Chapter 4
The Ch’Var who intermarries with a Gween wastes the precious Ch’Var bloodline, for the union of these races cannot produce children. Ch’Vars with Ch’Vars; Gweens with Gweens. Thus it has always been.
—Ancient saying
During breakfast the Harvey children listened halfheartedly while Victoria lectured them about manners. The volume of the kitchen television was on low, and the morning news flashed across the screen. Whenever Victoria looked away, Emily turned the volume up little by little. Something about a mysterious childhood ailment, and Emily wanted to hear it.
“Turn that down,” Victoria snapped after a while. “I’m trying to tell you something.”
When Emily complied, Thomas said, “I heard buzzing, like I’ve been hearing all over the house. Little flies or bees or mosquitoes, I don’t know.”
Emily nodded. “I hear it, too.”
“You know what’s weird, though?” Thomas said, holding a piece of raspberry jam-smeared toast near his mouth. “I haven’t seen any bugs. Not one. It’s like they’re moving around just out of sight.”
Victoria glowered at Emily. “Now you’ve got your brother imagining things.”
“We’re not imagining!” Emily said. “Listen! You can hear them.”
“You’re both crazy!” Victoria said. But she grew quiet.
Now Emily heard the buzzing quite distinctly—a definite burr of sound. She tried to place its direction.
Her brother pointed at the back door. “Over there, I think.”
Victoria arched her brows. “Nothing buzzing around here but your heads.”
Thomas went to his lips with a finger. “Shhh!” he cautioned. He saw his stepmother’s withering glance and closed his mouth, but only for a moment.
“An infestation of invisible insects!” Thomas said. “They got tired of being swatted and came up with a new breed. We’ve been studying about entomological selection in school.”
“Ridiculous!” Victoria said. “No one’s ever heard of invisible insects!”
“Doesn’t make them impossible,” Emily said. She spread peanut butter on a piece of fifty-grain toast, took a bite and chewed slowly. Anything to avoid the bowl of cereal Victoria had poured for her. Grown-up cereal tasted awful.
“I’m going to talk with your therapist about this, Emily,” Victoria warned.
Therapist—the word bore dark connotations for Emily, as if anyone going to such a person had a straitjacket reserved. It was one of Emily’s buttons that Victoria liked to push when Dad wasn’t around, a provocation that boxed the teenager in. If Emily flared back, it would be distorted and described as craziness. And if Emily said nothing, her silence “proved” mental debility.
This time Emily smiled, and the maneuver disarmed her adversary.
Victoria looked away uneasily, then continued her lecture. “No time to discuss other subjects today. I have a tennis date in a few minutes and my hair appointment after that, and I need something new to wear before your dad and I take off this afternoon for the San Margarita Golf Tournament. You can’t begin to understand the energy it takes to do all these things.”
Emily stared at a cobweb on the ceiling.
“We’ll be back tomorrow evening,” Victoria said.
“If you won’t be here, can we go see Return of the Killer Couch?” Thomas asked. “I hear it snuffs people with pillows.”
“Nonna and P’no—P—oh, whatever. Your grandfather called, and he’ll be by with Nonna this morning to take you somewhere.”
“Great!” Thomas said.
Emily smiled.
“Stay home all day tomorrow and do as Mrs. Belfer says,” Victoria said as she lit a white nicotine tube.
The children made long faces.
Victoria set the nicotine tube down in a ashtray and took a large spoonful of her fortified cereal. She alternated spoonfuls with nicotine puffs, and as she ate, smoke curled from her nostrils.
You look like a fire-breathing dragon, Emily thought.
Victoria pointed at Emily. “Do you realize that without manners or nice clothes a person is nothing . . . nobody? Look at you, Emily, uncombed hair and elbows on the table. Thomas, your T-shirt ought to go in the garbage. What people must be saying! This is a fine house, with a housekeeper, you know. Mrs. Belfer keeps everything nice and clean, and there you children are looking so nasty and dirty.”
Nice and clean? Emily thought. The paucity of work Mrs. Belfer did wasn’t done well, and now the house was infested with invisible insects.
“What’s written on that shirt, Thomas?” Victoria asked.
“Tom-Tom the Atom Man,” answered Thomas with good humor. He puffed out his chest to display. “Emily drew it because I’ll be a microbiologist when I grow up.” The shirt was white, with bright red, orange and yellow letters, each letter a smooth blending of color.
“You’ve made your brother look like a vagabond,” Victoria said, taking a drag of nicotine. “You did it because you don’t understand values, the importance of presentable behavior and appearance.”
“People ought to feel relaxed at home,” Emily protested. “Mrs. Belfer says so.”
Victoria frowned. “Without nice clothes and your hair and nails done at the best salons—the necessities of the haut monde—life as an adult is very difficult.”
“Daddy gets by without all that,” Emily said, and with the words out she was afraid she had created trouble for her father.
Victoria’s frown became a scowl, with deep lines that would have horrified her had she seen them. “Live in the proper neighborhood,” she said tersely, “frequent the proper establishments, associate only with proper people.” She took another drag on her nicotine tube.
“If you do all that, you can join the tennis club, right?” Emily said, her tone sarcastic.
“And what’s wrong with that?” Victoria’s eyes narrowed dangerously, her expression icy.
Emily stared at the television, which showed a female reporter in front of a hospital emergency room entrance. Children were being wheeled in behind her.
On the screen, the reporter began her nightly news broadcast. Emily kept her eyes and her attention on the television monitor. Any news was better than Victoria’s mouthings.
The reporter wore a strained expression as she spoke. “The mystery disease continues to strike children in this area. Joining us later tonight, county health officials will give us more information about what they believe is a new and virulent strain of an old disease—meningitis.
“The onset of the infection is abrupt, and young children appear to go directly into a coma. It is believed that adults are not susceptible because they may have developed immunity to a less dangerous strain earlier in their lives.
“Please stay tuned for further details.”
“Mon Dieu!” shrieked Victoria.
Her shrill cry startled Emily. “What’s the matter?”
“I’ve broken a fingernail on the edge of the table. Just what I needed. Now I have to see if I can get in the salon without an appointment. One problem after another!”
Emily stared at her stepmother’s artificial lavender nails and saw one dangling like a broken talon.
“Turn that depressing news off, Emily,” Victoria said as she carefully pulled away her broken nail fragment. “Well, I’m off now.”
She stood, reached in her purse and withdrew a handful of money, which she gave to Thomas. “Buy yourselves some candy,” she said. “The sugarless kind that won’t rot your teeth. Before you leave, Emily, comb your hair, and Thomas, change your shirt.”
Victoria slipped through the back door. Her body glided like a cat’s, soundlessly.
“She never listens to anyone,” complained Emily.
“She’s all right” came her brother’s cheerful reply, muffled by a mouthful of toast. “You just have to understand her.”
“I don’t want to,” Emily said.
She heard the familiar whine of her grandparents’ car outside, and dumped her cereal down the garbage disposal. Grandfather Harvey was lumbering up the front-porch steps when the children got there. He had bright green eyes and a thick thatched roof of white hair that hung over his forehead.
He hugged the children. “Ready to go? Nonna’s in the car.”
“Are we gonna have an adventure today, Panona?” Thomas asked, as they walked to the car. Panona was a name the boy selected, coined with nonna, the Italian word for grandmother. His grandfather didn’t object, asserting that creativity should never be stifled.
“You bet,” Panona promised.
“Where are we going?” Thomas asked.
“Exploring. So much to see in this world!”
Nonna, a tall woman in blue jeans and an oversized man’s shirt, slipped the car’s voice command unit over her mouth, and the rubber of it adhered to her skin. She spoke destination and speed commands into the unit. The vehicle accelerated and merged into traffic. With automatic controls activated, the steering wheel spun back and forth in front of her without being touched.
Emily sat in the front beside her grandmother, with Thomas and Panona in the back. It was warm in the car, and Emily touched a button to iris open the round window of her door. She looked up at her grandmother.
Nonna’s hair was dark gray and her face covered with a fine web of wrinkles, but her eyes were childlike, large and dark. The sandals on her feet had been handcrafted from scraps of leather and wood into an elegant design. A turquoise Indian necklace hung around her neck like a collection of blue-green teeth, and on her hand a marvelous ring sparkled family history in each pearl, diamond and piece of gold. She looked slightly foreign.
Emily thought about values, of the things that were important to her.
“I like to drive manually,” Nonna said when they were out of town. She removed the voice command unit from her mouth, slipped the device into a dashboard bracket and took the steering wheel in hand, her movements fluid. “Not in traffic, but out here on the highway to who-knows-where.”
“Destination unknown,” Panona said.
“Yippee!” Thomas squealed.
“A car is like a little nest,” Nonna said. “Here we are, four birds all cozy and safe.” She glanced at Emily and asked why she was frowning.
“Values. Victoria said we ought to get some.”
Nonna arched an eyebrow, “I suppose she meant the qualities everyone should have. Honesty, compassion, a sense of responsibility. Things like that.”
“She didn’t mention those,” Thomas said. “She talked about my T-shirt and Emily’s hair.” Thomas still wore the dreaded shirt, and Emily hadn’t combed.
Signs along the road with black letters against white tempted and coaxed: “See the thunder beasts-five kilometers to the Jabu Smith Amusement Park.” And then, farther along, another sign with a monster pictured on it and the words “Only one more kilometer.”
In the distance Emily saw a giant statue at the side of the road.
The car slid to a stop by the statue, one of the thunder beasts, and the Harveys got out. The crude cement creature was massive, towering high overhead in bright sunlight at the park entrance. The ferocious head was beaded with small aggregate rocks, and the body of the statue, including its tail, extended a distance several times its height.
“Bal-u-chi-ther-ium.” Nonna pronounced the word slowly, reading from a plaque. She wiped perspiration from her brow, for it was warm here. “Five meters high at its shoulder. Looks kinda like a giant pig, doesn’t it? Or a bear.”
“They were part of the explosion of mammals after the extinction of dinosaurs,” Thomas said.
“That’s right,” Nonna said. “Thunder beasts lived after the Cretaceous period, in the Oligocene epoch. Get over here beside this one, children, and I’ll snap your pictures.”
As Nonna took photographs, she philosophized: “These big mammals pounded all over the country eating each other up, and now they’re gone like their predecessors. What are we left with today? Corporations that eat each other up.” She laughed, a rich and full musical sound.
“Victoria says you’re a leftover hippie like they used to have a long time ago,” Emily said, staring at the turquoise Indian necklace her grandmother wore.
A snort erupted from the old woman. “She insults me. I’m too young to have belonged to that period of history. But I write poetry and make my own shoes and I was born in another country. So I’m offbeat in your stepmother’s eyes, I suppose.” Nonna sighed. “I don’t need to impress anyone. It’s a waste of good living time.”
Nonna might be her father’s mother, but she didn’t look or act like him, Emily decided. Both were tall and oval-faced, but there the resemblance ended. Her father never discussed much with Emily or Thomas.
Once he had told Emily that she reminded him of her grandmother. “You have a lot of the same qualities,” he’d said with a grin. “A little odd, but very, very . . . special.”
Emily was flattered.
The children and their grandparents took a path that led to the forest and found other beasts hidden in the shade, animals that peered around trees and leaves and nestled in the midst of ivy, wild berries and ferns. Saber-toothed tigers known as smilodans, silent and unmoving, inhabited the sweet-smelling wilderness, and Emily saw a creature that looked like a giant armadillo with a lethal barbed ball on the end of its tail. Another hung from a cement ledge and grinned at them with eight-inch teeth. Thomas pulled forth an imaginary sword and defended Emily against imaginary attack.
“Pow, pow, pow,” he said, flailing at the air like Quixote.
Emily watched her brother. He had a vivid imagination himself, and his favorite game was called “What If.” What if aliens from another world landed in their backyard? What if you could turn mashed potatoes into ice cream? What if Emily’s Chalk Man was real?
“Those are all done for,” Thomas shouted, and he ran ahead to join his grandparents, the baby fat jiggling around his waist as he moved.
On one side of the path, a few meters to the left of Emily, the arched back of another cement thunder beast loomed high in the air. This animal was larger and more menacing than any of the others she had seen.
Ahead of her, Thomas and the grandparents rounded a corner and disappeared from view. Emily looked behind her, saw no one else on the path. There were noises around her, birds singing and the rustling of leaves, but these sounds grew muted and faraway, like notes of music carried off by the wind. A shiver of fear rippled along Emily’s spine, and she hurried to catch up with her family. According to signs, the path only led in one direction—straight to the exit. When she decided she was safely past the creature that had disturbed her, she slowed her pace and thought how foolish it was to fear something made of cement.
A surprisingly cold breeze suddenly caught her hair and lifted it, slapping it painfully against her face, The cold became a freezing blast that crept beneath the collar of her dress and chilled her to the core. Emily moved to escape it, but the breeze intensified to a ferocious, howling creature that pummeled her body with fists of ice. Tears of pain filled her eyes, and she attempted to run, but the wind blocked her. A shower of evergreen needles roared across her head, scratching her painfully and filling the air with a sharp smell of spice.
“Help me!” she cried, her eyes closed.
But no answer came.
Emily was pushed backward. She stumbled, inhaled air with sharp, pain-fused gasps and tried to shout again. Terror thickened her voice and only a mumble of sound escaped her lips.
Then as suddenly as it had begun, the wind whispered itself away and the woods were silent once more.
Directly in Emily’s path stood the huge, snouted beast she thought she’d left behind, its back arched in an angry curve. Sharp teeth protruded from its half-open, underslung jaw. Emily stood mesmerized, and desperate thoughts fought their way into her mind.
You’re not here! she thought. Go away!
The folds of the monster’s skin, the sheen of its horns and the glisten of its tiny pig eyes all seemed lifelike. Beads of saliva dribbled from its mouth, and she thought she saw its eyes flicker. When she looked closer, the eyes became flat and unblinking. Dead eyes. Eyes of stone.
“You’re only cement!” she shouted. “You can’t run or make noises or eat. You can’t eat me!”
The animal vanished from her path.
Emily looked back through a filtering of bees, and saw the snouted beast statue on the side of the path, exactly where it belonged, its back arched above the underbrush. She stared at the animal, and it stared back without expression.
“I’m dumb,” she said. “Dumb, dumb . . .”
Victoria’s criticisms flashed through her mind, hostile whisperings. “Little Miss Crazy Brat.”
Moisture dripped from the beast’s mouth, and Emily’s throat tightened. She thought she detected a small movement of its jaws, a minute trembling, and she suppressed a scream.
“You’re a statue . . . a statue,” she repeated to herself as she turned to leave. Fortified by these words, she walked briskly along the path, somewhat comforted. Until she heard a sound behind her, slow and thudding, gaining on her.
She ran. And bumped into Thomas at the exit.
“I thought something was after me!” Emily wailed. “There was a wind and . . . ” She let her tears flow, with great, heaving sobs.
Thomas put his arms around her and held her until she grew quiet. “You’re okay now,” he said.
“Sometimes you seem older than I am,” Emily said.
“Not just because I’m bigger? For other reasons, you mean?”
“For other reasons.”
They rejoined their grandparents and walked back to the car.
“This amusement park is getting an old-fashioned merry-go-round,” Panona said. “I read that Jabu Smith is bringing in a real antique with wood carvings you don’t see everyday. People don’t do much of that anymore. Takes too much patience and time.”
“Someday the last craftsman will die,” Nonna said. “Then what?”
“Hats off to Jabu Smith and people like him,” Panona said.
They drove down the highway to an oceanside eatery that advertised kilometer-high hamburgers and ice cream cones as big as Antarctica.
On wooden tables outside, they spread a plethora of food in the bright sunlight, and Emily and Thomas began gorging themselves.
An ocean breeze wrapped around Emily, a perfect, warm breeze that caressed her and soothed her from the harshness of the other wind.
“Smell the flowers in the air,” Nonna said, “all mixed with briny odors from the ocean. It’s the wind blowing petals from a tropical paradise, bringing perfume from faraway.”
“The wind is sharing its bounty,” Thomas said with his mouth full.
“One day you’ll write poetry, young man,” Nonna remarked. “Same as I do, but more cheerful, from the happiness in your heart.” She gave Emily a hug. “And you, dear one, will wear a rainbow. I wish . . . Well, it doesn’t matter what old folks wish.”
“Wish what?” Thomas asked. He was always the curious one.
“That life gives you the best of everything,” laughed Nonna. “And more selfish things. I’d like to steal you from Victoria and your dad so I can see you every day.”
“I’d like that,” Thomas said with enthusiasm. “We could always go home for visits.”
Emily was without words, and she pressed snugly against her grandmother’s bosom.
When they returned to the Harvey home just before dark, Victoria and their father were still on their trip.
“Don’t forget Mrs. Belfer is here,” Emily said.
“The one who sleeps,” Nonna said with an edge to her voice. “I don’t think I’ve exchanged ten words with her.”
“We’ll be fine,” Thomas said.
They kissed each other goodbye, and the children entered the house.
Moments later, the doorbell rang, and Emily peered through the window by the door.
“It’s a man,” she whispered to Thomas. “The salesman who was here yesterday.”