by PAMELA DEAN
The kitchen was alight, but empty. Gentian moved around it slowly, as if she had never seen it before. The compost bucket was crammed with orange strings and large pale seeds, and under them triangular pieces of pumpkin rind. There were a scattering of sequins, a needle threaded with black, a heap of lipsticks, and six jars of face paint on the table. If it were Halloween, as it seemed, her parents would be on the porch. Gentian went softly down the hall and put her head around the door to the living room. Nobody was there. The sunroom beyond was dark. She craned further, to see through the archway into the dining room. There were a teapot and mugs and a plate of brownies on the table, but no people. A gray-and-black tabby she had never seen was asleep in a curl like an ammonite in the middle of the hearth rug, and did not stir. Gentian went back through the kitchen, through the empty breakfast room, and looked thoughtfully at the door to her father’s office for a moment. She opened it and stepped inside.
Her father was putting a book away in the bottom bookcase, which meant that for the same instant he did not see her and she did not see him. He stood up; Gentian jumped and uttered a squeak that dismayed her; her father, to her great satisfaction, said, “Argh!”
“Sorry,” said Gentian. “I didn’t know you were here.”
“Honey,” said her father, in an extremely odd voice, and stopped. “Well, I am here,” he said, more firmly. He looked at her with more attention than she found comfortable. “Did you want the computer for your arcane project?”
“No. I want to know why you named us what you named us.”
“Ah,” said her father. He sat down in his desk chair and gestured to her to come in. Gentian shut the door and perched on the filing cabinet; it put her on a slightly higher level than her father and she felt she could use the advantage. He was still looking odd, though his voice was back to normal.
“You’re back with us, then,” he said.
“I didn’t think you noticed I was away,” said Gentian, feeling boggled in her turn. She felt as if she had seen him quite recently, more often than she might during one of the periods when a book of his was late and he never emerged from the office. He might think he had not seen her since January.
“I wasn’t supposed to, I’m sure,” said her father, in the tone he used when he was about to lay down the law. “Was that your idea?”
“What? No! I only found out about it later. What made you realize what was going on?”
“I have my methods,” said her father.
“How could you think I’d do that?”
“Well, isn’t that every adolescent’s dream? Freedom from parental supervision, and no need to pay in arguments or worry?”
“I am not every adolescent. And even if I would like that,” said Gentian, and paused. Before her time with Dominic she certainly would have liked that, though actually freedom from Junie’s opinions was almost as nice. “Even if I would have, I wouldn’t achieve it that way.”
“What way?”
Gentian felt better. “It was like he got inside everybody’s head and put in an infinite loop so every time any of you wondered about me, the same conversation went by you and you thought you’d just been reassured, or just decided to do something about it.”
“Interesting. That’s not how it felt.”
“Does Mom have her methods too?”
“She hasn’t, but when I saw what was going on, I told her. It’s immoral to go on letting people be deluded that way.”
That’s right, thought Gentian, lay down the law. “Why have you got methods?”
“For the same reason we named you what we named you.”
“Well, what, then?”
“I think, in my classes, they called it Prophylactic Nomenclature. Rosemary used to call it Preventive Naming of Parts. No, no, not your sister.”
“Mrs. Zimmerman!”
“Yes, she was one of my professors in college.”
“Did Mom know her too?”
“No.”
“Oh, that was the college you went to before you transferred to Blackstock and met Mom.”
“Yes.”
“That still doesn’t explain anything.”
“I know this is going to upset you, but it’s magic.”
Gentian eyed him warily. Somebody in this house certainly needed a therapist. And if he quoted Horatio at her about how there were more things in heaven and earth than were dreamt of in her philosophy—but she knew that already. She knew that from Dominic. I wish I’d had a thermometer up there, she thought, to see if he really did make it cold as he vanished.
“I’m a failed magician,” said her father. “Now I write fiction.”
“Fiction isn’t failed magic,” said Gentian automatically. She added to herself, and I’m not sure that’s a very good reason for writing it. I should ask Becky. If she ever speaks to me again. She said quickly, “What about Mrs. Zimmerman?”
“She’s a successful magician. She helped me do the name-magic, and to pick the flowers.”
“You mean, to choose them,” said Gentian, automatically doing as Becky would, since Becky wasn’t here.
“Well, yes, I do, but we had to pick them as well.”
“So this works how?” Changeling technology again; she might as well find out about it. Though given what Dominic had said about juniper, gentian, and rosemary, she supposed she knew.
“Well,” said her father, “it wards off harmful influences, however exactly you want to describe them; the manuals say these plants keep away evil spirits, and witches, though since you can certainly describe Mrs. Zimmerman as a witch, it isn’t that simple. We assumed that by a witch they meant somebody with evil intentions, which is consistent enough. When the harmful influence is a person, that person is afflicted with whatever effects the herb has. I assume Dominic made advances to you, and it made him feel sick.”
“Well, yeah, I guess you could say that, but—but—look, Daddy, he was making advances for months, with that time machine, not to mention lying his head off whenever he thought he could get away with it, but your preventive stuff only worked when he tried to kiss me.” And succeeded, she thought, and a shiver, neither pleasant nor unpleasant, went up her back. “That was probably the best thing he did, not the worst.” Or was it? How captivating might kissing have been, if Dominic had not stopped it? Might she have stopped it herself?
“Where is he, by the way?”
“He went out to the balcony and disappeared.” She added, as her father looked expectant, “Well, he swelled up and turned into a very cold blue light, like a type B star, and then he disappeared.”
“I wouldn’t have thought the effect would be that powerful. It would just give you time to think, we thought, and keep you from being persuaded against your will. We’d hoped, too, you might be protected from the basic cultural harassment girls are subject to; I think that part worked all right.”
Gentian extracted from this rambling speech the part she found relevant, and answered it. “Well, it wasn’t just the kiss. He said, ‘What is worse nor woman was, ’ and I said that he was. That was what made him leave.”
“Ah,” said her father. “The devil is worse nor woman was. That’s the answer to his riddle.”
“Oh, fine. Talk about damning half the human race with faint praise.”
“The devil is not known for his evenhandedness.”
“Dad. You don’t even believe in the devil.”
“I don’t believe in the overall system he’s usually said to be a part of. But there are more things in heaven and—”
Gentian groaned, theatrically, and he stopped, smiling.
“What did you mean by ‘we’?” said Gentian after a moment. “When you said you hoped this or that? You and Mrs. Zimmerman? What about Mom?”
“Well, your mother and I had agreed that I would get to name the girls we had and she would get to name the boys, but there didn’t turn out to be any boys.”
“Huh. Don’t boys need protection too?”
“T
hat’s what Rosemary said. Mrs. Zimmerman. She wanted me to tell Kate what we were doing, and I agreed, finally, to do so if we had a boy.”
“I think you should have asked us.”
“Since this is not a society in which people choose their own names at some age of reason, there wasn’t a way to do that. Besides, the teenage years are times of crisis, but you needed protection earlier just as much.”
“I think it was wrong.”
“Gentian, all parents protect their children. I just had a little extra ammunition.”
“And I just got a little extra supernatural weirdo.”
“I guess this is what comes of trying to protect you from ordinary garden-variety sexuality. I suppose we upset the ecological balance, in some way. Only the top predator was left.”
“You know,” Gentian burst out suddenly, “I keep getting really mad at you, and then I get interested in how this all worked and I’m not mad any more. Is that another effect?”
“I doubt it. It’ll be nature or nurture. Your mother is like that. And that makes my point in another way. Parents influence their children, in a multitude of ways.”
“I don’t want,” said Gentian, sticking to the one thing she was sure of, “to go through life making people sick.”
“You won’t make everybody sick. Just amnesiac gentlemen with improbable ambitions who make sexual advances.”
“But what if I like amnesiac gentlemen with improbable ambitions?” It was just like parents, to give you a name that protected you from what you wanted.
“Learn all the riddles you can, until your taste matures,” said her father, dryly. He sounded like her mother. He rubbed his forehead. “Amnesiac gentlemen are really nothing to the purpose—they could kiss you till the cows come home and feel entirely splendid if they don’t wish you any harm.”
“But who decides what’s harm?” cried Gentian. “What have you got, some kind of computer program?”
“I’d put it in another way; I’d say you have an instinct for harmful intentions.”
“If I did, wouldn’t I be the one feeling sick?”
“Yes, all right, but I don’t see why you should suffer instead of the person who means harm.”
“But I don’t have any control over it!”
“Well, you could, when you’re older. Rosemary and I could teach you.”
“I’m a scientist, not a magician.”
“You can’t be scientific about feelings,” said her father, wearily.
“You can be scientific about anything.”
“Well, then you can be scientific about magic.”
Gentian was silent. She had walked right into that one. It might even be true, not just a rhetorical point. “How old is older?” she said.
“Oh, the default is eighteen, among the children of magicians; but given how you’ve acquitted yourself, maybe earlier. I’d have to consult your mother. I didn’t expect to have to think about this.”
“How many magicians are there? Is it heritable?”
“I don’t know and sometimes. It’s not a separate talent, it’s part of the same complex as lots of creative endeavors.”
Gentian dragged herself back to the point, and said, “But you won’t show how me to control this, this instinct right now.”
“You didn’t acquit yourself that well.”
Gentian was so furious she could not speak.
“What have you done with his time machine?” said her father.
“It’s—it’s kind of shriveled up,” said Gentian, intrigued all over again, in spite of herself. “It was an illusion, I guess. Or it was supernatural too, and he was the power for it.”
“It’s probably just as well,” said her father, but he looked wistful.
“If he hadn’t kissed me,” said Gentian. Why had he? Because he liked her? No. Because he had tried every other form of persuasion. Because he wanted his own way.
“If kissing you could make him sick,” said her father, “then I wouldn’t care to trust him with a time machine.”
“What, you mean this spell or whatever you call it doesn’t just look at whether somebody wants to hurt me? That it’ll only let in people you could trust with a time machine? How the hell does it decide that?”
“Well, you do. It’s just an aid.”
“But I didn’t. I let in Dominic. And you got it all backwards, anyway—he could kiss me until the cows came home and it wouldn’t do any harm, but you let him lie and cheat and upset Alma and Steph and Erin and make me neglect them all and lose a whole nine months of astronomy and—”
“Neither I nor any spell could keep Dominic from lying to anybody or you from mislaying your priorities.”
“I really don’t get this. What’s the use of this thing if it lets me be deceived and gets all upset when I get kissed?”
“There’s a difference between dreaming and doing. That time in the attic, all your thoughts of Dominic, that was dreaming. When it came to doing, you found out what he was.”
Was that true? When had she found out what he was? It wasn’t a discrete moment, like the pinpoint of bright Castor to the naked eye; it was a complicated dance of spectroscopic and eclipsing binaries that only tended to a point when you were far enough away. She wasn’t far enough away yet.
“He kissed Junie,” said Gentian, jarred into memory. “Months and months ago, when they went out to a movie. And she didn’t make him sick.”
“That must have been dreaming for her, not doing. Did she ever make him sick?”
Gentian considered this. “Not that I know of—well, you know, in fact, when she told him off and stomped out of the project because she found out he’d lied to Sarah, he looked as if he felt awful. That is, as if he’d eaten something he was allergic to, not as if his feelings were hurt. I can’t think what might hurt his feelings.”
“They’re permanently hurt,” said her father.
Gentian thought it over. “I think,” she said, “I’d rather have been left alone to figure things out for myself.”
“Well, it’s as well you weren’t, under the circumstances.”
“And if you were going to interfere, why did you let it go on so long?”
“Well, that was your mother’s idea.”
“Where is she?”
“Attending to the trick-or-treaters.”
Gentian got up without a word, and when through the bright kitchen and the hallway, and into the front hall. She opened the door on the cool, leaf-smelling autumn night. Her mother had just sent a group of five very small children on their way; Gentian could see a couple of older kids waiting for them at the bottom of the stairs.
“Mom,” said Gentian. “I need to talk to you.”
Her mother turned without hurry or surprise, but when she saw Gentian she closed her eyes for a moment, as Gentian had once seen her do when a cat that had seemed about to be hit by a car reappeared unharmed on the other side of the street. “Oh, good,” she said. “I was beginning to think you would be immured in your tower forever, spinning cobwebs. Just a minute.” She pulled from under the porch swing a piece of cardboard on which was printed in block letters, “two pieces of candy per customer; sorry we can’t admire you,” and propped it up against her basket of candy.
Gentian went back into the house and made her way to her father’s office again. She heard her mother shut the front door, and the jingle of hangers as her mother hung up her coat. Her mother came into the office through the door into the dining room, the pan of brownies in one hand and the teapot in the other, three mugs hooked by their handles over her thumb.
“Welcome back,” she said to Gentian. “I was getting worried.”
Gentian’s father took the teapot and mugs from her, put them all on the filing cabinet, and started pouring tea. It was strong black tea flavored with cinnamon and orange rind, and as the steam of it filled the air it seemed to Gentian the first real thing she had smelled since last Halloween’s wood smoke. Her father touched his little CD player to
life, and Laurie Anderson started singing about how in heaven everything is made of light, and the days keep going by. The song about the lawn-mowing angels would follow. Everything seemed the same as ever. But it’s not, she thought. I’ve lost three-quarters of a year, and maybe my cat, and maybe all my friends; my parents didn’t take care of me, they didn’t trust me to take care of myself; and I’ve lost—. She said, “Why didn’t you get worried back in January?”
“I did, of course. But I’m a financial analyst, not a witch. Juniper and Rosemary, who are in many ways far weaker characters than you are, had had enough of Dominic in a month. If you were still there, there might be a reason.”
“Dad says that was all dreaming, not doing.”
“You won’t have the second without the first.”
“Platitudes Unlimited,” said Gentian.
“It’s true just the same.”
“You put a spell on me because you didn’t trust me to take care of myself, and then when I couldn’t, you didn’t rescue me.” Gentian’s mother looked at her for a long moment, but when she spoke she said only, “You didn’t need rescuing.”
“I did need it. I’d have gone on forever if it hadn’t been for that spell.”
“It’s not a spell,” said her father, “it’s a property of—”
“I don’t care what the technical term is.”
“You rescued yourself, Genny. You answered Dominic’s riddle. From your experience and your heart. You named him what he was.”
“That’s just legalistic. It sounds good but it’s not true. I hate you.” That was legalistic, too, but there was no other way to say what she felt.
Her parents glanced at one another, in that way they had, looking sober but far from devastated. She waited to be told to go to her room; as an outcome with a slightly higher probability, she waited to be told it was all her fault and she had brought this on herself.
Her last remark was not a bad exit line, and would forestall whatever they were going to say. But she still had to live here; exiting did not really seem reasonable. They all sat there, Gentian on the floor, her father in the desk chair, her mother on the filing cabinet. Gentian felt thirsty, and drank her cooled tea. Her mother handed her a brownie on a discarded sheet of legal paper. Gentian ate it; why not. Laurie Anderson had gone through the lawn mowing angels, and a song called called “Coolsville,” that Gentian always skipped, and the brain song, and was almost finished with “Beautiful Red Dress.”
