White Apples (32 page)

Except—

She went to her small cedar dresser and opened the top drawer. Inside, it was empty except for her treasure—an old silver Faber-Castell ballpoint pen. She took it out carefully, handling the pen as if it were made of the most fragile glass. She walked to the table and just as carefully put it down next to the breakfast things.

"Isabelle, come here. I have something to give you."

Isabelle remained at the window. She was still looking at the dog. "I don't want anything." "Get over here! I don't
care
if you want to or not."

Isabelle turned around at once, stunned by the tone of her grandmother's voice. She had never talked like that.

Certainly not to Isabelle who had known this beloved woman all of her life. "What is it,
Oma?"

"Just come here and I'll show you." Her voice was still curt and unfriendly. The child in Isabelle cringed. She never wanted to make Grandmother angry at her. That was unthinkable. She hurried to the table and sat down.

"This pen is the most important thing I ever owned. You are permitted to bring one object with you when you die and I chose this. It was given to me by the only person I ever really loved with my whole heart. But don't ask me to tell you the story because I won't."

Isabelle wanted to say five things and ask six but by force of will she managed to keep her mouth shut, although her eyes were very wide open now.

"I'm going to give it to you. Take very great care of it because it has my death in it."

"Excuse me? I don't understand." Isabelle instinctively reached forward to touch the pen but stopped an inch away and slowly brought her hand back. "What do you mean?"

"My whole experience of dying, where I went, and what hap•pened to me afterward—all of that is inside this pen now. If you are ever in danger and need to hide, turn the top of the pen like this, as if to bring out the point. You will enter my death and you'll be safe there."

"Vincent said that I would be safe here too when he brought me." Isabelle's voice was resigned.

"You are safe for now, but it's slipping. If you enter my death, you can stay there as long as you like because it has already hap•pened. It is a fixed part of the past and cannot be touched."

This time Isabelle reached out and picked up the pen but still handled it very cautiously. She looked at her grandmother and then at the pen again.

"Do you remember when you were a little girl how you used to watch cowboy movies with your father? You'd always get scared by them and go run and hide in the laundry room. Well, think of the pen as another laundry room."

"You're not telling me something,
Oma.
You're leaving some•thing out."

The old woman looked at her calmly and lied. "No. There's nothing else but that." "Then what happens to you if I do it; if I enter your death?"

"Nothing, Isabelle. Why would anything happen to me?"

Her lie sat on the table next to the silver pen and the golden pastries. It shone jet-black like obsidian. It was cut as beautifully as a diamond. The old woman could see it. The younger woman could not. But because she had traveled to death once to retrieve Vincent, she could feel it, feel its presence and size. She even looked at the spot on the table where it was and frowned.

Seeing this, her grandmother casually reached a hand forward and brushed it across the table as if she were sweeping away crumbs. The glassy black stone, her lie made manifest, flew off the table and rolled under the bed.

The real truth of the matter was this: The instant Isabelle en•tered her death, the old woman would be fixed for eternity in this room. She would never be permitted to leave. She would not return to purgatory. She would sacrifice the opportunity to enter the mosaic. Outside the dog barked. "You must go now. He's telling you." She was just as glad. She had almost never lied to Isabelle and knew if asked too many questions now that she might not be able to finesse her way around them.

"It's just a dog barking,
Oma.
How do you know it's him?" Overcome with love for this girl, this
woman
pregnant

with a child, the grandmother reached over and put her arms around Isa•belle. "I know because I know. It's time for you to go, darling. But I'm so grateful we had these hours together."

Isabelle squeezed tighter. "What will happen to you when I go?" "I'll sit here and have some tea. It's a beautiful day; a great day to go downtown."

Isabelle pulled back. "Can you do that? Can you leave the house and go downtown?"

"I was talking about you. That's what you have to do now. You'll see." She let go of Isabelle and stood up. Taking the pen off the table, she put it firmly in her granddaughter's hand and bent her fingers around it. She whispered, "Guard this," because she was referring to Isabelle's safety as well as her own death. Without any hesitation she hoped her granddaughter would use the pen if she needed it.

In that moment of pure unselfish love, she realized that no matter what happened to her now, she would be all right. Whether she remained forever in this room, or returned to the places beyond death she so much preferred, she felt... full. She remembered a proverb—"Empty vessels make the most noise." But at this moment her heart and head, miraculously, made no noise at all. She could not recall a time in either her life or death when she had felt so brimming.

Isabelle closed the front door behind her and did not look back. She had no idea whether she would ever see this house again. She had no idea of anything now but that she must follow the dog as her grandmother had ordered.

It sat in the same place on the lawn, watching her impassively. She walked up to it and said, "Hi, Hietzl." She half-expected it to say, "Hi."

But it did not respond. For a time she wondered if her grand•mother had been playing a trick on her by saying that was its name. Who called their dog that?

Hietzl was not helpful. He looked at her with large brown eyes but did not even lift a paw to shake. "Do you understand me, dog?
Sprechen-sie Deutsch?"

"I know he's always wanted to learn." A middle-aged man came up with his hands in the pockets of a chic long, green, loden coat. Isabelle had never seen the man before.

"Hello, Hietzl." The man snapped his fingers and the dog began jumping around in happy circles, overjoyed to see him. Once in a while it leapt up on him. The man rubbed its head and did not seem at all upset that it was tracking mud and wet grass on his beautiful coat. "And good morning to you, Ms. Neukor." He was standing with the sun directly behind him. Isabelle had to shade her eyes to see his face.

"You know me?" "I do."

"What's your name?"

"Chivas. You can call me Chivas." "Like the whiskey?"

"Yes, exactly. You said you didn't like odd names like Hietzl, so let's use the name of your favorite whiskey." "That's regal of you."

He smiled at her joke and patted the jubilant dog some more. "And am I supposed to go with you now?" "If you'd be so kind. My car is right over there." He pointed to a large dark green Audi parked nearby. "And what about Hietzl?" "He goes with us. He rides in the back."

"Where are we going, Mr. Chivas?"

"Just call me Chivas, that's fine. Downtown—I'm to drop you off at the Café Diglas." Isabelle was taken completely off guard. "The Diglas? Why are we going there?" "Because Mr. Ettrich will be waiting there for you."

"Vincent?
At the Diglas?" Dismayed, she touched her forehead and narrowed her eyes, as if trying to better focus on all this. The dog sat down on the grass and furiously began scratching its chin with a rear paw. The

scratch-scratch-scratch was the loudest sound around them.

Chivas smiled and nodded. "It was his idea. He said it was where you had your first date?"

That much was true, but why was Vincent in Vienna at a café when he said he had so much to do? "All right, let's go."

As if it understood exactly what she said, the dog stood up and trotted toward the street. Isabelle looked at the car and looked at the car because she knew something was wrong about it.

Something—"Wait a minute. Now I
know
what it is: That's a new car. You have a new car. I know the model. My friend Cora Vaughan bought one this year. But we're five years ago."

Chivas shook a finger at her and winked. "Very good, Ms. Neu•kor. Very observant. I've even got a CD in the car from the Blood•hound Gang. Do you like their music?"

"I don't know who you're talking about. Why do you have this year's model car when everything else around us is five years ago?"

"Because Hietzl and I
are from
this year. We came back here to get you." He went to the passenger's door, unlocked and opened it for her.

"Explain." She wasn't going to budge until she heard an answer that satisfied her. And she definitely was not getting into that car with Mr. Whiskey and Hietzl the wonder dog.

"We have to get you back to the present, and this is the most comfortable way of doing that. By the time we reach the café down•town we'll be up to date."

Isabelle did not like that answer. But then she was hailed from behind by her grandmother's voice. Turning around, she saw that the old woman had opened the window to her room and was leaning out on the sill. Both hands were fanned around her mouth to make a megaphone. "It's all right, dear, you can trust him. He's telling you the truth."

Isabelle yelled back, "He says by the time we get to the First District it will be five years from now." "If that's what he says then it's true. Really, you can trust him."

The dog barked twice, impatient to be going. "What if I don't go with you?"

Chivas put up both hands in surrender, not wanting to offend. "You don't have to. It's your decision, but it's really a lot faster this way. Would you prefer to take public transportation? Does a tram run near here?"

She was looking at Chivas, sizing up both him and his words, when her grandmother called out to her again. "Isabelle, go with him. Trust me—it's all right."

"Yeah? Well, I have a better idea—I'll go with you, but I'll drive. You said we just have to go downtown, right?"

The man in loden nodded. "Right. That's fine with me." He handed her the keys to the Audi. Taking them, she waved a last time at her grandmother and got in the car. Chivas walked around to the passenger's side, gestured for the dog to jump into the back, then got in and closed the door. He reached across his chest for the seat belt. Isabelle only watched him because she never wore a seat belt.

He clicked in and said to her, "I would suggest you wear your seat belt. We're going to pass through some ugly weather on the way there and you never know what the roads will be like."

Before answering, Isabelle looked through the windshield at the splendid summer morning spread out like a feast around them. "What are you talking about? What are you telling me, Mr. Chivas?"

"Only that I think it would be a very good idea if you wore your seat belt. Again though, it's your decision." "A good idea" was an understatement. They had not traveled more than a block when the weather changed

completely. Stranger still, there was no gradual transition from one season to the other. One moment it was A and literally the next it was B.

In front of Isabelle's house the trees and flowers had all been in full gaudy bloom. The sun on them was a friendly summer-morning pale yellow. But the moment the car went around that first corner, the sky was an ominous leaden/purple gray. A late Novem•ber gray that says snow is very near. All of the flowers were long dead. The trees were leafless and a brown so dark that from a distance they looked black. In fact there seemed to be no color around them at all. From one second to the next, the world had gone from Technicolor to a black-and-white movie.

Shocked, Isabelle hit the brakes so hard that the dog slammed the back of her seat with his head. "Sorry, Hietzl, sorry. What is this?"

Chivas took a blue pack of Airwaves chewing gum out of his pocket and took a piece from it. "I told you before: There's going to be a lot of changes in the weather between here and downtown."

"Why? Changes like this?"

"Worse. Much more extreme. In the last five winters there have been some very heavy snowstorms here."

She dipped her head and regarded him skeptically. "And we're going to pass through all of them in a twenty-minute ride?"

He looked at her as if she had asked the most obvious question in the world. "Well, yes, five years is twenty seasons. Between here and the First District we must go through all twenty of them if we are going to return to our time. That's why I brought a four-wheel-drive car."

Isabelle looked at her hands on the steering wheel and then, for no logical reason, at Chivas's hands. "What kind of driver are you?"

"I placed third in the Acropolis Road Rally and fourth at Monaco when I was alive."

"Okay, you drive then." As the first giant flakes of snow flick•ered into view and swirled around in the air on the now-whipping wind, Isabelle got out of the Audi and traded places with the one•time rally driver.

On the back seat, Hietzl watched all of this mysterious human moving around with calm indifference.

Five minutes away at Gersthof, they came upon the first major traffic accident. The snow on the ground was four inches thick. A silver moving van had skidded on a patch of ice and gone right into a red and white tram. The whole area around the two giants had come to a standstill. In the street many people wearing their thickest winter clothes braved the snow and bitter wind to see what the damage looked like.

As soon as he took over as driver, Chivas had turned the heater on to full and slipped the transmission into

four-wheel drive. Still it was very treacherous going because the temperature outside was below freezing and the roads were all snow and ice.

In her thin cashmere sweater and T-shirt Isabelle was cold de•spite the heat being turned on full blast. She held her elbows tightly but didn't pay much attention to this cold because what was going on outside the car was fascinating. She spoke loudly so as to be heard above the blower. "How much longer will we be in winter?"