“Speak up, dear,” Momdy said, who sat almost next to her. “No one will hear.”
“There’s a river,” Sophie said again, almost shouted. She blushed. In the darkness of her bedroom, with Lilac’s certainty before her, it had all seemed—not easy, no, but clear at least; the end was still clear to her, but it was the means that had to be considered now, and they weren’t clear. “And a bridge to cross it by, or a ford or a ferry or anyway some way to cross it; and on the other side an old man to guide us, who knows the way.”
“The way where?” someone behind her ventured timidly; Sophie thought it was a Bird.
“There,” someone else said, “Aren’t you listening?”
“There where they are,” Sophie said, “There where the Parliament’s to be.”
“Oh,” said the first voice. “Oh. I thought this was the Parliament.”
“No,” Sophie said. “That’s there.”
“Oh.”
Silence returned, and Sophie tried to think what else she knew.
“Is it far, Sophie?” Marge Juniper asked. “Some of us can’t go far.”
“I don’t know,” Sophie said. “I don’t think it can be far; I remember sometimes it seemed far, and then sometimes near; but I don’t think it could be too far, I mean too far to get to; but I don’t know.”
They waited; Sophie looked down at her cards, and shifted them. What if it was too far?
Blossom said softly: “Is it beautiful? It must be beautiful.”
Bud beside her said, “No! Dangerous. And awful. With things to fight! It’s a war, isn’t that so, Aunt Sophie?”
Ariel Hawksquill glanced at the children, and at Sophie. “Is it, Sophie?” she asked. “Is it a war?”
Sophie looked up, and held out empty hands. “I don’t know,” she said. “I think it’s a war; that’s what Lilac said. It’s what you said,” she said to Ariel, a little reproachfully. “I don’t know, I don’t know!” She got up, turning around to see them all. “All I know is that we have to go, we have to, to help them. Because if we don’t, there won’t be any more of them. They’re dying, I know it! Or going away, going away so far, hiding so far that it’s like dying, and because of us! And think what that would be, if there weren’t any more.”
They thought of that, or tried to, each coming to a different conclusion, or a different vision, or to none at all.
“I don’t know where it is,” Sophie said, “or how it is we’re to go there, or what we can do to help, or why it is that it’s us that have to go; but I know we must, we have to try! I mean it doesn’t even matter if we want to or don’t want to, really, don’t you see, because we wouldn’t even be here if it wasn’t for them; I know that’s so. Not to go, now—that’s like, it’s like being born, and growing up, and marrying and having children, and then saying well, I’ve changed my mind, I’d rather not have—when there wouldn’t be a person there even to say he’d rather not have, unless he had already. Do you see? And it’s the same with them. We couldn’t refuse unless we were the ones who were meant to go, unless we were all going to go, in the first place.”
She looked around at them all, Drinkwaters and Barnables, Birds, Stones, Flowers, Weeds, and Wolfs; Charles Wayne and Cherry Lake, Bud and Blossom, Ariel Hawksquill and Marge Juniper; Sonny Moon, ancient Phil Flowers and Phil’s girls and boys, August’s grandchildren and great- and great-great-grandchildren. She missed her aunt Cloud very much, who could have said these things so simply and incontrovertibly. Daily Alice, chin in her hand, was only looking at her smiling; Alice’s daughters were sewing calmly, as though all that Sophie had said were just as clear as water, though it had seemed nonsense to Sophie even as she had said it. Her mother nodded sagely, but perhaps she hadn’t heard aright; and the faces of her cousins around her were wise and foolish, light and dark, changed or unchanged.
“I’ve told you all I can,” Sophie said helplessly. “All that Lilac said: that there are fifty-two, and that it’s to be Midsummer Day, and that this is the door, as it always was; and the cards are a map, and what they say, as far as I can tell, about the dog and the river and so on. So. Now we just have to think what next.”
They all did think, many of them not much used to the exercise; many, though their hands were to their brows or their fingertips together, drifted away into surmise, wild or common, or sank into memory; gathered wool, or knitted it; felt their pains, old or new, and thought what those might portend, this journey or a different one; or they simply ruminated, chewing and tasting their own familiar natures, or counting over old fears or old advice, or remembering love or comfort; or they did none of these things.
“It might be easy,” Sophie said wildly. “It could be. Just a step! Or it might be hard. Maybe,” she said, “yes, maybe it’s not one way, not the same way for all—but there is a way, there must be. You have to think of it, each of you, you have to imagine it.”
They tried that, shifting in their seats and crossing their legs differently; they thought of north, of south, east, west; they thought of how they had come to be here anyway, guessing that if a path there could be seen, then perhaps its continuation would be clear; and in the silence of their thinking they heard a sound none had heard yet this year: peepers, suddenly speaking their one’ word.
“Well,” Sophie said, and sat. She pushed the cards together as though their story were all told. “Anyway. We’ll go step by step. We’ve got all spring. Then we’ll just meet, and see. I can’t think what else.”
“But Sophie,” Tacey said, putting down her sewing, “if the house is the door…”
“And,” Lily said, putting down hers, “if we’re in it…”
“Then,” Lucy said, “aren’t we traveling anyway?”
Sophie looked at them. What they had said made perfect sense, common sense, the way they said it. “I don’t know,” she said.
“Sophie,” Smoky said from where he stood by the door. He hadn’t spoken since he’d come in and the meeting had started. “Can I ask something?”
“Sure,” Sophie said.
“How,” Smoky said, “do we get back?”
In her silence was his answer, the one he’d expected, the one thing everyone present had suspected about the place she spoke of. She bowed her head in the silence she had made, and no one broke it; they all heard her answer, and in it, hidden, the true question that was being put to them, which Sophie could not quite ask.
They were all family, anyway, Sophie thought; or if they came, they counted, and if they didn’t, they didn’t, that’s all. She opened her mouth to ask: Will you come? but their faces abashed her, so various, so familiar, and she couldn’t frame it. “Well,” she said; they had grown indistinct in the sparkling tears that came to her eyes. “That’s all, I guess.”
Blossom jumped from her chair. “I know,” she said. “We all have to take hands, in a circle, for strength, and all say ‘We will!’” She looked around her. “Okay?”
There was some laughter and some demurrers, and her mother drew her to her and said that maybe everyone didn’t want to do that, but Blossom, taking her brother’s hand, began to urge her cousins and aunts and uncles to come closer to take hands, avoiding only the Lady with the Alligator Purse; then she decided that perhaps the circle would be stronger if they all crossed arms and took hands with opposite hands, which necessitated an even smaller circle, and when she got this linked in one place it would break in another. “Nobody’s listening,” she complained to Sophie, who only gazed ather unhearing, thinking of what might become of her, of the brave ones, and unable to imagine; and just then Momdy stood up tottering, who hadn’t heard the plan Blossom had urged, and said, “Well. There’s coffee and tea, and other things, in the kitchen, and some sandwiches,” and that broke the circle further; there was a scraping of chairs, and a general movement; they went off kitchenwards, talking in low voices.