"Not everything. Your mother is dead."
"You can't blame God for wanting her in His garden."
"I wish it was time for me." He was lying on the bed, staring up at the ceiling, and he drummed his fingers on his chest. "I guess they don't take weeds."
"You're not a weed, Dad."
"Hmm. At least Tiffany is okay now."
"What do you mean?"
"She finally came out of the house. She wanted her picture."
"Yeah?" (Attention, please: today's lucidity is now ended.)
"I kept one, gave her the other."
"A picture?"
"Yeah. I'm keeping it in the wardrobe."
It bothered Denny to play along with these mirages of memory, as if he were disrespecting his father. But nevertheless, a little later when he walked to the window, he opened the wardrobe. He had hauled it here from the basement in Little Canada—his sister's old clothes closet from the tiny front bedroom she had chosen over the larger one at the rear because she wanted to look out at the park instead of the alley. He remembered thinking, as he had trundled it step by step into his father's room, that the hollow boom of the metal was like the empty descent of Tiffany's life. So now he stared at it again, the dull, sculpted coating like metallic surf, scratched at the corners, the even duller patch where a sticker (RAINBOW GIRLS) had once adhered.
"How are you doing for clean shirts, Dad?" he said.
But his father had closed his eyes, so Denny didn't need a pretext to check and make sure there really wasn't a picture.
Only there was, of course.
He pushed the hem of the champagne-colored bathrobe aside and lifted out the frame. Amber. The little girl he seldom saw, who bore more than a passing resemblance to his sister, Tiffany, at age nine. Tiffany had looked almost exactly like this: blonde hair, green eyes, rosebud mouth, a certain serenity that said she was in control. But after the fire that had scarred her face and scarred her soul, she hadn't been in control. Not for almost four decades. Dead seven years now, she would be fifty-four if she hadn't overdosed. But she would always be nine years of age and unscarred in their father's resurrections.
So his old man had somehow swiped the portrait, and Denny supposed he ought to bring it to Ariel's attention.
He could take it with him and do a quick check for missing pictures on the first floor, even though he was pretty sure he would have noticed if he had seen it before. So it must be from the second or third floor.
Despite the clanging of the wardrobe, his father's breathing was deeper and his thin eyelids stayed closed and trembling with the rapid eye movements underneath. What right did he have to mess with the old guy's dreams, Denny thought. Let him have the picture until someone hollered about it. Waggling it back behind the champagne-colored bathrobe and a line of shiny trousers hanging by their unstylish cuffs, he gently closed the wardrobe doors.
He went looking for Dana then, and found her behind the house, puttering listlessly in the small garden on the side opposite the rubble of the barn. She probably knew he had parked out front; probably she was avoiding him. But given that she felt hopeless about having a relationship beyond the confines of New Eden, he would regard this as not entirely a rejection. In fact, you could almost read something flattering in the fact that she felt she had to avoid him.
"How are all the little cabbages and tomatoes today?" he said, barely glancing at the seared rows.
She straightened, fired a slate blue glance at him. "The rabbits and the caterpillars like them."
"Safe to say you won't be becoming a vegetarian any time soon?"
"Safe to say . . ."
"Ah, well, there's always green eggs and ham."
"Not on this farm."
He surveyed the fields and the yard. What she said was true. Other than the mangled remains of a small chicken coop, the farm had clearly kept its commitment to cash crops. "You can see why I'm a city slicker. I still think the cow's in the meadow and the sheep's in the corn." His eye paused on the sugar maple. "Then again, red eggs are not out of the question."
She offered him mild perplexity.
"You practically lassoed a redbird with your clothesline," he said.
"What are you talking about?"
"There's a nest in the maple right where you looped the rope. And it has an egg in it as big as a Ruby Red grapefruit and twice as bright."
She wasn't very good at hiding shock, this Scandinavian woman with fair skin and high color, and he almost joked about her sudden flush, "That's the shade"; but the way her glance skittered from roof to tree to sky brought him back to his own misgivings and the question he kept putting to her.
"Dana, what's going on here?"
"I don't know," she said, and she murmured a couple of half phrases, half aloud, half focused, that came together with startling vehemence. "Let's kill it!"
"What?"
"The red egg. I think we should destroy it."
"Why?"
"It's red. It's unnatural. Just show me where it is." And she started off walking toward the maple.
He picked up the conversation at her shoulder, "Okay, but I'd still like to know why. So what if it's unnatural? Better red than dead."
She wasn't going to laugh today, and she just kept marching along until she was at the base of the sugar maple, where she began to circle, craning upward at the first branch.
"I'll get the ladder," he said.
By the time he returned, lugging the stepladder, she was farther out but still circling, and he had more questions, all of them off the mark.
"Does this have something to do with the crows in the dryer? . . . Is there something about birds around here? . . . Is that why Paavo had the chicken wire around the windows?" This last even though he knew the chicken wire had only been around the lower level. And then he said: "What's with the color red?"
"Ask Amber."
"Amber?"
Dana was three steps up the ladder before he put his hand on the back of her knee. "I'll get it, if you want. What do you mean ‘ask Amber’? Is it something to do with her name – Amber . . . red?"
"Just steady me."
"You can't reach far enough. You have to climb out onto the branch."
She hesitated. "How will you kill it?"
"How?"
"Bring it down. I'll take care of it."
She backed off the ladder and up he went.
The branch felt solid, but the leaves were shaking and he searched the upper foliage for another source of disturbance. It was a mature tree at the zenith of the season and there were many dense clusters of leaves. Whatever laid the egg could still be up here, as aberrant as the thing itself, a Mayzie bird gone missing or mad after its involuntary act of motherhood. But nothing came at him. And the egg was still there, garish and mysterious, displayed on a nest that was more like a pile than a weave. He looked for a feather or any other sign, but no, nothing. Just the egg.
He lifted it and, like a blob of mercury, it seemed to dance in his hand. All the way down the ladder he never took his eyes from it, but he could feel Dana watching him as carefully as he was watching the egg. At the bottom he discovered she had the shovel, so she must have gone back to the garden while he was up there concentrating on the prize.
Still moving slowly, he extended his hand to show her, but before he could react, she knocked it to the ground. It hit with a muted crunch, defying gravity as it rolled upright. Something quite red shot out to hold it in that position. The thing was alive at that instant—he was sure of that—incubated without heat beyond the ambient temperature, and already consciously performing its single trick of balance in a desperate bid for survival. With unbelievable venom, Dana slammed the shovel down and crushed it flat.
She smashed it twice more, pained with the effort but swinging her forearms and hunching her body weight into each blow. The almost hatchling was mangled into a literal blood pudding of red feathers, red fluids, red membranous skin and red scaly legs, with only the sclera
around its flattened remnant of an eye showing white.
Denny could not abide cruelty—could not clean a fish or kill a mouse—and though he was trying to understand the threat that this deviant embryo posed, he could not. He looked at Dana, and the repulsion in his eyes must have penetrated her manic act, because she suddenly burst into tears and covered her face. He caught her as the shovel clanged to the ground.
He had wanted to hug Dana Novicki for a long time, he realized, but there was nothing romantic in it now. It felt paternal. If he could have somehow known that she was twenty-three years of age the day he was born, it still would have felt paternal. He held her buried against his chest, her arms crossed between them, and her remorseful shudders contradicting the ghastly act she had just committed. Things were very wrong throughout New Eden, but all he had to substantiate this was the eccentric and circumstantial evidence of a bizarre summer.
In a moment she regained her composure and, with her arms still hugged against her breasts and her eyes downcast, she stepped away.
"Tell me what it is, Dana. What's all this about pictures and red things?"
She looked dazed and weary, not even a distant relative of the woman who had swung a shovel three times against the defenseless thing at their feet.
He caught her wrist to stop her retreat.
"All right, I won't ask you anymore. But listen, I've decided to take my father out of New Eden. Things are too shaky around here. And since I don't know what's going on, I've got to take him out—even though I can't take care of him myself. In fact . . . in fact, I'm asking you to go on taking care of him. If you'll come with us back to where I live in Little Canada, I'll pay you everything I'm paying Ariel—"
She shook her head vigorously.
"You can live there the same as you do here, Dana—independent, no strings attached—except that I can help when I'm home from work. You can drive a car, go shopping, have a life. Don't tell me you don't want that. I know you do."
"You don't know what you're asking."
"The hell I don't."
"It would be over as soon as she knew."
"You mean Ariel? Why?"
Each flurry of head shaking gained celerity, as if she were trying to convince herself. He took her by the shoulders, but she wouldn't look at him.
"No strings, Dana. I swear."
"You can't take your father out of here."
"Watch me."
"Don't do it, Denny." And now she looked him dead in the eye, repeating: "You don't know what you're asking."
"I don't think you know what you're turning down."
"Yes, I do. Is that what you want to hear? I can give you that. I'd love to leave here. I'd love to go live with you and your father. But trust me, I can't leave. And neither can your father."
It was absurd. It roused what small capacity he preserved of the warrior man. Do not tell me what I cannot do. An old woman like Ariel Leppa couldn't hold anything over him the way she seemed to with everyone else in this odd household. More than that, he was uplifted by Dana's bold assertion that she would love to accept his offer. That alone was reason enough not to argue, not to risk poisoning the sentiment. It wasn't the thought of a relationship with him that was holding Dana in check. She had opened up to him that much in order to stress some other imperative. But what?
"Trust me," she said again. "Leave your father here. He'll be all right, if you leave him here."
Chapter 28
Painters preferred the north light. Ariel had read that somewhere. Painters and surgeons from the days when operations were performed by candlelight favored the "cool, clear light of the north." Sixteenth-century studios and operating theaters had skylights oriented to the north. Ariel's studio window was pointed north, and she stood there in the weathered frame high up on the third story, where a year ago she had contemplated suicide, feeling cosmic and apocalyptic.
But there was no cool and clear light out there now. Out there in the darkness was the cistern, and in it her child—a copy of her child. If Amber lived till dawn, then that version of her could surrender the paint as her petition to go on living. And if she didn't make it—if, for instance, that ghastly spidery spawn of her own artistic endeavors caught her at the bottom of the hole—well, what was a mother to do?
A mother.
Not the right term. At risk of profaning the sacred, Ariel had to be honest about her role. She was Amber's creator in every sense of the term. The implication beyond biology was intriguing. Could a mortal act of genuine creation compare with a divine act? She would have to think that over, come to a conclusion once and forever. Up until this point she had been timid about using her powers, and that was natural because she was a good person, one who had no intention of usurping higher prerogative. But, in fact, what was the difference between the mortal and the divine? She painted, and it was her design, her rendering, her will that controlled the outcome. Of course, the paint was procreative in some organic and palpable way, but it was still just paint. An inert thing by itself. The way it was used, on the other hand, could be . . . well, godlike.
She had to be ruthlessly honest about this because it would be just as bad to be too humble as too vain. It wasn't a sin to maximize what you had, as in the parable of the talents. You could make the argument that something had created the red dust that went into the paint, and you could reason that the creator of the red dust was therefore the ultimate god, but Ariel had mixed the paint and shaped the images, and how could that not be the heart of it? Was it a universe of overt creative acts that included her in its pantheon of creators, or was the universe just a single creative act from which all else derived?
Downstairs in a bedroom a perfect facsimile of Amber slept. So far she had obeyed to the letter, following her predecessor twin to find where the stolen paint was and even taking the initiative of trapping the disobedient Amber before coming back to report to her mother-creator that the missing paint was in the cistern. A little better than Eve had done, wouldn't you say?
When dawn raked its fingernails through the canopy of night to the east Ariel got her cane, and it was only fear that she might encroach on the hours of the hunter spider that made her wait a little longer. Light spread like surf up a Plutonian shore, and when it touched the far horizon she glided through the house where her creations slept, dreaming dreams of the immortality that was hers to bestow. She was the cynosure of all hope, all morality, all judgment for those things she had made. Within that sphere, she need answer no one.
She opened the door to Amber's room without knocking and found her sitting upright in the middle of the big bed, rocking. In the diluted light of dawn, the dresser and the oak bedposts were black, the walls and the sheets white. And something of this contrast extended to Amber in a way that was faintly shocking to Ariel. Her daughter's face and cotton nightshirt were white, but her hands were black. Jet-black trailed up her wrists as though she were wearing ragged velvet gloves.
It looked like blood, except for the fact that nothing transferred to the white sheets, and mud wouldn't have dried in such thin rivulets on her forearms. But as she opened her mouth to speak, Ariel grasped something else: the rocking, the lack of focus, the steady gaze at the wall opposite the bed—a few hours ago she had spoken to her anointed one, and there had been none of this obvious trauma. This was not the Amber she had recently created.
"Thank God you got out of that old cistern," she said smoothly. The fact that her clever little girl had escaped should have infuriated Ariel, but instead she smiled calmly. "Amber? I couldn't come for you in the dark—you know that. I can't imagine how you made it back here, but it would have been suicidal for me to go out there in the dark. Of course, I want the paint returned—that's a matter of survival for all of us—but I've been fretting over you all night."
No reaction, no expression, just a little girl in ebony gloves, rocking, staring. What was the black stain on her skin?
"Amber? Where is she?"
"In the cellar," came b
ack abruptly.
"The cellar?"
Suddenly the child's face turned, and her eyes lit up with awareness, and she looked squarely at her mother and spoke with just a hint of tremor. "Here's the way it is. If you paint me again, then I'll paint too. I'll paint spiders and snakes, and I'll let them loose in the house. If you do anything else to me, you won't ever get your paint back. It will just be there where someone else will find it. And I wrote a note, so whoever finds it will know where it came from and what it can do."
As abruptly as she had turned, Amber faced back to the wall and resumed rocking.
Outrage sizzled like a lit fuse in the high-ceiling room, but it was a long fuse. Time was on her side, Ariel decided. She stood up, walked slowly to the door.
"How dangerous," she said. "How very, very dangerous."
But the rocking continued.
Ariel went straight to the cellars, where she found the blackened canvas, and that snuffed out her rage with cold fear. She scratched at the black coating, searching for confirmation that this was indeed one of her paintings. But of course it had to be. There were the familiar corrugated fasteners and copper staples she used on frames. This was the newer Amber . . . painted out of existence with – what, black ink, shoe polish?
She thundered up the steps, breathing hard but driven to assess the damage to her security. She reached the studio electrified, fumbling with her key. Wheezing, shaking, she unlocked and threw open the door.
Everything had looked in order a few minutes ago, and it still looked in order, but that must be a lie, because she had just held one of her sacred paintings in her own two hands down in the cellar, so someone had been in here. Someone had access. She rifled through the stacks of frames against the wall, one after another: Ruta . . . Paavo . . . Molly
. . . Dana . . . Helen . . . Marjorie . . . Beverly . . . Thomas . . . Kraft—even the younger sketch of herself waiting to be painted in. But NOT Amber! Not Amber One. Not Amber Two. Both missing.
She sat down hard on the floor. It was over. The little menace had her, could expose her at will. She felt like an old hag again. White-faced, bloodless, suddenly facing the merciless fate of all fallen deities. But why hadn't Amber said something about possessing her own portrait? Why threaten with just the paint and not mention that her mother could no longer change the painting? And why was she worried about another Amber being created—why hadn't she just taken her portrait and the paint and run away?
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