“Well, who, Val? Don’t just sit there blubbering. A lot of people have died, you know. At my age it seems as if that’s all anybody does, practically.” Then she said, “Oh, you must mean Paavo Latvela,” and she sighed and patted my hand with her knotty old fingers that could barely pick anything up anymore.
It all poured out of me in a flood, including the parts I’d censored from my mom.
Granny Gran sat patting my hand and listening and nodding, and after a while she put one bumpy-knuckled finger against my lips and told me, “Hush now, that’s enough. He’d be embarrassed. You wouldn’t want to embarrass him, would you? He was always a little shy, you know, a little nervous about strong feeling. That took a lot, him talking to you as straight as he did about attachments to people. And it was good sense, too, what he told you. I didn’t know he knew that much about such things. About monsters and the like, yes, but people’s hearts, well, that’s a surprise.”
Shy! Paavo, shy? It’s very hard when someone else turns out to know something you don’t, something personal and important, about somebody you thought you got to know pretty intimately. Especially when you’ll never have a chance now to find out that kind of thing about him for yourself.
“How can you just sit and talk about him like that?” I said. “He’s dead, Gran! I was with him and I didn’t even know what was going on until it was all over. I didn’t know Jagiello was him!”
“Well, of course it was him,” she said a little testily. “You didn’t think that a brainless, hollow-hearted, soulless bronze statue could take on a kraken, did you? Keep one out, yes, but fight one once the kraken was loose and moving? Never. Of course Paavo Latvela had to take over himself, and naturally he couldn’t do it in that elderly human body he was wearing, pleasing though it was. It was pleasing, wasn’t it? He was always fine-looking, in whatever form I knew him, but without ostentation. Great style, Paavo Latvela had. Thoughtful of him, too, not to let you know that he was moving Jagiello. After all, what could you have done besides what you did do, had you known?”
Well, off I went blubbering again, knowing she was right. There was nothing else I could have done, not a thing.
“Did you know?” I said, struck by a sudden horrible possibility. “Did you know he was going to do it that way and let him go off and do it?”
“Well, no, lovie,” she said softly. “I don’t think I could have managed that. I have some kinds of sight—I did see the ending, you know—but not that kind, not prediction, thank heaven.”
“You saw what happened at the lake?” I said. “How?”
“Why, in my bathroom basin, which I had filled with water. He used water to call me, because he needed my help to distract the kraken when you were looking for Joel. He had his hands full himself with the Princes, who were following his water shadow all over town, wherever he led them. I used the basin to concentrate and send some of the stored-up charge from here. Most of it I got from the cribbage game on the porch there. I made the kraken think that an army from Sorcery Hall was arriving through the Lincoln Tunnel. Off the brute went to do battle, leaving you free to contact Joel. That was about the limit of what I could manage, but it served, didn’t it?
“I stayed by the water and watched the rest: a great and terrible ending for Paavo Latvela. I did my crying then, you see. I couldn’t put it off, for fear I might not be spared the time to do it later.”
That pulled me up short: the thought of maybe losing Granny Gran too. I thought I would suffocate on my bitter feelings.
“Anyway, lovie, he did what he set out to do, didn’t he? I’m sorry it cost so much, but I know he’d rather have paid the price than failed.”
True, I knew it was true. “Oh Gran,” I said. “But he’s gone, and I have nothing at all to remember him by. Sometimes I can hardly even think what he looked like, I mean clearly.”
“Time will cure that,” she said a little grimly. “When you’re old like me, lovie, you’ll remember every hair of his fine head and feed your tired heart on those memories. But for now, it’s just as well, you see, because he’s gone and shouldn’t be haunting you, now should he? Getting in your way, taking your attention from what’s going on around you? Why, you could be busy remembering Paavo Latvela and walk in front of a bus!”
“Gran!” I said. I was really shocked. “You don’t mean I should deliberately forget him! He was wonderful, he treated me like a grown-up, he was—”
“Just don’t fight against it, that’s all,” she said, “the blurring effect of time, I mean. You can’t fight that any more than you can fight the growth of your bones, lovie.”
“I can,” I said. “I’ll find some way to remember.”
“And he did leave you something,” she added.
I stared at her, wondering if he’d given her something for me, something she’d been keeping to give me now that it was all over. Past her shoulder I could see Mom coming back with Mrs. Dermott.
“What, Gran?” I said, “Quick, give it to me before Mom comes!”
“It’s your name, lovie,” she said softly. “What did Paavo Latvela call you?”
I said, “He called me Val, or Valentine.”
“Not Tina, the little doll, the baby,” Gran said. “Val. Val for Valor. Valentine for love.”
And then Mom was saying, “Are you two ready to let anybody else into this conversation?” She was looking sharply at me, noticing that I’d been crying, of course.
Granny Gran said, “We were about to invite you, but I can’t find the phone number, dear.”
Mom gave up.
But I had my gift.
So back to Joel, I guess. This is hard because it should have turned out differently, or that’s how I felt. We’d been through enormous danger together, and I expected something strong and permanent between us, a bond, because of it.
Well, maybe that’s what I got, but not in the form I expected.
A day came when I figured I’d better go make my peace with the fact that Paavo Latvela was dead but that ugly, dumb statue was back in its place again. They’d made a copy of Jagiello and set him up on his pedestal again, on the terrace at the east end of the lake. I knew because I’d read about it in the papers. I hadn’t walked across the park after school since that night. I’d been taking the bus.
So one afternoon, on a warm day in late spring with the end of school in sight, I walked out on the black spur of rock in front of the terrace. For a while I watched some boys rappelling with khaki climbing ropes all over the cliff under the little castle at the other end of the lake. I felt nothing at my back where the new statue stood, no presence. I might have been standing anywhere.
Finally I turned around and walked between the two little old-fashioned lampposts (where Paavo had held himself up after the Princes jumped us that afternoon) and up the steps onto Jagiello’s terrace under the trees. I looked up.
There he was, as ugly as ever: the lumpy horse in lumpy horse-drapery, with a twig caught on the little chain that links the bit to the single rein. The king was standing in his stirrups brandishing his crossed swords at the sky over the lake, with the hilt of a third sword showing at his left hip. Funny, I’d never noticed that third sword before. Imagine carrying three!
What bothered me was that there was no sign of what I knew had happened, nothing at all.
While I was standing there getting teary and mad, two guys came up and one of them asked me in a heavy French accent what the statue was.
“It’s a monument to Jagiello, a medieval Polish king,” I said.
They discussed this in French. Then the short one asked me, “What ’e doing zere?”
“Guarding the lake,” I said. “Protecting us from monsters.”
I walked away.
Somebody caught up with me, but it wasn’t one of the French guys. It was Joel.
He and I had not spoken together since that last phone call. We’d been avoiding each other.
He said, “Hi. I came to say good-bye.”
> “What?” I said. Why say good-bye to someone you never talked to anyway?
“I’m going up to Boston to stay with my aunt and uncle. I leave next week so I can settle in over the summer before term starts in my new school.”
He looked very good, very slim and dramatically handsome. He was wearing jeans and a rugby shirt and a plaid scarf.
“It’s too warm for a scarf,” I said.
He got red in the face. He took off the scarf. There was the fiddler’s brand on the side of his neck, fresh and sore-looking.
“I’m glad you’re still playing,” I said.
“I play like a pig,” he said bitterly. “I don’t even have his bow to use, did you know that? It burned up. I mean all of a sudden it flared, like a torch, and I could see again by the light it gave. That’s how I found my way out of the damned subway where you left me. Though I nearly got run over by a northbound express.”
“Joel,” I said, “what’s eating you? We won, you know? It cost us, but we won.”
“You won,” he said. “Wasn’t it right around here that you killed the kraken with Coke bottles?”
“Oh boy, Joel,” I said. This was really very painful, and I wished I’d taken the bus across town after all. “It was Paavo Latvela who killed the kraken and paid the price for it too. I was along for the ride, that’s all.”
“That’s all,” he mimicked. “Don’t be so modest. It isn’t every day that the damsel in distress goes to fight the dragon while the gallant knight sits waiting to be rescued from a crummy hologram of a subway station. While you were pulverizing the kraken, I strolled out of the subway with the ashes of that bow on my hand and a fiddle under my arm, not a mark on me. I might as well have been asleep the whole time.”
I said, “Joel, if you’d gone and fought the kraken and come back the winner, I wouldn’t be sulking and whining about it. I’d tell people you were a hero and we’d have a party.”
“That’s right,” he said. “That’s what you’re supposed to do. You’re a girl.”
“Oh,” I said.
“Oh. That’s right. Think about it a minute.”
“I am thinking. You’re jealous.”
“I’m not!” he said.
“Admit it, Joel. You’re jealous!”
He wouldn’t look at me. Suddenly he hauled off and smacked his fist into the tree next to us. Then he stood there hugging his hand and yelling, “You had no right! You’re the girl, you’re the one who should have been stuck in the subway! Who ever heard of a girl fighting a monster! It isn’t fair!”
I shouted back. “What is this? I’m supposed to leave all the serious, exciting stuff for you to do because you’re a boy? Hey, did you ever hear of such a thing as a human being? A human being, you know, a person? I’m one of those, though I happen to be a female-type human being. That means I do things for myself like anybody else, even if they happen to be dangerous things. Which I’d better be able to do, too, because there isn’t always going to be some guy around to take care of it for me—like that night, for instance.”
Which was a low blow, but he’d asked for it. Besides, it was his own fault he’d been stuck in the subway. Nobody had asked him to try to use the key instead of giving it to Paavo the way he was supposed to.
“You could have been killed!” Joel said murderously.
“But not you, right? Because you’re stronger and smarter and better, right? Because a girl can’t fight a kraken, or how will the boys be able to talk about how superior they are? I’m glad you play the violin like a pig, because you are a pig, Joel Wechsler—a selfish, greedy, macho pig!”
“And you’re a nut,” he snarled. He shook his hurt hand at me. “Look what you made me do! I can’t play the violin with a broken hand!”
“Joel, nobody made you sock that tree. Nobody made you do anything, so don’t give me that crap, all right?”
“It doesn’t matter,” he said, hugging his hand again and turning away from me. “I’m giving up the violin, I’m not going to play anymore.”
“Oh, make up your mind,” I said.
“I have. I’ll quit There’s no point to it.” Suddenly he swung around and yelled in my face, “He was going to teach me, I know I could have gotten him to teach me! I’ll never find a teacher like him again, never in my whole life. He was an old man, and he didn’t know his way around like regular New Yorkers, and he went up against a monster. And I wasn’t there. And he died.”
So that was it. If Joel had been there he could have changed things. Ha. I’d seen the kraken, and I knew differently. That alone made me not so mad at what he said but sorry for him, a little. Besides, I saw that his eyes were glittering with tears.
“Well, I was there,” I said, “and I couldn’t make it come out any differently. And I’m sorry.”
I walked away. Joel didn’t follow me. I felt, besides miserable sadness and anger, this pulling in my chest, under my heart. There should have been something between us, something besides jealousy and anger and mean words. There was, too. I felt it and I knew he felt it. Paavo didn’t tell me what you do when you feel that pull and it’s to somebody who causes you a lot of grief, even if it’s mostly because that person is feeling a lot of grief himself.
Anyway, that was all I heard from Joel before he left. Meantime, I’ve started seeing Lennie again, just a friendly sort of hanging around together. And there’s a very nice guy, Brian, a new kid who only moved here last summer from North Carolina. I’m teaching him about New York, which he loves.
Yesterday, we walked across the park and sat down by the lake. A lady came by in front of us towing a little kid. She settled herself on the grass across the path from us and started to read, and the kid discovered a scoop of melting ice cream somebody had dropped on the pavement. He got down on all fours and started licking. We both stared, fascinated, sort of nudging each other with our elbows and wondering when the lady would wake up. She had her nose in one of those interchangeable romance novels that Megan is always trying to get me to read, so maybe the answer was, never, not on her own.
“The kid gets to finish the ice cream,” Brian whispered to me.
I thought of all the times I got stopped from doing things I wanted to do for no good reason except the sixth sense my mother had had about stuff like that. “Nope,” I said.
“How much?” Brian loves a bet.
“A nickel.”
“A dime.”
“Okay.”
A man with a dachshund on a leash came by and stopped. He tipped his hat to the lady on the grass and pointed out to her that her kid was eating ice cream off the sidewalk. The lady smacked the kid, the kid began to scream, and the dachshund gobbled up the ice cream. Brian paid me a dime.
“Real New York,” I said.
My New York, which the kraken didn’t get to scarf up like that dog ate up the ice cream, because we didn’t let it.
The other day I got a letter from Joel.
My hand wasn’t broken, which is a good thing, since this school is for teaching music first, everything else second. They are tough up here. I’ve got calluses on my calluses and permanent cramps in my shoulders. If you don’t practice all the time, you’re dead. My teacher is great, but he keeps telling me there are no shortcuts: no magic formulas, he says. (You know who I wish he could talk to. Wish I could talk to that person too.) And then he piles on the assignments, because he says he thinks I’m “promising.” What I’m promising is to kick myself around the block for letting myself in for all this. How’s your writing?
Joel, trying to be less of a pig
P.S. Maybe you would consider coming to my rescue sometime?
Boston isn’t so far. Maybe I will.
——
Val’s adventures continue in Sorcery Hall 2: The Silver Glove.
More Young Adult Titles
by Suzy McKee Charnas
The Sorcery Hall Series
Book 1: The Bronze King
Book 2: The Silver Glove
Book 3: The Golden Thread
This is the story of Valentine Marsh, a New York kid faced with the call of an impossible destiny; of her divided family, her enemies both home-grown and far-flung, and her awed and unlikely fellow-adventurers who, with Val in the lead, battle their way to the lofty gates of Sorcery Hall.
The Kingdom of Kevin Malone
Amy, brooding on a family crisis, retreats to Central Park—from the frying pan straight into the fire! Out of her past swoops her old arch-enemy Kevin Malone, the neighborhood punk who used to bully her. Kevin’s feverish imagination has transformed Central Park into the Fayre Farre. Here, among castles, elves, monsters, battles and prophecies, Kevin is a Prince and a legendary champion. He’s also still a self-centered jerk, and he’s lost control of his magnificent creation. Will Amy risk her life to help Kevin, or just leave him to sort out his own mess? And either way, where will that leave her?
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The Bronze King Page 15
