Figgs & Phantoms (13 page)

Mona read the name: Capri.

“Mona, wait!” Fido shouted, bursting into her room, waving the book Miss Quigley had lent him:
The Nigger of the Narcissus.
“Mona,” Fido cried, “the book says: Wait! ”

“Mona, wake up, wake up.” Fido shook his sleeping cousin.

Sissie, standing in the doorway, screamed.

M
ONA FLOATED through a swirling nothingness, through doorless doors and windowless windows, into the eye of a windless storm. Then all was still.

Colors pulsated from orange to pink as she gazed up into the fronds of a palm tree.

“‘The tree that is wild and free,'” she murmured. “Capri. I am in Capri.”

The palm tree replied with a blaze of pink.

Weary from her long, roadless journey, Mona leaned against the palm, waiting for the familiar figure of her Uncle Florence, or the form he had now taken as his own, to appear on the horizon.

There was no horizon. The gray sky, if there was a sky, was bound to the gray land by an invisible seam. All was silent.

“An island that's surrounded by the sea,” Mona remembered, and then she heard the sea washing unseen rocks on an unseen shore. Undulating. Surging. Pounding. Faster, faster the waves crashed and thundered; the ground shuddered, beaten by an angry foam.

Orange blotches again mottled the palm's thrashing fronds, spreading its color as if to devour the pink. Lashed by the winds, Mona wrapped her arms around the swaying trunk. Some invisible power was trying to tear her from the tree. Some force was trying to blow her back into endless space. Mona refused to go.

“Pink palm, pink palm,” she cried over and over as she hung on to the one tangible reality in her unformed dream. At last the storm subsided; the waters calmed. The orange blight faded, and once again the palm stood tall and pink.

Exhausted and confused, Mona sank to her knees and rested her head against her palm tree. Where was Uncle Florence? Who was trying to frighten her? Was she really in Capri or was she lost in her own nightmare? Lost.

“It was night. I was lost.” As Mona remembered the words of the diary, the gray darkened to starless night. Black, impenetrable night that only magnified her fears. She tried to think of something to free her mind from the terrors that lurk in the night. She remembered a small book in the secret hoard; she remembered the blue in the illustration bordering a poem; she remembered trying to decipher the cramped lettering. And then she remembered these words:

Mona opened her eyes to the dark blue of the sky. A full moon nested in the “welcoming arms” of the pink palm. From afar she heard the lapping sea, and from farther still, the faint tap-tap-tapping of dancing feet.

“Uncle Florence,” Mona shouted, but no figure crossed the moonlit sands. The tapping faded away.

Mona rose and started across the desert in search of her phantom uncle.

The moon glowed brightly, hotter and hotter, until it blazed into the ball of a scorching sun.

Mona squinted back at the far-off palm, now suffused with orange light, then slogged on through the heat and glare. Her feet sank deeper into the sand with each step; a searing wind penetrated her every pore. Something more than the blistering heat and sucking sand was trying to hold her back.

Defiant, her mouth parched, her tongue swollen, Mona shouted her mother's song:

Mona shouted—and remembered. There had been an apple tree in her yard at home, an old, twisted apple tree no longer bearing fruit. She knew it well, having stared at its leaves so often from her bedroom window.

Now she stared at the apple tree again as it rose in all its knotted glory before her.

The grass was long and cool in the shade of the old apple tree. Mona wished for a tall glass of lemonade, and it appeared in her hand. She took a tasteless sip, then recalled the tart, thirst-quenching flavor and drank deeply.

Leaning back refreshed, reveling in her new-found power of wishes-come-true, Mona laughed with delight. She knew what her next wish would be.

Mona gazed into the desolation bordering her apple-tree world, wishing. Wishing. Wishing.

Slowly he appeared, a four-foot six-inch shadow shaped by remembered details: the round face, the sad smile, the graying hair, the gnarled hands. The yellow sleeve garters.

Mona hid her face in her hands and dismissed the vision. Uncle Florence had not taken his sleeve garters with him; he had long arms now, he was taller, different. She had to find him as he was now, as he looked now, in his own dream, in his own Capri.

Mona set one foot on the scorching sand and withdrew it. Her journey might be a long one; she needed one more wish.

Closing her eyes, she wished for a horse, a big, black stallion to carry her over the boundless desert. Then she opened her eyes. Before her limped a formless black mass with flowing mane, a misshapen body on misplaced legs.

Mona quickly erased the hideous animal from sight and tried again to picture a horse. Straining her memory, she tried to visualize where the eyes were in relation to the nostrils, how the head joined the neck, where the legs met the body. It was hopeless. Mona had looked at many horses, but she had never truly seen one.

She would have to travel on foot, tomorrow. Another frowning night was blinding the desert, still burning under a darkened sun. Again Mona closed her eyes, recited the Blake poem, and opened them to a full moon—and words, suspender in space.

“I won't, I won't go back,” she shouted.

An ominous cloud crept over Mona's moon, shrouding her in blackness. The sign vibrated like a banged sheet of tin and shattered. Its drumming echoes bounced off the wall of night.

“Uncle Florence, where are you?”

The answer was a deafening thunderclap that rocked the ground. A bolt of lightning tore the sky and set fires dancing in a circle around her refuge.

Sobbing in defeat, Mona stumbled back toward the distant palm, her path lighted by the apple tree burning behind her.