Part 14 (1/2)

”What in the world?” Ophelia said. She picked up the egg, tracing the joins with a finger.

”It's just something that's been in our family,” Fran said. She stuck her arm out of the quilt, grabbed a tissue, and blew her nose for maybe the thousandth time. Just like a clockwork monkey. ”We didn't steal it from no one, if that's what you're thinking.”

”No,” Ophelia said, and then frowned. ”It's just - I've never seen anything like it. It's like a Faberge egg. It ought to be in a museum.”

There were lots of others. The laughing cat, and the waltzing elephants; the swan you wound up, who chased the dog. Other toys that Fran hadn't played with in years. The mermaid who combed garnets out of her hair. Bawbees for babies, her mother had called them.

”I remember now,” Ophelia said. ”When you came and played at my house. You brought a minnow made out of silver. It was smaller than my little finger. We put it in the bathtub, and it swam around and around. You had a little fis.h.i.+ng rod, too, and a golden worm that wriggled on the hook. You let me catch the fish, and when I did, it talked. It said it would give me a wish if I let it go. But it was just a toy. When I told my mother about it, she said I was making it up. And you never brought it back. You said we should play with my dolls instead.”

”You wished for two pieces of chocolate cake,” Fran said sleepily.

”And then my mother made a chocolate cake, didn't she?” Ophelia said. ”So the wish came true. But I could only eat one piece. Maybe I knew she was going to make a cake. Except why would I wish for something that I already knew I was going to get?”

Fran said nothing. She watched Ophelia through slitted eyes.

”Do you still have the fish?” Ophelia asked.

Fran said, ”Somewhere. The clockwork ran down. It didn't give wishes no more. I reckon I didn't mind. It only ever granted little wishes.”

”Ha, ha,” Ophelia said. She stood up. ”Tomorrow's Sat.u.r.day. I'll come by in the morning to make sure you're OK.”

”You don't have to,” Fran said.

”No,” Ophelia said. ”I don't have to. But I will.”

When you do for other people (Fran's daddy said once upon a time when he was drunk, before he got religion) things that they could do for themselves but they pay you to do it instead, you both will get used to it. Sometimes they don't even pay you, and that's charity. At first charity isn't comfortable, but it gets so it is so. After some while, maybe you start to feel wrong when you ain't doing for them, just one more thing, and always one more thing after that. Maybe you start to feel as you're valuable. Because they need you. And the more they need you, the more you need them. Things go out of balance. The more a person needs you, the harder it gets for you to leave. You need to remember that, Franny. Sometimes you're on one side of that equation, and sometimes you're on the other. Y'all need to know where you are and what you owe. And where you are is beholden to the summer people, and unless you can balance that out, here is where y'all stay.

Fran wasn't sure what he thought about all that now that he was friends with Jesus, about how the question of eternal life and the forgiveness of sins balanced out. Maybe that was why religion made him so itchy. All she knew was that n.o.body, not even her daddy, had ever suggested Jesus was going to help her out of her particular situation.

Fran, dosed on NyQuil, feverish and alone in her great-grandfather's catalog house, hidden behind walls of roses, dreamed - as she did every night - of escape. She woke every few hours, wis.h.i.+ng someone would bring her another gla.s.s of water. She sweated through her clothes, and then froze, and then boiled again. Her throat was full of knives.

She was still on the couch when Ophelia came back, banging through the screen door. ”Good morning!” Ophelia said. ”Or maybe I should say good afternoon! It's noon, anyhow. I brought oranges to make fresh orange juice, and I didn't know if you liked sausage or bacon, so I got you two different kinds of biscuit.”

Fran struggled to sit up.

”Fran,” Ophelia said. She came and stood in front of the sofa, still holding the two cat-head biscuits. ”You look terrible.” She put her hand on Fran's forehead. ”You're burning up! I knew I oughtn't've left you here all by yourself! What should I do? Should I take you down to the emergency?”

”No doctor,” Fran managed to say. ”They'll want to know where my daddy is. Water?”

Ophelia scampered back to the kitchen. ”How many days have you had the flu? You need antibiotics. Or something. Fran?”

”Here,” Fran said, coming to a decision. She lifted a bill off a stack of mail on the floor and pulled out the return envelope. Then she reached up and pulled out three strands of her hair. She put them in the envelope and licked it shut. ”Take this up the road where it crosses the drain,” she said. ”All the way up.” She coughed miserably, a rattling, deathly cough. ”When you get to the big house, go around to the back and knock on the door. Tell them I sent you. You won't see them, but they'll know you came from me. After you knock, you can just go in. Go upstairs directly, you mind, and put this envelope under the door. Third door down the hall. You'll know which. After that, you oughter wait out on the porch. Bring back whatever they give you.”

Ophelia gave her a look that said Fran was delirious. ”Just go,” Fran said. ”If there ain't a house, or if there is a house and it ain't the house I'm telling you about, then come back and I'll go to the emergency with you. Or if you find the house and you're afeart and you can't do what I asked, come back and I'll go with you. But if you do what I tell you, it will be like the minnow.”

”Like the minnow?” Ophelia said. ”I don't understand.”

”You will. Be bold,” Fran said, and did her best to look cheerful. ”Like the girls in those ballads. Will you bring me another gla.s.s of water afore you go?”

Ophelia went.

Fran lay on the couch, thinking about what Ophelia would see. From time to time she raised a pair of curious-looking spygla.s.ses - these something much more useful than any bawbee - to her eyes. Through them she saw first the dirt track, which only seemed to dead-end. Were you to look again, you found your road crossing over the shallow crick once, twice, the one climbing the mountain, the drain running away and down. The meadow disappearing again into beds of laurel, then low trees hung with climbing roses, so that you ascended in drifts of pink and white. A stone wall, tumbled and ruined, and then the big house. The house, dry stack stone, stained with age like the tumbledown wall; two stories. A slate roof, a long covered porch, carved wooden shutters making all the eyes of the windows blind. Two apple trees, crabbed and old, one green and bearing fruit and the other bare and silver black. Ophelia found the mossy path between them that wound around to the back door, with two words carved over the stone lintel: BE BOLD.

And this is what Fran saw Ophelia do: Having knocked on the door, Ophelia hesitated for only a moment and then she opened it. She called out, ”h.e.l.lo? Fran sent me. She's ill. h.e.l.lo?” No one answered.

So Ophelia took a breath and stepped over the threshold and into a dark, crowded hallway, with a room on either side and a staircase in front of her. On the flagstone in front of her were carved these words: BE BOLD, BE BOLD. Despite the invitation, Ophelia did not seem tempted to investigate either room, which Fran thought wise of her. The first test a success. You might expect that through one door would be a living room, and you might expect that through the other door would be a kitchen, but you would be wrong. One was the Queen's room. The other was what Fran thought of as the War Room.

Fusty stacks of old magazines and catalogs and newspapers, old encyclopedias and gothic novels leaned against the walls of the hall, making such a narrow alley that even lickle tiny Ophelia turned sideways to make her way. Doll's legs and old silverware sets and tennis trophies and Mason jars and empty matchboxes and false teeth, and stranger things still, poked out of paper bags and plastic carriers. You might expect that through the doors on either side of the hall there would be more crumbling piles and more odd jumbles, and you would be right. But there were other things, too. At the foot of the stairs was another piece of advice for guests like Ophelia, carved right into the first riser: BE BOLD, BE BOLD, BUT NOT TOO BOLD.

The owners of the house had been at another one of their frolics, Fran saw. Someone had woven tinsel and ivy and peac.o.c.k feathers through the banisters. Someone had thumbtacked cut silhouettes and Polaroids and tintypes and magazine pictures on the wall alongside the stairs, layers upon layers upon layers, hundreds and hundreds of eyes watching each time Ophelia set her foot down carefully on the next stair.

Perhaps Ophelia didn't trust the stairs not to be rotted through. But the stairs were safe. Someone had always taken very good care of this house.

At the top of the stairs, the carpet underfoot was soft, almost spongy. Moss, Fran decided. They've redecorated again. That's going to be the devil to clean up. Here and there were white-and-red mushrooms in pretty rings upon the moss. More bawbees, too, waiting for someone to come along and play with them. A dinosaur, only needing to be wound, a plastic dime-store cowboy sitting on its s.h.i.+ning shoulders. Up near the ceiling, two armored dirigibles, tethered to a light fixture by their scarlet ribbons. The cannons on these zeppelins were in working order. They'd chased Fran down the hall more than once. Back home, she'd had to tweezer the tiny lead pellets out of her s.h.i.+n. Today, though, all were on their best behavior.

Ophelia pa.s.sed one door, two doors, stopped at the third door. Above it, the final warning: BE BOLD, BE BOLD, BUT NOT TOO BOLD. LEST THAT THY HEART'S BLOOD RUN COLD. Ophelia put her hand on the doork.n.o.b but didn't try it. Not afeart, but no fool, neither, Fran thought. They'll be pleased. Or will they?

Ophelia knelt down to slide Fran's envelope under the door. Something else happened, too: something slipped out of Ophelia's pocket and landed on the carpet of moss.

Back down the hall, Ophelia stopped in front of the first door. She seemed to hear someone or something. Music, perhaps? A voice calling her name? An invitation? Fran's poor, sore heart was filled with delight. They liked her! Well, of course they did. Who wouldn't like Ophelia?

Who made her way down the stairs, through the towers of clutter and junk. Back onto the porch, where she sat on the porch swing but didn't swing. She seemed to be keeping one eye on the house and the other on the little rock garden out back, which ran up against the mountain right quick. There was even a waterfall, and Fran hoped Ophelia appreciated it. There'd never been no such thing before. This one was all for her, all for Ophelia who opined that waterfalls are freaking beautiful.

Up on the porch, Ophelia's head jerked around, as if she were afraid someone might be sneaking up the back. But there were only carpenter bees, bringing back their satchels of gold, and a woodp.e.c.k.e.r, drilling for grubs. There was a ground pig in the rumpled gra.s.s, and the more Ophelia set and stared, the more she and Fran both saw. A pair of fox kits napping in under the laurel. A doe and a fawn peeling bark runners off of young trunks. Even a brown bear, still tufty with last winter's fur, nosing along the high ridge above the house. Fran knew what Ophelia must have been feeling. As if she were an interloper in some Eden. While Ophelia sat on the porch of that dangerous house, Fran curled inward on her couch, waves of heat pouring out of her. Her whole body shook so violently that her teeth rattled. Her spygla.s.ses fell to the floor. Maybe I am dying, Fran thought, and that is why Ophelia came here. Because the summer people need someone to look after their house. If I can't do it, then someone else must. Ophelia must.

Fran, feverish, went in and out of sleep, always listening for the sound of Ophelia coming back down. Perhaps she'd made a mistake and they wouldn't send down something to help. Perhaps they wouldn't send Ophelia back at all. Ophelia, with her pretty singing voice, that shyness, innate kindness. Her short hair, silvery blond. They liked things that were s.h.i.+ny. They were like magpies that way. In other ways, too.

But here was Ophelia, after all, her eyes enormous, her face all lit up like Christmas. ”Fran,” she said. ”Fran, wake up. I went there. I was bold! Who lives there, Fran?”

”The summer people,” Fran said. ”Did they give you anything for me?”

Ophelia set an object upon the counterpane. Like everything the summer people made, it was right pretty. A lipstick-size vial of pearly gla.s.s, an enameled green snake clasped around, its tail the stopper. Fran tugged at the tail, and the serpent uncoiled, unbottling the potion. A pole ran out the mouth and a silk rag unfurled. Embroidered upon it were these words: DRINK ME.

Ophelia watched this, her eyes glazed with too many marvels. ”I sat and waited and there were two fox kits! They came right up to the porch, and then went to the door and scratched at it until it opened. They trotted right inside and came out again. One came over to me then, with something in its jaw. It laid down that bottle right at my feet, and then they ran down the steps and into the woods. Fran, it was like a fairy tale.”

”Yes,” Fran said. She put her mouth to the mouth of the vial and drank down what was in it. It tasted sour and hot, like bottled smoke. She coughed, then wiped her mouth and licked the back of her hand.

”I mean, people say something is like a fairy tale all the time,” Ophelia said. ”And what they mean is that somebody falls in love and gets married. But that house, those animals, it really is a fairy tale. Who are they? The summer people?”

”That's what my daddy calls them,” Fran said. ”Except when he gets religious, he calls them devils come up to steal his soul. It's because they supply him with drink. But he weren't never the one who had to mind after them. That was my mother. And now she's gone and it's only ever me.”

”You take care of them?” Ophelia said. ”You mean like the Robertses?”

A feeling of tremendous well-being was was.h.i.+ng over Fran. Her feet were warm for the first time in what seemed like days, and her throat felt coated in honey and balm. Even her nose felt less raw and red. ”Ophelia?” she said.

”Yes, Fran?”

”I think I'm going to be much better,” Fran said. ”Which is something you done for me. You were brave and a true friend, and I'll have to think how I can pay you back.”

”I wasn't -” Ophelia protested. ”I mean, I'm glad I did. I'm glad you asked me. I promise I won't tell anyone.”