Dust of Eden (28 page)

"Sir
Aarfie
."

"Funny name."

"Amber says she saved you yesterday."

"Amber?"

"She started the fire."

"Amber did it?"

"She was watching you in the barn." The slapped look was evident, even with the sunburn, and the longer Ariel stared, the brighter it became. "Nasty habit of hers. Spying on people."

"I wasn't hiding anything, so she wasn't spying."

"No, of course not."

"If she didn't tell you, Denny Bryce and I were having a picnic, and I went to sit in the barn afterward."

"It's none of her business. No one's business but yours."

"I guess you're wondering about me taking his picture." Tremor in the voice. "It's really awkward. I don't know if I can do it."

"Yes, everything is awkward. This whole arrangement . . . being alive when you shouldn't be . . . awkward."

"Ariel—"

"Much easier to just follow conventions, niceties . . . natural laws."

"Ariel, I'm not complaining."

"Yes, you are. Why is everybody making this so
awkward
for me? Can you tell me that, Dana? Why don't I have"—she gestured—"cooperation or . . . gratitude or . . . sympathy?"

"You've got all of those things, Ariel."

"Really? You've been dead, Dana. What was it like? Tell me that and I'll believe in your cooperation." She waited a full ten seconds, even though Dana instantly adopted a pose of settled long suffering. "Well, so much for enlightenment. I feel better now that you've . . . cooperated. Take Mr. Bryce's photograph, Dana. You can do that, and I expect you to."

Neither of them touched their coffee.

The brittleness Ariel had felt last night was diamond hard now. Like it or not, she was at her best as judge and executioner. She saw this as a role that had been forced upon her by a lifetime of alienation, but her great fear was that it was her native element. Perhaps these second comings were about punishment and revenge after all. She didn't know how to be loved. Would she even recognize it if it came? Or would it be lost in her own resistance and suspicion?

Even Amber's gushing gratitude for
Aarfie's
return seemed pasted on.
Thanks, Mommy, thank you SO much!
rendered in a remembered voice from a still younger child. Not her. Not really Amber. But what was Amber? A hybrid of two little girls thirty-five years apart. "Beluga butt" and "freaky scene" with
Dylanesque
overtones all in the same sentence. "Groovy" and "cool" were her bridge over decades.

And then at lunch Dana, sitting across from Denny Bryce, who had come for his afternoon visit to his father, lifted the Polaroid camera from below the line of the table. And when Denny pulled back from looking over his father's shoulder, she said:

"Oh, come on now. Your dad's all spruced up. Pose with him."

Ariel's appraising scrutiny sharpened. Martin Bryce, shaved and freshly barbered, was wearing a new long-sleeve shirt his son had brought him, but that wasn't the incentive for Denny's cooperation. It was the relationship that was unmistakably deepening between him and Dana, Ariel decided. She could see it in his eyes, wide and boring into hers. The premise there was a mix of doubt and tentative trust, and she could tell which one was winning by the fact that he leaned forward with a reluctant smile. The electronic flash left his expression floating in the air, and Ariel memorized it, certain that the image would be all she needed to combine with her artistic eye on canvas.

Denny Bryce was the one exposed element in New Eden. He had insinuated himself through implied threats and an open wallet in order to get what he wanted. And now Ariel could recognize the daily surge of his little foreign car up the driveway. It seemed likely that sooner or later he would know too much. So she needed some insurance, a little implied threat of her own.

She could paint him to life in the house right now, handicapped in some way, and that would end the natural-born Denny Bryce in the natural world, just as it had the natural-born Amber. But that wouldn't end the danger he posed. He was active in society, and there would be an investigation if he broke off his connections. So, unfortunately, she would have to deal with him terminally. She could do that by creating him here at New Eden, which would cause his death naturally wherever he happened to be elsewhere. A perfect murder (she thought it once, then banished the term). And when he was created here at New Eden, she would immediately paint him out again. Presto. No corpus
delicti
. Ariel the judge and executioner would have to protect New Eden. The world had no jurisdiction here.

With a nascent whir, the Polaroid snapshot slid out of the camera and everyone craned to see. An image emerged from the chemical wash. One more toss in the wishing well of immortality for those who stood in line.

Ariel loomed in like a towering adult casting a shadow over her children's discovery. "Let me see," she said, reaching across Dana for the prize.

And Dana, smelling lavender water and talc and something horribly eager, was suddenly repelled. Just before the bony wrist passed her cheek, she dropped the photo—some at the table thought she flicked it—into her soup. It was tomato soup. Dana's white cotton blouse looked like it was spattered with gore.

Ariel's gasp was palpable. "Well, I'll just take another," the goddess of creation at New Eden said, reaching for the camera, which Dana—now standing as she dabbed at her blouse with a napkin—held in one hand.

The grandstand understood all of it, of course: Ariel's motive, Dana's taking of the photograph, the change of heart. They cheered inwardly when the photo went in the soup. But it was too much to expect Dana to refuse to give up the camera. So when that object seemed suddenly to slip from her grasp, fracturing its plastic shell and cracking the lens on the hardwood floor, mitral valves hung up and lungs quit respiring. For a long moment no one dared a living breath.

But Ariel was only half surprised this time. "Poor Dana," she said very evenly, "your arthritis must be killing you."

And then she looked at the rest of them in a slow pan, smiling benignly.

Hearts jump-started, lungs filled to capacity, and in the wake of Ariel's gray retreat victorious smiles broke forth. But Dana was not smiling. She sat back down in a cold sweat, eyes averted, oblivious to the goodwill burbling around her. She didn't have arthritis.

Yet.

A
riel slept three times that day—two and a half hours, forty minutes, twenty-five—but despite being up the night before, she wasn't tired. Old people who slept were either ill or bored, she told herself. In reality her body was shedding its long-term needs like a dead skin. Beneath the surface she was beginning to consume her final resources, like a fiery star-bound meteor.

So the naps were only to preserve her strength, because there was no doubt at all now what she must do tonight. Tonight she would be altering six portraits—Helen's, Beverly's,
Paavo's
,
Ruta's
, Molly's and Dana's—the able-bodied of her disobedient second comings.

She didn't dare think about it during the day. If she thought about it while she was still smarting from the nearly open rebellion, she would very likely succumb to her baser instincts. A lifetime of eating crow, playing second fiddle, bringing up the rear, and now that she had a taste of control, a rebuff. That made it doubly tart. But even with the delay and the naps, dark images were simmering inside her. Artistic blasphemies she couldn't suppress.
Ruta
with no mouth. None at all. And Molly with a thunderous butt—a beluga butt!—so big that she couldn't climb the stairs. Dana turned into a cinder of Cinderella, left scarred, as if her sunburn were indeed the searing, weeping wounds left by the barn fire.
Paavo
with his sleeves pinned up because he no longer had arms. Or maybe she should take his legs, leaving him in Amber's old American Flyer coaster wagon to get around. Horrors all, tinged with gallows irony.

But she put off the conscious decisions of what to paint, because in the end it had to be more measured than that. Otherwise how would it be explained to Denny Bryce? Yet she wanted them to know without ambiguity. She couldn't take
Ruta's
mouth away, but she could make it smaller. Just enough to make her want to scream through it (
ha-ha
).
Paavo's
strong hands could become gnarled and stiffened, like Dana's were going to be, and "Helen the Hunchback" was an appellation waiting to happen. Beverly would be
runtier
still, thinned and weakened. Accelerated aging, that was all. Weaker, stiffer—Molly staring at her enlarged and infantilized thighs in the mirror, noting the flaccid flesh of her arms. Enough change so that Ariel's
Edenites
would see it in each other's eyes—the common tenor, the realization of what they were and that Ariel could run the clock in either direction.

Denny Bryce might notice, but he wouldn't recognize the suddenness of the process. All in one night. Passover.

Her first-born to a soul. The tenth plague. Unannounced. No Paschal Lamb's blood on their lintels to save them.

M
aybe it was the silver dragon's eyes staring out at her from the sewing room window sash, or maybe it was the fear she sensed everyone had for her mother, or maybe it was just her own streak of wildness, but Amber knew that she wasn't going to give back the paint now. She would have after
Aarfie
came back—she had tried to—but now it was too late. She didn't care if that meant she was ungrateful and disobedient. She already believed she was a bad person, because she had no friends, no real father anymore, and because her mother didn't love her even though she had tried. You couldn't fake that.

The magic paint almost made up for it. The paint was power and control over her own life, if she could just get good at using it. Sure, she had made a few mistakes, but she wouldn't make any more. She would just hang on to the paint until she figured out how to use it to make things better, and also because as long as she was the only one who knew where it was, she was protected.

But if she wasn't going to give it back, she
was
going to have to move it. Sooner or later her mother would figure a way to get it off the roof, so it had to be moved.

Night was the best time. Night was the only time, now that the third-story window was screwed shut. Amber went to bed at ten o'clock without being told, and at twelve thirty, while the house exhaled the heat trapped in its walls, she rose up again and pulled on her jeans, her
Mudd
T-shirt and
Skechers
, and stroked Sir
Aarfie
, whispering: "You stay here,
Aarfie
. And don't bark, okay? No bark."

He made a throaty "woof" that registered his indignation as soon as she closed the door on him, but she moved away quickly so that he wouldn't think it was a game.

In the parlor, luminous with moonlight, she stopped and listened. She had a funny feeling, like everything around her—the wooden blue doll on the mantel, the pincushion porcupine on the corner shelf, the metronome that seemed to be clicking its tongue with disapproval, the oval picture frames gaping like open mouths hanging on the wall—was alive and warning her not to go. Her mother said she had fallen while climbing in her other life and that was how she had ended up paralyzed, and now she had to climb from the ground to the roof, so maybe that was why she felt anxious. But she had to do it. Because if she didn't, she wouldn't have that much of a life anyway.

The moonlight was so bright that she could see mosquitoes rising off the screen as she pushed onto the porch. The air was very still and muggy under the overhang, but as soon as she passed the corner by the willow she felt the uneven current, as if the wind were circling the house in waves. And by the time she got around to the back it was flooding against her like water flowing through an invisible moat. The old TV antenna wires slapped rhythmically against the clapboards, reminding her of Colonel Klink slapping his riding crop on his thigh in
Hogan's Heroes
(“. . .
Don't even think about trying to climb that wall, Hogan”
). But the thing that bothered her the most now that she stood behind the towering farmhouse was the light on the third floor. That was the studio.

And it meant her mother was painting.

She could be painting anything, of course, but the fear that she was altering her horrid little daughter right this instant grew to a conviction in Amber's mind. The picture could already be done and just drying. And when it dried what would she be? Too old to climb up on a roof and get the magic antidote? Too old to climb down if the change came while she was up there?

Rebelling against her fear, Amber went straight to the lightning rod and clamped her hands as high as she could. Then she drew her hips up parallel with the ground by planting both feet against the side of the house. The rust on the rod gave her a grip, but it tore her skin too. Hand over hand, foot over foot she climbed, pulling with her arms and pushing at right angles with her legs. Every few feet she tried to rest her hip against the rod. And each time she did, she heard a wrenching sound from the brackets. There were three of them, so rusted that you couldn't see the screws. And there was no window on the second floor within reach of the pole.