Child of a Rainless Year

by Lindskold, Jane

  Domingo and Blanco came out to the garden soon after I carried out the breakfast tray. The breakfast bread was just as good as I had thought it would be, and if Domingo had brought a few rosebuds in a little bud vase, well, that only made the repast sweeter.

  “Will you paint today, Mira?” he asked. “We’re about done with the exterior coverage, but there’s lots of detail work to do. That’s why some of the crew is here on a weekend. I’m going to act as if we’ll get rain in a week or so, and lose time.”

  “Like washing your car or something,” I agreed, looking up at the curves and curlicues that lined the gables. “Modern rain magic. I suspect that painting is going to be a seasonal job.”

  “Not to this extent,” Domingo said, “but touch-up, yes, I think so. Still, it looks wonderful, does it not?”

  “Anywhere else,” I said, “it would look gaudy and overdone. Here, well, it looks just right.”

  I realized then, that I hadn’t answered his question about my joining the paint crew.

  “Let me do a bit of research this morning,” I said. “You came up with some interesting angles. Also, now that I have names for the trustees, I may be able to track one of them down. We’re no longer dealing with people from generations ago. Thirty years ago, they were at least passively administering my inheritance. Aunt May describes Michael Hart as the youngest of the trustees, although she doesn’t specifically describe him as young. Still, from how she describes what he said to her, how they talked, there’s a sense they were contemporaries. If Michael Hart was in his thirties, then, he’d only be sixty something now. The others could be alive, too.”

  “Are there addresses on the paperwork?”

  “I didn’t look last night. I was too overwhelmed, but I’m sure there must be. Who knows? They might be at the same address, even. Same phone number.”

  “Don’t count on it, Mira,” Domingo said. “A long time has gone by.”

  “I know,” I said, “and I promise I won’t get my hopes up too high.”

  “Promise, too, that you won’t lock yourself away all day,” Domingo suggested gently. “I can tell today will be lovely.”

  “I’ll do my best,” I said. “Promise.”

  Once inside, I dutifully put plates and such into the dishwasher. I knew if I didn’t, the silent women would, and I felt guilty about that. My mother had frightened them. I remembered that clearly. I had no desire to be a more passive tyrant.

  I took Aunt May’s journal to the front window seat, the same one from which, as a child, I had watched people go by on the street. It was as comfortable as I remembered, and as most of the work was taking place at the back of Phineas House, it was peaceful, too.

  I opened the journal. The entry was dated from the year I was a sophomore in high school—roughly five years after Aunt May had initially resolved to find out what she could about Colette. Aunt May had probably saved me a lot of dead ends. Offering a mental word of thanks, I settled in to see what Aunt May had to say.

  OUTSIDE THE LINES

  Mr. Gilhoff was on the phone when I came into the bookstore, but he motioned for me to wait. That wasn’t a problem. Stan’s birthday was coming up, and I knew he’d enjoy a good book, preferably one filled with blueprints and diagrams. I guess that’s one of the big differences between men’s work and women’s work. If they’re lucky, men get to do something they like, something that interests them. Women just get chores. For me, if I never have to deal with another dirty pot or pile of laundry, that would be just fine.

  Maybe things will be different for Mira. I’d like to think so. She’s doing very well in school. It would be a pity if the end result of all that work was, well, laundry.

  Mr. Gilhoff ended his phone call before my train of thought could get too gloomy.

  “Good morning, Mrs. Fenn,” he said. “Looking for anything particular?”

  I nodded, “Something for Stan’s birthday. Architecture would be good—not a pretty coffee-table book, something with more meat on it.”

  “I can help you there,” he said. “New or used?”

  “Depends on condition,” I said. “New, I suppose, but I’ll take used if it lets my budget stretch.”

  “I have few ideas,” he said, “while I look for the appropriate books, why don’t you take a look at this one? It’s not new. In fact, the theories have been around since the early nineteen hundreds. However, they’ve remained more of interest to scholars than to popularizers because they weren’t translated into English until recently. I thought you’d be interested, though.”

  He handed me a book called Rites of Passage by someone named Van Gennep, and went off to find books for Stan. I took the customer’s chair and started skimming. The writing style wasn’t easy to get into. It wasn’t that the author was being impenetrable, more that he assumed his reader would be familiar with his subject matter—a thing I wasn’t.

  Even so, within a few minutes, I thought I saw why Mr. Gilhoff had set the book by for me. Long ago, I’d asked him about the title “Mistress of Thresholds,” and here was someone concentrating on the “between” states of things, the transitional moments. He used a word I’d never before encountered to define this transition: “liminal.” Mr. Gilhoff hadn’t come back yet, so I borrowed a dictionary and looked it up. It sent me off to the word “limen,” and that definition set my heart thumping.

  “Limen” was defined as “thresholds.” The dictionary went on about transitional elements and such, but the connection was confirmed. No matter how impenetrable this author was, I was going to read this book and learn anything I could about thresholds, about liminal things.

  I skimmed chapter headings and much of what I read didn’t really seem to apply. I wasn’t interested in the “magicoreligious” rites of various primitive peoples or territorial affirmation or ceremonies for burial. Still, the general theory, the idea that the times we pass between states are as much or more important than the states themselves seemed very pertinent. In fact, the more I thought about it, the more I realized how such rites still exist today.

  I thought about the life-changing moments our own society celebrates: births, baptisms, marriages, even, in a sort of weird way, deaths. There are coming-of-age ceremonies, too, though I guess these are more common in religions than real life. Bar Mitzvahs. Confirmations. Then again, there are coming of age ceremonies in our society, too: getting the right to vote or getting a driver’s license or reaching the legal drinking age.

  It’s funny, but I’d never thought about how each one of these involves not only the new state the person is coming into, and the older one that’s being left, but a funny one that comes in between. Baptisms mark the entry of a child into a specific religion. Before that, the child is sort of like a stateless person. Some religions say that unbaptized babies don’t get a shot at heaven, even though the little things can’t have done anything wrong.

  Basically, then, unbaptized babies can be looked at as being in a transitional state—but it happens to grownups too.

  I mean, women are only brides for one day, but that transitional event when they pass over from being single to married is so important we give it its own name and surround it with superstitions and rituals. “Always a bridesmaid, never a bride.” “Happy is the bride the sun shines on.” “Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue.” “Carry the bride over the threshold. Be careful not to stumble.”

  That last one made my breath catch and my heart yammer under my breast. Thresholds again. Crossing over. Crossing into a new life, carried, presumably, by the one who will care for you the rest of your life. But the threshold itself is important. It’s a place that’s not one thing or the other. It’s not in or out. What would a Mistress of Thresholds be then? Would she be some sort of doorman or something else entirely? Would she understand these liminal situations?

  I was still thinking about this when Mr. Gilhoff came back with a pile of books.

  “How much?” I asked, holding up the o
ne I’d been reading.

  “How about a quarter?” he said. “The spine’s broken and it’s had some hard use. Usually, I wouldn’t even have bought it, but I thought you could use it.”

  “Sold,” I said quickly, before he could reassess the volume’s condition. It didn’t look that bad to me. True, I might be able to find the book in my local library, but I liked having books of my own. “Now, what did you find for Stan?”

  We sorted through the pile, and I ended up buying two very nice used books. Their condition was so good I suspected they had been bought as gifts for someone else, and never read—or kept as treasures. I knew Stan had neither of them, and imagined with pleasure him sitting up with one propped open on his knee, reading as Mira did her homework nearby. It was a pleasant image, one I treasured as I drove home to face the laundry.

  INSIDE THE LINES

  Liminal, I thought, setting down Aunt May’s journal. The term wasn’t completely unfamiliar to me. I was pretty sure I’d heard it in relation to pop psychology used much as this Van Gennep apparently had, to talk about transitional moments in people’s lives. “Liminal space” was the term I’d heard. The place you are when you’re no place.

  I had no doubt why the silent women had wanted me to read this passage. Aunt May’s account didn’t explain anything, yet, in a weird way, it did. It explained where I’d gone when I’d visited with Paula Angel.

  Ghosts are pretty much a classic example of beings who exist in liminal space. Not only are they caught between life and death, they’re caught between the present time and the time in which they originally lived. If you’re religious, you could say they’re caught between heaven and hell.

  If I could see Paula Angel, that meant I could see into liminal space. If we could go to a bar and have a couple of beers, that would seem to indicate I could travel there, too. I’d needed a guide to do it—or had I? Had Paula Angel guided me to her? She’d never said so. If anything, she’d indicated the reverse. She’d said that Colette had been able to see her—not that she had been able to make Colette see her.

  And that meant the same applied to me.

  Liminal space. It was used in art to describe when colors blend so that you can’t really decide whether you’re seeing one hue or another. Blue-green, green-blue. Red-orange, orangered. I remember crayons like that, and how I’d drawn lines with them, side by side, wondering just how much more yellow could be mixed in before you lost the primary color entirely.

  Color. Aunt May hadn’t mentioned it, but once you left those basic primaries behind, you were playing in liminal space. Color wheels try and draw neat little lines of division between colors, but those are fabrications. In nature colors shift and flow. They take color from each other, too. A blossom might seem white until you place it against snow. Then you can see the pale pink underlying the flower’s white. There are no absolutes. Not even snow is really white.

  Later, I stood on a ladder, painting a scalloped white border around a turquoise dormer window, relaxing into the simple, repetitive motion, doing what Domingo called “listening to what the House wants.” All I felt was a general sensation of contentment that might well have been my own. I dipped brush into bucket again and again, stroking on the liquid color, losing myself in the motion, daydreaming a little.

  When I heard the sound of horse hooves, I didn’t even register them at first, or if I did, I thought they were some new twist to the paint crew’s mariachi music.

  Clop-clop, clop-clop. The hooves rose and fell in the rhythm of a well-disciplined trot, a gait that would cover ground without wearing out the horse too much. I listened, moving my paint brush to the rhythm, rising and falling along the curving edges as a bird’s wings rise and fall in flight.

  Clop-clop, clop-clop. I could almost see the horse now, a tidy little bay with a long white blaze that exploded into a star. She had good lines, but was more compact than lean. She looked mostly Morgan, but there was a touch of Arab in the daintiness of her face.

  Clop-clop, clop-clop. I could hear a creak and hiss now, the wheels of the gig the horse pulled, moving over the road. Good wheels, rubber tires on them, for all the gig looked like something a dandy might have taken his sweetheart out in for a turn around the park in the days of Queen Victoria. The seat was high and I raised my eyes to get a look at the driver. I imagined him in a tailcoat of plum satin with darker facings on the lapels. He’d wear a stovepipe hat and a narrow mustache.

  Clop-clop, clop-clop. The paintbrush faltered in my hand. I’d had the color right, plum satin, rich with reddish undertones that caught the sunlight. It was a good color for a woman with dark hair, raven-wing dark as this woman’s was, worn piled high and held in place with glittering amethyst pins. She held the reins in one hand with perfectly competent confidence. She held something else in the other, and as I watched, she raised it to one eye.

  Clop-clop, clop …

  Thump! Thud.

  I heard a shout, a loud, almost anguished cry.

  “Mira! Hold on. Mira!”

  19

  From the second millennium B.C., the Chinese used color to indicate the cardinal directions, seasons, the cyclical passage of time, and the internal organs of the human body.

  —Sarah Rossbach and Lin Yun,

  Living Color

  INSIDE THE LINES

  “Mira! Hold on. Mira!”

  The shout came a second time, and this time I recognized the source. Domingo. His voice—and the panic in every note—pulled me back from wherever it was that I had been.

  I was suddenly aware that the ladder under me was swaying. The thump and thud I’d heard had been my paint bucket falling off where I’d hung it from the ladder and tumbling down to land on the ground two stories below. The white paint had left a trail like the droppings of an impossibly large bird streaking the gaily painted side of Phineas House.

  The ladder was tipping to one side, tilting back. I shoved my own weight in the opposite direction, glad for once not to be slim and featherweight. The ladder halted in its tottering. Then strong hands had it from beneath: Domingo and Tomás, both men looking pale and frightened beneath their outdoorsman’s tans.

  “Mira!” Domingo called. “Stay still while we make sure this is stable. Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine,” I called back. “Now. I don’t know what happened. Maybe I drowsed off?”

  Domingo forced a laugh. “Only you, Mira Fenn, could fall asleep on a ladder, paintbrush in hand. Just a moment more.”

  I felt vibrations as the two men made sure the base of the ladder was well-anchored. Then Domingo called, still shouting a little, as if I were farther away than at the top of an extension ladder.

  “Can you come down now?”

  For answer, I started picking my way down. I didn’t want to admit it, but my legs were trembling. When I got down onto the lawn I gave both men impulsive hugs. Domingo held me a trace longer than was necessary, then moved me to arm’s length.

  “You, inside. I will come in and see that you are taken care of. Tomás, will you put this ladder away and see what can be done about the paint?”

  “Sí,” Tomás said. “Your nephew is here. I’ll get him too clean up on the ground. I’ll check the side of the house myself.”

  “Thank you, Tomás,” I said, still shaky. “I’m sorry to create so much more work.”

  “No problema, Miss Fenn,” he said with a grin. “Better you than one of us. You are paying us, after all.”

  His teasing did more than all of Domingo’s anxious fussing to make me feel firmer on my feet. I insisted on walking under my own power to the kitchen—but I didn’t send Domingo away either. I let him seat me at my own kitchen table and obediently drank the glass of water he put in front of me.

  “Mira, do you think you got dehydrated?” he said, refilling the glass as soon as I had emptied it. “This is easy to do, this time of year. The weather is so pleasant compared to summer, you can forget how the dry air takes it out of you.”

>   “No, Domingo, I don’t think it’s that. I’ve been careful. I don’t like what the dryness does to my skin. If anything, I’ve been drinking too much. Domingo …”

  I hesitated, then barged on. If anyone deserved to know the truth, it was Domingo. He had never laughed at me, not even when I told him about Paula Angel.

  “Domingo, I … I guess you could say I had a vision. I saw my mother—Colette—riding in the gig pulled by Shooting Star. I couldn’t have imagined it. It was too perfect. I could see the details of her dress, the lace at the collar and wrists. I saw how her hair was dressed, even where it was a little mussed. I saw the trappings on the horse, what she held in her free hand. I think it was a vision of the day she vanished.”