Harriet Wolf's Seventh Book of Wonders

by Julianna Baggott

  “Yes?”

  “Be gentle with Tilton.” I close my eyes, so tired now.

  “Of course I’ll be gentle with Tilton.”

  “Unfortunately,” I say, “she loves you deeply.” I take the phone from my ear and plop it into its cradle.

  The room is quiet except for the distant racket of televisions, blathering up and down the halls, canned cheering and laughter—like there’s a party I haven’t been invited to. And if I were invited? Say what they will about me, but I know my own mind. I’d refuse to go.

  Chapter Eight

  Air

  Tilton

  Mrs. Gottleib’s station wagon is full of air. It shifts around my body. It’s like flying. It wouldn’t surprise me if Mrs. Gottleib’s station wagon somehow relies on air; the motor breathes the wind in through its grille, pours it through the engine, and the car itself grows lighter because it’s so full. I’m afraid that it will tighten my own lungs like a bellows—the way a bird’s body works as a bellows—and I will start to lift. This is why there are seat belts. Plus the fact that people die in car wrecks. It happens all the time.

  Luckily, (a) my surgical mask cuts down the gusts of air that I swallow. The mask was in our emergency kit, in the event that I ever go outdoors. And (b) I’m in the backseat, the safest spot in the car. Mrs. Gottleib wanted me to sit in the front beside her, but studies refer to it as the death seat. She told me to say no more. So I didn’t. And (c) I have a heavy bag on my lap that secures me to the vinyl seat. It’s filled with medical necessities: sunscreen, which I’ve already applied; insect repellent; EpiPen; various medications; water bottle; gauze; peroxide; Band-Aids. I’m wearing my mother’s wraparound cataract sunglasses. Mrs. Gottleib tells me that I look like Michael Jackson. Ruthie used to have his albums. Mrs. Gottleib’s comment makes no sense to me.

  I ask if there’s a train station out here. I don’t tell her that my father, George, left with Marie Cultry while taking her to a train station in winter.

  She says, You want to ride a train?

  No thank you!

  Also, in Mrs. Gottleib’s station wagon you can forget you’re moving. It’s like the world is moving past you. When you stop, the world stops. There’s nothing between me and the birds. Nothing but air. Air that they could beat their wings through and ride. I see them. They see me.

  There are many houses; each is a space to be filled. In each house there’s a family, ones who leave and ones who stay. Sometimes there is a building and it’s filled with apartments. In each apartment there’s a family of people who leave and stay. In each house, there’s also the Wee-ette. Not my Wee-ette, but theirs. My Wee-ette is now alone in our house. She doesn’t like to be alone. I closed my eyes in her bedroom—empty now, a chamber that doesn’t hold a heart and lungs—and I told Wee-ette that I’m going to see my mother in the hospital via Mrs. Gott­leib’s station wagon. I will be home soon.

  She sighed like curtains rustling.

  I am the keeper of all the pacts: Wee-ette’s old ones; the two with my mother; the four between Ruthie and me; and the one between just Wee-ette and me, which made me the keeper of the pacts. I checked on them before I left. The screwdriver is tucked under Wee-ette’s old typewriter. I used it to unscrew the heating vent on the far wall of Wee-ette’s bedroom. It’s been a while since I’ve checked. The vent’s grate popped off, a little sticky. There were the sheet metal innards of the heating system. The house is old, the walls so thick there’s a ledge—a perfect shelf for a little box—and then the ledge falls away as the duct goes straight down. See how there are spaces within bigger spaces! On the shelf was an egg container, only half-dozen-sized, made of cardboard. I pulled it out and opened the lid. Inside the two rows of egg pockets—more spaces within a bigger space—were the wound-up pieces of string. All of our pacts—ten total—each with its masking tape tab labeled with initials, date, and keywords. Six of them include me and Ruthie together, either with or without our mother. Return & Save is the most important. The others are about sharing Halloween candy and not telling our mother things about boys Ruthie had a crush on. The Halloween candy is gone. The boys that Ruthie had crushes on probably sell things for a living. But it would be good to have another pact between Ruthie and me. Just one more to set it all straight forever.

  I didn’t want to leave the pacts. I wanted to fit them in my pocket, for safekeeping. For me to safekeep them or them to safekeep me? I don’t know. But I didn’t disturb them. After giving each a little pet-pet, I closed the egg carton, put it back in the heating vent, screwed the grate back, and replaced the screwdriver under the typewriter.

  Now I close my eyes because Mrs. Gottleib says that we’re here in the hospital parking lot.

  I tell her just a minute, just a second, okay okay okay?

  The hospital is full of rooms where people come and go and come and go and each person who comes and goes is a cavity of heart and lungs and some of them stop working.

  Mrs. Gottleib says no. It’s my car, Tilton, and I’m kicking you out of it. I’m not going to baby you. You’ve had enough of that.

  She opens the door. Mrs. Gottleib’s station wagon has filled me up with its air. I’m light-headed. I tell her that I have breathed car air into my head.

  What? I can’t hear you through that stupid surgical mask!

  I repeat myself loudly.

  We’re at a hospital, she says, so if that turns into something real, we’re at the right place.

  Do you think it could turn into something? I ask.

  Each of Mrs. Gottleib’s pupils is small, like the dot you’d put into an apparatus to look at an eclipse, which can blind you.

  Tilton! Out of my car. Shake your can!

  I’m scared of Mrs. Gottleib. I’ll tell Wee-ette this when I get home. I’m scared of not only her eclipse-apparatus pupils but also her nose, a fleshy crocus bulb; her nostrils, which are large and stiff; her arms that wag when she’s agitated; and her growling voice. I decide to shake my can. I slide across the backseat. I put my foot on the cement, which is not at all like that on our back patio. I stand up and the sun is different too.

  Mrs. Gottleib slams the door so loudly I think the station wagon might fall to pieces. Come on, Tilton, she says. Let’s move.

  And so I move. And my breath is caught in the mask like breath in a cupped hand. Like a trapped whisper.

  Doors auto-open. We step through. They auto-shut. When I was little there were doors like this at the grocery store that opened when you stepped onto a rectangular rubber mat. These doors don’t need mats at all.

  The halls are loud. Room after room. Bags hang from metal poles. Tubes. Nurses and doctors. Food on trays. Everything on wheels—like roller skates. Like if the world shifted, everything could roll away.

  Mrs. Gottleib holds a grocery bag of my mother’s clothes. She talks to a woman behind a desk. The woman says something I can’t hear. We move down a hall. Doors open for us and close, with deep sighs, as if they are annoyed by us.

  Your mother might be out of it, Mrs. Gottleib tells me. She might say weird things. The drugs can make you loopy. That’s how it was with Albert.

  Albert is Mr. Gottleib and dead. He died in a hospital, which is where people come to die.

  Lord! That’s what I say, just like Wee-ette always did when she was annoyed by callers, book talkers, and fan letter writers. Lord, Lord!

  We come to my mother’s room, 315. I want to tell Mrs. Gott­leib that I’m like the American widgeon. A nervous duck, it’s always the first to sense trouble and will throw itself into the air, flapping wildly, calling out in alarm. In this way, the American widgeon alerts all the less nervous ducks, who spend their time paddling around, dipping under, and letting their feathers bead. I feel danger inside my ribs.

  When we walk inside, my mother is asleep. She’s small and tinted a different color, ashy. The room smells like the nurse’s station in elementary school, like someone is trying to cover up the smell of barf. Lord, Lord, Lor
d.

  I step closer. Her face is pinched, her eyes closed. Her large head looks small. Her hands are pasty. Tubes are stuck into her and taped down. Her lips are slightly pulled back, revealing a pectinate smile. I touch her skin. It’s chilled.

  She’s dead! I scream. She’s dead, Mrs. Gottleib! She’s dead!

  Mrs. Gottleib grabs my flapping arms. She’s not dead! Mrs. Gottleib screams back at me, but it’s a hushed scream, which is awful.

  Then my mother’s eyes flip open like someone turning on a light, and she’s not dead. Just like that. Dead, not dead!

  Mrs. Gottleib says, Jesus, Tilton! You’ll put the whole floor on code blue!

  I said not to bring her here! my mother screams at Mrs. Gottleib. Look what you’ve done. Then my mother says to me, gently, Tilton.

  An animal moans on the other side of the curtain in the very same room. Do they let animals in here? I screech.

  Tilton, come here, my mother says.

  I fall toward her like I am on wheels. I put my head on her chest just like she did before Wee-ette died. Her stomach is fatty but her chest is dainty. I press my ear to it and hear her lungs and heart. Somewhere in there, a soul. That’s what Wee-ette called her body: her soul case. Nothing more, she told me. Just a ratty old soul case!

  Are you okay? my mother asks.

  I am.

  Is your thumb okay?

  It’s okay.

  Is Mrs. Gottleib taking care of you?

  No.

  Mrs. Gottleib isn’t taking care of you? You aren’t staying with her?

  No.

  Mrs. Gottleib rolls her eyes. Tilton is twenty-three years old. She doesn’t need a sitter.

  My mother rubs my arms as if I might have caught a cold while not staying with Mrs. Gottleib. Did you eat?

  I had cereal and Tang.

  Did you sleep?

  I don’t tell her I watched television. This would upset her, but I do confess that I took a bath in the bathtub, alone, but I leave out wearing my nightgown while doing it.

  Are you sticking to your routine? she asks me.

  I fixed Mrs. Devlin’s television. I haven’t written her daughter a poem for her wedding yet, though.

  My mother pulls me close. There’s a new ending, my mother tells me. She pets me like a cat—long strokes—an exaggeration of the little pet-pets that I gave the pacts in their carton pockets.

  And then I think of the lightning hitting the plane, the hunk of engine hitting the road, dead parts of people, men with torches, and my father—George Tarkington—cupping Marie Cultry’s elbow. A new ending?

  A nurse in the doorway wants to know if everything is all right.

  It’s all fine, Mrs. Gottleib says. Just a little panic.

  Don’t trust Ruthie, my mother whispers to me. The seventh book.

  I don’t say anything when my mother mentions the seventh book. I made a pact with Wee-ette before her soul case broke. I keep my pacts.

  Mrs. Gottleib says, Your mother is agitated, Tilton. She needs to rest.

  My mother is highly agitated. Her eyelids flutter as she tries to close them.

  Homing pigeons have a complex set of systems, I say. Magnetoception lets them see magnetic fields because of a certain nerve. They smell home, which is called olfactory navigation. They feel temperatures too, and they know the way the sunlight slants a certain way when they’re getting close. Sometimes, they fly over roads and follow them home like people. Ruthie is going to find her way home and you will too.

  And my mother says, My pigeon, my pigeon, my sweet pigeon.

  I say, Come home, come home, come home.

  Chapter Nine

  Empty Book

  Harriet

  I suppose, looking back, that Dr. Brumus may well have uncovered my forgery of Eppitt’s file and been aware that my file was missing an important page. But Eppitt was spared, and my file was never re-created.

  I had unrestricted access to Brumus’s office after my father’s second abandonment—at least when Brumus was out, which he often was. His guilt gnawed at him. I’d catch him looking at me with a pity so deep it had to come from some loss in his own childhood. I never knew much about that, but he seemed to carry his own grief around. When he wearied of one secretary and was about to get another, he looked especially old and deflated. His new secretaries were a pump, filling him temporarily with air.

  I spent most of my time in Brumus’s office clipping items from the newspapers that my father had subscribed to for me. Dr. Brumus, meanwhile, lent me a pair of durable scissors from the sewing room and a tub of office paste. His office was outfitted with a set of encyclopedias and a host of medical books. I read everything on nervous conditions—the kind my mother might have—and mutism, hysteria, bleeding conditions. I concentrated on lungs for Eppitt’s sake, and on other ailments that might afflict the angels airing on the porches.

  I looked into how to prevent pregnancy by investigating prevention’s opposite: fertility. Although I had never had sex with Eppitt, we did fool around in our spare moments under the Duck Porch, in the pump house, the empty barn stalls. I needed to know the boundaries. I wanted to have sex one day, but only for the express purpose of having children.

  Mostly, however, I loved the newspapers—inky fingers, the tangy scent of paste. If the clippings I chose were your only historical source, you’d think of the world as endlessly odd and perilous. People were killed by random gusts of wind, cyclones of fire, church steeples, Far East fish eggs, and shattered wickets in croquet matches. Locusts fell from the sky and butterflies swarmed the Atlantic. I liked stories of gender confusion. Headlines read, “Violet, the Man in Skirts,” “Princess in Pants,” and “Lunatic’s Career as Duchess.” If I’d been a boy, my genius wouldn’t have been wasted.

  I was interested in what people left behind. Two hundred and forty-four thousand items had been abandoned on New York City transportation: 42,000 umbrellas, 22,000 pairs of gloves, 20,200 handbags, and 12,000 tin hats; gas masks and rifles; plus a dulcimer, a case of beetles, a three-legged chicken, a woman’s leg—complete with laced boot and stocking—and, of course, babies. Babies were left in theaters, restaurants, bathroom stalls. Was I trying, with my interest in the left behind, to prove that I was lucky, like Mrs. Funk wanted us to believe?

  When I think of my first book, I fall in love with my child self. The book became so full that it sprang open when laid flat—like something that wanted to fly. I told Eppitt about everything I learned, and together we fell more in love with the world out there, as my father had put it. I walked around in a bruised, aching, transcendent state of lovesickness and homesickness.

  Even now I remember the story of the Electric Girl, a “highly strung” eighteen-year-old who sent metal tea trays sailing through the air when she walked into a room. That’s how I felt when I saw Eppitt and thought of our escape. After clipping an article with the headline “Wolf Woman Shot,” I whispered to Eppitt under the Duck Porch that she made me cry—not just because I was Harriet Wolf, good old Hairy Wolf, and felt a kinship. And not just because of her tragic death. But because the shooting in some way must have felt like a relief.

  Eppitt understood me. He said, “The Wolf Woman was alone but you’re not. We’re a family.” And when I told him about the locust infestations and butterfly swarms, I worried that we’d get lost and separated from each other, but he said, “I’d come and find you. I’d never give up.”

  We held each other tightly. It wouldn’t last, but there would be another miracle. There are always more miracles.

  THE OWL AND THE GOOD WHEEL

  This miracle was an accidental gift from Brumus’s libido—his cycle of deflation and repumping with new air. None of his secretaries lasted long.

  I walked into the office one day, and the Owl was gone. Her chair empty, desk bare.

  Days later, there was a new Owl and she needed a new name. When she was with Brumus in the small room with the cot, she was silent. So I called her the Good
Wheel. She never squeaked. Her sharp, pensive face was cupped by dark hair. Previously a nurse in the sick wing, she’d been bitten by a child on the meat of her calf and she limped. Human bites can be dangerous, as I knew not only from medical texts but also from the many human bites at the Maryland School. They festered if not tended. Dr. Brumus looked at the bite himself, probably touching her leg tenderly. This was during the interview process for the Owl’s replacement. The Good Wheel got the job because she could prop her leg while doing secretarial work.

  This wasn’t an easy time for me. True, I had access to encyclopedias, newspapers, the world—and I got out of a lot of labor. But some of the girls of Stump Cottage hated me for having been declared a genius. Susannah Traub rubbed it in, asking, “Hain’t your father come to pick you up yet?” She’d been left by a young couple from West Virginia at age eight, which is old enough to remember whether they loved you or not. She pinched my arms, spat in my water glass (she worked in the kitchen), and ratted to the guards that I had gone off with Eppitt. If the tattle made it to Brumus, we were never reprimanded.

  She turned the other girls against me. Soon barely a female soul made eye contact with me. We grew to despise one another, but like sisters in some grotesque family. If I saw one of them now, we’d likely hug like two girls trying not to drown.

  I missed the Owl terribly. I ran into her as she walked out, fitting a letter of recommendation from Brumus into her purse. She looked at me with pity and swollen pride, as all the nurses did by this point. They muttered, “That one there. A genius. But still here.” The Owl pulled me to her bosom, which smelled of sweet talc, and started to cry. “One day, one day,” she said. This meant that I would get out, surely. I might even have a normal life—just not yet. I hugged her so long that she had to pry me loose.