by Anne Nesbet
“I was in that chair,” said Cousin Louise out of the blue. “I remember that now. I was a tiny child in that chair. Only that. And his eyes.”
“Not his eyes,” said Maya. “He’s too young.”
“No, I am sure he is the one,” said Cousin Louise in her flat voice. “Oh, what an unlucky family we are! He took me in. He’s the one, without a doubt.”
That couldn’t be, of course. The purple-eyed Fourcroy was much younger than Cousin Louise, for one thing. But it seemed useless to point that out. Cousin Louise marched along the sidewalk, and Maya walked beside her, not daring to interrupt.
“And then I was different,” said Cousin Louise. “After that, I was changed. It was him, I am completely certain. Ah, here we are.”
James still had enough energy to run up the stairs, but nobody came striding to the apartment door when he rang and rang the bell. Maya, fifteen steps behind him, listened with every fiber of her being for her mother’s footsteps, and heard nothing. No one was home, after all. The apartment seemed very dark and cold and strange, even after Cousin Louise had made her methodical way from room to room, turning on lights and taking eggs out of the refrigerator for an omelette.
They were eating that omelette (and listening to James talk about his plans for some game he was going to play with the other boys during tomorrow’s morning recess), when there was finally the sound of a key in the door. Maya bolted into the hall: Her father was there, alone, pulling his jacket off, looking tired. She had gotten to him so quickly that she had caught a glimpse of his face before he had had time to put the proper parental expression on it (calm, comforting, confident). She had seen the familiar wear and worry there, the shadows under his cheekbones, before he brushed those shadows away and turned to greet her and James with a hug and a smile.
“She’ll be fine,” he said. “They’re just keeping her over-night for observation.”
“Observation?” said Maya.
“Oh, you know, running a few tests.”
Tests. Maya was still digesting that word when Cousin Louise came rustling up behind them, reaching for her coat.
“And so I depart,” she said. “Sylvie will be home tomorrow, I hope?”
Maya’s father nodded. He was never quite comfortable around Cousin Louise. He became stiff, somehow, and he was not usually a stiff person.
But as Cousin Louise slipped out through the door, she put one cool hand on Maya’s cheek and said, “Be careful, Maya. Be prudente.”
Once Cousin Louise had gone, it turned out their father was too distracted to ask them anything about their afternoon. He just listened to James ramble on about the chocolate chip cookies and let the rest of it drop, to Maya’s relief. They were all tired.
Before going to sleep that night, however, she brought out the envelope of old photographs again, all those shining children smiling up at her from under their long-ago caps and berets. They were special, she could see that. Special, like James was special. The camera had figured that out somehow; it had known enough to make Maya a dull shadow, too. But what they meant, those pictures, what they were for, exactly—that she couldn’t understand.
(The Cab. needs its new Keeper. That’s what the terrible photograph had said.)
Her fingers ran over the numbers on the back of the photographs, and the worry grew in her until she had to put the pictures away and instead bring out the little cabinet from its hiding spot. Just seeing it again made a difference, and then the simple work of touching up the miniature cabinet’s salamander and phoenix with the bronze paint she had found in a shop around the corner settled her down and dulled the edges of her troubles: the shimmering photographs, the hospital room too far away where her mother was sleeping. The little cabinet glittered in the light of her bedroom lamp; it alone, of everything and everybody in Maya’s world (with the usual exception of James), seemed content with the way things were going in the universe at the moment.
She put it on her table to let the paint dry, and even with her lamp turned off, the small cabinet continued to catch the tiny scraps of light that filtered in from the street and glimmered quietly to itself—almost like the echo of words in a language a person might understand, if only she had been raised in a world of glass and earth.
Maya fell asleep listening to the cabinet and dreamed what must be its dreams (things melting, things crumbling, things being made and remade)—and then woke up in the middle of the night, her eyes seeing nothing but darkness, her breath catching in her throat, all of her consumed by an idea the dreams themselves seemed to have given her: She must save her mother!
How do I do that? she asked herself. The thought had come to her so suddenly, ripping her right out of sleep, that she was somehow certain she could save her mother, if only she knew what she must do. The room was very dark and quiet at that hour; even the baby cabinet was slumbering away on its table, and a thin breath of sweetness came drifting her way from her books.
She sat up in her bed. That was it, of course: the anbar. How could she have not seen it? The anbar that brought people back to life—wasn’t that what that desperate man had said? And the happy, beautiful woman they had met at the door of the Salamander House that first day, she had said something similar, hadn’t she? Life! That was what her mother needed, most of all. Some of that radiance they all had, the beautiful people of the Salamander House. The brightness in their radiant eyes.
She was already at the bookshelf by now, digging the warm little case of anbar out from behind the line of books. Oh, it smelled lovely. There were flowers that bloomed only at night, weren’t there? It had been calling to her, and she had taken so long to hear it. The round satin box nestled into her hand like something alive. She tiptoed into the kitchen with it and started going through the cupboards, looking for something that would tell her how this thing should be done. And then she found it: a small container of organic honey her mother had bought to put into her tea. Honey! That was perfect. Her father never sweetened anything he drank. And James did not even like honey. Perfect.
She took off the tops of the two containers very carefully and studied their contents. The dusky sweet smell of the anbar was now everywhere in the kitchen. The honey glistened peacefully in its jar. It was as if she knew now exactly what to do: The spoon sang out from the drawer, the hot water tap called to her from the sink. The heated spoon sank right into the golden anbar, and brought up what struck her as exactly the right amount (though of course there was no way of knowing), and then the anbar vanished into the honey as she stirred with the still-warm spoon.
After the lid went back onto the honey jar, she had another thought. She took a sticker from her school binder and wrote “ONLY FOR TEA!” on it with black ink, and stuck that on the honey jar. Just in case. And the honey went back into the cupboard, and the anbar went back onto its bookshelf, and Maya went back to bed, and her dreams the rest of the night were ordinary ones and slipped away from her as soon as her alarm rang in the morning.
Chapter 10
Shimmer
Old photographs?” said Valko, taking a slow sip of his soda. He sounded, it had to be admitted, skeptical, and his eyes were still slightly sleepy, as an aftereffect of all those hours just spent in school.
The sun had come out again that afternoon during Histoire/Géographie, so Maya and Valko were huddled in their jackets around a table at the café. Pretending it wasn’t actually October. Pretending also, at least in Maya’s case, that if your mother is home from the hospital, that means life is pretty much back to normal. Even if “normal” means anbar on your shelves and a stack of bizarre snapshots you found hidden in the walls.
“Look at them, though,” said Maya, and she poured the photos out of their old envelope onto the table. “They’re strange, see?”
Even in the light of day, the long-ago children shimmered and glowed, the flat squares of those photos unsettled by some kind of illusion of depth, of color, of life.
“Oh!” said Valko, awake again. He
picked up the nearest photograph and tipped it back and forth to watch the play of the light. “What are they? They almost look like holograms.”
“You think that’s what they are?” said Maya.
But Valko was already shaking his head.
“No,” said Valko. “They couldn’t be. They don’t look quite right for that. Plus, I think you need lasers to make holograms. I saw this exhibit once—all right, never mind!”
Maya had actually managed to knock a spoon off the table in her impatience. The worry in her was getting harder and harder to bundle up and suppress.
“I just need to know what they mean!” she said. “You know why? Because remember that photo that Fourcroy guy took of us, when we were there with James? Remember that? Well, it looks just like these.”
“No way,” said Valko. He was really paying attention now.
“It’s hanging up in his weird laboratory room. You and me and James. But James is the shiny one. He’s shinier even than any of these. A really big number written on the bottom: 300-something. And something else about his being a Lavirotte. So here’s the weird thing—”
“Numbers like these?” said Valko. He had found the writing on the back of the photos. “‘174 X’? I mean, what’s that, a kind of measurement?”
“It’s got to be,” said Maya. “The higher the number, the more the kid shimmers. See? Look at Adèle. 216. She’s very shiny. But listen—”
“It’s that camera!” said Valko. “I knew that camera was weird somehow. I was trying to see the brand name, and he kept getting in the way—”
“Valko, listen! He knew we’re Lavirottes. How’d he know that? He was making a big show of being surprised we were relatives, and then all the talk was about him being a Fourcroy. So how’d he know—”
“Maybe the other guy told him. The old one. Hey, Maya, what’s this date here?”
“But I don’t think they get along at all. I don’t think he’d tell him anything. I think this Fourcroy guy knew all along we were related—”
“1957? Could it be 1957?”
Maya looked.
“Could be. But you’re not listening.”
“Adèle, 1957,” said Valko, and gave Maya a meaningful look, as if she were supposed to get something from that. And then she followed the slow swoop of his eyes over to the Fountain of Lost Children, and she did get it.
“Amandine, 1954; Laurent, 1955; Adèle, 1957,” she said, reading from that banner the cherubs had been holding now for more than fifty years. “You think this is that Adèle? Why? And I told you what my mom found out—they weren’t really lost, those children. They went missing just for an afternoon, or whatever. They were just slow in the head. Or moved away.”
“Don’t know about that,” said Valko as he bent back over those most peculiar photographs. “I mean, kids still go missing around here. That’s what I’ve heard. They just don’t get fountains anymore, right?”
Soon he had gone through the whole little stack of pictures, looking at the backs. Maya knew what he was looking for, and what he wasn’t going to find: other names. Amandines or Laurents, for instance. He shrugged and let it go.
“So why are you worried about a photograph?” said Valko in his most reasonable voice. “Even a shiny one.”
“Because I think he thinks James is special,” said Maya. “He wants him for something.”
And got stuck.
Because what she could not say (she could not even move her lips to form the words) was he wants James to be the new Cabinet-Keeper.
What she also could not say, almost not even to herself, was this: And that’s not fair. She, Maya, was the one who knew how beautiful the Cabinet was. She was the one who would care enough to keep it safe.
“It all goes back to that Society of theirs, I guess,” said Valko, filling in the silence where Maya had gotten stuck. “Philosophical chemistry and shininess. And fancy cameras.”
He smiled at the photographs in a thoughtful way, his hands still tipping them back and forth: You couldn’t help it, really. The light was so strange, the way it played in those faces. It made Maya feel sad and tingly, both at once.
“Don’t you think—” she said, and got stuck again. “Couldn’t it be—I mean, it looks to me like it, really it does—some type of magic?”
Valko looked at her. His eyes were such a comfortable shade of gray; you could almost see the thoughts in them, busily working themselves into actual words.
“They’re kind of wonderful, right?” he said cautiously. “They’re beautiful, these pictures. Is that what you mean?”
Maya shook her head. It seemed so stupid, when you said it out loud. She could feel her face beginning to flush, and she hated that feeling.
“It’s just—all these strange things here. It wasn’t like this in California. The salamander on that door. I swear it moves when it sees me. And our Cousin Louise—she’s not just boring or whatever, she’s actually really hard to see. And these pictures. They shimmer. It’s not normal. It’s not. It really has to be magic. I know I sound like an idiot.”
And she felt like worse than an idiot. She felt like someone who had just torn off her nice mask and shown the whole world what an ugly, stupid dolt she really was. She stared down at the table in dull despair, her plain old doltish hand spread out flat and cold against the enamel.
“Hey,” said Valko.
And his own warm hand settled right on hers for a moment, solid and consoling. Like there wasn’t all that much to feel so doltish about, not really. Then the hand was gone again, but he was still smiling.
“You’re not an idiot,” he said. “You’re just saying there are things here that you don’t understand. That’s all that magic means, right? Something real that nobody’s figured out how to explain yet. There are nice scientific explanations somewhere, though. For everything.”
“Even salamanders that turn their heads?”
“Well, only you saw that,” said Valko. “So that one’s pretty easy. Ninety percent of what we see is just our brain filling in the gaps. Really.”
“Okay, then,” said Maya. She was already feeling a hundred times better. She had taken a crazy plunge, and was still alive. That made up for a lot. “How about Cousin Louise? You met her.”
“Hmm,” said Valko. “Yeah. But I’m not sure I really remember much about your Cousin Louise. Sorry.”
“That’s what I mean,” said Maya. “She’s invisible. She’s forgettable. She’s hard to see.”
“Doesn’t sound like magic to me,” said Valko, laughing. “Sounds like the opposite of magic. Too bad it’s not catching—we could have her sneeze all over the dreadful Dolphin and his crowd.”
Then he added in a different sort of voice—
“When is it, anyway, that big party of theirs?”
“What party?”
“The fancy-schmancy one. The Dolphin’s thing.”
“Oh, well, I don’t know,” said Maya. “I’m not going.”
“Hm,” said Valko. “Maybe you should, though. It’s a way in, isn’t it?”
“A way in?”
“I don’t know. Maybe you could kind of sound out the Dolphin’s gang while you were there. About that weird Society they hover around. About what their parents are all up to. We’d like to know, wouldn’t we? You still have the invitation somewhere?”
It was still in her bag, in fact. They examined it together in the late-afternoon sun.
“Looks to me like you can bring a guest,” said Valko. “You could bring me, for instance.”
It was strange: She had taken that big plunge, yes, but half of her mind was still stuck, was thinking about the words written at the bottom of that glowing photograph of James, about the Cabinet of Earths, needing its new Keeper—and about the little cabinet she had made. How perfect it was. How well it had come out. All the tiny shelves were filled now with their miniature bottles of earths and sands. She had been thinking recently how nice it would be to hold the little cabinet up t
o the big one, to see how similar the two were. She could think that, but she couldn’t say that aloud, not even to Valko. There was a lock on that part of her mind, and the lock itself was as hard to focus on as Cousin Louise. It should frighten me more, being locked up this way, thought Maya. But that was part of being locked up, of being stuck: She couldn’t even look at the thing close enough to be frightened properly.
The other half of her mind was thinking: the Dolphin’s party! No way! All those beautiful girls in their fancy dresses! She could just imagine their eyes narrowing as they looked down at Maya’s sensible dark shoes, the ones her mother insisted were so good for ankles and insteps. It made Maya shudder, thinking of that.
“It might be sort of fun,” said Valko. He smiled at her from under his slightly jagged fringe of dark hair. “You know? Apart from the research opportunities.”
In the end she surprised herself: She said okay. Though she pointed out what it said on the invitation, about the strictly black-and-white attire; 8 p.m.; Palace of the Invalides.
Valko nodded. Valko agreed. And then he grinned and snapped his fingers.
“Charismatograph! he said.
What he meant by that, Maya had no idea.
“That was what it was called,” said Valko, pleased as punch to have found the word hiding in him somewhere. “That brand of camera he used. Not that I know what that means.”
Maya’s parents, unlike Maya herself, had absolutely no doubt that being invited to a party in a palace was a purely good thing.
“In the Invalides?” said her father, with a whistle of disbelief. “Dancing around Napoleon’s tomb, or what?”
Once she had seen the invitation, Maya’s mother actually took Maya shopping one afternoon for black-and-white clothes over near the Motte-Piquet métro station. They walked there slowly, both of them pretending they just preferred a nice stroll to a gallop, but really conserving Maya’s mother’s energy. It was a lovely day, the sky actually blue if you craned your neck back to take a look at it, and as days go it would have been almost perfect in every respect, except that Maya’s mother kept bringing up Valko in a tactful, nonprying way, until Maya felt a little like screaming. Mothers can’t help that sort of thing. But they found a nice skirt, white with black flowers. With her own white shirt and a black belt borrowed from her mother and her boring black shoes and her mother’s black teardrop necklace, the Maya in her mirror on that Saturday evening looked more or less like someone going to a party.
