by Anne Nesbet
“Did you hear all that snuffling?” said Valko. “I have a cold, and I’m quieter than that. I mean, what was that all about?”
“No idea,” said Maya, and then she looked down at the card in her hands. “I’m invited to something. A party. In October. Weird.”
The bell was ringing already, so she stuffed the invitation into her notebook and shrugged. It wasn’t as if her name were actually written on the card; it must have been a whim that had come over them, the Dolphin and Cécile. Those pretty faces, sniffing the air as if it carried some trace of her. She didn’t like that at all. It was beyond weird, when you thought about it. It was out-and-out creepy.
Then a couple of days later Maya put her hand deep into her coat pocket, looking for change, and found the little round container of anbar still hiding there. As soon as she touched it, the memory came flooding back, of the moment when her hand had just shot right out and plucked the case off the young Fourcroy’s table. Now the pretty box of anbar seemed to burn her fingers. She was so surprised to find it in her hand, in fact, that she dropped it right onto the floor and then had to stoop very fast to pick it up before her mother could come back into the hall and start asking questions.
She had never stolen anything before. It didn’t seem like the sort of thing she would do. And yet somehow she had done it! The fragrant little box almost winked at her as she hid it behind the books on her bedroom shelf. What else was she capable of? she wondered.
The Dolphin’s crowd no longer sniffed the air, the next day, when Maya stood in the school yard. Whatever aura she had held for them for those few days seemed to have evaporated into thin air. Odd, though, all the same.
Her mother was fighting off a touch of the flu. That’s what her father said the morning her mother didn’t even get out of bed to see James and Maya off to school. Maya’s fingers itched with worry. She actually had to go back into her bedroom for a moment and run her hands lightly over the little cabinet she was making—the salamander was very good now; she had used some of James’s modeling clay, and the tiny head turned at just the right quizzical angle—before she could face breakfast and school.
“Don’t fret about it,” said her father, though there was a little crease of trouble on his forehead. “I’m taking the day off from the lab. She’ll be drowning in chicken broth and attention.”
Maya could hardly look at him, because otherwise she knew the knot of worry in her might just fly out all over the place, and then what would they do? James had to be gotten cheerfully to school. That’s the way they ran things on days like this, Maya and her father. Still, it was like finding the same old load of bricks on your shoulders again, the weight you thought you had finally shed.
But when she climbed the stairs at the end of the day (a few minutes later than usual, because there were math problems to copy out from Valko’s notebook), Maya caught the scent of something encouraging: the faint aroma of baking. Half a flight later she knew the baking must be happening in her own apartment, because the smell had evolved into something more specific: chocolate chip cookies, and the Davidsons were the only family in the building that ever baked something as American as chocolate chip cookies. More specifically, only Maya’s mother ever baked them. Maya’s feet fairly danced up the last dozen steps to the door. Everything must be all right, if her mother was baking again.
But it was the inexpressive back of Cousin Louise she found bent over a tray of cookies when Maya came sailing through the apartment door. James was standing there, too, a toothpick in one solemn hand.
“We’re seeing if they’re done,” he said to Maya.
“But where’s Mom?”
“Mom got the recipe out, but then she had to go to the hospital,” said James.
“What?” said Maya. “What?”
“Maya, bonjour,” said Cousin Louise, turning to look at Maya with her bland eyes. “You are not to worry, says your father. The hospital is just a precaution. And James wanted very much to continue with the cookies, though I am not really qualified.”
“We’re making cookies for that uncle,” said James. “In the Salamander House.”
“What?” said Maya again. Her school backpack clonked heavily to the floor.
“Because we ate his candy up,” said James. “Remember how we went to see him and ate all his dessert up? I told Mom about that, and she said we should bake him something. And so we were going to do it today, and then she had to go for a checkup.”
“A checkup?” said Maya. The happiness had drained out of her so abruptly that she felt a little dazed.
“At the doctor’s,” said James, and he poked another cookie with his toothpick.
“You don’t have to test cookies like that,” said Maya, distracted. “If they look done, they’re done.”
“Cousin Louise said perhaps we should be extra careful.”
“It’s that I know nothing about cookies,” said Cousin Louise in French. “Now that you are here, Maya, we can go to this other Fourcroy you have found.”
“But what is wrong with Mom?” said Maya.
Cousin Louise and James both turned away from the cookies to look at Maya. Cousin Louise’s expression was unreadable, but James looked startled.
“It’s a checkup, right?” he said. “Like when you get the plastic dinosaur from the treasure chest afterward. Only I don’t think they give dinosaurs to grown-ups.”
“Your father said not to worry,” said Cousin Louise.
Maya had to go out into the hall for a moment to bite back a lot of loud shouting words. Not worry! Maybe that worked on little kids like James. Maybe if you spent your life being almost invisible, like Cousin Louise, you eventually weren’t able to tell the difference anymore between empty words and the truth. When she was finally able to come back in, Cousin Louise and James were already putting the cookies into a tin.
“Time for us to go,” said Cousin Louise. “We have worked it out, James and I. I am not going to do any talking.”
“She’s our nanny,” said James, looking smug. “Our nounou.” A lot of the kids in his class were picked up by nannies at the end of the day.
“What I want is to look, quietly,” said Cousin Louise.
Maya felt tired already. They were really planning to take cookies to the purple-eyed Fourcroy in the Salamander House? All right, then; why not.
James carried the tin of cookies; Maya sagged along behind, worrying about their mother. And Cousin Louise walked in their shadow, and her thoughts, if she had any, were inscrutable.
At the entrance to the Salamander House, however, Maya felt a papery hand tighten itself around her arm.
“Familiar,” said Cousin Louise. She was looking up at the door, the building, the carvings crawling everywhere. “Look at her, for instance!”
It was the young woman whose head looked out over the street from the top of the door. The expression on her stone face was sad and wise, somehow; she hardly seemed to notice the fox draped around her neck.
“It’s a Maya statue,” said James proudly. “See?”
“Strange,” said Cousin Louise in a thoughtful voice. “Et là, the little salamander on the door. I have seen it before, I think.”
Maya opened her mouth to point out that a similar salamander had looked out at them from the frame of the Cabinet of Earths, but the words refused to be spoken out loud. She had to close her mouth with the faintest little pop, like the noise a fish makes when it smacks its lips underwater. So instead she stepped up to the sill and typed in the code for the door: 1901.
“What if he’s not home?” said James. “Will we leave the cookies here anyway, if the uncle-cousin’s not home?”
The door opened with a little click. James slipped under Maya’s arm and into the hallway beyond, but Cousin Louise stayed still for a moment longer, looking up at the building and thinking something over. Her vague, inexpressive eyes seemed almost—but perhaps it was just a trick of the light—clouded with doubt.
“Are you comi
ng in?” said Maya, as politely as she could manage. She could already hear James looking noisily for the right button on the intercom inside. “F!” James was saying. “F! Like Forest!”
“Caution,” said Cousin Louise under her breath. “Caution.”
But she came in all the same.
Chapter 9
Hot Chocolate and Anbar
They tiptoed up the stairs to the fourth floor and right into an argument.
“Be reasonable,” a man was saying to the purple-eyed Fourcroy. “You know she can’t go on without it. She feels like she’s dying, she says. Only the anbar really perks her up anymore. It is the only miracle she has left, now that time looms so very large before her.”
Henri de Fourcroy looked slightly bored. His eyes wandered away from the man at his door and caught sight of James and Maya coming up the stairs, Cousin Louise trudging along behind them.
“Ah, but monsieur!” he said, his beautiful eyes brightening. “As you can see, my guests have arrived! Perhaps another day?”
And then he managed in one flowing gesture to usher James and Maya (and Cousin Louise behind them) into his entrance hall—and leave the complaining man outside on the landing behind the door.
“We brought you cookies,” said James, holding the tin out in front of him. “We baked them ourselves.”
“How kind of you,” said their cousin-uncle. “How unnecessarily thoughtful!”
Maya was feeling rather unsettled, for some reason, and Cousin Louise lowered herself into a chair by the door.
“That’s our babysitter today,” said James, leaning toward the cousin-uncle in a confiding sort of way. “Our mother would have come, but she’s sick.”
The purple-eyed Fourcroy clicked his tongue against his palate in a sympathetic way.
“Come on in, come on in,” he said, and he led them down the hall to the living room.
Cousin Louise just stayed where she was, a human-sized shadow in a chair, but the younger Fourcroy took no notice of her. He was quite engrossed in his conversation with James, and Maya walked down the hall silently behind the two of them, her eyes, for the most part, on the floor. If she looked left, she might see the study again, the one where her hand had snatched the small velvet case and made her a thief. She tried instead not to look in any particular direction at all. And then she heard James say, in his cheerful way—
“Hey, Uncle Fourcroy, what is anbar, anyway?”
“Shall we try these cookies of yours?” asked the cousin-uncle. “Should I pass around little plates? What do you think?”
“You don’t need plates for chocolate chip cookies,” said James. “You just reach in and pick them up, like this.”
The carpet in this room was a deep red, with branches of green snaking through it and butterflies perched on
the fuzzy woven twigs. And here and there in the pattern and branches and leaves, just the slightest hint—glinty silk eyes or flickery tail—of a salamander. Maya worked away at the wings of one of the bright little knotted butterflies with the toe of her shoe. It was a way of not listening too hard to the conversation James and the younger Fourcroy were having, and she became so engrossed in that carpet and those butterflies that she didn’t even notice, for some time, that the conversation in the room had lulled, and Henri de Fourcroy was now looking straight at her.
“Will you also have a cookie, Maya?” asked the cousin-uncle.
She jumped in her chair.
“Yes, yes,” she said. “Thank you.”
“They are truly delicious,” said the elegant young man with warmth. “I seem most fortunate in my choice of cousins.”
“You were going to tell me what anbar is,” said James. Maya hushed him, but it made no difference. Henri de Fourcroy looked at James, and then (a moment later, perhaps?) relaxed into a broad smile.
“Have you heard of ‘ambrosia’?” he said. “The food of the gods. Perhaps like these sweet cookies you have been so kind to bring?”
“Anbar is chocolate chip cookies?” said James.
“Well,” said the purple-eyed Fourcroy. “A metaphysical substance, actually. Strange words, yes? But we use them to say that some things, dear James, cannot be made or explained by science alone. Many very useful and wonderful things! You could fill a whole pharmacy with them. That is, in fact, the chief work of our Society. Quite a noble and interesting work, too, if I do say so myself.”
“You mean it’s a medicine?” said James, sounding very disappointed.
“Much better than medicine,” said the elegant young man. “Ambrosia from a-mbrotos, you know. A food for immortals. That’s Greek, my young cousin. An old, old language. Could you stay a bit longer, so that I could prepare for you a little drink of chocolat chaud? Because that also, to be honest, may be a bit like ambrosia.”
“Cocoa?” said James. “Maya, can we stay for cocoa? I really, really want to.”
“And a little something special, perhaps,” added the purple-eyed Fourcroy, with a smile, “for your sister, who seems like someone who might already appreciate the charms, as it were, of a thing like ambrosia. . . .”
“Let me go ask,” said Maya, standing up right away. How eager she was to get out of this room and away from the discussion of anbar, anbar, anbar! Was that what he was getting at, with those hints and wise smiles? Had he guessed? Did he know? Oh, she hadn’t meant to steal that little case; it had just happened. But here, in this place, she found herself feeling more and more uncomfortable.
The purple-eyed Fourcroy hardly noticed her; he was intent instead (as people usually were) on James, who was really on a roll today, all sweetness and charm. “Never much need to worry about James,” her mother had said with a laugh once, when he had wandered off in the supermarket for a moment, only to reappear in the midst of a small crowd of doting clerks and checkers. “Everyone will always want to see him safely home!”
Oh, but thinking of her mother made Maya’s stomach hurt. Was she all right? Were they back from the hospital, perhaps, by now?
In her worry she didn’t even notice for a second or two that Cousin Louise’s chair in the entry hall was empty. But she would never have just left them there! No, there she was, a shadowy figure signaling to Maya from the shadowy corridor that ran back into the darkness to the left.
Maya went down that other hall to the doorway where Cousin Louise now stood.
“Do you see this?” asked Cousin Louise, in a voice so quiet it was almost drowned out by the ticking of a clock farther down the hall.
Maya looked through the door. It was a room that looked out on the inner courtyard. The walls were green. And in that room was (Maya’s mind faltered for a moment, trying to find a word that described what she was seeing) a chair.
A dentist’s chair. No. A dentist’s chair if that dentist lived in some other, more ancient universe than ours. Everywhere vines and branches of metal twining about. A bright phoenix with amber eyes flying up one of the sides. Were those candlesticks along the top?
And arranged in neat rows on the old-fashioned counter on the left side of the room: tongs and test tubes, spoons and funnels, odd twisting devices she had never even imagined in her strangest nightmares, all embellished and bright, all alive with patterns, all beautiful, all full of loveliness and menace.
“Oh!” said Maya, and the dry weight of Cousin Louise’s hand settled in warning on her arm.
That was not all: from the ceiling hung a long loop of string. And from the loop dangled (like a small, square sheet hung up to dry) a photograph. Not an ordinary photograph, but something all shivering with light and depth. She shook off Cousin Louise’s arm and went forward a couple of steps, just to see (but some part of her seemed already to know what she would find, and that part trembled and shrank back).
A shining, luminous boy. And next to him two shadowy figures, the outline of one of them slightly marred, in the place where that person’s coat pocket must have been, by one pinprick of white light, as though something had pierc
ed the picture at some point and flawed it, when it was being developed.
“Time for us to go,” said Cousin Louise. “Quiet, quiet. Go back to fetch your brother, please, and we will leave.”
James! But that’s who it was, the luminous boy. It was James.
And there was writing along the bottom edge of the photograph, she saw that now: “Charismatograph reading: 326.8X. A record!—and they are Lavirottes.”
And in smaller letters still: “Perfect arrangement. The Cab. needs its new Keeper.”
“Maya,” said Cousin Louise from the doorway. “Touch nothing. We must immediately leave.”
Maya jumped a little in her skin. Then she turned around and walked back to the entry hall, back down the other corridor to the comfortable room where she could hear the clear voice of her brother, laughing.
“There you are! Can we?” he said as soon as he saw her. “Can we stay for cocoa?”
Henri de Fourcroy looked up at Maya, his purple-blue eyes again seeming to take the measure of something in her.
“We have to go now,” said Maya, keeping her voice as steady as possible. She could not quite bring herself to look into those lovely, unsettling eyes, so she directed everything she said to James alone. “Mom might be waiting for us, you know. She might be home already.”
“But I’m glad you liked the cookies!” said James to the purple-eyed Fourcroy as Maya propelled him down the hall toward the door.
“Oh, very much!” said the cousin-uncle, and for a moment he looked as if he were remembering the flavor of something, and wanting more of it. Hungry. That was how he looked.
Cousin Louise stood up from her chair by the front door with all the convincing dullness of someone who had been sitting there for an hour without moving. You would really never guess, to look at her, that she was capable of poking about in an apartment’s dark corners.
“Come, children,” she said, and so they left, James waving good-bye as they started down the stairs.
Until they were back on the street and walking away from the salamander, neither Maya nor Cousin Louise said a word. James chattered on undaunted, and when they came to the next long block, Maya let go of his hand so he could skip ahead. She had been holding on to him too tightly: she had to shake her fingers to loosen them up again. But James bounced in zigzags along the broad sidewalk before them as if he hadn’t noticed a thing.
