Pale Phoenix

by Kathryn Reiss

  "Married!" cried Dan.

  "But you're only thirteen!" objected Miranda.

  "I felt a lot older by then." Abby shrugged. "And it was easier then to decide who you wanted to be. There wasn't so much bureaucracy, you know? No tax forms or social security numbers. You were freer, then. It was easy to say I was sixteen—just small for my age. Oh, maybe some people didn't buy the story, but so what? There I was—an orphan. If a homesteader needed a wife, who would object?"

  "What happened?" pressed Dan. "Did you just walk out of the marriage?"

  "Did you have any children?" asked Miranda.

  "No and no," answered Abby. "I didn't have children, thank goodness. And I wasn't married long because Luke—Luke died." She fell silent, and Miranda sensed not to push. No matter that more than a hundred years had passed; this was a sadness still raw.

  "It was easier to move around once trains were in use," said Abby. "I could go farther—and faster. I needed to get away from the places I'd lived so no one would recognize me. I went to San Francisco and invented another story, but after the big earthquake in 1906, I came back east. I was homesick for Garnet and had been away a long time." She sighed. "It's so hard. You have no idea. Always moving on ... leaving people you care about. Always trying not to care too much about anybody because you know it can't last. That's another reason I like old people best. They die—and I don't have to just leave them in the lurch."

  "What was it like when you came back to Garnet? Did you stay long?" asked Dan. Miranda imagined the future museum curator in him was regarding Abby as a special exhibit.

  "I worked as an assistant teacher. The schoolhouse was the Prindle House, can you imagine? But I didn't stay long. The teacher I was working with moved north, up to a little Maine fishing village, and she took me along with her as her assistant."

  "Did you ever get married again?" asked Miranda.

  Abby looked sad. "No. By then it was too risky. You had to have licenses—proof of age. I did fall in love one other time—not very long ago at all. It was in the late 1960s, in Philadelphia. The man wanted to be a writer—he said I inspired him, that I was his muse. But I had to leave him, too—and then later I heard he'd died young. But it's always that way. Whether they die young or old, everybody I've ever known has died."

  She hesitated, then spoke again. "When I'm feeling sad, which is most of the time, I go back to the ruin of my house. It's easy to do—I just wish myself there, and I'm riding back through that wind, back to the rubble and ash. There I'm like a ghost. Time is exactly as I left it. My brother is searching for me, and I try to tell him I'm there but I can't. And I can't leave the site. I'm stuck there. Time just stands still. So I leave, and I'm back in the real world where time goes on and I'm the only thing that doesn't."

  Abby dropped the manila envelope. It was creased and torn. "Finding a family is always the hardest part. It used to be easier, but as time goes on, I can't find people to take me in so readily. Earlier I could find work as a maid in a big house or pose as some lost relation. But now"—she laughed harshly—"people are smarter. They don't fall for that anymore. And the child labor laws make it hard for me, too. And there are no servants—at least not servants who are as little as I am. If I don't watch out now, I'll end up in foster care, or in an orphanage again—like I did in the 1930s...." She shook her head and frowned over at Miranda. "You knew, Mandy. But I couldn't tell you then."

  "I knew?" Miranda was confused. Then she understood. "Oh, Abby, then you were the girl Nonny remembered! It wasn't your grandmother at all."

  "I was back here in Garnet again, camping out in the woods up on the hill. Talk about irony. First the Prindle House was William's family's home—and might have been mine, too, if we'd married. Then it was where I lived with Matilda and Tobias. More than a century later I was teaching school right in the living room—and then only about twenty years after that, when the new schools were built, it became a horrid old orphanage, run like a prison, and I was an inmate—thanks to Susannah's great-granny."

  "Well, I bet you didn't stay long," said Dan. "I bet you ran away again."

  "Of course I did. I always do. But deciding to leave is difficult. You've seen homeless people. It's hard out there on the streets."

  Miranda shifted uncomfortably as she remembered following Abby on her search for food through the snowy streets.

  Abby selected a faded photo in sepia tone and handed it to Miranda. "Look, here it is. The Prindle Home for Female Children. An official picture of the whole lot of us." She pointed to the front row. "And there's yours truly."

  Miranda peered at the photograph, squinting to see the features of the thin figure standing rail-straight, her pale hair pulled back in two long braids. She passed the picture to Dan. "Those braids look too tight," she said in a low voice. What else was there to say?

  Chapter Thirteen

  WHEN MRS. HOOTON called them for pizza, Dan, Miranda, and Abby trooped downstairs. "Don't say anything," begged Abby. "Please don't tell anyone."

  They joined Helen, Philip, and Buddy in the dining room, where two extra-large pizzas waited on the table. Miranda noticed how pleased her parents looked at the sight of Miranda and Abby together. Dan's parents entered from the kitchen carrying a tossed salad and a tray with drinks. "This isn't like a regular dinner party," Buddy piped up. He was accustomed to the formal entertaining his parents did when the museum's board of directors came to dinner. "It's more like family."

  "Our extended family." Virginia Hooton smiled and passed Miranda the salad.

  Miranda tried to throw herself into the spirit of the lighthearted gathering, but her mind was occupied with all Abby had told them. She ate her salad and two pieces of mushroom pizza, chewing slowly while she thought. Dan, too, was subdued, though he managed to consume his usual five pieces of pizza. Abby, on the other hand, was more animated than usual. She joked with Buddy while she ate and plied Mr. and Mrs. Hooton with questions about their museum.

  "What are the earliest exhibits?" she wanted to know.

  "Oh, we have things from the seventeenth century," Ed Hooton told her. "Mostly household items. It's amazing—some of the tools people used daily we don't have a clue about today. Dan and I put together a children's quiz for classes that take the museum tour, and the children have to guess how various tools and utensils were used. It's been very successful and popular with teachers."

  "Kids today don't know very much about history," said Abby with a smirk.

  Miranda glanced over at her and grinned. Abby's superior tone, usually so grating on Miranda's nerves, seemed well earned after all she had told them earlier. "But you always manage to get A's in your history classes, don't you?" Miranda teased.

  "Oh," said Virginia Hooton brightly. "Are you especially interested in history, Abby?"

  "You could say that." Abby helped herself to another slice of pizza.

  Outside, the wind howled, but inside Miranda played cards with Buddy, Abby, and Dan in the kitchen while the parents talked over coffee and cheesecake in the dining room. Miranda found it hard to concentrate on their game. Her mind was whirling with possibilities and impossibilities, and she itched to ask Abby more questions. Finally Helen and Philip thanked the Hootons for having them over and bundled up against the cold to cross the street back to their own house. When they'd reached the porch, Miranda stopped and turned back to Abby. "Let's go for a walk," she said in a low voice.

  "But it's snowing. It's practically a blizzard."

  "But we need to talk—especially if you think I can help you. I think better when I walk."

  Helen unlocked the front door. Philip stepped inside and removed his scarf. "Coming girls?" he asked.

  "Not yet," said Miranda. "We're going for a little walk."

  "A walk!" exclaimed Helen. "In this weather you'll need skis."

  Philip put his hand on her shoulder. "Let them go," he said. They exchanged a hopeful look.

  "Well, don't go far," cautioned Helen. "It's dark and a
lready quite late—and you both have school tomorrow."

  They promised to return soon and set off. The moon lit the road through the flurries, its glow nearly as bright as day. After walking for nearly five minutes, silent except for the crunch of snow under their boots, Miranda shyly linked her arm through Abby's.

  "Nice," Abby said, squeezing Miranda's arm. "Friends always used to walk this way. I miss it."

  The simple comparison between "then" and "now" touched Miranda. She realized she no longer doubted Abby's story. Excitement soared in Miranda, submerging the confusion and frustration of the past weeks. But all she said was, "So how do you do it? Travel through time."

  "I don't travel around, you know. I told you—I can only go back to that one time and place, to the ruin, just after everyone died."

  "Then why go, if you can't do anything?" asked Miranda logically. "If all you can do there is cry, why make yourself miserable? You can't change anything."

  Abby slid on a patch of icy sidewalk and clutched Miranda's arm more tightly to regain her balance. "It's like an addiction, I think. I feel this pull. I don't expect you to understand. It's this urgency. And so I go back whenever I feel like it—whether I'm at school or home or anywhere, I can just disappear. And when I return, only a short time has passed. Sometimes I hover back at the site of my house for what seems to me like days, but when I let go and return to the present—whenever the present is—it's maybe only an hour later."

  "Hmm." Miranda kicked up snow with her boots as they walked. "I wonder how it happened to you in the first place. I mean, what saved you from the fire? What was different about you from the other people who died?"

  Abby stopped walking. "I'm not a witch, Mandy!"

  Miranda looked at her in surprise. "Who said anything about witches? I'm just trying to figure out why you were saved when no one else was. Maybe you have a guardian angel or something. Anyway, you know there's no such thing as witches."

  Abby started walking again. She shoved her hands into the pockets of her denim coat. "You may know that, but it's taken me a long time."

  "What do you mean?"

  Abby's breath hung in white puffs as she explained. "It was such a different time, Mandy. People were different in Garnet when I first lived here—and it was more than just clothing and manners. You have no idea. People believed in devils and witches. Anything we didn't understand could be attributed to witchcraft. You must have studied the Salem witch trials in school."

  Miranda nodded. "Yeah, that was when some stupid girls accused a bunch of women of being witches and torturing them and stuff, right? And so the women were sentenced to death."

  "Right. But it wasn't just a few women who were sentenced, and it wasn't just in Salem. It happened in Garnet, too. The whole of New England was all worked up about witches when I was a girl. When anything strange happened, people panicked."

  "Did you believe in witches? Do you still?"

  Abby was silent for a moment. "I guess I did. Now, I don't know what to think. Something happened to me, that's for sure. If it wasn't witchcraft, then what was it? There was a woman who lived in the woods—up on the hill behind the cemetery. She was Indian, or part Indian. Her name was Willow. She used to come into town to barter for food. She grew herbs, and she could heal people even when nothing else worked. She saved one of my sisters from a fever once, when others in the village died of it. She was wild and strange and used to mutter things to herself as she walked. People pretty much stayed away from her, but after she saved my sister, they started coming to her when they needed her help. I was a little bit afraid of her, but fascinated, too. I guess I thought she might be a witch. Other people did." She glanced at Miranda beneath snow-tipped lashes. "And for a long time after the fire, I worried I must be a witch, too. How else to explain being shot forward into the future the way I was? I was scared people would notice that I never changed and accuse me of witchcraft. Oh, Mandy, they hanged witches. It was a horrible way to die. I can't bear to think about it."

  Miranda took her arm again. For all of Ahby's long years of experience, Miranda thought, the small, scared Puritan girl Abby had once been still lurked close beneath the surface of the modern girl. "Well, look, if it wasn't a magic spell that saved you from the fire and threw you into the future, what was it?"

  "I can't think," said Abby. "Unless it was the charm that Willow gave me." She smiled sadly at Miranda through the flurries of snow that settled like a blanket around them. "But I lost it long ago."

  "What charm?" Miranda demanded as they reached the top of the hill and stopped.

  Abby fingered a strand of long hair that had escaped from her woolen hat. "It was a small stone carving. My mother sent me to Willow's house in the woods to bring her a chicken as thanks for curing Constance's fever. It was already months after the sickness was gone, but my mother was so grateful, I took things to Willow often. Loaves of bread and fish and wampum—beads made from periwinkle shells, you know, from the coast. Sometimes she let me stay while she worked in her garden. We never talked, but I loved the smell of the herbs and flowers. It was always so peaceful there. Anyway, the day I brought her the chicken, she took the crate and set it down by a tree, and then placed her hands on my head, not saying anything. I was afraid to move or speak. After a while she reached into her skirt and brought out a little statue.

  "Willow held it out to me and smiled. When I didn't take it, she pointed to the chicken, which was clucking and scratching in its box, and said, 'A bird for a bird.' So I took it. She said, 'This carving is older than time. It is for second chances.' I was scared—she really did seem like a witch, Mandy—so I dropped the carving into my apron pocket and ran back to my house. I never even said thank you." Abby shrugged her shoulders and dislodged a shower of powdery flakes. "I never saw her again. But even though I knew my parents would forbid me to keep it, I carried the little statue with me all the time. Later, when the house burned down, I had it in my apron pocket. It was the only thing I had with me besides the clothes I was wearing when I left my own time."

  "So how did you lose it?" Miranda asked.

  They had trudged through the snow up one side of the long street and now crossed over to walk down the other side. They leaned against each other when the wind blew to ward off the chill.

  "It was stolen, actually." Abby frowned. "I was living in Boston then—it was 1853 or 1854. I was a housemaid for the Longridge family. They were a good family to work for, but my time there ended in total disaster." She sighed, remembering. "They were rich as anything; Captain Longridge imported all sorts of things from around the world. He was always setting out on voyages and coming back with treasures that they'd put on display."

  "What happened?"

  "Well, Captain Longridge collected everything—jewelry, paintings, china, silver, you name it. But he was especially interested in statues. He had some Greek and Roman pieces, and other things, too. Little medallions and stone carvings from Africa and Asia. He told me some of the carvings were thousands of years old. He kept them in a glass cupboard, and I dusted them once a month. One day he came home while I was cleaning his study. I hurried to leave—one of the rules of the house was that the servants were never to be seen by the family. But Captain Longridge started talking to me about his collection of statues as I dusted them, and so of course I listened. I was just trying to make polite conversation when I told him about my own little carving. He asked to see it, so I went up to my room in the attic where I kept it hidden under my mattress. When I brought it down, he went crazy. He said he absolutely had to have it for his collection, that it was very old and valuable, and that he'd give me a lot of money for it. Enough so I wouldn't have to work as a maid anymore."

  Miranda felt a little thrill of excitement flicker through her body. But she kept her voice even as she hugged Abby's arm and asked: "You didn't sell it to him, though, did you?"

  "No..." Abby shook her head. "I couldn't. You see, it was the only thing I had that came from my own time.
I couldn't let it go."

  "I can understand that." Again excitement seized Miranda. "But the money would have helped you—"

  Abby's voice rang out in the dark angrily. "That's what he kept saying! The money, the money, the money—he seemed to think that's all I needed to be happy. He grabbed for the statue and said he would have it, no matter what—and I ran. I ran to my room and he followed me. There was no way to get out of the attic, so I did the only thing I could to escape—I wished myself back to my own time. And there I was at the ruin, miserable as ever, but safe."

  "And you never went back again? To the Longridges', I mean?"

  "I stayed at the ruin as long as I could bear it, longer than ever before. But even though it's hard to stay away, it's also horrible being there. So eventually I let myself return to the present—and when I appeared back at the Longridges' hardly any time had passed at all. My room was full of people. Everyone screamed and ran when they saw me." She laughed hollowly. "You see, I hadn't been careful. Captain Longridge saw me vanish. He was frightened out of his skull and summoned the police, the preacher, the whole family. And he told them I'd tried to steal one of his statues. All those people were waiting there to see what would happen—and then I reappeared.

  "'Seize her!' someone shouted, and the constables rushed toward me. Captain Longridge grabbed my little statue and the police carried me away." She let out a long breath. "They put me in the police wagon. But of course I disappeared back to Garnet as soon as I could, and stayed there even longer, waiting at the ruin until I figured enough time had passed so I could go back. When I returned to the present, a few hours had passed. The police cart was parked outside the courthouse. No one was around—they were probably all out looking for me—so I was able to slip away. Of course, I had to leave Boston."

  "Did you find a new family to live with?" asked Miranda, her voice full of concern.