"Sunburn. And how are you today, Ariel?"
"Lovely, thank you. You should put some cream on your skin."
Dana nodded once. "I see you've gotten Amber a dog. You had one in the sixties, didn't you? Is that . . ."
"Sir Aarfie."
"Funny name."
"Amber says she saved you yesterday."
"Amber?"
"She started the fire."
"Amber did it?"
"She was watching you in the barn." The slapped look was evident, even with the sunburn, and the longer Ariel stared, the brighter it became. "Nasty habit of hers. Spying on people."
"I wasn't hiding anything, so she wasn't spying."
"No, of course not."
"If she didn't tell you, Denny Bryce and I were having a picnic, and I went to sit in the barn afterward."
"It's none of her business. No one's business but yours."
"I guess you're wondering about me taking his picture." Tremor in the voice. "It's really awkward. I don't know if I can do it."
"Yes, everything is awkward. This whole arrangement . . . being alive when you shouldn't be . . . awkward."
"Ariel—"
"Much easier to just follow conventions, niceties . . . natural laws."
"Ariel, I'm not complaining."
"Yes, you are. Why is everybody making this so awkward for me? Can you tell me that, Dana? Why don't I have"—she gestured—"cooperation or . . . gratitude or . . . sympathy?"
"You've got all of those things, Ariel."
"Really? You've been dead, Dana. What was it like? Tell me that and I'll believe in your cooperation." She waited a full ten seconds, even though Dana instantly adopted a pose of settled long suffering. "Well, so much for enlightenment. I feel better now that you've . . . cooperated. Take Mr. Bryce's photograph, Dana. You can do that, and I expect you to."
Neither of them touched their coffee.
The brittleness Ariel had felt last night was diamond hard now. Like it or not, she was at her best as judge and executioner. She saw this as a role that had been forced upon her by a lifetime of alienation, but her great fear was that it was her native element. Perhaps these second comings were about punishment and revenge after all. She didn't know how to be loved. Would she even recognize it if it came? Or would it be lost in her own resistance and suspicion?
Even Amber's gushing gratitude for Aarfie's return seemed pasted on. Thanks, Mommy, thank you SO much! rendered in a remembered voice from a still younger child. Not her. Not really Amber. But what was Amber? A hybrid of two little girls thirty-five years apart. "Beluga butt" and "freaky scene" with Dylanesque overtones all in the same sentence. "Groovy" and "cool" were her bridge over decades.
And then at lunch Dana, sitting across from Denny Bryce, who had come for his afternoon visit to his father, lifted the Polaroid camera from below the line of the table. And when Denny pulled back from looking over his father's shoulder, she said:
"Oh, come on now. Your dad's all spruced up. Pose with him."
Ariel's appraising scrutiny sharpened. Martin Bryce, shaved and freshly barbered, was wearing a new long-sleeve shirt his son had brought him, but that wasn't the incentive for Denny's cooperation. It was the relationship that was unmistakably deepening between him and Dana, Ariel decided. She could see it in his eyes, wide and boring into hers. The premise there was a mix of doubt and tentative trust, and she could tell which one was winning by the fact that he leaned forward with a reluctant smile. The electronic flash left his expression floating in the air, and Ariel memorized it, certain that the image would be all she needed to combine with her artistic eye on canvas.
Denny Bryce was the one exposed element in New Eden. He had insinuated himself through implied threats and an open wallet in order to get what he wanted. And now Ariel could recognize the daily surge of his little foreign car up the driveway. It seemed likely that sooner or later he would know too much. So she needed some insurance, a little implied threat of her own.
She could paint him to life in the house right now, handicapped in some way, and that would end the natural-born Denny Bryce in the natural world, just as it had the natural-born Amber. But that wouldn't end the danger he posed. He was active in society, and there would be an investigation if he broke off his connections. So, unfortunately, she would have to deal with him terminally. She could do that by creating him here at New Eden, which would cause his death naturally wherever he happened to be elsewhere. A perfect murder (she thought it once, then banished the term). And when he was created here at New Eden, she would immediately paint him out again. Presto. No corpus delicti. Ariel the judge and executioner would have to protect New Eden. The world had no jurisdiction here.
With a nascent whir, the Polaroid snapshot slid out of the camera and everyone craned to see. An image emerged from the chemical wash. One more toss in the wishing well of immortality for those who stood in line.
Ariel loomed in like a towering adult casting a shadow over her children's discovery. "Let me see," she said, reaching across Dana for the prize.
And Dana, smelling lavender water and talc and something horribly eager, was suddenly repelled. Just before the bony wrist passed her cheek, she dropped the photo—some at the table thought she flicked it—into her soup. It was tomato soup. Dana's white cotton blouse looked like it was spattered with gore.
Ariel's gasp was palpable. "Well, I'll just take another," the goddess of creation at New Eden said, reaching for the camera, which Dana—now standing as she dabbed at her blouse with a napkin—held in one hand.
The grandstand understood all of it, of course: Ariel's motive, Dana's taking of the photograph, the change of heart. They cheered inwardly when the photo went in the soup. But it was too much to expect Dana to refuse to give up the camera. So when that object seemed suddenly to slip from her grasp, fracturing its plastic shell and cracking the lens on the hardwood floor, mitral valves hung up and lungs quit respiring. For a long moment no one dared a living breath.
But Ariel was only half surprised this time. "Poor Dana," she said very evenly, "your arthritis must be killing you."
And then she looked at the rest of them in a slow pan, smiling benignly.
Hearts jump-started, lungs filled to capacity, and in the wake of Ariel's gray retreat victorious smiles broke forth. But Dana was not smiling. She sat back down in a cold sweat, eyes averted, oblivious to the goodwill burbling around her. She didn't have arthritis.
Yet.
Chapter 19
Ariel slept three times that day—two and a half hours, forty minutes, twenty-five—but despite being up the night before, she wasn't tired. Old people who slept were either ill or bored, she told herself. In reality her body was shedding its long-term needs like a dead skin. Beneath the surface she was beginning to consume her final resources, like a fiery star-bound meteor.
So the naps were only to preserve her strength, because there was no doubt at all now what she must do tonight. Tonight she would be altering six portraits—Helen's, Beverly's, Paavo's, Ruta's, Molly's and Dana's—the able-bodied of her disobedient second comings.
She didn't dare think about it during the day. If she thought about it while she was still smarting from the nearly open rebellion, she would very likely succumb to her baser instincts. A lifetime of eating crow, playing second fiddle, bringing up the rear, and now that she had a taste of control, a rebuff. That made it doubly tart. But even with the delay and the naps, dark images were simmering inside her. Artistic blasphemies she couldn't suppress. Ruta with no mouth. None at all. And Molly with a thunderous butt—a beluga butt!—so big that she couldn't climb the stairs. Dana turned into a cinder of Cinderella, left scarred, as if her sunburn were indeed the searing, weeping wounds left by the barn fire. Paavo with his sleeves pinned up because he no longer had arms. Or maybe she should take his legs, leaving him in Amber's old American Flyer coaster wagon to get around. Horrors all, tinged with gallows irony.
But she put off the conscious
decisions of what to paint, because in the end it had to be more measured than that. Otherwise how would it be explained to Denny Bryce? Yet she wanted them to know without ambiguity. She couldn't take Ruta's mouth away, but she could make it smaller. Just enough to make her want to scream through it (ha-ha). Paavo's strong hands could become gnarled and stiffened, like Dana's were going to be, and "Helen the Hunchback" was an appellation waiting to happen. Beverly would be runtier still, thinned and weakened. Accelerated aging, that was all. Weaker, stiffer—Molly staring at her enlarged and infantilized thighs in the mirror, noting the flaccid flesh of her arms. Enough change so that Ariel's Edenites would see it in each other's eyes—the common tenor, the realization of what they were and that Ariel could run the clock in either direction.
Denny Bryce might notice, but he wouldn't recognize the suddenness of the process. All in one night. Passover.
Her first-born to a soul. The tenth plague. Unannounced. No Paschal Lamb's blood on their lintels to save them.
Chapter 20
Maybe it was the silver dragon's eyes staring out at her from the sewing room window sash, or maybe it was the fear she sensed everyone had for her mother, or maybe it was just her own streak of wildness, but Amber knew that she wasn't going to give back the paint now. She would have after Aarfie came back—she had tried to—but now it was too late. She didn't care if that meant she was ungrateful and disobedient. She already believed she was a bad person, because she had no friends, no real father anymore, and because her mother didn't love her even though she had tried. You couldn't fake that.
The magic paint almost made up for it. The paint was power and control over her own life, if she could just get good at using it. Sure, she had made a few mistakes, but she wouldn't make any more. She would just hang on to the paint until she figured out how to use it to make things better, and also because as long as she was the only one who knew where it was, she was protected.
But if she wasn't going to give it back, she was going to have to move it. Sooner or later her mother would figure a way to get it off the roof, so it had to be moved.
Night was the best time. Night was the only time, now that the third-story window was screwed shut. Amber went to bed at ten o'clock without being told, and at twelve thirty, while the house exhaled the heat trapped in its walls, she rose up again and pulled on her jeans, her Mudd T-shirt and Skechers, and stroked Sir Aarfie, whispering: "You stay here, Aarfie. And don't bark, okay? No bark."
He made a throaty "woof" that registered his indignation as soon as she closed the door on him, but she moved away quickly so that he wouldn’t think it was a game.
In the parlor, luminous with moonlight, she stopped and listened. She had a funny feeling, like everything around her—the wooden blue doll on the mantel, the pincushion porcupine on the corner shelf, the metronome that seemed to be clicking its tongue with disapproval, the oval picture frames gaping like open mouths hanging on the wall—was alive and warning her not to go. Her mother said she had fallen while climbing in her other life and that was how she had ended up paralyzed, and now she had to climb from the ground to the roof, so maybe that was why she felt anxious. But she had to do it. Because if she didn't, she wouldn't have that much of a life anyway.
The moonlight was so bright that she could see mosquitoes rising off the screen as she pushed onto the porch. The air was very still and muggy under the overhang, but as soon as she passed the corner by the willow she felt the uneven current, as if the wind were circling the house in waves. And by the time she got around to the back it was flooding against her like water flowing through an invisible moat. The old TV antenna wires slapped rhythmically against the clapboards, reminding her of Colonel Klink slapping his riding crop on his thigh in Hogan's Heroes (“. . . Don't even think about trying to climb that wall, Hogan”). But the thing that bothered her the most now that she stood behind the towering farmhouse was the light on the third floor. That was the studio.
And it meant her mother was painting.
She could be painting anything, of course, but the fear that she was altering her horrid little daughter right this instant grew to a conviction in Amber’s mind. The picture could already be done and just drying. And when it dried what would she be? Too old to climb up on a roof and get the magic antidote? Too old to climb down if the change came while she was up there?
Rebelling against her fear, Amber went straight to the lightning rod and clamped her hands as high as she could. Then she drew her hips up parallel with the ground by planting both feet against the side of the house. The rust on the rod gave her a grip, but it tore her skin too. Hand over hand, foot over foot she climbed, pulling with her arms and pushing at right angles with her legs. Every few feet she tried to rest her hip against the rod. And each time she did, she heard a wrenching sound from the brackets. There were three of them, so rusted that you couldn't see the screws. And there was no window on the second floor within reach of the pole.
The wind was tossing her hair against her mouth and her arms were burning and her legs felt like sand was draining out of them, so she had to stop now and simply hang with her arms extended and one leg still pushing against the side of the house. But she still thought she could do it. She thought she could do it right up until she got halfway when without any warning at all the rod began to pull away from the house.
Her feet slipped off the clapboards and her body swayed slightly past the vertical. She almost let go, but miraculously the pole stayed straight and her legs swung back against the house. And now as she twisted and scrabbled to get her feet back in place, she saw that it was the middle bracket. When she had come even with it, it had popped out of the rotting board. The lower and upper brackets were still holding, though. If she could keep her weight centered with the lightning rod over the ground, maybe it would support her.
Giddiness was sweeping over her, and she tried to focus on the thrumming through the metal as she went higher. The sewing room was just above her now. She closed her eyes for a few seconds, and when she opened them again she made three more determined steps against the siding and swung her knee onto the window ledge. Numbed and exhausted, she clung there for long moments.
One more hard pull and she would reach the galvanized gutter, she thought. Drawing close against the clapboards, she gathered her right foot under her and pushed . . . and pulled . . . and now she had her right elbow above the gutter. The thrumming stopped as she got past the upper bracket with a last thrust of her left hand. And there on the roof she lay, flat to the pitch, letting the blood flow back into her limbs and the pain subside where the skin at the base of her fingers had been pinched against the pole.
Below her the TV antenna wires still slapped the side of the house, and to either side loose shingles flapped with the gusts as if in derisive applause. Nevertheless, she felt safer now than she did in the house. The minor sense of triumph quickly restored her. This was her realm. This was where no one else could reach her. Even the wind seemed different now, soothing on her forehead instead of pushing at her back.
It wasn't until she made her zigzag to a higher point and then to the pipe and then to the chimney that the feeling of being out of reach from things that could hurt her underwent revision. Because now she could hear something inside the cupola. But she had already thrown herself up the pitch, and if she stopped, she would slide down. So she kept going until she got one hand over the saddle shingles at the ridge, even though she knew it wasn’t going to wait, that if it was going to attack, it would do so while she couldn’t defend herself. And before she could pull herself up, it came at her with a rush of wings and golden eyes.
She never saw the claws. They scraped her ear and cheek as she turned away, and then the thing was gone. By the time she got one leg over the ridge, all she saw was an edge-on silhouette gliding into a line of trees against the blue green glow to the west. An owl, probably. That's what happened when you burned down a barn. Owls went looking for new homes.
She t
ouched her cheek. There was blood for sure—black and slippery. Her mother used to warn her about cuts and rusty nails and stuff, so she knew you could get lockjaw from that, and now she had gotten rust from her fingers in the scratches on her face. She'd better hurry up and get done so she could wash out the cuts, she thought. Straddling the ridge, she edged cautiously toward the cupola. The good thing about the owl was that there probably wasn’t anything else in there now. Half standing, she wormed her way through the broken slats.
It still smelled funny inside, like the mud that stayed icky in the canals along the road, but she thought she could smell the owl too. A kind of warm, gray odor, like a dog that had been out in the rain. Everyone in the house beneath her laughed when she said she could tell colors with her nose. Which she could. Gray. Definitely gray.
She waited for her eyes to adjust, but the stripes of moonlight stayed silvery blue and the black was just black. So she felt around very slowly where she had snugged the paint jar down next to the platform until her fingers touched the glass shoulders just below the screw cap. There wasn't any point in saving the paintbrush or the poster paper, so she just tucked the jar against her side with one hand and started back down the roof.
It was easier than going up, even with the paint. But then she came to the lightning rod. She was going to have to put the brakes on gravity, and for that she was going to need both arms. Encircling her Mudd T-shirt over the jar, she tucked the hem deep into her jeans. The glass was cool against her skin right where her heart thumped, and she could actually feel the red liquid sloshing around like it was blood or something. She kept her legs bent to stop the T-shirt from pulling up as she worked her way off the edge of the gutter onto the lightning rod. Then she began walking down the side of the house, controlling the descent with her arms and the pressure of her hip against the pole.
Her father had read some of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to her—the part where Tom and Huck climb up and down a lightning rod in order to help Jim—and Amber grew a little heady remembering that, thinking she could do the same even though she was younger and a girl. No one could climb like she could. But then her hands slipped just above the second floor, and she had to press her forearms against the rusty metal to stop a slide. Chastened and scraped, she came down the rest of the way fighting for breath.
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