by Anne Nesbet
“Your Uncle Fourcroy!” said Valko, more than once, as they climbed the stairs. And he shook his head in disbelief.
Maya tried to shut him up with a glare, but the stairs were a bit too shadowy for glares.
“Remember to be very polite,” she said to James. “He’s not really our uncle. Some kind of very, very distant cousin, maybe. So just be polite.”
But when they got to the landing of the fourth floor and the dark wooden door swung open before them, James stuck out his free hand as if there were no doubt about any of it at all.
“Bonjour, Uncle-Cousin!”
And the brown-haired man who had opened the door laughed aloud and shook James’s hand with mock seriousness.
“But I haven’t met you all,” he said. “Not all of you, I don’t believe.”
“I’m James Davidson,” said James. “You sort of met me and Maya the first day we were in Paris. Right? Remember that?”
“And I’m Valko,” said Valko.
Maya was having a difficult time speaking just then, because in the light that spilled onto the landing, she had just caught a glimpse of Henri de Fourcroy’s incredible eyes, which were not just blue, but purple, the purple
of the tall irises that sprang up every spring under the liquidambar trees back home in California, the purple
of grape juice, of felt pens, of make-believe jewels.
Once when her mother had taken her for a haircut, Maya had been paging through the glossy magazines in the waiting room and had come across a page filled with pictures of extraordinary eyes: blue-green, green-blue, violet, orange—incredible things! It turned out that if you wore contact lenses, you could have eyes any color you wanted, almost. Even pink or gold! Polka dots! And for one heady moment, Maya had dreamed of arriving at school with brilliant turquoise eyes, of being a different sort of Maya entirely, dazzling and mysterious. And then she had put that magazine down and forgotten all about it until now.
The eyes of the elegant young man at the door were exactly the sort of astonishing purple-violet-blue that people might pay money to wear, but Maya was absolutely sure they were real.
So that’s why he had to wear those glasses, she thought. Because passersby might stop and stare.
“The scientist’s children!” said the man, and he stood back to let them through. “Of course! And now you say we are cousins? Well, what a surprise! How lovely to see you again! Come in!”
“Actually, I’m just a friend,” said Valko as he stepped over the threshold.
“Come in anyway,” said the man, and then he turned his purple eyes right on Maya and smiled slightly.
“How kind of you to come,” he said.
Maya handed him his letters without saying a word, and his eyes rested on her thoughtfully for a moment, almost as if he were seeing something in her she knew nothing about. And then he was focused again on James, who was, as usual, being delightful.
“Come sit down and explain yourselves,” said the purple-eyed man. Off the end of the long hall was a living room, with comfortable chairs and a fireplace. “There are little candies somewhere here. Ah, there they are. They have caramel in them, do you mind?”
James did not mind at all!
“Ask your sister to tell me why you count as cousins,” said the man to James in a playful sort of way, after everyone except Maya had eaten a couple of caramels.
“Tell him, Maya,” said James, turning for a moment to smile at her while his hand darted out for another sweet. “He’s our uncle, right?”
“I’m sorry,” said Maya, her voice sounding to her as if it had stayed at the other end of the long hall. “We shouldn’t be bothering you this way. I mean, we’re probably not related at all. It was just the family tree—those Fourcroys.”
“A family tree with Fourcroys in it!” exclaimed the elegant young man with a smile. “But, you know, Fourcroys are very rare! I am practically the only one left, I do believe.”
“Except for the old man,” said James, confidingly. “Right?”
The purple eyes became very quick and sharp, for all that the face they were in held on to its warm and welcoming smile.
“What old man do you mean, Cousin?” said the elegant young man, and he flicked his eyes from James to Maya and back to James.
The one who takes no more deliveries from you!
But of course she couldn’t say that. Indeed, she couldn’t say much, not out loud. Her mouth wouldn’t quite open, or it would open and the sound wouldn’t come. She had wanted to ask all sorts of questions, about the Society he supposedly ran, about the bronze salamander downstairs that kept forgetting it should not be alive, about the old man with his opera sets and his Cabinet of Earths, but the words would not form themselves. Something wouldn’t let her speak, not about any of that, not in this place.
It was a strange feeling, and she didn’t like it very much. Especially with everybody turning to look at her, and her mouth opening and closing like a flustered fish.
“Maya, are you all right?” said Valko.
“A little dizzy, maybe,” said Maya. And alarmed. But she didn’t want to admit to that for some reason, not here.
“There’s a washroom near the door you came in by,” said the man kindly. “Why don’t you go and splash your face?”
So that’s what she did. It was all right to leave James for a moment, because Valko was right there. James would chatter, but Valko would watch out for him. And she did feel strange.
Maya walked back down the hall to the bathroom and splashed her face with cool water. It brought her back to herself, more or less. She found she was curious again. The layout of the apartment, for instance: That was strange. It seemed to stretch around the courtyard like an angular doughnut, because here was a hall heading away from the street, and she was sure there had been yet another hall peeking out from the door at the back of the living room. Through the doorways on the left came light from the street windows. She glanced into a couple of those rooms on her way back. Studies of some kind. A sweet smell. The second study had a great, old desk in the center of it, and on that desk there stood the strangest apparatus. She slipped through the door for a moment to take a closer look. The sweetness was stronger in here, not just sweet, but musky-sweet. A lovely smell.
There was a dark little bowl on the desk, with a candle burning in it. And suspended over the candle fire was another, smaller bowl, and in it, melting, was something translucent and gold, like honey, but harder than honey. And fragrant! From that slowly melting cake of gold, not two inches in diameter, came the heady, wonderful sweetness that filled the air of this room and had called her in. She was so lost in that perfume that when a bell suddenly rang—the door! it must be the front door!—she jumped and looked around herself in panic. She hadn’t meant to sneak about like this, poking and prying. And now he would catch her at it! How awful.
Her uncle-cousin’s footsteps went striding down the hall past the room where Maya found herself hiding.
A woman’s voice at the door, a pleading voice. Maya couldn’t make out all the words. Just anbar. That strange word again. Anbar, and something else that Maya couldn’t hear. That she was sick—was that it? And her uncle-cousin was replying in his patient, pleasant way, perhaps saying that he was busy, perhaps telling her to come back some other time.
She considered hiding under the desk. No, that was ridiculous. And then she looked around the room again and noticed—the complexity of the wood paneling had tricked her eyes at first—that the room had another door, after all. Past the desk with its purring candle and the mysterious cake melting into some kind of slow honey was a door with a handle. Beside it, a little table with what must be two more of those cakes, only these were in tidy little red velvet cases. Looking like something familiar, like—but the noun slipped away when she groped for it.
She put her left hand on the doorknob. And as the door began to open, her right hand, without any warning at all, reached over to the little red cases of incense,
or whatever it was, and whisked one deep into the pocket of her coat. She was through the door by the time her mind caught up with her hand, and then she had only time enough to catch her breath in surprise and close the door quietly behind her, because she was back in the living room at the end of the hall, and Valko and James had turned in their chairs to look over at her, and the footsteps of her uncle-cousin were already coming back in this direction down the hall.
“Oh, good, you’re back!” said James when he saw her. “What took you so long? We’re going to get our pictures taken!”
Indeed, the purple-eyed Fourcroy was now coming back through the door with the strangest old camera in his hands, like nothing Maya had ever seen, all bulbous with attachments and lenses and impossibly complicated meters.
“Are you recovered, little cousin-or-niece?” he asked Maya with great courtesy.
“Yes, yes,” said Maya. “I’m fine.”
But in fact she was restless. Itching to leave. The purple-eyed Fourcroy took no notice.
“We’ve agreed, James and I, that such a reunion of cousins, since it seems we may be cousins, should be documented. Do you mind? Hold steady, now.”
And he took a photograph right then and there, with Maya still half turned toward James’s chair and Valko looking over in her direction as if he had something in particular to say. Some hidden machinery in the camera popped and whirred. The elegant young man set it down very carefully on the table and smiled.
“So!” he said.
“I’ve never seen a camera like that,” said James. “Wow!”
“Very old,” said the elegant young man. “An absolute antique. Have another caramel, won’t you?”
Valko was craning his neck to get a better look at the camera, too, but the purple-eyed Fourcroy kept getting in his way with that dish of candies.
“We have to go home now,” said Maya. “James! Let’s go.”
“Thank you for coming to see your old cousin Four-croy,” said the man, in his friendly way, and he smiled as he said it, since he was so very much the opposite
of old.
“Thank you for the candy,” said James, and Maya and Valko echoed something similar.
“I didn’t quite finish all of mine,” added James.
“Well, then, you’ll have to come back,” said the cousin-uncle. “And have more sweets another day. If I give you the entrance code, it will be easier for you to come visit, won’t it? 1901.”
“Come on, James,” said Maya. “You can’t take more candy now!”
“It’s quite an easy code to remember,” continued the cousin-uncle. “It’s the year the house was built, you see.”
“That’s very long ago,” said James.
Their cousin-uncle looked at James, and for a moment there was a flicker of feeling in his extraordinary eyes that Maya could not make sense of—amusement or pain or some odd mixture of the two.
“Perhaps it is,” he said. “What long lives they have, buildings!”
As they spiraled back down the stairs to the ground, Maya remembered what it was the little honey cakes reminded her of: rosin. That’s what violinists put on their bows to get more sound out of their strings—was it made out of tree sap? Something like that.
Maya’s mother used to play the violin, back before she got so sick. Then one day, she said the violin was too heavy, and her arm was too puffy, and her fingers too stiff, and she had closed up the rosin in its little satin bag and put the bow away and shut the violin case to wait until she was “really healthy again.”
And when was that going to be? Not just not sick, but her own wonderful self again, through and through. That was what Maya most urgently wanted to know. She emerged into the sunlight of the avenue Rapp, with James and Valko chattering at her about uncles, candies, and doors—and her heart caught her completely by surprise by being all tangled up in that other, deepest question:
When, oh when, cried her heart, was her mother finally going to be well?
Chapter 8
Worrying
Every single person on the planet probably has some bad habit they’d rather the rest of us didn’t know about. People leave their underwear on the floor or wash their hands too much or write love letters to television stars or always put off doing their math until the last minute. Maya, for instance, was a worrier. She knew she was, but it was still aggravating when her mother pointed it out (“You worry too much, honey-bun! It’ll all be okay, really it will”—though the universe didn’t have a very good track record on these things, as far as Maya could tell). As long as she could remember, Maya had always worried with her hands as well as her mind: She would pick at loose threads on her clothes until the edges unraveled, trouble her fingernails down to the quick, roll the wax that slipped down the candlesticks into smooth and milky pills. And scabs! They didn’t stand a chance.
“You have very busy fingers,” her mother had said one day, half-alarmed and half-amused. What had Maya been worrying away at then? It was long ago. Maybe the hair of one of her dolls. But what Maya most remembered about that moment was the odd feeling of pride that had rippled through her. Busy fingers—and they were all hers, to put to work on whatever she wanted. They just needed something to do.
When she got a bit older, she had found that the right sort of project (if it was fussy enough and complicated) could satisfy her hands almost as much as picking and pulling and worrying at things. So that very evening, after James had finished chattering about towers and uncles and gone yawning to bed, Maya got out some scissors and glue, little screwdrivers and thread, whatever she could find, and let her busy fingers make what it was they were moved to make, just to keep them out of trouble, while her mind worked away at its own rough places.
(Why was her mother still so tired?) Rummaging through the big supply closet in the study, she found some tiny plastic bottle tops that could serve as glasses.
(Her father saw it, too; that look on his face at breakfast!) And glue that when shaped into sticky little white peas could be dipped in cardamom or cinnamon and made into blobs of miniature sand.
(If her mother was sick again, would they tell her?) Rectangles of plastic became the shelves; she built the cabinet’s frame from tiny dowels, glue, and clay.
(They would try to hide it from her, probably, as long as they could.) It was the oddly familiar curve of that plastic casing that had done it, the shell from which she had extracted James’s silly windup clown. That had probably given her the idea.
(She would watch them like a hawk; she would not let them fool her into thinking all was fine.) More glue to fit the shelves with their rows of tiny glasses into the frame with its rounded front. And then there was just the question of the salamander.
“Maya, hon?” Her mother stuck her head around the door. “Are you really still up? You’ll be misery itself tomorrow, if you don’t get some sleep. What’s that you’re working on?”
But Maya had already swept the little cabinet behind her and under the bed. It was a private thing. Nobody should see it. It needed her. It was hers to protect, hers to keep safe.
And she absolutely could not talk about it. Not at all. When Maya and Valko talked about Cousin Louise, or the various Fourcroys, Maya would get stuck, sometimes, if the topic got too close to the Cabinet, which was too private for words. Sometimes she would open her mouth and then find there was nothing she was able to say. Her jaw would just stick for a bit, while her brain tried to find a way around the topic. It was a little unsettling, to tell the truth. It was odd. But then, odd things seemed to be going on all around her these days.
A day after their unexpected visit to the Salamander House, for instance, Valko and Maya were chatting in the courtyard at school, and the Dolphin and his elegant gang were hanging out, looking lovely and bored, by the classroom steps. Pretty much like every other morning recess. And then the wind changed. (Literally: Maya had to brush the hair back out of her eyes.) And for some reason, when the breeze got as far as the Dolphin
’s crowd, a few of them turned their heads and looked over at Maya and Valko, almost as if they thought the wind had been conjured up by someone on purpose. This was strange, because never yet in the first month of classes had the Dolphin or any of his well-dressed friends ever so much as glanced in Maya’s direction. And now they were looking her way with what might even be actual interest. In fact, a couple of them almost seemed to be sniffing the air as if they had just caught the scent of something they rather liked.
Maya and Valko looked at each other, and Valko, who had some nimble muscles in his face, raised a questioning eyebrow.
“Okay, that’s weird,” he said to Maya. “Did one of us just make a really loud noise or something?”
“One of them’s coming over,” said Maya. “Oh boy, the Dolphin himself. And what’s her name, that really blond girl.”
“Cécile,” said Valko. “Wonder what they want.”
Well, they didn’t want Valko, apparently. The Dolphin and Cécile sailed up to the two of them but did not so much as glance in Valko’s direction. The Dolphin just passed a lazy hand over the top of his burnished hair and gave Maya an assessing sort of smile, the slightest bit vague around the edges.
“You’re the new girl, I think,” he said. And then he sniffed the air again. “From the United States.”
“Hello,” said Maya.
“How do you like Paris?” said Cécile, coming up behind him.
“It’s beautiful,” said Maya, a bit distracted by the sarcastic waves she could feel flowing in her direction from Valko.
The Dolphin and Cécile stood there for a moment, looking at her, and then Cécile pulled out a printed card from her bag and handed it over in one smooth, graceful motion, almost as if her hands had nothing to do with the rest of her, and then the two of them drifted back
to the rest of their people.
Maya gave herself a little shake, like a rabbit once the fox has faded back into the woods.
