Afternoon of the Elves (9 page)

Hillary nodded.

“That's your father. He's dropped the screwdriver.”

However, this snowstorm, like many of its relatives, had no intention of being cast in the role of predictable, and shortly after ten o'clock it tapered off to a sprinkle, then stopped. The sky cleared. The air warmed. Sara-Kate's house, which had been hidden all morning behind curtains of falling snow, came into view before Hillary's anxious eyes. She'd been half afraid the place would vanish during the storm, whisking Sara-Kate from her grasp again.

She was out the door tramping eagerly toward the Connollys' yard before her father had finished plowing the front walk. But then, seeing that Sara-Kate was not yet there, she hung back by the hedge. After all that had happened, she felt shy about entering without an invitation. The snow rose over her knees in places and had changed the appearance of everything. It lay in an unblemished white blanket over the yard, concealing all but the trees and the largest bushes, and giving the open spaces a virtuous, barren look.

The rusty washing machine had become a gentle rise and fall in this soft-rolling landscape. The piles of car parts, the tires, the glass, the rotten wood and tin cans were smoothed away. The house itself looked more respectable surrounded by such tidiness and dressed in snow garlands along its gutters and windowsills. And finally, as if these gifts of cleanliness and order were not enough, the sun came out suddenly from behind the last snow cloud and hurled a dazzling light upon it all.

Hillary stepped back into the shade of the hedge and hooded her eyes with one hand. She was not impressed by the snow's transforming powers. Where, she wondered, was the elf village? Had it suffocated under all this heavy beauty?

While the yard shone with the brilliance of diamonds, Hillary's thoughts plunged like moles under the snow to the dirty, junky places she knew and trusted. And she had just about figured out where the Ferris wheel stood, invisible though it was, and the approximate location of the little houses, when Sara-Kate emerged and issued the invitation she'd been waiting for.

“Why are you standing there staring like an idiot?” Sara-Kate yelled in a most irritating and un-elf-like voice. “Come on. Let's get started!”

These words set what was to be the disconcertingly ordinary tone of the morning, for not once did Sara-Kate reveal a flicker of elf-ness. Though Hillary longed for another sign, though she dropped hints about “elf magic” and finally asked Sara-Kate point blank if the Ferris wheel would spin again, the thin girl did not respond. She pretended to have forgotten everything about the night before. It was a great disappointment until Hillary reflected how “elf-like” even this behavior was. How could Sara-Kate be expected to cast her invisibleness aside all at once? Naturally she would find it safer to appear and disappear like her smaller relatives, to show only parts of herself until Hillary had proven trustworthy.

“Which I will,” Hillary murmured with determination. “I will.”

After this, Hillary stopped looking for signs. And indeed, Sara-Kate continued to play her role so convincingly that the whole issue began to seem rather silly in the light of the day, so snowy and free from school. And there was so much to be done! The village had literally to be excavated, house by house, stone by stone, like the ruins of Pompeii. Everything was there somewhere, but where? And how were they to find it without stepping on it first?

They divided the area into four sections and worked each section carefully and thoroughly in turn. Once a house was discovered, the gentlest fingers were needed to free it from the snow. This was slow work. Even Sara-Kate's hands turned numb and achy and had to be thawed out with warm breath, and then held in her pockets for a while.

After a house was unearthed, its yard could be dug out more quickly with mittened hands. Sara-Kate borrowed one of Hillary's mittens. But the stones in the little stone walls were always getting in the way and being knocked around.

“Let's just put them in a pile for now. Then we can lay them down in the right places when the whole village is cleared out,” Sara-Kate suggested. “Also, all these leaf roofs have fallen apart and I was thinking that the elves might like wooden ones instead. There's a pile of wooden shingles under the back steps. Shall I get them out?”

Hillary nodded. She was working on a different problem.

“According to our calculations, the water well should be right about here,” she said, pointing to a patch of snow she had been probing with a stick. “But, it's not. What could've happened?”

They found out a moment later when Sara-Kate stepped back from the house she had been working on. A muffled crunch came from under her boot.

“Oh, no!”

“It's a house!” cried Hillary, rushing over to look.

“But how could it be? There aren't supposed to be any here.”

“And here's another!” exclaimed Hillary, just saving herself from putting her own foot on it.

Sara-Kate looked thoroughly alarmed.

“Wait a minute!” she said angrily. “Has somebody been building more elf houses in this yard while I wasn't here?” She gazed at Hillary, who shook her head.

“Then how could...”

“I know what it is,” Hillary said. “We've figured the village out wrong, that's all. Look, the rest of the houses lie under the snow in this direction, not up there where we were looking for the well. And that means the well must really be just ... about ... here.” She probed a patch of snow and nodded at Sara-Kate.

“It's here,” she confirmed.

Sara-Kate seemed relieved.

“Whew!” she said. “I thought maybe these houses were multiplying by themselves during the night.”

“Well, I suppose there's nothing to keep an elf from building more houses if she needs them, is there?” Hillary couldn't help saying. She sent one more meaningful look in Sara-Kate's direction but the older girl took no notice. She put her head down and started excavating the house she had stepped on. For the next half hour, no one spoke as the laborious work continued.

At last, however, the village began to emerge again. On all sides, dramatic peaks of snow towered over the little houses as a result of snow-removal operations. The peaks gave the village the cozy look of a hamlet nestled in the foothills of the mountains, though what the serious-minded elves would think of this, Hillary was not sure. Certainly, they would have more difficulty coming and going over the snowy terrain. Would they provide themselves with cross-country skis?

Hillary smiled at this thought. She was about to ask Sara-Kate for her views on the matter when she noticed her standing rigidly beyond the village, her face turned toward her house. She was looking at the window on the second floor, Hillary saw. Its shade had been drawn up. Some commotion was underway up there, a silent flutter behind the glass.

Hillary stepped forward and caught sight of Sara-Kate's face. It was as tense as a knotted fist, wholly absorbed in the action above.

Hillary took another step forward.

“Is it your mother?” she asked softly.

“Yes.”

“Is she still sick?”

“Yes.” Sara-Kate stared up at the window. “She wants me to come in.” She sounded tired.

“It's all right. Do you want me to go home?” Hillary asked her.

“I guess so.”

“All right.”

Sara-Kate sighed and turned to look at Hillary. There, in Hillary's face, she seemed to see something that interested her, something new and rather amazing if her expression told the truth.

Sara-Kate blinked. She folded her thin arms across her chest and examined the younger girl again.

“What is it?” Hillary said. She felt that she was standing in a spotlight. “Do you want me to do something?”

Sara-Kate looked at her. “My mother has been worse lately and she likes to have me stay near her,” she said. “Do you have any money?”

“I could get some,” Hillary said.

Sara-Kate stared at her.

“Without telling anyone,” Hillary added quickly.

“We are out of things,” Sara-Kate told her. “My mother likes coffee and milk. And sugar. We need bread and some kind of fruit. She likes fruit.”

A moment of silence rose between them. Hillary glanced up at the window over their heads, but she couldn't see anything. She looked back at Sara-Kate.

“What else?” she asked the small, tense figure before her.

“Whatever.” Sara-Kate shrugged. “Anything. It doesn't matter.”

“Should I go to the store?” Hillary asked.

“Yes.”

“Should I go right now?”

“Yes,” Sara-Kate said. “If you can get some money.”

Without another word, Hillary turned and began to go home. She walked steadily, in a dignified way, until she reached the hedge. Once through it, though, out of sight of Sara-Kate, she started to run.

Not even in her wildest dreams would Hillary have done the things she now did if Sara-Kate had not asked her. Never would she have thought of doing them or, after planning, have carried them out with such a cold, clear mind.

In the next hour she would lie to her mother, she would steal twice, she would walk alone down forbidden streets, and transact business in a grocery store with the composure of an adult.

“It was no trouble at all,” she would tell Sara-Kate afterwards, handing over the bag of groceries in the Connollys' kitchen. It was almost the truth. Hillary had never been so proud to be trusted with a mission in her life.

“What did you tell your mother?”

“I didn't tell her anything. She was upstairs. I took a ten-dollar bill from her wallet on the counter. Then I called up to her and said you'd invited me for lunch.”

Sara-Kate grinned. “That must have surprised her.”

“It did.”

She'd run out the kitchen door before her mother could protest. She'd gone through the hedge into Sara-Kate's yard, then around the house to the street in front. Most sidewalks weren't shoveled yet so she'd walked on the slushy side of the road. She knew the way from her trips with Sara-Kate and she wasn't afraid, not even when a car honked at her for being too far out from the curb.

In fact, she'd felt the opposite of fear: a slow-rising excitement. The day was so bright, the snow was so deep. There was a lawlessness in the air, a sense of regular rules not applying, of their being cancelled, like school. Cars nosed along the streets in a bumbling way, avoiding drifts and stranded vehicles. Children waded like penguins through gleaming white yards, or built snow forts, or sucked on porch icicles. Office workers who should have been at their desks hours ago shoveled their driveways lazily and talked to their neighbors. It was all so breathtaking, so free and easy, that Hillary wanted to kick up her heels and turn cartwheels in the street. But she kept herself on course, kept her face blank. She knew that she was more lawless than anything in that day and must not draw attention to herself.

“That will be $13.05 please.”

“$13.05!” Hillary looked into the unsmiling face of the man behind the cash register. “But I only have ten dollars.”

“Then you'll have to put something back.”

“But, I can't! I promised I'd ...”

The man sighed, rolled his eyes, and leaned toward her over the counter.

“I guess it'll have to be the bologna,” Hillary said quickly.

She hated to give it up, though. The bologna was Hillary's idea of something extra that Mrs. Connolly might like. Meat was good for you. It made you strong. She'd retraced her steps to the cold-cuts case to put the package back but in the end the place she put it was in her pocket.

“Lucky the pockets in this jacket are big,” she said to Sara-Kate in the kitchen, though she still quaked inside to think of what she had done.

Sara-Kate glanced at her. “You have to be careful of the mirrors,” she said. “They have mirrors high up in the corners that can show what you're doing.”

It was her way of saying thank you, and Hillary answered with a nod. She knew they were speaking a special language now, and more than that, that she had passed a test and been ushered through a secret door. Next, Sara-Kate asked, rather formally because they were coming together so fast: “Please stay. I'll be right back.”

She took the paper bag and went upstairs. The electric stove in the middle of the room had been turned on. Faint waves of heat came across the cold floor from the oven's mouth. Hillary walked over and sat in one of the armchairs in the strange room-within-a-room. Now she could see why it was arranged as it was. The old stove wasn't powerful enough to heat the whole room, but if you stayed near it, you could be warm. The fan on the stove was working. It blew the heat toward her in a soft, pleasant way, as it was intended to do, she guessed.

Hillary took off her boots. They were wet inside from her hike through the snow. She sat back in the chair. She leaned her head against the chair's padded interior and thought how exciting it was to be here, on this most unusual island in the midst of the everyday world. All around the Connollys' house, the town honked and bumped, clanked and thudded, without an inkling of the secrets held within. It gave Hillary a delicious feeling to be sitting in such a private place, to have come through the ordinary face of things into Sara-Kate's hidden world. She stretched her hands out toward the oven's warmth and waited for her friend to come back.

In a little while, she heard the tread of boots on the stairs. Then Sara-Kate appeared, still carrying the paper bag.

“Is your mother all right?” Hillary asked, jumping up.