Afternoon of the Elves (12 page)

“No. I don't. I don't think anything except that Sara-Kate loved the village and she'd want me to take care of it while she's away,” Hillary replied quickly.

She went every day to the Connollys' house and watched and listened to everything that happened.

A repairman came to fix the furnace. A telephone man came to reconnect the phone. The dead insects were swept off the dining-room floor by a gang of housecleaners who also made short work of the dust, the cobwebs, the grime in the bathrooms—none of which were working, they reported. It was a shame and a scandal. So the plumber was called to install new pipes, and the electrician was called to rewire the circuits, and a roof man came to fix a hole in the roof.

“Please be careful where you step,” Hillary advised these workmen when they entered the yard. She crouched next to the Ferris wheel and placed an arm around it.

“See those little houses over there? See the pool? See the paths?” She pointed with her free hand. Yes, yes, they saw, grinning and winking like mischievous boys. The electrician cringed playfully:

“Is there something magic that lives here, then?”

“There might be. Who knows?” Hillary answered coldly.

“Should we be afraid of being changed into toads?”

“Only if you step on things,” Hillary replied, glaring at him as she was sure Sara-Kate would have done. The plumber's work boots looked shockingly familiar.

Hillary could stand guard over the elf village but she could not protect Sara-Kate from the things that people continued to say about her. She could not stop the whispered stories, the mean remarks. Even the newspaper, which Hillary had always thought of as an unbiased reporter of hard fact, came out with the oddest article.

“Is this story really about the Connollys?” she asked her mother. “Because Sara-Kate wasn't keeping her mother prisoner the way it says here. She was taking care of her when no one else could. And she was never ‘dirty and dressed in rags.' Sara-Kate washed her clothes and her mother's clothes, too. She folded them carefully in the laundromat. I helped. She was always clean and the house didn't ‘reek of garbage' either. It was just empty and dusty and strange. I was there. I saw everything.”

Mrs. Lenox shook her head. “Are you sure,” she asked Hillary, “that you were seeing everything clearly? Or were you just seeing what Sara-Kate told you to see?”

“No. No!” Hillary protested, but even as she spoke old doubts about Sara-Kate sifted into her mind and she found herself shouting to drive them back: “I know what I saw!”

“Well, whatever was going on down there I'm certainly glad I found you when I did,” Mrs. Lenox said firmly, “or what would Sara-Kate have dragged you into next? Running her errands around town? Lying and stealing?”

Hillary flushed and lowered her eyes.

“We all feel sorry for Sara-Kate,” her mother went on. “She's had a bad time. But have you ever wondered why she chose you for her friend? Why couldn't she have found someone her own age? Are you sure she really cared about you, Hillary? Or were you just someone who was useful to have around?”

“I think she cared about me
and
thought I was useful,” Hillary said, with an angry upward glance, though suddenly she wasn't sure at all. She remembered how easily Sara-Kate had lied to her mother in the Connollys' kitchen. She thought of the older girl's secretiveness, her bursts of rage, her unexplained disappearances. Was it possible that she had not seen Sara-Kate clearly?

At school, the newspaper story fueled a new round of rumors and opinions:

Sara-Kate was a sad, misguided creature who'd been caught in circumstances beyond her understanding.

Sara-Kate was a sharp-eyed, street-wise kid who'd steal the coat off your back if you let her near you.

Sara-Kate was a nut. Hadn't she starved her mother half to death and refused to ask for help?

Sara-Kate was going to a reformatory. No, she wasn't. She was going to Kansas on a plane.

“To Kansas?” Hillary murmured in disbelief. She couldn't see what was true and what was not. There was no higher authority announcing, “This is the final truth!” The more Hillary heard about Sara-Kate, the farther away she went. Her small, thin figure was disappearing behind a screen of opinions and facts and newspaper stories, leaving Hillary in a place as dim as the rooms of the Connollys' house. She was in a land of the unknown and the unknowable, she thought, a black land where not even her parents could help her.

“I am the only one who can decide about Sara-Kate,” she whispered to the little elf houses in the Connollys' backyard. “Oh, if she would just come home.”

The village comforted her. She kneeled in its midst, repairing roofs, straightening walls, while around her the wonderful yard that had sheltered the tiny community was invaded, laid open to strangers' eyes, littered with the workmen's debris. Its privacy and secrecy evaporated as Hillary watched, and was replaced by the cheapness and indifference of a run-down city park.

“If only Sara-Kate would come out her back door with her usual shout: ‘Let's get going!' Then there would be no worry about what to do or what to believe. Then we could start all over again just being friends,” Hillary whispered to the village that huddled like a real village at the feet of real snow mountains.

“Is it true that Sara-Kate left yesterday on a plane with her relatives?” Hillary asked her mother one afternoon, after school.

“I think it's true,” Mrs. Lenox said, looking up from the potato she was peeling for dinner.

“She never came back to say goodbye. She never called.”

“Well, I suppose there wasn't time in the end.”

“I think she hates me because I'm the one who got her caught.”

“No, no! Of course not! It wasn't your fault. It was no one's fault,” Mrs. Lenox cried, running across the kitchen to hug her. But Hillary turned away with tears in her eyes.

In the dark winter days that followed, what Hillary missed most about Sara-Kate, oddly enough, were the very things that had made her so difficult to get along with: her sharp remarks and clear, cold eye. Beside Sara-Kate's crisp manner, beside her quickness and lightness, the girls at school seemed slow and heavy. In fat-faced groups they clumped through the halls, weighted down with fashion clothes and expensive book bags. They pouted and complained, gossiped and giggled, and Hillary watched as if she'd never seen such behavior before, as if she'd never belonged to such a group. She was outside all groups now, but not because she was excluded. Everyone was being rather nice to her, actually.

Her teachers asked after her health. People smiled at her in the halls. Jane and Alison were always putting their arms around her, guiding her toward private nooks where they could whisper together.

“Don't worry if you still feel a little bad about Sara-Kate,” Jane said. “She was even worse than we thought, and she got you tied up in complete knots.”

“My mother says it would take anyone a little while to get over something like this,” Alison added, patting Hillary's hand. “It's not that you were stupid and fell for all the lies Sara-Kate told you, even though you did. It's that Sara-Kate was so terrible. Imagine going to the trouble of cooking up that elf village—”

“Which we finally went over and saw after she left,” Jane interrupted. “It's no big deal as far as I'm concerned.”

“Me either,” Alison said. “And then imagine her making up that whole complicated world of elves, down to the tiniest details of what they like to do and what they like to eat.”

“How did you find out about that?” Hillary asked angrily.

“Your mother told our mothers,” Jane said. “Don't worry. We understand. We don't blame you at all. It wasn't fair to pick on someone so much younger. We blame Sara-Kate.”

“Well, I blame you!” Hillary suddenly found herself yelling at them. “For not understanding one thing that happened. I blame you and I blame everybody in this whole dumb school!”

Not that she understood any better. She didn't. It was what made her so angry at them all, so angry at Sara-Kate, too, when she let herself admit it. If not for the fragile village, which day by day seemed more endangered by the yard, Hillary might have turned her back on everything. She might have walked away up the hill to her own house and shut the door for good.

Why had Sara-Kate left the village behind anyway? she thought crossly. If Sara-Kate cared for it so much, if it was really the magic place she'd pretended, why hadn't she taken it with her, or dismantled it and hidden it in some safer spot? Sara-Kate had gone without a word about the village, as if the place meant nothing and Hillary was nothing, too.

And yet, even as Hillary accused Sara-Kate, another way of looking came into her mind. She had only to approach the village for her bitter arguments to be grasped and whirled around, to be turned inside out by invisible forces. Couldn't it be argued, for instance, that Sara-Kate had left the village behind on purpose? Suppose she had left it as a present for Hillary, or as a sign of friendship. Perhaps it was meant to be a message of sorts, the very message that Hillary longed to receive: “Goodbye. I am all right. I'll stay in touch.” To be around the village was certainly to find oneself, willy-nilly, in touch with Sara-Kate. She might no longer be there “in person,” but she was there, Hillary discovered.

From her post beside the Ferris wheel, she watched the workmen come and go through the back door that only Sara-Kate had used before. Through the kitchen window, she saw a team of men move the stove back against the wall. How had Sara-Kate ever moved it in the first place? she wondered.

(“Elves are strong. And magic,” she heard Sara-Kate say in her ear.)

Hillary began to recognize certain real-estate brokers who came to direct house improvements, and she invited herself inside with them to look at the improvements close up: new tile on the kitchen floor; new counter tops; a door for the oven, and new burners. These things were certainly better than the shabby little room-within-a-room that was there before. And yet, there had been something wonderful about that other room, Hillary thought, something in the way the furniture had been taken apart and put together again so strangely. It was as if an entirely different sort of brain were at work behind it.

(“Strange and little!” Hillary heard Sara-Kate's angry voice say again. “If you were an elf you wouldn't feel strange or little. You'd feel like a normal, healthy elf.”)

A sale of house furniture and goods was announced and a women's group came to polish up the few remaining tables and chairs. Then people arrived to prowl and buy. Hillary prowled with them. She saw Sara-Kate's hot plates being sold, one to a bearded man with a limp, the other to a woman wearing bedroom slippers instead of shoes.

An oriental gentleman with a small and oddly elf-like figure bought the electric fan. He tested it first by lighting matches in its airstream. Then he picked the fan up and shook it like a stubborn catsup bottle. What on earth was he going to use it for? Hillary wondered.

(“Why do you think these elves are anything like you?” she heard Sara-Kate ask. “Maybe they're so different that nothing they do is anything like what you do.”)

Often on her visits inside the Connollys' house, Hillary went upstairs and down the hall. She walked into the second-floor room where Sara-Kate and her mother had lived during the very cold weather, where they had hidden when Mrs. Connolly had grown too ill to be left alone and Sara-Kate had stayed with her.

It was empty now, of course. Everything had been taken downstairs to be sold. But those four blank walls still held a glimmer of enchantment for Hillary. She remembered how the door had seemed to bulge with light, how near she had felt to the elves' magic. There were other explanations for the magic, now. There are always other explanations for magic, Hillary thought.