Points of Departure (27 page)

Lucy wandered the city and visited friends. “People don’t act like that,” she told her friend Maggie. “Not without a
good reason.”

Maggie shrugged. Maggie specialized in sidewalks and streets that went where no one expected them to go.

“Maybe he has a reason.” Her voice was soft, like the hiss of tires on pavement, going nowhere. “Maybe he prefers the company of his own kind. Or maybe he prefers no company at all. Or maybe he was never there at all. You can see things in the shadows sometimes.”

“He really
was there,” Lucy said to her friend Brian.

She met him in the park in the late afternoon. He was putting away his torches and Indian clubs after a long day of juggling. Brian juggled the lightning on rainy nights.

“Maybe he just wants to be friends,” Brian suggested.

“Well, cheer up. I’ll teach you to juggle.”

But the round balls always tumbled to the ground and Lucy could not laugh as she
had laughed every other time that Brian had tried to teach her.

“So what is it about him?” Brian asked at last, sitting down in the grass.

“It’s not him,” Lucy said, sitting down beside him. “It’s people. People shouldn’t act that way.”

“They do.”

“Not us,” she said. “They do.” She gestured at the people strolling through the park. A girl sat on a bench nearby and the sun was shining on her
hair. A man with sky blue eyes walked past the young woman and for a moment their eyes met. Lucy saw it and Brian saw it. But the man walked on past and the sunlight faded from the woman’s golden hair. “They’re like that,” Lucy said. “They don’t see past the surface. But this shadowborn … he’s one of us.”

“Maybe not,” Brian said. He reached for her hand and she started when he touched her—just
a small shiver.

Then she took his hand and they watched the sunlight fade and the shadows stretch away across the park. But she left when darkness came.

There was a thunderstorm over the city that night and great flashing streaks of lightning split the overcast sky. Rumbles of thunder shook the buildings and made bums and bag ladies seek the cover of doorways and bus shelters.

But Lucy was
a mean and stubborn woman. She walked through the storm and did all the things that should bring luck and power.

She threw three copper coins in a certain fountain at midnight.

She put seven pennies, standing on edge, between the bricks of a certain wall.

She turned her jacket inside out, like a woman who has been led astray by pixies and means to break the spell.

She found a four-leaf clover
in the wet grass of the park and tucked it behind her left ear.

At dawn, Johnson found her sitting in the park in the wet grass. “Do me a favor?” she asked without looking up.

“Can you make it rain tonight?”

He shook his head slowly. His face was set in a frown and his hands were deep in his pockets. “It won’t do you any good,” he said. She did not look up at him. “You can’t just stay and look
and wait.” He waited a moment, but she did not speak. “You really are upset, aren’t you?”

She plucked another daisy from the grass beside her.

“He was a friend. I didn’t think I could lose a friend so easily.”

“Tomorrow night, the stars must shine,” he said unhappily.

“It’s a long and lonely run,” she said slowly. And at last she looked up at him. He could not read her expression.

“But I
have until twilight.”

“It’s no good, Lucy. You’re looking for an explanation and—”

“I’m looking for trouble,” she said with a touch of her old tone. “I’ll find it.”

And the sun rose over the city and began to burn away the fog. Lucy went back to the tunnels on the East Side.

(Trust me: you couldn’t follow the directions there if I gave them.) Her footsteps echoed in the darkness. The construction
site was empty and the corridors were dark and silent. She went looking for trouble and she did not find it.

She ended up back at the phantom subway station, alone and unhappy. But she was a firecatcher and a lady of some power. Even tired and hurt, she had some power.

She traced a figure in the air, outlined it with light. A cap like a ragpicker, boots like a rancher, a shirt with undiscussable
holes. Face in shadow, of course.

“You know, I don’t understand,” she said to the figure.

“And I don’t think you do either.” A train rumbled through the station and the figure disappeared for a moment in the brighter glow of the headlight. Lucy did not move. A slight tremor went through the glowing shape; like a ripple in a reflection, starting at the battered boots and ending at the stained
cap. “I’m confused, and I don’t like being confused.” She glared at the figure for a moment. It did not move, did not speak.

She walked away, leaving a trail of glowing footprints. At the entry to the tunnel (Still want to know where the tunnels are, don’t you? Ha! You’ll never find out now.), she looked up at the night sky, toward the Little Bear, her articular constellation.

She walked across
town to the library, where she knew Johnson would be. “I came to say good-bye,” she said.

“You’re leaving on the Run?”

She nodded. “It’s a tricky run,” she said and her voice was young and soft. “I may not be back.”

Johnson tried to take her hand but she stepped back and laid a hand on the head of one of the lions. “It’s all right,” she said. “I just need a different point of view for a while.
I’ll be fine. I might be back later.”

Johnson shook his head. “Hey, if I see that shadowborn, what do you want me to—”

“Don’t say a word,” she said. “Don’t explain a thing.”

She stood with one hand on the head of the lion and she looked up toward the Little Bear, a constellation that had always seemed to be missing a star. And she began to fade—her hair changing from the color of steel to
the color of twilight, her face losing its craggy reality, her body losing its harsh line. And in a moment, she was gone and away on the Starlight Run.

She hasn’t come back yet. That’s why you can’t see many stars in the city—they’re short a firecatcher still. She became a star herself, sitting up in the far-off, throwing gobs of light down at the world. (And if you want to know how she became
the North Star, ask the man who lives by the lions. He may tell you, if you have the right look about you. Or he may not.)

What do you mean—the North Star was always there? Haven’t you been listening? The world is not as it seems. Ask any poet. Ask any bag lady. Ask anyone who sees in the twilight and knows of the fireborn and the shadows.

Down in the tunnels and secret ways of the city, the
white cat mated with a black tom and produced litters of kittens who pounce and play with paper scraps that dance and flutter but never live. A faintly glowing figure still waits in the phantom subway station for a train that will never stop.

And Mac? You want to know what happened to the shadowborn? It’s possible that he never was at all. But if he was, then probably he still is and probably
he is happy and probably he has never found the light sculpture that leans against the dark wall of the phantom subway station. Probably.

So that’s the story and you can draw your own conclusions.

But one warning: If you have a streak of the shadow in you, don’t follow the North Star. She may lead you astray. Lucy can be like that—she can hold a grudge.

And if you do have the shadow in you,
don’t worry. I made the whole thing up. There—feel better? All right?

All right.

I
N A HOSPITAL ROOM
with white walls, Xavier Clark held the hand of his dying mother. The chill breeze from the air-conditioner made him think of the snow-covered peaks of the Himalayas: Annapurna, Machhapuchhare, Dhaulagiri, Nilgiri. Places he had never been. His mother’s shallow breathing could have been the whispering of snow crystals, blown by mountain breezes across
a patch of ice. The veins beneath her pale skin were faintly blue, the color of glacial ice.

His mother’s eyes were closed, and he knew she was dying. With each passing year, she had grown more frail, becoming as brittle as the delicate teacups that she kept locked in the china cabinet. Her hair had grown paler, becoming so ethereal that her scalp showed through no matter how carefully she combed
and arranged the white wisps.

His mother’s breathing stopped, and he listened, for a moment, to the quick light sound of his own breathing and the pounding of his own heart. Closing his eyes, he clung to his mother’s hand and savored a faint uneasy feeling of release, as if his last tie to earth had been cut and he could soar like a balloon, leaving the ordinary world behind, Xavier returned
from the hospital to his mother’s house.

Though he had lived in the house for all of his forty years, he still thought of it as his mother’s house. Even when his father had been alive, the house had been his mother’s. His father had always seemed like a visitor, stopping at the house to rest and write between expeditions to Nepal.

When Xavier was five, his father had died in a snowslide on the
eastern slope of Dhaulagiri. When Xavier tried to remember his father, he could picture only the broadshouldered man that he had seen in out-of-focus book-jacket photos, a lifeless black-and-white image.

More clearly than Xavier remembered his father, he remembered his father’s possessions: an elaborately carved prayer wheel that reeked of incense, a small rug on which two dragons curled about
one another in an intricate pattern, a brass bowl that sang when struck with a wooden rod, wooden masks with great empty eyes and grimacing mouths, round brass bells the size of his fist attached to a strip of brightly colored tapestry. Upon receiving word of his father’s death, Xavier’s mother had taken all these exotic treasures, wrapped them in newspaper, and packed them in a steamer trunk that
she pushed into a corner of the attic. As a child, Xavier had yearned to look at his father’s belongings, but the steamer trunk was locked and he had known better than to ask his mother for the key.

His mother had never talked of his father after his death. She never remarried, raising Xavier herself, living frugally on the proceeds of his father’s insurance policies and on royalties from his
books.

As a teenager, Xavier bought copies of his father’s three books:
Adventures on the Roof of the World
,
Land of Yak and Yeti
, and
The Magic of Nepal
. He hid the books from his mother and read them in his room when he was supposed to be doing his homework. On the map in the flyleaf of one book, he traced his father’s journeys in red pen. In his sleep, he muttered the names of mountains: Machhapuchhare,
Annapurna, Dhaulagiri, Nilgiri. He remembered the names of Himalayan rivers fed by monsoon rains and melting snows. He knew the names of his father’s porters—the Sherpas who accompanied the mountaineering expeditions—better than he knew the names of his own schoolmates.

He was a shy teenager with few friends. After graduating from high school, he attended the local college and majored in biology.
He had planned to base his thesis on observations of mountain sheep in the Rockies, but just before he was due to leave, his mother had taken ill. He canceled his trip and spent the summer observing waterfowl in a local pond, writing a thesis on the behavior of coots in an urban environment.

At college graduation, he was offered a job as wildlife biologist in the Idaho National Forest. Upon receiving
the good news, his mother suffered the first in a series of heart attacks. He accepted a position as biology teacher at the local high school and stayed home to nurse her.

Living in his mother’s house with the silent memories of his father’s glorious past, he had become a secretive and solitary man. His clothes hung loosely on his body, like the skin of a reptile preparing to molt. His students
joked about him, saying that he looked like one of the thin dry lizards that he kept in the classroom’s terrarium. He had grown prematurely old, never leaving town because his mother was never well enough to travel and never well enough to be left alone.

In the empty house, the evening of his mother’s death, Xavier was truly alone for the first time in decades. He felt strangely hollow—not lonely,
but empty. He felt light, insubstantial, as if the slightest breeze could carry him away. He could do anything. He could go anywhere. He thought about his father’s trunk and went to the attic.

The trunk had been pushed to the farthest corner, tucked under the eaves—behind a broken lamp, a dressmaker’s dummy stuck with pins, a box of Xavier’s old toys, and an overstuffed armchair with torn upholstery
in which generations of mice had nested. The trunk was locked and, for a moment, Xavier hesitated, considering retreat. Then he realized that the house and all its contents were his.

With a screwdriver and hammer, he attacked the trunk’s rusty hasp and tore it free of the lid.

On top of the newspaper-wrapped bundles in the trunk lay a package wrapped in brown paper and decorated with Nepali
stamps. Xavier carefully unwrapped the package and found a leatherbound notebook filled with spidery handwriting that looked curiously like his own.

Xavier opened the book and read a page: “I have decided to leave the expedition and press on alone, following the Kali Gandaki to its source. In the bleak northern hills, I am certain I will find the man-ape that the Sherpa call the yeti. Winter
is coming and many will call me foolish, but I cannot turn back. I miss my wife and son, but I like to think that my son, if he were here, would understand. I cannot turn back. The mountains will not let me.”

Mingling with the dusty air of the attic, Xavier thought he smelled incense, a foreign smell that awakened unfamiliar urges. Kneeling beside the trunk, with his father’s journal in his hands,
he felt, in some strange way, that he had made a decision. He knew that he would not return to school for the fall term.

In a new backpack, purchased at the local sporting goods store, Xavier packed field notebooks, camera, and many rolls of film. He bought a kerosene stove and tested it in the backyard, boiling water for tea in a lightweight aluminum pot. He bought a plane ticket to Katmandu
by way of Bangkok and converted $5,000 cash into traveler’s checks. He studied a book titled
Nepali Made Simple
, memorizing simple phrases. He haunted the local college library, reading all the accounts of yeti sightings that he could find.