The Wikkeling (13 page)

“We'll see whose hair she has when she grows up,” said her father, laughing. While her mother's hair was long, blonde, and straight, her father's hair was black and curly. Rose's, so far, was in between.

That was the life of the house's back door: the life of the Library. The house also had a front door, which was seldom used. Visitors at the front door were nicely dressed, and they came from cars they parked in the slim driveway. They were treated very cautiously by Rose's parents, and were never invited in. This was one of the first categories Rose ever understood.
There are two kinds of people: those who come through the kitchen with the secret knock, and those who come to the front.

A few weeks before Rose had started kindergarten, she'd watched her mother answer the front door and talk with a woman whose hair stood in perfect, rigid blond ringlets. The woman wanted to discuss the parent-teacher association at Rose's school. When the woman left, Rose asked, “Do the front
door people ever meet the kitchen door people?”

Her mother put her hands on Rose's shoulders. “Rosie,” she said, “they don't. And it's very important that they never do. When you start school in the fall, all the kids you'll meet will be front door people. I need you to not ever tell anyone about the Subscribers—not friends, or teachers, or anyone. Do you understand?”

“It's not alright for us to have all of these books?” said Rose.

“The books are fine,” said her mother. “The problem is us. You, your father, and I live here secretly. No one, except for the Subscribers, knows we're here. This house is supposed to be empty. If you tell anyone that we're living here, we'll have to leave forever.”

“But people come and talk to you at the front door all the time,” said Rose.

“We're tricking them for now,” said her mother. “We said we own the place. Hopefully, they won't look into it any further.”

This issue proved so important that her parents came to her bedside that night and repeated the whole conversation. Then, at breakfast the next morning, they talked it over a third time.

At the moment, Rose sat at the small kitchen table on the ground floor of the Library, eating a bowl of corn cereal. The kitchen door opened behind her, and a waft of lilac scented air entered from the alleyway as her mother stepped into the house and closed the door behind. She took a chair opposite Rose, and set her bags on the floor: a cloth sack filled with groceries and a backpack constructed of stitched-together inner tubes from old bicycle tires.

“Hello, Rosie,” she said. She kissed Rose on the forehead. “Is your father home?”

“He's in Political Science,” said Rose around a mouthful of cereal. Political Science was a small section in the northwest corner of the fourth floor, a cozy wood-lined room with a stained-glass window depicting a boy and girl walking along a dirt road, carrying schoolbooks in their hands.

Her mother's cell phone rang, a chirping sound like a cricket. She dug it from her pocket and saw GAD-FLY on the screen. “Hello?” she said. “Oh, yes—of course I remember you.” She paused. “No, Rose doesn't have her own phone. But she's here, if you'd like to talk to her.” She held out the phone to Rose. “It's for you.”

H
enrietta and Gary gazed down in wonder at a street they'd never seen before—a broad, one-lane brick boulevard planted on both sides with enormous, leafy maples whose branches stretched out to touch Henrietta's house.

People strolled up and down paths on either side—a couple arm in arm, a man walking a dog, a group of grandparents with grandchildren. Everyone's clothes were of a strange style that Henrietta thought she'd seen once or twice in old pictures. Men and women alike were dressed in wool coats, buttoned across the front over wide lapels, and sported hats of a variety of styles, some with brightly colored feathers protruding jauntily from hat bands. Everyone, from little boys to old women, wore brown or black dress shoes.

Gary was the first to master his surprise sufficiently to say something. “The houses look like yours.” Across the street they could see a row of homes with pitched, shingled roofs. The general style was the same for all, but each house was different from its neighbors. It was as if ten people had each been asked to draw a circle three inches across, and the ten circles that resulted were similar, but also different depending on who made each. A few of the houses were one story, like Henrietta's, but some were two. Several had open front porches,
one with a porch swing, and some had no porch at all. From the chimney of one house billowed dark smoke, illuminated occasionally by tiny embers. Inside the front room of another, Henrietta saw several candles burning.

“Our house is old,” said Henrietta. “It was my grandmother's. All of
those
houses . . .” she trailed off.

“They became like mine,” said Gary.

They were both thinking the same thought, but neither spoke it right away because it sounded ridiculous.

“This is the
past
,” Henrietta whispered finally. “It sort of makes sense, I mean, why the windows are blocked off when we're outside, but not here. If we're looking into the past—the windows weren't blocked yet.”

Golden-green light filtered through the tops of the trees. Below, the brick street turned the sunlight that reached it into cinnamon. As the two continued to stare, their eyes fell upon an object in the middle of the boulevard in front of Henrietta's house. It resembled an enormous, irregularly shaped table.

“That's the biggest picnic bench I've ever seen,” said Gary.

“
Is
it a picnic bench?” said Henrietta. A couple of passersby stopped and sat on its edge, conversing. “I think it's . . . a stump!”

“You mean, from a tree?” said Gary. “Like in the history unit at school?” Henrietta knew what Gary was referring to—a movie called
They Built with Trees
, about how people used to make things out of wood. “It can't be a stump,” Gary mused. “Stumps aren't that big. You could park four cars on that!”

“But it is,” said Henrietta.

“Wow,” said Gary, and he looked up, obviously trying to imagine the
enormity of the tree that once grew there. “Hey,” he said. “What do you suppose will happen if we go outside now? Will it be now, or then?”

They opened the trapdoor. Henrietta looked at the housecat, who silently watched from the couch. Before it on the coffee table sat the open
Bestiary
.

“It looks like the cat's been reading,” Henrietta joked.

Gary laughed. “Studying for the Competency Exam!”

They dropped into Henrietta's room and returned to the living room, where their mothers were still talking, sitting on the couch.

“Ready to go already?” said Ms. Span as Gary entered.

“Um . . . actually, if it's okay, Henrietta and I are going to work on homework together. I thought I'd help her with math.”

“That would be wonderful, Gary,” said Henrietta's mother. “I'm sure Henrietta would appreciate it.”

“I will,” said Henrietta. “And we were just going to also . . . ”

“Go outside for a second!” said Gary.

The two children, nodding in unison, rushed to the front door and exited onto the sidewalk.

Before them stretched the same scene they saw every day: a four-lane asphalt road crammed with cars. Traffic lights winked. Enormous plastic houses squatted behind green squares of fake turf.

“I wonder when they widened the street,” said Gary.

“I guess things had to get bigger,” said Henrietta. “Did the clothes those people wore remind you of anyone?”

“Through the windows?” said Gary. He shook his head.

“Rose—with the headache. She wears a wool shirt sometimes.”

“You're right,” said Gary.

“We should call her,” said Henrietta, stepping back inside. “We could invite her over.”

They entered the living room to find Gary's mother preparing to leave.

“Gary, I'm glad you're going to help Henrietta. But be on time for dinner, and be
careful
when you cross the street.”

“I will, Mom,” said Gary.

Ms. Span turned to Henrietta's mother. “It was a pleasure to meet you, Aline.”

“And you, Margaret.”

Ms. Span departed.

“Mom, we were wondering,” said Henrietta, “if we could invite our other friend to study with us. She's in kindergarten. She was sick yesterday at school, and Gary and I helped her.”

“Sick?” said her mother. “Is she contagious?”

“Sick from headaches, like me. Can we invite her?”

“Your father will be home soon, dinner is on the way, and I'm still finishing up some work . . .” Her mother trailed off when she realized how nice it was that Henrietta was gaining some friends. “Oh, all right,” she said.

Henrietta and Gary returned to Henrietta's room, where they looked up Rose's number on the school network. Rose's mother answered and agreed that Rose's father could bring their daughter over and that, of course, he would enjoy seeing Henrietta's house and meeting her mom.

They waited out on the sidewalk. Traffic crawled through the lilac haze, and they thought about the street in the past. Henrietta wondered if the red bricks had been buried under the asphalt. Gary wondered about the trees, and the giant stump—were the roots still growing underground, even now? The thought made him feel claustrophobic.

“I wonder what kind of car Rose's dad drives,” said Henrietta. “Hey, did you see any cars when we looked out the attic window?”

“I didn't,” said Gary. Just then, a small puff of exhaust blew a candy-wrapper past their feet. Gary bent somewhat reflexively to grab it, and when he straightened he saw two figures approaching along the sidewalk.

He squinted at them. “There they are,” he said. “They're . . .
walking
?”

Rose and her father were indeed walking along the sidewalk, holding hands. Henrietta and Gary had scarcely ever seen adults walking anywhere except to and from their cars.

“On foot they're going faster than the traffic,” Henrietta observed.