The Winter People(89)
“This means no more can be made, right?” Fawn asked.
“Yeah,” Ruthie said, watching the last page fall. She knew, in that moment, what she would do. She would stay in West Hall and help her mother as guardian of the hill, keeper of its secrets. She smiled as she thought of it, how it seemed so simple really, like something that was meant to be; like destiny, after all.
Then, sensing movement, Ruthie turned just in time to catch a glimpse of a little girl in ragged clothes with a pale face peeking out from behind a tree.
She smiled at them, then slipped back into the shadows.
Katherine
Once awakened, a sleeper will walk for seven days. After that, they are gone from this world forever.
Katherine stared at the words on her computer screen. She had the memory card from Gary’s Nikon plugged in and was studying Gary’s photos of the missing diary pages, Auntie’s letter, and the map.
How bizarre it would all seem to someone looking at it for the first time, someone who hadn’t been to the caves, who hadn’t seen what Katherine had seen.
Losing these pages forever seemed criminal, a terrible waste. At the very least, they were of historical significance. She had a friend, a sociology professor at BU, who might enjoy having a look at them. And wouldn’t the man she’d met at the bookstore in town love to get his hands on a copy?
With a few keystrokes, she shrank the map showing the way to the cave entrance at the Devil’s Hand to postage-stamp size and pushed PRINT. While the laser jet did its work, she glanced down at her own hand, at the bone ring on her third finger: Auntie’s ring. Auntie the sorceress. Auntie, who could bring back the dead.
The ring had been Gary’s last gift to her.
To new beginnings.
She stood up, stretched. The day had flown by, as time often did when she was lost in her work. It was nearly ten o’clock at night, and she hadn’t eaten either lunch or supper.
The page printed, she carried it over to the art table and cut out the tiny copy of the map. She’d been finishing up the newest assemblage box since she got back to the apartment in the wee hours of the morning. The outside was painted to look like bricks; there was a door in the middle, and a neat sign above that said LOU LOU’S CAFé. To the left of the door, a large window made of thin Plexiglas. Katherine pulled open the door and could almost imagine the smells inside: coffee, freshly baked rolls, apple pie. There, sitting at a table in the center of the café, was the tiny Alice doll. Across from her sat Gary in miniature, wearing the good black pants and white shirt he’d left home in that morning.
I’ve got a wedding to shoot in Cambridge. I should be home in time for dinner.
And in front of him, his last meal. A turkey club sandwich and cup of coffee. Not an exciting meal, but she knew it was Gary’s favorite—his standard order at diners and truck stops—and it pleased her to be reminded that the Gary who sat in Lou Lou’s that day was the same Gary she’d known all along.
Using a superfine paintbrush, she applied a dab of glue to the back side of the tiny map, and reached in with a pair of long tweezers to stick it onto the table, beside Gary. The map he’d followed to get to West Hall, to the hill, and to the Devil’s Hand, where he’d photographed a little girl who’d been dead over one hundred years.
As she smoothed the Gary doll’s white shirt, she imagined that last conversation: Alice begged him to forget everything he’d discovered, to let it go. And Gary, who had been walking around for the past two years dazed and furious and full of pain over the seemingly impossible loss of his son, thought only of Austin—that if there was the slightest chance to have him back, even if only for seven days, he’d give anything for that.
How bright and full of wonder and magic the world must have seemed to Gary on that last day as he sat in Lou Lou’s Café. That he lived in a world where it was possible for the dead to awaken and walk again—what a miraculous discovery! What hope he must have felt, glowing all warm inside him.
And had he thought of Katherine, of what her face might look like if he brought their son home to her once more? How pleased she’d be. How amazed.
“I understand,” Katherine said out loud, stroking the little doll’s head. “I understand why you did what you did. I’m just sorry you didn’t tell me any of it.” And then, because she needed to say them, needed to say the words out loud and feel their weight leave her once and for all, she added, “I forgive you.”
She closed the door of the café, leaving them to circle through that conversation again and again: Alice trying to convince Gary to forget the whole thing, Gary telling her he just couldn’t.
Behind Katherine, a small sound.
A scratching at the front door to the apartment, as if a dog or cat wanted to be let in.
She rose from the stool, floated across the room, and paused for a moment, her hand on the doorknob.
Her heart sang.
Gary.
Sara
July 4, 1939
Independence Day
The midnight trips to town have grown more difficult. My eyesight is failing. My bones and joints ache all the time. The other day, I caught sight of my own reflection in the stream and did not recognize the thin old woman who looked back at me. When did my hair become so gray? My face so heavily lined with wrinkles?