The Cabinet of Earths

by Anne Nesbet

  “But the fountain’s still there,” said Maya.

  “Oh, yes.” And Maya’s mother laughed. “The café had moved in by then! They fought tooth and nail to keep the fountain, accurate or not. So there it still is.”

  Look at it this way: If Maya vanished for a day or ten years from her spot at the back of every class at the Collège Paul Sabatier, no one would ever have felt moved to carve a sad cherub bemoaning the loss of her.

  “Meh,” she said to Valko a few days later, when he asked how her French class was going. “The teacher hardly even glances at me. It’s like I’m invisible.”

  She thought of Cousin Louise then for a moment and shuddered.

  “Teachers never notice the ones who don’t cause trouble,” said Valko. “When I was younger, I was noticed all the time, believe me.”

  He laughed a bit, a nice laugh, and Maya felt the specter of her possible Louiseness dissipate just a bit.

  “Still, I’ll never ever fit in,” she said (but already more cheerful about it).

  “Very possible,” said Valko. “Likely, even. But you don’t have to fit in to be okay. Believe me! I am the not-fitting-in world expert. I have not fit in in maybe five different countries so far. I am homelandless. I even make mistakes when I speak Bulgarian. But it’s no big deal, not really. It’s not the end of the world, right? It’s okay.”

  He did look pretty convincingly okay, Maya had to admit, for someone dragged all over the world all his life. Even if he was losing his native Bulgarian. Which was kind of a scary thing, when you thought about it. Let’s say you get dragged off to France, and then your parents for some reason just plain forget to go back home. When do your ordinary English words for things start to disappear? And what does that feel like, when you notice they’re gone?

  “Hey, and how’s your little brother doing?” added Valko. “He never even had any French before, right?”

  “Oh, he’s doing great,” said Maya. “He always does great. The teacher has already sent a note home practically thanking my parents for bringing him to France. He had tons of friends by the third day. That’s just the way he is.”

  And then, to her surprise, she felt almost guilty. She really did love James, of course, with all her heart. After all, from a purely objective point of view, he was probably the most lovable child in the world. Really. But then she opened her mouth to compliment him, and a whine slipped out instead. How pathetic was that?

  “James really wants to climb up the Evil Tower,” she said in a rush. “That’s what he calls it. Mom’s still too tired, so I should probably take him. Maybe Wednesday after school.”

  On Wednesdays the collège got out at noon, and the little kids had no school at all.

  “How about I come along, too?” asked Valko. “I’ve been under the tower about a million times, but I’ve never actually gone up.”

  Maya was still feeling slightly bad about James at the end of the day, so she spent five euros on a windup clown figure with a flashing nose that she had seen him admire in the toy store around the corner. Something about the packaging intrigued her, to tell the truth. One of those rounded plastic containers that resist your scissors to the death. She carved the toy clown out of its plastic casing very carefully and kept the shell.

  And on Wednesday, Valko turned out to have been totally serious about the expedition to the Eiffel Tower.

  “Check out my sturdy tower-climbing shoes!” he said, showing Maya his sneakers. Whether they were any different from the shoes he wore every other day, however, Maya couldn’t have said.

  James was practically floating with happiness and excitement when they picked him up at the apartment after school. Maya couldn’t help but notice the relieved look on her mother’s face, too. Looking forward to some quiet rest time, probably, while her kids were off climbing iron stairs: normal. The way any mother might feel. Right?

  She looked again. It is one of the terrible things you start doing, when you get older and wiser: You can’t help yourself; you look again.

  Her mother was listening very intently to Valko at that moment, her cheek propped up on her thin, delicate hand. She must have just asked him a question, because her eyes had that interested flicker in them, very dark and alive in her too-pale face.

  “So in some ways, I don’t know what I am,” Valko was saying, almost wistfully. “Half this and half that, by now. It’s so bad I only dream in Bulgarian on, you know, odd-numbered days.”

  Then he laughed, and Maya’s mother’s eyes laughed, too, but that wasn’t the terrible part. The terrible part was that even while he was laughing, Valko turned toward Maya, just for a second, and on his face were still etched all those things he hadn’t yet had time enough to squirrel away properly: how surprised he was by what he couldn’t help but have noticed about Maya’s mother, how surprised he was and how sorry. But, Maya, you never told me your mother was sick. That’s what his face said in that very short slice of time.

  When your mother has been ill for a long, long time, your own eyes get used to it, the way callused hands have gotten used to their oars. You keep rowing on and on, and you don’t look back, not too much: just the next patch of water, and the next, and the next. Until, that is, some kindhearted person comes into the room who hasn’t been there all along, the way you have, and they look at her with their terrible uncallused eyes and say—actually, it doesn’t matter what they say. Their eyes make your eyes see it all over again: the odd bruises lingering on the side of her paste-colored face; the still wispy, short hair; the beautiful, fragile, fading skin.

  Maya dug her nails into her palm, to keep herself steady.

  “Listen, now, you’d better get going,” said Maya’s mother, still smiling. “I think James may just pop with impatience if you don’t head out soon.”

  The Davidsons’ apartment was ridiculously close to the Eiffel Tower. You just walked down the rue de Grenelle three blocks, right past the lost children’s melancholy little fountain, and there it was, looming up at the other end of a long green park. “Looming” was a word that turned up from time to time in books Maya had read, but she saw now that nothing on earth—not crises, shortages, dangers, icebergs—could possibly loom as convincingly as the Eiffel Tower, which grew larger and vaster with every step you took in its direction.

  Before they crossed the last strip of road between them and the tower, they all three craned their heads far back and let their eyes climb up the curving lines way into the impossible air. It remade space all around them. Everything flat gained unexpected, astonishing depth. Maya’s stomach began to feel just the slightest bit strange.

  “Wow!” said James. “Wow! Wow! Wow! The Evil Tower! And NOW we get to go up to the very, very top!”

  But the lines for the elevators were incredibly long; the snaking crowds waiting for their turn to buy tickets and zip up to the very, very top covered about a third of that enormous plaza between the tower’s feet.

  “Come on,” said Valko. “Look how short the line for the stairs is. This way! We’ll walk up.”

  “But I like elevators,” said James a little sadly, as he trailed along after Valko. He cheered up once they were actually on the stairs, though. It was like climbing up inside the legs of a great machine. Climbing up and up and up, until beyond the metal lattice the world began to swim.

  Once they had reached the second floor, Maya had to distract James from the sad news that tourists were not allowed to climb the stairs any higher, so she said he could take a couple of coins from her and try looking through one of the telescopes. It took him a long time to determine which telescope was the best one, but finally it was the glimpse of his very own school down below and to the east that decided him.

  “I can see the trees in the courtyard!” he said. “That’s where we play pirates and burglars during recess. . . . Don’t wobble me, Maya! And look! There’s the Salamander House! This is great!”

  Maya looked down, her heart suddenly thudding away as if some secret of hers
had been discovered. There it was, indeed: the Salamander House, right at the end of the short street far below where James’s school was. That much she could see without the help of any telescope. James, his eye glued to the end of the telescope, suddenly began waving his hand in a merry arc.

  “James! What are you doing?” said Maya.

  “He’s there again,” said James. “The man in the window.”

  “Stop that!” said Maya. “Let me look.”

  She was not as gentle as she might have been, but the coins would run out in a minute, and fear was unexpectedly bubbling up in her chest.

  “What man?” Valko asked James.

  “He’s interested in us,” said James. “He has glasses like a spy! He talked to Daddy the first day, and when he saw us, he said we were perfect and charming. I think he’s nice.”

  “Perfect and charming!” said Valko, half-teasing. “Are you sure about that?”

  “That’s exactly what he said, right, Maya? Didn’t he say that, Maya? Maya!”

  But Maya was trying to concentrate.

  She had found the house right away, all its carvings and stone creatures crisply etched into the telescope’s field of vision. Maya even thought she could see the door’s bronze salamander, its head turned wonderingly in her direction. She moved the telescope a half inch higher, and there on his

  little balcony was the same dark-haired young man who had been standing there weeks ago, on that first morning in Paris. Who had come out of that door and walked right to their own apartment building and left a business card behind that said, “HENRI DE FOURCROY, DIRECTOR.” The very same one. He had what looked like binoculars in his hands. Yes, definitely binoculars. He was looking through them toward the entrance of James’s school; then in one fluid motion he turned the binoculars right up toward Maya and James and Valko. He was looking at them. He was totally looking at them.

  She dropped the telescope as if it had stung her.

  “Maya!” said James. “Give it back! It’s my turn!”

  “Not now,” said Maya. “Money ran out. Come away from here.”

  “Was he there?” asked Valko. “Who is he?”

  “Let’s go back down,” said Maya.

  At least inside the ironwork of the tower’s legs they would not be so visible, so terribly visible.

  “Okay, okay,” said Maya to Valko as they descended from step to step to step (and her words came out in a jumbled, jouncing rush). “I forgot to tell you about this part. He’s the head of that Society thing, the one on the avenue Rapp. But his name is Fourcroy. Like the old guy with the sets: Remember I told you about him? So maybe this guy’s even a relative or something, since the old one is. But the weird thing is, he paid for us to come to France. I mean, the Society did. They gave my dad money—a fellowship. And the apartment, too.”

  She had to pause for a moment to catch her breath; that’s how fast they were going down those stairs.

  “Hunh,” said Valko, shaking his head. “Are you saying the guy in charge of all the Beautiful People is maybe your relative? And he invited you to Paris?”

  “He didn’t say he was a relative,” said Maya. “If he even is.”

  They were finally back out in the September sun, no longer filtered through wire safety fences and woven iron.

  “That was six hundred steps!” said James. “I was counting almost all of the way. That was maybe more than six hundred steps!”

  Maya heaved a sigh of relief, glad to be back on the ground—and less visible. But before she knew it, Valko and James had led her right back down the street past James’s school, past the old lady always plonked on the bench at the corner, past the spindly tree where the crosswalk ended, and there, right in front of her now, was the salamander on the door again, turning his head right around as if he had a message for her. Something to say.

  “Maya?” said Valko. “Are you all right?”

  “It shouldn’t be moving like that,” said Maya in some distress. “Should it?”

  “Maya?”

  “The salamander!” she said. “You really don’t see it?”

  “It’s metal,” said Valko, in his sensible way. “I think you’d need a blowtorch to budge it.”

  “Oh, come on,” said Maya, grabbing James’s hand to pull them all farther down the street to the right, away from the door and the salamander and that building with all its flowing waves of stone.

  But at that very second (Maya and Valko flattened themselves as inconspicuously as possible against the wall), the door of the Salamander House flew open, and a woman stepped through it. She was very beautiful and very young, and her clothes were far too fancy for three o’clock on a Wednesday afternoon. Really, she looked like someone who belonged in a magazine, not on an actual sidewalk. (Even a sidewalk in Paris.) But what was most striking about her was that she was happy, happy, happy, quite glowing with happiness and relief.

  “Oh, he has saved my life,” she was saying to the man coming through the door behind her. “Can’t you feel it? He and the anbar. . . .”

  “Come, chérie,” said the man. “It is a feast to look on you.”

  And it really was. You wanted to stare and stare. Or maybe even go up to her and say just anything, in the odd chance she would turn her radiant eyes right on you. And the man was glowing, too. Maya had never seen anything quite like it. But Valko poked her sharply in the arm, and she pulled her eyes away from them, so as not to be caught staring.

  The couple turned the other way, heading up the street past the old lady on her bench, and Maya had just given James’s hand a brisk tug, as a way of reminding him they were actually on their way home, when a low whistle made her look back toward the door of the Salamander House, where Valko was standing, quite casual-like, his left leg angled in a slightly awkward way.

  He had caught the outer door with his foot before it could close.

  “Well, hey,” he said, his voice almost a shadow of itself. “Look at this.”

  And he slipped right in through the salamander door—and held it open after him.

  Chapter 7

  The Purple-Eyed Fourcroy

  Maya had an impression of elaborately carved walls and stairs twining away from the hall and light spilling in from the courtyard ahead, but those first few seconds she was whispering so fiercely at Valko that nothing else was quite in focus.

  “What are you doing!” she was saying. “We can’t just wander in like this!”

  But of course by then she already had, and, what’s more, had brought James right in through the door with her. He was straining now to reach the wildly complicated metal railings that slithered up around pairs of marble pillars on either side of the entryway.

  “Look! It’s squids!” said James.

  Well, true, there might be something aquatic going on in those patterns of coiled iron, but Maya had other things on her mind at the moment.

  “Shh,” she said, and tightened her grip on his hand another notch or two. “Come on, Valko, let’s go.”

  “You know who those people outside were?” said Valko, scanning the walls and doorways with his bright gray eyes. “The Dolphin’s parents.”

  “You’re kidding,” said Maya. They hadn’t looked very much like parents to her, so young and so radiant. It twisted something sharp in her, thinking how old and tired her mother would look placed next to that beautiful woman stepping across the threshold with such confidence and grace. “They can’t be old enough to have a kid our age. Can they?”

  “They’re rich,” said Valko, as if that explained it all. “Hey, and look at this: There he is, your possible Uncle Fourcroy.”

  By the inner door there was a panel with names and buzzers.

  She pulled James up the two marble steps to the door to see for herself. And there it was: Henri de Fourcroy. In tiny handwriting that looked about a million years old. He hadn’t been in the phone book, but here he was all the same.

  “Can I push the button?” asked James.

 
“No!” said Maya.

  “Not even if he’s really truly our uncle?” said James.

  And at that moment a voice on the intercom cleared its throat. It sounded almost amused.

  “Dear children,” it said, in a very French sort of English. “If you have come here for visiting me, then you should certainly continue up the stairs on the right, should you not? Fourth floor.”

  “You pressed that button! said Maya under her breath to James. His eyes were wide. He gave his head a shake, staring all the time at the panel on the wall that had so unexpectedly begun to speak.

  “I did not!” he said, using his ordinary voice, the voice that carried so well on playgrounds, in classrooms, and on public buses.

  “Excuse us,” said Valko into the intercom in his best French, which was still significantly better than Maya’s best French. “Excuse us for disturbing you, monsieur.”

  “But you aren’t disturbing me at all!” said the voice. “And if I am your uncle, then we should definitely converse, is that not so? I am unlatching the door now: here.”

  And there was a click from the double glass doors ahead of them as the latch was released. Valko caught the door with his hand and then looked back at Maya with a questioning shrug. And she—

  What could she say in her defense? The voice speaking to them over the intercom, like the elegant young man she knew it belonged to, had a certain magnetic allure. Indeed, it was one of the pleasantest, most appealing voices Maya had ever heard: at once friendly and welcoming and warm. It was a voice that inspired confidence, even trust. And there had been a salamander on the Cabinet of Earths: Yes, she was curious about all the salamanders. That was probably part of it, too.

  “Be good children,” said the voice as an afterthought, “and bring up my mail, if you would. On the table in the vestibule. Merci bien!”

  The stairwell was beautiful, too; more loops and tendrils in the stained-glass windows bringing light into the stairway from the courtyard in back.

  Maya clutched Monsieur de Fourcroy’s packet of letters in one hand and James’s warm palm in the other. She was surprising herself, by walking so bravely up these stairs, and she wasn’t sure yet whether she liked that feeling.