Sara-Kate was going to a reformatory. No, she wasn’t. She was going to Kansas on a plane.
“To Kansas?” Hillary murmured in disbelief. She couldn’t see what was true and what was not. There was no higher authority announcing, “This is the final truth!” The more Hillary heard about Sara-Kate, the farther away she went. Her small, thin figure was disappearing behind a screen of opinions and facts and newspaper stories, leaving Hillary in a place as dim as the rooms of the Connollys’ house. She was in a land of the unknown and the unknowable, she thought, a black land where not even her parents could help her.
“I am the only one who can decide about Sara-Kate,” she whispered to the little elf houses in the Connollys’ backyard. “Oh, if she would just come home.”
The village comforted her. She kneeled in its midst, repairing roofs, straightening walls, while around her the wonderful yard that had sheltered the tiny community was invaded, laid open to strangers’ eyes, littered with the workmen’s debris. Its privacy and secrecy evaporated as Hillary watched, and was replaced by the cheapness and indifference of a run-down city park.
“If only Sara-Kate would come out her back door with her usual shout: ‘Let’s get going!’ Then there would be no worry about what to do or what to believe. Then we could start all over again just being friends,” Hillary whispered to the village that huddled like a real village at the feet of real snow mountains.
“Is it true that Sara-Kate left yesterday on a plane with her relatives?” Hillary asked her mother one afternoon, after school.
“I think it’s true,” Mrs. Lenox said, looking up from the potato she was peeling for dinner.
“She never came back to say goodbye. She never called.”
“Well, I suppose there wasn’t time in the end.”
“I think she hates me because I’m the one who got her caught.”
“No, no! Of course not! It wasn’t your fault. It was no one’s fault,” Mrs. Lenox cried, running across the kitchen to hug her. But Hillary turned away with tears in her eyes.
Fifteen
In the dark winter days that followed, what Hillary missed most about Sara-Kate, oddly enough, were the very things that had made her so difficult to get along with: her sharp remarks and clear, cold eye. Beside Sara-Kate’s crisp manner, beside her quickness and lightness, the girls at school seemed slow and heavy. In fat-faced groups they clumped through the halls, weighted down with fashion clothes and expensive book bags. They pouted and complained, gossiped and giggled, and Hillary watched as if she’d never seen such behavior before, as if she’d never belonged to such a group. She was outside all groups now, but not because she was excluded. Everyone was being rather nice to her, actually.
Her teachers asked after her health. People smiled at her in the halls. Jane and Alison were always putting their arms around her, guiding her toward private nooks where they could whisper together.
“Don’t worry if you still feel a little bad about Sara-Kate,” Jane said. “She was even worse than we thought, and she got you tied up in complete knots.”
“My mother says it would take anyone a little while to get over something like this,” Alison added, patting Hillary’s hand. “It’s not that you were stupid and fell for all the lies Sara-Kate told you, even though you did. It’s that Sara-Kate was so terrible. Imagine going to the trouble of cooking up that elf village—”
“Which we finally went over and saw after she left,” Jane interrupted. “It’s no big deal as far as I’m concerned.”
“Me either,” Alison said. “And then imagine her making up that whole complicated world of elves, down to the tiniest details of what they like to do and what they like to eat.”
“How did you find out about that?” Hillary asked angrily.
“Your mother told our mothers,” Jane said. “Don’t worry. We understand. We don’t blame you at all. It wasn’t fair to pick on someone so much younger. We blame Sara-Kate.”
“Well, I blame you!” Hillary suddenly found herself yelling at them. “For not understanding one thing that happened. I blame you and I blame everybody in this whole dumb school!”
Not that she understood any better. She didn’t. It was what made her so angry at them all, so angry at Sara-Kate, too, when she let herself admit it. If not for the fragile village, which day by day seemed more endangered by the yard, Hillary might have turned her back on everything. She might have walked away up the hill to her own house and shut the door for good.
Why had Sara-Kate left the village behind anyway? she thought crossly. If Sara-Kate cared for it so much, if it was really the magic place she’d pretended, why hadn’t she taken it with her, or dismantled it and hidden it in some safer spot? Sara-Kate had gone without a word about the village, as if the place meant nothing and Hillary was nothing, too.
And yet, even as Hillary accused Sara-Kate, another way of looking came into her mind. She had only to approach the village for her bitter arguments to be grasped and whirled around, to be turned inside out by invisible forces. Couldn’t it be argued, for instance, that Sara-Kate had left the village behind on purpose? Suppose she had left it as a present for Hillary, or as a sign of friendship. Perhaps it was meant to be a message of sorts, the very message that Hillary longed to receive: “Goodbye. I am all right. I’ll stay in touch.” To be around the village was certainly to find oneself, willy-nilly, in touch with Sara-Kate. She might no longer be there “in person,” but she was there, Hillary discovered.
From her post beside the Ferris wheel, she watched the workmen come and go through the back door that only Sara-Kate had used before. Through the kitchen window, she saw a team of men move the stove back against the wall. How had Sara-Kate ever moved it in the first place? she wondered.
(“Elves are strong. And magic,” she heard Sara-Kate say in her ear.)
Hillary began to recognize certain real-estate brokers who came to direct house improvements, and she invited herself inside with them to look at the improvements close up: new tile on the kitchen floor; new counter tops; a door for the oven, and new burners. These things were certainly better than the shabby little room-within-a-room that was there before. And yet, there had been something wonderful about that other room, Hillary thought, something in the way the furniture had been taken apart and put together again so strangely. It was as if an entirely different sort of brain were at work behind it.
(“Strange and little!” Hillary heard Sara-Kate’s angry voice say again. “If you were an elf you wouldn’t feel strange or little. You’d feel like a normal, healthy elf.”)
A sale of house furniture and goods was announced and a women’s group came to polish up the few remaining tables and chairs. Then people arrived to prowl and buy. Hillary prowled with them. She saw Sara-Kate’s hot plates being sold, one to a bearded man with a limp, the other to a woman wearing bedroom slippers instead of shoes.
An oriental gentleman with a small and oddly elf-like figure bought the electric fan. He tested it first by lighting matches in its airstream. Then he picked the fan up and shook it like a stubborn catsup bottle. What on earth was he going to use it for? Hillary wondered.
(“Why do you think these elves are anything like you?” she heard Sara-Kate ask. “Maybe they’re so different that nothing they do is anything like what you do.”)
Often on her visits inside the Connollys’ house, Hillary went upstairs and down the hall. She walked into the second-floor room where Sara-Kate and her mother had lived during the very cold weather, where they had hidden when Mrs. Connolly had grown too ill to be left alone and Sara-Kate had stayed with her.
It was empty now, of course. Everything had been taken downstairs to be sold. But those four blank walls still held a glimmer of enchantment for Hillary. She remembered how the door had seemed to bulge with light, how near she had felt to the elves’ magic. There were other explanations for the magic, now. There are always other explanations for magic, Hillary thought.
“Sara-Kate was very s
mart,” Mrs. Lenox had explained. “She knew that if she didn’t come to school, the school would come looking for her. So she wrote a note withdrawing herself from classes. She used her mother’s handwriting and her mother’s signature and completely fooled everyone.
“Then, since she had said they were away on a trip, she was careful to keep them both hidden during the day. She didn’t answer the door. She kept the shades drawn. The heat was off, of course, because the furnace was broken, and no one could tell they were there at all. At night, Sara-Kate came out under cover of dark while her mother slept. She went for supplies. She must have gone to different stores so as not to be recognized, and of course she didn’t always pay for what she took. The night your father saw her she must have been coming home from one of these trips.”
“Maybe,” Hillary had answered softly. She’d been thinking about Sara-Kate’s strange eating habits, about the “delicate stomach” that required hot cereal for school lunch but could suddenly take on large numbers of bologna sandwiches on special occasions. Had Sara-Kate eaten Cream of Wheat because it was the cheapest thing she could get that was hot and filled her up? Perhaps she really didn’t like wild berries and mint at all. But-then again, maybe she did. Hillary shrugged and glanced at her mother. Perhaps being hungry and cold and angry and alone didn’t mean you couldn’t still be an elf. In fact, maybe those were exactly the things elves always were, Hillary had thought, as she stood gazing up into her mother’s face.
The village looked fragile, but it had staying power. From the window of the second-floor room, Hillary looked down on it, over the new wooden roofs, over the tidy front yards. The Connollys’ house brought Sara-Kate back in stray bits and pieces, but the elf village was where she came back all together in Hillary’s mind. More and more, the village seemed the only true thing about her, the only fact that was sure.
Here Hillary had first run into Sara-Kate’s tiny eyes and felt the tiny eyes of elves upon her. Here she had watched Sara-Kate work coatless in the cold and learned about thick skins and private languages. Hillary had only to crouch between the little houses to see Sara-Kate flick a strand of wheat-colored hair over her shoulder.
(“It isn’t where you look for elves so much as how you look,” she would hear Sara-Kate say. “You can’t just stomp around the place expecting to be shown things. Go slowly and quietly, and look deep.”)
Look deep. Every day Hillary looked. If she had not yet seen an elf, if she still couldn’t be sure of Sara-Kate, it must be because she was not looking deep enough, she decided. She redoubled her efforts, in the upstairs room, in the yard, on the streets of the town, in the whole world for that matter. There was no place safe from her watchfulness now, and no person either. She felt her eyes turning tiny, like Sara-Kate’s. She felt herself turning shrewd.
Out in the Connollys’ yard, she hovered protectively over the little well. Its bottlecap bucket was frozen in place, but come spring it would work again, she thought. The Ferris wheel had stayed upright on its metal rod. Every afternoon, Hillary walked to it and turned it with her mittened hand to make sure it still worked. It always did.
The elves’ sunken pool looked more like a skating rink. Remembering the power rafts, Hillary leaned over and tried to see special marks of activity. Sometimes there were none, and a dark feeling would come upon her. But more often, strange scratchings appeared on the ice, or a mysterious circular clearing would show up in the snow nearby, and Hillary’s heart would beat faster. She would glance toward the Ferris wheel and see again how it had glowed and spun on that extraordinary night, and hear the bird cry that had sounded when it seemed least possible. She would remember how Sara-Kate had trusted her and been betrayed, how she had revealed herself and been hurt, and how every single thing Sara-Kate had taught her about elves had turned out to be true about the thin girl herself. Then Hillary was sure that she had been in the presence of an elf, and that the village was a special, magic place.
“A place that’s got to be saved,” she told her mother one day, not long after another rumor had swept the street: a new family wanted to buy the Connolly house; a nice family with a dog and two children.
“Saved?” Mrs. Lenox asked with a frown.
“Moved,” Hillary explained. “I’m going to move it into our yard. That way, when the Connollys’ house is sold, the village will still be here in case anyone wants it again. A place like that shouldn’t be allowed to fall apart. It needs to have someone taking care of it.”
Mrs. Lenox shook her head in a despairing way.
“Well, I don’t know. You’d have to put it somewhere out of sight and out of the way. Your father has the garden laid out so carefully. We wouldn’t want the Ferris wheel sticking up in the middle, and those little huts would get caught in the mower if they were put on the lawn.”
“Oh, no. They couldn’t possibly go there,” Hillary agreed. “How about behind the garage?”
“But that’s not a place at all. It’s full of rocks and briers.”
Hillary nodded. “It’ll be perfect,” she said. “I was checking it over this afternoon. It looks so terrible that I guess I never thought of it before. It just goes to show.”
“Goes to show what?” Mrs. Lenox asked, but Hillary had gone out the back door into the yard again, and there was no answer.
“It’s getting rather dark out there, and cold!” Hillary’s mother called to her, opening the storm door a crack so her voice would be heard. “I think you should come in now. Hillary! Where are you?”
Very odd, but there was still no answer, and Hillary seemed to have disappeared.
Afternoon of the Elves Page 9
