The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2012 Edition

by Fowler, Karen Joy

  “I guess I can do that,” Ophelia said.

  At the convenience, she picked up milk, eggs, whole wheat sandwich bread, and cold cuts for the Roberts, Tylenol and more NyQuil for herself, as well as a can of frozen orange juice, microwave burritos, and Pop-Tarts. “On the tab,” she told Andy.

  “I hear your pappy got himself into trouble the other night,” Andy said.

  “That so,” Fran said. “He went down to Florida yesterday morning. He said he needs to get right with God.”

  “God ain’t who your pappy needs to get on his good side,” Andy said.

  Fran coughed and bent over. Then she straightened right back up. “What’s he done?” she said.

  “Nothing that can’t be fixed with the application of some greaze and good manners,” Andy said. “You tell him we’ll get it all settled when he come back.”

  Half the time her daddy got to drinking, Andy and Andy’s cousin Ryan were involved, never mind it was a dry county. Andy kept the liquor out back in his van for everwho wanted it and knew to ask. The good stuff came from over the county line, in Andrews. The best stuff, though, was the liquor Fran’s daddy brought Andy every once in a while. Everyone said that Fran’s daddy’s brew was too good to be strictly natural. Which was true. When he wasn’t getting right with God, Fran’s daddy got up to all kinds of trouble. Fran’s best guess was that, in this particular situation, he’d promised to supply something that God was not now going to let him deliver. “I’ll tell him you said so.”

  Ophelia was looking over the list of ingredients on a candy wrapper, but Fran could tell she was interested. When they got back into the car Fran said, “Just because you’re doing me a favor doesn’t mean you need to know my business.”

  “Okay,” Ophelia said.

  “Okay,” Fran said. “Good. Now maybe you can take me by the Roberts’ place. It’s over on—”

  “I know where the Roberts’ house is,” Ophelia said. “My mom played bridge over there all last summer.”

  The Roberts hid their spare key under a fake rock just like everybody else. Ophelia stood at the door like she was waiting to be invited in. “Well, come on,” Fran said.

  There wasn’t much to be said about the Roberts’ house. There was an abundance of plaid, and everywhere Toby mugs and statuettes of dogs pointing, setting, or trotting along with birds in their gentle mouths.

  Fran made up the smaller bedrooms and did a quick vacuum downstairs while Ophelia made up the master bedroom and caught the spider that had made a home in the wastebasket. She carried it outside. Fran didn’t quite have the breath to make fun of her for this. They went from room to room, making sure that there were working bulbs in the light fixtures and that the cable wasn’t out. Ophelia sang under her breath while they worked. They were both in choir, and Fran found herself evaluating Ophelia’s voice. A soprano, warm and light at the same time, where Fran was an alto and somewhat froggy, even when she didn’t have the flu.

  “Stop it,” she said out loud, and Ophelia turned and looked at her. “Not you,” Fran said. She ran the tap water in the kitchen sink until it was clear. She coughed for a long time and spat into the drain. It was almost four o’clock. “We’re done here.”

  “How do you feel?” Ophelia said.

  “Like I’ve been kicked all over,” Fran said.

  “I’ll take you home,” Ophelia said. “Is anyone there, in case you start feeling worse?”

  Fran didn’t bother answering, but somewhere between the school lockers and the Roberts’ master bedroom, Ophelia seemed to have decided that the ice was broken. She talked about a TV show, about the party neither of them would go to on Saturday night. Fran began to suspect that Ophelia had had friends once, down in Lynchburg. She complained about the calculus homework and talked about a sweater she was knitting. She mentioned a girl rock band that she thought Fran might like, even offered to burn her a CD. Several times, she exclaimed as they drove up the county road.

  “I never get used to it, to living up here year-round,” Ophelia said. “I mean, we haven’t even been here a whole year, but . . . It’s just so beautiful. It’s like another world, you know?”

  “Not really,” Fran said. “Never been anywhere else.”

  “Oh,” Ophelia said, not quite deflated by this comeback. “Well, take it from me. It’s freaking gorgeous here. Everything is so pretty it almost hurts. I love the morning, the way everything is all misty. And the trees! And every time the road snakes around a corner, there’s another waterfall. Or a little pasture, and it’s all full of flowers. All the hollers.” Fran could hear the invisible brackets around the word. “It’s like you don’t know what you’ll see, what’s there, until suddenly you’re in them. Are you applying to college anywhere next year? I was thinking about vet school. I don’t think I can take another English class. Large animals. No little dogs or guinea pigs. Maybe I’ll go out to California.”

  Fran said, “We’re not the kind of people who go to college.”

  “Oh,” Ophelia said. “You’re a lot smarter than me, you know? So I just thought . . . ”

  “Turn here,” Fran said. “Careful. It’s not paved.”

  They went up the dirt road, through the laurel beds, and into the little meadow with the nameless creek. Fran could feel Ophelia suck in a breath, probably trying her hardest not to say something about how beautiful it was. And it was beautiful, Fran knew. You could hardly see the house itself, hidden like a bride behind her veil of climbing vines: virgin’s bower and Japanese honeysuckle, masses of William Baffin and Cherokee roses overgrowing the porch and running up over the sagging roof. Bumblebees, their legs armored in gold, threaded through the meadow grass, almost too weighed down with pollen to fly.

  “It’s old,” Fran said. “Needs a new roof. My great-grandaddy ordered it out of the Sears catalog. Men brought it up the side of the mountain in pieces, and all the Cherokee who hadn’t gone away yet came and watched.” She was amazed at herself: next thing she would be asking Ophelia to come for a sleepover.

  She opened the car door and heaved herself out, plucked up the poke of groceries. Before she could turn and thank Ophelia for the ride, Ophelia was out of the car, as well. “I thought,” Ophelia said uncertainly. “Well, I thought maybe I could use your bathroom?”

  “It’s an outhouse,” Fran said, deadpan. Then she relented: “Come on in, then. It’s a regular bathroom. Just not very clean.”

  Ophelia didn’t say anything when they came into the kitchen. Fran watched her take it in: the heaped dishes in the sink, the pillow and raggedy quilt on the sagging couch. The piles of dirty laundry beside the efficiency washer in the kitchen. The places where hairy tendrils of vine had found a way inside around the windows. “I guess you might be thinking it’s funny,” she said. “My dad and I make money doing other people’s houses, but we don’t take no real care of our own.”

  “I was thinking that somebody ought to be taking care of you,” Ophelia said. “At least while you’re sick.”

  Fran gave a little shrug. “I do fine on my own,” she said. “The washroom’s down the hall.”

  She took two NyQuil while Ophelia was gone and washed them down with the last swallow or two of ginger ale out of the refrigerator. Flat, but still cool. Then she lay down on the couch and pulled the counterpane up around her face. She huddled into the lumpy cushions. Her legs ached, her face felt hot as fire. Her feet were ice cold.

  A minute later Ophelia sat down on the couch beside her.

  “Ophelia?” Fran said. “I’m grateful for the ride home and for the help at the Roberts’, but I don’t go for the girls. So don’t lez out.”

  Ophelia said, “I brought you a glass of water. You need to stay hydrated.”

  “Mmm,” Fran said.

  “You know, your dad told me once that I was going to hell,” Ophelia said. “He was over at our house doing something. Fixing a burst pipe, maybe? I don’t know how he knew. I was eleven. I don’t think I knew, not yet, anyway. He did
n’t bring you over to play after he said that, even though I never told my mom.”

  “My daddy thinks everyone is going to hell,” Fran said into the counterpane. “I don’t care where I go, as long as it isn’t here, and he isn’t there.”

  Ophelia didn’t say anything for a minute or two, and she didn’t get up to leave, either, so finally Fran poked her head out. Ophelia had a toy in her hand, the monkey egg. She turned it over, and then over again. She looked a question at Fran.

  “Give here,” Fran said. “I’ll work it.” She wound the filigreed dial and set the egg on the floor. The toy vibrated ferociously. Two pincerlike legs and a scorpion tail made of figured brass shot out of the bottom hemisphere, and the egg wobbled on the legs in one direction and then another, the articulated tail curling and lashing. Portholes on either side of the top hemisphere opened and two arms wriggled out and reached up, rapping at the dome of the egg until that, too, cracked open with a click. A monkey’s head, wearing the egg dome like a hat, popped out. Its mouth opened and closed in chattering ecstasy, red garnet eyes rolling, arms describing wider and wider circles in the air until the clockwork ran down and all of its extremities whipped back into the egg again.

  “What in the world?” Ophelia said. She picked up the egg, tracing the joins with a finger.

  “It’s just something that’s been in our family,” Fran said. She stuck her arm out of the quilt, grabbed a tissue, and blew her nose for maybe the thousandth time. “We didn’t steal it from no one, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  “No,” Ophelia said, and then frowned. “It’s just—I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s like a Fabergé egg. It ought to be in a museum.”

  There were lots of other toys. The laughing cat and the waltzing elephants; the swan you wound up, who chased the dog. Other toys that Fran hadn’t played with in years. The mermaid who combed garnets out of her own hair. Bawbees for babies, her mother had called them.

  “I remember now,” Ophelia said. “When you came and played at my house. You brought a minnow made out of silver. It was smaller than my little finger. We put it in the bathtub, and it swam around and around. You had a little fishing rod, too, and a golden worm that wriggled on the hook. You let me catch the fish, and when I did, it talked. It said it would give me a wish if I let it go.”

  “You wished for two pieces of chocolate cake,” Fran said.

  “And then my mother made a chocolate cake, didn’t she?” Ophelia said. “So the wish came true. But I could only eat one piece. Maybe I knew she was going to make a cake? Except why would I wish for something that I already knew I was going to get?”

  Fran said nothing. She watched Ophelia through slit eyes.

  “Do you still have the fish?” Ophelia asked.

  Fran said, “Somewhere. The clockwork ran down. It didn’t give wishes no more. I reckon I didn’t mind. It only ever granted little wishes.”

  “Ha, ha,” Ophelia said. She stood up. “Tomorrow’s Saturday. I’ll come by in the morning to make sure you’re okay.”

  “You don’t have to,” Fran said.

  “No,” Ophelia said. “I don’t have to. But I will.”

  When you do for other people (Fran’s daddy said once upon a time when he was drunk, before he got religion) things that they could do for themselves, but they pay you to do it instead, you both will get used to it. Sometimes they don’t even pay you, and that’s charity. At first, charity isn’t comfortable, but it gets so it is. After some while, maybe you start to feel wrong when you ain’t doing for them, just one more thing, and always one more thing after that. Maybe you start to feel as you’re valuable. Because they need you. And the more they need you, the more you need them. Things go out of balance. You need to remember that, Franny. Sometimes you’re on one side of that equation, and sometimes you’re on the other. You need to know where you are and what you owe. Unless you can balance that out, here is where y’all stay.

  Fran, dosed on NyQuil, feverish and alone in her great-grandfather’s catalog house, hidden behind walls of roses, dreamed—as she did every night—of escape. She woke every few hours, wishing someone would bring her another glass of water. She sweated through her clothes, and then froze, and then boiled again. Her throat was full of knives.

  She was still on the couch when Ophelia came back, banging through the screen door. “Good morning!” Ophelia said. “Or maybe I should say good afternoon! It’s noon, anyhow. I brought oranges to make fresh orange juice, and I didn’t know if you liked sausage or bacon, so I got you two different kinds of biscuit.”

  Fran struggled to sit up.

  “Fran,” Ophelia said. She came and stood in front of the sofa, still holding the two cat-head biscuits. “You look terrible.” She put her hand on Fran’s forehead. “You’re burning up! I knew I oughtn’t’ve left you here all by yourself! What should I do? Should I take you down to the emergency?”

  “No doctor,” Fran managed to say. “They’ll want to know where my daddy is. Water?”

  Ophelia scampered back to the kitchen. “How many days have you had the flu? You need antibiotics. Or something. Fran?”

  “Here,” Fran said. She lifted a bill off a stack of mail on the floor, pulled out the return envelope. She plucked out three strands of her hair. She put them in the envelope and licked it shut. “Take this up the road where it crosses the drain,” she said. “All the way up.” She coughed a rattling, deathly cough. “When you get to the big house, go around to the back and knock on the door. Tell them I sent you. You won’t see them, but they’ll know you came from me. After you knock, you can just go in. Go upstairs directly, you mind, and put this envelope under the door. Third door down the hall. You’ll know which. After that, you oughter wait out on the porch. Bring back whatever they give you.”

  Ophelia gave her a look that said Fran was delirious. “Just go,” Fran said. “If there ain’t a house, or if there is a house and it ain’t the house I’m telling you about, then come back, and I’ll go to the emergency with you. Or if you find the house, and you’re afeared and you can’t do what I asked, come back, and I’ll go with you. But if you do what I tell you, it will be like the minnow.”

  “Like the minnow?” Ophelia said. “I don’t understand.”

  “You will. Be bold,” Fran said, and did her best to look cheerful. “Like the girls in those ballads. Will you bring me another glass of water afore you go?”

  Ophelia went.

  Fran lay on the couch, thinking about what Ophelia would see. From time to time, she raised a pair of curious-looking spyglasses—something much more useful than any bawbee—to her eyes. Through them she saw first the dirt track, which only seemed to dead-end. Were you to look again, you found your road crossing over the shallow crick once, twice, the one climbing the mountain, the drain running away and down. The meadow disappeared again into beds of laurel, then low trees hung with climbing roses, so that you ascended in drifts of pink and white. A stone wall, tumbled and ruined, and then the big house. The house, dry-stack stone, stained with age like the tumbledown wall;, two stories. A slate roof, a long covered porch, carved wooden shutters making all the eyes of the windows blind. Two apple trees, crabbed and old, one green and bearing fruit and the other bare and silver black. Ophelia found the mossy path between them that wound around to the back door with two words carved over the stone lintel: Be bold.

  And this is what Fran saw Ophelia do: having knocked on the door, Ophelia hesitated for only a moment, and then she opened it. She called out, “Hello? Fran sent me. She’s ill. Hello?” No one answered.

  So Ophelia took a breath and stepped over the threshold and into a dark, crowded hallway with a room on either side and a staircase in front of her. On the flagstone in front of her were carved the words: Be bold, be bold. Despite the invitation, Ophelia did not seem tempted to investigate either room, which Fran thought wise of her. The first test was a success. You might expect that through one door would be a living room, and you might ex
pect that through the other door would be a kitchen, but you would be wrong. One was the Queen’s Room. The other was what Fran thought of as the War Room.

  Fusty stacks of old magazines and catalogs and newspapers, old encyclopedias and gothic novels leaned against the walls of the hall, making such a narrow alley that even lickle, tiny Ophelia turned sideways to make her way. Dolls’ legs and old silverware sets and tennis trophies and mason jars and empty match boxes and false teeth and stranger things still poked out of paper bags and plastic carriers. You might expect that through the doors on either side of the hall there would be more crumbling piles and more odd jumbles, and you would be right. But there were other things, too. At the foot of the stairs was another piece of advice for guests like Ophelia, carved right into the first riser: Be bold, be bold, but not too bold.

  The owners of the house had been at another one of their frolics, Fran saw. Someone had woven tinsel and ivy and peacock feathers through the banisters. Someone had thumbtacked cut silhouettes and Polaroids and tintypes and magazine pictures on the wall alongside the stairs, layers upon layers upon layers; hundreds and hundreds of eyes watching each time Ophelia set her foot down carefully on the next stair.

  Perhaps Ophelia didn’t trust the stairs not to be rotted through. But the stairs were safe. Someone had always taken very good care of this house.

  At the top of the stairs, the carpet underfoot was soft, almost spongy. Moss, Fran decided. They’ve redecorated again. That’s going to be the devil to clean up. Here and there were white and red mushrooms in pretty rings upon the moss. More bawbees, too, waiting for someone to come along and play with them. A dinosaur, only needing to be wound up, a plastic dime-store cowboy sitting on its shining shoulders. Up near the ceiling, two armored dirigibles, tethered to a light fixture by scarlet ribbons. The cannons on these zeppelins were in working order. They’d chased Fran down the hall more than once. Back home, she’d had to tweeze the tiny lead pellets out of her shin. Today, though, all were on their best behavior.