Read Child of a Rainless Year Online
Authors: Jane Lindskold
Child of a Rainless Year (46 page)
“No, I don’t believe that,” Mikey said. “What I think is more likely is that Phineas House, well, put the idea in his head. It must have been aware of fire, given the number of times its rival the Montezuma burned.”
“You mean Domingo was the House’s puppet? If it wanted puppets, why wouldn’t it use the silent women?”
“Domingo may have been a puppet, though it is hard for me to imagine the House having the volition to actually control a living person. As for the silent women, they are extensions of the House’s desire to serve its inhabitants. Without inhabitants, I suspect they do not fully manifest.”
“So what do you think happened?”
“I think what happened was in between Domingo being a deliberate arsonist and being the House’s puppet. I think the House dreamed and Domingo shared those dreams. Eventually, Domingo acted on those dreams. When you think about it, the fires were all quite like fires Domingo would set. They were well-planned, no one was hurt, no surrounding property was hurt. The only thing that happened was an obstruction to the House’s perfection was removed.”
“I don’t like it,” I protested. “Domingo is a builder, not a destroyer.”
“But he’ll rip out old wood that’s grown weak or rotten to put in new. He’ll tear out weeds that are choking his plants. Really, there’s not a lot of difference between the destroying and building—at least from the point of view of the weeds.”
I glowered at Mikey. “You aren’t going to talk to Domingo about this—not without a lot more proof than you’ve given me.”
“That is why I wanted to speak with you about the matter,” Mikey said with deceptive mildness. “I wanted your opinion on how to handle the matter.”
“You won’t bring it up,” I repeated stubbornly. “I don’t care if your theory is correct—and I don’t know if it is—or not. This is slander of the worst possible type.”
Mikey held up his hands in a gesture of surrender.
“As you wish, Mira, as you wish. I will not speak a single word on the matter, but I felt I had to tell you. Aldo Pincas created more than he imagined when he had Phineas House built. None of us really understand it or what it is capable of.”
I heard the warning in Mikey’s words, and nodded stiffly to acknowledge it.
“Fine. But we say nothing of this to Domingo. Nothing.”
Hellerer describes a sensation of literally feeling herself ″in″ time, moving
inside
an hour or a day, walking within a week, looking behind her at the ″smaller″ previous days or weeks as they recede in the distance.
—Patricia Lynne Duffy,
Blue Cats and Chartreuse Kittens
Saturday’s kaleidoscope, the one holding the leaden mirrors of Saturn, wasn’t cased in lead—as Venus had been in copper or Jupiter in tin—a fact for which I was grateful since I was going to be handling it. Nor was the tube dull grey. I guess after iron, tin, and silver, Colette had wearied of that hue. Instead, the casing was thick enamel that flowed like watered silk through all the shades of yellow, from sunny brilliance to the pale tint found in the inner petals of grass flowers.
But what first caught the eye was not the yellow casing, but the elaborate object chamber. A handblown sphere had been filled with golden-orange liquid in which glitter in the same shades had been suspended. The sphere was ringed around with flat pieces of enameled metal, richly colored after the fashion of Saturn’s shifting rings. I’d been too overwhelmed the first time I’d inspected the cabalistic kaleidoscopes to think about the artistry of this piece, but now I took time to give it the appreciation it deserved.
Saturday midmorning once again found Mikey Hart and I in the downstairs front parlor. I sat in the window seat that had been my favorite when I was a child, feeling still some of the same sheltered protectedness of the spot. I needed that feeling, for I realized I was scared stiff to look through the eyepiece and see what the kaleidoscope might reveal.
Mikey patiently waited out my fidgeting, then said, “Well, Mira, how well does lead reflect?”
It was exactly the right question to ask me, for it engaged my curiosity. I knew I’d glanced through the lens at least once, but the impressions were intermingled with impressions from the others I’d inspected that day. Hard as I tried to remember, I couldn’t recall how the lead mirrors had managed to act as reflectors.
I lifted the kaleidoscope to my eye and turned toward the window, discovering as I did so that within Saturn’s sphere, when light reflects off of lead, it becomes gold, golden light breaking into nearly monochrome mandalas.
Sunflakes,
I thought,
like snowflakes, sparkling with color, singing with light. It wasn’t like this before, I’m sure I’d remember if it had been. I guess this means it’s ready to be used for scrying.
I thought,
like snowflakes, sparkling with color, singing with light. It wasn’t like this before, I’m sure I’d remember if it had been. I guess this means it’s ready to be used for scrying.
I gasped as a particularly beautiful sunflake took form, and reflexively started to lower the kaleidoscope so Mikey could have a look. In my peripheral vision I saw him making shooing motions.
“You keep it, Mira. Take a good look. This is the one that is supposed to reveal lost articles and secrets. Lost a sock lately or maybe your glasses? This is the time to find them.”
I didn’t wear glasses, and a sock had hardly touched my foot through New Mexico’s warm summer. I knew Mikey was teasing me. I was surrounded with puzzles and secrets enough, including and especially the mystery of wherever it was that Colette had gone when she vanished.
But was a person a lost object? I didn’t know, and maybe I was just a little fearful of what I might find out. After all, what if she was dead? Would I see her corpse in a grave? Her ashes scattered on the winds? Her bones gnawed by scavengers spread about some isolated arroyo?
Instead I concentrated instead on learning one of Colette’s secrets, focusing with all my might on finding the solution to the question I had never asked her.
“Who is my father?” I thought—or maybe I said it aloud. I don’t really know. “Who is he or was he?”
I turned the kaleidoscope in my hand, peering through the golden mandalas, watching them shift and change until I felt drawn into a blizzard of golden light. The golden light was easy on my eyes, not in the least harsh or glaring. My earlier fear slowly ebbed, exhilaration taking its place as I walked, penetrating deeper and deeper into the glittering field, catching sunflakes on my tongue and listening to their bell-like chime as they fell in drifts about my feet.
Gradually, I became aware of an intrusion into the omnipresent golden light, something in shades of grey and black, a rhomboid shape, nearly square, flat and two-dimensional. I moved toward it as the one anomaly in the golden haze. I’d forgotten to concentrate on a question, forgotten everything but my pleasure in my surroundings. So it was that I was rather surprised to be confronted with a photograph framed in a stolid walnut frame: a head and shoulders shot of a man who was staring into the camera with a stern and solemn expression.
The man depicted within was young—in his mid-twenties, perhaps—but had about him a sense of stolidity. You didn’t need to look at him for long to know that for all his youthful leanness, he would be stout and stodgy come middle age. He wore his hair in a stiff brush-back. His face was adorned with a thin, somehow military seeming mustache, though he didn’t wear a uniform, but instead what seemed to be a suit with an old-fashioned stiff collar.
Now I remembered the question that I had carried with me into the golden mandalas and I asked aloud in pure amazement, “That’s my father? I don’t believe it!”
The golden light went ruddy, as if flushing with anger, but then paled again into more comfortable hues. The photo in the frame changed, showing the same man in successive images, each slightly older than the last. The man’s hair receded, his figure broadened, his expression grew sterner and more selfconfident. He wore glasses or the vague expression of someone who is accustomed to glasses but has put them by for vanity’s sake.
The photos were never candid, and always focused on the head, so that I could see little of the man’s costume, but from what I could see, it always remained formal, the style old-fashioned. The photos themselves seemed old-fashioned, though I was pressed to say why. Good photography is something I admire, but have never pursued, perhaps because I so much enjoy creating with my hands.
Then abruptly, the sequence ended with a picture that showed this man—my father—no older than maybe forty, and I was willing to bet younger than that. I continued to stare at the frame, and the golden light obliged by beginning the sequence once more. This time I garnered a few more details, including a strong sense that the man’s hair was probably dark blond or light brown, that his eyes were also light, grey maybe or pale blue.
After this second showing, the frame lost cohesion, its browns, blacks, and greys breaking into minute particles that dispersed into the surrounding golden light until they were lost. Then the blizzard in which I had so joyfully ventured began to cohere and solidify, becoming again the sunflake mandalas, and I was aware again of my body sitting on the window seat, my feet curled beneath me, my back leaning against the wooden window alcove.
I lowered the kaleidoscope, too confused to even feel tired. Mikey set down the book he had been reading, an action that made me feel certain I had been walking amid the sunflakes for a long while.
“Well?” Mikey asked. “You were entranced for quite a while—well over an hour. Except for two things, you said very little.”
“What did I say?” I asked, carefully setting the kaleidoscope on a nearby table and rising. I was certainly stiff enough to have been sitting motionless for an hour or more.
“The first thing was mumbled,” Mikey said, “but I caught the word ‘father.’ The second was rather more clear. You said in complete astonishment ‘That’s my father? I don’t believe it!’ Then you fell silent again, right up until now.”
I walked over to where a pitcher of iced water, the ice nearly melted now, had been set on a tray. I poured myself a tumbler full, taking delight in the deep reds of the glass, using them to draw myself back into a world other than one filled with golden light.
Mikey waited with astonishing patience, but then he probably had experience with this disconnected feeling, the feeling that nothing around you is as vivid as the images moving in your mind’s eye.
“I saw,” I said at last, “a picture frame, and in it the image of a man in his mid-twenties.”
I described the man as best as I could, including in my description how, after I had expressed doubt the image had shifted, showing the same man at various ages.
“You say the images stopped when he was maybe forty?”
“Forty or a bit younger,” I concurred. “I thought forty at first because he seemed so, well, stolid. The second time through, I looked more carefully. He had lines on his face, at the corners of his mouth and near his eyes, one between his brow, but none of them were at all deeply graven. They were almost protolines, showing where he would have deep lines in another ten years. Know what I mean?”
Mikey nodded, touching his own face where habitual expressions were deeply etched. “I do indeed. Now, remember, sunscreen and moisturizers are modem obsessions. A man of your mother’s generation not only wouldn’t have had access to them, he probably would have shunned them as unmanly if he did. Then there’s the question of lighting. Photographers didn’t always have access to bright lighting. The man in the pictures might have been older than you think, the lines on his face recorded more softly than today’s unforgiving cameras are likely to do.”
I shook my head. “You’re right, Mikey, but I think I’ve got the age right. It’s just a feeling, which isn’t much to go on, but still …”
Mikey’s nod acknowledged the potential validity of my feelings. “I wonder why you were shown static images rather than the man himself.”
“You know perfectly well why,” I said, “but are too kind to say so. Obviously, the man is dead. My guess is that the first image was from the year I was bom—remember I asked to see ‘my father’ not Colette’s husband or lover—and that would be the year he became my father. Only after I protested did the other images appear, almost like annual shots right up until the year of his death.”
“I don’t suppose,” Mikey said, “you recognized him.”
“No,” I started pacing, aware even as I did so that my body ached with a preternatural fatigue. “I didn’t. I’ll tell you something else that puzzles me even more than that. He didn’t seem at all Colette’s type.”
“Type?”
“You’d know if you’d seen the pictures,” I said, “especially since you knew Colette. This man was stiff, stuck-up, self-absorbed. You could tell from how he looked at the camera, from how, except for a couple of pictures, he didn’t wear his glasses. Colette’s lovers—and I remember a good number of them—were all, not playboys exactly … dandies, young gentlemen about town, men who knew how to have a good time and liked doing so in the company of a pretty woman. The man in this picture looked like he’d try to be dignified while eating birthday cake.”
“Maybe Colette’s experience with him,” Mikey hazarded, “turned her away from the serious types, especially if he rejected her when he learned she was pregnant.”
“Maybe,” I said. “It makes as much sense as anything. Mikey, why is it whenever we find an answer, it just raises more questions?”
“Because you haven’t answered the question that’s at the heart of this,” Mikey said, his expression kind but stem. “You came here to find out what happened to Colette, and that question remains unanswered. I admit, I thought that your father had something to do with it, but if he died young …”
“Those photos seemed to span about ten years,” I reminded Mikey. “That’s long enough for him to have had something to do with Colette’s disappearance.”
Mikey nodded. “You’re right. You were nine when she vanished, weren’t you?”
“That’s right.” A strange thought came to me then. “Do you think he—my father—was killed by Colette and she fled to escape the consequences?”
“It’s possible,” Mikey said. “It’s also possible that he died trying to do something to Colette, or even that he kidnapped her and then died and for some reason—amnesia maybe—she never returned. Let’s not place the blame for his death on her. It might be a coincidence.”
“I’m fine with that,” I said. I’d paced back in the direction of the window seat, and now I sunk down onto the cushioned surface once more. “Mikey, I’m beat, but I’m also not going to wait another week to ask after Colette. Maybe a person isn’t included in ‘lost articles,’ but I have to try.”
“What do you want to do?” Mikey asked.
“It’s past lunchtime,” I said. “Let’s get something to eat. That sandwich I had earlier is less than a memory. Then I’ll take a nap. If I haven’t gotten up by, say, four, you promise you’ll wake me?”
Mikey nodded. “I promise. That will leave eight entire hours for you to experiment with before Saturday’s mirror falls inert—and even time for a dinner break.”
“Good,” I said. “I’m so tired I could fall asleep right now, but I’m going to make sure I eat something.”
“Want a tray in bed?” Mikey asked.
“No. I’d fall asleep in my sandwich.” I patted back a yawn. “Come on.”
As we made our sandwiches, I had a thought.
“Mikey, you knew Colette far better than I did. Maybe you’d recognize the man I saw.”
“I might,” Mikey said, smearing enough mayonnaise to explain his girth on a slice of dark rye. “But I’m reluctant to use the kaleidoscopes. They have been working for you—I’d hate to …” He piled sliced turkey on his bread, searching for the right term. “Uncalibrate it. That’s the best word I can come up with. If we don’t get anywhere this evening, I promise to try. Sunday’s kaleidoscope might work. Certainly this man is a ‘great person’ in our current difficulty. Tuesday’s might work, too, if he was an enemy of your mother, and perhaps of you.”
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