Virginia Hamilton (11 page)

Otherwise, neither of them bothered to greet the other. She couldn’t say whether they were friends.

He never lets on I come here. Thomas would have teased me if he’d mentioned it.

Maybe they were friends. Secret friends.

Her heart beat faster. She watched Dorian leave his post at the window as she stepped up on the stoop.

Dorian’s mother was a secretive person if ever Justice had seen one. Some kind of caution she had come to share with Dorian. Mrs. Jefferson would seem to let Dorian slip from her mind. She never seemed to pay attention to him, and this didn’t bother him at all. But she never for an instant forgot about Justice’s brothers.

“Watching they every move,” she would tell Justice. “Somebody got to.”

There was another world where Mrs. Jefferson lived. Justice could feel herself being drawn into it once again.

Most houses this time of day were closed tight against the hot weather. The Jefferson house was no exception. When Justice went to open the screen door, she found it locked.

Should-a known, she thought.

The screen was caked with dust. She saw that the entire front of the house was dust-covered, as was the hedge.

You don’t see it at first, she thought. Sure does look like the dust bowl is spilling over everything.

A moment later, Dorian opened the door and unlocked the screen. She tried to get by him into the house, but he was too quick for her. He thrust out a short-handled broom, which she took from him. She couldn’t recall having seen the broom before; yet she knew exactly what was to be done with it.

Do it and get it over with. She sighed, turning around, facing the yard and hedge. Just get it done.

Justice went down to the hedge opening where the sidewalk up to the Jefferson home began. There she felt compelled to sweep backward toward the stoop. She hoped none of the neighbors would see her as she swept the broom across the walk in front of her backing feet.

“Because of the Child and Child,” Mrs. Jefferson had said. Justice had the impression that Dorian’s mother had given this as a reason for the need of sweeping. Mrs. Jefferson never said Thomas’ and Levi’s names. She would say One Child for Thomas and Two Child for Levi. Or Them. Or she said Child and Child. Justice, as she swept, said Child and Child over and over again to herself. She could see how thoroughly it left her out of things.

“Because nobody know how much of Them is tracking you.” Justice knew Mrs. Jefferson had told her this. “So sweep away the footprints, you, so Child and Child cannot follow.”

Justice did as she had been told.

There had been a time when she believed Leona Jefferson was some kind of crazy woman. But gradually she had grown accustomed to Mrs. Jefferson’s peculiar ways. They still appeared odd to what Justice knew as order and routine; yet they made a kind of sense within the world of the Jefferson household.

Now Justice swept the broom up to the stoop and climbed backward up the steps. She thought of her own house, now hidden by the Jefferson place. Her own house was the best house and the one she loved. At once, Thomas was on her mind—never was he out of it for long—and the way she had hidden herself in the hedgerow. She quaked with dread.

I have to tell someone, she thought, and pulled herself together.

The front door opened. Justice turned to face it, still clutching the broom. Dorian held open the screen and took the broom from her. She stepped forward and entered this house like no other.

There was no entrance hall or foyer in Dorian’s house. A visitor stepped across the threshold and was simply within. There wasn’t time for Justice to rearrange her mind’s eye from the bright, searing outdoors to this damp and cool interior. But she reminded herself about the powdery dust outside, how the screen door had been caked with it. The dust pressed against the frame of the picture window, rising in the corners like the sands in an hourglass. Fragments of dust had filled the air, like a town’s dry gossip, which goes unnoticed until it begins to chafe and burn.

Now Justice stood in the Jefferson house surrounded by carpeted floors of evergreen and the cabbage green of pictureless walls. A huge floor-to-ceiling mirror made portraits of whoever stood where Justice was standing.

Clay pots of crinkled ivy were crammed on end tables. And the tables, in turn, crowded the spring-green couch on which Dorian sat with hands tightly folded, waiting for Justice.

She sensed that the plants welcomed her, that they understood her as they did Dorian and his mother. She felt them empty her of all the silliness of her years. All of the nonsense.

No, please!
she begged them.
I want to stay myself.

The green of plants crowded her vision and gripped her mind. She was given a keener awareness. She became a receiver.

Justice was prepared.

And found herself seated on the couch next to Dorian.

“I never knew I moved from the doorway,” she told him, surprised.

“Justice, you,” he said evenly. But he looked apprehensive and gave her a guarded little smile.

“I been here long?” she asked him.

“Not too long. You only just come in a minute ago.

“You sure of that?” she asked.

“Maybe you been here a little while, but not long,” he assured her. Holding himself still and straight on the couch, he was unwilling to look at her more than a few seconds at a time.

She folded her hands, feeling them pulse and tremble. She leaned back on the couch and closed her eyes, only to see a swell of green behind her eyelids. They fluttered open again.

“You can let it be,” softly Dorian reminded her. “Nothing’s not going to get you hurt in here.”

“I know that,” she mumbled, and was quiet before she said, “Your dad’s still asleep.”

No need for Dorian to answer. His dad slept through the morning on into afternoon so that he could be alert for his night shift at his job.

Justice had the sensation that time wavered green, and changed. She sensed that it would escape. She often had trouble keeping it.

There was an arch between the front room where she and Dorian were sitting and the kitchen and dining area. She could see through the arch to the back door, which was curtained in aqua lace with a green blind beneath. To the left of the door was the round dining table where the Jeffersons ate their meals. Only half the table was visible behind the wall separating the two rooms. Justice knew who had to be seated there at the table, out of view.

A wind came up in the front room, causing plant runners to skittle over the floor like crabs. Dust was shaken by the wind from the fronds of a wild palm.

There can’t be wind here, she thought.

But the wind lifted her with Dorian at her elbow, steering her. It sailed her from the couch through the arch. There were voices with her on the wind. She sensed they came from miles and miles away. Insistent voices echoing in the new clarity of her mind. One voice was particularly at a loss.

Justice whirled on the wind. “Where—how far away are you?”

She knocked into the dining table in the kitchen. She could see only green. The confused sound of voices was like thunder swelling and rolling in.

Hands from across the table grasped her arms. The hands trembled with fear, but still they firmly held her. At once, she and Dorian were seated at the table, side by side. The wind escaped under the back door and through cracks of the house. The voices died away to a hum, like the sound of a refrigerator.

“Can you hear me, Justice, you?” said Leona Jefferson. “Baby Justice, come on back now.”

“I was sailing!” Justice said, shocked. She had difficulty seeing through a green mist. Her heart pounded, shaking the table. A surge of frightening beats filled the house.

“Mama!” she heard Dorian cry out in terror.

“Shhhh!” Leona’s voice saying, “She’s not going to hurt anything. We can keep it in, but you can’t be afraid and you have to concentrate!”

Hands touched Justice’s face, smoothed back her hair. They pressed hard on each side of her head at the temples. She felt herself quake inside and she wanted so much for the hands to make her feel safe. But they were like so many flies. She was able to knock them away without even moving.

“Mama?” Dorian whispering.

“Shhhh!”

“How did I do that?” Justice asked. “It’s scaring me—make it go away!”

Hands flew back, pressing her head again.

“Stop it!” Justice cried out. Then, quite suddenly, she gave in: “No, let them be. Let the hands alone.”

“That’s right,” Leona said soothingly. “We got to keep it in, mostly. Let it out a little at a time.”

Justice turned her head this way and that; the hands turned, also. Wherever she looked, objects moved, slid and jumped, and rustled in a sudden wind.

“I thought all the wind had gone,” she said. No one answered.

But hands were helping to calm her down, although a huge pounding continued in the room. She couldn’t imagine what it was. Her own heart beat now—tinka-tink, tinka-tink—racing small and insignificant. Yet, ever so slowly, the pounding diminished. Perhaps the hands absorbed it. They did seem to draw it off, Justice felt, the way creeks catch and hold the run-off of water from a flash of hard rain. The hands were so soothing.

She sensed the room settle down. The three of them were seated comfortably at the round table. Justice and Dorian were closest to the arch, with Leona Jefferson across from them.

There were no hands touching Justice. She hadn’t noticed when they stopped pressing her temples. Now she saw in the center of the table a large round pan some three inches deep. She stared at the familiar-looking tin, but found no memory of it.

“You practice on the small things,” someone said. “That’s how you learn.”

“Huum? Is that you, Leona?” Justice asked. “Why is it sometimes you sound just like some teacher?” She sat with her chin in her hands, looking into the tin. It was full of smooth white sand. There were little piles of yellow, blue and red sand on top, like bright buttes or cones.

“Baby child,” Leona said, “I can sound any way I need to sound, you know that.”

“Uuum.” Justice felt fine and ever so relaxed, as though her eyes were closed. “You are the Sensitive, aren’t you? But I don’t know—”

“You
do
know, honey,” Leona said soothingly. “Why you want to fight it so long and hard?”

“Fight it?” Justice said.

“Because there’s not only the one kind, like Child and Child,” Leona said.

“My identical brothers,” Justice said.

“There is born mind and mind. There is born a child and power!”

“Oh, no,” Justice said.

“Powerful Justice!” said Leona, her voice wavering with feeling. “And no one might not never know. But the Sensitive always know.”

“No,” Justice said again.

“Without me to bring you together with it, you wouldn’t have a chance.”

“Together. It makes me so afraid,” Justice said. There was a thin veil of green behind her eyes. She sensed it would be with her so long as she stayed inside this house.

“One day, everything will change for you,” Leona told her, “but you mustn’t let anyone know for a while.”

“I’m so afraid of Thomas,” Justice said.

“And not the other one, the Number Two Child?”

“Levi wouldn’t hurt a soul,” Justice said.

“You know that for sure?”

“Yes. But Thomas can hurt and hurt somebody,” Justice” said.

“You’ll have to beat him one day, and beat him for good,” the Sensitive said.

“I don’t want to hurt anyone,” Justice told her.

“You won’t, baby, not unless you have to.

“Look,” said the Sensitive. “Look at the sand.”

Justice and Dorian leaned low over the table so that their eyes were level with the rim of the pan. She willed herself and Dorian inside the pan, where the white sand became for them a vast, arid land of heat. Their size had diminished; they were made small.

Brilliant-colored buttes rose like isolated mountains to tower over them out of the surrounding white sand. They skirted the red butte, holding hands. Standing still, their hands lifted in the air and their arms stiffened, as a divining rod.

Justice was holding hands with someone else on her right. She sensed it was Levi, although he was not visible to her. But their arms stiffened also, rodlike again.

Clasped hands of the three of them pointed at the butte. At once, they heard the immense, the deafening grind of a mountain moving. They moved the red butte over the sand. But the enormous gap it left behind showed them nothing useful.

They moved a yellow butte. And three hundred feet below the gap left by it, they found what they needed.

Justice withdrew herself and Dorian from the pan. And again they leaned low at the rim. The experience had left Dorian trembling from head to foot. His shoulders jerked uncontrollably and his breath came in shallow pants.

“Concentration,” said the soft, determined voice of the Sensitive. She placed a hand on Dorian to calm him. Soon, he was quiet at Justice’s side.

“Must I concentrate?” Justice asked the Sensitive. When there was no answer, she sighed and did as she was told.

“Your sight must be no wider than a pin,” said Leona. “Use only the right eye.”

Justice covered her left eye with her palm and concentrated on the white sand.

“Now. Move the colored sands where they belong.”

She first moved the red butte.

“Careful!” whispered the Sensitive.

Justice refocused a pinpoint of sight out of her right eye. She lifted the miniature cone of sand. Dorian, with his weaker sight, helped to hold it steady as she reduced and directed the energy she needed. Next, she took over from Dorian to move the red butte into place above its gap.

Then Justice worked the yellow sand cone, setting it smoothly down and leaving no trace of the hole it had made, nor the fresh water beneath it.

The whole time, she had the feeling of motion and power, of clean strength swelling to engulf them. It frightened her and it filled her with awe.

“You did the yellow cone real good,” said the Sensitive. “Now, Baby Justice, tear the red apart.”

Justice separated the red cone into particles and swirled them into a red sand devil.