“Come on,” she said. Dennis looked up at me and laughed.
I squatted beside them, scared and uncomfortable.
“Watch carefully,” Altria said. She stroked my chest, pulled a streamer of fire from me, and, as Dennis gaped, placed her red-cloaked hand on his forehead.
“Do you hurt other people against their will?” she asked.
“What?” He tried to pull her hand off his forehead. He struggled, kicked his legs, gripped her arm and pulled. She didn’t move.
“Do you rape people?” she asked.
He convulsed, arms and legs and neck straight and stiff, his head back, mouth stretched in a silent scream. Then the fit left him and he relaxed. “Only special people,” he whispered. “Only the exact right one. I don’t find her very often.”
Altria lifted her hand from his forehead and turned to me. “Here.” She placed her palm on my chest. Fire poured out of her into me. “Some of what you gave me. Curse him.”
“What?”
“You don’t want to curse the people you love. I heard you talk to Tobias after your mother ate the fruit of that beautiful tree. You’d give this up if you had to hurt people you love every day. Why not curse someone who deserves it?” She took my hand, guided it down to rest on Dennis’s head. “It’s not hard. Give him something to pay him back for what he’s done to others.”
“But he—but you—but I don’t really know—”
“Your hand’s so hot. Hurt me,” Dennis said. “You’re turning into my type.”
“Nothing twisted gives you pleasure,” I whispered. Heat poured out of my hand, flooded into Dennis.
He began to weep.
Altria stood up, leaned to pat his cheek, then grabbed my hand and dragged me out of there.
SHE hugged me from behind again, and we rose up into the air. Wind chilled the tears on my face. Would he be all right? Did he deserve to be cursed? I didn’t even know who he was, or if he’d really done what he said. He hadn’t hurt us, hadn’t even come close. Guilt twisted and burned in my belly. This time I’d cursed someone who had no defenses. How could that be right?
We flew fast above the boulevard for two miles, over the people at Sábado y Domingo, past the convention centers again, over the point that stuck out into the ocean, past the part of the cemetery that was on the cliff above the sea, where our family has had plots for years in preparation for the ultimate, and down to the narrow, unimproved beach in Bosquecito that Jasper and Flint and Beryl and I walked to from our house, Mariposa Beach. At high tide, the waves lapped at the rip rap and there was no beach; at low tide you could walk along the beach past a tar hill to where the cliffs curved out and away, and below them were the magical tide pools where I had been searching for treasure since I was a little kid.
The tide was halfway in or out, and seagulls flew along the strand, crying. Grown-ups and kids and dogs walked or raced or swam along the water’s edge, leaving footprints in wet sand that shone for a moment before all the water forced to the surface by the pressure of the feet sank down again. The air smelled of sea, with a touch of dead fish.
At a moment when everyone faced away, Altria dropped us to the sand with a soft thud not too far from where the dark rocks that sheltered and formed the tidepools began.
The air was warm in this stretch of beach where the shore wind was diverted by the cliffs. Heat rose from sand that had been baking under afternoon sun for several hours.
I took off my shoes and socks and dug my toes into the sand, wishing I could crawl under it and bury myself. Altria sat close, her arm draped over my shoulders.
Not far off, a man and his dog played fetch the driftwood stick and throw it. Out in the rocks twelve-year-olds poked sticks into tidepools, and one stooped to pick something up. Three teen girls in bright bikinis walked along the water. A woman with her pants rolled up held her little boy’s hand, and they waded in the edges of the waves. Farther back, where the beach was just a beach and didn’t have rocks in the water, people swam, bodysurfed.
“You’re not happy,” Altria murmured.
“I wish I knew what was right,” I said. “I have no sense that that was right. I feel like you forced me to do something awful.”
“I do that. You knew that.”
“I do now.”
“But I was trying to help, Gyp. If you can open up your head a little, you’ll see that you have treasure. Open your head. You don’t even know how to curse right. And it’s all so close.” She gripped my head between her hands and stared into my eyes. So strange, this view of my own face, which I usually saw in the frozen moment of a photograph, or with planned expressions in front of a mirror, never just serious and searching and frustrated. “I want to get this right, but I don’t know my job yet, either. Will you give me more chances?”
“I don’t know.”
She caught one of my tears on a finger and tasted it. She took my hand, turned it over so she could read my wristwatch. “I have fifteen more minutes.”
“I can set time limits and you’ll respect them?”
“Today. Hmm. Fifteen minutes.” She stroked her hand across my head, warm and gentle, and looked down the beach.
A bathing-suited mother played with her two naked toddlers in the surf.
“Let’s try that,” Altria said, and laid her hand on my back.
It was like the earlier diminishing had been, a collapse and collection down into a smaller self, pulling tighter and losing pieces of myself—bone length, muscles, all the growth and change experience had written on my body. In a moment I had dropped down into the cavern that my T-shirt became, arms and legs pulling up out of my clothes. I sat in a dark cocoon of fabric. I had the urge to wail.
Altria lifted the edge of the T-shirt. Her face—my face—was suddenly the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. It promised comfort and security. I held out my arms to her.
“Hey, little one,” she murmured in a soft voice, and lifted me, cradled me against her breast. I reached my arms as far up toward her neck as I could and laid my head on her chest. I could hear her heart beat. The sun blazed on my skin. A breeze brushed my back. Both things felt like touches.
She held me tight for awhile, and it was all I wanted. I didn’t think about who or what I had turned into. The warmth of her chest against my front, a smell like campfires and sagebrush and fresh bread, her breath across my head, ruffling what little hair I had, her arms around me, tight and warm.
“Hey,” she murmured. “You want to go wading?”
I didn’t want to move.
Her arms shifted around me. Her hands cupped me under my arms, and she set me on my feet on the sand. I sensed each grain of sand against the bottoms of my feet. I took a step and stumbled, landed on my butt, sand printing its story against my skin.
“Too small, maybe. I don’t know human children.” She got to her knees in front of me, took my hand, helped me back to my feet. “Can you walk?”
I tottered, even with her support. She let me sit down again, rose, and stooped to lift me. Sand formed a gritty layer between her arm and my body. “Come on. Let’s see if you want to get wet.”
She walked down to the water’s edge and held me up on my feet on the wet sand. A wave rolled toward us. It looked like a tidal wave from so low! I screamed, and Altria lifted me above the surge line; the water ran up and washed around her knees. “Oh!” she said in a surprised tone. “Cold.” She lowered me into the water as it washed back out. “What do you think? Do you like that?”
It wasn’t as scary as a wave racing toward me. The water felt cold, and I liked the pressure of the rush of it past my legs and waist. It smelled salty. I danced a little, felt the pressure change as I turned my body.
Altria laughed. She lifted me again and walked into the water in all her clothes. Waves broke around us. As long as she held me tight, I wasn’t afraid. I loved how the water moved around and against us.
The water was cold, but the sun was warm. Sometimes the water embraced us, and sometimes it let u
s go, and then I felt colder than when I was down in it; breeze chilled me. Altria moved around in the water, cradled me against her, jumped up as surges swept past us, stood when the level dropped. She moved farther out to where we could float.
Then—something talked to me. Something deep and low and thrumming, something speaking about time and change and how things repeated, always different and always the same. Something about the power of water, the water washing in and out of the power in me, the power that had formed Altria. Something that was too big and old to be either a curse or a blessing, something that was a constant surge and retreat. It called to me. I pushed at Altria’s chest, ready to answer the call, to float away into that deeper power and forget who I was.
“What are you doing? Shit,” she said, and ran out of the ocean.
My mind was half engaged with the call; even though we weren’t in the water anymore, I still heard it. Altria set me on top of my T-shirt and grabbed something shiny out of the sand, stared at it. The sun sparkled on it, and it looked pretty. I reached for it. In the grip of my desire for the shiny thing, I lost my connection to whatever it was that called.
“Shit,” she said. She snatched me up, grabbed my clothes, handed me the shiny thing, and held me tight. She closed her eyes.
A moment later we were in my bedroom.
She set me on my bed.
I put the shiny thing in my mouth. It tasted sandy, salty, gritty against my tongue, but there were smooth things under the grit, and I liked the feel of it.
“My hour is up, Gyp,” Altria said. She kissed my forehead.
I took the shiny thing out of my mouth and shook it. I sucked on it some more, then looked around and realized that Altria was gone. A green stone nudged my knee. I held it. There was a song inside it, like the song of the deep water. It was a home song, a comfort song, but it faded. I opened my mouth to cry.
Then I grew. My arms and legs shot out, my spine extended, lengthened my torso; flesh spun out around me to match the pace of my skeleton’s growth; strength and knowledge, muscle and bone and blood vessels all stretched out, knitted a new me, a full-grown me, naked and sticky with seawater and sand. I took my watch out of my mouth and sat on my wet bedspread for a while, the protection stone in my right hand.
What was that?
She’d turned me into a baby.
She wasn’t much of a mother.
I smiled.
She wasn’t much of a mother, but she hadn’t let go of me, and she had brought me home, and honored her commitment to play with me for an hour and that was all.
Jeeze! I’d been a baby!
Strangely, I had loved that. As long as she didn’t let go.
But what was that sea-call thing? I had trouble even thinking about it. I put the stone up to my forehead, caught a thread of promise, lost it.
I put on one of my sleepshirts and crossed the sitting room to the bathroom for my second shower of the day.
Twenty-one
I looked up Dennis in the phone book. He was listed. I never wanted to talk to him again, but I was worried, and I felt guilty. I dialed his number. “Hello?” he said in a hoarse voice.
“Hello? Dennis? Are you all right?”
Silence. Then, “Gypsum?”
“Are you okay?”
“No.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
I heard him breathing.
“It’s very odd,” he said presently. “I’m not myself. I don’t know who I am. I ate an apple, and just the taste . . .”
I waited. Then I said, “Are you okay?” again.
“No. I don’t know. I’ve got your phone number now, anyway. Caller ID. I’ll call you.” He hung up.
He couldn’t have the right number. Mama blocked that. Still—
My heart was still shocky and unsettled. I got out the journal and wrote down the facts, then what Altria had said to me, and what I felt.
I stared at her words again, the ones about curse people who deserved it, and I had something to treasure. Open my head.
Flint knocked on the door, poked his head in. “The curse wore off at three-forty-five,” he said.
“Oh, good.” I flipped back to an earlier page where I had written about cursing Flint and Jasper, and in the “duration” field, wrote “five hours.”
“You ready to do lights?”
“Still building up after my last curse. Would you take me to the market to buy steaks?” I asked.
“Sure.”
I handed him my car keys and we drove to the market.
After we returned with dinner ingredients, I finished up more batches of cookies. Tobias had done several sorts and lost interest, leaving me to clean everything up.
Somewhere in there, I went to lean over the retaining wall in the backyard to check on the banana tree. It had vanished, and Tobias’s shield had, too; the only thing left was a scrap of yellow in the dirt, the original banana.
Thank God there was a time limit.
Around six, the sun dipped low and evening fog moved in. Good weather for making Christmas lights.
Flint and I went out in the front yard, where there was an ornamental garden in the middle of the roundabout with a bench we sat on. “Did you figure out a spell to keep your hands cool?” I asked.
“Damn! No!”
“I’ll wait.” I felt the power in my chest, warm, heavy, ready to be called. Building. See how this one went. Maybe it was treasure. Why couldn’t Flint and I work together all the time?
Flint muttered to himself. I looked at our big yellow house. Lights were on in upstairs rooms. In mine, in Beryl’s, in the master bedroom. Light shone from the kitchen windows, from Dad’s study. A light glowed in the upper room of Tobias’s tower, and over it all, I could sense the wards woven to protect us and our place, faint traceries of blue and green lines.
The family van pulled into the driveway and drove right to the front door. Flint and I jumped up and went around the van. Flint opened the side door. All the seats had been taken out of the back. Beryl, muddy and scratched but happy, sat there with this year’s tree, a bushy lopsided pine with dense, short needles. It was tall enough that it had bent to fit in the van. It smelled wonderful. We helped it out. “Welcome, welcome,” Flint told it. It straightened its top.
Mama came around the van. “Beautiful tree,” she said, “may I help you?”
I strained to hear if the tree responded, but I guessed I didn’t speak tree; I couldn’t hear anything.
Mama held out her hands, palms up, and something streamed from them that I couldn’t quite see. It wrapped around the tree’s roots, and then the tree floated. Beryl climbed out of the car and took hold of one of the tree’s branches, and we all went in through the big front door, turned left in the great hall, and proceeded to the living room, where a tub of enriched earth and a watering can waited.
The tree drifted up and settled down into the earth, moved its roots, dug in. Beryl watered it and tamped the earth. “Thank you, glorious tree. Welcome to our house.”
I had a sense of things happening all around me. They teased at my energy, but I couldn’t see or understand them.
“Did you figure out how to use just a bit of the energy?” Flint asked me.
“Not exactly.” I had established a time limit, but Altria had used everything I had in her allotted hour. I remembered how we built the staircase: she had been in charge of the draw, had taken it more slowly than Flint knew how. Maybe I could control the flow. That would be useful. “Should we experiment before we dress the tree?”
“Yeah. Welcome, tree. Thank you for gracing us with your presence,” Flint said to the tree. We went back outside and sat on the bench again.
He took my hand. “I’m not sure about whether I can keep it cool.”
“Let’s just try to go slow. Colored lights or white lights?”
“White lights for the front of the house and the tree,” he said. “We could put colored lights on the hedge.”
“Do you
have an image of what you want?”
He pointed at the house. “A line of lights at the eaves. A line of lights around each of the windows. A line of lights around the front door. What do you think?”
“Sounds nice.”
“Pretty much what Jasper did a few years ago, before I got this job.”
“So we should add something fancy.”
We grinned at each other. “Let’s do the easy part first,” Flint said.
“All right.” I gripped his hand and closed my eyes and thought of feeding my power to him slowly so he could shape it. White lights, or maybe slightly yellow lights for warmth, safe and gentle on the outside of the house, to go on at dusk and turn themselves off and rest during the sunlit hours of the day. I imagined lights in each of the places Flint had mentioned, and let energy flow in a smooth thin stream from me into my brother’s hand.
Flint squeezed my hand. “Look.”
The house wore lacy lines of light, not straight lines but strange weavings and patterns; an embroidery of lights around each window, along the eaves.
“Wow.”
“You thought them safe? I felt that. I love that. On at sunset, off at sunrise? Thanks for thinking that.”
“You made lace!” I turned his hand over and looked at it. “I didn’t burn you.”
“Yeah. We’re getting good. I should never say that, because that’s what I always think right before I mess up big-time. Dang.”
“We did all right. Let’s go talk to the tree.”
The tree had settled itself. It was a bigger tree than we had had in some time, a proud bushy tree, dark green and fragrant.
“You have to do the tree talking,” I said. “I don’t understand the language.”
“All right.” Flint went to the tree and put his hand on a branch. “May we dress you in light?”
I almost heard an answer.
“Thank you.” He held out his hand to me, and I stepped forward and took it.
Safe lights, cool lights, shine and don’t burn, shine and feel good to the tree, I thought. I felt our power flowing gently and slowly.
Flint squeezed my hand. I opened my eyes. He had laid a lacework of lights over the tree’s branches.
A Fistful Of Sky Page 28
