A Fistful of Sky (24 page)

It felt good. No, great. I could get addicted to this. I listened to my slow, deliberate breathing and paid attention to how the tightness loosened in my shoulders, how contentment filled me as the tension left. “All right,” she murmured what felt like a long time later. She squeezed my hand and released it.

I opened my eyes.

At our feet, white marble gleamed.

I crawled over to look at it.

The steps were rough instead of smooth, with faint chisel marks still on them. The railing was delicate Gothic fretwork, all marble. No way did this match the house in color or style, but who saw the backyard besides the family? The stairs looked safe. Even wet, they wouldn’t be slippery, because of the roughness. They glittered in the hazy sun.

I looked over my shoulder at Altria. “Beautiful,” I said. “Thanks. Thanks.”

She smiled and cocked her head. “Now are you going to let me suck your brain?”

I laughed and lay back on the lawn, feeling boneless and utterly relaxed, cursed out and clean. Birds chirped and fluttered among the bread, tasting here and there. A scrub jay landed on a loaf of wheat bread not five feet from my head. It squawked at me.

“Gyp?” Jasper yelled from the house.

Altria and I looked that way.

“I’d better go,” she said.

“You’ll come when I call you?”

“Probably. Promise me energy and I’ll come for sure.”

“Thanks again for coming this time.”

“My pleasure.” She got to her feet, dusted off her dress.

“Hey! Gyp!” Jasper was on the porch now.

“Wrong,” said Altria, and melted.

I rolled over and sat up, then stood so he could see me over ambient bread. “Hi,” I said.

He jumped over bread and came to me. “What—” He glanced to the side where Altria had stood before she disappeared, then back at me. “What?”

“Look.” I pointed to the staircase.

His eyebrows rose.

“She built it using my energy. I thought I better figure out how to fix all the things I ruined. That’s my start.”

“Pretty good. It looks different. Nice rock.”

“I hope Mama likes it.” I straightened. “Is Aunt Hermina all right?”

“She’s getting over it.”

“Did I burn her?”

“No. She’s not physically hurt. She’s mad about a lot of things, though. What the computer did, what it made her do, ruined her research, stuff she’d been working on for years. Those plants are no longer things she can propagate and sell to nurseries. And she’s mad because the computer is gone, go figure. She has a couple disks, and she hopes her work is still on them, but they kind of got buried under plantlife so it’s hard to tell if they’ll be usable. She’s in Dad’s study trying them in his computer right now.”

I wrapped my arms around myself, hunched my shoulders. Maybe I could curse myself mute and then I wouldn’t be able to curse anymore. I could sink down silently into Aunt Meta’s fate. Eat myself up from the inside.

“Let’s try the stairs,” Jasper said.

I sighed.

We walked down the stairs one step at a time. I couldn’t rid myself of the conviction that these stairs would be cursed too. Would they throw anybody who walked down them? Tip you over, send you sailing? My power, Altria’s direction, what was I thinking?

I navigated the stairs with no problem, and so did Jasper. We walked out into the orchard to check them out.

There were the weather-stained and venerable retaining walls holding up the upper terrace, and there was the gleaming white staircase, shining in front of them like something Photo-shopped into a background where it didn’t belong. The mellow ochre walls of the house beyond,

the glossy green of the orange tree’s leaves, the dark shingled roof. And that glowing staircase.

It was a beautiful staircase.

“Altria?” I didn’t realize I had said her name aloud until I heard it.

She stood beside me and studied the view. Then she laughed. “Well, you said white.”

“Yeah.”

She put her hands on my shoulders. “Hmm. A bit of buildup already, just after I drained you. We can fix it.”

“Okay.”

She hugged me from behind, her arms around my waist, her chin on my shoulder. “Close your eyes.”

I closed my eyes. I felt the movement of power from me into her, from her into air. Jasper gasped.

“All right,” said Altria.

I opened my eyes. The staircase was now golden marble veined with black, and it melted into the view, an organic part of the whole. “Much better,” I said. “Thank you.”

“Let’s do different work next time. Something lively!”

“I’ll see.”

“Sounds like a no to me. So I’ll just take this.” She skimmed her hand across my shoulders, pulled tension out that I hadn’t even noticed, and vanished.

“At first I thought the filtering effect would only work with Flint,” I said, “but I think it works just fine with her, too.” We headed toward the staircase, climbed the steps. They worked just like steps.

“She uses your energy for anything she likes. Once it gets one step removed, it’s not your problem anymore. I wonder what she is. She took energy from me and used it, too. But then she kind of gave it back. Is she a vampire?”

“Maybe.” None of the standard vampire rules seemed to apply. She could run around in broad daylight. What she was sucking wasn’t exactly blood. Was she a parasite or a symbiote? “Probably not. But I don’t know what she is.”

“Oh, I forgot. You got a phone message from Phil.”

“What?”

“That’s why I was looking for you. Phil left you a message. Says

everybody has the flu and he really needs you to work this afternoon.”

I groaned. It wasn’t even eleven yet and I’d been up for hours. I had attacked and demoralized half my family, and the other half had attacked and demoralized me. Now Phil wanted me to come to work? When I kept collecting curse power? “I better call him and tell him I’m really sick, too.”

“He sounded desperate.”

“He’d be worse off if I went to work with all this uncontrolled power. Look what happened to Aunt Hermes!”

Jasper frowned. “Maybe you could take Flint with you. Things get desperate, Twinkie attack!”

“Flint has a job tonight. Anyway, he’s retired from helping me. I burned him bad last time. I’ll see what I can do.” I dug a loaf of dill rye and a loaf of sourdough bread out of a pile the birds hadn’t pecked down very far yet and took them into the house.

In the kitchen, I put the bread in the bread box, then grabbed the phone and called work.

As soon as Phil recognized my voice, he said, “How sick are you?”

“If I’m contagious, nobody else on Earth wants to catch this,” I said.

“How contagious could you be? I thought you got hit hard last weekend, but you came to work on Monday. Are you saying you’ve had a relapse?”

“Same sickness, different symptoms.”

“Can you walk? Can you talk? Can you think semi-straight? Look, Gyp, chances are nobody will come in looking for a tutor, but you’re my last shot at getting someone to actually be here the required hours. My plane leaves at 3:30—Mary and I are flying up to San Francisco to spend Christmas with the kids—so I have to get out of here by one, and Anita’s got to leave on the dot of four. Could you please, please come in at ten minutes to four?”

“Anita can’t just close down the Center?”

Phil muttered something. “I’d consider it service above and beyond the call of duty if you could manage to come in today, and close up tonight. You’d build up some nice brownie points. You can close the Center at six; that’s when the rest of campus is closing. Can you manage two hours?”

“All right,” I squeaked.

“Thank you. That wasn’t so hard, was it?”

If I planned it just right—cursed something right before I left, maybe

brought something to curse—if nobody showed up looking for help—This wasn’t going to work. I could tell already.

“Merry Christmas,” I said to my boss.

“You have a merry Christmas, too,” he said.

We both hung up.

The phone rang. I picked it up. “Hello?”

“Gypsum! Just who I wanted to talk to! Hi, this is Ian.”

“Hi, Ian.”

“You busy tonight?”

I covered the transmitter with my hand and sighed. Then I took my hand off. “I’m working until six, and then I have to go curse something. After that I’m free for a couple hours, maybe. What did you have in mind?”

“You have to go curse something?”

“Did I say that?” I said weird things to Ian all the time just to see what would happen. He didn’t know that any of it was true. Sure, he knew Claire, and he had met Claire’s mother. July never kept it a secret that she was a practicing witch, but she never kept it a secret that she wasn’t very good at it, either. You could know July, hear her talk about this stuff, and just think she was a flaky Californian, even if you saw her do craftwork. She did get things right. But then she was always surprised by it. And the sorts of things she got right were things that might have happened anyway, like getting something to bloom or summoning up a little nice weather so she could take a walk.

So, because I made these absurd statements, there was a chance that Ian believed I, too, was a flaky Californian. Last week at this time there wasn’t even the possibility that he’d seen me do anything outre, and I hadn’t introduced him to my mother. We were much more secretive about our practices than July was.

But somehow, when I talked to Ian, I just said things. Maybe because I couldn’t believe this guy, and I didn’t understand him. He’d spent time with me. Unlike every other guy I’d met, he kept coming back for more. Why? Whatever courtship signals were, I didn’t send them; I knew chat much, so what did Ian see in me that no one else did? He baffled me. At the same time, it was kind of exhilarating to just run my mouth around someone who wasn’t in my family. I said, “It’s like a tic. I have to curse things every once in a while. You don’t want to be around when that’s

going on.”

“When you curse things, what does it involve? Is it like Tourette’s? Do you just say nasty things to them? Display your vocabulary and your imagination? I’d love to see that.”

“No, I really curse them. I curse them to fall apart or grow too fast or rot. Actually, I just got this power, so I don’t know what I’m doing yet, but I have to do something.”

“I’d love to see that, too.”

“But Ian—I mean, what if I cursed you by mistake?”

“Is it fatal?”

“Not so far.”

“Is it permanent?”

“I’m still exploring that part. Sometimes it wears off after, uh—” what had the computer said? “—six point seven hours. Sometimes it lasts, but that seems to be when I combine it with something else.”

“Six point seven hours,” he said thoughtfully. “So, say,

you curse me at six-thirty, by one-twelve, I’m back to normal?” “You can do math? With minutes?” For some reason this made me mad.

“It’s a tic,” he said.

I laughed. “Can you pick me up at the Learning Center at six?” I didn’t want to drive. Too used to cussing out other drivers—I didn’t want to do anything automatic where the consequences could be dire. I was hoping I could get someone to drop me off this afternoon, but I hadn’t figured out how to get home afterward. Catch a bus? What if I got mad at other passengers? I hadn’t used the bus system enough to know if that was something I would do. Ask someone to pick me up? I wondered how busy Jasper was.

If Ian could pick me up, I wouldn’t have to bother my brother. But what was I going to do about Ian and curses? What if I cursed him, for real, and he hated me?

Unless I gave up my power, it was going to be part of me for the rest of my life. I wasn’t reconciled to giving up the power, especially when I didn’t know who to give it to. I guessed I might as well test my friendships with it, because sooner or later, they’d be bumping up against it.

Later I might have better control. Later might be better.

But where did that leave me now? Here he was, asking to meet me, and I’d agreed. Cancel now? On the off-chance I could learn how to handle myself and we could try again later? Or just go with it and see what happened? I’d already told him what was going on.

He said, “Six would be okay.”

“So what was it you had in mind for this evening, anyway?” I asked.

“I’ve changed my mind. Since you’ll be at the beach anyway, how about a stroll along the breakwater at dusk, and some kind of seafood? There’s a couple nice restaurants down there.”

“Is this, like, an actual date-type thing?” Part of what baffled me about Ian’s approach was that he invited me to things, and I thought, Is this a date? Only it was things like going to a movie with him and five friends, or going to a concert with Claire, or there’s a new exhibit at the Natural History Museum, want to meet there and take a look? I asked three other people to come, so we’ll have someone to discuss it with. Or there’s a Sing Your Own Messiah at Grace Lutheran tonight, want to go sing? We both like singing four-part music, and besides, Susie and Janet and George will be there.

He never picked me up, and he never took me home. We always went with company.

I always had a good time. There were always moments when Ian and I wandered around alone with each other, and I got a chance to say stupid things, and he responded with wild claims about his own family, who lived in Idaho and never came to California.

I had such a crush on him.

“I mean, is it going to turn out that you bring about six friends and we have a lovely time, only I have to curse them since they’re there, and I turn them all into statues, or something, and then you never call me again?”

“Uh,” he said.

“Not that I’d mind if you brought friends. Except—no, maybe I would mind. I have to tell you that up front this time, because when I’m irritated, I bet the curses work out even worse.”

“Urn.”

“I mean, Ian, I only got this power Wednesday night, and I really don’t know what I’m doing yet. Some of the results have been horrible.”

For a minute he didn’t say anything. Then he said, “I’ll come alone.”

“Good.”

Neither of us spoke.

“See you later,” I said at last.

“Later.”