The Elementals

by Francesca Lia Block

  It was especially easy to find Jeni’s picture. Because it was the only one that was circled.

  The silence around me was thick and deep. I ripped the page out of the yearbook and then had to steady my hand with the other one to keep it from flapping like the wing of a dying bird.

  The car pulled up then. I heard it in the drive. I bolted out the back door into the yard, through the side gate, into my car. Go go go. I got away but the paper was not in my hand—as if I had imagined it, as if I was insane.

  * * *

  Detective Rodriguez was in when I came by the station the next morning looking like an avenging demon. He didn’t seem particularly happy to see me.

  “Miss Silverman. How are things?”

  I followed him into his office and he adjusted his large body into his chair. Held out his hands, waiting.

  “I saw something,” I said.

  “You saw?”

  “Something. At Kragen’s.”

  “At Kragen’s.” He narrowed his eyes at me, trying to telegraph something. Ramifications was the word that came to my mind.

  “Let’s just say someone found a yearbook in someone’s home.”

  “A yearbook? In a teacher’s home?”

  “And a picture of a missing person was circled.”

  He cleared his throat. “Let’s just say that what she found was taken illegally by forced entry from someone who had absolutely no criminal record and a solid alibi.” He leaned forward on his desk. “Miss Silverman. Ariel, right? I have three daughters. Not one—three. Your age. If anything happened to them I’d be out of my F-ing mind, excuse the French. I’d be busting through walls without warrants, the whole nine yards. I understand, believe me I do. I’ll have my men look into this. But you can’t go chasing after Fritz Kragen just because he seems a little odd to you.”

  I wanted to jump across the desk and he could tell.

  “Okay, very odd. But he’s clean and I’ll just say this—if you get yourself into any trouble, I won’t be able to help you. Understand? No matter how much empathy I may feel.

  “Now, I strongly suggest you get yourself some help dealing with all of this and I promise if anything new turns up we’ll be on it.”

  “You’ll investigate, then?”

  He cut me off. “Meanwhile, I’m sure there are some important things you can attend to in your own life.”

  My own life? But he was right. There was.

  Jeni, the living need me.

  But what if she did, too?

  27. Vigilant, our magic

  Rodriguez called me a week later and told me they hadn’t found anything at Kragen’s. We were right back where we started and I was even less sure of my sanity. Had I seen that circled picture of Jeni at all? But, as Rodriguez has said, I needed to attend to my life now, and my mom’s, from which, at this point, with the surgery ahead of us, I could hardly distinguish my own.

  I had never been to Duarte, where the cancer hospital was. That was all I knew about Duarte. Long streets lined with low buildings, a suburban emptiness. And the hospital. Which had well-groomed gardens, fountains and impressive-looking buildings designed to make you feel reassured. But I didn’t. I just felt small and numb.

  I went with my parents for the initial consultation and sat quietly in the corner while the doctor talked about the tumor that had grown through the wall of one organ into another. No one cried; we were getting used to this. The doctor had a calm voice and steady, cool hands. He told me when we left that I should make sure I got cancer screenings as early as possible. I just stared at him, not sure whom he was speaking to.

  On the way out I passed a young Asian man, not much older than I was, shuffling along, wearing a colostomy bag. He stared, challenging, and I met his eyes for a moment, then had to look away.

  He could have been me.

  * * *

  The night before the surgery my dad and I stayed in the waiting room. I curled up in the chair with one of my mom’s shawls draped over me. It had butterflies on it and smelled like her. I wanted to capture her scent inside of me so that it would never dissipate.

  My dad fell asleep with his legs stretched out in front of him, his arms crossed on his chest and his mouth open. His shirt was wrinkled, there were crumbs on his pants and his face looked terribly pale and crumpled like fabric in the fluorescent lights. I tried to imagine what it would be like to have only him. There was no one else alive in our family; it would just be us. And Elise Ronan, I thought perversely, and promptly wanted to vomit.

  At midnight the new iPhone my dad got for me rang and I walked into the long glass corridor that ran between the two main buildings and answered. It was John.

  “I’m here,” he said.

  “You’re where?”

  “I’m at the fountain at the main entrance.”

  I had told John that the surgery was going to be here and the date. We’d been e-mailing and texting since I’d seen him on New Year’s Eve. But the idea that he had come here made no sense to me. It was as if someone had told me an elf prince had come, accompanied by a hundred fairy children to sing to me and bring me cakes.

  Still, I ran down the stairs and crossed the plaza to the fountain. It was lit up in the night, glowing a greenish white, and the air was moist with it. I saw a tall, shadowy figure standing on the other side.

  It was John.

  “Why?” I asked him. “Why do you keep coming to me? What have I done for you?”

  He grabbed my shoulders and pulled me into him. I could smell him—his smoky sweat—and I wanted to bury my face into that smell, drown in it.

  “Ariel. Stop. I think about you all the time. I wanted to be here.” He paused and rubbed his cheek against my hair. “Do you want me to leave?”

  I grabbed him tighter. His muscles were hard, tensed under his coat. Everything was so quiet, except for the sound of the fountain. Without that it seemed as if we could have heard the stars.

  “No,” I said. “Don’t leave.”

  “I got a hotel,” he told me. “If you want I can go there and wait for you or you can go there with me tonight and sleep and I’ll bring you back here in the morning.”

  I went back upstairs and left a note for my dad, then drove with John to a cheap hotel a few miles away. The lobby smelled of cigarettes and the man who checked us in looked right out of a zombie horror movie, without the rotting flesh. He gave us the key and we went upstairs, past a door with something fastened on it. I jumped back against John. The thing was the head of a man with a pointed beard and horns.

  “What the hell is that?” I said.

  “We can go somewhere else if you want…” He put his body between me and the door with the carved head.

  I was too tired to go anywhere else; he saw that.

  “Sometimes those things are just there to remind us that we have to be vigilant in our magic,” he whispered, taking my hand and leading me down the hall.

  The room had ugly, scratchy curtains and bedspreads but it could have been a boutique hotel full of stargazer lilies and silver champagne buckets as soon as we got in bed. We lay there fully clothed and held each other so closely it was hard to tell who was who.

  The alarm clock woke us at five. My eyes hurt like they’d been replaced with glass ones when John turned on the light. We didn’t take the time to shower or get breakfast but John had brought a blueberry muffin, an apple and a banana, which I didn’t eat but held carefully in my lap as we drove back to the hospital.

  “Call me when the surgery is over,” he said. “I can give you a ride if you want.”

  He closed his eyes and pressed his lips to my forehead as if he were praying.

  * * *

  My mom lay on the gurney, looking fragile as a child in the hospital gown. Her hands were shaking when I held them but she smiled.

  “It’s going to be okay,” I told her. For some reason, this time, I believed it and I could tell it relieved her to hear the confidence in my voice, although I hardly reco
gnized myself. I thought of the devil head in the hotel hallway and then of John, all the beautiful and frightening images I’d seen since I had known him. Vigilant in our magic.

  Whatever was between John Graves and me, it had the quality of something otherworldly—maybe I’d go as far as to say magical—and I was going to believe in it now. How could I choose not to? If nothing else, he had infused me with a calm and confidence about my mom that I hadn’t felt before.

  It frightened me that Tania had wanted me to sleep with her and Perry and John because somehow they believed they were involved with the retrieval of souls. But what was that if not some form of magic? Insanity, maybe. But could I dismiss it so easily? And wasn’t cancer, and the loss of Jeni, a kind of insanity, too? A much worse kind.

  I went back into the waiting room with my dad and curled up under my mommy’s shawl again. The smell of her was already fading.

  Jeni, I whispered in my brain, please keep her safe. And I will help you, too.

  When I woke up, the craggy-faced doctor was standing over me talking to my dad, who was wiping his eyes with his rumpled shirtsleeve.

  “She did well,” the doctor said. “I think we got it all.”

  He smiled at me and in that moment it was the most beautiful smile I had ever seen.

  * * *

  John Graves told me later how he had spent the night in Berkeley before he came to be with me:

  He had gone out into his garden, lit candles all over and strewn red roses and poured wine on the ground around the pond. He had put a wreath of leaves in his hair and taken off his clothes and danced under the moon and spoken to the mysteries. I don’t know if that is part of why my mom’s surgery went so well or not. But it made me love him even more. And I was indebted no matter how I looked at it. To John, and Jeni, too. But I was still afraid.

  * * *

  I was there when my mom opened her eyes. She patted her lips—delicate as parchment—together and stared at me.

  “Who is this?” she said.

  I smiled at her. “It’s me, Mom.” They had told us that the meds might make her hallucinate.

  “It’s my angel!” She tried to smile but then groaned and the nurse showed her how to squeeze the control to administer more medicine.

  “You did great,” I said. I was surprised at how rich and warm my own voice sounded, the way a woman’s voice would sound when comforting someone she loved, not the voice of a frightened child.

  My mom blinked at me and clutched my hand. “Thank you, angel,” she whispered.

  My own gratitude buckled my knees. I knelt beside the bed and closed my eyes and thanked the gods and goddesses and spirits and guides.

  While my dad slept in the chair I fed my mom ice chips and when she shuddered with pain I helped administer more of the I.V. medicine. She dozed off, waking to reach for my hand.

  “I think I saw her?” She spoke it like a question, her eyelids flickering.

  “Who, Mommy?”

  “Jennifer.”

  “What did you see?”

  “She was looking for you.”

  “Tell her I’m looking for her, too,” I said, but I wasn’t sure, though I wanted it to be, how true it was anymore.

  * * *

  When John drove me home from the hospital I sat with him in the car, staring at the yellow house and wondering how it would be possible for me to go inside and leave him. But I couldn’t ask him in either. For some reason John was still too much a part of my imagined world to bring all the way into my real one. I was afraid he might vanish if we crossed that threshold.

  “Thank you,” I said, because the language I loved hadn’t invented more accurate words yet.

  He reached over and took my hand, put it in his thick denim lap. “I’m here for you.”

  “But I haven’t been there for you.”

  “You were scared.”

  “I still am.” I told him about Kragen and the yearbook, about how no one would listen. About how I had to find out what had happened to Jeni.

  As I spoke I stared out the window into the leafy street where she and I once rode our bikes, oblivious to terror.

  “So you think he did it?”

  “I’m not sure. He has an alibi.” My voice snagged on phantom nails in my throat. “I don’t know what I think anymore. I don’t even know what’s real.”

  He squeezed my fingers so that it almost hurt. “I know how hard this is for you. I’ll help you. In Berkeley. Just come back to me.”

  I moved my hand away as gently as I could. “I can’t. I don’t understand what happened. With anything.”

  His eyes, behind the glasses, were so full of all the things I feared and wanted.

  “I know,” he said. “I’m so sorry. It’s not an excuse, but when we lost her, it made us sick with grief.”

  He meant Camille. “I can’t even imagine what that’s like.”

  John got very still and lowered his head. “She was really, really tiny. She fit in the palm of my hand. But her eyes were like little lights.” He took off his glasses and wiped away the steam that coated them and put them on the dashboard.

  “I can’t come back,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Ariel,” said John. “Even if you run away again, my love will follow you.”

  It reminded me of a story from a picture book my mother read to me when I was little. I had to get out of the car, fast, or I never would. I pulled my hand away and kissed him quickly on the lips. And then I was gone.

  * * *

  Just days after John left I got the call.

  “Did you hear the news today?” she asked me. I wasn’t sure who it was for a second.

  “Katie?”

  She was speaking too fast. “I knew there was something fucked up about him.”

  “Are you talking about…”

  “Kragen! He was arrested for child molestation,” Katie Leiman said.

  * * *

  Fritz Kragen had been taken into custody for fondling an unnamed female student. Rodriguez called me this time. He sounded warmer than before.

  “How’s it going, Miss Silverman?”

  “Is there any proof?” I asked.

  “About Jennifer Benson? Nada. The same. But we got him on this one. I know I’ll sleep easier. And your instincts were right on the creep factor, I’ll give you that.”

  “What about Jeni?” My teeth chewed on the inside of my lip; I wondered how hard I’d have to bite down to taste blood.

  “Case is still open. I promise we’ll let you know if we get anything.”

  “Okay.”

  “Oh, and you ever want a job on the force and need some advice, you come to me. But no more breaking and entering, understand?”

  Even if it hadn’t been proven Kragen was the one, at least now he was behind bars.

  I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to feel. Substantiation? Acceptance? Closure? I felt mostly only a fierce agitation that slowly dissipated as I directed my attention to my mom and her recovery.

  I drove to the hospital every day, memorizing the freeways until I wasn’t afraid of them anymore, and sat at her bedside reading to her or watching movies and feeding her pudding and soup.

  One day I took her out in the wheelchair and we went to the Japanese garden tucked away behind bamboo, a miniature version of the magnificent one in San Francisco. A woman and her three children were leaning over the koi pond, feeding the fish. The oldest child was bald and pale and I tried to imagine how the woman must feel, how every day she must have to fight her terror with each breath. I gave my mom some fish food and we tossed it over the bridge on the other side of the pond. The fish came surging toward us—huge, wiggling, meaty bodies that fought for the crumbs of food we tossed into the water, their mouths opening obscenely. They made me think of Fritz Kragen and I wanted to throw up.

  My mom must have noticed the look on my face. “Let’s go back,” she said. I hadn’t told her about Kragen yet. It wasn’t something I wanted her to have to deal
with.

  We brought her home after a week and when I saw her back in her room at home it changed something in me. In some ways Kragen’s arrest was part of this change as well. I didn’t feel like sleeping anymore. I did the shopping and the cooking and ate more food. I started running again. I even took some yoga classes at the studio near my house. It was as if the combination of my mom surviving the surgery and my time with her afterward and Kragen’s arrest had given me some part of myself back. Sometimes I imagined returning to John but I was still afraid of losing the self I had lost once before in that house of fae.

  * * *

  Six weeks after her surgery I went with my mom to a consultation about chemo. The handsome Persian doctor didn’t look much older than I was. He was the one who had treated her before. My mom shook her head at everything. When we left she said, “I don’t want it!”

  She’d had it before, lost her hair and whatever curves she’d had left on her body. Now her hair had just begun to reach the length it had been before she’d started.

  “No one wants it,” my dad said.

  “Yes!” Her voice was thin as ice. “Yes, some people do. He said so. They go right into it after their surgery.”

  “They don’t want it,” I said. “They want to live.”

  My mom sat very still in the front seat. I could only see the back of her head.

  “I want you to live,” I said. “I’m not letting go of you again.”

  “Me neither,” said my dad. He reached for her hand and at first she stayed stiff but then I saw her shoulders slump.

  “We’re going to help you through this,” I said. “I’m going to be here this time. It’s going to be different.”

  * * *

  A week later she came into my room and sat on my bed, where I was reading one of my books of fairy tales.

  “May I talk to you?” she asked, and I put my arm around her waist and leaned my head on her shoulder. She stroked my hair.

  “I’m not sure I can go through it again,” she said.

  “I know. But I know you can do it.”

  “I don’t want to lose my hair. I know it sounds vain but…”