The Cabinet of Earths (11 page)

His eyes were distant now, like lakes on a foggy morning, when the shore fades into the gray all around. But even as the old Fourcroy became mistier around the edges, clarity and strength began to return to Maya's mind. The Cabinet had caught her off guard, with its swirling glass, but now an idea was growing in her, a larger idea than she had expected to find in herself. The dizziness was almost gone. She still kept her face turned away from the Cabinet, but it was easier now to look where she wanted to look, and to open her mouth and speak.

“Even someone who had been very sick?” she asked. “Could we bottle up the earths of someone who used to be sick? Or might still be sick? And then she would not be sick anymore?”

“Life!” said the old Fourcroy. “That's all that's left in them, the immortal ones. They cannot be sick. How could they be? No mortal part left in them to wither or fade.”

Oh! Maya's heart filled right up and spilled over. She held her head high and stood up again, tall and strong against the pull of the swirling glass.

“Then I'll do it,” she said. “Yes—”

The Cabinet roared in triumph behind her, roared and reared up and came rushing over her head like a great wave breaking on a rocky shore—

“—Just, not yet.”

The wave froze, wavered, melted away again into a tangle of angry whispers. Maya turned around to face all that rippling glass.

“Not yet,” she said again, still very strong.

The Cabinet was so beautiful. Nothing so beautiful had ever chosen her, out of all the people in the world, to be its Keeper. She put her hand on the glass, which was glass again, and not liquid, though it was warm under her fingers and still vibrating very slightly with the echo of all that it had so very recently been.

“For her, I'll do it,” said Maya. “You know. For my mother.”

At that the spell seemed to relax its hold on her, or at any rate the Cabinet of Earths, having more or less gotten what it wanted, sank down quietly into its corner and rested, and the old Fourcroy looked at it and at Maya with the oddest mix of expressions on his face. And then he shook himself as if waking up and went into his little kitchen and made them both cups of tea, which they drank at one of the worktables in the studio, with the ordinary light of day spilling over them from all those many windows.

“You'll have to tell them about my mother,” said Maya, a little shyly. “They have to take the earth out of her. You'll tell them that, right?”

He looked very puzzled for a moment, and then his eyes sagged a little at the corners with worry.

“Maya,” he said, giving quick, watery glances to the left and right, almost as if he feared that someone or something might be hiding among the decorated boxes, listening in. “Maya, my dear. Come outside a moment. Come this way, right outside—you can bring your tea!”

Outside! She felt foolish, standing in the courtyard with a teacup in her hand, but the Old Man was so anxious, his hand so full of tremble, that she worried most about him. And whether, perhaps, he might actually be a little bit mad, after all.

“Listen, Maya,” he said in a whisper, his fingers gesturing back toward the place where the Cabinet stood. “Forgive me, dear girl, but the nearer I am to
it
, the more I find I forget certain things. Important things!”

His hand went anxiously through his wisps of white hair. For a moment he looked quite stymied.

“What things?” said Maya, to help him along.

“About grandmothers,” he said, with a tiny gasp. “I mean, immortal grandmothers. I understand! I do! Of course we want our grandmothers to be immortal!”

“My
mother
,” said Maya firmly. “Not my grandmother. My mother goes into the Cabinet of Earths. Or her earth does, anyway. In a bottle, like the others. That's the deal. She gets to live. Like it says:
Nothing is lost
.”

“Ah, yes,” he said. “Of course, of course. But it's just—are you sure? It may not be—it seems to me—just to think about it some more, my dear. I mean, ‘
Nothing is lost'
is perfectly fine, as far as it goes. But also:
Everything changes
. They cut that bit out, the Fourcroys, when they started mixing magic into their science. I'm just trying to say—”

And he was trying very hard! There were little beads of sweat on his pale forehead, and his fine tufts of white hair were beginning to sag.

“—I'm just trying to say, it may be hard, my dear, for the poor grandmother, being immortal.”

“Not my grandmother,” said Maya. She was beginning to lose her patience with him. “My
mother
.”

He had paused for a moment, gasping for air, so Maya forged on.

“Just tell me what I have to do, to get her earth into a bottle. Because that's the deal: She gets to live. If the Cabinet wants me to be its Keeper—all right. Whatever. I will. But she's saved. You tell them that.”

“It's you who must tell him, Maya,” said the Old Man, in a thin, watery echo of a voice. “Of course you will! You'll tell him that, the head of the Society, the Director, the foremost Fourcroy, the Henri I was named for: my beautiful uncle. Brave girl!”

“Who? Who? Who do you mean,
the foremost Fourcroy
?”

Maya nearly kicked the wall in impatience. How many people with the same strange name could there be in one single city? Did she have to go looking
again
for some ancient, unfindable Henri de Fourcroy?

“Even the young one in the Salamander House is a Henri!” she said. “That man with the purple-blue eyes. And now you're saying there's another one, too?”

“Ah,
ma fille
,” said the old Fourcroy, his eyes fading again into mist and distance. “My poor, dear girl! But that Henri de Fourcroy is not another one at all: It is he! Himself! He, my dear, is my terrible, beautiful uncle.”

Chapter 12
An Unlucky Family

I
t happened three times in a single day: Maya reached to open a shop door, and a frowning face loomed at her from the glass. Her own face. Maya Davidson, future Keeper of the Cabinet of Earths. By the third time, she was so rattled by it, she just slouched right away without buying anything at all.

Because you'd think that a person who had just more or less arranged for her mother to be saved from death would be in a pretty good mood, wouldn't you?

Well, no.

Instead a terrible restlessness had gotten into Maya's bones. She sat down in a chair, and then it felt like time started pouring past her, a flood of wasted time, and she would leap right back up again, while her mother looked up from her book in surprise. It was like she'd forgotten to do something, and then forgotten that she'd forgotten it. Like there was a list somewhere of things she urgently needed to do, and time was running out, and she had lost the list.

“Maya!” said her mother, putting the book she was reading down on the table. “You're acting like a trapped cat!”

At the same time she was happy: That was the odd thing. Like right now, looking at her mother, her face, her warm and loving eyes: to think she was going to be
all right
, after all. Forever and ever. Well! All those fancy doctors hadn't been able to manage it, had they? They hadn't loved her mother nearly enough, that was the thing.

You had to be able to love things, to save them. You had to see the beauty in them, the way the brass vines of the Cabinet wound their way across the glass, the bottles curled so tenderly around their dark handfuls of earth—

“Speaking of cats,” said her father, looking up from the letter he was reading. “The neighbors say Boofer thanks us for the lovely shirt. Why is our dog thanking us for articles of clothing? Did we send Boofer a shirt?”

“Boofer's not a cat,” said James.

“I didn't say he was,” said their father.

“You said, ‘speaking of cats.' ”

Impatience sent the pen in Maya's hand skittering to the floor.

“All right, that's it,” said her mother, laughing a little. “No more homework! You need a break. And for your information, Greg, I did send Boofer a shirt. Why not? An old shirt of Maya's. It had a hopeless snag in it.”

They were all looking at her now, but Maya's mother was smiling that particular smile of hers, the one that meant she had done something nobody else's (sane) mother would ever do, and was not embarrassed to admit it. On the contrary: was rather pleased with herself, and enjoying the joke.

“Well, I was going to throw it out. But then I thought: a postcard! For Boofer! All the lovely smells of Paris! Maya's school, the bakery, our apartment—I'm sure for a dog it's all there. So I stuffed it into an envelope and mailed it off.”

“Cool,” said James.

Boofer! That hollow homesick place in Maya's heart contracted for a moment—and then she thought about Mrs. Johnson, in the house next to theirs, opening an envelope from Paris and pulling out
Maya's dirty old shirt
, and all the impatience and irritation came flooding back over her, and her chair made an angry scuffing sound against the wooden floor.

“Oh, Maya!” said her mother. “You poor girl. Leave those books and go walk around the block or something. It's almost five, anyway.”

At five she was supposed to meet Cousin Louise.

Cousin Louise!

But she did not want to see Cousin Louise. Some part of her really, really didn't want to see Cousin Louise.

In fact, so much irritability was crawling about under her skin that when her mother leaned over to give her a kiss, Maya actually flinched.

“Maya, what's up with you? Something wrong? Tell me about it, dear.”

“I can't,” said Maya. “I'm sorry. I'm late. I can't”—and the impatience pulled her like a very taut string, right out of the apartment and down the stairs.

Because there it was, the source of all that impatience and irritability: She knew now—she knew!—she could save her mother. The thing is, when you
can
do something, you get itchy, you get impatient, you feel you
must
. Before time runs out, or the tide changes, or the train leaves. And there were things she had to do, or it was all no good. Going back to see the
foremost Fourcroy
, for example. It was awful, but she had to arrange things with him somehow, for her mother. After that, it would be all right. The Cabinet was waiting impatiently. The Cabinet was beautiful, and it would be all right.

And no one could know anything—anything—about it. She could not say a word.

She was late for Cousin Louise, who was sitting alone at her café table, no coffee before her yet. Of course. The waiter wouldn't even come by without Maya there; that's why Maya was always so careful to show up on time. Until today.

Her bad mood had swallowed her up. She poked at her drink viciously with her spoon and wouldn't even look up at Cousin Louise for the longest time.

“Well,” said Cousin Louise eventually, her voice as level as ever. “I gather you are no great fan of the
passé simple
. Nevertheless.”

I am being unreasonable
, thought Maya, but somehow she couldn't stop being unreasonable. Unreasonableness seemed almost to be pouring into her from elsewhere, into her and through her and drowning out everything else.

The purple-eyed Fourcroy. He was the one who could take the mortality right out of a person's mother, extract it, and bottle it up. And then it would be Maya's job to keep that bottle safe, Maya and the Cabinet of Earths. . . .

“—Fourcroy,” said Cousin Louise. Maya looked up in surprise. Cousin Louise seemed to have been speaking already for some time.

“Not as young as he seems,” said Cousin Louise. “I've thought it over, and I'm sure. Our unlucky family! Always the same man. Can it be? Untouched by time, eternally young—”

“Immortal,” said Maya, and then her mouth clamped shut, and she couldn't speak at all.

“Well, now,” said Cousin Louise. “Immortal? That seems very unlikely.”

How had the word even slipped out? Because it was definitely a slip. It was almost talking about the Cabinet itself, to say something like that. Maya sat up a little. Something was waking up in her, something buried under-neath all the static of her unreasonably bad mood.

She looked up at Louise and made the only sound she could make at that moment, a sort of tight-lipped hum.

“Maya?” said Cousin Louise.

And Maya took the bottle her drink had come from and held it up like an idiot, right in front of Cousin Louise's face. And made that foolish sound again.

“Maya, no need to grunt,” said Cousin Louise. “The word is
bouteille
. Noun, feminine. And in any event, please don't wave the poor bottle about. You can put it down.”

“Yes,” said Maya. She could speak about soda. “Yes, exactly.
Bouteille
. F-f-f-f—”

But there she got stuck again.

“Fourcroy,” said Cousin Louise, and though it was hard to tell, she seemed almost to be thinking about something.

The waiter, misunderstanding, had already brought another bottle of soda, and had, what's more, ignored Louise's instructions to take it back. Maya put her finger on the bottle, on the cool beads of water condensed on its side, and thought very hard about soda so she wouldn't get stuck again.

“So. You are saying: the
immortal
Fourcroy,” said Cousin Louise, and she leaned back a little in her chair. “Did I get that right?”

“Yes,” said Maya, patting the bottle of soda, just to be safe. “Thank you.”

And then they ran through some verbs, all the same.

Maya was still sitting there mulling things over after Cousin Louise left—just noticing that the irritability had let up a bit, like an ache once you finally take the medicine your mother keeps offering you—when she looked up and saw Valko coming her way and smiling.

“Hey, have some of this,” she said to him, and pushed the extra bottle his way.

“What's up?” he said, plopping into Cousin Louise's chair. “You look pretty thoughtful.”

“Families,” said Maya. “Heredity. You know.”

“Test isn't until next week,” said Valko.

They were studying genetics in their biology class. Maya had tried to force her way through the biology textbook, but it was a hard slog. And her mind kept wandering off.

Let's see. If your great-great-grandfather's sister is, say, a witch, and then data is missing for a few generations, and then your mother is clearly not a witch, though admittedly a little bit quirky around the edges, and then experts in the area of witchness tell you
you
are a witch, even though the only evidence for that so far is making miniature Cabinets of Earths and nearly being swallowed alive by the big one—well, the only solid genetic conclusion you can draw from all that is this:
magic is recessive
.

But what about luck?

“My Cousin Louise says we're an unlucky family,” said Maya to Valko. “Do you think that's possible? Unluck-iness is a trait, like brown hair?”

“Brown hair is very lucky, though,” said Valko. “Keep
that
in mind.”

Maya took a final sip of her soda and shook her head at him.

“Seriously, though,” said Maya. “Look at everything that happened to Cousin Louise's family. Squashed by a church! And before that, the war! And now, the way she lives. So maybe she's right.”

“We-e-ell,” said Valko, settling back in his chair in a comfortable way. “What do you think? Do
you
feel particularly lucky? Or unlucky?”

That was so much exactly the problem that Maya could only stare at him for a moment while a sudden storm went twisting and howling through her mind.

“I don't know,” she said.

Because that's the thing: How can you tell? If your mother gets cancer, that's bad. But if she gets cancer and so far is still alive, what's that? Lucky or unlucky? It feels so very much like it must be one of those things, luck or unluck. Only you just don't know which. Not yet.

And then the Cabinet, too. Or being a Lavirotte. How could she know yet whether she was lucky or unlucky, to have been chosen that way by the Cabinet of Earths? All of those things tangled together.

Her hands were hanging on to each other so tightly her fingers ached.

“But some people are luckier than others. You know, like my brother,” she said. “People just want to help him or be around him. And you know what—I did feel lucky the night we went to that party. Like everything in the universe was pretty much on my side, for a change.”

Valko grinned at her.

“Surprisingly fun, that party,” he said. “As far as the science of luckiness, though, I don't know. We'll have to keep thinking about that one.”

Indeed. There was only one way to figure out for sure whether the Lavirotte branch of the Davidsons was genetically unlucky: research.

“Hey, Mom,” Maya said that evening. “Tell me more about Louise's family. About what happened to them during the war.”

Her mother looked surprised for a moment, and then sighed.

“Oh, Maya, they all died, I'm afraid. During the war, when the Nazis occupied France. It's a terrible story, really! The father was a Jew from Argentina, the mother I think had some role in the Resistance, if the stories are true, and in the end they all died—except for Henriette, of course, who grew up to be Louise's mother. Henriette survived because she went to live with her cousin's family, with your grandmother, that is, out in the countryside somewhere. But her parents, her baby sister, they were hiding with relatives in Paris. Someone turned them in. And all three of them died.”

An unlucky family
, thought Maya. She felt sick inside, imagining that little girl Henriette, far away, not knowing where her family was, never hearing any news, and all the time having to pretend nothing was wrong, out in that village with Maya's grandmother.

“How come you never told me any of this before?” she said.

“Because it's so sad,” said her mother. “It's hard to have to admit to your own children, when they're little, how sad the world can be.”

“It's not just sad,” said Maya. “It's awful.”

Her mother traced a thoughtful pattern on the tablecloth with her finger: a loop that faded very fast into tentative wisps, into nothing.

“I guess it's up to us to save what we can,” she said finally. “That's why my mother tried so hard to adopt Cousin Louise, I think, after the accident in the church. There wasn't much of the family left. Maybe someday it will be your turn to be brave and save someone you love. Who can say?”

Maya's mother stood up because the buzzer was ringing; James and his father were back from the park.

“Well, and that reminds me that I've been intending for ages to invite Cousin Louise to tea—”

So there it was. The impatience washed back over her, rising like a prickly tide: Maya
had
to go back to the Salamander House, however hard it might be. Because given this strange chance of hers, she could not, could not, waste it: She had to do
whatever it took
, if
whatever it took
might save her mother.

But there was a slight problem with that: Her brain kept rebelling.

She would get as far as the avenue Rapp, and then something would happen—she would remember some other errand she had to run, or her mind would flash back to what it was
really
like, sitting in that living room with the young Fourcroy looking at you with those purple-blue eyes. And once she was at the intersection, hesitating a little, and there, suddenly, was the friendly face of Valko.

“Hey there, Maya,” he said. “What's up?”

“I've got this errand to run,” said Maya, but she could feel her resolve crumbling away.