The Cabinet of Earths

by Anne Nesbet

  “I bet it was scary,” James was saying. “Was it really, really scary?”

  “I’m afraid it’s entirely my fault he’s pestering you,” said Maya’s mother, leaning forward in her chair. Her face was pale, but her eyes were very alert, the light dancing in them the way it tended to do when something had caught her attention. “I’ve told them the story a thousand times, you see. They’ve seen the newspaper articles and the pictures. I hope you’re not offended.”

  “Offended,” said Cousin Louise, quite blank. “Why?”

  There was a little hiccup of time in the room, during which Maya’s mother offered everyone cookies, and everyone but James politely refused.

  “Well,” said Maya’s mother brightly, as if starting over again. “I’m so glad we’ve finally found you! And my mother would have been so glad. She wanted to adopt you, you know, when . . . when . . . that terrible thing happened, when the church fell down and everybody was killed, even your poor brother—”

  “Your poor brother was Nicolas,” said James solemnly. “He was six. And the church was made of stone.”

  “Oh, dear,” said Maya’s mother.

  But Cousin Louise still had not so much as flinched.

  She said instead, in her dry and plodding way, “The children, I presume, will be going to school?”

  School! Maya’s heart closed around that word like a sea anemone poked by an unfriendly hand. School! And while her mother rattled on about the forms they had filled out, and the various educational establishments in the quartier, and her conviction that being thrown into the French public schools would, in the end, be the best experience her children could ever possibly hope for, Maya thought about home, and the new locker she would have had if she had stayed at Livingston Junior High where she belonged, and the way her friend Jenna would again this year almost certainly bring her stuffed chipmunks to class on the first day, just because that was what Jenna always did at the beginning of every year since the first day of kindergarten five million years ago—and she forgot all about Paris for a moment. Just closed her eyes and remembered what it felt like: school!

  But then Cousin Louise said, “Mais oui, of course,” and that brought Maya right back out of her daze. She had just managed to miss something important. What?

  “How wonderfully kind!” said her mother. “Maya, how about that? Cousin Louise has just offered to help you with your French.”

  There were, in fact, audible underlines under all of those words. Maya’s inattention must have been showing.

  “Oh, Mom!” said Maya in horror, and her father, who believed in the comforting effect of treats, pressed a cookie into her hand.

  “Of course we don’t want to inconvenience you, Louise,” said Maya’s mother. “There’s your work.”

  Maya looked up in hope. But no—

  “Bah, the work,” said Cousin Louise. “I file letters, papers, forms in the basement of an enormous firm. Anonymous labor. They will not mind me, present or not present. I am invisible.”

  And for a moment there seemed to be almost a flicker of something in Cousin Louise’s eyes. Perhaps only Maya saw it, that quick winking of light, and Maya looked away very fast, feeling a little strange inside.

  She knows, thought Maya, keeping her eyes well away while her stomach did that odd, embarrassed flop. She knows what she’s like.

  When Cousin Louise had finally said au revoir—which means, unfortunately, not just “good-bye” but “until we meet again”—when she had disappeared, neither smiling nor frowning, into the rattly old elevator and gone off and away, Maya’s father leaned back against the apartment door for a moment in mock exhaustion.

  “No more,” he said. “I don’t care who it is; I don’t care what Society they run; I don’t care whose long-lost cousin they may be—that’s it. We don’t open the door.”

  “Well, I was glad to meet her,” said Maya’s mother, relaxing a little into her chair. “And now Maya will have help with her French.”

  A wave of frustration sloshed over Maya’s edges at that. And she was so tired, too! Your edges always get sloshier when you’re tired.

  “But, Mom,” she said. “Don’t you see what a crazy idea that is? You don’t know anything about her. For all you know, she could be an ax murderer!”

  Maya’s mother looked distinctly taken aback.

  “Good grief, Maya,” she said. “Louise is our cousin. She’s not an ax murderer.”

  “Even ax murderers are somebody’s cousins,” said Maya. “She’s a little strange, couldn’t you tell? She’s, like, blurry or something. Didn’t you notice how strange she is? I can’t go wandering around Paris with Cousin Louise. She’s practically invisible.”

  Maya’s father laughed out loud.

  “Slow down!” he said. “Just because a person’s not, um, especially memorable—”

  “Not that,” said Maya—to her mother, not her father, because if anyone was going to understand about statues on buildings that looked like you, and brass salamanders that came alive when you walked by, and cousins that were surrounded somehow by a blurry, numbing cloud, it would be her mother. “I mean really, like, invisible. Couldn’t you see that?”

  For a moment Maya thought she saw a spark of recognition lighting her mother’s eyes—“You, too?” said those eyes for a millisecond—and then the millisecond was over, and her mother blinked, and whatever that light had been was forgotten and gone.

  “Maya,” said her mother kindly. “Calm down. Think of it this way: It will be good for Louise, having some contact with her cousins.”

  Maya was just opening her mouth to say—something!—when her mother stopped her with the tiniest shake of the head.

  “Look,” said her mother. “Brains are very delicate things. You know that. Do you think her life has been easy? An injury like that can change someone’s entire personality.”

  Maya’s mouth stayed open for another moment, and then she gulped it shut.

  “Injury?” she said. “You mean, she was hurt?”

  “Maya!” said her mother. “A whole church fell on her!”

  (“With a great big CRASH,” said James, from somewhere under the table.)

  “But,” said Maya. “You didn’t tell us she got hurt.”

  She was beginning to feel pretty foolish. Of course, it made sense. All that rock tumbling down! And then never to be the same as you were before that happened! It was an awful thought, to tell the truth.

  Though something naggled at her about it all. She remembered the picture. It was in the album back home, a clipping from the newspaper, as old as could be. The smiling child in the arms of her rescuers. Grainy smile, grainy ruins, big headline shouting something in Italian underneath, because they had all been tourists in Italy, Cousin Louise’s family, when the church fell on them.

  Just the slightest flutter of a thought—smiling!—and then it winked out again and was gone.

  “It’s probably something along the lines of autism,” said Maya’s mother. “Though she wasn’t born with it. Anyway, I know you’ll handle things with your usual good sense. And now—”

  She yawned.

  “—I’m taking a nap. Go look at your room, James, why don’t you? It’s right down the hall. . . .”

  There was a long moment of silence in that apartment, still so empty and unfamiliar, with the suitcases scattered around like toppled bricks. For the first time, Maya noticed the wall of the living room wasn’t a straight line at all, but a long curve. Even the windows had a curve to them, and through the rippled glass she could see the street winding along and the windows of the building just across the way, with their fancy iron balconies good only for potted plants, not people. And slate-colored roofs with more windows thrusting out from them. All in all, the place looked remarkably like, well, Paris.

  “Where’s my room?” James was asking from farther and farther away. “Here? Is this it? Can I mess it up now?”

  She ran her fingertip along the curving wall, all
the way to the fireplace in the corner, where there was a potted plant at one side and a mirror above, tilted just the tiniest bit, so that her own face looked down at her, her eyes darker in the glass than they usually looked, darker and more serious, somehow.

  And then when her finger got as far as the mantelpiece, it tripped. There was the smallest paper corner of something, trapped between the mantel and the wall. You could see that someone had painted over the joint where the mantelpiece met the wall, but not very carefully, and there was a black line of a crack visible now. And that was where her finger had tripped: not on the crack itself, but on a tiny cardboard corner that stuck out from that crack, no farther than a fraction of an inch. An eye might not notice the bump of it, even, but a finger did.

  And her fingers were already working carefully away at that corner in the crack, easing whatever it was out, bit by bit, trying to get just enough cardboard between her index finger and thumb to pull the thing out. Because if she lost hold of it now, she saw, it would fall all the way into the depths of that crack and be gone for good.

  Maya was good at fiddling things out of tight places, though.

  With a slight sigh of paint dust, out it came: a large envelope, quite old, it seemed. With something in it. Several somethings. They poured out easily into her hand: photographs. Black and white, square-shaped, odd. How old they must be, she couldn’t help thinking, these pictures of children in quaint tailored coats and antique sweaters. Walking along sidewalks, looking up into the camera with a smile and a wave: alive, almost.

  Almost alive.

  She was tipping a photograph back and forth in her hand, watching it shimmer.

  A little girl, maybe four years old, with dark ringlets spilling out from under her tam; dark, sparkling eyes. Sparkling. Yes—

  “So what’ve you got there?” said her father. Out of nowhere, almost. Maya jumped.

  “Bunch of photos,” she said, hugging the envelope closer to her chest. But she held out a hand, to give him a look.

  “Hnh,” he said, an appreciating sort of sound. “Cute kids. Used to live here, maybe. Nice old prints, too. Different emulsions back then, you know.”

  Then he drifted back out of the room again. Suitcases trumped photographs.

  For a while, however, Maya could not move away from that place or look away from those pictures. They were silvery in a way she had never seen a photograph be silvery before; almost three-dimensional, somehow, when you rocked the shining children in your hand. Not everything in those photos had that magical fullness: The trees, the sidewalks, the cobblestones in the background stayed flat, and even the other figures in the frame, the passersby, the extras.

  But oh, the beautiful, luminous children!

  Those children were like little flames of silvery depth flickering against the ordinary flatness of everything else, and some of the flames were brighter and deeper than others.

  On the backs of the photographs were neat notations in pencil, numbers followed by something that looked like a droopy “X”: “174X,” “56.8X,” and even “216X!!” on the photograph of the ringletted girl.

  “Adèle,” it said there, in fine and feathery script, and a date she could not read. 1951, maybe. 1957?

  Maya’s breath caught in her throat, and her fingers tingled as she slipped the photographs back into the envelope they had been waiting in all this time. It was the strangest feeling that filled her now, after all that long day of travel, bronze salamanders, elegant young men in sunglasses, and cousins your eyes just slipped right over—

  She felt—really she did!—as if the very walls of this room had sent her a letter.

  Chapter 4

  The Baby Who Sang in the Ruins

  They had just slogged through Parisian puddles for an hour, and now Cousin Louise was looking up and down the street, choosing a café.

  “There,” she said finally, with a point and a sniff. “We’ll go there.”

  She liked cafés. Well, in principle, Maya did, too. Sitting at a little round table in Paris, watching well-dressed people stride by in their high-heeled shoes, clickety-clack, clickety-clack, while you sipped a fizzy drink—nothing more relaxing than that, under ordinary circumstances. That is to say: in other company than that of Cousin Louise.

  “Please request that table over there, Maya,” said Cousin Louise (never in English, always in French). “The one facing the fountain. I’ll have a café crème, very hot, please tell him.”

  Even in parts of the world where people speak English, it can take some gumption to tackle a waiter on a busy day. But every afternoon spent with Cousin Louise led like clockwork to this uncomfortable moment when Maya had to sort through her new French phrases, fingering them like foreign coins in a pocket to see what she had to spend; when she had to march forward and catch the eye of a man whose vest and apron meant business; and then had to galvanize herself, open her mouth, and talk.

  This time Maya’s face must have sagged into a frown for a moment, because when they were safely at their table, and the waiter was about to bustle back any moment with their drinks, Cousin Louise asked, “You think I am making you do this only for tormenting you?”

  (Maya could understand more of Cousin Louise’s French now, but her brain still made peculiar English of it.)

  “Non, non,” said Maya halfheartedly.

  “But listen, Maya,” said Cousin Louise. “If I ask for a table, I will not get one. If I order café crème, they will not bring it. They do not see me.”

  For a moment Maya was filled with the most peculiar thought: Maybe that was the literal truth! Had she spent this week trailing a truly invisible person all over Paris? But what could that possibly mean? What if the whole Davidson family was simply being haunted by this Cousin Louise?

  It was a foolish, impossible thought, but still she had to put her hands in her lap to keep the worry from showing, and when the waiter came with the drinks, she watched him with an eagle eye. But he put her Orangina and a tall cylindrical glass on her side of the table and the coffee on the other side, quite as if he realized Maya was not there all alone. A relief. Cousin Louise might not necessarily be a ghost, after all. Which would have been awfully hard to explain to her parents, come to think of it, if it had turned out to be true.

  “So,” said Cousin Louise, after testing the temperature of her coffee. “And how was it, the first day of school?”

  But of course she used the French expression: la Rentrée. The Comeback. The Reopening. The Return. The words don’t work so well if you’re a refugee from California and deeply missing all your friends and your dog.

  Maya thought about her day, about how during récréation, which was recess, all the normal students stood around looking cool in their black jackets and chatting in French, while the friendless new kids hung out on the edges and, if they were Maya, counted the many, many days remaining before the next vacation. And decided it was safer to talk about James instead.

  “My brother seems to be doing very well,” she said. (Taking the usual pauses before the verbs.) “He bounced to school this morning—is it all right, ‘bounced’?—with his new backpack and his new pencils. And this afternoon he bounced out once more, very contented. He likes school.”

  Not to mention that three or four little boys had waved good-bye to him as he took Maya’s hand to walk home.

  “I see,” said Cousin Louise. “It is easier for him. He is not at all invisible, that one.”

  Maya stole a look at Cousin Louise’s inscrutable face and then gave her soda a determined stir. The thing was, even when Cousin Louise seemed to be making a joke, you could never be quite sure enough to laugh.

  “Yes, he will take taxis all the time, if he wishes, when he is big,” said Cousin Louise, as if that were the measure of something grand. “He will hold out his hand, and they will not speed by. They will see him and stop. They will even serve him coffee when he requests it, in cafés.”

  She rested her bland eyes on Maya, in whose mind thos
e taxis and waiters had gotten all tangled up with the black-jacketed crowd at the Collège Paul Sabatier. Being ignored? Well, even Maya knew something about that.

  “And now,” said Cousin Louise, opening her book. “We will talk about the imperfect past.”

  As if the present weren’t imperfect enough! At least in the past there had been friends to hang out with, and a dog that loved you, and a world that spoke your own language.

  But Cousin Louise meant a verb tense. About which she went on and on and on. Maya was trying her best to pay attention, but her mind kept drifting away to more interesting things: the brightly lit windows of the shops, the little fountain with its sad cherubs holding up their marble banner, the tourists sauntering by with their cameras dangling from wrist straps and their noses buried in their guidebooks, the flock of fashionable students making a smooth and languid turn into the entrance of the café, like the birds swooping from tree to tree in the Champ de Mars.

  “Aux enfants perdus”—the café was named after the fountain. “What children?” thought Maya drowsily. “Lost how?”

  “Maya,” said Cousin Louise. “Maya!”

  Maya gave a guilty start. She was pretty sure that Cousin Louise had been trying to get her attention for some time already.

  “I see you are indifferent to verbs today. But if you would be so kind as to catch the waiter’s eye.”

  Just at that very moment, though, someone gave Maya a friendly tap on the shoulder.

  “Hey there,” said a boy in English, very close to her ear. Maya jumped in her chair and twisted around to see who it could be.

  “I think you’re Maya,” he said. “Excuse me. Aren’t you?”

  He had dark brown hair, almost black, the slightest hint of a curl in it. And eyes that were a surprisingly friendly gray. But why was a random boy calling her by name? In English? In Paris?

  “Whoa, sorry, didn’t mean to startle you,” said the boy, holding out his hand. “I saw you at school this morning. The new girl from the U.S., so I was curious. Maya, they said.”