by Anne Nesbet
But Maya didn’t feel cheerful or normal.
One thing at a time, she told herself. That was the phrase she used to use to get through the bad days, back when her mother had first gotten sick. One thing at a time.
Only here, which one thing was she even supposed to tackle? They were all so huge and so shapeless; there weren’t any helpful little angles to grab on to.
Her mother was sick again.
Valko was maybe being sent away.
Strangeness was warping the universe (at least the little corner of the universe near the Bulgarian embassy).
A shadow that had once been the purple-eyed Fourcroy wanted Maya to bring him back to life.
In fact, she might be caught up already in his instructions’ clockwork spell.
She might. It was hard to know.
She was trying not to be clockwork, but how could she know for sure?
Because for one thing, she was certainly walking in circles. She had passed by the charcuterie three times by now. One of the women there actually gave her a sympathetic smile and tilt of the head on the third loop by—that was embarrassing. Maya turned around in some haste and went the other way, back to the sidewalk outside the ice-cream shop on the rue de Grenelle.
Where someone gave her a friendly tug on the elbow.
“Hey,” said Valko. “Your mother said I’d probably find you here.”
She was so surprised to see him there that for a moment she forgot how miserable she was.
“But I just made up that bit about ice cream!” she said.
“I figured,” said Valko. “But here you are. And me, too. Let’s pretend it’s summer and get ice-cream cones anyway. Then we’ll both have been telling the truth all along.”
Valko chose the mint that had real little shreds of mint leaf sprinkled through it, and Maya went for a flavor she had passed by and wondered about a million times, but never tried: rosemary and honey.
“‘There’s rosemary; that’s for remembrance,’” said the ice-cream woman with a smile as she dipped her scoop into the bin. “That’s your Shakespeare, mademoiselle. Rosemary for remembrance, and rosemary also for staying true. But the honey makes it sweet, non?”
It was so different from the usual vanilla or strawberry or chocolate! A powerful combination, herb and blossom: it tasted like summer, maybe even like magic.
She found herself, despite everything, feeling the tiniest bit encouraged.
Of course, it helped having Valko there, discussing the fruits of his latest research. (That’s what he said, with one eyebrow raised: the fruits of his research.)
“Two important things,” he said. “No, three. First of all, remember how I cleverly paused, despite those awful, crazy women kind of being after us, to leave a mark at the edge of the strangeness yesterday?”
Maya tried, but failed, to remember that particular detail, but she made a noncommittal sound from behind her ice cream, and Valko took that as a yes.
“So I went back last night on my way home and did some measuring. I mean, only approximate measuring, because I don’t have one of those wheels they use to measure distance. Have you seen those?”
Maya shook her head.
“Well, they’re pretty cool, but I never thought I would actually need to own one. Anyway, here’s the thing: the first time we saw that shadow, the strangeness spread about a hundred meters out from, let’s say, the hole in the wall. I think that’s the center. I made a lot of marks that first time, so I’m pretty sure about that. But yesterday the radius was twice that. Two hundred meters.”
Maya tried to remember how far they had run, to get to the place where the air was normal again. (She still wasn’t very good at meters; a meter’s a little bit more than a yard.)
“So that means it’s either moving or growing,” said Valko.
“You think it’s going to happen again?”
“That’s the second thing!” said Valko. He sounded oddly cheerful for someone talking about the world warping. “It was eight a.m. yesterday, right? Well, I started messing around with the calendar a little. The time before was four p.m. on Friday the twenty-sixth of October. And then I remembered that crazy Saturday night after that uncle of yours really crashed and burned—that was the night the transformer blew a hole in our wall. And you know when that was? Eleven p.m.”
He paused and gave Maya the sort of look that meant there was something significant in all of these numbers, and couldn’t she see it?
“Go ahead and tell me,” said Maya. “About once a week something goes seriously wrong around here. Is that it?”
“Almost!” said Valko. “You know how many hours there are between eleven p.m. Saturday and four p.m. Friday? One hundred thirty-seven. Okay. Now guess how many hours there are between four p.m. Friday and eight a.m. Thursday—if you remember that Daylight Savings Time ended that Sunday, which I did finally remember?”
“You’re kidding,” said Maya.
“No, not kidding: one hundred thirty-seven exactly,” said Valko.
She looked at him.
“That’s really random,” she said.
Valko grinned.
“What’s really random about it is that it’s not random at all,” he said. “Or maybe it isn’t. We can test it, right? If it’s every one hundred thirty-seven hours, then the next one will be—”
“Is it Wednesday?” said Maya.
“Wednesday at one a.m. Last day of vacation. I’m waiting up for it.”
Maya took the last bite of her cone and frowned.
“It’s such an unspecial number,” she said. “Why would anything happen every one hundred thirty-seven hours?”
Valko shrugged.
“Would you prefer something else?”
“I’d prefer never,” said Maya. “But that’s not a number at all. What was your third thing?”
Valko looked puzzled for only a moment, and then smiled.
“It’s the crazy women,” he said. “I did some research. You know how they said they were samodeeeeev?”
Maya laughed. He mimicked their accent very well.
“Well, I looked into it. . . .”
He gave Maya a sly glance.
“That means I asked my mother. And she said that samodivi are, ahem, a key part of Bulgarian mythology.”
“What do they do?” said Maya.
“Oh, the usual: they sing, they dance, they tear people apart. Like the whatsits in Greece. The ones who hung around Dionysus. Anyway, they’re very dangerous, but especially to men.”
“Didn’t hear them hissing your name,” said Maya.
“True. Anyway, I told her you had been asking, and she was very impressed.”
“I didn’t, though.”
“Did so: they were coming after us, and they said they were samodeeeeeev, and you said, and I approximately quote, ‘What’s that?’ So that counts as asking, and now my mother’s even more looking forward to meeting you, whenever that is. November twelfth. Just ask lots and lots of mythology questions, and everything will go smooth as silk.”
Or I could come down with the flu, thought Maya, and get out of the fancy embassy banquet altogether. She filed that away under “Seriously Possible Options.”
“So now can I ask you what’s worrying you?” said Valko.
She told him. How a better daughter would have bravely stuck around to hear the truth. But not Maya!
“You can handle this,” said Valko, after he’d heard a good chunk of her story. “Look at all the other things you’ve handled. Things are always worse when you don’t know.”
Maya looked at him with skepticism. She couldn’t help wondering how much experience he’d had with really bad news. Because she wasn’t sure, anymore, whether knowing everything was really the best way to go. She had been so hopeful, just a week or so ago!
That made her have to look away again.
“Go home and tell her you’re sorry and you can handle absolutely anything the world throws at you. Tell her Valko tol
d you so, and he’s always right.”
He had put his arm around her shoulders: a very comforting arm. It would have been pretty okay to stay exactly like that for a year or two, but time doesn’t seem to work that way. A few minutes later she was heading back up the stairs to her own apartment, taking the steps steadily and with pretend courage.
Maya’s mother came looking for her as soon as Maya was in through the doorway.
“Oh, Maya,” said her mother. “I’m so sorry! It must have seemed like I was pouncing on you earlier. I’m so sorry.”
“I’m the one who’s sorry,” said Maya. “I was awful. I don’t even know why I bolted like that. I’m not a baby anymore. You can tell me any news you want. Go ahead.”
Her mother looked at her a long time, and then smiled that private, sad, lovely smile of hers.
“Come here—come sit next to me on the couch—we’ll be comfy together, even without the Blanket.”
At home in California they had the coziest, fluffiest throw folded up on the couch in the living room: the Fuzzy Blanket. Snuggling up under it in times of trouble was traditional for the Davidsons.
For a few minutes Maya just enjoyed the old comfort of leaning against her mother, feeling her mother’s kind hand smoothing her hair, that sense of being cared for, of not being the one who has to make everything all right. It was like glimpsing that wonderful just-next-door universe for a second, where mothers are never sick and bad things never happen. And that was that, of course: as soon as you start thinking again, the window into elsewhere whistles shut.
Maya couldn’t help herself: she sighed.
“Oh, sweetie,” said her mother, giving her a one-armed squeeze. “I try every trick in the book, just to get you not to worry. But it never works, does it?”
“First bad stuff has to stop happening,” said Maya. “Then I wouldn’t have to worry.”
“Hmm,” said her mother. “Well, let’s try this. You know I haven’t been feeling the greatest, not for a while.”
“Yeah,” said Maya. Actually, she whispered it: yeah.
“Remember when I had what I thought was the flu and ended up in the hospital, back in October?”
“Yeah,” said Maya, or at any rate her lips moved the way they would move to say it. Yeah.
“And they ran all those tests, just to see what was up. Well”—her mother paused—“it wasn’t exactly what we thought.”
All right, thought Maya. I can handle this. Whatever it is: step by step.
“The thing is: I’m having a baby.”
It was exactly like being clonked over the head with a saucepan.
“WHAT?” said Maya, her spine snapping straight again. “What? What did you say?”
“I’m pregnant,” said her mother. “I know, it’s a big surprise.
“You can’t be!” said Maya. Maybe it was more like being clonked over the head with an enormous, very cold icicle. Alarm was still zigzagging all through her, and her stomach was doing something funny with itself. “I thought the medicines—I thought that was something they did to you! You can’t be pregnant!”
“It was unlikely,” said Maya’s mother. “But it was never impossible.”
“And you didn’t tell me!”
“Because you would just worry. And it was so early. There was no telling, you know, whether it would even stick around, the little bean. But it seems to be hanging in there, so far, and in a few days we’ll be at three months, and—”
“It’s not safe!” said Maya. “It can’t be safe! You’ve been so sick. What if this—what if it—”
It couldn’t be safe. All those cells growing and dividing. You didn’t want that happening, if you’d had cancer. Did you? Maya felt the horror of it spreading through her. It wasn’t safe.
“Oh, Maya!” said her mother, and her eyes were stubborn and full of sympathy, both at the same time. “Nothing is safe! Nothing in life is safe! But I thought about it, and I thought about it, and I have to go back to living, to moving forward. I can’t just hide away somewhere, half alive, half not.”
“I can’t believe you did this,” said Maya. It took her aback a little, how angry she suddenly felt. “I can’t believe it. What about James? He needs you to be okay! I need you to be okay! How could you do this?”
Maya’s mother didn’t respond for a minute. She just smoothed Maya’s hair against her head, again and again. It was calming, even though part of Maya was mad enough not to want to be calmed.
“You’ve been through too much,” said her mother finally. “That’s the thing. I know it. And I’m so, so sorry about it. But I think this might end up all right. We have to let go. We can’t control the future. Right? But sometimes things do go fine.”
Not nearly often enough, in Maya’s experience. But what could she say?
“Can you let go of this a little bit?” said Maya’s mother. “This is your vacation still. You enjoy these free days of yours. Don’t let worries weigh you down. Hmm, Maya? In fact, I know what we could do right now, before Pauline comes over to frighten our poor ears. You could show me that box of old letters. . . .”
And she tipped her head toward the table, where there was indeed a nice, clear spot, all ready for papers.
When Maya, still a bit shattered around the edges, was pulling the box of letters from under the bed in her room, her fingers knocked against the other box, the Summer Box, and she drew it out, too, more slowly. The egg wanted her to peek in on it as it slumbered there in its silks. It was so beautiful! Something that beautiful should not be hidden away in a dark box—at least, not always. Not all the time. Not when someone like Maya’s mother was around, who was so precious and fragile and who so loved beautiful things.
Before she had thought much further, the egg was in one hand, the box of letters in the other, and Maya was heading back out to the dining table, where her mother was waiting.
“Oh!” said her mother, when Maya set the gargoyles’ egg down on the table in front of her. “What is that?”
“It came on my birthday,” said Maya. “It’s so beautiful, I wanted to show you.”
“Your birthday?” said her mother, taking the egg very gently into her own hands. “But it’s amazing, Maya. Look how there are trees painted on it. No, not painted. How’s that done? And writing, too. How interesting! What does it say, do you know?”
“I think it says, ‘Keep me safe,’” said Maya. “‘Keep me secret and keep me safe.’ I figure showing you is still pretty secret. And that’s my name there; look. It’s all in Bulgarian.”
“Oh!” said her mother again, and this time she really did seem startled. “Oh, Maya. Valko gave this to you?”
“It’s a gargoyles’ egg,” said Maya, seeing she was going to have to do some sidestepping.
“That’s clever,” said her mother, with a smile that went very quickly from amusement to worry. “But it must be awfully valuable, don’t you think? I just wonder whether Valko’s parents—”
She must have caught a glimpse of Maya’s face, because she brought herself up short.
“No, there I’m being silly. Just because it’s so lovely and so different. It’s a wonderful present, Maya, really. I’ve never seen anything like it. I can see why it says to keep it safe. You will, won’t you? You’ll keep it very safe?”
“Yes,” said Maya.
She wasn’t sure about those gargoyles—they had had an agenda, sure, but then they had gone away.
And whatever the gargoyles were up to, their egg was beautiful, and it needed her help and her care.
Even her mother thought so, so that was that.
Maya Davidson made the promise deep in her heart: she would never let any kind of harm come to her mother, no matter what crazy thing her mother had fallen into. It was up to her to keep them all safe: her mother, the mysterious future new brother or sister (that her mind still rebelled against, to tell the truth), and the gargoyles’ egg.
10
THINGS BEND—UNTIL THEY BREAK
Now, how does a person get permission from his or her parents to wander the streets of Paris at one a.m., checking the latest warpings of the laws of physics? Well, clearly, one doesn’t. Permission is not there for the getting.
That had Valko, in particular, scratching his head. As he explained to Maya (who tried very hard to see the whole matter from his perspective, since it clearly meant so much to him), this was the first chance in his whole life to test an important scientific hypothesis (the Strangeness-Repeats-Every-137-Hours-and-the-Radius-of-the-Strangeness-Grows-by-100-Meters-Each-Time Hypothesis) in a scientific way. It was better than all those years watching the barometer.
“Well, if you stay up until one, you’ll still know the main thing,” said Maya. It was a drizzly, cold Tuesday, perfect for convincing you that winter was on its disheartening way. “You’ll know the timing.”
“But there’s just no way I’m going to be able to sneak out in the middle of the night to see how far it spreads this time,” said Valko. “There’s no way. They’ve put in all this extra security at the embassy, since the wall exploded. Somebody probably thinks that was terrorism, right? Not that they tell me anything. So what do we do? I’m stuck.”
“We glue five thousand little cameras to walls everywhere?” said Maya.
“Right,” said Valko glumly. “Camera-equipped mini robots with night vision.”
They were hiding out under the awning of the impossibly fancy chocolate shop on the rue Saint-Dominique: little tiny Parisian monuments in chocolate, chocolate deer, chocolate bunnies, chocolate hearts. Why was it that you could not look at chocolate, even on a chilly day, without thinking of it melting?
That gave Maya an idea.
“The strangeness changes things, right?” she said. “What if we put out markers along the streets, like a trail of chocolate chips or something, and then the next day see which ones have become all crazy and weird?”
