“You say, ‘What a surprise,’ ” Lilac reminded her, whispering close to her ear.
Lilac’s odor was of snow and self and earth. “What a surprise,” Sophie began to say, but couldn’t finish it, because tears of grief and wonderment flew up her throat behind the words, bringing with them all that Sophie had been denied and had denied herself all these years. She wept, and Lilac, surprised herself now, thought to draw away, but Sophie held her; and so Lilac patted her back gently to comfort her.
“Yes,” she said to her mother, “yes, I came back; I came a long way, a long long way.”
Walking From There
She may have come a long, long way; for sure she remembered that this was what she was to say. She remembered no long journey, though; either she had awakened only after most of it had been sleepwalked away, or in fact it had really been quite short…
“Sleepwalked?” Sophie asked.
“I’ve been asleep,” Lilac said. “For so long. I didn’t know I’d sleep so long. Longer than the bears even. Oh, I’ve been asleep ever since a day, since the day I woke you up. Do you remember?”
“No,” Sophie said.
“On a day,” Lilac said, “I stole your sleep. I shouted ‘Wake up!’ and pulled your hair.”
“Stole my sleep?”
“Because I needed it. I’m sorry,” she said gleefully.
“That day,” Sophie said, thinking How odd to be so old and full of things, and have your life inverted as a child’s can be… That day. And had she slept since then?
“Since then,” Lilac said. “Then I came here.”
“Here. From where?”
“From there. From sleep. Anyway…”
She awoke, anyway, out of the longest dream in the world, forgetting all of it or nearly all of it as she did so, to find herself stepping along a dark road at evening, silent fields of snow on either side and a still cold pink-and-blue sky all around, and a task she’d been prepared for before she slept, and which her long sleep had not forgotten, ahead of her to do. All that was clear enough, and Lilac didn’t wonder at it; often enough in her growing up she’d found herself suddenly in strange circumstances, emerging from one enchantment into another like a child carried sleeping from a bed to a celebration and waking, blinking, staring, but accepting it all because familiar hands hold him. So her feet fell one after the other, and she watched a crow, and climbed a hill, and saw the last spark of a red sun go out, and the pink of the sky deepen and the snow turn blue; and only then, as she descended, did she wonder where she was, and how much further she had to go.
There was a cottage at the bottom of the hill, amid dense small evergreens, from whose windows yellow lamplight shone out into the blue evening. When Lilac reached it she pushed open the little white gate in its picket fence—a bell tinkled within the house as she did so—and started up the path. The head of a gnome, his high hat doubled by a hat of snow, looked out over the drifted lawn, as he had been doing for years and years.
“The Junipers’,” Sophie said.
“What?”
“It was the Junipers’,” Sophie said. “Their cottage.”
There was an old, old woman there, the oldest (except for Mrs. Underhill and her daughters) Lilac had ever seen. She opened her door, held up a lamp, and said in a small old voice, “Friend or Foe? Oh, my,” for she saw then that a nearly naked child, barefoot and hatless, stood before her on the path.
Margaret Juniper did nothing foolish; she only opened the door so that Lilac could enter if she liked, and after a moment Lilac decided that she would, and went in and down the tiny hall across the scatter rug and past the knickknack shelf (long undusted, for Marge was afraid of breaking things with her old hands, and couldn’t any longer see the dust anyway) and through the arched doorway into the parlor, where a fire was lit in the stove. Marge followed with the lamp, but then at the doorway wasn’t sure she wanted to enter; she watched the child sit down in the maple chair with broad paddle arms that had been Jeff’s, and put her hands flat on the arms, as though they pleased or amused her. Then she looked up at Marge.
“Can you tell me,” she said, “am I on the right road for Edgewood?”
“Yes,” Marge said, Somehow not surprised to be asked this.
“Oh,” Lilac said. “I have to bring a message there.” She held up her hands and feet to the stove, but didn’t seem to be chilled through; and Marge didn’t wonder at that either. “How far is it?”
“Hours,” Marge said.
“Oh. How many.”
“I never walked there,” Marge said.
“Oh. Well, I’m a fast walker.” She jumped up then, and pointed inquiringly in a direction, and Marge shook her head No, and Lilac laughed and pointed in the opposite direction. Marge nodded Yes. She stood aside for the child to pass her again, and followed her to the door.
“Thank you,” Lilac said, her hand on the door. Marge chose, from a bowl by the door of mixed dollar bills and candy with which she paid the boys who shoveled her walk and split her wood, a large chocolate, and offered it to Lilac, who took it with a smile, and then rose on tiptoe and kissed Marge’s old cheek. Then she went out and down the path, and turned toward Edgewood without looking back.
Marge stood in the door watching her, filled with the odd sensation that it had been only for this tiny visit that she had lived her whole long life, that this cottage by the roadside and this lamp in her hand and the whole chain of events which had caused them to be had always and only had this visit for their point. And Lilac too, walking fast, remembered just then that of course she was to have visited that house, and said what she did say to the old woman there—it was the taste of the chocolate that reminded her—and that by next evening, an evening as still and blue as this one or stiller, everyone in the pentacle of five towns around Edgewood would know that Marge Juniper had had a visitor.
“But,” Sophie said, “You can’t have walked here since evening…”
“I walk fast,” Lilac said; “or maybe I took a shortcut.”
Whatever way she had taken had led her past a frozen lake and a lake island all glittering in starlight, where a little pillared gazebo stood up, or perhaps it was only snow-shapes that suggested such a place; and through woods, waking a chickadee; and past a place, a sort of castle iced with snow…
“The Summer House,” Sophie said.
… a place she’d seen before, from above, in another season long ago. She came toward it through what had been the flower beds that bordered its lawn, gone wild now and with only the tall dead stalks of hollyhock and mullein standing above the snow. There were the gray bones of a canvas sling-chair in the yard. She thought, seeing them: wasn’t there some message, or some comfort, she was to deliver here? She stood for a moment, looking at the derelict chair and the squat house where not a single footprint went through the snow up to the half-engulfed door, a summery screen door, and for the first time she shivered in the cold, but couldn’t remember what the message was or whom it had been for, if there really had been one at all; and so passed on.
“Auberon,” Sophie said.