Duplex (11 page)

F
OR MANY YEARS MARY COULD THINK OF NOTHING except her daughter and it was the same for Blue-Eyes—she couldn’t get enough of Mary. She followed her everywhere with a hand attached to some part of her mother’s body or clothes. Walter wanted to send the girl to a private school where they learned to speak foreign languages and handle money and say prayers, but the school was too far away for Blue-Eyes to attend as a day student, which would have meant leaving her bed empty night after night with no one for Mary to read to or sing to sleep. Of course this had been Walter’s plan all along.

Instead Blue-Eyes went to the same school Mary had gone to, the one just before the first of the three green hills leading to the Woodard Estate. When she got old enough Mary dropped her off at the head of the street and Blue-Eyes walked. She took the same route her mother had taken and, like her mother, she carried a new schoolbag. Several of the sycamores had died and been cut down; all of the bubblers in the schoolyard had been replaced by hygienic drinking fountains. Mary smelled the plastic of her daughter’s schoolbag and felt an ache in her heart, the same ache she felt when she first held the Yellow Bear. It was a smell associated with those moments when normal time was suspended and something out of the ordinary happened, like the first game of the spring when a ball landed at her feet and Eddie came running toward her and after he bent to scoop it up his face lifted—so close she could see all his eyelashes sticking out around his eyes like sunbeams in a drawing.

Blue-Eyes loved school, certainly more than Mary, who had preferred naptime and recess. Every Parents’ Night the teachers heaped nothing but praise on the girl, and her work was always prominently on display, bearing a gold star or an A+ or 100%. There was something not quite right about Blue-Eyes, though; Mary could see how uncomfortable every thing she did made the other parents and the teachers. For example, the movie about the Descent of the Aquanauts that she painted on a roll of shelf paper that got wound on chopstick handles past an opening cut in the bottom of a shoe box—once you started turning the handles it was like you were churning the sea inside the box to such a frenzy it was only a matter of time before it got out and then it would be everywhere, making such a mess you’d never be able to clean it up. “It isn’t that your daughter can’t do the work,” the teachers said, peering earnestly into Mary’s face. “She can do everything, but ...” They were never able to finish the sentence, a problem Mary had long since grown used to.

Teachers came and teachers went but the school itself remained remarkably unchanged. Strips of Palmer method script still hung above the chalkboards, and the same lifeless tortoise still kept guard outside the principal’s office. The sombrous mural in hues of brown showing soldiers planting a flag on a hill was still hanging in the same place it had been hanging the time Mary found Eddie standing in the hallway after they’d been told he was never coming back, and there he was, the same as ever. “I have something I want to tell you,” he said, but then the fire drill bell went off and she never got to hear what he had to say.

At some point everyone who had ever known you, including much younger people, would forget you and die without ever having told people even younger than themselves about you—and then you would really be
gone.
Miss Vicks had had a love story, but who could remember it? It was said Miss Vicks, herself, remembered nothing. Mary hit Eddie on the head with her wand to get his attention when they were in some play together but all that happened was he got a bloody nose afterward. If you wanted to be remembered you had to become famous—that was the lesson history taught you, if you chose to pay attention to it. Even so, the person you’d been, the person who breathed and had blood circulating through every part of herself, would be gone.

“It’s different for some people,” Downie told Mary. “Ever since that night on the street, blood is no longer part of the story for Eddie.”

“What do you mean?” she asked.

She had taken to visiting number 37 in the afternoons before Blue-Eyes got home from school and while Walter was still at work. She liked returning to the street now that she no longer lived there. The robots’ house felt different; the love seat and the television set had disappeared but even so the house felt less empty than it had when she was a girl, chiefly due to the fact that all of the apparently empty space in it was filled by Downie. He’d told her this, otherwise she wouldn’t have known. Whenever she came to visit he assumed a smaller, hospitable form, more like a man, really, though the house had a smell to it that made her think of the places where animals lived, one combining damp fur and urine and earth.

“I very much doubt whether Eddie still sees in color,” Downie continued. “He can see a lot. He can see everything a person needs to see in order to play baseball. But that doesn’t mean he has a heart.”

Mary looked through the bay window. If she ignored the way some of the trees were gone and some of the others were so huge she couldn’t see their tops it was almost like nothing had changed at all. The inside of the house was cold, as cold as Downie himself. “He’s good to his parents,” she said. “He always sends them money.”

“He got what he asked for,” Downie reminded her.

They were sitting in the living room at the kitchen table, which Mary was sure only appeared for her benefit. Downie had made her an egg salad sandwich, sliced on the diagonal, the way he knew she preferred it.

“Whatever Eddie asked for,” Mary said, “it certainly wasn’t me.”

“He got baseball,” Downie said. “You got what you wanted, too.” His voice was like ice and Mary knew he meant Blue-Eyes. “You would do anything for her,” Downie said. “Remember?”

“That was a long time ago,” Mary said.

“You must remember the sound the hare made when you ran over it,” Downie persisted. “It isn’t often a person gets to hear a sound like that.”

“I do remember,” Mary said; she knew she would never forget the horror she’d felt that night in the clearing.

As for Blue-Eyes, after five thousand days it was as if Mary and her daughter had never known one another. Mary sang “There is a tavern in the town.” She read “The Hullocks were blackening as Velvet cantered down the chalk road to the village.” Blue-Eyes put her fingers in her ears. Mary’s smallest mistakes incensed her—like when she called the store Penneys and not JCPenney, as if it were the height of hypocrisy for an adult to pretend to know anything and get something as simple as that wrong.

Meanwhile the sorcerer was happy to have his wife back. Mary lifted her hips to him; her eyes clicked into their sockets like a doll’s eyes on stems. He found a paw print filled with rainwater in the rose bed and drank it, greedily, in gratitude.

With every passing year Blue-Eyes became prettier and harder to get along with. By her fifteenth birthday Mary had had enough.

“Where is that brochure?” she asked.

St. Foy was run by an order of sisters dedicated to silence and good works and turning even very difficult girls into model citizens. The saint herself had been deemed sweeter and more fragrant than honeycomb; she was twelve years old when she died. The brochure showed her standing atop a pedestal, her head piled high with snow. In the brochure it described how it was snow that had come to the saint’s aid when she was undergoing her martyrdom on a red-hot grill, veiling her body from the curious eyes of onlookers. On the other hand, suspicions about the place abounded. For one thing, snow never fell there, it being on the coast. For another, Foy was said to be a perversion of Fée, which was French for “fairy,” a fact you’d figure out soon enough in one of the language classes.

To Mary’s surprise, Blue-Eyes raised no objection to the plan. “When you were born,” Mary said, “I loved you so much I never wanted to let you go.”

“Born, Mother?” Blue-Eyes said. She was holding a round plaid suitcase in one hand and tapping at the side of her head with the other, trying to disable the port without Mary noticing. A rectangular plaid suitcase stood between them. Her father had given Blue-Eyes the set of matching luggage for her fifteenth birthday, the anniversary of his collision with the Yellow Bear. “I get the message,” she said as she tore off the wrapping paper.

On the drive to St. Foy there had been no wind but when they arrived at the school’s imposing front entrance the wind began to blow off the ocean. Dead leaves and shade poured from the hydrangea bushes on either side of the door. The seabirds grew mute; Mary rang the bell. The door was a single wood plank without a window. There was no window since whoever opened the door wasn’t supposed to have to look first to see who was out there. As Mary was well aware, even the most disgraced of God’s creatures was welcome in a convent.

Given the exorbitant tuition, as Walter had pointed out to her, the nuns didn’t really need to worry. He had stayed behind, having been forewarned in a dream not to go. In the dream he stepped from his silver-gray car and into a pool of shadows. Just like in real life, the wind was blowing off the ocean and the seabirds were silent. The road went uphill and down and was called a
scaletta,
meaning staircase but also skeleton. As long as his skeleton didn’t have a soul in it he would be welcome there. A sorcerer with a soul, though—that was another matter.

“Just wait here,” said the young woman with frizzy black hair who opened the door. She turned her back on Mary and Blue-Eyes and took off down a long dark hallway.

The vestibule was square and forest green. With the front door closed it was every bit as dark as the hall. A mahogany table stood to the left, a porcelain umbrella stand containing several umbrellas and a pair of crutches to the right; the hallway down which the young woman disappeared extended straight ahead, ending in a set of swinging doors. From behind the swinging doors came the sound of running water, chair legs moving on wood, high-pitched girlish voices; closer at hand, maybe on the other side of the wall, someone opened what seemed to be a closet door and began rummaging around, rattling hangers.

The young woman never returned. In her stead a very old woman with big watery eyes appeared, pushing a walker ahead of herself. “Say good-bye to your mother,” the old woman said and averted her gaze as if from the sight of something distasteful. The vestibule used to be wallpapered with pink flowers, Mary remembered, just as she knew the old woman hadn’t always needed to use a walker. Though she was dressed in a black habit and a white headdress she didn’t look much like a nun, and it wasn’t just because of the fact that she wasn’t wearing a cross.

“Good-bye, Mother,” Blue-Eyes said, tipping her cheek in Mary’s direction for a kiss.

“I’m not going anywhere until you say you love me,” Mary said. Out of the corner of her eye she caught a glimpse of a flickering curtain of light just above the umbrella stand. This could mean her age was catching up with her and her cornea was coming loose or it could mean there was actually something there.

“I love you, Mother,” Blue-Eyes said, but she didn’t sound convincing. She, too, was looking in the direction of the wall above the umbrella stand. “Tell Dad he did the right thing,” she said. “Not coming.”

“He wanted to come,” Mary said, “but he had work to do.”

Blue-Eyes turned to face her. “He would have died,” she said, and when Mary laughed she shook her head. “For real,” she said. “Dad would have died for real. Don’t you understand anything?” She returned her attention to the wall.

“It’s time for you to leave,” the old woman told Mary. She maneuvered her walker around so that it faced the empty hallway, then she looked back over her shoulder. “As for you, young lady,” she said, “it’s time for you to come inside.”

Blue-Eyes followed the old woman down the hallway. It seemed to go on forever but eventually they arrived at an elevator. “I’m the only one allowed to operate this,” the old woman told her. It was the kind of elevator where you pulled open a brass gate and slid a heavy lever in place before you could get it to move. “The girls are at dinner,” the old woman said. The elevator began to ascend in small jerks like a Ferris wheel. “You can join them after you get settled in.”

Blue-Eyes’s room was about the same size and shape as the vestibule. The only difference was that it had a window facing the water; in the morning she would have a good view of the sun coming up above the still-dark strand. The room contained a narrow bed and a dresser; there was a thick layer of dust on the baseboards and the empty bodies of horseflies and June bugs in the space between the storm and interior windows. The old woman told Blue-Eyes the last girl who’d stayed in the room had died in it; she choked on a saltine after refusing to do as she was told.

Folded at the foot of the bed was a set of long underwear with a note pinned to it explaining that in the interest of saving money the building was kept unheated. Blue-Eyes had no need for long underwear but how was the school expected to know that? She put the clothes she’d brought with her away in the dresser and sat on the bed—the mattress was thin and seemed to be stuffed with straw, but otherwise wasn’t too bad. Oddly, this was one form of comfort she’d found she couldn’t do without.

Somewhere nearby the sound of singing started. Blue-Eyes left her room and followed the sound until she came to a wide landing at the head of a formal staircase, the newel posts topped with tense-looking creatures with wings, supposed to look like angels. If you stared at them long enough though—just as she’d done with the flickering curtain of light in the vestibule—you could see the wings twitching, the eyes shifting this way and that. Brightness poured up the staircase from below but not high enough to reach the landing. The old woman with the walker stood at the far side of it, beckoning to Blue-Eyes to hurry up.

Inside the chapel there were girls of all ages and sizes, not arranged in any obvious order, all of them wearing sky-blue uniforms. Blue-Eyes slid into an empty pew near the back. The service was a mystery to her; she’d never been in a place like this before, and the book she’d been handed at the door was crammed full of different-colored bookmarks. At some point the girl with frizzy dark hair who’d opened the front door for them slipped into the pew behind her and tapped her on the shoulder. “Come to my room after,” she said, handing Blue-Eyes a piece of paper with her name and room number written on it. She was called Penny, which made sense, since her face was round and her features in faint relief like on a coin.