The Cabinet of Earths (9 page)

She put it on her table to let the paint dry, and even with her lamp turned off, the small cabinet continued to catch the tiny scraps of light that filtered in from the street and glimmered quietly to itself—almost like the echo of words in a language a person might understand, if only she had been raised in a world of glass and earth.

Maya fell asleep listening to the cabinet and dreamed what must be its dreams (things melting, things crumbling, things being made and remade)—and then woke up in the middle of the night, her eyes seeing nothing but darkness, her breath catching in her throat, all of her consumed by an idea the dreams themselves seemed to have given her:
She must save her mother!

How do I do that?
she asked herself. The thought had come to her so suddenly, ripping her right out of sleep, that she was somehow certain she
could
save her mother, if only she knew what she must do. The room was very dark and quiet at that hour; even the baby cabinet was slumbering away on its table, and a thin breath of sweetness came drifting her way from her books.

She sat up in her bed. That was it, of course: the
anbar
. How could she have not seen it? The
anbar
that brought people back to life—wasn't that what that desperate man had said? And the happy, beautiful woman they had met at the door of the Salamander House that first day, she had said something similar, hadn't she? Life! That was what her mother needed, most of all. Some of that radiance they all had, the beautiful people of the Salamander House. The brightness in their radiant eyes.

She was already at the bookshelf by now, digging the warm little case of
anbar
out from behind the line of books. Oh, it smelled lovely. There were flowers that bloomed only at night, weren't there? It had been calling to her, and she had taken so long to hear it. The round satin box nestled into her hand like something alive. She tiptoed into the kitchen with it and started going through the cupboards, looking for something that would tell her how this thing should be done. And then she found it: a small container of organic honey her mother had bought to put into her tea. Honey! That was perfect. Her father never sweetened anything he drank. And James did not even like honey. Perfect.

She took off the tops of the two containers very carefully and studied their contents. The dusky sweet smell of the
anbar
was now everywhere in the kitchen. The honey glistened peacefully in its jar. It was as if she knew now exactly what to do: The spoon sang out from the drawer, the hot water tap called to her from the sink. The heated spoon sank right into the golden
anbar
, and brought up what struck her as exactly the right amount (though of course there was no way of knowing), and then the
anbar
vanished into the honey as she stirred with the still-warm spoon.

After the lid went back onto the honey jar, she had another thought. She took a sticker from her school binder and wrote “ONLY FOR TEA!” on it with black ink, and stuck that on the honey jar. Just in case. And the honey went back into the cupboard, and the
anbar
went back onto its bookshelf, and Maya went back to bed, and her dreams the rest of the night were ordinary ones and slipped away from her as soon as her alarm rang in the morning.

Chapter 10
Shimmer

O
ld photographs?” said Valko, taking a slow sip of his soda. He sounded, it had to be admitted, skeptical, and his eyes were still slightly sleepy, as an aftereffect of all those hours just spent in school.

The sun had come out again that afternoon during Histoire/Géographie, so Maya and Valko were huddled in their jackets around a table at the café. Pretending it wasn't actually October. Pretending also, at least in Maya's case, that if your mother is home from the hospital, that means life is pretty much back to normal. Even if “normal” means
anbar
on your shelves and a stack of bizarre snapshots you found hidden in the walls.

“Look at them, though,” said Maya, and she poured the photos out of their old envelope onto the table. “They're strange, see?”

Even in the light of day, the long-ago children shimmered and glowed, the flat squares of those photos unsettled by some kind of illusion of depth, of color, of life.

“Oh!” said Valko, awake again. He picked up the nearest photograph and tipped it back and forth to watch the play of the light. “What
are
they? They almost look like holograms.”

“You think that's what they are?” said Maya.

But Valko was already shaking his head.

“No,” said Valko. “They couldn't be. They don't look quite right for that. Plus, I think you need lasers to make holograms. I saw this exhibit once—all right, never mind!”

Maya had actually managed to knock a spoon off the table in her impatience. The worry in her was getting harder and harder to bundle up and suppress.

“I just need to know what they
mean
!” she said. “You know why? Because remember that photo that Fourcroy guy took of us, when we were there with James? Remember that? Well, it looks
just like these
.”

“No way,” said Valko. He was really paying attention now.

“It's hanging up in his weird laboratory room. You and me and James. But James is the shiny one. He's shinier even than any of these. A really big number written on the bottom: 300-something. And something else about his being a Lavirotte. So here's the weird thing—”

“Numbers like these?” said Valko. He had found the writing on the back of the photos. “‘174 X'? I mean, what's that, a kind of measurement?”

“It's got to be,” said Maya. “The higher the number, the more the kid shimmers. See? Look at Adèle. 216. She's very shiny. But listen—”

“It's that camera!” said Valko. “I knew that camera was weird somehow. I was trying to see the brand name, and he kept getting in the way—”

“Valko,
listen!
He knew we're Lavirottes. How'd he know that? He was making a big show of being surprised we were relatives, and then all the talk was about him being a Fourcroy. So how'd he know—”

“Maybe the other guy told him. The old one. Hey, Maya, what's this date here?”

“But I don't think they get along at all. I don't think he'd tell him anything. I think this Fourcroy guy knew all along we were related—”

“1957? Could it be 1957?”

Maya looked.

“Could be. But you're not listening.”

“
Adèle, 1957,”
said Valko, and gave Maya a meaningful look, as if she were supposed to get something from that. And then she followed the slow swoop of his eyes over to the Fountain of Lost Children, and she did get it.

“
Amandine, 1954; Laurent, 1955; Adèle, 1957,”
she said, reading from that banner the cherubs had been holding now for more than fifty years. “You think this is that Adèle? Why? And I told you what my mom found out—they weren't really lost, those children. They went missing just for an afternoon, or whatever. They were just slow in the head. Or moved away.”

“Don't know about
that
,” said Valko as he bent back over those most peculiar photographs. “I mean, kids still go missing around here. That's what I've heard. They just don't get fountains anymore, right?”

Soon he had gone through the whole little stack of pictures, looking at the backs. Maya knew what he was looking for, and what he wasn't going to find: other names. Amandines or Laurents, for instance. He shrugged and let it go.

“So why are you worried about a photograph?” said Valko in his most reasonable voice. “Even a shiny one.”

“Because I think he thinks James is special,” said Maya. “He wants him for something.”

And got stuck.

Because what she could not say (she could not even move her lips to form the words) was
he wants James to be the new Cabinet-Keeper
.

What she also could not say, almost not even to herself, was this:
And that's not fair.
She, Maya, was the one who knew how beautiful the Cabinet was. She was the one who would care enough to keep it safe.

“It all goes back to that Society of theirs, I guess,” said Valko, filling in the silence where Maya had gotten stuck. “Philosophical chemistry and shininess. And fancy cameras.”

He smiled at the photographs in a thoughtful way, his hands still tipping them back and forth: You couldn't help it, really. The light was so strange, the way it played in those faces. It made Maya feel sad and tingly, both at once.

“Don't you think—” she said, and got stuck again. “Couldn't it be—I mean, it looks to me like it, really it does—some type of
magic
?”

Valko looked at her. His eyes were such a comfortable shade of gray; you could almost see the thoughts in them, busily working themselves into actual words.

“They're kind of wonderful, right?” he said cautiously. “They're beautiful, these pictures. Is that what you mean?”

Maya shook her head. It seemed so stupid, when you said it out loud. She could feel her face beginning to flush, and she hated that feeling.

“It's just—all these strange things here. It wasn't like this in California. The salamander on that door. I swear it moves when it sees me. And our Cousin Louise—she's not just boring or whatever, she's actually really
hard to see
. And these pictures. They shimmer. It's not normal. It's not. It really has to be magic. I know I sound like an idiot.”

And she
felt
like worse than an idiot. She felt like someone who had just torn off her nice mask and shown the whole world what an ugly, stupid dolt she really was. She stared down at the table in dull despair, her plain old doltish hand spread out flat and cold against the enamel.

“Hey,” said Valko.

And his own warm hand settled right on hers for a moment, solid and consoling. Like there wasn't all that much to feel so doltish about, not really. Then the hand was gone again, but he was still smiling.

“You're not an idiot,” he said. “You're just saying there are things here that you don't understand. That's all that magic means, right? Something real that nobody's figured out how to explain yet. There are nice scientific explanations somewhere, though. For everything.”

“Even salamanders that turn their heads?”

“Well, only you saw that,” said Valko. “So that one's pretty easy. Ninety percent of what we see is just our brain filling in the gaps. Really.”

“Okay, then,” said Maya. She was already feeling a hundred times better. She had taken a crazy plunge, and was still alive. That made up for a lot. “How about Cousin Louise? You met her.”

“Hmm,” said Valko. “Yeah. But I'm not sure I really remember much about your Cousin Louise. Sorry.”

“That's what I mean,” said Maya. “She's invisible. She's forgettable. She's hard to see.”

“Doesn't sound like magic to me,” said Valko, laughing. “Sounds like the opposite of magic. Too bad it's not catching—we could have her sneeze all over the dreadful Dolphin and his crowd.”

Then he added in a different sort of voice—

“When is it, anyway, that big party of theirs?”

“What party?”

“The fancy-schmancy one. The Dolphin's thing.”

“Oh, well, I don't know,” said Maya. “I'm not going.”

“Hm,” said Valko. “Maybe you should, though. It's a way in, isn't it?”

“A way in?”

“I don't know. Maybe you could kind of sound out the Dolphin's gang while you were there. About that weird Society they hover around. About what their parents are all up to. We'd like to know, wouldn't we? You still have the invitation somewhere?”

It was still in her bag, in fact. They examined it together in the late-afternoon sun.

“Looks to me like you can bring a guest,” said Valko. “You could bring me, for instance.”

It was strange: She had taken that big plunge, yes, but half of her mind was still stuck, was thinking about the words written at the bottom of that glowing photograph of James, about the Cabinet of Earths, needing its new Keeper—and about the little cabinet she had made. How perfect it was. How well it had come out. All the tiny shelves were filled now with their miniature bottles of earths and sands. She had been thinking recently how nice it would be to hold the little cabinet up to the big one, to see how similar the two were. She could think that, but she couldn't say that aloud, not even to Valko. There was a lock on that part of her mind, and the lock itself was as hard to focus on as Cousin Louise.
It should frighten me more, being locked up this way
, thought Maya
.
But that was part of being locked up, of being stuck: She couldn't even look at the thing close enough to be frightened properly.

The other half of her mind was thinking:
the Dolphin's party! No way!
All those beautiful girls in their fancy dresses! She could just imagine their eyes narrowing as they looked down at Maya's sensible dark shoes, the ones her mother insisted were so good for ankles and insteps. It made Maya shudder, thinking of that.

“It might be sort of fun,” said Valko. He smiled at her from under his slightly jagged fringe of dark hair. “You know? Apart from the research opportunities.”

In the end she surprised herself: She said okay. Though she pointed out what it said on the invitation, about the strictly black-and-white attire; 8 p.m.; Palace of the Invalides.

Valko nodded. Valko agreed. And then he grinned and snapped his fingers.

“Charismatograph!
he said.

What he meant by that, Maya had no idea.

“That was what it was called,” said Valko, pleased as punch to have found the word hiding in him somewhere. “That brand of camera he used. Not that I know what that means.”

Maya's parents, unlike Maya herself, had absolutely no doubt that being invited to a party in a palace was a purely good thing.

“In the
Invalides
?” said her father, with a whistle of disbelief. “Dancing around Napoleon's tomb, or what?”

Once she had seen the invitation, Maya's mother actually took Maya shopping one afternoon for black-and-white clothes over near the Motte-Piquet métro station. They walked there slowly, both of them pretending they just preferred a nice stroll to a gallop, but really conserving Maya's mother's energy. It was a lovely day, the sky actually blue if you craned your neck back to take a look at it, and as days go it would have been almost perfect in every respect, except that Maya's mother kept bringing up Valko in a tactful, nonprying way, until Maya felt a little like screaming. Mothers can't help that sort of thing. But they found a nice skirt, white with black flowers. With her own white shirt and a black belt borrowed from her mother and her boring black shoes and her mother's black teardrop necklace, the Maya in her mirror on that Saturday evening looked more or less like someone going to a party.

Her hair was dark enough to go along with the monochrome theme, too, though not as dark as Valko's. It had grown out a bit since August, but hadn't yet quite reached her shoulders. (Back home, of course, her friend Jenna would have been there, those bluebird-blue eyes of hers sharper than any doubt or worry, to help Maya be fearless in front of that mirror:
Dude, not so bad!
) No, she didn't look a thing like Cinderella, and nothing she was wearing could pretend to be really chic, but all in all the effect was all right, she guessed. Then she caught a sweet whiff of
anbar
coming from the bookshelf and almost laughed. You'd think the stuff had a mind of its own, the way it was practically whistling her over. She pulled out the pretty case and twisted off the cover to take a look. About half the
anbar
hadn't gone into the honey. It sat there in its red case like some unbelievably fancy lip balm.

Well, she wasn't putting
anbar
on her lips. That seemed a little extreme. But she dabbed some behind her ears and rubbed the tip of her finger into her wrist the way old ladies do at department store perfume counters. Maybe that was a silly thing to do, but when the aroma of
anbar
wrapped itself around her, she felt, finally, dressed up. Not just dressed up, but, well, sophisticated.

And by then it was after eight and Valko was at the door, all in black except for bright white laces on his sneakers.

“Like the look?” he said, showing off his shoes. “All the best spies are wearing fluorescent laces this year. That's what I hear.”

Outside it was clear but cold, a nice October night if you had enough layers on or were on your way to a party where the rooms would be heated. They walked at a good clip, with their hands in their coat pockets, and Maya had the oddest sensation that she was rising slightly above the ground, floating perhaps half a centimeter above the sidewalk toward the floodlit golden dome of the Invalides.

“Well, here we go,” said Valko as they approached the gate on the far side. “Good luck to us. Gather lots of data. You look totally beautiful, by the way.”

But maybe she had misheard that. Maybe she had just made that last sentence up. By the time she looked up from digging the invitation out of her pocket, Valko was focused entirely on the great carved door they were about to go through, where a couple of burly guys were checking invitations and letting people in.