Points of Departure (22 page)

She held the steel rings up to the door. With a sharp pencil, she marked the places where the screws would go. Eight screws, each an inch long. She tapped starting holes with hammer and nail, then screwed the hoops into place.

The wood of the frame was hard and the pressure of the screwdriver against her palm raised a blister.
But she persisted even when the blister popped, ignoring the pain and forcing the screws into the wood. She was breathing heavily by the time she finished.

She slid the steel rod neatly into the hoops. She rattled the knob and tugged on the door, but the lock held firm.

She left it then and tried to go about her normal evening routine. She made herself some dinner, even though she wasn’t really
hungry, settled down with the
New York Times Book Review
, and tried to read the reviews of children’s books.

The apartment was not quiet. She could hear the rush of traffic on the nearby street; it ebbed and flowed like rushing water in a river. She turned on the radio and classical music filled one corner of the room. But beneath the rumble of passing cars and the dancing tune on the harpsichord,
she could sense the silence, the great angry darkness. She poured a nightcap, but even the whiskey could not hold back the brooding silence.

It began to rain. Raindrops tapped against the windows, as if seeking a way in. The tires of cars hissed on the wet streets. Mrs. Jenkins found that she had started a review for the third time and she still did not remember what it said.

She took out her
umbrella, her raincoat, and her plastic rain hat, and she went to the movies. A musical comedy was playing at a theater down the block. In the darkness of the theater she felt safe: bright pictures moved on the giant screen, enormous faces sang about love, and everything worked out right in the end. But when the movie was over, she had to go home.

The light bulb on the landing had burned out
and she fumbled for her keys. As she stood in front of the door, she heard music and laughter, but assumed the noise came from her downstairs neighbors, three students who tended to be noisy.

She opened the door to her apartment and blinked in the sudden glare of the hallway light. The radio in her bedroom was blaring a pop hit—something about love and betrayal. A muted television voice told
a joke she could not hear and a laugh track roared with amusement.

She ran toward the living room, dropping her umbrella in the hall and leaving the front door open, thinking only of turning off the television and stopping the laughter.

A blizzard of paper scraps covered the living room floor, drifting around the couch and piling up beside the legs of the coffee table like snow beside fence
posts. Last Sunday’s newspaper had been torn into tiny pieces and scattered like a New York snowstorm, white touched with gray.

The oven timer was buzzing, a raucous nagging tone. The blender, an ancient Osterizer, was stuck on puree and it whined on a high thin note. All the heating elements of the stove were cherry red, and the kettle was whistling with agonized desperation, as if it had been
howling for hours with no hope of relief. As Mrs. Jenkins stood in the doorway, unwilling to venture into the snowdrifts of paper, the toaster popped and the laugh track guffawed. A breeze from the open window caught a few paper scraps, swirling them in a miniature tornado, picking up other scraps and tossing them high in the air. Mrs. Jenkins heard the front door slam closed and her breath came
quickly, almost in sobs.

“I’m sorry,” she said suddenly. Her hands were clasped in front of her and she was almost crying. “I’m sorry. Please stop it.” Then louder. “Stop it! I said I’m sorry!”

Then shouting so that she could be heard over the laughter, the whistling, and the buzzing, “Goddamn it—I’m sorry!”

The lights went out. The laughter fell silent, along with the whine of the blender
and the buzz of the timer. The whistling of the kettle persisted for a minute, deepening from its panicked wail to a bass note, fading to a whimper, and then to nothing.

Mrs. Jenkins stood in the darkness, listening to the sound of her own breathing. She heard a faint rustling and something soft—maybe a paper scrap blown by the breeze—brushed past her ankle. Nothing else happened.

She reached
for the light switch beside her and flipped it up and down. No response. The apartment’s circuits had overloaded and a fuse had blown, a minor emergency that Mrs. Jenkins could deal with.

Tentatively she stepped into the living room, shuffling her feet through the newspaper scraps. Nothing harmed her. She could see the outline of the television set in the faint glow of a streetlight shining through
the window. She fumbled for the set’s on/off switch and pushed it to off.

Carefully she made her way into the kitchen where she turned off the blender, the oven timer, and all the heating elements on the stove.

She turned quickly away from the stove, half-expecting to find someone watching her from the living room. The room was empty. She listened—but heard nothing except the rapid beating of
her own heart. She groped in the kitchen drawer for spare fuses, a candle, and matches.

On her way to the fuse box she caught a glimpse of her own reflection in the living room window. In the wavering candlelight, her face was pale, her eyes were wide, and the irises were ringed with white.

She changed the fuse. When she threw the circuit breaker, the lights in the hallway came on and the radio
deejay announced the next tune. She went to the bedroom, turned off the radio, and sat for a moment on the bed. The bright lights hurt her eyes and her ears still rang with the remembered buzzing of the oven timer.

She forced herself to stand and walk down the hall to Andrea’s room. The steel bar had been shoved to one side, unbolting the door. Slowly, she slipped the bar out of the hoops completely,
leaving the door free to open. She put the bar in the kitchen drawer where she kept the fuses.

Her purse lay in the doorway where she had dropped it. She picked it up, shook off the bits of paper, and took out the box of Milk Duds that she had bought at the theater. About half were left. She put the box on the kitchen counter and returned to her bedroom.

Her head ached and the sickness in her
stomach had grown worse. She felt feverish as she undressed and put on her nightgown. She lay on the bed and picked up a magazine, planning to read for a while before going to sleep.

She woke with her stomach in a knot. The bedroom light was still on. Her stomach twisted and she ran to the bathroom where she vomited into the toilet again and again, continuing to retch helplessly even after her
stomach was empty. For a time, she lay on the bathroom floor, welcoming the coolness of the linoleum. She roused only to vomit.

She woke sometime later and pulled the blanket closer around her, shivering with a sudden chill. Vaguely she wondered where the blanket had come from; it hadn’t been there a minute ago. Her fingers worried at a hole in the flannel as she drifted in and out of sleep.
Finally, she woke enough to realize that she might be more comfortable in bed. She pulled the blanket around her shoulders like a cape and staggered back down the hall to her bedroom, pausing now and then to lean against the wall. The hall seemed very long, but at last she reached her room and collapsed on the bed. She drifted in and out of sleep for the rest of the night.

Once she woke and wished
she had a glass of water so that she could wash the taste of vomit from her mouth. The next time she woke, she discovered a glass of water on her bedside table. She sipped it gratefully and did not question its presence.

In the morning, she woke briefly, then drifted back to sleep. She slept sporadically, and each time she woke she found a gift on the table beside her: a glass of orange juice
from the pitcher in the refrigerator; a cup of hot mint tea sweetened with honey; two slices of toast, still warm from the toaster; the stuffed white kitten with its blue-glass eyes.

Late in the afternoon, she fell sound asleep again and slept through until morning. She woke early, feeling ravenous, and wandered into the living room. The paper scraps had been swept into a paper bag and a jam
jar on the kitchen table was crammed full of dandelions and yellow mustard flowers, gathered, she suspected, from the back patio. The box of Milk Duds was empty.

The rain had stopped and the sky was clearing: pale blue with a border of white lace clouds. A rainbow curved over the radio tower on Twin Peaks.

She thought about what it would be like to be young, lonely, and far from home. Then she
smiled at the bouquet of ragged flowers. Children could be thoughtless, but they meant well.

The apartment was quiet, but it seemed filled with a kind of warmth, a cozy feeling, like the sound of a cat purring or the touch of sunshine on bare skin. Mrs. Jenkins threw away the empty Milk Duds box, added more water to the jar of flowers, and fixed herself some scrambled eggs for breakfast. As she
worked, she hummed to herself, a tuneless happy sound.

She folded the blanket that had covered her when she lay on the bathroom floor, recognizing the worn sky blue flannel as Andrea’s security blanket. Mrs. Jenkins left it at the door to Andrea’s room. Inside the room, the transistor radio played softly.

When she went out to get a Sunday paper, Mrs. Jenkins stopped by the corner market to buy
another carton of chocolate ice cream and a box of graham crackers.

W
E START WITH
a thief: slim, wiry girl with ash-gray hair and eyes the color of the winter sky. No one knew how old she was and no one cared. Old enough to beat; just barely old enough to bed.

Tarsia was running from an angry baker. The loaf tucked under her arm was still warm. She dodged between the stalls of the market, heading for a spot where she knew she could climb
the tumbledown wall that ringed the city.

From there she could run surefooted across slate roofs, hide among the chimneys. A creature of the wind and sky, she could escape all pursuit.

She heard the whistle of the guard’s warning and the pounding of his running feet. Ill luck: he was between her and the wall. Behind her, the baker shouted curses. She changed course abruptly, ducking into the
mouth of an alley and—too late—realized her mistake.

The walls were slick stone. Though she climbed like a monkey, she could not scale them. The alley’s far end had been blocked by a new building. A dead end.

She heard the guard’s whistle echoing down the cold stone walls and remembered the feel of the shackles on her wrist. Her bones ached in memory of the cold jail.

A jumble of papers that
the wind had blown against the alley’s end rustled. A rat peered out at Tarsia—a grizzled old grandfather rat who watched her with an arrogant air of unconcern, then turned tail and darted into a hole that had been hidden in the shadows. It was a dark, dank hole just the width of a small thief’s shoulders.

Tarsia heard the footsteps at the mouth of the alley and, like a sensible thief with a
healthy concern for her skin, she dropped the loaf and squeezed into the hole. Her shoulders scraped against the damp stone. A creature of rooftops and light, she wiggled down into the darkness.

On her belly, she groped her way forward, reminding herself that rats were only bats without wings. As a child of the rooftops she knew bats. But she could hear her heart beating in the narrow stone passage
and she could not lift her head without bumping it. She inched forward, telling herself that surely the drain led into a larger passage; it could not just get smaller and darker and damper.

A cold blast of air fanned her face, carrying scents of still water, damp stone, and sewage. At last, she could raise her head. She felt a soft touch on her ankle—a tiny breeze rushing past—with only a hint
of fur and a long tail.

She heaved herself out of the drain into a larger space, quick and clumsy in her eagerness to move. She stepped forward in the darkness, stepped into nothing and stumbled, clutching at an edge she could not see, slipping and falling into a moment she did not remember.

A thunder of wings from the pigeons wheeling overhead, the scent of a charcoal fire—damp, dismal smell
in the early morning—drifting from a chimney. The slate roof was cold beneath Tarsia’s bare feet and the wind from the north cut through her thin shirt. In one hand she clutched the damp shirt she had taken from a rooftop clothesline.

She was listening.

She had heard a sound—not the rattle of the latch of the door to the roof. Not the pigeons. Perhaps only the wind?

There again: a rumbling
like drumbeats and a wild sweet whistling like pipes in a parade. From behind a cloud swept the chariot of the Lady of the Wind. She brought the sunshine with her. She wore a silver crescent moon on her forehead and a golden sun shone on her breast. Ash-gray hair floated behind her like a cape. Four lean hounds—winds of the North, South, East, and West ran laughing through the sky at her side.

The Lady looked down at Tarsia with wise eyes, smiled, and held out her hand. Tarsia reached out to touch her.

Tarsia’s head ached and her feet were cold. She opened her eyes into darkness, leaving behind the bright dream of a memory that had never been. Tarsia had watched the caravan that carried tribute to the Lady leave the city, heading north, but she had never seen the Lady.

The hand with
which Tarsia had clung to the edge was sore and stiff; when she touched it to her lips, it tasted of blood. She lay half-in and half-out of a cold stream that tugged at her feet, as it flowed past.

She could not go back, only forward. She felt her way slowly, always keeping her hand on the wall and always sniffing the air in hopes of scenting dust and horses—city smells. She heard a rumbling
sound ahead that reminded her of cartwheels on cobblestones, and she quickened her pace.

The tunnel opened into a cavern—a natural formation in the rock of the earth. Patches of fungus on the walls glowed golden, casting a light dimmer than that of the moon.

The giant who lay in the center of the cavern was snoring with a rumbling like cartwheels. He slept in a cradle of rock, molded around
him, it seemed, by the movements of his body. The air that blew past the giant, coming from the darkness beyond, carried the scents of grass and of freedom.