Nicholas Bonner was hugging himself rapturously, bouncing on his tiptoes, mouth wide open, tongue floating and preening between strong bluish-white teeth. Farrell looked down and saw that the clover bracelet on his wrist—Julie’s forgotten favor—had turned brown and crisp and was a breath away from falling to sharp crumbles. It scratched his skin faintly as he raised his arm to study it. From the look of it, he might have been holding it near a fire.
Chapter 10
Ben did not come home that night, nor the day and night after. Sia gave three unrelated explanations for his absence. On the third night, Farrell cooked dinner, and they ate in a tightrope silence in which Farrell’s thoughts ticked and clanged and grated as noisily as his Aunt Dolores’ insides had bombilated all through innumerable family gatherings. No one was ever allowed to take the slightest notice, even during a volley over a soldier’s grave or Tournament Night at the bowling alley; which always meant the death of conversation before dessert, spluttering smaller cousins being hustled out of the dining room, and his mother reciting recipes in forlorn counterpoint to Aunt Dolores’ salute to visiting royalty. Now in turn he heard himself chattering helplessly about garlic soup or his work at the zoo, trying to drown out the bowling-alley racket of his mind, while Sia watched him from far across the table, stolid as a sidewalk. She ate and drank whatever he set before her, as if that were her job.
After dinner, she built a fire, hunkering flat-footed to riffle through kindling like a cardsharp, turning the heavy madroña half-logs daintily around each other until they fitted, all but clicking into a perfect snowflake matrix. She snapped a single match at the pile and sat back with a soft little grunt as the flames exploded upward like arterial blood. Without turning, she said, “It is quite possible to die of unasked questions. Why do you never ask me what you want to know?”
Taken off-guard—they had been torpidly discussing the Avicenna City Council’s recent motion to prohibit the local sale of war toys, grain-fed beef, and all dolls without genitals—he replied immediately, “How come you never go out of the house?” He had not realized that he was even aware of it.
“What kind of a question is that?” She sounded mildly surprised and amused. “What makes you think I don’t go out?”
Farrell said, “Your clients come to you. Ben and I do all the shopping. You don’t go anywhere with Ben—not to dinner, not to a party, a movie, a concert, not since I’ve been here. I haven’t once seen you get the mail.”
“But when do you ever see me, Joe? What do you think you see me doing?” Her voice remained oddly playful, almost arch. “All you can be sure of, with your schedule, is that I am someone who eats breakfast, receives strange people at strange hours, and likes to listen to your music in the evenings. For all you know, I might spend my afternoons preaching hell and repentance at a bus stop. I might be working with a gang of shoplifters, confidence tricksters. I might have half a dozen lovers or a paper route. You wouldn’t know.” Farrell laughed grudgingly, and Sia said, “Ask me a real question.”
“Where the hell is Ben?” Sia did not seem to have heard, but continued to squat with her back to him. Farrell said, “Sia, forty-eight hours is just too long for a departmental meeting, but it does make him a missing person. I think we ought to call the cops.”
“No,” she said to the fire. “No, we call no one.” She was hugging herself, rubbing her shoulders as if she could not get warm. A song prickled across Farrell’s mind: Last night I saw the new moon, with the old moon in her arms. He said, “When I saw him in Barton Park, he didn’t recognize me. I didn’t tell you that part.”
“You didn’t have to.” Farrell heard the calmness as condescension and found that he was suddenly, carelessly furious. “Of course I didn’t have to,” he mimicked her. “Nothing ever comes as a surprise to Madame LaZonga. The cosmos is wired to that bay window in the kitchen, the gods check in with you twice a week, your rocking chair is shrouded in eternal veils of goddamn mystery. Me, I really don’t want to know all that stuff, whether the universe runs on premium or unleaded. I’m just a bit anxious about my friend, that’s all.”
She was laughing before he had finished, a rough, generous whoop that set the fire tumbling and giggling itself. Realizing that she was trying to rise, he placed his hand under her elbow, letting her lever herself upright against him. The weight on his arm was so much greater than he had expected that he almost toppled over her, momentarily filled with the terror of drowning. The feeling vanished as soon as she was on her feet, and Sia gave no sign that she had noticed his clumsiness, or his fear.
“Ben was right, how nice,” she said. “It takes serious work to get you angry, but it’s very rewarding.” She gripped his upper arms, not laughing now. “In the first place, I see nothing from that window or that chair but what anyone else might see. That is the exact truth—and bloody annoying it is too, I can tell you. As for mysteries, visitations—” And here she drew her mouth impossibly down until she looked like Winston Churchill burlesquing the Mask of Tragedy. “—I regret, the gods have not dropped me so much as a postcard in a long time. Perhaps they lost my forwarding address.” She gave him a gentle shake, grinning with her small white teeth, turning her face as though to bring every scored slackness into the cruelest light for him, like a beaten wolf exposing its throat to trigger automatic mercy. She said, “I am an old woman with a young lover and I don’t know where he is. That is all the story, Joe. I told you that the first morning we met.”
Standing this close, she smelled of the bitter coffee that she drank continually, and more faintly of the fire-smoke in her hair and the musky madroña slickness on her hands. Farrell asked, “How long has he been doing it? Running around in the woods, playing he’s Egil Eyvindsson sacking monasteries.”
The mocking, wholehearted smile bent like a broken leg. “If you mean the League, he has only been with them for a year or so, going to their little wars, fighting in their tournaments.” Her tone was flat and dismissive whenever she spoke of the League. “But Egil is another matter. Egil is much older than all that.” Abruptly she let go of him and stepped away, stumbling over Briseis dozing under the chess table. Briseis uttered the scream she had been saving for an earthquake, scuttled to Farrell, sat on his foot, and went back to sleep. Sia never took her eyes off Farrell.
“And Egil is real,” she said softly and clearly. Farrell felt his stomach chill with the familiar apprehension of unpleasant knowledge bearing down on him. Sia said, “Ben—our Ben—would have known you. Egil Eyvindsson doesn’t know anyone in this world.”
Oh, dear God, I have done it again. The gift is absolutely intact, I’ve done it again. He concentrated intensely on scratching Briseis’ ears, hearing himself mumble, “I believe it, I mean, we were in a play together one time, The Three Sisters, and Ben just vanished into his part, Tusenbach, didn’t break character for weeks, I mean even after the play. Tusenbach can be a real pain in the ass at a party.” What is it with me and weirdness, how do we find each other? Damn, you’d think one of us would grow out of it.
“Come and sit down, Joe.” It was a command, though her voice remained low. She took his hand and led him to the couch, while he added hopelessly, “I was Chebutykin. The old guy.” Sia pushed him down firmly and sat across from him on a footstool, shoulders hunched and her hands hanging between her thighs. Except for the bright regard, gray as the moon, she looked like a sexless peasant sullenly working up to the effort of spitting into the fire. Maybe it’s Egil Eyvindsson who sleeps with her. Ben probably doesn’t have the least idea.