“Let’s be easy on each other,” says Issy.
Cornelia clamps her jaw shut. She puts a blank piece of paper in front of Sekou, though he seemed perfectly happy with the one he’d been working on. That’s when we all hear the front door open, followed by the outside—smell, sound—spilling in. Who else did they bring? From their looks of surprise, no one is expected.
Sekou bounds into the dining room. We rush after him, Issy at the front. In the foyer, Sekou laughs and points and waves, but there’s nothing to see out in the sunlight.
“Hello?” Xavier steps into the day. The hollow drone of a leaf blower, the endless frittering trill of Spizella passerina. He turns and shrugs. “I guess it blew open.”
Sekou’s eyes linger. I lean down to ask what he saw, but he scrambles into the parlor. Cornelia’s wrist chimes again. She rushes to her phone in the kitchen. Xavier comes back in and latches the door, and asks Issy if she knows if Cornelia figured out the route. They talk interstates. I find Sekou in the parlor, standing under The Good Path where it hangs above the sofa. He peers up at the painting, his finger hanging from his mouth. I crouch beside him, slowly.
“Did you see someone out there?”
The boy dips a shoulder, then hits me with a coy smile. I know he understands. He breaks away, jumping to the sofa with a shimmy, glad to have an audience. I clap. He rolls his head onto the sofa cushions, digging his little hands between them. Then he titters and turns, and in his hands is Topsy.
Topsy lives in my drawer, wrapped in Grandmother’s Hermès scarf, the one with the ponies on it, the one she let you wear when you were playing pirates. Is it possible I brought him down this morning without remembering? It would be strange not to remember, but all right, it’s possible. Is it possible Sekou discovered him before I came downstairs, and squirreled him away? Well, anything is possible, despite the fact that I never heard him on the stairs—which is why it’s also possible that it was you who opened the door, and you who hid Topsy just where Sekou would find him, so that I would find him, too, and know it was an invitation. If it is you, I think, as I smile at the little boy, petting Topsy’s head, pretending it’s perfectly normal to have found him where I found him—if it is you, then it’s clear what I am meant to do.
All at once, I resign myself. With that resignation comes clarity. Why have I been keeping myself away when Home was where you came close? I give Sekou the kiss he deserves. I stand in my conviction. The adults are in the dining room, whispering about me.
“I’ll get my things together,” I say, as I breeze by. Into the kitchen I go, pulling the Mother from her spot. She fills two bowls: leaven for tomorrow; fed starter to keep alive. “I’ll need a cooler,” I say, knowing Issy has followed, “and that container of flour, and my wooden spoons.”
Xavier hovers. “We should confirm you got the letters.”
“The mudroom.”
He goes.
Small feet patter toward me. Then comes the gentle tug of two small arms around my legs.
“Would you like to see?”
Sekou nods. I lift. I do my best not to press my nose into his curls. I take off the cloth. He gazes down. She bubbles from her slumber.
“Is that Sarah’s sourdough starter?” asks Cornelia, but they know the answer.
50
Philip set a bag from the bagel store onto the coffee table, filling the loft with the smell of garlic. From the couch, Gabby fixed me in her gaze. I should have guessed she’d come with Issy. Officially, I was glad to see her; her presence reignited the possibility of Home. But without the Homesteaders to distract her, I felt naked, shy, scrutinized.
Issy grabbed an everything bagel and plopped onto Gabby’s lap as though it was the most hospitable place on earth. Only then did Gabby look away from me, wincing under the weight of her daughter’s exuberance, taking a breath and making the choice to fold herself back into the girl she’d made, all while Issy prattled on about the loft and pigeons and the subway.
“Is there money for doughnuts?” Issy asked, closing her eyes as she bit. Poppy seeds rained over her lap. “Cornelia says they’re good here.” She glanced up at me, stuck back by my room. “Don’t you want an adventure?”
“How are you, Saskia?” Gabby asked.
I couldn’t tell someone so solid, so clear, how mixed up I was: the need for you, and for Home, and for Sarah’s bread and the sound of the hammers, for Abraham’s steadying regard, even for little Nora flipping me the bird. But I couldn’t lie to Gabby, either.
“We miss you, Saskia.”
“Really?”
“Why do you think we’re here?”
Philip rustled in the bagel bag then, making a racket of paper and plastic. “Anyone want coffee? I was going to make coffee. You want coffee, Gabby?”
The woman shook her head, and brushed her fingers along her daughter’s bare arm as Philip turned to his task. Issy closed her eyes like a baby, slipping her face against her mother’s neck. “Sarah was saying just the other day that the bread doesn’t taste as good without your hands having been on it. And Tomas asked for a story about you the other night. He laughed when Teresa told him about little Topsy—how you carry him around in your waistband. Oh, and Ben said to be sure to tell you hi.”
“Ben?” Truth be told, I’d been hoping to hear that Abraham missed me, but this news bruised in a different way. Issy opened her eyes.
“In fact,” Gabby said, “you have Ben to thank for putting this trip of ours together.”
“Hey, wait a minute.” Philip’s voice boomed from the kitchen. “Who’s paying for all this?”
Irritation passed over Gabby’s face, but she tamed it. “Oh yes, Philip, you’ve been very generous. But this trip was Ben’s idea.”
I came forward into the room, drawn by the impossibility of it. She meant Ben—the Ben who’d hated me from the moment we met?
Gabby laughed at my expression. “Back in October, he told me he thought you must be missing us. He’s been corresponding with Xavier, and Xavier told him he’d moved out and—”
“You knew about that?” Issy turned on her mother. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I keep what’s private private.” Gabby patted her daughter to get her to stand up, a request to which Issy reluctantly agreed.
“Saskia thinks Ben hates her,” Issy said.
“I suspect,” Gabby said, after a moment, “that it’s more complicated than that.”
“Can we go on our adventure now?” Issy said. I was dizzy. I was filled with a feeling that reminded me of anger but was more hollow, and rang, uncomfortably, of hope. “Time for doughnuts!” Philip gave us money, Gabby folded back into herself, and we headed off into the day—Issy ready for the world, and me, stunned by the way it can surprise.
51
Xavier returns with a thin stack of envelopes. “You got seven letters.”
Cornelia moves in on him. “What does the extra one say?”
He hands them to me with an apologetic glance her way. Opening someone else’s mail is a federal crime, but I don’t say a word. I pull a knife from the drawer.
Xavier has arranged them in order by postdate. The paper yawns open. The first six letters are exactly the same as the set he already showed me.
The first: Hello again.
The second: Did you miss me?
The third: I missed you so.
The fourth: I need you, in fact.
The fifth: It’s time to come Home.
The sixth: All five of you. Or else.
But he’s right. There is a seventh letter. The four other bodies in the room—even the boy’s—lean in when I get to it. We are all holding our breath.
52
“I’ve told you a thousand different ways, I’m not here about more money.” Gabby’s voice woke me. It was their last night in New York. Under my watch, Issy had gaped at the high-rises of Times Square, moaned rapturously at the Veselka pierogis, and sprinted into the throttle of pigeons in Washington Sq
uare Park. I’d bought her a new deck of cards at a magic shop, which she refused to open, as though the cardboard box itself was a priceless artifact. Meanwhile, Philip and Gabby stayed in the loft and talked—about Jane’s money, I assumed. Now Issy snored abundantly beside me.
“Why did he send you, then?”
“You invited us, Philip.”
I extracted my foot from under Issy’s, avoiding the creaky board as I crept toward the curtain. Philip’s loft gave the illusion of spaciousness, but really it was a warren of art supplies and rescued furniture. It was into this chaos that I scuttled, rawly awake, all ears. The scent of General Tso’s chicken lingered in the loft.
“This,” Gabby went on, “is what I’ve been trying to get you to see: you and Abraham—both of you—need to stop this alpha male bullshit. You want the same thing. Yes, you do. It’s just because he’s not on his knees in front of you, begging, that you can’t see it.”
“He wants more money,” Philip said.
“Abraham doesn’t even understand how money works, much to my eternal frustration. No, Philip, he wants to protect her.” She dropped a newspaper onto the table, and I recognized it—a picture of me walking home, from the beginning of the school year. A flood of knowing filled my limbs: warmth, surprise. They were talking about me.
“Let us take her back.” She was pleading now, the longing in her voice so striking, so surprising, that it threatened to make me cry. “You mentioned your concerns to Abraham. He listened. You cannot insist on keeping her here simply because you are lonely. The prophecy states—”
“I don’t believe prophecies, Gabby.”
There was a prophecy? About me?
“Then look at how miserable she is. That should be enough. You’re welcome to come, too. Philip, you’ve always been welcome. But if you can’t leave this life, send her with us. And not just to keep her out of the public eye. Abraham knows she’s special. That’s what he told me to say—I don’t know the details, but when Abraham insists, I’ve found it best to listen. We’ll keep her safe—Abraham, Marta, Sarah, and myself. What she has been through—she deserves stability.”
What a horrible, wonderful thing, to discover that they wanted me because of who I was, and not in spite of it.
53
As with the first six envelopes, the edge of the knife finds the space between the flap and the body. The blade slits the paper open at the fold, sending linen fibers into the air, like juice spritzing from an orange peel. The slip of paper waiting inside is another edge. It stings a red line along my fingertip.
The seventh letter, which they press in close to decipher: Convince the other four, Saskia. You’ve always been their leader.
Cornelia blurts: “That’s not true at all.”
54
I thought Philip might say yes, all right, take her, but instead he stretched into a bear yawn and said he needed shut-eye. Gabby and Issy were leaving in the morning. I could reveal myself and tell her I was coming along. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it, not if Philip didn’t think it was the right choice, no matter how deeply I longed for Home in my bones. For a long time, I watched Gabby meditate beside her bed, an Unthinged World all to herself. I wished I could be like Issy, and dare to press myself against her.
55
“I’m hungy, Mama,” Sekou whispers when Issy returns with my suitcase. We’ve been drawing at the kitchen table while the adults gust toward departure.
Issy lifts the boy into her arms. His skinny legs snake around her waist. “My ravenous tapeworm.” She plants a line of kisses on his brow. “You want to use the potty?”
“Billy! Don’t hang up!” Xavier’s sharpness from the mudroom gifts me Issy’s glance. He’s in there to sort through unopened mail for “clues,” but really it’s just to have another dustup with Billy.
“Let’s see about snacks, okay?” Issy says. Before I can stop her, she opens the nearest cabinet. It’s bare. My face flames. She peeks into two more before she realizes. When she turns back, it’s with brimming eyes.
“Bread,” I say. Just enough bread to keep me going, which is not the whole truth, since occasionally I get a brief notion and have vegetables delivered from the grocery store. My hands find the sky, channeling culty bullshit. “The Mother provides.”
“I have Goldfish waiting in the car,” she whispers into the little boy’s ear. “And we can do McDonald’s. But before that, we need to use the potty.” He lets out a cry at the mention. She calls out, “Are we going or what?”
56
One rainy March afternoon, I arrived home to discover a teary Xavier sitting at the kitchen counter. It occurred to me he hadn’t been in school for a few days.
“Xavier’s moving back in,” Philip said.
Xavier shrugged his father off and lifted his eyes to mine. I saw apology there, borne of finding one’s self on the side of those who are not wanted.
“You’re both wonderful,” Philip said. “Wonderful, beautiful beings who deserve to be loved for exactly who you are.”
Xavier looked like he might sob so Philip boomed, “I believe this calls for cheese fries.” At the diner, their bellies stuffed, he put his hands on both our shoulders. “Finish out the school year, darlings. Finish out the school year and we’ll go north.”
57
The outside doesn’t scare me. It’s being in the outside—but not the way they’re thinking. What the outside might do to me is not my concern.
Grit under my soles. The sneeze of cut grass. Evening light in Renaissance flares. Vast sky. Whisper of Acer palmatum, the Japanese maples. Clouds that dance over the sun. The urgent chick-a-dee-dee-dee that earns Poecile atricapillus its common name. Hum of an airplane, hum of Apis millifera—the honeybee. Crunch of gravel off the step. Imagine the blast of noon. Imagine the veil of midnight.
They surround me. Breath on my shoulders, arms, neck. Eyes all over me. We move to the SUV, a movie star and her entourage. Sekou’s hand rests in mine. It’s hard to sort the view. Maybe my eyes are like a newborn’s and the accumulation of stimuli is too much information. Or maybe that’s vanity talking—maybe I’m just an old loser who’s been afraid for too long.
They are waiting. Maybe they want it. Who could blame them? A scream, some ravaged weeping, the rending of garments, a spasm of the lungs. Me on my knees, declaring defeat. Why else would I have locked myself in there? Why else, if mine is not a terror that lives just under the surface of my skin, ready to burst into flames upon activation?
They do not understand; I am not afraid to be in the outside. They do not understand; I am afraid of being in the outside. I am afraid of what my being is capable of, now that I have entered the world again.
What keeps me going, despite the fear? Well, the fact of Topsy, left out for Sekou to find. The fact of the door to my home, flushed open with no explanation. The thought of you in the Home woods, wandering.
Fear is for tomorrow, or tomorrow’s tomorrow. Fear is for the choice I will make when what I do unfurls. But for now I’ll take a few steps, one foot in front of the other. Then I’ll sit for a while as Xavier drives.
You know what I am. You know what I do. You know that I am right to be afraid.
58
“I am Love.”
Abraham’s voice was a just a man’s voice, yes. But in the fog of the early morning as it rose off the lake, it was so much more than that: it was the single note to which every Homesteader attended. A bell had rung out when the night was still black. Then came a knock on the door. Philip and Xavier and I stumbled from our beds. Ephraim was on the porch. He held out his hand to Philip and the men shook their hellos—we’d arrived the night before, after most of the Homesteaders were already in bed. “No need to dress,” Ephraim said, although he was in his white shirt and work pants. We followed the trail of Homesteaders down to the lake, where mist was rising, milky white, into the arrow of dawn.
Pants sodden to his knees, Abraham stood in the water before us, a dog beside him with sh
ort, bristled hair and a rib cage like a barrel. It turned to sniff the wind.
“You are Love.”
Issy and I shared her quilt on the bank. Beside us, Tomas, more boy than toddler now, snuggled under the shelf of Teresa’s breasts. On our other side, Sarah’s hands lay still as she leaned against the oak of Ephraim’s body. Ben and a squirmy Nora sat cross-legged at their feet.
There was a crunch of pine needles as two figures approached. They’d loomed large in my mind in the months since Issy had mentioned them. Cornelia was even prettier than I imagined: petite, with a steady flow of brown hair. She settled in at Issy’s other side with a whispered hello. Her mother, the infamous Butterfly, was tall and slender. She wore a blond coif and a sweater that nipped in at the waist and then out again at the bust and hips. She had what I’d heard described as “bedroom eyes,” a phrase I’d never understood until I saw the languid way she lingered at the edge of the group, gaze fixed on Abraham, and how he seemed to straighten, ever so slightly, in recognition. She was nothing like Mother, but in her bearing lay the same wounded demand.
“We are Love.”
I wasn’t the only one looking at Butterfly. Jim’s eyes moved across her body as a breeze buffeted the water. It made my stomach churn, the brazen way his gaze fondled her in front of all of us, his wife most of all. Jim wasn’t allowed to look long; Teresa noticed the swivel of his head and jabbed him in the ribs. He coughed like a kid caught cheating on a test, and moved his body away from hers, but lesson learned; he didn’t look at Butterfly again.
Then it was Philip’s turn to flicker his eyes over that woman. I shouldn’t have been surprised. I was even a little pleased for him, and for myself; maybe Butterfly could be the way back to Home. I checked to see if Xavier noticed, but he looked asleep.
Fierce Little Thing Page 10
