky,” Cindy said. “Do you write stories?”

“Articles about people,” he said. She looked disappointed. “Some day I’d like to do a real story about your Uncle Bob.”

“Isn’t that what you came here to do?” Luellen asked.

He began to explain his articles, stopped, and shrugged. “I couldn’t do justice to Bob, Leo and you in the kind of space they’ll give me. That tape you let me hear was terrific. Thank you.”

Luellen nodded. “I thought you might like it.”

Beth picked at a salad but ate little, and contributed nothing to the conversation. She could scrape together enough money to pay the taxes, she was thinking, but it would be scraping bottom, plus using her credit cards. Cindy’s bank account was off limits. Her future education depended on it. Beth’s parents always gave Cindy birthday money, Christmas money, and most of it went into that account. Beth and Daniel had worked for an environmental group, Green America, which paid very little, and she knew that her parents would not help out with managing expenses on this house. They had not forgiven her for marrying a New York Jewish lawyer, especially one who didn’t make a lot of money. She suspected they had rejoiced when Daniel was critically injured while hiking. He had died after three operations. The insurance had been insufficient and now, four years later, she was still paying off medical bills. She was free to marry a proper man, her mother had hinted, one who would fit in with them and their friends. She bit her lip, and looked up to see Jake Manfried’s gaze on her.

“I’ll help Luellen clean up in the kitchen,” she said to him, “and then if you have any more questions about Uncle Bob, we can tackle them.”

He nodded. “I’d like that,” he said. “I’ll help too.”

A few minutes later they went out to sit under the oak tree to talk. “This is a wonderful place,” Jake said. “So many flowers. Who did all this?”

“When Leo died,” she said after a moment, “my husband and I, and Cindy, of course, came. While Daniel was busy helping Uncle Bob write a will, I planted a few things. That was four years ago.”

The will had been necessary, she had come to realize when her mother said they would never allow Bob Wranger to be cremated and his ashes spread next to that black pervert’s remains. Bob would have a decent Christian funeral and be buried in the family plot next to his mother and father.

Another memory flashed into being. She had been with Luellen in the kitchen when she heard the piano on that visit following Leo’s death. Uncle Bob was in the family room, Daniel at the Memphis office, and no one else was in the house except Cindy. Startled, she had looked at Luellen, who had stopped her motions of making coffee. Beth had gone to the basement door, down a few steps, far enough to see Cindy on the piano bench, picking out a tune.

“Cindy! Stop that! Get up here this instant!” she had called.

Cindy had a preoccupied expression and took a moment to look up and acknowledge the order. With obvious reluctance she had slid off the bench, crossed the basement, and started up the stairs.

Beth moved aside to let her daughter leave the stairs, then closed the door hard.

“Cindy, you are not allowed to go down there and play the piano without permission. You know better than that.”

“He said I could,” Cindy said.

“Who said you could?”

“Uncle Leo,” the child answered, and looked past Beth to Uncle Bob, who had come into the hall. “He said it was all right,” she said to Uncle Bob.

“And it is,” Uncle Bob said. “Cindy, you can play that piano whenever you want to.”

Beth felt chilled, frightened, afraid for her daughter, and almost instantly decided it was Cindy’s imagination, her fertile and unpredictable imagination. She glanced at Uncle Bob, and the chill returned.

“If Leo said it’s all right, and I say it’s all right, that’s it,” Uncle Bob said, speaking in a sober voice, not his usual way to talking to Cindy. “You were playing his favorite song, honey.”

Beth could not have named the song her daughter had been picking out. It had sounded as if she were listening to a melody and choosing the right keys to accompany it. When she asked Luellen if she knew it, Luellen had shaken her head.

“Honey,” she had said that day, “Bob and Leo were making music before I ever knew them. That must have been one of the earlier songs they played.” She had paused, then added, “Bob told me once that some of the music he had wanted to play in the salon was music he had never heard, except in his head. He called it the other music.”

“Were you always close to your great uncle?” Jake asked, drawing her back from memories and worry.

“No. I met him for the first time six years ago, but we visited quite often after that.”

From the wide French doors there drifted the opening bars of “Bye, Bye, Blackbird.” It was being played slowly.

Beth smiled. “Luellen’s teaching Cindy some of the songs the group used to play. She plays it on the guitar and sings the words, Cindy learns the melody and they go on from there.”

“Cindy is very gifted,” Jake said.

Beth nodded. Then to her surprise she told him about Uncle Bob’s final days and his death.

“Cindy came home from school on Friday, terribly upset. She said we had to go see Uncle Bob. We had to. He had become frail, but there was no crisis. Luellen had not called or anything. I tried to talk her out of it, but she kept on, and we came on Friday night. Saturday and Sunday she and Luellen played some of the old songs. They left the basement door open so he could hear. It pleased him so much. On Monday I went to the kitchen to heat some soup for him. They were playing ‘Moon River,’ one of his favorite songs. Do you know it?”

Jake nodded, vaguely familiar with it.

“They were playing the phrase,” she said, and sang the words in a sweet, low voice, “We’re after the same rainbow’s end, right around the bend, my huckleberry friend--” She broke it off there and said, “They both stopped at that same instant.”

She paused with her head lowered for a second, then continued softly. “They came up together and we all went to the family room. He was dead. He was smiling.”

Neither spoke again for several minutes as they listened to the music coming from the basement. The tempo picked up, as if sheet music were being followed effortlessly.

“Mr. Manfried,” Beth said in a strained voice, “please, that isn’t for publication, what I just told you.”

“Of course not,” he said. “Completely off the record. It’s Jake,” he added.

She nodded. “Beth.” After a moment, she said, “You’re not a New Yorker, are you? Where do you come from?”

Jake told her about growing up in Muncie, about the job he had come to hate and the difficulty of finding anything else that he could live on. She talked a little about her proper Virginia family and their dismay when she went to New York to work for Green America, and their greater dismay when she married Daniel, and their evident relief when he died. She said Uncle Bob had been gentle and understanding, and Leo was one of the kindest men she had ever known. Over the years, they had pooled income, Social Security, a retirement plan that Luellen had set up for Uncle Bob and that he had outlived. One by one the sources of income had vanished, until now, following Uncle Bob’s death, Luellen’s small retirement account and her Social Security check were all she had. Beth made so little and her debts were such that she could not see any way to keep the house and to provide for Cindy. Insurance, taxes, Cindy’s education, and for the last several years music lessons . . . She would transfer to Memphis, she said, but the pay would not increase, and the expenses would only grow.

“But I have to keep it,” she said. “I promised Uncle Bob that Luellen would join him and Leo again when the time came.” After a moment she added, “And then there’s Cindy. She belongs here.”

Jake nodded. Cindy belonged here. She was playing “Moon River,” jazzing it up, improvising. Not the way Bob would have done, not yet, but as if she had cut her baby teeth on it, and was in the process of growing into a role foreordained for her. The thought made him uneasy.

“Any one of them could have become a big star,” he said. “The trio could have made big time. Why didn’t they go that route?”

“Uncle Bob told me that they were exactly where they wanted to be, doing exactly what they wanted to do, and more than that no one should ever ask for,” she said.

In the basement, Luellen stood and patted Cindy on the head. “I’m going on up now. And you’re supposed to practice for that recital next week. Remember?”

Cindy made a face.

“Honey, your face will freeze like that one of these days,” Luellen said.

“You always say than but it never does. I want it to.”

Smiling, Luellen went to the French door and up the ramp where she stopped to gaze at Beth and Jake under the oak tree, and to listen to Cindy start playing Chopin. Her smile broadened, and she laughed softly as Cindy played it her way. She returned to the basement and went up the stairs instead of interrupting the conversation under the tree.

She was thinking about one day a long time ago. Bob had sent her away, over her protests. “Six months, girl, and if you don’t like it, come back,” he had said.

“He made me go away once,” Leo had said.

She had signed a six month contract with an agent, and she had returned. It was like walking out one door, turning around and reentering through another one.

“I’m back,” she said that day, walking in on Bob and Leo working on a new arrangement.

Leo had burst into song, “Hello, baby, it’s so good to see you back where you belong.”

“Leo, hush up. That voice is enough to make frogs take to drink,” Bob said in his growly way. “Welcome home, honey. Come sit by me. There’s something I been waiting to try out with you.”

The music was already in place. She sat by him and looked it over, and they began, “I really must go.”

“But, baby, it’s cold outside.”

Now, in the kitchen in the Memphis house, she heard the music in her head, her own clear young voice, his gravelly voice as they sang through the musical dialog the first time, and then again and yet again with variations. When they finally stopped, laughing, they were all dripping with sweat. Leo’s face looked like melting tar, Bob wiped sweat dripping off his nose with the back of his hand, and her hair was plastered to her head. It was one of the happiest days of her life.

Leo got in the last word that day. “And baby ain’t never goin’ away again.”

“Damn right,” Luellen said. She decided to make up some mint juleps. She had a feeling that the young man out there talking to Beth was here for a reason and it wasn’t to write a nonsense piece of fluff about Bob.

Beth had been aware when Cindy began to practice her recital piece, and when she began jazzing it up. She stood, shaking her head. “Chopin must be spinning in his grave, and her teacher will have a heart attack on the spot if she does that at the recital.”

Jake was grinning. “Chopin never sounded so good.”

She frowned at him and started back to the house. Jake looked at his watch for the first time since--he couldn’t remember since when, but he felt a mild shock. Six o’clock, and he had a plane to catch at eight-thirty. He hurried after Beth.

Luellen met them in the kitchen and handed him a frosty glass of mint julep, and another one to Beth. “Can you stay for dinner?” she asked him.

“Thanks, but I can’t. I have to leave soon. Luellen, when you guys played, you said people came to listen. Did you charge them?”

“No. Sometimes a few of them played along. Some brought their own brown bags. Some of them left donations, but we never asked for anything. Why?”

“You could have a restaurant down there, play some of the old music, maybe draw in some live music.”

Beth shook her head. “Neither of us knows a thing about running a restaurant. Luellen’s a wonderful cook, but she isn’t going to start cooking for a restaurant crowd. And good cooks cost money.”

“Not a full scale restaurant. A cabaret or bistro, a limited menu of just a few New Orleans specialties. Not even full time. Enough to have a business that pays for itself and maybe makes a few dollars more. What you need is enough to keep up the house, take care of taxes, things like that. You could do it. I know you could.”

“Thanks for the suggestion,” Beth said in a way that meant it was dead on arrival.

“Honey, you give me a week in New Orleans and I’ll have us a cook,” Luellen said. She looked at Jake. “We’ll talk about it. Folks are having a wake for Bob in two weeks. They’ve been getting in touch from New Orleans, Baton Rouge, Detroit, even New York, and they intend to do it up right. Come back, you hear?”

He couldn’t stop thinking about Beth on the flight back to New York. The way she ducked her head, the quick glances she cast his way now and then, her soft Virginia-accented voice. The way she twisted her wedding ring when she spoke about her dead husband. “Forget it,” he told himself, knowing that he could not do that. Another thought came to mind. Roberto Gomez. The only good thing about his job was that through it he had met some good people, interesting people, and Roberto Gomez was one of them. He ran a small recording studio that specialized in new groups cutting demos. And he had a room full of recording equipment.

The next day he called Roberto and invited him out for a beer. Two weeks later he and Roberto drove to Memphis in a rental car that Jake had paid for. All expenses, he had promised, suppressing a groan at the thought maxing out his credit card.

They arrived at eleven in the morning, thinking they would be the first, only to find the house already starting to look crowded. He motioned for Roberto to come with him, walked past the strangers, and on to the kitchen. Luellen spotted him and said they had a permit, they had invited all the neighbors, and they had to stop at two in the morning, and for them to make themselves at home. She and several others were preparing a huge kettle of red beans and another of rice. For later, she said and shooed him and Roberto away.

The music started at two in the afternoon and didn’t stop again, although now and then it paused, especially when the tape started Luellen’s song, “My Mama done told me.” There was what Jake thought of as a reverent hush until it ended, and then wild applause. Beth was at his side with tears in her eyes.

Roberto had become manic, Jake thought once that night. Roberto had been reluctant to come, dismissive of the idea of a New Orleans wake as something out of the dinosaur age, or staged for a tourist crowd. In his forties, he had seen musicians come and go, and he had heard it all, but that night he was everywhere with his recorder, getting autographs, and even dancing with two other guys.

Jake met a lot of people whose names he couldn’t keep straight, people with trumpets, with saxophones, guitars, clarinets. Most of the time he stayed close to Beth, until he would become aware of what he was doing and go somewhere else, only to gravitate back near her. Late, almost midnight, he went out under the oak tree where a group was playing “Old Man River,” and a singer who could not have been Paul Robeson but sounded like him was singing. When he finished, the group played “Summertime,” and Luellen sang. She still had the voice, Jake thought in wonder and awe. She still had the voice.

Now and then he caught a glimpse of Cindy, and she even played the piano a time or two. When she played a jazzy Chopin there was explosive applause. Beth ordered her to bed at midnight. She vanished for a short time, but she didn’t stay away.

At one-thirty a trumpet started to play “When the Saints Go Marching In.” Luellen’s voice rose and all other music stopped as she sang. When she finished, others took up the melody, then others, and soon more than two hundred musicians were all playing or singing together.

At two in the morning, it was over.

Jake went out to the oak tree where he found Beth and a few others. Roberto was there, drenched with sweat, a great big smile on his face. “Man, I owe you,” he said as Jake drew near. “I owe you big.”

“When you’re ready,” Jake said, “we should start hunting for a motel that’s still open for business.”

“You boys don’t need a motel,” Luellen said. “Folks are going to be crashing all over the house, but I kept a room up on the third floor for you two.”

“Good and better,” Roberto said. “I’m wiped out. Totally wiped out.”

When Jake woke up late the next morning, Roberto had already left the room they had shared. He found him in the breakfast room having coffee and a beignet. Thinking Roberto would be more than ready to head back home, he was surprised when Roberto said, “Let’s hang out awhile. Something I want to talk over with Luellen.”

“Stan Marconi brought a bushel basket of beignets from New Orleans,” Beth said. “A crew started cleaning up a few hours ago. They’ve all been so terrific!” She looked exhausted, but happy. “The poor meadow took a hit, but it’s tough. It will recover. I planned a low maintenance meadow back there from the start. You can’t kill it with music.”

A large brown man looked into the room, searching, spotted Roberto and asked, “You got any more of them releases? I didn’t sign one yet.”

“Sure do,” Roberto said. “Guido, isn’t it?”

“You got it, man.”

Roberto pulled a paper from a bag by his chair and passed it to Guido, who had come into the room. “On the dotted line, pal. Terms and signature.”

Without more than a glance at the printed paper, Guido scrawled his name, and added something Jake couldn’t see. He waved generally at them all and left. Roberto put the paper in the bag without a word.

It was late in the afternoon before everyone was gone except Roberto and Jake. Luellen joined them in the breakfast room. She sank into a chair and said, “Whew!” Then she turned to Roberto. “You said you wanted to talk to me. I may not be very coherent, but what’s on your mind?”

He was all business after that. He wanted to produce an album, a New Orleans Wake. “I’ll filter out the noise, make some selections, and go on from there,” he said. “When you open your cabaret, you can play it nights you don’t have live music.”

She shook her head. “We can’t do that, pay all those folks for releases.”

Roberto pulled out some of the papers he had been collecting, glanced at a few of them, and passed them to her. “I told them all what was happening here, what you wanted to do to keep the place, to keep Bob and Leo safe without a big box store sitting on them, or cars dripping oil on them.”

Luellen looked at the papers he had given her and caught in her breath. “Releases? You were getting releases all night? Guido, Pete, Sully, others, all they want is a free meal after we’re open?”

“Some of them wanted real money, but they won’t be included in the album,” Roberto said smugly. “They cut themselves right out by wanting cold cash. God knows there’s enough others to make up an album, to make two, three albums.”

“But why ask me about it?” she said. “You can produce an album and you have the releases to do it.”

“You didn’t read the top part,” Roberto said. “It will be your album. I’m just the producer.”

“How can that work?”

“I want the lead song to be yours, the one you played last night. ‘Blues In the Night.’”

Beth stood then and said, “I’ll leave you two to discuss business.”

Jake got up too and walked out with her. They went to sit under the oak tree. “You’re really going to do it? Open a cabaret?”

“We crunched numbers and came up with one we think we can work with,” she said. “It really was a great idea, Jake. I never would have thought of it, but we think we can make it work. And with music from last night, I’m positive we can. Eventually we’ll bring in live music, but this will be a start.”

Jake visited many times after that, with or without an excuse. He was there for the opening of the cabaret. On Cindy’s tenth birthday, Beth was no longer wearing a wedding ring.

Now they often sit under the oak tree in the long warm summer evenings. The cabaret is open three nights a week, and they talk sometimes about making it four nights, but there’s no rush. Reservations are lined up for months to come. Weekends that Cindy and the Krewe play, the place is jammed, with reservations required a year in advance. Cindy never leaves for long. She seldom goes on tour, but sometimes her group goes to New York to produce a CD in Roberto’s snazzy studio. His first album was a hit. As Luellen’s heir, Beth receives the continuing royalties and license fees, not big money, but sufficient.

Often out here, under the tree, Beth tries to think through a conversation she had with Luellen when she asked if there had ever been a lover in her life.

“Honey, love’s a funny word. Means so many different things, now doesn’t it? Family love, love of country, of flag, mother for child, religious love, love of a friend, love for your mate. All different. There were a few men along the way, love along the way, but it never was the right sort of love. None of them really did fit in, belong somehow or other. I reckon there’s something even stronger than the love we talk about, more than friendship, more than sexual love, more like a finishing of something not really whole. I think I learned that when you find where you belong, it’s foolishness to keep moving on.”

Beth suspects that she hasn’t yet thought through to the bottom of that, but meanwhile she’s where she wants to be, and doing what she wants to do. And she has Jake. It’s enough.

Sometimes they talk about opening a real restaurant up in the salon, which no one ever uses. “Maybe some day,” they agree. Jake writes a column for the River News, and he is writing his book about Uncle Bob. It’s going slowly, but over the years Luellen told him so many stories, so much magic, it can’t be hurried.

They hold hands and talk, and sometimes, especially when Cindy is away and the basement is still and dark, they listen to the other music. The songs vary, but what he likes best is when Uncle Bob is at the piano, Leo with the clarinet, and Luellen is singing, “‘My mama done told me . . . .’”

Shadows on the Wall of the Cave

ASHLEY WAS DREAMING WHEN HER PHONE RANG. In the dream she was in absolute dark, running wildly, crying out soundlessly, screaming, hearing nothing. A pin point of light, a single star in a void, blinked out when she ran toward it, only to appear somewhere else, again and again.

She came awake, wet with sweat, shivering, and groped for the phone. It was her father.

“Your grandmother died during the night,” he said. “I’ll catch an eight o’clock flight. Do you want to fly down with me?”

She shook her head. “I’ll drive.” Her voice sounded hollow, strange. She cleared her throat. “I’ll get there tonight.”

“Give us a call when you get in,” he said. “Drive carefully.”

After hanging up, Ashley pulled the thin summer blanket over her, then pulled the bedspread up also, cold, shivering. She seldom knew what brought on that nightmare, but three times this week she had known. Before her mother had flown to Frankfort to be with Gramma, she had said they would go to the farm after the funeral, and she wanted Ashley to go with them. “There are things she would have wanted you to have,” she had said.

Ashley had refused. The last time she had been to the farm, seventeen years ago, she had promised herself that she would never go back.

Huddled in bed, covered, even her head covered, in spite of herself that day surged into memory again.

For years every summer, Ashley’s mother Maribeth packed up Ashley and suitcases into the car and drove from Pittsburg to her parents’ farm in Kentucky. Ashley’s Aunt Ella left Atlanta at the same time with her two sons to spend the same weeks on the farm where the sisters had grown up, where Grampa had grown up as well.

It was a time of joyous freedom for the children when they could run in and out at will and play without the restrictions of a big city. Their companion in play was Grampa’s dog Skipper, a short-haired brown and white mutt, who, Grampa said, would kill any snake he came across and wouldn’t let a stranger on the farm without setting up a ruckus.

Below the house, past the kitchen garden, through a small area of woods, was Rabbit Creek, no more than ten inches deep, where they could splash and play, hunt for crawdads, find miniature monsters lurking under rocks. Sometimes they populated the creek with crocodiles, or piranha, watched lions and tigers come to drink, or they spied submarines on secret missions. The woods on one side after a few hundred yards gave way to corn fields, and on the other the land rose in a low rocky hill, their Mt. Everest, or the magic mountain. Big Foot lived high on the mountain, or a dragon guarded its treasure, or bears prowled.

But best of all was the cave. The entrance was narrow, one-person wide, with a massive boulder on one side, and a limestone outcropping on the other. The passage curved around the boulder, widened and descended in a shallow slope to a small chamber where the cave ended. No more than twenty feet in all, dry, dimly lighted from the outside, it was a hideout, a castle dungeon, a spaceship, submarine, whatever Nathan declared it to be.

Nathan was eleven, their leader in all games, Ashley was nine that summer, both with hair turning darker, mud-colored, Ashley said. Joey was seven, still a towhead, a daredevil who was determined to do whatever his big brother did. Neither Ashley nor Joey disputed Nathan’s leadership.

That day they were explorers in the dark African jungle, alert for headhunters who were roaming the area. “There’s a gold mine somewhere out here,” Nathan said. “We’ll find it. I’ll buy an airplane with my share.”

Joey nodded. “Me, too. A jet fighter.”

“I’ll buy a castle,” Ashley said. “With a moat.”

Nathan consulted a scrap of paper. “Ten paces from the river, turn right, and find the big boulder. This way.” He led them to the boulder and cried out in astonishment, “Look! A mine entrance!”

“The headhunters!” Joey yelled. “I saw one over there!”

He pushed past Nathan and fled into the cave, with Ashley and Nathan close behind.

“Skipper, stay. Guard,” Nathan ordered.

There was no point in trying to get the dog to go inside. No amount of coaxing or cajoling, or bribery with a bone or dog biscuits had ever enticed him inside. He flopped down at the entrance, tongue lolling, and became a guard dog.

The chamber was a foot or so higher than Nathan’s head, irregular in shape, and big enough for three to be comfortable without touching one another or the walls, although a step or two in any direction would put a wall within reach. Joey sat down cross-legged as Nathan unslung a small day pack, prepared to hand out provisions, cookies and a thermos of Kool Aid.

“We’ll wait them--” Nathan started, and the light went out.

Ashley reached for Nathan, but her hand felt nothing. “What happened?” she said. “What’s the matter?” Her voice rose as she called, “Nathan, where are you? What happened to the light? Nathan?” The black was intense, without a glimmer of light, and there was no sound except for her own voice, and then a strangled sound of her whisper. “Nathan! Answer me! Joey!”

The silence was as intense as the darkness. Ashley took a step, another, to where Nathan had been. She was sweeping her hands before her, trying to find one or the other of them, crying now, pleading, calling Nathan, then Joey. Panicked, crying, yelling, she ran with her hands outstretched to reach the wall, to reach anything. Running this way, that, screaming, encountering nothing, hearing nothing. No walls, no cousins, no light from outside. She began screaming, “Mommy! Daddy! Mommy!” There wasn’t even an echo, as if the darkness swallowed her cries.

She ran and cried and her screams had become whimpers only when she saw a tracery of light and ran toward it. As she ran, the light increased until it defined the narrow cave entrance. Stumbling, she ran to it, scraped her arm on the wall in her dash to get outside, to safety.

Skipper rose to greet her with a wagging tail, and she tripped over him, fell, then pulled herself up and ran as fast as she could to the path that led to the house.

“Mommy!” she screamed when she ran into the kitchen. Her mother was at the sink. She dropped a pan and caught Ashley, who flung her arms around her and pressed her head hard against her, wracked with great heaving sobs that left her unable to scream or speak.

“What happened? Did you fall down? Honey, it’s all right now. Calm down. Tell me what happened?”

When her mother tried to push her away a little, Ashley clung ever harder.

She heard Nathan’s voice and lifted her head enough to see him stagger into the kitchen. “Jesus! Oh, Jesus!” He said again and again, his face the color of dry putty.

“Nathan! What’s wrong?” Aunt Ella cried. “Where’s Joey?”

With the question the nightmare became family business.

Years passed before Ashley could sort the snapshot memories of that day, late into the evening, and the chaotic days that followed. Relatives came, her father and Nathan’s father were there. Strangers, some with dogs, were everywhere, policemen, reporters and television people. Skipper was tied to the porch rail and he lay groaning, moaning, growling. Different people asked Ashley a lot of questions. A woman doctor asked her if Nathan had done something to her. Others asked if he had done something to Joey and scared her so much she promised not to tell. Did Joey have an accident and she and Nathan had become afraid and hid him?

That first day and night Ashley had clung to her mother as a baby might and her mother had to stay with her until she fell asleep. When she woke up during the night, alone in the dark, she began to scream and couldn’t stop. After that, she kept a light on in her room day and night for fear of the return of the blackness.

One of the most vivid snapshot memories was when Grampa grabbed Nathan by the shoulders and shook him. “Tell me the truth, boy! What happened to Joey? What did you do to Joey?”

Joey was Grampa’s favorite. They all knew that. Grampa said Joey was Bill made over. Ashley’s Uncle Bill had died in Vietnam when he was nineteen. He was just a name to her, as unreal as any other historical figure.

There were theories: a pool of gas had formed in the cave, sickened and disoriented the children and Joey had run out first, had hidden somewhere, maybe in a smaller cave. He had found a second passage, wandered into it and had become lost. A kidnapper had grabbed him. The tabloids suggested flying saucers, alien abduction. Grampa rejected all of them. He had played in that cave, his kids had played there. Experts had gone over it inch by inch. There was no other passage, and no gas. And Skipper had not barked at a stranger, a kidnapper. The heavy question remained in the air: had Nathan killed his little brother, buried him somewhere?

When Christmas grew near that winter, her mother said maybe they should go just for a day or two. They had always spent Christmas at the farm along with Ella and her family. Ashley became ill and vomited repeatedly for the next two days. No more mention was made of going to the farm for Christmas. It wasn’t even brought up as a possibility for the regular summer visit. Ella had collapsed that spring in a nervous breakdown.

Ashley finally forced herself out of bed, into the shower, to get dressed, pack some things for her trip. Her grandmother’s death had been expected for months. Grief had long ago morphed to a dull acceptance, possibly even relief. It had not been a kind death. She had become ill with cancer, had surgery, and spent her last two years in a nursing home in Frankfort. Grampa had stayed with her, leaving the house empty, and a tenant farmer managing the farm.

During a visit to the nursing home, Ashley had seen Nathan again, the first time since that summer. They had kept in touch since then. He would go to the funeral, he had told her, and they planned to attend the church service and the funeral itself, and then duck out of the family gathering afterward. Gramma and Grampa had many living relatives in the Frankfort area, nephews, nieces, their offspring, cousins. Ashley knew very few of them.

The problem was what to do about Grampa. Decisions had to be made. He wanted to go back to his own house, his farm, back to the daily chores he had done all his life, but he was also developing dementia. An indelible image in Ashley’s head was of Grampa shaking Nathan, demanding to know what he had done to Joey.

When Ashley thought of Joey, he was always running, screaming in the black void until he went mad and died.

It was a long drive, but done in one day, and she had a motel reservation for when she arrived. She had left her departure date open. There was little need for her to return home at any given time, working as she did for a Web design company whose employees worked at home for the most part.

The service was as awful as she had feared, and her mother insisted that she ride in the limousine with the family to the cemetery. That part, at least, would be brief, Ashley thought, and went with them. At the graveside the preacher had just begun a prayer when suddenly Grampa jerked away from Uncle Walt and pointed at Nathan, who had been standing as far from him as space permitted.

“He’s the one!” Grampa yelled. “He’s the one who killed my Billy! He’s the one!” He began to cry.

Everyone turned to stare as Nathan walked away swiftly. Ashley jerked loose from her mother’s grasp of her arm and hurried after him.

She caught up at the parking lot and fell into step at his side, nearly running to keep up. “He’s demented, Nathan. Really demented.”

“Yeah, I know. Did you come in a limo?”

“Yes.”

“I drove myself. Let’s get the hell out of here.”

They were both silent as he drove aimlessly, out into the countryside, back to the city, out again. Finally he pulled up at a tavern. “Let’s get a beer,” he said.

In a corner booth in the nearly empty tavern with steins of beer before them, he said, “It’s been hell, hasn’t it?”

She nodded. “More for you than for me. I just had counseling and shrinks for a couple of years.” She took a long drink of beer. “They tried hypnosis to make me remember what really happened.”

“That’s the question, isn’t it? What happened? After Mother’s breakdown, as soon as I turned twelve, it was off to a boarding school for me. I never really lived at home again. Boarding schools, summer camps, prep school.”

She hadn’t known that. “You said you were studying physics. In college, I mean.”

“And philosophy, and psychology. A lifetime studying, and the question still is what happened? I’m something of an expert on disappearances, and even alien abductions. Ask me anything.” His smile was without mirth. He drained his stein and held it aloft to signal for another one. “You know Gramma left us some money?”

She shook her head. “I didn’t even know she had money of her own.”

“Dad told me. A hundred thousand for each of us. Maybe more than that. Apparently she stashed something away for each grandchild when we were born, and it’s grown and grown. Like Topsy, I guess. Anyway, it’s there.”

She almost laughed at the thought of money of her own. Her father had become a rather famous economist, had written books that were considered important to other economists, and he would be more than ready to advise her about wise investments of a new-found fortune.

“All those years going to school, didn’t you come up with anything?” she asked after a moment.

“A physics instructor, a pal, said Joey fell through a hole in the universe, into a parallel universe maybe. Of course, the family still thinks I conked him and buried him somewhere.”

“They used search dogs. They’re trained to find bodies. The family knows that.”

Others were beginning to come into the tavern, the noise level rose as someone put on twangy country music.

“It’s a question of what to believe,” Nathan said. “The impossible, or the unthinkable. They prefer the unthinkable. Facing an impossibility is more than they can deal with. Would you believe if you hadn’t been there?”

“I’m not even sure I believe in spite of being there,” she said, but the words did not carry the light tone she had intended. “It was impossible. And I have trouble with holes in universes. But people see and accept the impossible a lot. A weeping Virgin Mary, or a Christ figure oozing blood. Others. Reports from around the world say the same kinds of things.”

“Images that bolster one’s core belief system, by their definition, are not impossible. It’s when you threaten those deep beliefs, shake people’s reality, that they’re forced to deny what they’ve seen and opt for rational explanations no matter how ugly or incredible.”

“The family was hit by an earthquake off the charts as far as their realty is concerned,” she said after a moment.

Nathan nodded. “Still keep the lights on day and night?”

“I can’t shake it. I found that I couldn’t work in a cubicle. My first job. I was getting a stiff neck from turning every few seconds to make sure it was still open. I had to quit. Small enclosed spaces, dark. Still there.”

“Elevators must be another kind of hell for you.”

“Walking up and down stairs is good for the heart,” she said as lightly as she could.

“Right,” he said. “Let’s order something to eat. Hamburgers, fries, undo all the good that stair climbing brought about.”

Later, driving her to her motel, he said, “Ashley, I have to go back. Come with me.”

She tensed so much she was almost paralytic, catatonic. “I can’t,” she whispered.

“You don’t have to go inside. We’ll take a rope, tie it to my wrist, and you hold the other end, yank me out if . . . It can be a guide rope, a way out if the lights go off. That’s all. I want to see it again, measure it. I can’t get a picture of it in my head, just a black space, that’s all that comes. I have to see it again.”

“Nathan, we agreed. We said we wouldn’t go there.”

“I have to. Kids played in that cave for more than a hundred years. What was different that one time? They went over it inch by inch and nothing happened. Why that one time? I have to see it again.”

He was staring straight ahead, his hands tight on the steering wheel as he spoke. “Maybe it happens periodically, even predictably, but no one had ever been there at the right time before. Was it something about us, the three of us, the configuration of our bodies or something? Joey sat down, remember? Was he in the middle, dead center? Is that what was different? I have to go. I’ll get a rope and a steel tape measure, measure the goddamn cave, make a map.”

“Nathan, please, don’t. Stay away. Even Skipper knew something was wrong with the cave. Remember? He wouldn’t go in.”

“I remember,” he said softly. “And we were going to find a fortune in gold. I remember.”

They reached her motel where light shone from around the drape she had not closed completely.

“I’ll pick you up around nine,” he said, exactly the same way he had named the games they would play, their roles in the games. Numbly she nodded.

The farm house appeared to be intact but neglected, with leaves and scraps of paper in drifts on the front and back porches,the yard unkempt and weedy, with overgrown hedges, seedling sumac and maple trees, a lot of Queen Ann’s lace in bloom. It made Ashley sadder than the funeral had done.

She and Nathan skirted the house and found that the path to Rabbit Creek had vanished amongst brambles and more weeds. Nathan went first, stamping down what he could, holding back a few low-hanging branches for Ashley.

The creek was unchanged, as was the cave entrance. Ashley felt a wave of nausea as they drew near the boulder. “No closer,” she said in a low voice, six feet or more from the entrance.

Nathan nodded. He had a length of nylon rope, a thin pale life line to lead him to safety if necessary. He tied a loop in one end, slipped it over his hand, and handed her the coiled rope. Without speaking, he waved to her and walked the rest of the way to the entrance while she played out the line. He passed out of sight around the boulder.

She turned her back on the cave, and gazed at the corn field across Rabbit Creek. Grampa once said that sometimes the creek flooded the other side where the ground was lower. She tried to see wind-whipped waves instead of corn. It was hard to imagine the friendly little creek flexing enough muscle to cover whole fields.

Suddenly the rope in her hand twitched, and she spun around, ready to start pulling. The tension on the line relaxed, then jerked again. She yanked it hard. Then she dropped it and felt her world spinning, her vision blurring. She flung out her hand to clutch a nearby tree trunk to keep from falling.

Joey had emerged from the cave. Close behind him Nathan was straightening up from a doubled over position.

Joey looked exactly the same he had looked that day, wearing the same stained, smudged t-shirt, blue shorts, sneakers. The same tow head, sunburned face, dried mud on his leg. The same wiry body, knobby knees, deceptively thin arms . . .

He stopped moving when he saw Ashley, and when Nathan touched his shoulder, he flinched away. He was so little, Ashley thought. He was so little.

“Joey,” she whispered. “It’s me, Ashley.”

She took a step toward him, another, and he shrank away before she could touch him. She drew back her hand and looked from him to Nathan. He was pale and strangely pinched, much older suddenly.

“I was starting to measure, and saw something from the corner of my eye. It was Joey, sitting on the floor, just like he was before.” Nathan’s voice was unfamiliar, hoarse, and he was staring at Joey as if hypnotized by the slight boy.

Joey turned from him to Ashley, back to Nathan. His lips were trembling, he looked ready to cry. “Where’s Nathan?” he asked. “Where’s Ashley? Who are you?”

Nathan leaned against the boulder. “Joey, where were you? Did you see anything? Do you remember anything?”

Joey shook his head, edging away from Nathan, keeping his distance from Ashley. “I didn’t go anywhere. I just sat down. Nathan said he had something to eat. Then you were there.”

Suddenly he turned and bolted for the path to the house. Nathan ran after him and caught him, but not before he had gone a step or two into the brambles. Nathan lifted him and held him above the vines, crashing through brambles up the path, and set him down in the yard. He kept hold of Joey’s arm as Ashley made her way after them, trying to avoid what she could of the punishing thorns. They were all scratched by then, and Joey was bleeding on his legs and arms. He began to cry.

“We’ll go somewhere to clean those scratches, get some bandaids,” Nathan said.

“Nathan, look, the back door is open,” Ashley said, pointing to the house. “We can go inside and clean him up.” That meant that her parents and Nathan’s were already there, in the house. And they were due for a shock, she thought grimly. She reached for Joey’s hand and, with her holding one hand and Nathan the other, they walked the rest of the way to Grampa’s house.

When they entered, Maribeth called from the living room, “Ashley, is that you? I’m glad you changed your mind.” She walked from the hall into the kitchen, stopped, staring, and then screamed.

The others ran to the kitchen. Aunt Ella swayed, the color drained from her face, and Uncle Walt caught her and eased her into a chair. His face was livid, a tic jerked in his jaw, as he yelled at Nathan, “What abomination is this? Where did you get that child? What are you trying to do to us?”

Ashley, still holding Joey’s hand, walked toward the bathroom, and both sets of parents moved aside hurriedly to let them pass. The voices rose behind them as she went into the bathroom with Joey and closed the door.

She lifted him to the counter and looked inside a drawer for a washcloth and towel, then another drawer where there was soap. “We’ll clean up those scratches and see how many bandaids you’ll need. You could end up looking like a mummy, you know.”

His smile was fleeting, but at least he wasn’t crying any more, she thought gratefully, conscious of his wariness, the intensity of his gaze as he watched her soap the washcloth.

“Ashheap?” he said.

She swung around to glare at him, baring her teeth, making a monster face. “You’re in for it,” she said. “Hanging out to dry time. You know what I said I’d do if you called me that again.”

His grin was longer lasting this time. “You won’t catch me. You’re bleeding, too,” he said, pointing to her arm. He winced and drew back when she began to wash his face.

“It was just like Sleeping Beauty’s wall of thorns to keep everyone out,” she said. “I guess a boy can be like a Sleeping Beauty, get magicked away for a long time.”

“Why didn’t you come get me?”

“Couldn’t find you,” she said. “I guess you were magicked into Magic Mountain, out of sight or something.” Gently she washed his arms and patted them dry. So far the scratches were minor, superficial. The voices from the other room rose and fell, rose even more. She ignored them and began to wash his legs.

“So while you slept, Nathan and I grew up all the way, and then we found you again. How about that?”

“I didn’t go to sleep,” he said, then yanked away from the washcloth. “That burns.”

“Looks like mummy time coming up real soon now. Promise you won’t go around scaring anyone.”

He grinned.

She finished with his legs and began to search the cabinets for bandaids. There didn’t seem to be any. “Of course, if you’re all bandaged up, you probably can’t swim in the motel pool,” she said.

“What motel pool?”

“Where I’m staying. A great big pool out back, but I guess there are rules about bandages and mummies and stuff.”

He was obviously torn between being a mummy and going swimming. He looked at his legs, then his arms, and shook his head. “Nothing’s bleeding.”

A couple of the scratches were bleeding a little, but nothing a bandaid or two wouldn’t take care of, and she had bandaids in her cosmetic bag in the motel.

Joey jumped down from the counter as if to demonstrate his fitness for swimming. He watched her wash and dry her own scratches, and afterward they walked together toward the clamorous voices in the living room, where an abrupt hush greeted then. Joey slipped his hand into Ashley’s and she gave him a reassuring squeeze. Maribeth and Aunt Ella were both pale, Ella shaking hard, and Uncle Walt’s face was fiery red. Ashley’s father, who looked more like a dock worker than an academic economist, was slightly removed from the others, watchful and wary. Every eye was fixed on Joey, but no one made a motion toward him or spoke to him.

“Let’s go,” Nathan said. “Joey, how does McDonald’s sound? One or two burgers?”

Several hours later Ashley and Nathan were sitting on a terrace overlooking the swimming pool where Joey was playing with a few other kids. Ashley and Nathan both had a tall cold vodka with bitter lemon. She felt they both deserved and needed it.

“What was all the yelling about?” Ashley asked. It was the first chance they’d had to talk. They had gone to McDonalds, then to a big box store to buy some clothes, including a swimsuit, for Joey. Nathan and Joey were registered in the same motel Ashley was in.

“First,” Nathan said, grinning slightly, “they accused me of hiring a child actor. Then trying to pass my own son off as Joey. Dad said they could have me arrested for something or other, or was I trying to kill my mother with one foul trick after another. Then it got ugly.” He laughed and took a sip of his drink.

Joey was on the high drive. He didn’t dive off, he cannon balled, landed with a tremendous splash, and bobbed up like a cork.

“Anyway,” Nathan went on, “I reminded them that a simple DNA test would settle the question of parents. Then it was a matter of publicity, a new media circus even worse than the first one. Careers destroyed, and so on.”

His father was a high executive in a firm that supplied electronic equipment to the government, and of course Ashley’s father was a distinguished university professor. Nathan was enjoying himself, Ashley realized, as he said, “They would both be ruined by a new round of tabloid-type publicity. The farm would be overrun by the curious, photographers, television crews, flying saucer nuts . . . They’d dog our footsteps day and night and Joey would be at risk. Except,” he added dryly, “he didn’t call him by name, just ‘the boy.’ My mother could go into another breakdown with the stress. You get the drift.”

She nodded. They wanted Joey to go back to wherever he had been for seventeen years. “So what’s the solution?”

“We’ll have a conference tomorrow, after we’ve all had a little time to think about it. My conference, Ashley, my terms. Or I go public. And Mother, at age sixty, will have to explain to her garden club friends how it happens that suddenly she’s a new mother to a seven-year old feisty boy.”

He laughed. “I want the farm house and three or four acres around it. They’ll probably get Grampa declared incompetent and sell the rest of the farm. Dad will have to arrange for the right papers for Joey, school, medical records, birth certificate, whatever is needed. He has connections, he can manage that. And I’ll become Joey’s father. No publicity. They’ll come around to accepting a grandson. That’s not going to be a problem as long as they can avoid the publicity.”

Joey was on the high dive again. They watched him jump off.

“You want to live on the farm?” she asked then.

“Not exactly. I intend to set up a research facility. I’ll get in touch with my old physics instructor and, believe me, he’ll jump at the chance to join me.” His grin was very much like Joey’s then, with the same kind of shining eyes. “Will you help?”

“How?”

“Be a second parent, or aunt or something. But aside from that, we’re going to need a good computer person, a research assistant, something of that sort. Someone who really knows the truth. You.”

She remembered how Joey had slipped his hand into hers as they approached the stunned and disbelieving family. She suspected that Nathan was going to be very busy for years to come, and Joey would need a hand again and again. Not the hand of a paid care taker, her hand. Besides, she really was a good computer geek. She nodded. “I’ll help. Joey’s going to need an aunt. And a lot of tutoring to catch up with seventeen lost years before school starts again. What about the research?”

“I’ll put a heavy duty gate on the cave entrance, and we’ll come up with the right tools, the right methods to investigate, really investigate a hole in the universe, the doorway to a different universe, a place where a second or less is equal to seventeen of our years.” He laughed again, and nodded toward Joey, who was poised to jump off the high dive again. He looked too small to be up there alone. “The living proof of multiple universes,” Nathan said.

Ashley’s gaze drifted from Joey to the improbable blue water in the pool, the green trees nearby, borders of vivid flowers . . . She felt as if reality had undergone a shift of a magnitude she could not yet grasp. A sharp memory rose in her mind of her grandfather releasing a little fish and putting it back in a lake. “Too small,” he had said. “Not a keeper.”

Mockingbird

MY SISTER AND I ARE ON THE PORCH at our grandfather’s house. Beyond the expanse of lawn before me, the land slopes down to a lake, ringed by cattails and some brambles. It is a small lake, hardly more than a pond, blue in the sunlight, with silver streaks where the water is riffled by a breeze. On the far side is the Holt farm. Closer, butterflies and bees are giddy from nectar and pollen, hummingbirds hum. I don’t know the names of the flowers in bloom: yellows, reds, pink, too many, too untidy, a mass of blooming plants; white clover dots the lawn, birds call from the nearby oak tree. The countryside is not silent, never quiet.

I am in a low-slung chair, my sister on the swing, lazily moving back and forth. There is a squeak with each forward motion. Amidst the random music of birds and bees, the wind in leaves, the squeak is as regular, as monotonous and predictable as a metronome. I wish it would stop. I have things to think about, decisions to make, and the regularity of the squeak interferes.

My mind is a sieve. I fill it with words, with images, pages to be written, great thoughts to ponder, none of them related to the present dilemma. When I wander through the maze of myself, look again, the miracles of my mind are aswirl, as if caught in a tidepool of receding water, forever gone.

I open my dissertation, still in manuscript, and see the words as if written by another, alien to me. I nod as phrases summon concepts, the way one nods at strangers who take on familiarity when they draw near, but they are not my words; I have no claim on them. When my gaze moves on, the passed phrases leave a blank space.

Birds fill the empty space and twitter and chirp and cry raucously. Random noise, like the noise in my head. When one approaches me, I close my eyes.

The mockingbird says, “Why do you close your eyes?”

--So you won’t pluck them out.--

“Why won’t you speak to me?”

--No one talks to birds.--

“Look at me just once.”

I don’t close my eyes tighter, but I think tighter and it’s the same thing.

Across the porch my sister murmurs, “Express, address, redress, compress, repress, suppress.”

“What are you talking about?”

“What God does with trivialities.”

“Impress?”

She gives me a pitying, or possibly scornful, look. I close my manuscript and put it aside, and she continues to swing gently with her book in her lap, murmuring in a voice too low now to be intelligible. Back and forth with the jarring squeak.

“What on earth are you doing?” Irritation, exasperation, frustration: I hear them all in my own voice.

“I’m catching butterflies. They are so beautiful.”

I walk across the porch to see what she has been reading; it is a dictionary. Just that. Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary.

“Fluorescent blue, amber and scarlet, magenta, gold . . .”

“What are you talking about?”

“The words. The beautiful words, butterflies in my net.”

Her mind is a net that catches and holds them, and mine is a sieve that lets them escape.

We both love Bobby Holt, and have loved him since we were children. He looked at us with a yearning expression, first one then the other and, in apparent confusion, retreated. He loves us both. He has not married. If she catches him in her net, he will never be released again.

We were awed by our grandfather, who looked like a giant when we were young, visiting on his farm. When we returned home, I thought of him as big enough to hold both of us in the palm of his hand. By the time we were eleven, we had overgrown Grandmother, and I thought of her as doll-like. My sister put words to my thoughts: “He’s a roar and she’s a whisper. A tree and a twig. A willow and a wisp.”

When they came to our graduation from high school, I was shocked to see that Grandfather was not a giant, but just an ordinary tall man.

“The enchantment stopped at the farm gate,” my sister said.

One summer at the farm we watched smoke rise, and we smelled fire throughout the day and into the night when the sky glowed in the east as the fire moved over the dry forests. Grandfather glared at the flickering eastern lights, and he said it would not reach us; it would stop at the lake. When it moved around the lake and drew closer, he said it again: it would not reach us. The rain would come first. And it did. The fire burned Mr. Holt’s cornfield across the lake, but it did not reach us.

“With his will and his eyes he held the false sunrise at bay,” she whispered that night. “The enchantment is restored.”

When I recall him now, it is that image: he is facing the fire in the east, his face fierce, fists clenched, and he is a giant again.

We came this time for his funeral.

The first time I realized we were not exactly the same was when we were eight or nine. Always before, looking at her had been like gazing into the mirror, but that afternoon, looking at her I saw someone else. Someone strange and foreign. I ran to the bathroom and stared into the mirror; she followed. And there, gazing at us side by side in the glass, I saw again the difference in the reflections.

She was alien, a dreaminess in her eyes perhaps, an expression I could not copy. “What do you see?” I asked in a whisper.

“Me. You. Us. Yin and Yang, before and after, hard and soft, opaque and transparent, alike and different.”

I stopped her. She couldn’t explain what she saw any more than I could. “Good and bad?”

She shook her head. “Incomplete.”

I didn’t know what she was talking about, and that was the real difference I discovered that summer. I often didn’t understand what she meant. I didn’t know what opaque meant, and when I tried to look it up, I couldn’t find it in the dictionary. Later I wondered who was transparent, who opaque.

Our mother treated us like dolls, her precious, animated dolls, she often said. She also talked about how difficult it had been to carry two, how difficult labor had been, how she had suffered, but of course none of that was our fault. We must not blame ourselves. She bought identical everything for us. When we turned twelve we stopped wearing our identical clothes. My sister wore pink, I chose blue; she dressed in jeans and a yellow shirt, I wore jeans and a green top. I cut my hair short, hers was still long. That was the only time I could remember being first. Mother said she was very disappointed in us.

Born thirty minutes before me, my sister was first to cut a tooth, first at potty training, first to talk. Always first. At twelve she declared that when she grew up she would marry Bobby Holt.

I could do math and science; I understood process, physical objects, the abstractions of algebra. She did poetry and art. She understood the labryinth of her psyche and could translate the impulses and images she found there. I have a dissertation not yet finished; she has published two slim books of poetry. I don’t understand her poetry or the illustrations she did in water color. Neither does she. I asked her once and she said the poem was what it was, what it meant was what it was. I didn’t understand that, either. She hasn’t read my dissertation. It has formulas and graphs.

I tried to explain quantum mechanics to her: probability, indeterminacy, chaos theory, photon as either wave or particle, right spin, left. Her eyes glazed and her expression became soft and blank. If one electron has a right spin, its matching electron has a left spin; change one, the other changes . . .

Destroy one; does the other languish and die? I didn’t know the answer, especially when applied to the macrocosm.

She lives in the sun, I in her shadow, yearning for sunlight.

She could not write a short story for our class. I told her if a, then certain things must follow, until you end with x,y,z. Cause and effect. She looked at me in wonder, then wrote something, and I wrote a story. Hers was considered brilliant, an incomprehensible prose poem, mine a story with a beginning, middle, end. Competent.

My dissertation will be competent. An old joke on campus: What do you call a medical student who finishes at the bottom of his class? Answer: Doctor. What do you call a physics major who finishes in the bottom of the class? Assistant.

Grandfather left the farm jointly to our father, my sister, and me. “We’ll sell it, of course,” Father said, and my sister shook her head. She wants to live here. “Talk to her,” he said to Mother, then included me in his indignant glare. “Talk sense into her.” The will of any two of us will prevail.

Mother never talked to us or with us. She sometimes talked at us. Father went back to his middle-management job in a high-tech firm in Seattle. He will return tomorrow for the weekend, and on Sunday he and Mother will both go back to Seattle. Now we are here, Mother, my sister, and I, and no one has mentioned selling the farm again. Mother is relying on me to talk sense into my sister. An impossible task.

It has taken me twenty years to learn what my sister grasped intuitively when we were children; we are both incomplete. When the ovum divided to form two fetuses, the brain cells were unfairly distributed. Matched particles, one spinning left, the other right. One brain housed in two separate skulls.

Across the lake I can see Bobby walking through meticulous rows of grapes. He is wearing shorts and a tank top. I wish he would look this way, but he is concentrating on the vines. Mr. Holt did not replant corn in his field after it burned. He tilled the ashes into the ground and the next time we came to the farm, there was a vineyard. Now Bobby owns the vineyard. It is very productive, pinot noir, much in demand.

We buried Grandfather on Monday, and as the casket was lowered into the ground next to Grandmother’s plot, Mother said in a tremulous voice, “Now they are together again at rest.”

That night I dreamed of him. He was a giant, walking away in his deliberate pace, hand in hand with a little girl. They were both nearly transparent. Not at rest, not yet.

I can’t bear to watch Bobby, and close my eyes, wishing I could block my swirl of thoughts. The mockingbird is back.

“What did you see in her sketch book?”

--Nothing.--

“Liar!”

She left it on the sofa last night. I looked. There was Grandfather, a giant, hand in hand with a little girl, walking away. The oak tree was visible through them. Has she gone from a to x,y,z, the way I did? I doubt it. She arrives without making the journey.

We will stay here together, I understand and accept finally. I’ll find the answer: if one particle is destroyed will the other wither and die? Who is transparent, who opaque?

The Late Night Train

I AM SITTING AT THE KITCHEN TABLE in my parents’ house with an open book, but I am not even trying to read the words. It is too cold in my upstairs room to take refuge there. I never gave a thought to how small the house is when I was growing up in it. Four downstairs rooms, kitchen, dining room, living room, a short hall with the bath and staircase on one side and my Dad’s room on the other. And two unheated bedrooms upstairs. My sister and I shared one of them, my bother had the other. It seemed room enough then.

When I plugged in a space heater in my room, it threw a circuit breaker and I don’t dare try that again. There is no escape from a blaring television announcer, shouts, screams, cheers, commercials: a basketball game. Dad likes to watch basketball, and Mom is pretending an interest. They both have significant hearing loss and probably don’t realize how painfully loud the sound is. I should buy some ear plugs, I think, and wonder why I didn’t do it before. For upstairs, earmuffs would be more appropriate.

I am trying to resolve our dilemma, to all appearances one that has already solidified beyond resolution during the past seven months, since Dad’s stroke in June. Now he is in a wheelchair, and my mother and I are in straitjackets. Also, I am trying to decipher the curious message my own brain is sending me by way of a train whistle.

The first time I heard the train whistle in the night, I paid little attention, simply rolled over, pulled the cover up and returned to sleep. I gave it scant thought the following day. Just a fluke of a wind current carrying sound abnormally, I decided. I knew no train track was within miles, far too distant to hear the trains.

The next time I heard it, a week or two later, I sat straight up in bed. There was a line of light showing my door from the downstairs hall. It was three in the morning and it was very cold in my room. As children we left the door open for heat from below to drift in, but when Eleanor reached puberty, she kept it closed, because Roger’s room was right across the hall. Now I keep it closed at night. If Dad got up and saw a light upstairs, it would set him off in a rage.

The whistle sounded, drew closer, faded away. In the silence that followed, I heard Dad going to the bathroom. His wheelchair makes a squeal at random intervals. He claimed not to hear it, and my mother agreed. If he said black was white, she would nod.

I must have been dreaming, I thought uneasily, and translated a squeal to the sound of a train whistle. I knew it would be a long time before I could go back to sleep; I was too sore and it had been hours since a hot bath had relaxed my muscles enough to allow sleep in the first place. I had spent much of the day in the orchard, trying to rake up the fallen apples. Dad had insisted it had to be done.

By way of mild protest, I had said, “I thought Mr. Garry cleaned it up when he did his.”

“They had a falling out,” Mom said, even as Dad started one of his ranting ranges, cursing their neighbor Garry for being nosy and insolent, and me for being too lazy to earn my keep.

“Let it go,” I ordered myself in bed, wide awake, listening for the squeal on his return to bed, thinking of how my feelings for him had changed. What had been fear had become simple hatred.

All through childhood and adolescence, I had feared him, not because he was physically abusive, but for his rages that came with ferocity and unpredictability over major things, like not coming straight home from school, to minor ones, like leaving a light on at night. At those times he had yelled obscenities, cursed all three children and his wife, the world and everyone in it. He had knocked things off tables, flung chairs over, broken whatever was within reach.

As much as I feared the rages, I came to dread even more his cutting, mind-numbing sarcasm and insults. “You fat pig, the boys must line up just to get a smile from someone as fat and ugly as you are.” Eleanor would run from the room in tears. It wasn’t just her. He had a trigger for each of us. My brother fled when he was sixteen, and Eleanor when she was seventeen. I left the day after graduation, a week before my eighteenth birthday, and although I have visited frequently, I have not lived here since then until now.

At twelve, when Eleanor left, I was too young to run away, and I couldn’t understand then why Mom stayed, but now at thirty, I well understand that she no longer has the choices she might once have had. She is as stuck as I am.

The crazy train whistle, I remind myself, and try to remember the circumstances the next time. Before Christmas, and bitterly cold, with snow on the ground and frost-decorated windows. I had to go shopping that day, and was waiting for Mom to add items to my list. Since her heart attack a few years ago, she can’t tolerate extremely cold weather and has given up leaving the house until spring.

“Get some dormant oil spray for the trees,” Dad ordered.

“Dad, for heaven’s sake, let Mr. Garry do them the way he’s always done.”

Mr. Garry has tractors, motorized everything, farm hands to do the chores, and he had included Dad’s one and a half acres along with his own forty or fifty-acre orchard. I thought it was simple generosity for a long time, then came to realize he was also protecting his trees by keeping disease and insect pests out of Dad’s adjoining grove.

“He puts a foot on my ground, I’ll shoot him,” Dad said. “You hear me, you let him in her, he’s dead.” He began to curse and yell and Mom gave me a warning look.

“I added it to the list,” Mom said, almost inaudibly. It would have made little difference if she had screamed the words; his voice filled the house.

I took the list from my mother, glanced at it, and waited for her to count out money. It might be enough, or not.

“And bring me the receipts,” Dad yelled. “All the change and the receipts. You hear me? I want to see it all! And it better be right. Stupid, you think I don’t notice five dollars missing, or three, but I do, and I want the change, all of it.”

I suppose that was what did it that day. I had been making up the slight difference with my own money week after week, watching my savings account erode with the inevitability of a glacier flowing into the sea.

“I haven’t been stealing your money!” I yelled back at him. “And what’s more I don’t intend to get a spray for those damn trees! If Mr. Garry doesn’t do them, they won’t get done. I’m not going to try to spray an acre and a half of trees with a five gallon sprayer in this weather, or in any weather! Sell the damn trees to Garry and be done with them.”

I turned and walked from the room, shaking. I never had talked back to him before.

“You listen to me, stupid! Don’t you turn your back on me when I’m speaking to you! Come back here! Or get your ass out of my house and stay out! Stupid! Thief! Lying stupid thief!”

He was screaming obscenities when I left the house. Briefly I worried about my mother having to listen, but not for long. She had put up with him all my life, and I had no doubt for all her married life. I could still remember nightmarish road trips and my terror that he would hit someone, kill us all, or have a stroke in his fury, and her silence. Now I wished he would get angry enough to bring on another stroke, this time a fatal one.

That is the clue, I think at the table, the whistle came after an especially ugly day or two. Something has to break this impasse. I have to find a way to talk them into selling the property and moving to an assisted-living retirement community. With his meager pension, Social Security, and the proceeds of a sale, they could do it, just barely. But it would be better than living out here miles from the nearest village, with one in a wheelchair and the other too weak to push the chair or help him in or out of it.

Her heart attack happened a few months after he retired, not a voluntary retirement, I suspect, and during those months she dropped a circle of friends. When I asked why she never saw any of them any longer, she said, “Oh, well, you know, when you get older your interests change.” He drove them off, the way he drove off Mr. Garry. In a community of retirees, she could make some friends again, have a few activities of her own.

“But he’s always had an orchard,” she said in the fall when I first suggested it.

“That’s the point. He’ll never manage it again. He can’t.”

“We’ll see,” she said vaguely. “I’ll bring it up with him.”

She will never dare bring it up with him. As long as I can remember, the only way she ever dealt with him was by bending whichever way the wind was blowing, do anything or say anything to try to keep the peace. And apparently she’s oblivious that it isn’t working, and never worked. No one could keep the peace with him.

When we children were all young, she usually tried to deflect his rages from us on to herself, and often it worked, which made me feel guilty. I was the one who tracked in mud, or who failed to take out the garbage, or whatever the particular offense was that time. At the same time I was glad whenever he turned away from me to anyone else.

Whatever any of us does, money will reach a crisis point before much longer. The house is in disrepair. I’m afraid of the wiring, and the water heater is not going to last much longer. I found a job in the village in September, ten miles away, minimum wage, but a job. In the two weeks I kept it, Mom had to call me home three times. He got his chair mired in rain-softened earth, trying to get out to inspect his trees. Again when she set the brake on his chair and didn’t have enough strength to release it, and he couldn’t either. And he had fallen from his chair and she couldn’t get him back into it. I quit the job before my supervisor fired me outright.

He didn’t want a Christmas tree, but I put a small one on an end table. Mom’s smile when she saw it made it worth the gamble that crossing him always was. He hated the lights and wouldn’t have them on when he was watching television, and since that was all hours of the day that he was up, the lights were seldom on, only after he went to bed at night, or when he took a nap. He wheeled into the living room that day, found the lights on and knocked the tree off the table, cursing. I was starting dinner, heard the crash, and hurried to see what happened.

“Clean up that goddamn mess! Get that crap out of here!”

I walked back to the kitchen. I didn’t touch it the rest of the day, or the next morning, and he was a madman in his fury. When Mom started to pick things up, he turned his wrath onto her. She burst into tears and ran from the room to her own makeshift bedroom in the dining room. After her heart attack, we had moved her bed so she could get some rest, and she had not wanted it moved back. Her refuge.

“See what you’ve done!” he screamed at me. “You’re trying to kill us! You think you’ll inherit my land, my trees, sell out and make yourself a little fortune. You want to kill her! Clean up that goddamn mess like I told you!”

Silently I cleaned up the mess. Then I went to see to Mom. She was lying on her bed weeping.

“Why do you let it happen?” I asked, sitting next to her, stroking her back. “You know he’ll kill you with his temper fits. Or he’ll kill himself. But you don’t have to stand and watch. Walk out. Leave the room, come in her, and close the door.”

“It’s the stroke,” she said, still weeping. “It changed him. He’ll get better again.”

“It didn’t change him, Mom. Face it, he’s always had that crazy temper. The only difference is that he didn’t lose it as often before. Now it’s every day. But it’s the same.”

“No. No. He’ll get better. You’ll see.”

That night I heard the train whistle. It sounded closer, almost at the end of the driveway. It was fifteen degrees. I read at one time or another that freezing to death isn’t very painful after the first minute or two. It is said that people begin to feel comfortable and simply go to sleep.

I know why I hear it, I realize suddenly. I yearn to go out and board the train.

The basketball game is over, and I duck my head and pretend to be reading. He doesn’t speak to me as he wheels himself down the hallway to the bathroom. After he finishes in there and is ready for bed, Mom will have a bath and go to bed. And the house will be peaceful and quiet until I go up. The best time of day, when they’re both in bed.

He can manage in the bathroom and his bedroom. There are rails and handholds everywhere, but it’s always a long process, and apparently a grueling one for him. When he comes out in his flannel pajamas with a lap robe around him, he looks exhausted. Around three in the morning he’ll be up again, and then at eight, until a nap. That’s a good hour also. Sometimes my mother and I have a cup of coffee and talk a little, although neither of us has much to say. All day she is on full alert, aware when he’s moving, when he’s settling down for a nap, when he goes in to get ready for bed. She is constantly straining to hear him, and I never say anything when she has that intent look on her face. By the time he’s in bed, she is too tired to stay up longer than it takes for her bath. Fatigue alone won’t insure her sleep. She has sleeping pills as well.

And this is how it will be forever, I think, for her, for him, and for me, or until one of is dead and the other two are free to do something else, or are forced to. Without me, they would have to move, sell the land, go somewhere else. Whenever I call Eleanor in Seattle, there is a baby or a small child crying for attention in the background. She can’t help out. No one knows where my brother is.

If he would just die, I could take Mom with me, rent an apartment, get my old job back perhaps, and start living again. If she goes first, I’ll call county authorities to come take him away. One of his rages will be proof enough that he is insane. But as long as there are three of us, the pattern that has been established is how it will continue to be.

And I yearn for the night train, a trip to anywhere.

During one of our quiet afternoons I asked Mom if she ever heard a train whistle in the middle of the night.

She looked puzzled, then averted her gaze. “I did once,” she said after a moment, as if an elusive memory had come into focus. “A long time ago, when Eleanor was little. A trick of my ears, I guess. There’s no train close enough to hear.”

“Only one time?”

She nodded. “I was pregnant again and there were other things on my mind.”

Pregnant with me, I realized. Had I from the safety and comfort of the womb first heard it with her thirty years ago?

This time when I hear the train I get up. I already have on heavy wool socks, and pull on my boots. I put on my robe, and take my down jacket from the closet. We had to keep our coats and jackets in our rooms, not in the family closet by the front door, where they were in his way. I don’t have a light on, but I don’t need one, the light seepage from under the door is enough. I find my gloves on the closet shelf and put them on. All my actions are dreamlike, unhurried. There’s no need to hurry. The night train is always on time and so are the passengers.

I am at the bottom of the stairs when he comes out of the bathroom in his robe, with the lap robe on his legs. He is turning to go back to his room when I take the handles of the chair and guide it the other way.

“What the hell are you doing? Goddamn it, let go! Take me back to bed!” His voice is loud as I wheel him to the front of the house, then reach around him to open the door. Mom won’t hear him, not with her hearing loss, and the sleeping pill, behind a closed door. He is yelling hoarsely, with a note of panic in his voice.

The cold air takes my breath away and he cries out, then is gasping, pleading. I feel as if I’m floating down the ramp, and turn onto the driveway. Mr. McHenry keeps it plowed all winter.

It isn’t far to the end of the driveway, fifty or sixty feet, and the train is drawing closer, the whistle like a piercing scream. I stop at the edge of the road and set the brake, and Dad is crying and cursing.

I leave him there to wait for the night train.

My bed feels warm after the cold outside, and I’m hardly even settled into it before I fall asleep.

It was a dream, a wish fulfillment nightmare, I tell myself, coming awake very early. It is still dark outside, and I hurry from my room to go downstairs to turn up the thermostat and start a pot of coffee before Mom and Dad begin stirring. The house is very quiet. Too quiet.

While waiting for the coffee, I go down the hall to the bathroom and push the door open, and then on to his bedroom, where the door is already open, the way he left it in the middle of the night. In a panic, I run to Mom’s room, but it is as empty as the rest of the house. A piece of paper on her pillow stirs in the draft from the open door. A handwritten note, dated and signed, from her to me, the letters spidery and uneven.

“My dearest Christy, I love you. I’m taking him out to catch the late night train.”

An Ordinary Day With Jason

BEFORE WE WERE MARRIED VERNON TOLD ME about the family trait that he feared would be so off-putting that I would tell him to get lost. We were in bed on Sunday night, where we had been most of the time since Friday. We were eating stale popcorn, the only food left in my apartment. On Friday we had planned a dinner out and a movie, but the rain had turned to freezing rain mixed with snow.

We made the final commitment that weekend. And he told me. It came up in the most innocuous way.

“Honey,” he said, “did you have an imaginary friend when you were a kid?”

“Sure. Her name was Doris. She had red hair in pigtails and a lot of freckles. She was dumber than I was.”

“What happened to her?” he asked.

“I guess she went where imaginary friends go when they’re no longer needed. Out of awareness, out of mind.”

“Did anyone else ever see her?”

I helped myself to more popcorn. It really wasn’t that bad. “Of course not. What are you getting at?”

“Humor me,” he said.

He was leaning on his elbow watching me, strangely serious, considering that both of us were naked, covers drawn up to our chins because the apartment was cold, and a bowl of stale popcorn was balanced on my stomach.

“Okay. I’m humoring you. No one else ever saw Doris. Now it’s your turn. Tell me about your imaginary friend.”

“One more question first,” he said. “What if someone else had seen her? More than one saw her?”

I shook my head. “Then she wouldn’t have been imaginary. And it would have freaked me out when she went away.”

He had yet another question. “Did you know Doris was a product of your imagination?”

I had to stop and think about that. Finally I had to admit that I wasn’t sure, but I didn’t think so.

“You said one more question,” I said then. “You’re over the limit. Just tell me where you’re going with this. Is it something about your imaginary friend?”

“Yeah,” he said. He took some popcorn, more, I thought, to buy a little time than because he wanted it.

“Suppose an imaginary friend isn’t always a playmate. Not a Calvin and Hobbes situation, or Christopher and Pooh, and not a red headed Doris. Suppose it’s an object.”

“Okay. A stretch, but I’m supposing. Your friend was a little unusual. Then what?”

“Suppose it’s a staircase,” he said slowly.

I couldn’t help it. I laughed and nearly choked on popcorn, and I upset the bowl. When I could speak, I said, “Your imaginary friend was a staircase?”

He nodded, and I laughed harder until he had to pound me on the back for fear I would really choke.

We had to get up, of course. You can’t roll around on a bed strewn with buttered popcorn and salt. There was more that came out in bits and pieces that night.

Vernon had had the ability, or whatever it can be called, to project, conjure, imagine, do something, and make a staircase appear, one that anyone else in the room could also see. It stopped when he was six or seven, the way Doris stopped appearing to me at about that age. His father had done the same thing. Not every generation did it, he said that night, sometimes it skipped, but it always returned, possibly as far back as when the ancestors were leaving the trees and opting for houses with indoor plumbing.

I didn’t believe a word of it. But it came to pass. What a useful phrase, one that should not be discarded or scorned. Jason’s first staircase appeared when he was three, while we were still in a New York apartment.

I was reading a magazine article and Jason was playing with blocks and a truck that he crashed into the blocks over and over with a cry of, “Whoosh!” I glanced up from the magazine when he became still, and there it was, a fully formed staircase, with a banister. Except for the fact that it ended where the wall met the ceiling, it looked exactly the way a staircase would look in any house with an upstairs.

I screamed, “Vernon!” and I grabbed Jason and held him against me as hard as I could as I backed away from the apparition all the way to the wall.

Vernon ran in, looking as frightened as I was. He saw the staircase and said, “We don’t have an upstairs.” The staircase vanished.

Jason reacted to my terror and began to cry, and I was shaking. After Vernon got us both calmed down again, and Jason resumed his play, Vernon said, “Honey, it doesn’t do anything. It’s just there. All you have to do is say we don’t have an upstairs and it’s gone.”

He stayed close to us the rest of the afternoon, but we didn’t talk about it until Jason was in bed. “April,” he said earnestly that night, “there’s nothing dangerous about it. He doesn’t have a psychological problem any more than I did, or than Dad did. He’ll outgrow it, exactly the way I did, the way you outgrew Doris.”

“But it will freak out anyone who suddenly sees a staircase appear,” I said. “And someone will.”

He shook his head. “It just happens in rooms, in closed-in places, never outside. We’ll move to a warmer place where he can spend more time outside. We’ll home school him until he outgrows it, and avoid house guests for the next few years. Can you cope with that? Is it asking too much?”

I had no answer, and he put his arms around me and drew me closer to him. “Honey, Dad’s okay, as you well know, and I seem to be okay. No lasting effect, no damage. Just a few somewhat irregular years ahead, and it’s over. Please, April, try to see it that way.”

I had to admit that he was more than okay. He writes elegant articles for magazines like The National Geographic and Archeology Review. Anthropological discoveries, architectural wonders, basket weaving in Bolivia, dances in Tibet, things like that and they are always well received, as are his photographs. And Dad, his father, is the owner of a prestigious horse breeding farm, his horses prized and ridden by royalty, he boasts. He claimed that he made very little money from it, and Vernon explained that it was true, because he had practically an army of workers on the farm, managers, trainers, farm workers, and so on.

That night Dad joined us and between them they made it sound very simple, almost commonplace. When the staircase appeared, I could make it disappear by saying we don’t have an upstairs. We should not make an issue of it with Jason, who seemed unaware of it. And Dad would find us a house as soon as possible where Jason could spend a lot of time outside. Also, Dad would spend more time with us, and with three of us no one person would be burdened by being watchful at all times. We especially should not let Jason realize there was anything weird about stairs that appeared and vanished. It was just another part of the mysterious world he found himself in.

Dad found the house we’re living in now, a few miles from Roanoke, in an affluent subdivision with two sections, A and B. The A section is completed and most of the houses there are occupied. The B section is mostly empty lots with only three complete houses. Two on the far end, and ours. Apparently the developer ran out of money, couldn’t get credit, lost interest or something and Dad was able to get a good deal on a lease for this house.

Across the street from our house is a park with a clubhouse, a large children’s playground, a wading pool, and a covered pavilion. In our own fenced back yard we have a whole playground, swing, sliding board, a jungle gym to climb, and a sandbox.

Jason is enraptured by trucks, and has a fleet of ten or twelve that he plays with in the kitchen when I’m busy there. If there’s a pause in the roars, the whooshes and crashing sounds, I’m quick to glance around and say the magic words if necessary. “We don’t have an upstairs.” The roars and whooshes and crashes resume and all is well.

My ordinary days might strike others as extraordinary, but I’ve found that anything that you get used to takes on the cloak of ordinariness rather quickly.

We all share household chores, and Dad’s available as a babysitter when he’s at our house. Vernon and I go to the movies, have dinner out now and then, and there’s bus service nearby to a big mall and also to downtown Roanoke. I know why both Vernon and Dad want to make my life as easy as possible. Vernon’s mother abandoned them when he was four, and Vernon’s desperately afraid I might decide to go back to my old job in New York. Not a chance. I worked for a soulless insurance company. Besides, I love him too much to think of leaving. I think his mother was a twit who probably ran off with the UPS man.

Most mornings Jason and I go to the park and playground where I read or chat with other adults and Jason romps and plays with other children. We get back to the house in time for lunch and then a nap for Jason.

The day everything changed we arrived back home and saw two men talking to Dad in the living room. They were both wearing dark suits, and my first thought was missionaries.

That day, with the strangers in the house, I hurried Jason past the open arch to the living room and on to the kitchen. I was fixing his lunch when Dad entered.

“Insurance salesmen,” I said. “Missionaries.”

“Nope. Researchers. They’re studying memory loss and drafted me to be one of their subjects.”

I stopped cutting up an apple. “What do you mean, drafted you?”

“It seems,” he said, “they’re into a study of a new drug to arrest memory loss. It starts at an early age, but after about sixty it speeds up. They want people from sixty to sixty-five to participate in a fifteen-year study to see if the stuff works. They enrolled a couple of guys at the clubhouse, and someone mentioned that I was sixty-two, and they came after me to add to the study. They give tests now and then to see what’s going on. They’ll be back the day after tomorrow to give me the first test before the stuff has had time to take effect.”

“Dad, please don’t tell me you’ve agreed, that you let two strangers give you a drug without checking them out thoroughly first. Please tell me you didn’t do that.”

“April,” he said, “they showed me their credentials. They’re medical researchers.”

I called Vernon out from his study. “Tell him what you just told me,” I said to Dad.

“Well,” he said in a very deliberate way, after he retold it, “I said they gave me the drug, but I didn’t say I swallowed it. Now did I? See?” He fished in his pocket and came up with a little white pill.

“We don’t have an upstairs,” Vernon said in a loud voice then, and I didn’t even bother to turn to see the staircase before it vanished.

“Brain drain dudes,” Jason said. “Brain drain dudes.”

Vernon rolled his eyes and I said helplessly, “Some of the older kids at the playground. He’s picking up a lot of words there.”

Dad held the pill in the palm of his hand and regarded it thoughtfully. “Funny thing,” he said. “I’m sure I never mentioned to anyone how old I am.”

We were all looking at the pill, and Vernon said in a strained voice, “Dad, I think you’d better put that in something.”

The pill in Dad’s hand was changing, there were tiny thread-like wisps emerging on one side. Dad touched it gingerly with his fingertip, enough to roll it a bit and the threads vanished.

“I think you’re right,” Dad said. Vernon got a plastic baggie out and Dad let the pill fall into it. He zipped the baggie closed. He tilted his head slightly in the direction of Vernon’s study and said to me, “I guess we’d better let you get on with giving Jason his lunch.” They walked out of the kitchen, down the hallway to the study, entered and closed the door behind them.

It seemed to take forever to get Jason to eat, then to read him a story and tuck him in for a nap. The staircase never appeared while he was in bed, and I was free as soon as he was bedded down. I hurried to the study. No one was there.

They could have gone out without passing through the kitchen, and evidently that’s what they had done, and I was furious. A pill that grows and retracts tendrils, strange men passing out pseudo drugs, appearing and disappearing staircases, suddenly it was all too much. At that moment if the UPS man had come knocking, I would have been tempted to get in his brown truck and go wherever he was going.

Dad’s car was still in the driveway and our car, Vernon’s and mine, was still in the garage, so they couldn’t have gone far. Sometimes when Vernon was stuck on an article he went for long walks through our half of the subdivision, and I decided that was what they were up to.

Walking, talking, leaving me out of it altogether, whatever it was. Thinking about it only made me angrier. Then I heard a dog barking and Vernon came into the living room where I was and he was leading a dog on a leash.

I sank down onto the sofa and closed my eyes for a moment. They were both still there when I opened them again. “Where did that come from?” I asked.

“Pet store,” he said. “Cute, isn’t he? He’s a cocker spaniel.”

“Vernon, I may be losing my mind,” I said carefully. “Would you like to explain anything to me? Anything at all before I start screaming.”

The dog had black and white spotted long hair, with the requisite oversized silky ears, big soulful eyes, a plume of a tail that was wagging his whole body at the moment.

Vernon sat down next to me and unleashed the dog. He began to run around the room sniffing everything, including me.

“He’s for Jason,” Vernon said. “He’s housebroken, not quite two years old and answers to the name of Spotty.” He took a rubber ball from his pocket and held it up, as if to prove a point.

“What in God’s name is going on here?” I demanded, and heard my voice rising before I even thought of yelling.

Vernon took my hand. “April, please believe this,” he said, “I never meant to deceive you, lie to you, but there are a few things I didn’t mention before. I was afraid to,” he said and he sounded sincere, abject even. “I was afraid I’d lose you,” he added in a low voice. “I love you so much it scared me, thinking that I might lose you.”

It’s hard to stay mad at a man who sounds like that and says that, but I did. “So, what lies, what deceit? How did you get that dog home from a pet store? Both cars were here! Where’s Dad, and why did those men come and give him a pill that puts out tendrils?”

I would have gone on, but he put his hand on my mouth and said in an agonized voice, “I’ve been a fool and I’m sorry. Please promise you’ll hear me out before you say anything else.”

I nodded and he removed his hand. “That night, when I told you about our family, it was clear that you didn’t believe me,” he said, holding my hand. “I should have told the rest, but . . . Anyway, I didn’t. He’ll outgrow it at about six or seven, that’s true. But not forever,” he said. I yanked my hand loose. “Just hear me out,” he said again and I put both clenched hands in my lap, prepared to listen before I lit into him.

“When I reached puberty,” he said, “I began seeing the staircase again, and I knew I was doing it myself. Dad knew it was happening almost as soon as I did. He . . . he educated me. I had to learn how to use the stairs.”

I shook my head. “What do you mean, learn how to use the stairs?”

“They’re real, April,” he said.

He talked until Jason woke up and went crazy excited when he saw the dog. It was love at first sight, both ways. After he was dressed, he and Spotty went to play ball in the back yard, and Vernon and I sat on the patio where he finished telling me.

The stairs are real and Jason has no idea where they lead or that he’s responsible for them. He can’t be allowed to go up them or even suspect how real they are. He’ll have to be taught how to use them when he reaches puberty, and Vernon and Dad will be his teachers. The stairs will end up wherever he decides he wants to be, but first he has to know exactly where that is. After he has learned his lessons thoroughly he will no longer need the stairs to go wherever he wants to be.

At about that point I suddenly craved a long tall gin and anything. Or perhaps straight gin. And I seldom drink anything alcoholic.

“Vernon,” I said, sitting on a sunny patio in a subdivision near Roanoke, Virginia, watching my child play with his dog, so typically midAmerican, it was right out of Norman Rockwell, “you’re telling me that both you and your father can teleport. And that my son will be able to do it too as soon as he’s old enough.” My words were spaced as if I had already had that long tall glass of straight gin.

Vernon nodded.

His biographical sketches always make a big deal of the fact that he was graduated from high school at the age of sixteen and that for the next six years his father took him traveling. Exotic places, cities in just about every country anyone ever heard of, villages that no one ever heard of, places so remote they had never been mentioned in any tourist guide.

I thought of the articles he had written, the places he had been, and I said, “Those years, you didn’t bother with airplanes? Is that right? You just went there?”

He nodded again.

I thought of all the photographs he had accumulated during those years, he had always said. Most of those pictures were digitized, and few of them had negatives, which some publishers wanted more than the prints. “You’re still going to those places, aren’t you? To take pictures with your digital camera.”

He nodded.

I began to think about Dad’s stash of wine, which he likes with his dinner every day. I stood up and said, “I’m going to get drunk now.” I went inside to start, and he remained on the patio looking miserable, watching our son play with his new dog.

I didn’t believe him, I decided, but that was a lie. I hadn’t believed it about Jason, either, until proven. Dad had a big assortment of wine, completely unfamiliar to me, but a five dollar bottle or fifty dollar bottle meant nothing. I opened a red wine and poured a lot into a water glass and took a drink, and then I sat down in the kitchen and the questions began piling up. Where was Dad? Why the dog all at once? Who were those men and what were they after? The list got longer and I began to make notes. In a little while Vernon came in and sat at the table, and I started down the list.

“He’s in Tennessee,” Vernon said. “He’ll be back soon. We’re going to give the dog the pill. We think it’s a tracking device or something like it, that it embeds itself, the covering dissolves, and it lets them keep track of a person’s whereabouts. About a month ago Dad attended a horse auction that turned out to be by invitation only, with tight security. The owner of the horses is a competitor and he spotted Dad and called security. Of course, Dad got the hell out of there, but the security firm was alarmed. Apparently it happened at least one other time. Anyway, we suspect that they are trying to find out how he shows up in places where they are responsible for security. Their reputation is at stake. They want to keep track of him and his possible contacts if we’re right about the pill.”

He said that some of his ancestors had been tried as witches, that one had been burned at the stake, and another one imprisoned. Since no prison could hold any of them, he had left and headed west where he vanished. They, the family, had kept as much of the past a secret as possible, one reason for the big farm in Tennessee, where they had isolation to a point and felt safe. But, he added a bit lamely, a really good investigation might uncover some other events that were not easily explained. I assumed he referred to some of his own travels.

“Why did Dad go to Tennessee now? What’s he up to?”

“He wants to make sure the house is ready for all of us if we decide it’s time to go there,” he said reluctantly. “Only if we think it’s necessary,” he added, when I shook my head.

“Why would it be necessary?” I demanded. “What else are you leaving out?”

He got up and poured himself a glass of wine, returned and we both took long drinks. “Dad’s afraid he might have to take off for a while,” he said. “He doesn’t want to leave you and Jason with just me. It’s too hard for you. The farm is safe, a one story house, big and comfortable, with some very loyal employees who accept that the family is a little peculiar. He can come and go there easily. No one can sneak up on him, or slip something into his pocket, keep him under surveillance all the time.”

“So the dog will have the embedded tracking thing,” I said after another drink of wine. It was getting better. I might take it up with dinner, too. “They’ll think Dad is at home most of the time while he’s free to go wherever he wants to. And so are you.”

Vernon nodded. He was turning into a regular bobble head, I thought and giggled.

“I need a little time,” I said then. “This is all too much for one sitting. I’m going to take a walk.”

He nodded.

I walked through the empty subdivision, and even got a little lost a time or two. The streets all wind about, change their names in a capricious manner, and there are few landmarks. But I did need to walk and think. It was crazy, but that didn’t mean it was untrue. I could well understand why it had to be kept a closely guarded secret. What a prize they would be to a research neurologist. Not just a scientific goldmine, but for corporations, the military . . . Geneticists would go crazy over them. Isolate the gene or genes responsible, and go on from there. To what end? Too many possibilities to contemplate.

One thought persisted regardless of how many others swam to the surface. I had to protect Jason. Little else mattered. If the farm was the best place to do that, we’d move to the farm. Vernon had grown up there, and he had been safe there. I suspected that we lived in the leased house instead of the farm because that’s where Vernon lived when his mother took off. He was afraid I’d get lonely or something. But I had already decided she was a twit. That was not a consideration. Jason’s safety was.

Our house unexpectedly came into sight and I went home.

Vernon and Dad were both vastly relieved when I told them I agreed that we should move to the farm as soon as possible. Dad had been moving his belongings most of the day, and they both worked well into the night taking things they didn’t want movers to handle. We should keep everything as normal appearing as we could, Vernon said that night, not raise any suspicions, and that meant that I should follow my usual routine, keep going to the park and playground and so on. He would arrange for a moving company to come and pack up whatever was left, and ship it. The brain drain dudes would be back the day after tomorrow in the afternoon between two and three, and Dad would handle them. He would make sure that Spotty was nearby when they arrived, he said. He suspected they wanted to test the tracking device.

We followed that scenario, and the next day was ordinary. The staircase appeared several times and I sent it away. Jason played with his new dog, and things kept disappearing. Dad’s wine collection vanished. Most of Vernon’s records, his CDs and DVDs, files, magazines that featured his articles . . .

On the next day when we got home from the park, it was in time to see a car stop at the curb in front of our house, and the two men in suits get out and start up our sidewalk. They paused when I crossed the street holding Jason’s hand.

“We’re a little early,” one of them said, “but we’d like to see the senior Mr. Branleigh.” He smiled an insurance salesman smile.

“I’ll see if he’s home,” I said, unlocking the door, keeping a good grip on Jason’s hand. I realized that if the tracking device worked, they believed Dad was there. A spasm of fear tightened my insides. They followed me into the foyer. “Please wait here a minute. Jason, why don’t you go play with Spotty while I fix lunch.”

He was interested in the two men in suits, looking them over soberly, and I had to pull him along with me to the kitchen. Spotty started to bark and Jason ran out to roll on the ground with him.

I glanced inside Vernon’s study, and went on to Dad’s room, where I knocked on the door although I knew he wasn’t there. Those men weren’t expected until later and he was busy. But I went through the motions.

When I returned to the foyer, I gasped. The staircase was there and the men in suits were gone. I said the magic words, but they had lost their magic. Jason had to hear it, I remembered, and ran to the back door and out. Jason was sitting on his swing, talking to Spotty, who was watching him. I said the words again, loud enough for him to hear me. He didn’t look up or indicate that he had heard, but he seldom did. I ran back to the foyer. The staircase was gone. And the men in suits? Where had they gone?

I was getting more and more nervous. When Jason was finally in bed for his nap, I had to make myself stop going to the foyer to make sure the staircase was gone, that the men in suits were really gone. The car remained at the curb. At last Dad appeared. I almost knocked him down in my rush to get to him before he left again and I was nearly incoherent when I told him what happened.

“Calm down,” he kept saying, as he patted my arm. “We’ll figure out what to do.”

Vernon came soon after that and I let Dad tell him. He turned pale. “Does Jason know? Did he see it happen?”

“No! He ran out to play with Spotty. What difference-” I stopped myself. “Oh, my God! Your mother! Is that what happened to your mother?”

Dad answered. “He didn’t see it, either. He didn’t know. And we don’t know for sure, but it’s the most likely thing.”

Vernon rubbed his eyes and went to the sink where he stood with his back to us. Dad looked deeply troubled as he said, “I told her they were real, what you could do with the. I warned her not to go near, but . . .”

The forbidden door in Bluebeard’s castle came to mind, and I understood why Vernon had not told me until the issue was forced.

No one spoke for a minute or two, until Vernon swung around from the sink and said, “Dad, you have to go to the mall and buy something, anything, and then come home on the bus, and get here before two thirty. I’ll go to the library, and get home by four, also by bus. April, it’s going to be up to you to carry this off. Can you do it?”

I nodded. Anything, I would do anything to get us out of this. How to explain two agents of some kind vanishing in our house?

They both left soon after that, and after half an hour I called the police. “Please send someone,” I pleaded, all raw nerves again. “I’m alone with a small child, and I’m afraid. Please.”

It took about ten minutes for two uniformed officers to get there. I met them at the door and was talking before they got all the way inside.

“We were at the park, my little boy and I were. That car was there when we got home, and it’s still there. Where is the driver? Why is it there? I keep thinking I hear someone at a window or something.”

“Now, Mrs. Branleigh, take it easy. We’ll have a look around. Why don’t you have a cup of coffee or tea or something,” the older one said with a comforting smile. “I’m sure there’s nothing to be alarmed about.”

I didn’t have to fake a thing. I was shaking and ready to fly apart. I sat at the kitchen table while they had their look around. They asked if they could have a look around inside and I nodded. “Don’t wake up Jason.”

When they came back the older one took out a notebook and asked a few questions. My husband, I said, was at the library in Roanoke doing some research. And my father-in-law had gone to the mall, and would be back any minute. Some people were supposed to meet with him between two and three.

“I thought it was those men when I saw the car, but they were too early, and no one came to the door. Jason will be up any minute now and I’m afraid.”

“Well, no one’s around, so you can relax. No basement here?” he asked and I shook my head. And no upstairs, either, I nearly added.

He turned to his companion who had not said a word. “Call in the license number, see if we have anything on it.” The other one nodded and left, passing Dad at the door. Dad hurried into the kitchen. He was carrying a bag from Penney’s.

“What’s going on? Why are you here?” he asked the officer.

“Is there someplace where we can talk?” the officer asked. Dad took him to the living room.

As soon as Jason was up and dressed we went outside. I sat on the patio with a cup of coffee and he played ball with Spotty. I did not want Jason to see the uniformed police officers and I most certainly did not want him to blurt out that the brain drain dudes had been there.

The police left, but we knew it wasn’t over yet. Others would come and ask questions. The best we could hope for was that the men in suits were from the private security company, and Dad would simply deny that he had been in California that year. His word against Styvesant’s, he said. “And,” he added, “Styvesant is no better than a horse thief. He puts nags up for auction. Let them prove it.”

A tow truck came and removed the car and two private detectives came. Vernon let them search the house and yard. They even looked on the roof. And they searched the park and the clubhouse, and no doubt talked to residents of the other section of the subdivision, including a couple who had seen Dad and Vernon on the bus that day. No government official came to ask questions to our great relief.

The plan is for all of us to use the stairs to go to the farm, and to leave as soon as Jason is sound asleep. Dad will carry Jason, who is not likely to wake up. Vernon will have a big suitcase, enough to do us until the movers bring the rest of our things, and I’ll have a smaller suitcase. The last thing I put in the suitcase was Jason’s new favorite book, Where the Wild Things Are. I wonder if that’s where the two men in suits ended up, with the wild things.

Dad will come back with Vernon, and he will drive to the farm overnight with Spotty. We will say he drove Jason and me, but it’s too long a trip for Jason, who would need a bathroom break. Also, there’s the possibility that we could be stopped somewhere. We want whoever hired those agents to believe that Dad is at the farm, and if they keep tabs on him, that’s where they will locate the tracking device for the next ten years or longer. Vernon will wait for the movers, and then drive our car to the farm.

And I have a plan of my own that I haven’t mentioned yet. But I will. If Vernon thinks he can flit off now and then to exotic places and take pictures while I sit at home, he’s in for a surprise. From now on he will have a companion and Dad will be our baby sitter.

“Ready?” Vernon asks, taking my hand.

I nod. The staircase is only four or five steps this time, and it’s for my benefit since I can’t teleport, but although anyone can climb the stairs, only the conjuror can decide where they end up. Vernon will keep a good grip on my hand so we’ll all end up at the same place. We start up the staircase.

To find these and other Kate Wilhelm titles on ebook, go to:

www.infinityboxpress.com

Watch for the new Barbara Holloway Mystery coming in September 2012!!

• By Stone, By Blade, By Fire

Other books by Kate Wilhelm now available:

Charlie Meiklejohn & Constance Leidl Mysteries

• Seven Kinds Of Death

• All For One

• Smart House

• Sister Angel

• Sweet, Sweet Poison

• The Gorgon Field

• The Dark Door

• Torch Song

• The Hamlet Trap

• With Thimbles, With Forks, And Hope

Collections

• Music Makers, including:

“Music Makers”

“Shadows On The Wall Of The Cave”

“Mockingbird”

“The Late Night Train”

“An Ordinary Day With Jason”

• The Bird Cage, including:

“The Bird Cage”

“Changing The World”

“The Fountain Of Neptune”

“Rules Of The Game”

Other Fiction

• Don’t Get Caught — NEW! —

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Kate Wilhelm

Kate Wilhelm’s first short story, “The Pint-Sized Genie” was published in Fantastic Stories in 1956. Her first novel, More Bitter Than Death, a mystery, was published in 1963. Over the span of her career, her writing has crossed over the genres of science fiction, speculative fiction, fantasy and magical realism, psychological suspense, mimetic, comic, family sagas, a multimedia stage production, and radio plays. She has recently returned to writing mysteries with her Barbara Holloway and the Charlie Meiklejohn and Constance Leidl Mysteries novels. Her works have been adapted for television, theater, and movies in the United States, England, and Germany. Wilhelm’s novels and stories have been translated to more than a dozen languages. She has contributed to Redbook, Quark, Orbit, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Locus, Amazing, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Ellery Queen’s Mysteries, Fantastic Stories, Omni and many others.

Kate and her husband, Damon Knight (1922-2002), also provided invaluable assistance to numerous other writers over the years. Their teaching careers covered a span of several decades, and hundreds of students, many of whom are famous names in the field today. Kate and Damon helped to establish the Clarion Writer’s Workshop and the Milford Writer’s Conference. They have lectured together at universities in North and South America and Asia. They have been the guests of honor and panelists at numerous conventions around the world. Kate continues to host monthly workshops, as well as teach at other events. She is an avid supporter of local libraries.

Kate Wilhelm lives in Eugene, Oregon.