She kept to the field because it was already too late to avoid the spider. If it was there, she would have to outrun it. Too late too for the culvert. Too late and too dark. She had a stitch in her side, and the paint sloshing against her chest like blood from her heart made her feel queasy. Hunger pains alternated with faintness. She wished she had eaten the gingersnaps Mrs. Novicki had put out for her. When she crossed the dead furrow, she slowed. And when she got to the field nearest the house, she began to walk.
In the charred debris where the barn had stood she dug into the ashes with the spade and buried the jar. She buried it deep enough where she didn't think it could be broken or accidentally uncovered. She would have to clean the ashes off the spade before she put it back, she thought dully. And she couldn't go inside the house until she figured out what to do. But she was too tired to think now. Or maybe it was just that, even after tonight, she didn't want to accept the truth: that she couldn't share her life with a twin after all. They were like the newborn queen bees her father liked to talk about. First one out of a cell must kill the others.
She slipped toward the machine shed where her mother parked the old Plymouth Fury that she still drove to the strip malls. She could sleep in the car for a while because no one would dare go look at the cistern until daylight. But the shadows and the smelt of things around her—violet smells, deep black violet—made her uneasy.
She didn't feel like she was really inside the shed when she passed under the sagging header and stood in the gloom. It was not like a room of the house where you could see everything and you knew what each object was. The oily smell and the uniform color hid things. Her child's mind grasped only that everything was blending together, that it was rotting or rusted or somehow changing into something that she would become too if she stayed long enough. She curled up and hugged herself on the car seat, and she thought that maybe blending in wasn't so bad after all, and that if she sat really, really still she could become part of the shed. Then she would be hidden too.
From the rearview mirror her white face ghosted back at her, whereas nothing else in the car was reflected. There could be things on the back seat watching her and she wouldn't know. Things in the shed too. Guarding her, she told herself. And that self-deception allowed her to close her eyes.
She didn't mean to fall asleep, but exhaustion and the hour of the night dictated otherwise, and it wasn't until she heard a series of short, even scrapes that she opened her eyes again. The nightmare stalkers in her imagination tried the sounds on for size—snakes that moved like inchworms and jackbooted centipedes and trudging spiders—but there was something helpless and lost about this sound that correctly informed her at last. Opening the car door, she scrambled to the entrance of the shed.
"Mr. Bryce," she called.
He paused his shuffling gait.
"Mr. Bryce . . . over here."
"Tiffany? You'd better come out of there."
"Why?"
He concentrated hard for a moment, but his thoughts, like his slippered steps, came in disconnected segments. "Do you want me to come in and get you?"
And that little paternalism was all it took to drive her crying into his embrace, her arms around his waist, her face buried in his concave chest. She blurted out her own disjointed segments then—all the way back to Aarfie and the scarecrow and the spiders, and he just kept patting her on the back of the head and crooning that it was okay now.
". . . You're the only one I can trust, because you're the only one she hasn't painted," Amber/Tiffany babbled. "I don't wanta disappear like the others, and I'm scared. She makes people disappear who go against her, but I stole her paint, so now she won't do anything to me until she gets it back. But she's already made another person like me, and she's got a painting of me. That's the big thing. The painting. I've got the paint, but she's got my picture."
"It's okay . . . it's okay," he said.
"It's not okay." She pushed herself away. "She's got pictures in her studio, and she's got mine. I've tried to get in, but the door is always locked. So nobody can get their picture."
He looked at her, thinking hard. "I'll get it," he said and turned toward the house.
"Where are you going?"
"Inside."
"I'm not safe in there."
He looked around, looked at the house. "You'll be safe in my room."
She couldn't stay outside forever, and if she ran away her mother might paint her out anyway, she thought. Even though the jar of stolen paint would not be accounted for, her mother might take that chance. She had thought a lot about running away, but it always came down to the fact that her mother would paint her, or maybe everyone, out, if attention were drawn to the farmhouse. The stolen paint might not even matter anymore if the risk to her mother got big enough. So she couldn't leave. Maybe she could hide in Mr. Bryce's room for a few hours until she figured things out. It had windows she could escape through, if she had to, and her mother and her twin wouldn't know she was gone until they went back to the cistern in daylight.
So she took Mr. Bryce's hand and they went to his room. One long segment of shuffling to the porch, then another segment from the top of the steps to the new corridor where the seam of light from under his door made her hesitate. But he had left the lamp on himself, she realized. When the door was closed behind them, he went directly to the brown wardrobe that stood next to the windows. The flimsy metal tinned as he rummaged behind his clothes, and then he had the edge of something that had a white corner on it, and as he hauled it out she froze in disbelief.
It was her portrait.
For just an instant she had the ridiculous impression that it was something he had done, but of course it was her mother's work. No question about that. Her. Amber Leppa. Exactly the portrait she had seen more than a year ago. No question at all, as exultation rose in her breast. This was it! Somehow. She couldn't believe it. Old Mr. Bryce had walked out of her mother's studio with the painting that kept her a prisoner!
"Take it," he said as offhandedly, as if he were offering her a peppermint.
"But how did you get it?"
"A man gave it to me."
She studied his face, but there was no way to tell the truth. He made up things when he couldn't remember. What man could he be talking about? Paavo? Her father? The thought was like lightning in her blood.
"You can have it," he repeated.
It didn't matter how it had come to him. She had it. She had it. She had it. She took the frame, then leaned it on the bed and hugged him. She hugged him twice.
The problem was going to be where to hide something that big, she decided about the painting. She could take the canvas off the frame like she had seen her mother do, and . . . and suddenly her world came crashing down. Because it had taken her a minute but now it occurred to her that this might not be her picture. It could be her twin. Squatting down on her haunches, she breathed painfully as she scrutinized the image. It looked the same as she remembered, but her mother had probably made the second one from the first. She hugged her knees and rocked and thought. And then she knew what she had to do.
"Thank you," she said, mouse quiet. "You don't know what you've done." And giving him another hug, and carting the frame along, she hurried from the room.
Martin Bryce stood staring after her for a moment, wondering if there was something wrong. Then he turned stiffly to regard the wardrobe. Shuffling to its open doors, he pulled back the clothes and made his slight genuflexion. It was still there. The second of the two paintings the man in the wheelchair had given him at the top of the stairs. One for Tiffany, one for him.
There were half a dozen bottles of liquid shoe polish down in the cellars. All but two—one black, one white—were dried out. There was more of the white, but Amber chose the black. Black felt right.
You could get along with just three fingers and a thumb on one of your hands, she thought. The Simpsons had only three fingers and a thumb on each of their hands. So she would probably neve
r miss her little finger if she guessed wrong. She chose the left hand, even though it would be harder to separate the little finger from the finger next to it in the painting. The shoe polish applicator was just a blob of fuzz too thick to use for a brush. She tried a pipe stem cleaner from a yellow sleeve on the shelves but that was still too thick, and then she tried a broomcorn stem from the whisk hanging from the end of a shelf but that was too unsteady, so she ended up using a small finishing nail. She wiped the nail as clean as she could—and she remembered then to wipe the ashes off the spade, which she still had in her waistband—and then she dipped the nail in the black polish and practiced making a straight line on the side of the shoe box that held the shoe polish bottles.
Upstairs her twin was probably asleep in their bedroom. She wondered if it would cause pain to lose a finger this way—if, in fact, her twin would wake up screaming. If it did, she would paint out her head next, because that would end the pain.
And what if it was her own finger that went away? She didn't dare scream, because if everyone woke up, she would have to leave the house in the middle of the night carrying the painting, and what if the pain was so horrible that she couldn't run?
Don't think, don't think . . .
She tried to catch just the tip of the finger first, but there was barely any paint on the point of the finishing nail at all. Not even a drop. And her hand was trembling. So she dipped the nail deeper in the shoe polish this time and came back to the canvas, kind of resting the side of her right hand against her left. But her left little finger was right there, practically over the one in the painting, and that made her want to wince when the drop of shoe polish squiggled on.
. . . Do it!
And it was more than she wanted to get on the painting, so it kind of smeared around, and then her left hand began to tingle and then burn. At least she thought it did, but after she jerked it away and held it up in front of her face, already whimpering and gasping against the tightness in her throat, it was still there. Chewed fingernails and all.
So she listened.
But there wasn't any scream. None. Zip. Nada. Zilch.
Feverish, excited, fearful, she dipped the nail back into the polish, and this time the black flowed where she wanted it to, and she was sure she got all of the finger blotted out—all of two of them, in fact. And she was about to take the fuzzy applicator and just go at it, but then she thought: Maybe it has to dry first before anything happens.
She read the label, which said that Kiwi shoe polish was nontoxic and had extra scuff protection, but it didn't say anything about fast drying. She knew from her mother that paintings sometimes went on drying for weeks, even months, so you couldn't always tell. Still, the polish looked dry already. Upstairs, her twin might be missing part of her hand. She could wake up any second and start screaming. And if the rest of her wasn't painted out right away, then however much longer she waited to do it, that's how much longer it would take before the screaming would stop. She was almost sure now the polish was dry. But what if it wasn't? If it wasn't, she could be committing suicide. She wouldn't know it was really her own picture until it was too late.
Do it!
Dropping the finishing nail, she dipped the fuzzball applicator back in the bottle and brushed out the left hand, then the arm, then the face. She thought of the monsters she had done in the cupola—how, no matter how badly she painted them, they came to life exactly like that—and now, in a way, she was making another monster: one-armed, headless Amber flopping around on a bed upstairs.
Choking with passion and fear, she poured the shoe polish over the canvas and began spreading it with her hands. It seemed to gush from her fingers and palms now. But to her horror, she could still see the feet. Frantically she pawed over the saw-toothed canvas until the stain transferred to the lower part, and when she was satisfied that every discernible part of the image was obliterated, she jerked her hands up reflexively, allowing the last of the liquid to trickle down her arms like black blood.
Chapter 27
The clothes dryer still reeked of dead crows. The drum had been scoured with bleach, but you couldn't turn the thing on without being bathed in a warm acridity that quickly led to nausea. It was up into the duct and inside the frame, the crow stench, bonded to every mote of dust and felt snubber on the old Maytag, and it "fuzzed" into the air through the lint filter and the seams around the venting. Clothes came out smelling putrid. Even Paavo, whose nose had no more functionality than a nose on Mount Rushmore, wouldn't wear his shirts unless they had been line dried.
Twice Denny had tried to rake out the bits of lint that curled around the drum and inside the shell, but the odor persisted everywhere in crevices and in foil corrugations and in syrupy patches of congealed grease. That was why he was outside looking up at the sugar maple. He had fifty feet of new plastic clothesline still in its sleeve, a cordless Black & Decker drill and a pair of twenty-gauge screw eyes. But he saw now that he was going to have to get up in the damn tree to remove the old line, which hung at an absurd slant. Dana or someone had managed to loop it into the first crotch. The person had cinched it tight, like a lariat, and if he cut it off from below it was going to leave the knotted part hanging up there.
He could swear a kind of stasis was setting in down on the farm. Everyone frozen by pain or favoring the muscles of the day, palsied extensions where yesterday steady hands had prevailed, and still no one making much eye contact. Maybe he was just now getting it. Maybe he had rationalized a more Pollyanna-like atmosphere because he wanted his father to fit in. Maybe it was time to get his old man the hell out of here.
He went inside and found a six-foot stepladder in the pantry and carried it back out, but he couldn't stop the polemics in his head. It was nice and simple to just think Get the hell out of here, but then what? Truth be told, it was still a better deal than the depressing diaper decrepitude of the institutions. Hired compassion in eight-hour shifts, where you were buying a benevolent prison and the guards came and went and the one-size-fits-all rules were administered from afar. Flowers and carpet couldn't hide sanctioned family abandonment. Guilt. You could smell dead crows everywhere.
The ladder got him halfway to nowhere, because unless he wanted to stand on the very tippy top, he still couldn't work handily with the knot. He should have brought a kitchen knife; then he could have severed the lasso. Easier to pull himself up on the branch now. Easier if you were sixteen and you didn't have hemorrhoids or bruise easily. But he managed it, sliding along like chiffon over a pineapple, catching his pants, abusing his privates. He hoped it wasn't going to be a Gordian knot.
And then he got distracted by a nest in the crotch of the sugar maple, and that was fairly odd for midsummer, because even if you couldn't see that it was freshly built, you couldn't mistake the single egg therein. Fairly odd too that the egg was just sitting there, yet he had neither seen nor heard any squawking from momma bird. Most of all, it was a fairly odd egg. Big, for one thing. And for another, it was bright, bright red. Not just some off-hue brown, but Fabergé crimson.
Ha-ha. Someone playing a joke. The old folks at KNEAL, who could barely get off their whoopee cushions, had planted this thing up here, anticipating that he would drive up today with plastic clothesline and two twenty-gauge screw eyes and climb this tree and hump along this branch to discover a Jurassic Park egg.
But it wasn't Easter, it was summer, he repeated to himself. What was a leftover Easter egg doing up here? And then he remembered the mouthless creature he had struck with his car that day, and this egg was exactly that shade of vermillion.
Someone was jerking him around and he didn't know why, but he felt very, very threatened by it. Red fur, red carrion, red straw, red egg. Not funny at all. What was causing mutations around here—a rogue pigment in the food chain?
Like his mother—like the sympathetic school counselor he was—he could rationalize anything. But now the evidence was done tapping him on the shoulder; it was staring him in the face. T
he shaggy eccentric in the wheelchair upstairs telling him the place was a "nursery," the barn burning down, and then there was Paavo's chicken wire all around the windows.
Denny scrutinized the egg. Definitely not poultry. Ostrich maybe, except it wasn't buried in the sand. Maybe he'd been burying his head in the sand. . . .
He resisted the impulse to confront Ariel. One of the underlying premises he was good at was manipulating other people's credibility, usually by inflating it. He had done so to navigate young people through the shoals and reefs of maturation, done it to keep his parents afloat, reversed it a bit to get his father installed at New Eden, and now he was at the far negative limit with Ariel. People could be dangerous when you bankrupted their credibility.
He untied the old rope, drilled one hole in the tree and another in the porch stanchion, twisted in the screw eyes, strung up the new line, and took the ladder back. Then he went to see his father.
"How are you, old man?" he said.
"I've been better."
"Yeah? You need a shave, but I guess that doesn't bother you."
"Not a bit."
A Kleenex lay on the floor, one slipper was under the bed, the eyeglasses were on the window ledge. The newspaper Denny had brought last Sunday lay undisturbed on the dresser. Even if his father could read well enough with the magnifier, he couldn't concentrate through a whole story.
"Looks like the Twins are starting to fold in the pennant stretch," Denny said with the brass brightness of small talk.
"Do you have enough money?"
"I'm fine, Dad."
"Take all you want."
Anachronistic philanthropy. The money had dried up years ago. "Thanks, Pop. You always took care of everyone. Good planning. Everything runs well because of you."
Dust of Eden Page 25
