Shyly, she sat next to him on the bed while he slipped the ring onto her finger. She hugged her father, and Frank shook Albert’s hand. “Those are very nice boys,” Albert said. “I apologize for Rebecca’s husband . . .”
“No need.”
“But you handled it admirably. And so did Ian.”
Together, without words, Frank and Claudia lay with the boys tumbled around them, admiring the dusky majesty of the old ring. Then Claudia got up and lay down on the other side of Ian, scooching her body close to his, adjusting the light-blocking mask she said that she would need if she lived in an underground cave, then doing the thing that endeared her to Frank in a way that almost nothing else did, not her smarts, or her riding, not even her sexy. Claudia wasn’t like other women, who needed to be draped in someone’s arms as they slept. But she needed a little touch. What she did was straighten both her arms and tuck her hands under Frank’s back as she prepared to sleep. Now Ian, Frank had noticed, did the same thing on those nights he slept next to Colin.
Frank lay awake, listening to some chuffing and coughing noise in the near distance that was certainly too big to be anything but a bear. Somewhere out there was the nutty old woman they would go to see tomorrow, stirring a pot filled with eyeballs and dried frogs, who Claudia seemed to think might hold the key to their future. Frank was sure she had the key to nothing. What else was out there?
He never wanted to get out of the soft bed, which felt like an old refuge where two hardheaded people guarded two kids who were not only small and vulnerable, but who knew it. If only there were just bears, or wolves or sharks, or anything with simple reasons for their rampages.
TWENTY-FIVE
THE SIGN READ, Please Park Here Wildflowers.
“Is that a signature? Or a reference to the flora and fauna?” Frank said.
“I don’t remember it this way,” Claudia said, taking Ian’s hand. Frank took Colin’s hand. Colin shook him off, and then, glancing up, repented. Ian counted each of the two hundred and fifty-six steps that led up to what they all assumed would be a house, although nothing was visible from the stairs except a dark crowd of fir and maples, second-growth trees huddled along the jaw of a ridge. When they got to the top, even Claudia, who now regularly ran three or four miles around Lake Monona or at the farm, was pulling her soaked linen shirt away from her breast and gasping. Frank’s bad leg and his lungs were burning flaps.
Ian was spent.
Colin was fine.
As they drew closer, they saw the house, which to Frank looked so little he could scarcely believe it was inhabited by humans and not elves, but it was sturdy, the yard so colorful it was almost a sound. Instead of the traditional southern wraparound porch, there was a sort of squared-off widow’s walk with high railings on top, which Frank imagined must give a killer view of the valley and the hills beyond, this afternoon cloaked in the blue clouds that gave the range its name.
“Do you think she’s here?” Claudia said. “I sent her a note, just as I was supposed to do. Do you think we have the right time?”
Some heightened sense of his own made Frank turn around, so quickly he almost elbowed the tall, dark-haired woman standing so close behind him she could have cut his throat with the large set of garden shears that lay in the flat basket she held. She smiled, a smile that burst up into her all but black eyes like a small sunrise. Not pretty . . . the word that came to Frank was arresting. Her hair was very long, and though Frank couldn’t tell how old she was because her face was fair and unlined, she was probably past the age when his own mother said that women needed to cut their hair so as not to seem to be pretending to be the girls they were once. “I think we’re looking for your mother,” Frank said.
“You’d have to go all the way to Tampa for that,” the woman said. “It’s me you’re looking for.” She set the basket on the ground and held out her hand. “Hello, Claudia. It’s been a long time, but you look just the same.”
Claudia said, “You recognize me?”
“Not that many medical students come to see me. In the thirty years I’ve lived here, you make a grand total of two,” said the woman. “I think the other one was my kinsman, your professor. I must have seemed so old to you then.”
How long could she have lived here, alone on this mountaintop? Frank studied the woman’s face. If she was forty, that would have made her less than thirty when Claudia first visited this place. She had to be older than that. The thick mink-colored hair was not graying, however, and although she was dressed for the outdoors, it was in modern and expensive clothes, tapered gray pants and a long black sweater that hugged her thighs. She wore silver filigreed earrings and a touch of expertly applied makeup.
“Do you have children?” Frank asked.
“Have we been introduced?” she said, with a disarming smile.
“I’m so sorry. I had the feeling that we had been. I’m Frank Mercy, and these are my sons, Colin and Ian.”
“And I’m Julia Madrigal. There are dozen of Madrigals all over this county. I do have children. I have one son. His name is Hale. His name is Hale Winslow, though. His dad’s name. He’s at basketball right now. Colin, you don’t have to be bored. Go up there behind the house. There are about six tire swings.”
“You heard him?” Frank said.
Julia said, “Sure.”
“That was rude, Colin,” Claudia said.
“Well, he is bored.”
Colin glanced at Frank and then took off.
“Telepathy is pretty useful and amazing. I think I know about thirty senders and that many receivers, about ten who are both.”
“Their mother, before us, was both,” Frank said.
“Ian, you’re about four or five, right?” Julia said. “Do you watch TV too much?” Ian nodded. “Hale does, too. But not on school nights.” She gestured toward her door. “I built this house myself. You won’t believe that, but I’m very handy. Our old house was much bigger, on this very site, but not nearly so energy efficient. You know, Claudia, I am still a kindergarten teacher. Do y’all have Saturday kindergarten? We’re thinking of starting it here. I’ve just been picking in my kitchen garden and puttering around until you came.” Julia Madrigal smiled, displayed a full set of very straight and well-kept teeth.
Not one element of her appearance or demeanor conformed with what Frank had envisioned. She lived in a Spartan cabin. She had herbs in her basket—but they were parsley and oregano. She looked like an Eddie Bauer model. Something about all that ordinariness made Frank wonder if she was an authentic . . . what? They’d never figured out a name for it. Should they call Ian a healer? A medium or some goddamned thing?
Opening the unlocked door, Julia invited them in.
The house was little, but gave the effect of spaciousness because it was so spare and studded all around with cut-glass windows. The table and benches were built into one wall, as were two benches that snapped flush when they weren’t in use, and two chairs that could be pulled up to little shelflike desks: Frank imagined the young Hale, who had feet the size of a teenager judging from the rubber muck boots stationed on a sisal rug at the door, doing his homework. There was a galley tightly fitted with almost miniature kitchen appliances. The ceiling, crowded with three big triangular skylights, went straight up to the peak of the house. A small spiral staircase probably led to the top deck. Loft railings jutted out on three sides—the two bedrooms, Julia explained, and the room that jumbled together a library, TV area, and playroom for Hale, as well as spillover sleeping for guests.
“My husband, Cato, he just loved the old house. But you could have pushed a rat through the holes in the walls, and when I saw the state of that cellar after I tore it down, I reckon that plenty of rats had done just that. Cato died when Hale was just five, in an accident . . .”
“You couldn’t warn him?” Claudia asked, and then, embarrassed, put a hand up to shield her eyes.
“I’m not a psychic,” said Julia Madrigal. “I can’t do what Colin
does, send messages or speech telepathically. I can’t see the future, honey. There was a logging truck and its brakes failed. Cato was just pulling out of the grocery store. That trucker came down Canaan Road like a freight train and the poor driver was killed as well.”
“You must have been happy together,” Claudia said. “You and Cato. Imagine being able to get your husband out of a bad mood just by being around him.”
“We were happy. I never met anyone else I enjoyed talking to as much as Cato. We could sit and talk for eight hours, and, when Hale was a baby, sometimes we did. Cato built furniture. Yeah, I know. That seems just like what you’d have to do if you live in the Smoky Mountains, but he was from Brooklyn, and we met in college. He taught me to build and do woodwork. He studied graphic design, but he never did that.”
Claudia said, “What did you major in?”
Julia smiled at Ian. “Witchcraft,” she said. “No. Elementary education, since here I am, showing kids that if you pour a half a cup of water with yellow food coloring and a half a cup of water with red food coloring, you get a whole cup of orange. What I’m like, what there is about me . . . what I can do, if you want to say that, is not learned.”
“Can everyone in your family do it? Because you all should be working for the diplomatic corps, don’t you think?” Claudia said. She never said “you all,” or lapsed into any other southernisms, in Madison, but her speech had stretched out like taffy since she set foot in North Carolina.
“Nobody else in my family can do this. Nobody even wants to know about it. And as for diplomacy, that’s the last thing our government would want—or any other government either. Too evolved for them.” What Frank had fussed around with for so long, picking at pieces and edges, suddenly merged: this woman was entirely correct. There was no money in peaceful coexistence. Someone who could foster it was as perilous as a nuclear weapon. Be happy. Hell no!
They will for sure kill her, then.
Julia was brewing coffee, slowly slicing a small loaf of banana bread. Colin came in, sweaty. Julia asked the boys if they liked Legos “because Hale has about seven thousand five hundred and eighty-two Legos up there, if you want to play.” Ian glanced at Colin, then Frank, then Julia. “Does he have the Death Star?” She nodded. Colin asked, “Could we have some of that bread first?” They did, and then disappeared. “Hale will be sorry he missed them. Not too many boys his age right near here.”
“What protects you?” Frank asked, when his boys were gone.
“I used to think about that, being kidnapped by people who wanted to make twenty billion dollar corporate mergers between paranoid corporate leaders. That never happened. No one pays attention to me.”
“Claudia said you helped people. Couples. Others. People who got drunk and hit their wives. Who hit their kids. They stopped doing that.” Julia nodded and Frank went on, “Can you stop them from being drunks? Like with my grandfather, who’s dead now. He had dementia. Ian couldn’t make my grandfather well, but he made him stop smacking my mother with his cane and throwing his food at the wall. So, what if they go back to drinking—”
“Most of them never stop.”
“What’s to keep them from just blabbing in the local bar about what you can do?”
“Nothing. I don’t think about it.”
“What, you just have faith? In God or something?”
“Or something.”
Frustrated, Frank got up and shoved his hands into his pockets, sighing as he gazed out the window. “Why don’t you get on a plane and go to, well, Brooklyn and ask someone to give you ten thousand dollars, and then fly to Los Angeles and go to a bank and ask someone to give you ten thousand dollars, and then fly to the Emirates and tell someone to be nice and give you a million dollars . . . ?”
“I’m not set up like that. When I was twelve, I did it with mascara, though. My parents weren’t unaware of this. They made it clear that there were appropriate and inappropriate uses for all extraordinary things, just as you will do with your boys. Colin could tell other kids the answers to all the tests, if he knew them, right?”
“Yes.”
“Does he?”
“I don’t think so.”
“He’s not wired to do that.”
“What does the sign mean that says wildflowers?” Frank asked.
“I don’t want people tromping up the low side of the hill and wrecking the wildflowers. They aren’t really wild. I sowed rue anemone and hepatica and cohosh and dwarf crested iris just how I want. It should say, ‘Beware the owner of the wildflowers.’ ”
Julia stood up.
“I would guess you all are thinking now, Why does she sit up there with a kid, waiting for someone who wants to use her badly? The practical reason is, this is my home, and where would I go that anyone couldn’t follow? People I help out are grateful. They’re resourceful and supportive, and protective. Some of them are in law enforcement. Others pitched in to help build the house. Some are clergy. They don’t tell, except maybe others who might need me, too.” She unselfconsciously began to braid her hair, then to loosen it again. “There’s also the fact that anyone who came here with . . . well, bad motives would be affected by me, unless they were crazy. Or missing something.”
“What is it that they would be missing?” Frank asked her.
“A human soul, for want of a better term.”
“That is exactly who would come,” Frank said. “I used to be . . . never mind. People don’t go out to kill somebody because they think, Hey, there’s this lady making the world a little too safe around Durham, unless they’re stone thugs. Irredeemable. You have to find a real fine citizen, a piece of meat, to kill a lady and a kid because they’re supposed to.”
Claudia was staring at him. She wasn’t used to Frank speaking out, especially to strangers. But he couldn’t stop himself.
Julia said, “I can’t do anything about that . . .”
“Move, or put in a machine-gun turret, or an alarm system. Get a guard dog or a moat. Or something.”
“That person you describe wouldn’t be deterred by any of that.”
“Frank,” Claudia said. “You’re really worried about them, I know, but what she’s saying—”
“Of course I am!”
“We’re here to learn from Julia before any of that becomes an issue for us.”
It already was an issue, Frank thought, but he said nothing.
“You know, Frank,” Julia said, in the voice she would use to tell her kindergartners it was time to clean up their paints, “I don’t know anyone else like me. So, can I spend some time with Ian?”
She climbed up, and Colin came down, now clearly close to hostility from enforced hanging around.
“My neck hurts,” he said.
“Like a sore throat?” said Claudia.
“No, like . . . something else. I’m just so bored. Can you drive me back to the grandfather’s place so I can go fishing and you can stand here and talk all day? I’d rather be back with those girls than be up here.”
“Let’s climb up to the roof porch,” Frank suggested.
Colin said, “Fine.”
Frank and Claudia climbed up to the little square porch, where they stood looking out over the ancient furred folds of the mountains. The watery sun and the constant breeze made Claudia sleepy, so they went back down, just as Julia came out onto the landing, beaming.
“What a great kid. What an instrument he has.”
Instrument, thought Frank. Like a cello. Like a scalpel.
“And you, Colin, do you have any questions?” Julia asked. “Other than, when can we leave?” She said to Claudia, “Your teacher, back then, called me an empath. But I’m not an empath. An empath is just someone who feels deeply, sometimes to extremes, and who feels called to nurture and give emotionally. You’re probably an empath. Many good therapists are. But Ian is different. Ian is an empath and he also has a tremendous, maybe unprecedented ability to exercise what you would call mind control. I am differen
t in that way, too. He can change things and behaviors. Discord hurts him, physically, and makes him feel sick, like he was telling me about your sister’s divorce—”
“My sister isn’t divorced.”
“Ian said your sister is divorced.”
“Ian never met my sisters until yesterday. Which sister?”
“He didn’t say that, honey,” Julia went on. “If he only just met them, I’m sure he doesn’t know. He’s four. He wants people to feel better. Of course, he’s a kid, so part of the reason he wants people to be happy is so it doesn’t bug him. Or torment him.” Julia turned to Frank. “But he is also very afraid of bad guys. I think maybe you’re putting that idea in his head.” Julia Madrigal stood. “I’m sorry to be rude. But now I have to go get Hale. It was so good to meet you all.”
She held out her hand.
Frank shook it, feeling her confidence, wishing he could feel anything like it, knowing that wasn’t his portion.
By the time they returned, Albert Campo had fished out the stream. “Look at these trout!” he crowed. “Fresh as if they were still in the stream.”
“I can’t eat them,” Ian said. “They look like not dead. Can I just have corn? Just corn. Just corn and bread,” he said.
Claudia said, “Let him have the full-starch option, Dad.”
The rest of the evening passed peacefully, and Frank would later be grateful that the first time he’d spent with Claudia’s family, all together, which would also be the last time, was so pleasant for both of them. A year later, Becca’s husband, Rad, would be killed by one of his best friends in a hunting accident, and by then, Claudia lived so far away that she couldn’t even come home to these mountains to comfort her big sister. As a token, for Frank, that weekend was pure and good, a memory he would keep in his hip pocket like his first wedding, a photograph that never got old. Years later, standing alone on some canted hillside, shivering with sweat as he tried to wedge rocks into a makeshift wall, clouds like dirty sheep crowded overhead, Frank would think of the amber evening light in Dr. Campo’s kitchen, and watching Claudia so young and so content with all she did, solicitous of her dad, girl-giggling or gossiping with her sisters, deeply compelled by Julia Madrigal, and so tenderly proud of the sweet dependency of the two young boys so newly in her life.