It was good and dim in the kitchen now. I lit a candle and set it next to the mirror, so it kind of made everything glow. Then I set myself down in a chair and leaned over it, positioning myself just right so I could see the glare of the candle of the water, and I asked myself: Where is Frankie?
All this was just stuff I’d seen my grandmother do before, but that was the outside stuff. What I didn’t know was what to do inside—what to think about. I had to wing it. So I just cleared my mind and tried not to think about anything, which is a lot harder than it sounds. Everything distracted me—the ruffles my breath made on the water, the throbbing in my leg, some damn bird chirping his head off right outside the window. But after a few minutes I kind of got into it, and next thing I knew the world around me went black and all I could see was the water like it was a screen, and there on the water was an image: a bunch of sunflowers.
For about a second it was as plain as a hog in a dress, and then it was gone. I sat bolt upright, feeling mighty shocked. Sunflowers? I thought. What the hell is that all about? What did that have to do with Frankie?
Nothing, I thought—a misfire. Just a bunch of stupid flowers.
But then I started feeling a little warm glow, because I’d done it—I’d seen something. It wasn’t much, maybe not even accurate, but it was something. And it seemed like it happened right away, too. I couldn’t have been sitting there longer than ten minutes. That was pretty good.
Call me an optimist, I guess.
I kept staring into the water. Right, I thought. Think. Sunflowers. What do those mean?
Suddenly I heard the pickup truck come crunching into the driveway, and Mother came up the back steps and into the kitchen. I didn’t have time to move, I was so surprised.
She was surprised, too—more than a little. She came in the door and stopped and stared at me like I’d sprouted horns.
“Forget something?” I asked.
“Haley Bombauer, what are you doing?” she whispered.
Well, there was no need to answer that, so I just didn’t.
“How come you’re home so soon?” I asked.
“What are you talking about?” she said. “I’ve been gone for three hours!”
Well, I got a bit of a chill then, I don’t mind telling you. Mother went to the curtains and threw them back, and sure enough it was dusk. When I sat down it had been broad daylight. I looked at the candle, and it was out. Just a smoking little stump.
“Oh, my,” I said.
“Haley,” said Mother. “What are you doing?”
“Looking for Frankie,” I said.
We stayed like that, staring at each other for the longest time. It was like I had been sharpened, and I could see more now—I mean more of her. I looked into her eyes and read things I hadn’t seen before. I could read her feelings, but more than her feelings—like her thoughts were words in my head. And I knew she couldn’t add it all up, poor old Mudder Dearest. It just didn’t make sense. Here was me, likely as not the most outrageous undaughterly daughter our family had seen in five hundred years, or even five thousand, and yet I was taking right along after my grandmother, and doing it in secret so nobody would know. She just didn’t know what to make of it.
Finally she said, “What did you see?”
No harm in telling her, I thought.
“Sunflowers,” I said.
“That’s it?”
I nodded.
“Put that stuff away,” she said.
“Excuse me,” I said, “but I seem to have a broken leg. How ’bout a little help, here?”
But Mother wouldn’t budge.
“It’s the rules,” she said. “You have to put the things away yourself. Nobody else is allowed to touch them until after. It breaks the…” She didn’t finish that.
“Breaks the what?” I said.
She didn’t say anything.
“Breaks the what?” I repeated.
“The spell,” she said.
We sat there for a while longer. That strange, old-fashioned word floated between us, echoing. Spell.
“I think you did that when you walked in the door,” I said.
“Put it away,” she said. “Now.”
I hadn’t heard that tone from her in a long time, and suddenly I remembered: She was the one who used to swat me on the bum when I was ornery, and that was the voice she used when she did it. Dad never could bring himself to spank me. So I hopped up and put everything away, and she just stood there and watched me, and when I was done she said, “You knew what you were doing?”
“Not really,” I said. “I just kind of figured it out.”
“Did your grandmother teach you any of that?”
“No,” I said.
“Then how did you know what to do?”
“I was born with it,” I said. “I’m a natural.”
“How do you know what you were born with?” she said. “That’s not for you to say. That’s for others older than you to—”
“Who else,” I said, feeling a little hot under the collar, “could possibly know what I was born with except me?”
“I’m just a little surprised, Haley,” she said. “Surprised…and scared.”
“Scared of what?” I asked. “There’s nothing to be scared of.”
“Haley, you have to know what you’re doing,” she said. “You can’t just sail into this like you do everything else, acting so damned arrogant and thinking you know everything when you don’t. You’re still a child, Haley.”
“How do you know so much about it?” I asked.
She looked at me like I was an idiot. “Haley,” she said. “You believe you got this from your grandmother, right?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Well, you didn’t,” she said.
“Whaddaya mean?”
“Think about it,” she said. “It had to pass through me to get to you.”
“Come again?” I said.
“Haley,” she said, “you got it from me.”
Well, I have to admit that had never occurred to me.
“You mean you know how to do it too?” I said. “Just the same way, with the water and candle and everything?”
“You have to be taught,” she said, not answering me. “It’s like trying to…I don’t know, like trying to fly a jet plane when you’ve only ever been a passenger. And almost as dangerous. You have to be trained in this.”
“Then train me,” I said.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because you’re not ready!” she said.
“Well, obviously I am,” I said. “If I’m doing it on my own.”
“And because I don’t do it!” she said. “I don’t want anything to do with it, and I never want to. Ever. So don’t ask me.”
“You used to have something to do with it,” I said. “Didn’t you?”
I could tell she didn’t want to answer that question. She looked away.
“Mother?”
“What?”
“You used to have something to do with it.”
Silence.
“Yes or no?”
More silence.
“Tell me!” I said.
“All right,” she said. “Yes.”
I knew it. “So when did you stop?”
She got pale then.
“You want to know when I stopped?” she said. “All right, if you’re so grown-up and smart I’ll tell you. I stopped when I saw your father die,” she said. “I saw it in the water, weeks before it happened. And I wish I never had, because it was terrible!”
This word came out as more of a scream. I jumped, and she started to cry. I wanted to hug her suddenly, but I was rooted to where I stood. Her words had seared me, frightened me to death. Suddenly the fiery image of the shed going up in smoke was in my mind, and that was an image that never failed to undo me. Even many years later, it was the worst thing I could think of—it would always be the worst thing. And Mother had her arms wrapped around herself, encas
ed in her own sadness, like an unborn baby in its sac of fluids.
“You’re not ready to handle what you might see, Haley.” Her voice was low through her tears—her voice got deeper when she cried. “You’re not ready yet. And you’re never ready to see something like that.”
“It was only sunflowers!” I shouted. “That’s all it was!”
I started crutching myself out of there. She had me really spooked now. I wanted to go outside, but I had to get past her to get to the door, and she put her hand on my shoulder to stop me.
“This time it was only sunflowers,” she said.
Well, she didn’t need to finish that statement. Today sunflowers, tomorrow something else—fire, maybe? Blood and guts? Death? I shook her off and went out the door to the corral. Brother was standing in his stall, asleep on his feet. He woke up when I came in and whickered at me. I was shaking pretty hard. I let myself into his stall and put my head on his neck.
“Oh, my, horse,” I whispered. “Oh, glory. Things are getting curiouser and curiouser.”
Whibbety whicket, he said.
I put my nose into him and smelled his horsiness. It was a smell that always calmed me down.
I stayed out there for a while, not wanting to go back inside. I made myself comfy on a bale of hay and just sat there, thinking things over. I hadn’t known for sure I could do it. I just thought I could. Now I felt like something in me had changed, just a little bit. I had looked through the Veil.
But what Mother said about seeing Dad’s death had busted me up inside more than a little bit. I’d never known she could look through the Veil too, but it made sense. Just her and Grandma out there alone in the woods all those years, until my Dad came along. There would have been plenty of time for her to learn Grandma’s tricks. So she’d taken more than a sense of churchiness with her when she went to live with Dad. She’d taken this gift with her, too—and she’d kept using it. She’d been doing it all the while I was a little girl, without me knowing. I wondered if old Fireball had known about it or if she kept it from him, too. It didn’t seem like the kind of thing he’d put any stock in. He probably just thought it was one of her Mennonite things.
Of course, it wasn’t a Mennonite thing. I would hate to give people the impression that Mennonites spend all their time staring into pots of water and predicting the future, because that’s not the way it is. I think Grandma would have been a Veil Lifter no matter what religion she was, Mennonite or Buddhist or Jew. It was just in her. And it was an old thing, older than her, even, older than all three of us put together. I wondered just how long the women in our family had been parting the Veil and looking into the other side—probably a lot longer than we’d been Mennonites, that’s for sure.
I didn’t believe for a moment that Mother would have told Dad she saw his death ahead of time. But it would have been hard for her to keep that secret locked up inside her, especially if she didn’t completely understand what she saw. Maybe she just saw fire. Maybe just an explosion. But she would have known it was him, and that he was leaving us. It would just about have killed me to have to keep a secret like that from the person I loved most in the world.
By then the sun was completely down. I went back out into the yard. All the windows in our house were dark, even my mother’s bedroom window. She was probably locked in there again, I thought, crying her eyes out.
I headed out to the road, slow, just feeling my way with my crutches. I wasn’t really going anywhere—just moving for the sake of it. The night air was cool and moist on my face, and I was getting better at those crutches. My hands were toughening up. Once I got on the road I turned left and kept going, past the Grunveldt house—all their windows were dark too. Folks around here go to bed with the chickens, as they say, and get up with the roosters.
Up ahead, at the top of the rise, I could see the Powell house. There were a couple of lights on. Miz Powell was still awake. It wasn’t too far—I mean, it would take me a while, but I could do it. By that time my muscles were crying out for some kind of exercise after all that time cooped up inside. I got into the rhythm of it: step, vault, swing the arms forward. It wasn’t all that hard. It was trickier on the uphill part, but I just went slower and tried not to overbalance. What the hell, I thought. I would pay Miz Elizabeth Powell a visit. It was a little late for callers, but I would knock light. If she didn’t hear me, she was in bed. And in that case I would just go home again and get in my own.
I made more noise than I wanted to climbing up to her porch—I still didn’t have much practice on steps, and I thumped around like a drunken stiltwalker. Once I got up I could see the living room lamp on through the white lace curtains.
There was a figure sitting in a chair. I gave a little tap on the door, and the figure got up and opened it. It was her, wearing some kind of Chinese-looking robe, and a pair of bifocals perched on her nose.
“Why, Haley!” said Miz Powell. “I was wondering when you’d be dropping by.”
She slipped something into her bathrobe pocket. I couldn’t quite see what it was, but I caught the gleam of metal.
“Not too late, is it?” I said. “I was just out and about. Your lights were on.”
“Not a bit of it, dear,” she said, as though poor wandering crippled girls were a normal nocturnal occurrence in this neighborhood. “Come in, do come in. Tea?”
“Nothing too strong,” I said. She closed the door behind me. “No caffeine.”
“Some mint, then,” she said. “My sister had lovely mint growing in the garden.”
She put on some water and I set myself down on her sofa like a fainting elephant, too tired even to look around. It was the first time I’d ever been in that house. It smelled like perfume and spices. In a few minutes she came out of the kitchen, and we had a pot of tea between us. I eyed the outline of the thing in her pocket. Whatever it was, it hung low and heavy.
“Set your crutches down here, if you like,” she said. “They’ll be out of the way.”
“Those things will be the death of me,” I said.
“Oh, I doubt that very much,” she said. “You’re durable, Haley. Rugged. I knew that about you the moment I met you.”
“Why, thank you,” I said.
“You’re quite welcome.”
“Mind if I ask you something, Elizabeth?”
“Not at all, dear.”
“You packing heat?”
She lifted her eyebrows. “I beg your pardon?”
“Your pocket, there,” I said, pointing. “Is that a…a gun?”
“Oh, my goodness, you are observant, aren’t you?” she said sweetly. “That’s a quality I respect.” She reached into her pocket and sure enough took out an old-looking pistol. In two shakes she’d popped the magazine out, taken a round out of the chamber, and handed it to me butt first. I didn’t know much about guns, but she sure did. She handled that thing like an expert.
“Go on and look at it, love,” she said. “It’s a souvenir from the war, an old German piece, but it still works quite well. It’s called a Luger. I suppose I don’t need it out here in the country. One does get certain habits after a time, though. And the older you get, the harder they are to break.”
I hefted the gun in my hand—it was heavy and cold. With a shudder, I noticed there was a little swastika imprinted on it. I handed it back to her.
“You lived in a bad neighborhood in London, I guess,” I said.
“Something like that,” she said. “I hope it doesn’t frighten you.”
“No, ma’am.”
“Good,” she said firmly. “Fear is a useless quality, my dear. Absolutely useless, and I would beg of you to remember that.”
We locked eyes for a minute. I didn’t completely understand what she was talking about, but she had a firm way of saying it. I had the feeling there weren’t a lot of people in the world who could get away with messing around with Miz Elizabeth Powell. I looked away first. I had to.
“Your tea is getting cold, dear,??
? she said.
She slipped the pistol into the drawer of a nearby end table, and I could tell that was the end of the conversation about the gun. Feeling a little overwhelmed, I took a sip of tea. It was strong, sweet, and almost peppery smelling, dark amber in the cup.
“I don’t believe I’ve ever had mint quite this good before,” I said. It sounded like a ridiculous thing to say after the gun, but I guess anything would have. And I was trying my best to be chatty.
“Oh, my sister grew all sorts of things in her garden,” she said. “She had champion roses, did you know that?”
“No, ma’am.”
“All sorts of amazing flowers, in fact. I was quite astonished when I saw them. Wait just one moment, Haley. I want to show you something.”
She went out into the kitchen. I could hear her rustling around out there, and a moment later she came back in with a huge bundle of sunflowers in her arms.
“What do you think of these?” she asked. “I decided to try something new, and cut them like they were regular flowers. Of course they’re huge, but they might look interesting standing in a corner, don’t you think? Like that?”
She set them down against the wall and stepped back. There were about ten of them, and even with their stalks trimmed they were taller than I was. Ms. Powell looked at me, waiting for me to say something, but I couldn’t speak. My throat closed up on me and my breath was coming short.