Letters From the Sky

by Tamer Lorika

  Jeanne kept a firm hold on Jericho’s hand as she opened the door to the stairwell, afraid to lose the creature when light began to seep in.

  But Jericho did not dim. She was as clear and visible as she had been in Jeanne’s bedroom, and Jeanne’s eyes widened in surprise. “I can see you,” she said in amazement.

  “I marked you,” Jericho replied with a lazy smile. “It’s that simple.”

  Jeanne grinned. Downstairs she scampered over to the coals on the hearth, poking and blowing them into a tiny blaze. She peeled strips of bark off the wood in the pile nearby, building them into a cheery pyramid and building it up with smaller sticks as she hung a kettle over it, then pouring coffee grounds into a cheesecloth to boil.

  “You and I are a fine pair,” Jeanne said, shaking her head. “One of us does not exist, and the other is not human.”

  “Clever. You do not exist?”

  “Perhaps not.”

  Jericho hummed a strange half-note. “At least you are beginning to believe in me?”

  “I’m sorry…”

  “For what?”

  “Ever doubting.”

  Jeanne deemed the coffee hot enough and poured two mismatched mugs. Jericho perched on a seat, leaning forward with her elbows on her knees. She looked strange in the kitchen, to be sure, unnatural—but not out of place. As odd as the thought was, Jeanne couldn’t help feel Jericho belonged there. Jericho belonged wherever Jeanne was. They both felt that way.

  Jeanne took one mug and sat across the table from Jericho. The table was so narrow, their knees brushed. As they sipped quietly—Jericho’s coffee black, Jeanne’s full of sugar from the cupboard—Jericho began to speak. She spoke of a new star, far beyond those in the night sky. She spoke of a strange fish, an eel that was certainly dead, found swimming days after. She spoke of—

  A buzz, a metallic clicking, inorganic and angry. Deep rumbling. Engine noises.

  Jeanne’s eyes widened, remembering the day and the closet and the dark and the panic—

  Jericho was at her side in an instant, kneeling between Jeanne’s legs and putting warm palms on her cheeks.

  “I’m here. Remember that. I’m here. Don’t be afraid.”

  Jeanne closed her eyes and nodded. Her skin burned deliciously where her mark touched Jericho’s fingers.

  “They won’t get you.”

  The consolation was out of place, and for a moment Jeanne’s panicked mind wondered who, but she could not focus on it for long. She put her face against Jericho’s neck and felt the warmth of bare arms around her waist.

  Slowly the engines faded.

  Unfurling from her place on the floor, Jericho took her place again across the table and pushed her knees against Jeanne’s. She grabbing Jeanne’s hand tightly and, without preamble, began to speak again. Her free hand paused a half a moment more, before running slowly through Jeanne’s hair.

  “In the middle of an unnamed heath, leagues and leagues away from London, stands a yew tree that is two thousand years old…”

  Jericho did not stop until the sun began to creep across the horizon and Jeanne was fast asleep on the table, head pillowed on her arm and hand clasped tightly in Jericho’s.

  Jericho kissed her temple, then stood to put strong arms around the girl. Lifting her above the ground, Jericho carried her upstairs to sleep in her own bed. She brushed the mark faintly.

  “I love you,” Jericho whispered. “I won’t let them hurt you.”

  She dissolved like snow in the morning air.

  * * * *

  For a long, claustrophobic four days, Jeanne was confined to the house by increasingly desperate pleas from her mother, contrived chores, and vague warnings. She left for school, of course, but was cautioned to come straight home—Saturday passed, and Sunday as well, during which she was allowed to go to church but not to linger afterwards. The priest took a long moment to offer her Communion, moving his lips as he raised a hand above her forehead. This benediction he offered no one else.

  On Monday, she welcomed the time at Cotillion—anything to keep her moving and not thinking about anything at all. Too much time at home meant time with her own thoughts, which felt stifling to her.

  Charles, as always, walked with her to Armand’s room. Oddly Paris did not, instead giving her a strange, fluttery wave before bouncing off with Monique and the others.

  There was a vague excitement from the halls, a holiday feel—two battered green trucks were seen pulling up to a few buildings on the outskirts of the small town yesterday, and officious men in smart uniforms wielding real pistols got out to speak with the keeper of the small inn. They quickly left and strolled up and down the dirt streets, knocking on doors and speaking in heavily accented tongues or a strange, barking language Jeanne did not recognize at all.

  The spark of excitement carried on for the rest of the day, even as the trucks were seen driving away, one with its roof up and shutters closed, the other free to the open air. Perhaps they would come back.

  Armand took a long time to start class that day, contending with thirty anxious and excited voices with very little patience for the language of the fan, which had been the subject of two weeks’ instruction already and was stretching into this, the third.

  The poor, harried man stood at the front of the class, clearing his throat twice and tapping the blackboard sharply before giving up altogether and blurting, “All right, that is absolutely enough. Sit down so we may all go home.”

  Thirty pairs of eyes turned on him, thirty jaws snapped shut. Jedrick slunk away from his post near the door, trying to blend into the wall. They sat cross-legged, thirty faces upturned in various stages of excitement.

  Twenty-nine…

  “Sarah—where is Tabitha Cohen?” Armand demanded.

  Claude, Tabitha’s dancing partner, just shrugged. Monique’s hand shot into the air.

  “Where, Monique?” Armand asked in a tired voice.

  “I don’t know, but she has not been at school all day,” Monique offered.

  Armand frowned. “Fine. We will begin without her. Claude, you may join the other partner-less boys for this afternoon. We won’t be dancing, in any case.” Sounds of disappointment at that. “Now I’m going to demonstrate a few gestures with the fan, and I’d like you to tell me what they mean.”

  Needless to say, Jeanne paid very little attention for the rest of the afternoon, but she wasn’t bored. Paris and Jedrick were an intensely pleasing distraction, especially when Jedrick began to mimic Armand’s voice under his breath with awful precision. Paris provided facial expressions and hand gestures until she was whacked on the head by a closed fan.

  Paris pouted. Jedrick laughed and was smacked as well. Jeanne felt rather content, considering it all. Complete.

  That evening, they all walked to Paris’s house. Madame Orange had sent word with Paris that they had been invited to dinner. It was no secret Madame Orange loved to entertain, to use the good china, to see her daughter displaying the etiquette that had been so carefully impressed upon her. But poor Madame Orange also had very few chances to entertain. Adults were afraid of the stigma of reciprocation. Jeanne and Jedrick, however, just liked the way she cooked.

  “Mother said she talked to your parents almost a week ago,” Paris said on their way home. “So it’s all right, isn’t it?”

  Jeanne had been in the kitchen with Maman when Madame Orange had entered—it had been a week ago, before the mark, before all of…this. Maman had graciously accepted the invitation, no doubt to get a brooding daughter out of her hair.

  “Maman said it’s fine,” Jeanne answered.

  “And my father didn’t have any objections,” Jedrick added.

  Paris clapped her hands. “Goody! Oh—I wanted to show you! Father got me a wooden fife from the city—you know, like the ones they taught us to play in school?”

  When the children arrived at the Orange residence, Paris scattered up the front steps and led them inside. She clattered across the polis
hed wood floors, but Jeanne and Jedrick paused to slip off their shoes. Jeanne, especially, was afraid that somehow her thick and clumsy loafers would break or bruise the wood. Her own floors at home were soft and grey and unpretentious.

  Paris led them into her bedroom, all three calling out a polite hello to the mother in an apron at the stove in the kitchen. Paris quickly shut the door as they entered her room, then dug around in the trunk at the foot of her bed as Jeanne and Jedrick made themselves comfortable on her bed. She came up with a slim wooden pipe clutched in one palm.

  “I don’t remember how to play much anymore,” she said with a pout, passing the fife to Jeanne before loosening her hair. “I was never very good in school, anyway.”

  Jeanne took the little instrument carefully. Putting it to her lips, she rolled it forward, the way she always had to do in order to get sound to come. She played around with the fingerings silently for a second before shrilling a halting “Frère Jacques,” until Jedrick yanked the pipe from her fingers.

  “Really,” he sighed dramatically. He peered at the fife, scrutinizing. “Armand has been recruited to teach the fourth years music during our lunch period. He has a million and a half of these in his supply closet.”

  Without another word, Jedrick brought the instrument up and began to play, softly, but with a great deal more skill than Jeanne had displayed. It was “Ode to Joy” and Jeanne laughed, pulling Paris to the middle of the bedroom. Putting one hand under the girl’s shoulder blades, she grabbed Paris’s fingers in the other. With halting, off-beat steps, they began to revolve in a sort of half-waltz.

  One two three, easier than ever before, despite the fact “Ode to Joy” was in four-four; they didn’t listen to the music anyway.

  “If you are so desperate for something to do, clean something!” Madame Orange barked.

  They had not heard the door swing forward. They did, however, see the half-smile on Madame Orange’s lips as she turned and walked away.

  Jedrick began to play a different song, very quietly, chastised. It was “Frère Jacques.”

  Soon, exhausted, the three friends fell onto Paris’s bed, tangled in one another’s limbs.

  “I found God,” Paris began with a quirk of her eyebrows and a feral smile. “Father Patrice keeps talking about heaven, doesn’t he? He keeps saying we’ll find it for ourselves, then tells us about our niches in the choir of the Lord or some other such rot.”

  Jeanne couldn’t hold back a half-gasp at the boldness of her words, but Jedrick just closed his eyes and nodded, hair brushing against Jeanne’s arm and Paris’s neck. “What do you think God is—or heaven, or what?” he asked.

  Paris was quiet for a long moment. “You guys. Or something. People. I like people. People are the reason why we’re doing this, aren’t they?” Her arm flopped to gesture ineffectually at the room, trying to explain herself. “Forget it.”

  Jeanne could not say why, but she understood what Paris meant. She really did. “It’ll be a big house,” she said. “A big, old house with a million rooms and hallways and dormitories and huge libraries and a garden with a river running through it, and everyone will be there, living in the same place.”

  Jedrick made a face. “Even the people you hate?”

  “I don’t hate anyone…” Jeanne trailed off, her voice quirking like a question.

  “What about you?” Paris asked. “Do you hate?”

  “No one,” Jedrick muttered. “Though if I have to hear Monique’s little giggle-squeal one more time, I might end up committing murder.”

  Paris flicked her pillow at him. “Her laugh is adorable, now shut up. What do you think heaven is like?”

  Jedrick frowned. “It’s wonderful. It smells good, clean, like the way it gets after it rains. And yes, there is a choir, but everyone sings well and they play jazz sometimes.” Paris laughed and Jedrick’s frown deepened. “I’m serious. That’s what I think. And it’s easy to walk around—there aren’t stairs or protruding stones or anything like that to get in the way.”

  That shut Paris up for a long time. They all shut up, each staring at the cracked plaster ceiling.

  “Don’t you imagine heaven as everyone being whole again?” she asked. “Where you can see, and Jeanne’s face is all smooth, and—”

  “My face is fine,” Jeanne cut in.

  “And I can see,” Jedrick added.

  “And you two are content?”

  It was a concerted, “Yes.”

  “I want to believe I can be that happy.”

  Madame Orange called them for dinner then.

  * * * *

  Jeanne tripped home that night at eight hours past noon, on the glass. She thanked Madame Orange profusely and politely for dinner, kept her napkin on her lap, and made generally appropriate conversation. A success, for all parties involved.

  She walked in the door to find her mother sitting stock-still on the living room couch, ember eyes burning tiny scorch marks into the door.

  “Where. Were. You?”

  The living room was dark, though the lights were on and the fire blazed cheerily just out of reach through the door to the kitchen.

  “Madame Orange’s house,” Jeanne answered, realizing she was in an insecure situation but not understanding why.

  “Why didn’t you come straight home like I told you to?”

  Maman rose from the couch, backlit strangely by the fire-glow. She looked even more worn and thin than Papa did, but yellow rather than grey—decaying yellow and tea-water tawny.

  “You—you told me I could go,” Jeanne replied, eyes flicking to the kitchen.

  “When was that?” Maman demanded sharply. “I certainly don’t remember.”

  “Last week—”

  “Don’t talk back to your mother!” Maman broke in. “I asked you to come straight home and that’s what I expect from you!”

  “I’m sorry,” Jeanne offered, bewildered. It came through in her voice.

  “Don’t talk back!” Maman repeated.

  Jeanne was silent.

  Maman stood straight as a board; it looked uncomfortable. She looked uncomfortable. Her voice softened at her next words, but her posture did not. “Oh, Jeanne…what’s happened to you?”

  “Maman, I don’t understand what you mean,” Jeanne tried.

  Maman stepped forward, too close, and put her fingers against Jeanne’s mark, gently, trembling, afraid. They jerked back in an instant, as if she were the one burned.

  “My poor baby. Such a bad omen,” Maman mourned quietly. “Come into the kitchen. It’s time for dinner.” Almost absently, Maman brushed hair across Jeanne’s face, curtaining the mark. Then she turned towards the kitchen.

  “I already—”

  But Maman was not listening. So Jeanne followed her to the kitchen, to sit with Gramaman and Papa at the table. They did their best to pretend nothing had happened, that they had not been listening attentively to every word Maman’s lips dripped, and thus they were able to keep their carefully constructed stillness.

  “I have to stay late again at school tomorrow,” Jeanne said, sipping vegetable broth and wondering if anyone was going to calm Suzette, who wailed in the other room.

  Maman nodded serenely. “Of course, of course; you have Cotillion, don’t you?”

  “That was today, Maman.”

  “Was it?” Maman blinked. “Then what do you need to stay for?”

  “I missed a lot of notes on geography when I was absent, and I need to learn the material. We have a test soon.”

  “When were you absent?”

  “When I—” Jeanne cut herself off, rephrasing. “When you called Dr. Kembrough.”

  Papa silently sipped his soup, and Gramaman disappeared to comfort Suzette. Maman nodded again. “I expect you to be home by five hours past noon, do you understand?”

  “Of course, Maman.” Jeanne finished her soup, then stood to put her bowl in the pail of water near the door for washing later.

  “Why can’t you just ge
t the notes from someone else?” Papa asked her.

  “It’s geography. Ms. Milovskaya has a world map and no one else I know does.”

  Papa, too, nodded. Jeanne used the pause to escape up the stairs, feeling as if she were caught in some dream like the ones she had before. Where everything was just a little bit off. It took her a long time to fall asleep.

  Chapter 8

  The whispers were worse the next day. Jedrick was gone to Armand, and Paris was with Monique, and Charles was quiet and didn’t even try to talk to her. Children weren’t hiding their quick signs of the crosses at her passing; a few of the boys spat on the floor when the teacher wasn’t looking. Jeanne had the sense to know none of this was meant as an insult to her, or to target her. People were afraid.

  What had the Auditor said? “When they cannot understand, they hate.”

  Ms. Milovskaya was not at her desk when Jeanne came in, so Jeanne left a note on top of a stack of papers:

  I will be able to catch up on my geography notes after school, if you are available. Thank you.—Jeanne

  When Ms. Milovskaya whirled in, red-faced and fleeing Ms. Roma, and looking about to spit invectives or burst into tears or spontaneously combust, she took a look at the note, nodded to Jeanne, and took a deep breath. She clapped her hands—every day, the same beginning, a chance to calm herself and release a little bit of aggression—and began class.

  Tabitha Cohen was not at school that day, either; it caused a bit of a stir when Monique pointed it out, shooting what was mostly likely meant to be a surreptitious look at Jeanne a few moments afterwards. There were only thirty kids in year eight, after all, and absences were scrutinized.

  Charles did not speak to her all day. Somehow, Jeanne felt relieved. She liked talking to Charles, but lately, every time he was near her, she felt vaguely nauseous, as if she were doing something wrong.

  She spent lunch time skulking down halls, around corners, in the shadows, not wanting to deal with the looks, the thoughts, everything. She went to eat lunch with Paris and Jedrick, but scavenged from their food rather than getting her own, and avoided facing the cafeteria. They made it abundantly clear this would not be allowed in the future.