Stranger Things Happen

by Kelly Link

  All the same, she rented old movies, Key Largo and Casablanca, and watched them with Walter and Lily. And sometimes she wondered if he had been telling the truth. Her period came and so she didn’t have to worry about that; she worried anyway, and she began to notice the way that birds watched from telephone lines as she walked past them. She counted them, trying to remember how they added up for joy, how for sorrow.

  She asked Walter who said, “Sweetheart, for you they mean joy. You’re a good girl and you deserve to be happy.” He was touching up the red trim around the front door. June sat hunched on the step beside him, swirling the paint around in the canister.

  “Didn’t my mother deserve to be happy?” she said sharply.

  “Well, she’s got me, hasn’t she?” Walter said, his eyebrows shooting up. He pretended to be wounded. “Oh, I see. Sweetheart, you’ve got to be patient. Plenty of time to fall in love when you’re a bit older.”

  “She was my age when she had me!” June said. “And where were you then? And where is he now?” She got up awkwardly and ran inside, past a pair of startled guests, past Lily who stood in the narrow hall and watched her pass, no expression at all on her mother’s face.

  That night June had a dream. She stood in her nightgown, an old one that had belonged to her mother, her bare feet resting on cold silky grass. The wind went through the holes in the flannel, curled around her body and fluttered the hem of the nightgown. She tasted salt in her mouth, and saw the white moth-eaten glow of the waves below her, stitching water to the shore. The moon was sharp and thin as if someone had eaten the juicy bit and left the rind.

  “Fore!” someone called. She realized she was standing barefoot and nearly naked on the St. Andrews golf course. “Why hello, little thief,” someone said.

  June pinched herself, and it hurt just a little, and she didn’t wake up. Rose Read still stood in front of her, dressed all in white: white cashmere sweater; white wool trousers; spotless white leather shoes and gloves. “You look positively frostbitten, darling child,” Rose Read said.

  She leaned towards June and pressed her soft, warm mouth against June’s mouth. June opened her mouth to protest, and Rose Read breathed down her throat. It was delicious, like drinking fire. She felt Rose Read’s kiss rushing out towards her ten fingers, her icy feet, pooling somewhere down below her stomach. She felt like a June-shaped bowl brimming over with warmth and radiance.

  Rose Read removed her mouth. “There,” she said.

  “I want to kiss her too,” said a querulous voice. “It’s my turn, Rosy.”

  There were two other women standing on the green. The one who had spoken was tall and gaunt and brittle as sticks, her dark, staring eyes fixing June like two straight pins.

  “June, you remember Di, don’t you, Humphrey’s other aunt?” Rose said.

  “She was different,” June said, remembering the giantess in the bakery, whose voice had reflected off the walls like light.

  “Want a kiss,” Humphrey’s aunt Di said again.

  “Don’t mind her,” Rose Read said. “It’s that time of the month. Humphrey’s minding the bakery: it helps her to be outside. Let her kiss your cheek, she won’t hurt you.”

  June closed her eyes, lightly brushed her cheek against the old woman’s lips. It was like being kissed by a faint and hungry ghost. Humphrey’s aunt stepped back sighing.

  “That’s a good girl,” Rose said. “And this is another aunt, Minnie. Minnie Mousy. You don’t have to kiss her, she’s not much for the things of the flesh, is Mousy Minnie.”

  “Hello, June,” the woman said, inclining her head. She looked like the headmistress of June’s comprehensive – so old that Lily had once been her student – who had called June into her office two years ago, when June’s O-level results had come back.

  It’s a pity, the headmistress had said, because you seem to have a brain in your head. But if you are determined to make yourself into nothing at all, then I can’t stop you. Your mother was the same sort, smart enough but willful – oh yes, I remember her quite well. It was a pity. It’s always a pity.

  “I’m dreaming,” June said.

  “It would be a mistake to believe that,” said Rose Read. “An utter failure of the imagination. In any case, while you’re here, you might as well solve a little argument for us. As you can see, here are two golf balls sitting nice and pretty on the green at your feet. And here is the third” – she pointed at the cup – “only we can’t agree which of us it was that put it there.”

  The moon went behind a wisp of cloud, but the two golf balls still shone like two white stones. Light spilled out of the cup and beaded on the short blades of grayish grass. “How do I know whose ball that is?” June said. “I didn’t see anything, I wasn’t here until now – I mean – “

  Rose Read cut her off. “It doesn’t really matter whose ball it is, little thief, just whose ball you say it is.”

  “But I don’t know!” June protested.

  “You people are always so greedy,” Rose Read said. “Very well: say it belongs to Minnie, she can pull a few strings, get you into the university of your choice; Di, well, you saw how much she likes you. Tell me what you want, June.”

  June took a deep breath. Suddenly she was afraid that she would wake up before she had a chance to answer. “I want Humphrey,” she said.

  “My game, ladies,” Rose Read said, and the moon came out again.

  June woke up. The moon was bright and small in the dormer window above her, and she could hear the pigeons’ feet chiming against the leaded glass.

  14. The view from the window.

  Before Humphrey came to see June, the woman in Room Five had paid for her third week in advance, and June found the perfume she had given her mother in the rubbish bin. She took it up to her room, put a dab on her wrist.

  He was sitting on the front steps when she swept the dust out of the door. “I lost your address,” he said.

  “Oh?” she said coolly, folding her arms the way Lily did.

  “I did,” he said. “But I found it again yesterday.”

  His eyebrows didn’t repulse her as much as she had hoped they would. His sweater was blue like his eyes. “You’re lying,” she said.

  “Yes,” he said. “I didn’t come to see you because I thought maybe Aunt Rose tricked you into liking me. I thought maybe you wouldn’t like me anymore. Do you?”

  She looked at him. “Maybe,” she said. “How was your flying lesson?”

  “I’ve been up in the plane twice. It’s a Piper Cub, just one engine and you can feel the whole sky rushing around you when you’re up there. The last time we went up, Tiny – he’s the instructor – let me take the controls. It was like nothing I’ve ever done before – that is,” he said warily, “it was quite nice. You look lovely, June. Have you missed me too?”

  “I suppose,” she said.

  “Aunt Di gave me the night off. Will you come for a walk with me?” he said.

  They went for a walk. They went to the movies. He bought her popcorn. They came home again when the sky above the streetlights was plush and yellow as the fur of a tiger. “Would you like to come in?” she asked him.

  “Yes, please.” But they didn’t go inside yet. They stood on the steps, smiling at each other. June heard a sound, a fluttering and cooing. She looked up and saw a flock of pigeons, crowding on the window ledge two stories above them. Two hands, white and pressed flat with the weight of many rings, lay nestled like doves among the pigeons. Humphrey cried out, crouching and raising his own hands to cover his head.

  June pulled him into the cover of the door. She fumbled the key into the lock, and they stumbled inside. “It was just the woman in Room Five,” she said. “She’s a little strange about birds. She puts crumbs on the sill for them. She says they’re her babies.” She rubbed Humphrey’s back. The sweater felt good beneath her hands, furry and warm like a live animal.

  “I’m okay now,” he said. “I think the lessons are helping.” He la
ughed, shuddering in a great breath. “I think you’re helping.”

  They kissed and then she took him up the stairs to her room. As they passed the door of Room Five, they could hear the woman crooning and the pigeons answering back.

  15. Rose Read on motherhood.

  I never had a mother. I remember being born, the salt of that old god’s dying upon my lips, the water bearing me up as I took my first steps. Minnie never had a mother either. Lacking example, we did the best we could with Humphrey. I like to think he grew up a credit to us both.

  Prune runs Bonne Hause half the year, and we used to send Humphrey to her in the autumn. It wasn’t the best place for a lively boy. He tried to be good, but he always ended up shattering the nerves of Prune’s wispy convalescents, driving her alcoholics back to the drink, stealing the sweets her spa patients hoard. Raising the dead, in fact, and driving poor, anemic Prune into pale hysterics.

  Di’s never had much use for men, but she’s fond of him in her own way.

  We read to him a lot. Di’s bakery came out of his favorite book, the one he read to pieces when he was little. All about the boy in the night kitchen, and the airplane… it was to be expected that he’d want to learn to fly. They always do. We moved around to keep him safe and far away from Vera, but you can’t keep him away from the sky. If he comes to a bad end, then we kept his feet safely planted on the ground as long as we could.

  We tried to teach him to take precautions. Minnie knitted him a beautiful blue sweater and he needn’t be afraid of birds nor goddesses while he keeps that on. We did the best we could.

  16. The Skater.

  In the morning, it was raining. Humphrey helped June with her chores. Lily said nothing when she met him, only nodded and gave him a mop.

  Walter said, “So you’re the boy she’s been pining after,” and laughed when June made a face. They tidied the first four rooms on the second floor, and when June came out of the washroom with the wastebasket, she saw Humphrey standing in front of Room Five, his hand on the doorknob. Watery light from the window at the end of the hall fell sharply on his neck, his head bent towards the door.

  “Stop,” June hissed. He turned to her, his face white and strained. “She doesn’t like us to come into her room, she does everything herself.”

  “I thought I could hear someone in there,” Humphrey said. “They were saying something.”

  June shook her head violently. “She’s gone. She goes to Charlotte Square every day, and sits and feeds the pigeons.”

  “But it’s raining,” Humphrey said.

  She grabbed his hand. “Come on, let’s go somewhere.”

  They went to the National Gallery on the Royal Mile. Inside everything was red and gold and marble, kings and queens on the walls frowning down from ornate frames at Humphrey and June, like people peering through windows. Their varied expressions were so lively, so ferocious and joyful and serene by turn, that June felt all the more wet and bedraggled. She felt like a thief sneaking into an abandoned house, only to discover the owners at home, awake, drinking and talking and dancing and laughing.

  Humphrey tugged at her hand. They sat down on a bench in front of Raeburn’s The Reverend Robert Walker Skating on Duddiston Loch. “This is my favorite painting,” he said.

  June looked at the Reverend Walker, all in black like a crow, floating above the gray ice, his cheeks rosy with the cold. “I know why you like it,” she said. “He looks like he’s flying.”

  “He looks like he’s happy,” Humphrey said. “Do you remember your father?”

  “No,” June said. “I suppose when I look in the mirror. I never knew him. But my mother says – how about you?”

  Humphrey said, “I used to make up stories about him. Because of my name – I thought he was American, maybe even a gangster. I used to pretend that he was part of the Mafia, like Capone. Aunt Minnie says I’m not too far off.”

  “I know,” June said. “Let’s pick out fathers here. Can I have the Reverend Robert Walker? He looks like Walter. Who do you want?”

  They walked through the gallery, June making suggestions, Humphrey vetoing prospective parents. “Definitely not. I do not want Sir Walter Scott,” he said as June paused in front of a portrait. “An aunt who writes historical romances is enough. Besides, we look nothing alike.”

  June peered into the next room. “Well,” she said. “You’ll have to go without, then. All this gallery is old gloomy stuff. There’s not one decent dad in the lot of them.”

  She turned around. Humphrey stood in front of an enormous painting of a woman and a swan. The swan arched, his wings spread over the supine woman, as large as the boy who stood in front of him.

  “Oh,” she said tentatively. “Do birds bother you in paintings too?”

  He said “No,” his eyes still fixed on the painting. “It’s all rubbish, anyway. Let’s go.”

  17. Bonne Hause.

  The summer wore on and the nights were longer and darker. Humphrey came on the train from Leuchars every weekend, and at the beginning of August, they climbed to the top of Arthur’s Seat for a picnic supper. Edinburgh was crouched far below them, heaped up like a giant’s bones, the green cloak of grass his bed, the castle his crown.

  Ravens stalked the hill, pecking at the grass, but Humphrey ignored them. “Next weekend Tiny says I can make my solo flight,” he said. “If the weather’s good.”

  “I wish I could see you,” June said. “but Lily will kill me if I’m not here to help. Things get loopy right before the Festival.” Already, the bed and breakfast was full. Lily had even put a couple from Strasbourg into June’s attic room. June was sleeping on a cot in the kitchen.

  “S’all right,” Humphrey said. “I’d probably be even more nervous with you there. I’ll come on the eight o’clock train and meet you in Waverly Station. We’ll celebrate. Go out and see something.”

  June nodded and shivered, leaning against him. He said, “Are you cold? Take my sweater. I’ve got something else for you, too.” He pulled a flat oblong package from his pack and gave it to her along with the sweater.

  “It’s a book,” June said. “Is it something by your aunt?” She tore off the paper, the wind snatching it from her hands. It was a children’s book, with a picture on the cover of a man with flaming hair, a golden sun behind him. “D’Aulaire’s Greek Mythology?”

  He didn’t look at her. “Read it and tell me what you think.”

  June flipped through it. “Well, at least it’s got pictures,” she said. It was getting too dark to look at the book properly. The city, the path leading back down the hill, were purpley-dark; the hill they sat on seemed to be about to float away on a black sea. The ravens were moveable blots of inky stain, and the wind lifted and beat with murmurous breath at blades of grass and pinion feathers. She pulled the blue sweater tight around her shoulders.

  “What will we do at the end of the summer?” Humphrey asked. He picked up one of her hands, and looked into it, as if he might see the future in the cup of her palm. “Normally I go to Aunt Prune’s for a few weeks. She runs a clinic outside of London called Bonne Hause. For alcoholics and depressed rich people. I help the groundskeepers.”

  “Oh,” June said.

  “I don’t want to go,” Humphrey said. “That’s the thing. I want to be with you, maybe go to Greece. My father lives there, sometimes. I want to see him, just once I’d like to see him. Would you go with me?”

  “Is that why you gave me this?” she said, frowning and holding up the book of mythology. “It’s not exactly a guide book.”

  “More like family history,” he said. The ravens muttered and cackled. “Have you ever dreamed you could fly, I mean with wings?” “I’ve never even been in a plane,” June said.

  He told her something wonderful.

  18. Why I write.

  You may very well ask what the goddess of love is doing in St. Andrews, writing trashy romances. Adapting. Some of us have managed better than others, of course. Prune with he
r clinic and her patented Pomegranate Weight Loss System, good for the health and the spirits. Di has her bakery. Minnie is more or less a recluse – she makes up crossword puzzles and designs knitting patterns, and feuds with prominent Classics scholars via the mail. No one has seen Paul in ages. He can’t stand modern music, he says. He’s living somewhere in Kensington with a nice deaf man.

  Zeus and that malevolent birdbrained bitch are still married, can you believe it? As if the world would stop spinning if she admitted that the whole thing was a mistake. It infuriates her to see anyone else having fun, especially her husband. We’ve never gotten on well – she fights with everyone sooner or later, which is why most of us are exiled to this corner of the world. I miss the sun, but never the company.

  19. An unkindness of ravens.

  June waited at Waverly Station for three and a half hours. The Fringe was in full swing, and performers in beads and feather masks dashed past her, chasing a windblown kite shaped like a wing. They smelled of dust and sweat and beer. They looked at her oddly, she thought, as they ran by. The kite blew towards her again, low on the ground, and she stuck out her foot. The kite lifted over her in a sudden gust of wind.

  She rested her head in her hands. Someone nearby laughed, insinuating and hoarse, and she looked up to see one of the kite-chasers standing next to her. He was winding string in his hand, bringing the kite down. Bright eyes gleamed at her like jet buttons, above a yellow papier-m‰chЋ beak. “What’s the matter, little thief?” the peacock said. “Lose something?”

  Another man, in crow-black, sat down on the bench beside her. He said nothing, and his pupils were not round, but elongated and flat like those of an owl. June jumped up and ran. She dodged raucous strangers with glittering eyes, whose clothing had the feel of soft spiky down, whose feet were scaly and knobbed and struck sparks from the pavement. They put out arms to stop her, and their arms were wings, their fingers feathers. She swung wildly at them and ran on. On Queen Street, she lost them in a crowd, but she kept on running anyway.