The Kings and Queens of Roam: A Novel

  Still, Mrs. Samuels seemed truly happy to see her.

  “Rachel,” she said. And again: “Rachel. Look at you. You’re—”

  “I know,” she said. “I’m wearing the brooch.”

  Mrs. Samuels placed her hand on Rachel’s arm and lightly squeezed it: it was the way old people showed deep feeling. “So you are,” she said.

  “I thanked you, didn’t I? For the brooch.”

  “Thanked me? It was yours already. Your sister . . . ?” Neither of them spoke for a moment. “You’re looking particularly beautiful today, Rachel.”

  “Beautiful?” Rachel was tired of defending her own hideousness. She merely sighed.

  “I mean your hair especially. And that’s a Very. Attractive. Dress.”

  “Thank you, Mrs. Samuels.”

  Mrs. Samuels was one for the long, thoughtful pause. Sometimes. Even in the. Middle of. Sentences. Mrs. Samuels liked to say things that mattered. Being blind and in a conversation with her, it was like waiting for a train at an abandoned station in the middle of the night. Rachel spent the long moment remembering her number: 247.

  “I think I know what you’re doing,” Mrs. Samuels said, finally.

  “You do?”

  A bird landed on a nearby branch and sang a little song. “And I think it’s wonderful.”

  “You do?”

  “This . . . foray,” she said. “Into the world. Without your sister. I’d been hoping. For something like this.”

  “It is something, isn’t it?” Rachel said. “But—”

  Rachel listened to the bird sing. A cardinal.

  “Yes, Rachel?”

  “I think I should continue. With my foray.”

  If Helen returned and found her here she would take her by the wrist and drag her home and it would be terrible—Helen would be so upset they would spend the rest of their lives getting over it and they never would, because Helen would hold it against her forever. She could hear her now: You said you would never leave me. Never! And she had said that. She had lied to her sister. But this was for the best.

  Mrs. Samuels didn’t move.

  “I think this must mean something,” she said. “Meeting you here.”

  “You do?”

  “I do.” A human gaze must exert some sort of special invisible force, because Rachel felt it, Mrs. Samuels’s eyes all over her face. Then Mrs. Samuels whispered a kind of secret: “I’m just. Coming back. From your mother’s. Grave.”

  Rachel pointed.

  “That’s right,” Mrs. Samuels said, sounding a bit stunned. How could a blind girl know? It was magic! “Just over there.”

  Rachel had been there many times, of course. She and Helen went once a month. Helen always managed to bring up the circumstances, and how terrible it was that two people died simply because they were trying to do something good for someone—for her, for Rachel. To think they were struck down while they were only trying to help their sweet little blind daughter Rachel. Think how much would be different now if you’d never been blind! Think about it. They would still be alive.

  Rachel didn’t want to think about it.

  “It’s very nice, your mother’s grave. A very nice place to be.”

  “My parents’ grave, you mean,” Rachel said. “My mother and father are buried side by side.”

  Mrs. Samuels sniffed. “Well, I don’t talk to your father,” she said. “We never really . . . got along. A good man, I haven’t a bad word for him. But your mother was my friend. I really only talk to her.”

  “Why do you keep saying talk?” Rachel asked.

  “Because I do, dear,” she said. “She was never much of a talker when she was alive, you know. But now. Oh, my. She can’t stop.”

  “No,” Rachel said. “That’s impossible. She’s dead.”

  “Well,” Mrs. Samuels said. “I’m certainly not going to argue with you about that. But we do talk. I stand by her grave and talk to her the same way I’m talking to you right now. The only difference between the way it is now and the way it was then is a cup of black coffee and a slice of Bundt cake.”

  Rachel laughed. “And why not bring that with you? No one would mind, I’m sure. Set up a little table beside the stone.” She didn’t regret saying it: why should she? Even to Mrs. Samuels, who had always been so kind. But she was thinking, If my mother can talk, why hasn’t she been talking to me?

  “She’s right,” Mrs. Samuels said, her friendly tone changing.

  “Who?”

  “Your mother. You are beginning to sound like your sister. That awful girl.”

  That awful girl. Rachel tried to slap Mrs. Samuels when she said this, but she wasn’t really sure where her face was and she missed, terribly. Rachel had never tried to hit anybody in her life, and there was so much more to it, she discovered, than the act itself. Her whole body began to tremble. Mrs. Samuels took her in her arms and held her.

  “I’m sorry,” Mrs. Samuels said. She patted her on the back as though she were a little girl. “There now. I know, I know. But Rachel, dear, all your mother wants you to know is who your sister is. Helen is not the woman you think. You’re such a beautiful girl,” she said. “But you don’t know who you are. You’re a woman now, Rachel. You’re all grown up. More than anything this is what your mother wants you to know. You have to start over.”

  “Start over?” Now she did push herself away from Mrs. Samuels, and wiped her face with her dress sleeve. “But that’s what I’m doing.”

  “How? What do you mean, Rachel?”

  “I’m leaving,” she said.

  “Where to?”

  “To a better place,” she said. “Helen told me there was a better place. Away from the Hanging Tree, the Boneyard, the House of Death. It’s on the other side of the ravine. A river, and a town.”

  Mrs. Samuels took Rachel’s hands in her own. She was crying now; Rachel could hear it in her voice. “No. No, Rachel. None of that—it’s a story, a terrible story, and she’s a terrible, hideous person,” she said. “Hideous inside and out. She tells you lies and you believe her because you don’t know any better, because she’s never let you know any better. She’s never let another soul near you. You couldn’t know. But now you can, now you can. Rachel? Rachel, dear? Where are you going? Rachel: you have no idea what’s out there.”

  “But I’m hopeful,” Rachel said. “That’s the important thing, right?”

  Rachel kept walking until Mrs. Samuels’ voice faded in the distance, until even the wind was louder. She didn’t see anybody else on her way to the Forest, and no one saw her, or if someone did they didn’t stop her, watching from a distance through the small windows of the small houses where the mill workers once lived. She felt something warm rub against her leg and disappear, and she could smell it: a dog. She could hear it running, the soft crackling of brittle twigs beneath its paws. She walked faster now as she tried to get the sound of Mrs. Samuels’s voice out of her head, to forget what she’d heard. But the words felt like sand in Rachel’s blood, even as she entered the woods, even as she waited for the sound of a hundred silent wings . . .

  There are stories in the woods, stories everyone hears and knows in their own heart to be true. Stories of darkness, beauty, life, death. Mystery. There is something out there, beyond the bend, before the shadow: everyone knows this. But it’s not everyone who wants to find it. Rachel wanted to find it, and so did Ming Kai’s Markus. He left his home just days before Rachel left hers, heading her way before he even knew where he was going, as she was heading his. Because each had been told the same story by the person they loved the most: there was a world out there better than the one they lived in now, and all they had to do was seek it.

  A PRAYING WOMAN

  It was getting on to a purple dusk now, so when the fog settled in so suddenly it looked like the sky and all the clouds in it had fallen into the woods and across the road, and Helen felt like she was walking through a dream. She was also lost. She didn’t think it was possible to get
lost in Roam, but Jonas had taken her outside of it, and the truth was she didn’t have a very good sense of direction. The road split at some point a mile or so back and there was no marker, no sign, nothing; she went left and she should have gone right. The left branch of the road became a path through a multitude of tall, scrawny pine trees, and then it just stopped altogether. She turned around and retraced her steps but hadn’t noticed how the path itself had bifurcated at some point and she had to make another choice and she made the wrong one again, and now there was no one in the world more alone than Helen McCallister—unless it was her sister, Rachel.

  She stopped and leaned against one of the pine trees. The hem of her dress was damp and she was bleeding: some of the underbrush had cut thin red lines into her ankles. She itched all over. If she had to live the rest of her life confined to one little room somewhere it would all be the same to her; she hated the outdoors. She hated trees and grass and night and being in a place where if she died no one would ever find her.

  Jonas probably would. He’d look for her. Maybe he was looking now, but it didn’t matter. She was too late and she knew it.

  She leaned against the tree and watched the sky darken and go black. She could feel the tree she was leaning against, and if she put her eye close to it she could see its bark, but it wasn’t much to look at. She thought of Rachel. She turned away from the tree to the nothing of the night and hoped she was wrong about her sister, hoped she didn’t know Rachel as well as she knew she did.

  When it finally turned inky dark and thick as water, she saw a dim, white light. She walked toward it and after a few minutes saw that it wasn’t a real light at all—it was her mother. Helen was in the graveyard. Her mother was pacing back and forth in front of her gravestone, looking sad and dark and grave herself. She was lost in thought and didn’t see Helen until Helen was right there. Then she stopped and looked at her, not surprised at all. “Helen,” she said, using that same tone of disapproval she’d used before.

  Helen said, “You died. I did the best I could.”

  “You did the worst you could,” her mother said.

  She went back to pacing, and it wasn’t clear to Helen if she was even talking to her anymore, or just talking, the presence of a living ear inspiration enough.

  “I imagined a different sort of life than the one I led,” she said, “but I suppose everybody could say the same. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, to be surprised by what you get. If the life you imagined was the life you actually turned out to live it could be boring, or uneventful at the very least, even if the life you imagined was very eventful, if you see what I mean. Here I am in a romantic foreign land, you could think, just as I imagined I would be!

  “But who would have thought my first child, bless her heart, would have turned out to be so horrid, and my last child so very beautiful—but blind. This would be absolutely beyond the imagining of anyone.

  “Your father and I weren’t really the ideal people to shoulder the burden of our various tragedies; they seemed to swallow us up. Or you could say they defined us. They became who we were: not just a family, but a family that had suffered and endured until our deaths, which only brought more suffering to the family, to you and Rachel.

  “You were so good to her once, but then you changed. I don’t know what happened. If I could have screamed from the bottom of the lake I would have said, with my final words, Do not let Helen have her. But I couldn’t say it, because I was already dead.”

  “I don’t know what to do now, Mother,” Helen said. “Tell me what to do.”

  “It’s sad,” Mrs. McCallister said. “But I can’t see the future: I can only see the past.” Mrs. McCallister slowly dimmed, dying again, like a candle’s flame. She blended into the darkening air. And she was gone.

  Helen stood there for another moment, and then walked back toward town, each step faster than the one before it. Soon she was running, and she didn’t stop running until she made it home.

  THE LUMBERJACK

  AND HIS DOG,

  PART III

  When the rest of the lumberjacks went back to the mountain, Lumberjack Smith stayed behind and waited for Carla to return. Sometimes a dog would do that, he knew: go away somewhere and be a dog and then come back to the home where she lives. He missed his dog, missed her with a deep and unsettling pain that traveled through his chest and down to his stomach and then spread into his blood and to the very tips of his fingers. The tips of his fingers were the only place he could actually get to the pain, so he chewed like a rat on his nails until they disappeared completely. His fingers took on the appearance of naked eyeless snakes. He didn’t understand it, an emotion of this power, didn’t know what to do with it. It possessed him.

  Lumberjack Smith was in love with a dog.

  How could he have known? Up in the mountains for so long, for months and months at a time, he had grown used to missing her. But the idea of her waiting for him was a salve, a prize, a promise of a homecoming so fine it more than equaled the dark time away. What good is always being happy? Sadness hints at the possibility of a future reward. He may have loved his wife as well, but it was a different kind of love, because there were lots of women who could have been his wife, and she was as good as any other. But there was no dog other than Carla who could have been Carla. There was no blind, three-legged dog anywhere in the world, and even if there were it would have been some other dog that wasn’t Carla, and there would be no more homecomings like the ones he’d had before, and there would be no more thinking of them, and there would be no more happiness. There is no greater grief than that of a man with a broken heart who only just learned he had a heart at all.

  Lumberjack Smith tried to work through it. After a few months he went back to the mountain. With his lumberjack brothers he felled the mighty oaks and pine, the hearty maple, the occasional ginkgo. But there was no passion in it for him; Smith was merely going through the motions. At night around the fire, around the blazing fire that could be seen like some distant star from as far away as Roam, he rarely made a sound, and when he did it was little more than a grunt. He didn’t drink whiskey and ate no more than a normal man would eat, which, as he shrank up and weakened, is almost what he became—normal. His lumberjack brothers did not save him or even try to, because there was a code among them that a man saved himself, and if he couldn’t, then he wasn’t worth saving anyway. It was like that old story the lumberjacks told, the one about a giant who was taken down by a flea. The story was that the giant tried to kill a flea that had taken up residence in his hair, and became so frustrated that he pulled his own head off.

  One day Lumberjack Smith crawled into his hole, a cave covered with various scraps of metal and steel, a wall between him and the rest of the world, and made no plans to come out.

  But then one day, one day after many weeks of darkness, one day when he was close to extinguishing the tiny flame that burned inside of him, he saw two little eyes peering between pieces of corrugated steel. He thought it was a bear at first, but it wasn’t.

  It was a dog.

  Smith and the dog looked at each other through the slit in the steel for the rest of the day and into the night. Neither of them moved. The dog whimpered, though, and Lumberjack Smith whimpered, too. Smith’s heart began to beat again. He felt the flame within him flicker. He climbed out of his hole and took the loose fur of the dog’s neck in his hand, and he pulled the dog to him, wrapped his arms around it, and sobbed.

  He had been saved.

  He gave her (for it was a her) a name that would be uniquely hers, but would, at the same time, honor the dog who came before.

  He named her Marla.

  Marla turned out to be nothing like Carla at all. Black, feral, she growled when his lumberjack brothers came too close and caught rabbits for Smith to eat as he regained his strength. Smith had taken care of Carla; Marla was taking care of Smith. Still, Smith liked to believe that the spirit of his old dog had come down from the Great Barn or wher
ever it was that dog souls go and possessed this wandering canine and led her here. A formidable animal, fierce and unforgiving as a wolf, but at night as gentle and warm as any woman curled up beside him. The moments of pure happiness Smith experienced—fleeting, like the shadows of birds flying just beyond the range of his vision—made him miss his old Carla all the more.

  That’s when he discovered: Marla was pregnant. Soon she was the mother of half a dozen healthy pups, each one as strong and eager as the next for a shot at her milky nipples. Only one died, and when it did Smith took it out to a quiet place and dug a hole and placed it carefully within. He had never had a chance to bury Carla. This tiny body, to him, was her, and he cried like a baby.

  Now he had six dogs, each as black as the next. There was no room for all of them in his cave, so he made his cave deeper, longer, wider. They huddled and slept around Smith in a circle no other living thing could penetrate. They hunted together, and brought back deer with them—once an entire herd, which Smith and his dogs shared with the other lumberjacks. One year became two. The six dogs became ten, then twenty. And all they did, down to a dog, was love Lumberjack Smith.

  How sad it was, then, when Smith realized that this was not enough, that all the love from all the dogs in the world could not begin to heal the gaping wound in his heart. Though he truly believed they had been sent to him by Carla to make him happy, he wasn’t; there was no substitute for the love he had for her. There was no substitute even for the idea of her, and it was wrong of him to think any other dog—or any other fifty or a hundred dogs—could be that one dog for him.