Pale Phoenix (16 page)

Abby pleated the envelope as she spoke. "So I drank her mulled cider and warmed up by the fire, and wondered what on earth had happened to me. I figured I wasn't dead after all—surely heaven wouldn't look like the Prindle House. I must have been in shock, I guess. I couldn't imagine what was going on. But then—" Her voice lowered, and Miranda and Dan had to lean forward to hear her. "Then suddenly I noticed the needlework—it was a sampler—the woman had been working on. It was lying on the chair next to mine, and I straightened it out to see properly." She paused. "That was when I knew something impossible had happened. The date on the sampler was 1756—more than sixty years in the future!"

Miranda had been following Abby's story as if watching a film; she could picture it all so exactly. The bedraggled, frightened girl brought into an unfamiliar house, warming herself in front of a fire, her mind in turmoil. And then seeing the needlework, grabbing it up to check the date—and then what? What do you do when you discover the impossible has happened? How had Abby coped? Miranda gazed at Abby with new respect.

"So what did you do then?" asked Dan eagerly. He no longer seemed afraid of Abby.

"What could I do? When the woman came back with my drink, I asked her what town we were in, and what colony. I just had to be sure. She said, 'Garnet, of course. In Massachusetts. Dear child, has something happened to addle your wits?' She thought I was Laura, her cousin's daughter from Philadelphia who was coming to stay after having been orphaned. The woman—her name was Matilda Prindle—was good to me. I stayed with her, telling her I had no recollection of what had happened to my trunk, my cloak, or anything. She believed I had been set upon by thieves, and so traumatized that I lost my memory—you know, you call it amnesia now."

Abby pursed her lips thoughtfully. "I let her think what she wanted. At the time, I didn't know what to think about what had happened, either. Maybe I
had
lost my memory. How could I know? Certainly I realized something amazing had happened. You wouldn't believe how frightened I was when I walked around Garnet with Matilda Prindle and saw places I recognized, but all changed. It was like something out of a nightmare. And the people! I saw faces I thought I almost recognized ... I went to Thomas's house—my brother's—but the house had become a milliner's." She glanced at Miranda's perplexed expression. "A hat shop," she explained. "It was right where The Sassy Café is now."

Abby hugged herself and continued. "I discovered horrible things. That Thomas and Sarah were dead, and their children, Charity, Nicholas, and Daniel, too. Dead from old age! I learned that Charity had married into the Prindle family and that Matilda's husband, Tobias, was her son. Little Charity's son—I couldn't believe it. She was just a baby, practically, when I knew her. Can you imagine how it was for me to believe that somehow—in an instant—the little children I knew 'had grown up, led their whole lives through, had children and grandchildren—all in the time it took me to whirl through that wind?"

"I'd never have believed any of this if I hadn't seen you disappear," Dan said under his breath.

Abby creased the envelope into a square. "Anyway, I stayed with this new generation of Prindles as long as I could. When Matilda Prindle's cousin Laura showed up at last a week later, I had already made myself helpful to the family. Matilda and Tobias had four children, and they let me stay on with them as a sort of housekeeper or poor relation. I did a lot of the work, but I also got to eat meals with the family and take lessons with their two daughters. Laura, the cousin, was a few years older than me, but we soon became friends. It was hard to leave...." Abby's voice trailed off.

"But why did you leave them at all?" Miranda asked. "Why not just explain what had happened to you, awful and bizarre though it was, and stay?"

"Because memory lasts a long, long time. The people of Garnet—my Garnet, that is—were afraid of witchcraft. We saw it everywhere. It seemed to be all around us, in the air, anyplace. The people in Matilda and Tobias's Garnet thought they had finally put that fear behind them. But after a few years, people couldn't help but notice I wasn't changing. And the whispers of witchcraft started again. I couldn't bear it. Even later, when people didn't believe in witches so readily anymore, I'd have been enough to convince them all over again." Abby threw down the manila envelope and hugged herself again. "I don't grow. Nothing changes at all." She stretched out her hand. "Look, my nails haven't grown since the fire. And my hair hasn't, either." She held out her foot and peeled off the sock. "Look at this. See that bruise?"

Miranda and Dan gazed at the dark blue fleck on the knuckle of Abby's big toe.

"Well, that happened about a week before the fire when I dropped an iron ladle on my toe while I was helping my mother make stew. The bruise hasn't gone away in all this time. Same with the burn on my thigh—it never healed. At first I kept putting ointment on it, and bandages—but then I noticed it never changed at all. It didn't get better, but it didn't get any worse. It hurt—but I learned to live with the pain. I hardly ever notice it now."

"I guess you'd get used to just about anything in three hundred years," said Dan.

Abby pulled her sock back on. "I always have to move on before people notice there's something weird about me. Sooner or later, someone notices I'm still a kid. I never get taller. I never"—she glanced down at her small breasts—"never develop much." Her smile was rueful. "I think the wind threw me into a time warp or something after the fire and kicked me into the future. I just thank God I wasn't ill with smallpox or a fever then, or else I'd still be ill today."

"You mean you never get sick or hurt?" marveled Dan.

"Oh, sure I do. It seems to be only the things that happened to me
before
the fire that never change." Her mouth twisted. "I've had plenty of cuts and bruises in my time, believe me. But they all healed normally—and whenever I got sick, I got better again, even though I sometimes prayed I'd die. But I'm stuck with this burn and this bruise. And this girl's body and brain."

Miranda stood up and prowled restlessly around the bedroom. "And that old man who died? The one you were living with in Baltimore? Who was he really?"

"His name was Louis Horner, and I was sort of acting as his nurse. I like living with old people. I can help them as much as they help me, and they aren't so quick to turn me in to the authorities. But of course when he died, he left the house to his own relatives. I had to get out of there fast before people arrived for the funeral."

"But how do you move on when you have to leave?" Miranda couldn't imagine how it would feel to be on her own, without her parents. She stared out the window. The snow was falling so thickly that she could only barely make out the outlines of her house across the road. "Do you just run off without even leaving a note?"

Abby sighed and fingered a packet of photographs. "Oh, sometimes I leave a letter, sometimes not. I just move on, but it's never easy leaving the people you care about—over and over again. It's wrenching. You never get used to it."

Dan reached for Miranda's hand. "How do you choose where to go next?" he asked.

"I'm drawn back to Garnet, but I have to be careful not to come here more than once every fifty years or so. I can't risk having people recognize me. But Garnet's my real home. I belong here. It was hard, that first time, to leave the Prindles. At least they were related to me—through Charity, you see. I didn't know where to go from there. But I left them a note saying thank you for everything, and just ran away to Boston one night. I found work in a tavern as a serving girl. Once Tobias Prindle was in Boston, visiting his brother. They walked in—and I panicked. I couldn't let Tobias see me. After that, I made sure I moved farther away."

"Tobias Prindle." Dan spoke the name quietly. "Now I remember where I've heard that name before. There's a letter written by a Tobias Prindle—something about witchcraft—in the Prindle House exhibit now. Could it be the same man?"

"Probably," nodded Abby. "I'd like to see that letter. It seems to me Tobias
had
published something in the newspaper—I think I remember people talking about it."

"Well, where did you go when you ran away again?" asked Dan.

"To Concord. I helped on a farm. I stayed there during the war."

"During the war?" Miranda looked perplexed. "What war?"

"The American Revolution," said Abby. "You know."

Miranda's eyes opened wide. "You must be a walking history book! You must know everything there is to know—the real, inside stories about everything. Did you meet Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson and everybody? All the founding fathers—Just think of it, Dan. Abby was right there."

Abby sighed. "I was there, all right. Milking cows and weeding the vegetable garden, trying to grow enough food to feed the hungry British soldiers that were billeted with the family. But that's as close as I came to fame and glory. Think about it, Mandy. Have you met the president? Do you know the inside story about what's happening in politics?"

Miranda frowned, disappointed.

"Oh, I did a lot of things," continued Abby. "In the early 1800s I worked for rich families in New York and Boston. That's when I was with the Longridges. When I left them, I had to get out of town fast. I went west with a family who had a land grant. I helped with all their children and stayed out in Kansas for a long time...." Her voice faltered. She looked at Miranda and Dan sitting shoulder to shoulder on the bed and sighed. "I fell in love—and got married."

"Married!" cried Dan.

"But you're only thirteen!" objected Miranda.

"I felt a lot older by then." Abby shrugged. "And it was easier then to decide who you wanted to be. There wasn't so much bureaucracy, you know? No tax forms or social security numbers. You were freer, then. It was easy to say I was sixteen—just small for my age. Oh, maybe some people didn't buy the story, but so what? There I was—an orphan. If a homesteader needed a wife, who would object?"

"What happened?" pressed Dan. "Did you just walk out of the marriage?"

"Did you have any children?" asked Miranda.

"No and no," answered Abby. "I didn't have children, thank goodness. And I wasn't married long because Luke—Luke died." She fell silent, and Miranda sensed not to push. No matter that more than a hundred years had passed; this was a sadness still raw.

"It was easier to move around once trains were in use," said Abby. "I could go farther—and faster. I needed to get away from the places I'd lived so no one would recognize me. I went to San Francisco and invented another story, but after the big earthquake in 1906, I came back east. I was homesick for Garnet and had been away a long time." She sighed. "It's so hard. You have no idea. Always moving on ... leaving people you care about. Always trying not to care too much about anybody because you know it can't last. That's another reason I like old people best. They die—and I don't have to just leave them in the lurch."

"What was it like when you came back to Garnet? Did you stay long?" asked Dan. Miranda imagined the future museum curator in him was regarding Abby as a special exhibit.

"I worked as an assistant teacher. The schoolhouse was the Prindle House, can you imagine? But I didn't stay long. The teacher I was working with moved north, up to a little Maine fishing village, and she took me along with her as her assistant."

"Did you ever get married again?" asked Miranda.

Abby looked sad. "No. By then it was too risky. You had to have licenses—proof of age. I did fall in love one other time—not very long ago at all. It was in the late 1960s, in Philadelphia. The man wanted to be a writer—he said I inspired him, that I was his muse. But I had to leave him, too—and then later I heard he'd died young. But it's always that way. Whether they die young or old, everybody I've ever known has died."

She hesitated, then spoke again. "When I'm feeling sad, which is most of the time, I go back to the ruin of my house. It's easy to do—I just wish myself there, and I'm riding back through that wind, back to the rubble and ash. There I'm like a ghost. Time is exactly as I left it. My brother is searching for me, and I try to tell him I'm there but I can't. And I can't leave the site. I'm stuck there. Time just stands still. So I leave, and I'm back in the real world where time goes on and I'm the only thing that doesn't."

Abby dropped the manila envelope. It was creased and torn. "Finding a family is always the hardest part. It used to be easier, but as time goes on, I can't find people to take me in so readily. Earlier I could find work as a maid in a big house or pose as some lost relation. But now"—she laughed harshly—"people are smarter. They don't fall for that anymore. And the child labor laws make it hard for me, too. And there are no servants—at least not servants who are as little as I am. If I don't watch out now, I'll end up in foster care, or in an orphanage again—like I did in the 1930s...." She shook her head and frowned over at Miranda. "You knew, Mandy. But I couldn't tell you then."

"I knew?" Miranda was confused. Then she understood. "Oh, Abby, then
you
were the girl Nonny remembered! It wasn't your grandmother at all."

"I was back here in Garnet again, camping out in the woods up on the hill. Talk about irony. First the Prindle House was William's family's home—and might have been mine, too, if we'd married. Then it was where I lived with Matilda and Tobias. More than a century later I was teaching school right in the living room—and then only about twenty years after that, when the new schools were built, it became a horrid old orphanage, run like a prison, and I was an inmate—thanks to Susannah's great-granny."

"Well, I bet you didn't stay long," said Dan. "I bet you ran away again."

"Of course I did. I always do. But deciding to leave is difficult. You've seen homeless people. It's
hard
out there on the streets."

Miranda shifted uncomfortably as she remembered following Abby on her search for food through the snowy streets.