“I hate milk.”
“Oh. Well, that’s good, because there isn’t any. But—are you hungry? Did Mrs. Iverson get you anything to eat?”
A small shudder beneath the blankets. “Some soup. And some crackers.” The shudder extended into a snaky sort of motion that ended with the girl sitting up. “Actually, do you like have a Coke or something?”
“Actually, no. I think there’s some tea, chamomile tea? No? Okay, let’s see, there might be—”
With a dramatic sigh the girl flopped back against the pillows. She pulled the covers up to her chin. “Oh forget it.”
Jack took in her fierce wedge of face, that voice so inflated with childish annoyance: the butterfly that stamped. Unexpectedly he laughed.
“What?” she demanded.
Jack shook his head, moving aside the hurricane lamp so he could lean against the nightstand. “Nothing. Just, I think it’s customary under these circumstances to say ‘Thank you.’”
“What? Oh.” The face shrank still deeper into the bed, like a currant in bread dough. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.” He toyed with an old electric lamp, clicked the switch experimentally a few times. “Marzana Candry. Is that your real name?”
“I already told you.”
“I mean your real last name. It doesn’t sound Polish.”
Hostile silence. He could see her eyes glittering. After a moment she hissed, “Yes.”
“Marzana Candry.” At her baleful look Jack corrected himself. “Marz Candry. Where are you from, Marz? Where in Poland?”
Silence.
“Let’s try again: where were you before you came here? New York? New Jersey?” Her eyes squeezed shut. “Connecticut? Long Island?”
Still nothing. Jack’s momentary good humor vanished. He thought of going through all fifty states, and then starting on individual cities, but before he could the girl said, “My parents are fucking dead, okay? And I’ll fucking kill myself before I go back to Poland, and I’ll never tell you where I came from so forget it, okay? Okay?” she ended in a near shriek.
“Okay,” Jack agreed, startled.
“The only reason I even came to your stupid house was by mistake. I was—I was with my friends and we got, like separated, okay? And I got lost, it was night and raining and I didn’t know where the fuck I was going and if I did I wouldn’t have come here to your stupid fucking house, all right?”
Jack looked beyond at the wide dormer window, its panes slashed with blue and gold.
“Your friends. Fellahin?”
The girl snorted and rolled her eyes. “What, you get that from the web? Some subway hippie Scientologist? Fuck that. They were my family. We were living down by the river and the fucking cops blew us out.”
“What happened to the rest? Your friends?”
“I dunno. Wasted, I guess. Who cares? You care?” She fixed him with a defiant stare. “Huh?”
Jack stared back. “No. I guess I don’t actually give a fuck.”
That shut her up. An odd look played across her face. She sat up and made a small gesture with one hand.
“So what is this?” she asked, a little hesitantly. “A museum?”
Jack laughed. “A museum? Yeah. And I’m the mummy.”
The girl frowned. “Really—is it a museum?”
“No—it’s my house—my grandmother’s house, actually. My family’s.”
Her eyes widened. “You live here?”
“Sure. If you can call this living,” he added. “Why?”
“It’s just so…”
Her voice trailed off. Jack looked around and tried to see it all as she must. The worn oriental carpet, its threadbare pathways trodden by generations of bare feet; the marble fireplace with its carved wooden screen and dried hydrangeas; the monolithic Victorian furniture, caparisoned with doilies and antimacassars and bits of velvet patchwork. A Chatty Cathy doll that had been his aunt’s; a Marymount College mug filled with pens and eyebrow pencils; a corner where a brass incense burner and peeling plastic daisy decals were all that remained of a shrine to The Turtles.
“It doesn’t look like my house,” Marz said at last, very softly.
Outside the wind tore at the dormer window. Shadows washed across the floor, scattering the carpet with dark roseates. An odd sort of peace came over Jack: how long had it been since he’d sat in this room? As a child he’d slept here, as he’d slept everywhere in Lazyland. But this room had always held an unspoken sadness after his aunt had run away. When she had left Yonkers, hitchhiking cross-country to disappear in the winter after the Summer of Love, she had been scarcely older than the sullen girl before him.
He thought of what a terrible grief his family must have gone through, his father and grandparents and uncles. And he had sensed it only as a child senses death, as an inexplicable absence that has less to do with the disappearance of the dead themselves than with the empty places left in those who mourn, the empty places left in the house itself.
“Mmmmm…”
Jack looked up to see the girl yawning, her defiant expression softened by weariness. He made an awkward little bow.
“I guess I’ll say good night, then.” He waited for the girl to say something, but she only stared at the ceiling. “All right. Good night.”
At the door he turned. The girl lay in the enormous bed like a shipwrecked child in a battered lifeboat. A profound uneasiness pierced Jack, to gaze into that familiar place and see a stranger there. He closed the door and hurried upstairs to his own room.
CHAPTER NINE
What the Storm Said
Spring came late to Mars Hill. Even before the glimmering, the season had always been a slow sputtering fuse: ice-out on the lakes in late March or early April, followed by the first few sparks of green amidst lichen-covered stones and the sloping shoulders of the Camden Hills ten miles to the south. What most people recognized as spring didn’t come to Maine until the end of May, or even June. And of course the chimerical weather of the last two years had changed even that.
This spring, ice-out didn’t occur until the morning of April 19. Martin knew when he saw the first loons flying overhead, making their way inland from the bay to Swan Lake. Somehow the loons always knew, and would arrive at their summer homes within an hour of the final thaw. Martin Dionysos (né Schuster) stood on the porch of his tumbledown cottage, the hairs on his neck prickling as he watched them arrow overhead.
Tears sprang to his eyes and he let them come, weak and shivery with gratitude—it had not been so very long ago that he had been terrified he would never be able to cry again, just as he had been certain the loons would not return, or the peepers in the marsh. But while there was nothing that could keep the broken sky at bay, or the terrible weather, enough magic resided still in the bones of this place that Martin could lie awake at night in his bed, haunted by the song of frogs. Now he clutched the decrepit porch railing and watched the loons fly past.
“There they go.” From a neighboring cottage wafted the voice of old Mrs. Grose, one of the three year-round residents at the crumbling spiritualist community. “Magic birds.”
Martin smiled. “Magic birds.” That was what the Abenaki Indians had named them. “I guess spring’ll be here someday, too.”