Word & Void 02 - A Knight of the Word (3 page)

He looked doubtful, but nodded anyway. “Okay.” He glanced down again at the real estate papers. “Are you going to sell the house?”

“Robert!”

“Well, that’s what it looks like.”

“I don’t care what it looks like, it’s none of your business!” Irritated at herself for being so abrupt, she added, “Look, I haven’t decided anything yet.”

He put his coffee cup in the exact center of the papers, making a ring. “I don’t think you should sell.”

She snatched the cup away. “Robert …”

“Well, I don’t. I think you should let some time pass before you do anything.” He held up his hands in a placating gesture. “Wait, let me finish. My dad says you should never make any big changes right after someone you love dies. You should wait at least a year. You should give yourself time to grieve, to let everything settle so you know what you really want. I don’t think he’s right about much, but I think he might be right about this.”

She pictured Robert’s father in her mind, a spectacled, gentle man who was employed as a chemical engineer but spent all his free time engaged in gardening and lawn care. Robert used to call him Mr. Green Jeans and swore that his father would have been happier if his son had been born a plant.

“Robert,” she said gently, “that’s very good advice.”

He stared at her in surprise.

“I mean it. I’ll give it some thought.”

She put the coffee cups aside. Robert was annoying, but she liked him anyway. He was funny and smart and fearless. Maybe more to the point, she could depend on him. He had stood up for her five years earlier when her father had come back into her life. If not for Robert, her grandfather would never have found her trussed up in the caves below the Sinnissippi Park cliffs. It was Robert who had come after her on the night she had confronted her father, when it seemed she was all alone. She had knocked the pins out from under him for his trouble, leaving him senseless on the ground while she went on alone. But he had cared enough to follow.

She felt a momentary pang at the memory. Robert was the only real friend she had left from those days.

“I have to go back to school tonight,” she said. “How long do you have?”

He shrugged. “Day after tomorrow.”

“You came all the way home from California for the weekend?”

He looked uncomfortable. “Well …”

“To visit your parents?”

“Nest …”

“You can’t say it, can you?”

He shook his head and blushed. “No.”

She nodded. “Just so you don’t think I can’t see through you like glass. You just watch yourself, buster.”

He looked down at his feet, embarrassed. She liked him like this—sweet and vulnerable. “You want to walk over to Gran and Grandpa’s graves with me, put some flowers in their urns?”

He brightened at once. “Sure.”

She was already heading for the hall closet. “Let me get my coat, Mr. Smooth.”

“Jeez,” he said.

T
hey went out the porch door, down the steps, across the yard, and through the hedgerow that marked the back end of the Freemark property, then struck out into Sinnissippi Park. Nest carried a large bundle of flowers she had purchased the night before and left sitting overnight in a bucket of water on the porch. It was not yet nine, and the air was still cool and the grass slick with damp in the pale morning light. The park stretched away before them, broad expanses of lush, new-mown grass fading into distant, shadowy woods and ragged curtains of mist that rose off the Rock River. The bare earth of the base paths, pitcher’s mounds, and batting boxes of the ball diamonds cornering the central open space were dark and hard with moisture and the night’s chill. The big shade trees had shed most of their leaves, the fall colors carpeting the areas beneath them in a patchwork mix of red, gold, orange, and brown. Park toys dotted the landscape like weird sculpture, and the wooden trestle and chute for the toboggan slide glimmered with a thin coating of frost. The crossbar at the entrance was lowered, the fall hours in effect so that there was no vehicle access to the park until after ten. In the distance, a solitary walker was towed in the wake of a hard-charging Irish setter that bounded through the haze of soft light and mist in a brilliant flash of rust.

The cemetery lay at the west end of the park on the other side of a chain-link fence. Having grown up in the park, they had been climbing that fence since they were kids—Robert and Cass Minter and Brianna Brown and Jared Scott and herself. Best friends for years, they had shared adventures and discoveries and hopes and dreams. Everything but the truth about who Nest was.

Robert shoved his bare hands in his pockets and exhaled a plume of white moisture. “We should have driven,” he declared.

He was striding out ahead of her, taking the lead in typical Robert fashion, not in the least intimidated by the fact that she was taller and stronger and far more familiar with where she was going than he was.

She smiled in spite of herself. Robert would lead even if he were blindfolded.

She remembered telling him her deepest secret once, long ago, on the day after she had eluded him on her way to the deadly confrontation with her father. She had done something to him, he insisted, and he wanted to know what it was. That was the price he was demanding for his help in getting into the hospital to see Jared. She told him the truth, that she had used magic. She told him in a way that was meant to leave him in doubt. He could not quite believe her, but not quite ignore her, either. He had never been able to resolve his confusion, and that was a part of what attracted him to her, she supposed.

But there were distances between them that Robert could not even begin to understand. Between her and everyone she knew, now that Gran was gone, because Nest was the only one who could do magic, the only one who would ever be able to do magic, the only one who would probably ever even know that magic was out there. She was the one who had been born to it, a legacy passed down through generations of the Freemark women, but through her demon father, as well. Magic that could come to her in the blink of an eye, could come unbidden at times. Magic that lived within her heart and mind, a part of her life that she must forever keep secret, because the danger that came from others knowing far outweighed the burden of clandestine management. Magic to heal and magic to destroy. She was still struggling to understand it. She could still feel it developing within her.

She looked off into the shadows of the woods that flanked the cliffs and cemetery ahead, where the night still lingered in dark patches and the feeders lurked. She did not see them, but she could sense that they were there. As she had always been able to when others could not. Unseen and unknown, the feeders existed on the fringes of human consciousness. Sylvans like Pick helped to keep them in check by working to maintain a balance in the magic that was invested in and determinative of the behavior of all living things. But humans were prone to adversely affect that balance, tilting it mostly without even knowing, changing it with their behavior and their feelings, altering it in the careless, unseeing way that mudslides altered landscapes.

This was the other world, the one to which Nest alone had access. Since she was very small, she had worked to understand it, to help Pick maintain it, and to find a way to reconcile it with the world that everyone else inhabited and believed fully defined. There, in no-man’s-land between the known and the secret, she was an anomaly, never entirely like her friends, never just another child.

“You’ve lived in your grandparents’ house all your life,” Robert said suddenly, eyes determinedly fixed in a forward direction. They were crossing the entrance road and moving into the scattering of shade trees and spruce that bordered the picnic grounds leading to the chain-link fence and the cemetery. “That house is your home, Nest. If you sell it, you won’t have a home anymore.”

She scuffed at the damp grass with her tennis shoes. “I know that, Robert.”

“Do you need the money?”

“I could use it. Training and competition is expensive. The school doesn’t pay for everything.”

“Why don’t you take out a mortgage, then? Why sell, if you don’t have to?”

She couldn’t explain it to him, not if she tried all day. It had to do with being who she was, and that wasn’t something Robert could know about without having lived her life. She didn’t even want to talk about it with him because it was personal and private.

“Maybe I want a new home,” she said enigmatically, giving sudden, unexpected voice to the feelings that churned inside her. It was hard to keep from crying as she thought back upon their genesis.

Her friends were gone, all but Robert. She could still see their faces, but she saw them not as they were at the end, but as they were when they were still fourteen and it seemed as if nothing in their lives would ever change. She saw them as they were during that last summer they were all together, on that last weekend before everything changed—when they were close and tight and believed they could stand up to anything.

Brianna Brown and Jared Scott moved away within a year of that summer. Brianna wrote Nest at first, but the time between letters steadily lengthened, and finally the letters ceased altogether. Nest heard later that Brianna was married and had a child.

She never heard from Jared at all.

Cass Minter remained her oldest and closest friend all through high school. Different from each other in so many ways, they continued to find common ground in a lifetime of shared experiences and mutual trust. Cass planned to go to the University of Illinois and study genetics, but two weeks before graduation, she died in her sleep. The doctor said it was an aneurysm. No one had suspected it was there.

Jared, Brianna, and Cass—all gone. Of her old friends, that left only Robert, and by the end of her freshman year at Northwestern, Nest could already feel herself beginning to drift. Her parents were gone. Her grandparents were gone. Her friends were gone. Even the cats, Mr. Scratch and Miss Minx, were gone, the former dead of old age two years earlier, the latter moved to a neighbor’s home with her grandfather’s passing. Her future, she thought, lay somewhere else. Her life was going in a different direction, and she could feel Hopewell receding steadily into her past.

They reached the chain-link fence and, without pausing to debate the matter, scrambled over. Holding the flowers for Nest while she completed the climb, Robert gave them a cursory sniff before handing them back. Side by side, the two made their way down the paved road that wound through the rows of tombstones and markers, feeling the October sun grow warmer against their skin as it lifted into a clear autumn sky. Summer might be behind them and winter closing fast, but there was nothing wrong with this day.

She felt her thoughts drift like clouds, returning to the past. She had acquired new friends in high school but they lacked the history she shared with the old, and she couldn’t seem to get past that.

Of course, the Petersons still lived next door and Mildred Walker still lived down the street. Reverend Emery still conducted services at the First Congregational Church, and a few of her grandfather’s old cronies still gathered for coffee at Josie’s each morning to share gossip and memories. Once in a while, she even saw Josie, but she could sense the other’s discomfort, and understanding its source, kept her distance. In any event, these were people of a different generation, and their real friendships had been with her grandparents rather than with her.

There was always Pick, though. And, until a year or so ago, there had been Wraith …

Robert left the roadway to cut through the rows of markers, bearing directly for the grave sites of her grandparents. Isn’t it odd, she thought, trailing distractedly in his wake, that Hopewell should feel so alien to her? Small towns were supposed to be stable and unchanging. It was part of their charm, one of their virtues, that while larger communities would almost certainly undergo some form of upheaval, they would remain the same. But Hopewell didn’t feel like that to her. It felt altered in ways that transcended expectation, ways that did not involve population growth or economic peaks. Those were substantially the same as they had been five years earlier. It was something else, an intangible that she believed might have influenced only her.

Perhaps it
was
her, she pondered. Perhaps it was she who had changed and not the town at all.

They walked up to her grandparents’ graves and stopped below the markers, looking down at the mounds that fronted them. Gran’s was thick and smooth with autumn grass; the grass on Old Bob’s was still sparse and the earth less settled. Identical tombstones marked their resting places. Nest read her grandmother’s.
Evelyn Opal Freemark. Beloved wife of Robert. Sleep with angels. Wake with God.
Old Bob had chosen the wording for Gran’s marker, and Nest had simply copied it for his.

Her mother’s gravestone stood just to the left.
Caitlin Anne Freemark. Beloved daughter & MOTHER.

A fourth plot, just a grassy space now, was reserved for her.

She studied it thoughtfully for a moment, then set about dividing up the flowers she had brought, arranging them carefully in each of the three metal vases that stood on tripods before the headstones. Robert watched her as she worked, saying nothing.

“Bring some water,” she said, pointing toward the spigot and watering can that sat in a small concrete well several dozen yards off.

Robert did, then poured water into each vase, being careful not to disturb Nest’s arrangements.

Together, they stood looking down at the plots, the sun streaming through the branches of the old shade trees that surrounded them in curtains of dappled brightness.

“I remember all the times your grandmother baked us cookies,” Robert said after a minute. “She would sit us down at the picnic table out back and bring us a plate heaped with them and glasses of cold milk. She was always saying a child couldn’t grow up right without cookies and milk. I could never get that across to my mother. She thought you couldn’t grow up right without vegetables.”