The Marriage of Sticks (24 page)

“I’m okay, Frannie. I’m coming.”

James’s voice was a high plea. “Please—
let me go.
”

Without looking, I opened my left hand. Lying on my palm was a small silvery-white stick. Written on it in perfect brown calligraphic letters was
James Stillman.

It began to smoke. It flared into rich flame. Although it burned brightly in the center of my hand, I felt no heat or pain. It was hypnotic. I couldn’t take my eyes away. The flame danced and grew and spread up my arm. I felt nothing.

Someone said my name but I only half heard the man’s voice. James? McCabe? I looked up. No one was there—James was gone.

Then pain came like a roaring explosion. My arm was agony. I screamed and shook it, but the flame only ate the wind thus created and blossomed upward. My skin went red, orange, molten, and shiny as oil.

But from somewhere inside, from
someone
I was but had never known, I knew how to stop it. Sweep the fire away like a live cigarette ash. With my free hand I brushed it and the flame that devoured my arm slid slickly down and dropped onto the floor like some kind of jelly.

The door behind me banged open and McCabe was there, pulling me by the collar out of the room. I could barely move. My arm did not hurt anymore. I wanted to watch as the flame spread across the floor, caught on the throw rug and jumped to the bedspread.

“Come on! Come on!” McCabe jerked me and I stumbled backward into him. The bedroom smoked and burned, flames rising high off the blazing bed, licking, blackening the ceiling.

As Frannie pulled I knew what had just happened to me but could not frame it clearly in my mind. When James asked me to free him and without warning I felt the stick in my hand, I was the other person. The one who had conjured stick and flame from nowhere. The one who had lived all the lives and understood why. The one capable of hearing impossible noises in Frances Hatch’s building. The one I would soon know too well and fear.

She knew how to free James Stillman and keep pain away from a burning hand. But the moment I heard my name called and looked up, I was Miranda Romanac again and
she
was only mortal.

Out in the hall, McCabe slammed the door shut behind us and looked worriedly around. “Should we try to put it out or just get the hell out of here?”

“We can’t get out, Frannie. The house won’t let us. It’s haunted. By my ghosts now. I brought them in when I came.”

He remained silent. The fire crackled two feet away.

“It’s the same thing that happened to Frances when I was a kid.”

“The same thing?”

“No, but it’s the same, believe me. You’re right, we can’t get out of here now.
You
gotta figure a way to do it.”

“What did Frances do?”

“She went to the attic. Did something up there. I never knew what.”

I looked toward the ceiling. “There is no attic.”

McCabe looked up. “Sure there is, I been there a hundred times.”

“It’s gone. There’s no more attic, Frannie. The house changes.”

He opened his mouth to answer but a muffled thumping explosion behind the bedroom door stopped him. “What the fuck are we gonna do, Miranda? We gotta go somewhere!”

“The basement. It’s in the basement.”

“
What
is?”

“I don’t know, Frannie. I’d tell you if I did. But it’s in the basement.” I saw my arm. The one on fire moments before. There wasn’t a mark on it.

“Wait a minute. Just wait a second.” McCabe sprinted down the hall and around a corner. Everything stunk of smoke. It poured from beneath the door into the hall, oozing along the floor.

I had been in the basement only a few times. There were two large rooms. Hugh said when we had some money we would do something interesting with the space. Hugh. Hugh. Hugh…There was a light in each room down there and one at the top of the stairs. I tried to picture it all and what could possibly be down there that was so important.

Frannie jogged back down the hall looking baffled. “You’re right, there’s nothing there anymore. Used to be a door in the ceiling with a latch you’d pull and a folding ladder would come down. But it’s all gone. There
is
no fuckin’ attic!”

“Forget it. Let’s go.”

“The house is going to burn down and we’re gonna be in the goddamned basement!”

I led the way. Down the front stairs, a left turn, and just before the kitchen, the white basement door. McCabe reached for the knob. I stopped him. “Let me go first.”

The dank odor of damp earth and stone. A place where the air never changed, a breeze never blew through. Clicking on the light at the top of the stairs did little good. No more than a sixty-watt bulb, it illuminated only a few steps down and then the rest fell away into a brown darkness. I took firm hold of the rickety banister and started down.

“I hope to God someone’s called the fire department by now. They’re having a busy day.”

“Be quiet, Frannie.” The only sound then was the muted clunk of our feet going down wooden stairs. At the bottom, the basement floor was bumpy and felt like hard-packed earth. It was about ten feet from the stairs to the first room. The door was half-closed but the light from inside sent a weak ray out across a patch of floor. I walked over and pushed the door open.

Days before, I had helped Hugh carry things into this room. It had been almost empty but for a couple of broken lawn chairs and an archery target with only one leg. We stacked our empty boxes and suitcases against moldy walls and discussed whether we should even try to clean the room a little. Years of neglect had left it looking like a typical moldy basement room where you store unimportant things and promptly forget them forever.

But the room I entered now was luminous, transformed. Painted a happy pink-orange, the once-shabby walls were covered with pictures of Disney creatures, giant George Booth bullterriers, Tin Tin and Milou, characters from
The Wizard of Oz.
On the spotless parquet floor sat a pile of stuffed animals and other cartoon characters: Olive Oyl, Minnie Mouse, Daisy Duck.

In the center of the room was the most extraordinary cradle I had ever seen. Made out of dark mahogany, it must have been hundreds of years old; it looked medieval. Particularly because of the intricate carving that covered every square inch of its surface. Angels and animals, clouds and suns, planets, stars, the Milky Way, simple German words carved with the most devoted precision: Liebe, Kind, Gott, Himmel, unsterblich.…Love, child, God, immortal. How long had it taken the artist to create it? The work of a lifetime, it said everything about love any hand could express. It
was
love, carved out of wood.

Overwhelmed, I crossed the floor thinking about nothing else but this exceptional object.

“Miranda, be careful!”

His voice and the sight of what was in the cradle arrived simultaneously.

“Oh my God!” The child living in my body, Hugh’s child, lay in that cradle. I recognized her the moment I saw her. I touched my belly and began to tremble uncontrollably. None of this was possible, but I knew without question that this was our baby, our daughter. Even my jaw was shaking when I managed to say quietly, “Hi, sweetheart.”

She lay on her back in a pajama the same happy color as the room. She played with her fingers and smiled, frowned, smiled, all concentration. She looked like Hugh. She looked like me. She was the most beautiful baby in the world. She was ours.

But she would not look at me even when I moved to the cradle to stare. Having controlled my shaking, I reached down to touch her. As my hand moved toward her, she began to fade. No other way to explain it. The closer I got, the paler she grew, then white, transparent.

When it first happened, I snatched my hand back. She returned. Everything about her became visible again. The cradle, her bedding, the room—all remained as it was, but not our baby. I could not touch her. It was not permitted.

Out loud but only to myself I said, “But I have to touch her. I need to touch my baby!”

“You can’t.” I looked at McCabe. His face was twisted in fury. “Don’t you understand? It’s a setup, Miranda! Just figure out what you’re supposed to do. We’re standing below a burning house. That’s the only real thing here.”

I could not accept that. I reached for my baby again, but the same thing happened. She faded. She never looked at me. My hand stopped. “She doesn’t see me. Why doesn’t she see me?”

“Because she’s not
here,
goddammit! The room’s a trick. The baby’s a trick. It’s all illusion. Let’s get out of here! Let’s look in the other room and then get the hell out.”

“I can’t. I have to stay here.”

“Not possible.” He stepped around me and picking up the cradle threw it against the far wall. It bounced off, hit the floor, and rolled over face down. One piece broke off and skidded back almost to my foot.

Horrified, I rushed to the cradle and turned it over. It was empty. Aghast, I put my hands in, but there was no child, no blanket or bedding, nothing but the empty smoothness of the wood. I was so confused I didn’t even think about McCabe or what he had just done. The baby was gone. Where was my baby?

“Can we go now? They’re waiting.” The voice behind me was different. I turned and saw…Shumda. The Enormous Shumda, Ventriloquist Extraordinaire, Frances Hatch’s lover, the man who killed the little girl who was once me. McCabe was nowhere to be seen and I knew why.

“It was you all along, wasn’t it? Upstairs, with the fire and the talking dolls? The whole thing
was
a trick; McCabe never came back to the house after he dropped me off.”

He bowed. “Correct. I’m good at voices. But we really do have to get going.”

“Where? Where’s my baby? Where did she go?”

“That’s for you to decide. Let’s go!”

“I’m not going with you.”

“Oh, but you
must.
Clarity awaits, Miranda!” He said it with the exaggerated voice of a bad actor making a thunderous exit.

I didn’t move. His expression slid from big smile to not happy.

“It was my baby, wasn’t it?”

“Yes. Come along now and you can see her in the next room. She’s there.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“You can believe him.” Hugh appeared in the door holding the baby in his arms. She was chuckling and hitting his nose with a tiny open hand. “Miranda, you have to do this. There’s no other way.”

I stretched out both hands to him. Hugh. With our baby.

He smiled. “It’s all right, Miranda. Shumda’s telling the truth—go with him and it’ll help you understand everything.” Before he turned and left, his eyes fell on the cradle. They moved to the piece of wood that had broken off. It lay near my foot. He looked at me and I knew he was saying something important.

“All right.”

The three of them left. I picked up the wood and slipped it into my pocket. I walked out of the room and across the cellar. The only sound was my shuffling footsteps. The air smelled heavily of dirt and damp. My face was very hot. I could smell my own sweat.

The door to the other room was closed. I grabbed the knob and tried to pull the door open. It was very difficult to move and scraped loudly across the uneven floor. When it was half-open I stopped to take a slow deep breath. I wasn’t ready for this but it had to be done. My heart did a few strange misbeats in my chest. I pulled again, hard, and the door came fully open.

What I expected was another room the same size as the last. That’s all. No real idea of what would be in there, but definitely not what was there.

A ramp—a wide gray concrete ramp leading upward to lights. Brilliant lights against a black night sky illuminated something I couldn’t see yet but which appeared to be…a stadium? A playing field? Giant banks of lights at fixed intervals shone down on what I could only guess was a field. I walked through the basement door and onto the ramp.

Stopping there, I looked left and right. It
was
a stadium. Walkways went off to either side and connected to other ramps. I had been to football games in college and later to Yankee Stadium with a boyfriend who was crazy for baseball. This was a very big stadium. I had walked through a door in the basement of my house in Crane’s View into the bowels of a colossal sports stadium.

There were no other people around, which made things even more ominous and disturbing. Thirty feet away I saw a brightly lit concession stand, but no one was there—no salespeople or customers.

“Hello?”

Nothing.

What was I supposed to do? I walked farther up the ramp to see what this was about. Hugh said I should do this. Shumda said I could see our baby if I entered this place.

My heart kept misfiring in my chest. I put a hand over it. Okay, it’s okay. After a few steps I stopped, and looked over my shoulder to see if the basement door was still behind me. It was. I could go back. I hesitated. But nothing was there; everything was in front of me. I walked up the ramp, into the stadium.

My footsteps echoed around me until I was almost at the top of the ramp. Then the noise inside the stadium rose up like a wave. You know it because you’ve heard it before: at a baseball game or rock concert when you return to your seat after buying a hot dog or going to the bathroom. That big noise is there but it’s in the background for the moment. Your own steps are louder till you reach the top of the ramp and walk in. Next twenty thousand people and their life-sounds envelop you in a second. Talk, movement, laughter, shuffling, whistles—all together in one mighty hullabaloo.

The stadium was packed with people. I stood at the entrance and paused to soak up the picture. Thousands of people. Every seat appeared filled. In that first glimpse I did not look at anyone carefully because I was taking in the whole picture. I was surprised to see nothing laid out down on the field, no football goalposts at either end of a marked field, ten-yard line, end zone. No baseball diamond with home plate and perfect white lines marking the base paths. The field was a manicured lawn with nothing but the greenest grass glowing even greener beneath the blazing arc lights. I heard snatches of conversation and laughter, feet scraping across the stone floors, clapping. Someone far away hooted. More. So much more. The human rumble of tens of thousands of people in an enclosed place.