Hannah’s face is shining. Bit clicks another photo of her, and then one of Verda, reflected again and again in the tarnished silver tea set on the table. Verda says, My dear Hannah. I have to stop. I am very tired, and I need to be alone.
Thank you, Hannah says. Her hands are shaking when she lifts her teacup to her lips. Do you have any primary sources, by any chance? Papers, things like that?
Verda says, Loads. She stands and pulls down a hatbox, and when she releases the top, there pours out the smell of sage and tobacco. I’ll give you my great-grandmother’s diary, she says. But that is all for this visit, at least. I’d like for you to return for something, even if it’s just a dusty old book.
She sees Bit gaping into the box and lifts out the dull gleaming thing he is trying to see.
Scrimshaw, she says, putting it in his hands. Walrus tusk. One of John Noland’s sons went out on the high seas and carved the face of his wife over and over again. After a year away, he came back to port and learned that she’d died of yellow fever the day after he’d left.
In wonder, Bit traces the woman’s face, echoed in the bone. It is Helle, to the life.
Please, Verda says now, taking back the scrimshaw and closing up the hatbox. I have a headache bearing down on me. But do return and bring some of your bread. And those leaves to smoke. It helps with my arthritis. Also bring young Master Ridley, who was so bored he took a nap today.
I wasn’t bored, he says. I’m relaxed in your presence.
They grin at one another, and she almost touches him, her claw hovering over his shoulder. You give me hope for the next generation, she says. Not that I believe humankind will last another century. She gives a gruff laugh.
He says, Doom and Gloom Verda.
She says, Off you go to your delinquency. Off you go, Hannah, to write your book.
Something peculiar flits across Hannah’s face, a daring, a desire, and then she tamps it down and says, softly, It’s just a lecture.
Nonsense, Verda says, closing her eyes. And my migraine has arrived. With bassoons and timpanis. Let Eustace out to fend for himself.
They tiptoe out and close the door. Again in the bright expanse of the day, Bit wants to break into a run. But Hannah mutters out of the side of her mouth, Let’s go tend our plot, and Bit is returned to the world of worry. In Verda’s little cottage, the plants out on the island had simmered at the back of his mind, a shadow thought that only sometimes overwhelmed him.
They find the plants huge, almost overgrown: all females, the males plucked out early, all almost twelve feet tall. Bit crouches on the bank, skipping stones until Hannah is finished, and they wade back through the stream to the path. Two more weeks, she says. Then pick and dry and we are on our way. She touches his arm, smiles crookedly. Then you can be a kid again.
He tries to sink himself into identifying the plants at his feet, the jimsonweed someone sowed long ago, the painted trillium, the jack-in-the-pulpit. But when they are halfway home Hannah sees Bit’s face. Oh, kiddo, what’s wrong? she says.
He says, It’s just. I mean, if someone gets in trouble, it may be us, but it may be Handy. It’s not right.
Handy schmandy, Hannah says. None of this would be necessary if Handy didn’t make those decisions he made and get us into a bind and then back out of the Council of Nine. He abandoned us. Got us into a mess and left us to fend for ourselves.
He didn’t abandon us, Bit says. He’s still our spiritual leader.
Hannah snorts, says, Right. All-Arcadia Yogas? Remember the time he made us all have an Eyesight Yoga? No corrective lenses because they separate you from the spiritual world? Remember what happened?
Muffin fell in the well, Bit says.
And the Weeklong Silence Yoga?
The kidlets freaked out and had bad nightmares, Bit says.
And the Poverty Yoga? When we weren’t supposed to have medications or extra food for three months and send all that money we saved to Mount St. Helens victims?
Bit shivers, remembering: Hannah, off the pills she’d been taking religiously, had returned to the dark creature in the bed whom he’d had to slowly draw into the light so many times over the years. I remember, he says. Okay.
When they come into the sunflower field, Hannah shields her eyes from the glare and laughs to see Simon welding away at his sculpture. Bit was near Hannah when Simon sidled up to her in the Eatery the other day; he was close enough to overhear their conversation. Simon had been famous in the Outside, an artist. He was handsome, with hard blue eyes and a tight frowning face. He’d muttered to Hannah that he was building her a sculpture out in the sunflowers. She was his Muse, he said. For a moment, through Simon’s gaze on Hannah, her motherness fell away, and Bit saw her as lush and attractive as she must be to men, with her long golden braids and roundness and the warmth in her large eyes. Oh, she’d cried out happily, that’s so lovely of you, Simon, and Bit felt the beginning of the old anxiety moving through him, that she would break the fragile bond of family and find a new allegiance away from him.
When Bit says to Hannah, jostling her back onto the path, Are you really going to write a book? he knows he’s really saying, Please don’t change and leave me.
And when she touches his cheek with her callused hand and says, Maybe yes, maybe no, he knows she’s really saying, You don’t have to worry about me.
Helle comes up to Bit. Cole and Dyllie and Ike have pushed their dinner plates to the side, and they are playing kick hockey with a bottle cap they found in the Motor Pool.
Hey, she whispers, Bit, I need you.
Ike looks up, his face contorted with disgust; he hates his sister, he says, but he watches and mimics her. Cole looks up, too, confused. Dylan does not even see Helle; he has the gift of focus and is kicking the bottle cap across the table with his fingertips.
Gimme a second, guys, Bit says. He crosses the Eatery with Helle, feeling tall for the first time in his life. They go down the hallway where the Tuesday night bathers are waiting for their three weekly inches of warm bathwater, and into the Library. In the far corner, there is a raging book discussion of The Mismeasure of Man. Abe is there, face full of joyous argument. He sees Bit and lights up further, and waves, blowing a huge kiss. Bit pretends to be embarrassed.
Helle turns to Bit. I need you, she says again, so low only he can hear it, and she twists the hem of her teeshirt in her hands. She is jittery, darting. You’re the perfect accomplice, nobody ever gets mad at you. Please, please, please, she says.
There is magic in perfect, in accomplice, and he says, without thinking, All right.
They go up the grand Entryway stairs, hearing the noises of a house overfull with people: someone plays on a common room piano (stuck D-flat), the recorder group trills its way through a madrigal, voices are raised, shouting or just discussing, babies shriek and are hushed with breasts or murmurs, the kidlets in the Dormitory across the courtyard are singing the good night song: The Dream passes by the window. And Sleep by the Fence. . He follows Helle into the brightest, biggest common area. Arcadia House is arranged around six central common rooms, each area separating into anywhere from twelve to fifteen bedrooms big enough for two adults or three tightly packed Ados. This common room they are in is the grandest: the two-story windows hold the dying sunset, the people pouring across the lawn, the lights coming on down in Ersatz Arcadia. There’s a catwalk with another floor of bedrooms up a curved staircase that Bit can never look at without a sense of foreboding.