Thresholds (13 page)

Maya wondered why Gwenda sounded sad. “You can . . . can you open a portal to anywhere you like?”

“No. Not yet. Maybe not ever. It depends on how strong my skill gets. Right now, the shorter the distance, the easier I can do it, and it helps if the other end leads home. There’s all kinds of energy to draw on there.”

Maya went to the dresser and picked up a picture of her and Stephanie when they were six, grinning and showing off their missing teeth. “You can do magic. You know how much my friend Stephanie wanted to be able to do magic? How can you be sad about something so amazing?”

Gwenda joined Maya by the dresser. She looked at the picture of Maya and Stephanie and smiled. You couldn’t help it, Maya thought. Steph’s grin was so wide. Gwenda peered at the other pictures. “Wow. You guys are always together,” she said. “Where is she?”

Maya set the picture back on the dresser. “She died last spring. Cancer.” The hollow place opened up in her chest again, grief lying in ambush. She hugged herself and bent her head, falling inward where loneliness waited.

Golden threads wove through the darkness, spinning a face against the absence of light. It was not Stephanie’s face. Maya closed her eyes and tried to bring it into focus, but it remained blurred. Something clicked—the egg was humming at her wrist—and she saw, suddenly, that the face belonged to Chikuvny Boy, not the way she had seen him, but some way that represented who he was. A face more felt than seen, something a blind person might create to stand for a treasured person. A flurry of unknown but almost familiar feelings feathered through her.

“Oh, little one,” she said, cradling the egg against her chest. It felt cold, and its quiet song was full of loss. Egg had loved Chikuvny Boy, its almost-twin, and lost him.

They mourned together.

Maya remembered the breathing exercises the counselor had taught her, deep, slow, banishing breaths to lift her out of the pit.
Come
, she thought to the egg.
We can’t stay down here.

Have you,
Maya echoed. She rubbed her eyes and turned to Gwenda.

“I’m so sorry, Maya,” Gwenda said.

“Me, too.” Maya stroked the egg, which had turned dark. Gradually it warmed under her fingertips, and green streaks patterned it. “Well, anyway.”

“Yes,” said Gwenda. “Anyway, I want to open a portal for you here so when the egg hatches, you can come home, and we can take care of you.”

“That would be good, I guess,” Maya said.

Gwenda rose and went to the door, frowned at the keyhole. “Can you lock it?” she asked.

Maya shook her head. “No, and I sure want to! Peter keeps coming in without asking.”

“I can manage it.” Gwenda tapped her fingertips against the metal plate with the keyhole in it and sang a soft musical phrase. The lock thudded home.

“What?” said Maya. She came closer. “How did you—can you teach me that?”

“I don’t know. It’s one of my portalkeeping talents, so probably it’s not something everybody can do.” She headed back to the rug by the bookcase, where she took off her bracelet and considered it. The charms were round, flat stones about the size of dimes, tan and beige and charcoal, ocher and brick red, with strange, filigreed writing on them. Gwenda selected a rose-gray stone and detached it from the ring. She used it to trace a three-foot-wide circle on the floor, then pressed it into the center of the circle, where it sank into the wood like an embedded jewel.

Gwenda placed one hand over the stone and put the other on top of the first. She sang a short song in the language of Janus House. Her singing voice was low, rich, and melodic. The tune asked a question that made Maya want to answer, though she didn’t know what it meant.

Gwenda lifted her hands. The stone and the circle around it glowed foxfire green, then faded.

“Maya,” she said and patted the floor beside her. Maya knelt. Gwenda pressed Maya’s palm to the stone. Gwenda sang again, the same phrase repeated, then reversed. Maya hummed along, and Gwenda nodded encouragement. The stone heated under Maya’s hand. She felt drifty, as though gravity had lost its grip on her.

Heat pulsed at her left wrist, shot up her left arm and down her right arm. Something shoved her hand up, away from the stone.

“What?” said Gwenda.

Maya looked at her right hand. A spiky-rayed star was printed in pink against her palm. “I don’t know. It came from the egg.”

“The
sissimi
is a protector,” Gwenda muttered. “Why would it protect you against being tuned to a local portal?”

Little one
?

Can’t be sure it’s safe.
A storm of sensations washed over Maya—terror, pain, hunger, a wrenching at the core. The fragmenting of a bond—

Maya sat back, stroking the egg. The egg had been through some kind of portal with Chikuvny Boy. Or maybe this was just another way it felt about having lost him. She knew the feeling. She shook her head at Gwenda.

“Well, if I can’t tune you to come to me, I’ll come to you, or someone else will,” Gwenda said.

She dropped the throw rug over the circle and the stone and stood up.

“That’s it?”

“That’s all I need for now. Except a way for you to summon us.” Gwenda took Maya’s right hand, and frowned down at the ring Harper had given her. She stroked it with her fingertip. It tingled. “If you need one of us, turn your ring around three times. Someone will come.”

“Thanks,” said Maya.

Gwenda went to the door and tapped the lock open.

Maya rummaged in her closet and found one of her father’s old extra-large NORTH IDAHO—NO SMALL POTATOES sweat-shirts. The sleeves were nice and long. She tugged the cuff down over the egg and half over her hand, then checked her appearance in the mirror. The sleeves were baggy enough to hide everything.

Knocks sounded on the door, and then Peter barged in. “Hey, Maya!” he yelled. “When the heck are you coming down? Everybody’s home and hungry now, and supper’s past ready!”

“How many times do I have to tell you not to come in before I say ‘Come in’?” Maya cried. A second earlier and the door would have been locked, and how could she have explained that? What if Gwenda hadn’t locked the door, and Peter had come in and seen Gwenda making magic, or seen the egg? “Hey, Dad, can I get a lock for my door?” she yelled as she and Gwenda clattered down the stairs in Peter’s wake.

During supper, Maya’s family talked about their day.

Candra’s journalism teacher was great and had written articles for national magazines, but the school newspaper’s editor was an idiot. “I went to the library during lunch and read some back issues. She was editing it last year, too. Talk about boring.”

“You going to turn that around?” Dad asked.

Candra grinned. Then she frowned. “Is it just me, or is Jefferson High School really cliquey? It wasn’t like that back home.”

“Because you were always in the best cliques already,” Maya said. She wolfed a piece of chicken, still hungry, even after stuffing herself at Janus House. She dug into her mashed potatoes and gravy. Every bite tasted great. Under the table, she cupped her hand over the egg. It was purring.

Candra glared at her.

Dad smiled. “Maya’s right, Candra. You’ve always been a member of a strong group. You’ll find your way here; it’s not much different from our old school. I have my work cut out for me, getting those kids interested in history, but I like my classroom.”

“I wish Adele were here,” Candra said. She had left her best friend behind. She hadn’t wanted to move.

“You can still e-mail her,” Maya said.

Candra narrowed her eyes at Maya, then looked at her plate. “Yeah, yeah,” she muttered.

“Well, the kids in my class are great,” said Mom.

“You always say that,” Candra said.

“And it’s always true. One of the boys—you’d like him, Peter—” She told a story about a boy who brought his pet snake to school wrapped around his neck. Chaos ensued when one of the girls spotted it, and then the boy taught everyone snakes weren’t slimy or scary.

Maya glanced around the table at the platter of fried chicken, bowls of salad and mashed potatoes, pitcher of milk, butter dish, and brightly colored plates full of food. Her sister, her brother, her mom, her dad, talking, eating, waving their hands, smiling like this was the best part of their day. It was all so . . . normal. So nice.

Gwenda, silent and smiling, looked different from the rest of them. Her friend. Not yet part of the new normal.

“My classroom has hamsters,” Peter said. “Mr. Garcia says I can help him take care of them.”

Everybody looked at Maya.

Her big news of the day? She met a boy from another planet. He stuck an alien vampire egg on her. She got so sick she thought she’d die, and a boy she hardly knew rescued her. She met new neighbors who had a portal under their house that opened into fairyland and other planets and who knew where else. They wanted to adopt her.

She swallowed and said, “I spent the day without a map. It was really confusing, but I made new friends.”

Mom and Dad exchanged a look and a smile again.

“We have lots of classes together,” Gwenda said. “I hope Maya’s a better student than I am. I could use some help with math.”

“Maya’s no good at math,” Peter said.

“Oh, okay. Maybe we can confuse each other,” Gwenda said, and smiled at Maya.

 

 

 

After supper, Maya walked Gwenda home, with Dad watching from the Andersens’ front porch. “Thanks for rescuing me,” Maya said as Gwenda stepped onto the porch stairs at Janus House. The night was soft and cool around them.

Gwenda smiled, with an edge of sadness. “It’s nice to know someone new. I hope we’ll be good friends.” She held out her right hand, palm up, too high for a handshake.

“I don’t—” Maya said.

“Put your hand out like this,” said Gwenda. Maya held out her open hand, palm up, and Gwenda slid her fingers across Maya’s fingers as though they were pulling away from a handclasp. “This is one of the greetings we do,” Gwenda said, “for hello and good-bye.” She sighed. “So much happened today.”

“Yeah.”

“See you tomorrow.”

Maya held out her hand again, and Gwenda brushed fingers with her.

 

 

 

Maya’s family worked on homework together in the living room after supper—the kids doing it, the parents devising it or correcting it. When they finished, Dad and Peter turned on the TV to watch sports.

Maya went upstairs and changed into her sleepshirt. She wanted to think through the whole day the way she worked best—on paper. She cleared off her desk and set up the colored pencils and watercolors, got a jar of water for her brushes, opened a different sketchbook with heavyweight paper, and started work.

First she made her family at supper. She put golden color across the page, then drew faces and food on top of the gold so it almost looked like a picture by firelight. She drew everybody laughing.

Then she did three pictures of the portal. She swept washes of color across the page, then penciled in dark silhouettes of the portalkeepers with their arms stretched against the storm of colors. She couldn’t get it to look exactly right, but she got some pictures she liked.

She added some quick sketches: Gwenda’s profile as she turned away from Maya to look out the window; Rowan’s half-face, frowning; and Benjamin’s crooked grin. She drew a serious Travis, one she hadn’t seen at school.

Then she focused her bendy-neck light on her egg.

The egg changed all the time. Every different thing it did enchanted her. She touched it, and colors flowed around her fingertip. She felt something warm and damp brush against the inside of her skin.

Her egg. Nothing she had planned to get, hers by pure luck, hers in some way she couldn’t understand. She made another picture. She couldn’t catch the colors; they moved too fast; but she got some pictures that gave a feeling of what her egg looked like between one change and the next.

She called up from memory the drawings she’d made in her carry-along sketchpad of the Janus House people. Moon and Star Tree Sisters—did she want them for aunts? She liked them, especially Moon, much better than she liked Great-Uncle Harper. Cousin Benjamin. Cousin Gwenda. Cousin Rowan. All the others she’d seen, off and on, going in and out of Janus House and working in the tunnels below. She dug out an earlier sketchpad and studied the pictures she’d drawn the week before of them playing music, playing games on the lawn, sitting on their porches reading or knitting or swinging. Dark faces, light faces, something similar in the bone structure of most of their faces.