He must have heard her enter but didn’t turn as she removed the coat and boots.
“They have my mother’s chin,” he said defensively when she stood beside him, the intimacy gone from his voice and expression.
“I’m deeply sorry for what happened to your fiancée.”
“I can’t believe you’re Shay’s grandmother. It’s impossible.”
“Yes. I know. Nevertheless –”
“But if you are, it must have been strange having twins by a man you’d never slept with. Must have been damned strange.”
Brandy closed her eyes on the hard stare and shivered even though burning with embarrassment. “Would you care for some coffee, Mr. Weir?”
“Yes, please, Miss McCabe.” He was right behind her. “Oh, shit. I don’t believe this. It’s not … I just can’t … in my world things like this don’t …” He made a choking sound and flopped into a chair.
By the time she had the coffee measured and brewing, milk was soaking through her granddaughter’s bra and dribbling down her rib cage.
Brandy excused herself to carry Joshua and Elton up to the balcony, wishing she could escape the angry frustration of the man who paced and cursed below.
“If you’re not Shay … even if you are, what are we going to do about them?” He watched her zip the twins into soft blankets ingeniously made into pajamas complete with feet. He still hadn’t held or touched them, as if by doing so he would commit himself.
The twins chose not to sleep.
“I mean if you are Brandy McCabe, how will you raise them? You’ll have all you can do to learn the ways of this world yourself.”
Elton drooled happily. Joshua cried. Brandy took Joshua in her arms to comfort him. Elton began to cry.
“Why don’t you answer me?”
“Here.” Brandy pushed Joshua at him and picked up Elton.
Marek and his son looked at each other for a surprised second. The son puckered up his face and screamed.
By the time both babies slept, Marek had lost his bluster and the coffee’d sat warming in the pot so long it was too bitter to drink.
“Are they always like that?” Marek whispered as Brandy stirred batter for cornbread.
“Several times a day at least. One seems to give the other the idea.”
“People should be married awhile before they have children.”
“That thought came to you rather late, I think.”
They made a meal of sausage, cornbread and stewed tomatoes.
When she’d served him fresh coffee he lit a pipe without bothering to ask her permission. The smell of it brought back memories of her grandfather, James McCabe, and the time he spilled hot ash from his pipe, starting a fire in his beard. She began to tell Marek the story but fell silent at his look of suspicion.
“I don’t believe that diary.” He tilted his head and stared at her but seemed to be looking inward. “It’s just that it explains so much.” His knee touched hers under the table.
Brandy hurried to gather the dishes and take them to the sink. But he was at her side, shelving each in the dishwasher as she rinsed it.
“And I wouldn’t know what to do with a good old-fashioned … prim … simpering … Victorian girl.”
“I have no idea what you mean by Victorian, Mr. Weir, but I do not simper.”
“Victoria. Queen Victoria. She set moral standards for years. She –”
“Is a foreigner, and worse, an Englishwoman. The Queen of England has nothing to do with …” Brandy saw the kiss coming and was fascinated at Marek’s power to immobilize her with a look. Or was it her curiosity again? Si fueris Romae, she thought.
She couldn’t blame her granddaughter’s body for the rash feelings touching him set in motion. She knew she should pull away. But she didn’t.
Marek did.
Brandy held to the edge of the sink to keep upright with the suddenness of his release.
He moved around the door of the dishwashing machine and the shelves of rinsed dishes. “You can’t be Shay. She never …” His eyelids narrowed over eyes as drained of color as his skin. “Do you know how long it’s been since I’ve screwed a –”
Brandy gulped air. “Screwed?”
Marek Weir walked to the door.
“Please … don’t go. It’s so lonely being Shay.”
“I’m going to go think … drink … run … jog. I’ll be back, but …”
Automobile lanterns swept light over the window above the sink, as he backed the Porsche to drive away. She’d been foolish to think he could love her when he found she wasn’t Shay.
One of the twins fussed behind her. Brandy McCabe turned to see Shay’s diamond was gone from atop the diary.
Cindy Wilson held onto her husband’s arm in the storeroom of Wilson Antiques, Ltd. “But, Ned, just let me try rubbing the frame again. Maybe it’ll –”
“I don’t want to hear any more about that damn mirror, and we’re not taking it out to the house. It’s no more magic than I am.”
“Then why does it never need dusting? Never tarnish? And when it’s going to show pictures it makes a sound.”
“What kind of sound?”
“Sort of an electrical buzzing … or hum like … like power lines make sometimes. And it seems to work on electricity … or static electricity if you move it or rub it or – I wish there was some way we could plug it into a wall socket.”
“Has Myrtle seen these pictures?”
“No, she’s flaky enough the way it is. I didn’t tell her about it for fear she’d quit. But, Ned, at first I kept seeing this blond girl. I even saw her having a baby. Then it was just clouds or gas or something.”
“Look, honey, I love you. But I’ve reached the limit of being able to even discuss this thing. We’re going to make another appointment with Myrtle’s analyst and you’re going to keep it this time.”
“Ned, I’m not mental. I’ve really seen these things.”
But he led her firmly from the storeroom and closed the door on the wedding mirror.
20
Marek returned, but only to deliver a stack of books, stand over the twins’ cribs, eye Brandy suspiciously and leave.
The books dealt with the history of the twentieth century and were written for school-age children. Brandy found the recital of events overwhelming, much of it – such as that German, Hitler, and the fact the United States would involve itself in foreign wars – every bit as fantastic as the wedding mirror.
But in general this history she’d not lived seemed as remote as Caesar’s conquest of Gaul. Reality was two babes wanting to eat every three hours twenty-four hours a day. She started them on cereals and mashed potatoes.
Rachael and Jerry visited often. He seemed to prefer this broken, colorless woman to the slim, capable beauty Rachael’d been when Brandy first came to this world. With all the advances touted by the history books and the “liberated woman” proclaimed by the television box, men did not seem to Brandy to have changed overmuch.
The local doctor determined Joshua, Elton, and Shay’s body to be in good health and started the twins on a series of inoculations he claimed would keep them safe from almost every disease Brandy’d heard of and a few she hadn’t.
Swaths had been cut through the forests on the western peaks and black dots moved down the slopes all day long. Marek told her they were people skiing. Brandy’d seen Norwegian miners race down a mountainside on wooden skis once.
Marek brought round flat pies for their dinner. He called them pizzas. Brandy thought them too highly seasoned. They were not comfortable with each other. He left early.
And then it was April.
Brandy found Shay’s life dull.
Remy Maddon strung a clothesline from a corner of the cabin to a tree so she could hang out diapers. Remy wasn’t comfortable with her either. His visits grew fewer. So did Ansel St. John’s.
Brandy felt cut off from other people.
And then it was May. Brandy wondered what had
happened to Easter.
Warm winds melted snow to water. Cold winds turned it to ice at night.
Marek visited again. He seemed warmer, more interested in the twins and Brandy until the Garretts arrived unexpectedly.
Marek announced he intended to take over the support of Brandy and the babies.
Jerry bristled. “Some support. A Porsche, luxury apartment. With your lifestyle you’ve got to be in hock up to your ears. NCAR doesn’t pay that well.”
“I have money from my share of the sale of the ranch and other investments. My only debt is the one I owe these kids and … Brandy.”
Brandy slipped into Shay’s coat and walked out on the raised voices.
She didn’t wish to be anyone’s “debt.”
The sky was dreary, the air unexpectedly warm. It smelled sweet with impending rain.
Mud, dirty snow, stretches of yellow grass. The world looked a dowdy place to Brandy as she walked along the road. But a robin hopped ahead of her, calmly pecking gravel bits.
It felt good to be released from the cabin.
When she came to the train antique store, Caboose Antiques, she found there were really two railroad cars. The one in back headed into the one in front to form a T.
Inside, a girl sat behind a desk idly turning the pages of a colorful magazine. Brandy wandered down the aisles fingering familiar objects, remembering. She came to a stove, identical to the one she, her mother and Nora cooked over.
Finally she picked up a potato ricer and took it to the desk.
“Oh, those are cute.” The girl smiled. “My mother has one she hooked on the wall and a little flowerpot nesting in it with ivy hanging down.”
“I intend to rice potatoes with it.” Brandy pulled out the roll of narrow bills Jerry Garrett had given her and paid more for a potato ricer than John McCabe had paid for their cookstove.
“Potatoes?” the girl said as Brandy left.
At the bridge spanning Middle Boulder Creek, she stopped to look upstream at the abandoned mill, its gray metal roof jutting into a sky of the same depressing hue, its lower edge sagging toward rocks, still rust-colored, in the creek below.
Behind a store building across the bridge a horse grazed on dead grass. Brandy stood at the fence and tried to smell him.
The concrete sidewalk stopped and, for perhaps thirty feet, stretched an old board sidewalk-weather – and shoe-leather-smoothed. Brandy walked back and forth, listening to its sound.
On the other side of the street men laughed over twangy discordant music in a rough-timbered building. The door opened and a beery, stale smell reached her, reminding her of passing Werely’s Saloon. A man emerged, shirtless under an open black vest with silver buttons all over it. He didn’t even look cold. He looked mean.
He stared across at Brandy and stretched heavy arms above his head, their skin disfigured by odd varicolored markings. When he lowered them, they encircled Ansel’s granddaughter as she stepped out from behind him. She managed to wiggle from the apelike grasp and give him a shove.
“Aw, come on, Lottie.”
“Fuck off, you big …” Lottie was halfway across the street. She stopped when she saw Brandy. “Well, if it isn’t Miss Mother Goose.”
“Hello, Lottie.” Brandy started back the way she’d come.
“Hey, wait.” Lottie fell in beside her. “It was nice of your dad to pay Gramps all that money. I won’t have to beg up the taxes this year.”
Brandy turned and was relieved to see the black-vested gentleman walking in the other direction.
“Look, I’m sorry I had to blow the whistle on you, but if anything’d happened – I mean, I didn’t want anybody nosing around the place.”
“You mean in his graveyard?”
“Yeah. I think my grandma’s buried there. I think you’re supposed to bury people in cemeteries. He was good to you. You won’t tell, will you?”
“Lottie, if you’re trying to convince me your grandfather killed his wife and –”
“Not with a gun or anything. Grandma was sick. Gramps treated her awful. Wouldn’t take her to a doctor. Worked her tail off.”
“That still isn’t murder and it doesn’t sound like Mr. St. John.”
“Yeah, well, he changed. When she got so sick even he could see she was dying, he just … changed. Knocked out part of a wall in the kitchen and put in that sliding glass door and then moved her bed in front of it so she could see out. First decent thing he ever did for her.
“I went East to visit my mother who was into another divorce. When I got back the bed in the kitchen was empty. No Grandma, no death notices, no funeral, no nothing.”
“Didn’t you ask him?”
“Sure. He just said she was dead and buried. That’s the last word he’s ever said about her. Started naming goats and cats Stina Mark.” Lottie turned back as they reached the bridge.
Brandy looked after her and shrugged. She’d known Ansel wasn’t “right,” but he’d been kind to her. She’d say nothing against him.
The paved road made a sweeping westward curve up ahead. An angular depression in the earth like a wide trench, unnoticeable unless one looked for it, took off up out of the valley from the top of the curve.
Several automobiles came around the curve as she made her way to the odd dip in the ground, the old mountain road that led to Central City and Denver, that used to lead to the Brandy Wine.
The sky lowered to hide mountaintops. What did flying machines do in weather such as this?
Brandy followed the ghost road over rocky outcrops, receding snow fields, claylike mud. John McCabe had called her “precious baggage,” lifted her to his shoulder and named a mine after her. Brandy didn’t know how much she remembered from being there and how much she’d been told by adults present at the time. But she thought she’d been delighted with all the attention, could remember looking down on cheering faces.
She crossed a ridge and the paved road which had switched back on itself, climbed a fence and came to a heap of mine tailings, old and rusty like the rocks in Middle Boulder Creek below the mill. Clouds swept fog fingers down the ghost road as she climbed the tailings.
On top, heavy boards were nailed across the entrance. The cloud mist turned to drizzle, soaking into her hair and clothes, running down her cheeks as she read the signs posted on the boards. PRIVATE PROPERTY. KEEP OUT. NO TRESPASSING. VIOLATORS WILL BE PROSECUTED.
Marek was gone when Brandy returned to the cabin, and the Garretts anxious to leave.
“We have to go look for the mirror some more,” Rachael said vaguely.
They didn’t bother to tell her who’d won the argument about her support. Brandy didn’t ask.
It rained the next day too, but cleared by early afternoon. She took a basket of diapers out to the clothesline.
The rain had taken most of the snow around the cabin. Tiny wildflowers had blossomed overnight.
Brandy could smell spring.
Turning to pick up the empty basket, she saw a figure walking toward her down the old path where the privy had been. It was Corbin Strock.
Sunlight glistened on raindrops clinging to pine needles above his head.
He was looking directly at her, but didn’t seem to be seeing her, his expression that of a man preoccupied, in a hurry, with shocking news to tell.
Corbin walked through a young pine tree and disappeared …
“She’s not here anymore, Corbin,” she called to the empty clearing, and felt both foolish and frightened. “The girl you knew as Brandy is in her grave.”
She dropped the basket and slid through the door. “In her grave,” she repeated to the window over the sink, rubbing fear-sticky hands along her blue jeans. Her breath rattled in Shay’s throat.
The clearing was still empty. Brandy watched it for a long time, trying to convince herself she hadn’t seen him, but seeing still the way his hair fell across his forehead under his hat, the very wrinkles in his shirt.
The diapers were still on the li
ne that evening when a boxy-looking automobile drove into the clearing.
As Marek stepped out, Brandy grabbed the basket and hurriedly pulled clothespins off diapers, feeling braver with someone solid for company. “You have a new automobile.”
“It’s a station wagon.” He grinned as if making a joke on himself. “And here’s a set of keys for you.”
“But I can’t drive a –”
“You can learn.”
Brandy stared at the machine. “Yes … I suppose I could.”
“You have to come out in the world sometime. You can’t hide here forever.”
“No.” What would it be like to drive an automobile?”
“My project at NCAR has been extended another two years.” He followed her into the kitchen. “That’s three years I can count on working in this area.”
Brandy sat at the kitchen table and folded diapers. She’d liked Marek better when he thought she was Shay. He wasn’t so stiff then.
“We’ve all been trying to give you time to adjust, but –”
“Do you think I could drive a flying machine too?”
“An airplane? You might try riding in one first. But what I wanted to say is, I’ve bought a house in Boulder.”
“Yes … there are ghosts here.” Brandy glanced at the window. It was growing dark outside. “But then for me there’ll be ghosts everywhere.”
“Look, I don’t know how men got around to this in the old days but –”
“This is now.” Brandy removed the pins from Shay’s hair. Combed her fingers through it. How had Shay kept it out of her cooking? “This world can’t be as impossible as it seems. After all, it produced my granddaughter. And she must have been a very brave person.”
He squinted, stuffed his hands in his pants pockets, then took them out. “Just what the hell are we talking about?”
She turned back to the pile of diapers. “Nothing … I guess.”
“Brandy?” His breath tickled the top of her scalp, a hand warmed each of her shoulders. “I’m not doing this right, am I?”
Did he have patches of hair all over him like the men in Lottie’s posters? She folded a diaper wrong and flung it to the floor.