She'd kept the same bedroom set-bed, end tables, dressers, chests, and so forth, though. Her mother had returned to Elfland when Amy was too small to remember, but had left that bedroom furniture as a parting gift, and even after the money suddenly poured in following the unexpected success of Amy and Titania, that hand-carved elven furniture had been much the nicest stuff in The Cabin.
Dad had bought good things, all leather and oak and very Scandinavian, that were now in storage; he'd left Amy's room alone because it was hers, and his office because he could not bear the thought of changing anything and possibly jeopardizing the amazing luck that had taken him, after fifteen Little Amy books, from a reliable seller for every library's collection, and the recipient of a few fan letters every month, to the Times bestseller list.
Probably he had made 99% of the money he ever made in the last six years of his life. She wondered what he might have done differently if he had known that those were the last six. Probably written one less Little Amy book to make time for the series finisher he always said he would do some day, spent a little more time traveling, and had hookers up at The Cabin twice a week. And drunk more, laughed more, and eaten more pizza-with-everythings. Dad hadn't been the type to mourn about tomorrow, no matter how inevitably it was closing in. Which had something to do with those times in Amy's childhood when she had been forbidden to answer the phone because it might be "the money bastards," Dad's expression for bill collectors, "they're like goddam Tolkien's goddam orcs but not as well written, Amy, and if you talk to one on the phone he can steal your soul."
The stairs she ascended, and the balustrade were elf-carved, too, part of the list of things Dad had put into the cabin, like replacing the pinewood floors with maple and the plain old thermopane windows with old-fashioned double sashes, to make it more like The Cabin in the Little Amy books. When she'd been nine, there had been a steel utility stair he got for free from a warehouse that was being torn down, and they had rejoiced at getting to spend two weeks installing it, finally replacing the strapped on extension ladder they'd used before then.
"Talk to me, Amy, this is scary."
" You're scared? You've got a gun and you're eighty miles away."
At the top of the stairs, she flicked on a light and walked down to her bedroom door, far down at the end of the hall (at least the place had always been big).
When she flipped the light switch, she gasped.
"Amy! Are you okay!" Derrick's voice in her ear was demanding, as if she were a patrolman about to do something fatal.
Her soul- what she thought was her soul-what she had thought was her soul-was on the bed, as a quilt. A big, gorgeous, elven-made quilted comforter, with a raw silk face printed and embroidered with the pattern she remembered so well, a very nice one and it would probably have cost a thousand dollars at the gift shops in Cheyenne or Sidney, but nonetheless it was not a soul, it was just your basic shiny elf-quilt, astonishingly warm, eternally durable, fascinating and elegant.
But a quilt. Though the pattern was indeed just as long as he was tall, and-
"Amy, are you okay? Say something. I'm dialing Larimer Sheriff's right now-"
"I'm fine, I was just startled by something that has nothing to do with anything, sorry I worried you, you don't need to send the deputies."
Of course she remembered that quilt vividly, now. She had been tucked under it clear back when she was younger than Little Amy in the books. She had lain on it with her homework open in front of her while she chatted on the phone about keggers and shopping trips down to Boulder or Fort Collins. She'd debated taking it to college with her.
"I know you'll hate my asking, but are you okay?"
"I'm fine," she said, and realized how husky her voice sounded. Her face was wet. "Just one of those finding my soul things. I've got PMS-Perceiving My Soul-okay?"
"I think it's weird you can joke about it."
"Well, I can cry, too."
"Are you?"
"Mind your own business."
Amy just could not believe that she had remembered her fucking bedspread as her soul. She had lived so close to the Border for so long-Wyoming was less than half an hour's drive up the highway from here, one low range and you'd be descending into it-and somehow she had managed to make a mistake like-
"H'lo?" The quilt moved. "Hello?" The voice was sleep-drenched and sad. An arm, in a blue flannel sleeve with Han Solo on it, reached out from under the quilt; and a surprisingly alto voice croaked "ah shit, ah shit, ah shit," as if it had not been used in months. The quilt flipped back revealing a small, painfully thin woman, big eyes and liver-lips beneath a messy mop of jet-black hair that made her look like a dead dandelion. She groped for her thick horn-rimmed glasses, on the bedside table, like an old drunk feeling around for his bottle, pulled them on with a grimace, and blinked at Amy through a cloud of blear.
"Derrick," Amy said, "it's what I thought, and it's fine, 'kay? I need to talk to Sam now. Thanks for being there and putting up with me and everything."
"All right. Can I call later about maybe-"
"I'll call you. Promise. Gotta go." She clicked off and looked at Sam expectantly, not even considering being angry; this was too perfect and too typical.
"Ah shit, Amy, I guess I should try to explain this or something."
"Well," Amy said, "you're not in much shape to explain anything, but I bet I can. After the fellowship ran out, even though you wrote something like ten picture books while you were on it, you still hadn't sold anything, so you didn't have any money or anywhere to go. The next fellowship person wasn't due for more than two months, so you put your stuff in storage and since you still had a key here, you stay here, sleep in my bed, because it's the only one here, and write at Dad's desk or the kitchen counter, and keep hanging on and hoping your agent will call or something. You're living on mac and cheese and bologna sandwiches. That about cover it?"
"Yeah, I guess it does." Sam sat up. "You're not mad."
"No."
"Why not?"
"Dad's will set up the Foundation to support people who kept swinging at writing no matter what. I think I have pretty good proof the Board was right about you. And I'm probably only here for a day or two, and I know perfectly well you'll take better care of the place than I will. Do you have any money at all?"
"About three hundred in cash. I could give it to you if-"
"Not what I'm thinking about. I just wanted to make sure you're okay. Really. But get dressed anyway. I'm forcing you into slavery-I have a trunk load of groceries, because I had been planning to be here about ten days, and you get to help carry them in."
"But it's your house," Samantha said, climbing out of bed, unselfconsciously changing into the jeans and sweatshirt from the bedpost. " I'd be mad."
"Then I'll never hide in yo
ur house. Things have been a little weird lately, and I could use having some company, and you probably need some variety in your diet. Let's just get the stuff in and then we'll sort it all out over some frozen pizza and Castles and Fat Tire."
"Is it okay to say I love you forever?"
"Only if that means I can tease you about the Star Wars jammies."
Sam shrugged and shook her black bangs out of her eyes, finger-combing her thick mass of hair. "Warm. My size. Clearance at Wal-Mart. Helps me stay in the right spirit for the readers. Besides, Han and Chewie rock."
The frozen White Castles went into the microwave at once, while the oven warmed up a Red Baron four cheese. "This is going to be more calories than I get in a week," Samantha said. "Not that I'd dream of complaining."
The microwave pinged and Amy pulled out the plate of sliders. They huddled over the cold beer and warm Castles, going through both faster than they had intended to. They had become friends almost the instant that the Board chose Samantha (Amy wasn't supposed to meet candidates before the choice was made), sharing a morbid sense of humor and the sort of attitude that well-meaning teachers had always taken them aside to talk about.
They balanced each other somehow. Amy drew dead and pickled things with frightening precision. Sam wrote sweet, sentimental stories of very young childhood, which everyone recognized as well done and no one wanted to publish.
The last few months had been the same; a steady drizzle of rejection slips because her work "lacked something." Sam made a face. "Wish I knew what I lacked. Okay, so I've got no plot, but neither does Goodnight, Moon. I write about really trivial childhood stuff but so does Beverly Cleary. And I really exaggerate stuff and get really silly, but, well, all I can say is, Shel Silverstein, Calvin and Hobbes, Maurice Sendak, The Phantom Tollbooth. And of course, Little Amy. Which I hope you'll forgive me for saying."
"I live to be said. I don't know. Dad broke his heart and bank account for most of his life, and two different editors laid their jobs on the line to keep the series going, and about fifty librarians and book sales people created a fan club that could never get up to a hundred members-and then one day, presto, he does a lightning re-write of A Midsummer Night's Dream, Titania strikes back with the genders reversed, Little Amy as the Counter-Puck, and making fun of my first boyfriend by setting him up as Bottom, and zip, bop, bang, he's richer than God."
"I've told you before I started reading those books long before Amy and Titania. I got Amy and the Secret Cave for Christmas right after it came out because I was already such a big Little Amy fan. Thanks for the food but please don't insist that I crap all over the only good thing in my childhood."
"Sorry. I really do hope whatever made Amy and Titania a success wallops you next week."
"Can you stand one question? I really don't want to be nosy-well, I do want to be nosy, but I don't want to offend you."
"If you do I'll just break a plate over your head and get over it."
"Great. Uh, you just said your father was making fun of your first boyfriend in that book-did you hate him for that?"
"Hate him? I don't even remember him. His name started with W-Walt? Wally? something like that-and Dad said, very accurately, that he was the sort of person you wanted to look at until you heard, the kind that the phrase 'beautiful but dumb' was coined for, and I was crazy about him then, I guess, but I'd probably have to reread the book. What are you laughing at?"
"Oh, you really don't remember Amy and Titania."
"I said I don't."
"Well, he was beautiful and dumb and that was funny, but the idea of him being named Wally, it's just-just so-I mean-"
Once Samantha got going on the wonderfulness of Dad's books, she could go for hours without ever producing an independent clause, giggling and waving her hands into a string of happy "you knows." Amy did her best to look stern. "Come on, take care of yourself, Sam. Make sure you consume enough of all this lovely fat, carbs, and alcohol. You need it a lot more than I do."
"Doing my best. There's only so much of me to go around it." She folded up a drippy piece of pizza and ate it like a sandwich. "Funny thing, for a lot of us, Amy and Titania kind of spoiled things. We liked it, but not as much as the earlier ones, and suddenly Little Amy wasn't an inside joke for sad lonely brainos. But it's good that after all that work, your dad got something out of it. That's a good thing, surely?"
"Yeah. He did work hard for what he got."
They decided the first frozen pizza and round of beers would be lonesome without another, and dealt with those in pleasant silence before Samantha finally said, "Um, not that it's necessarily my place to bring up the subject, but what did you have in mind for the sleeping arrangement?"
"Well, ownership has a few privileges attached. I'm taking the bed. Can you be comfortable on the nap couch in Dad's office?"
"I sleep there half the time anyway. I was going to suggest it."
They got blankets and a fresh pillowcase for the nap couch pillow from one of the cedar chests in Amy's room. As Amy turned the light off in the office, she couldn't help feeling that she really ought to have tucked Samantha in. "Good night, Sam."
"'Night," the voice under the covers muttered. "Thanks for not bein'ad."
Mad? Sad? Bad? Probably mad.
Amy hesitated a moment in the doorway. The big, high triangular window-one of Dad's few really successful building projects-framed Taurus's head, with the Pleiades in the upper right corner and just the tip of Orion's bow in the bottom point. She had seen the same stars framing Dad, slumped asleep over his desk.
She closed the door very softly.
Back in her room, she unpacked her duffel, and there was her stupid soul again, still a lifeless gray rag, with that remarkable drawing on it. She spread it out on her bedspread to look at it a bit more, positioning it carefully-the diamond that enclosed the gaudy Valentine heart on the bedspread was the same shape and size as-
Though the lights were on, the floor was dark as it rushed up into her face.
"Come on." A hand was shaking her shoulder, in an annoyingly tentative way. She rolled over on her back, and it was Wolfbriar looking down at her, exactly as he had been when she had been thirteen and he had been whatever age an elf ever is; they are all perpetually newborn, which is the only way they can bear living forever, and they never die, which is the only thing that makes their intense sensory memory endurable. "Come on. Wake up."
"What happened?"
"Your soul became not-in-pieces."
"Whole," Amy said, sitting up and rubbing her head. She'd had hangovers she liked better than this. "Whole," she repeated. Elves were like that with human languages; they would usually only learn one of any pair of antonyms.
"Whole," he said. "Your soul has been not-whole f
or a not-brief time."
Or then again, who really understood elves?
"Yes, it has. Since… oh, my. Since the night in here." Her eyes widened. "We hid you in the trunk because my dad was coming upstairs yelling 'Who is up there with you?'…"
Now she remembered the kissing and touching that had gotten more and more exciting; the final wild moments where she had whispered "yes, yes, yes…"
The never-before-tested bed creaking and squealing in rhythm, betraying them but she hadn't cared-
Then "What the hell are you doing up there? Is Wolfbriar up there with you?" in a drunken bellow from the front room, and the realization that Dad's little pixie must already have gone home, and the thumps of a big man hurrying up a ladder… Wolfbriar hiding in the cedar trunk, willing himself to not-be.
But since he would not exist to terminate the hiding spell, he had had to set a condition. And with Amy's soul newly divided, surely it must have seemed to him that she would repair her soul as soon as possible, so he had made her soul's reunion the trigger for his reappearance, but… well, sometimes you just don't get around to things, she thought.
She stood up, breathing deeply, and now her vision had cleared and become double again, the way it naturally was for a half-elf. She saw The Cabin as she had known it as Little Amy, and she saw the clumsily modified prefab house by the borrow pit. Her elf-eye delighted in the weave of silver in the walls, and her human eye saw the rough-fitted, stained and urethaned but never sanded enough number two pine of the floor, and-
Jim Baen’s Universe Page 33
