A Box of Gargoyles (11 page)

B
ut in the end, it turned out that as much as Maya had been worried about her birthday party, she hadn't been worried nearly
enough
.

The beginning wasn't so bad. Valko came at the end of the afternoon, and she unwrapped the gargoyles' egg to give him a look.

“They gave up and went away,” she said. “They left it behind. It's beautiful, see?”

“You're sure you didn't draw on it yourself?” he said.

“I can't even draw stick figures,” said Maya. “Look how pretty these pictures are! And they even kind of move when you look at them. At least, they did earlier.”

“Hmm,” said Valko. The egg looked like something a crazy old artist might make for a king, so densely covered with pictures and words that you could stare at it for hours and still be finding something new: little animals hiding in the grass, a kite soaring in the sky, trees and clouds. All frozen in place, Maya noticed, at the moment.

“There. See that writing? What is that? Is it Greek?”

Maya put her finger down on the words she could not quite read, and sure enough, at her touch the surface of the egg shimmered and came to life (a tiny sketch of a cat swiped a paw at an even tinier sketch of a bird).

“Hey, do that again,” said Valko after he had poked at the egg with his own fingers to no effect at all.

Maya settled her whole hand on top of the egg for a moment, and it was almost like resting her palm on the head of a rabbit, the stone was so warm and so welcoming. And sure enough, when she lifted her hand, the design was shifting about and remaking itself.

“Oh!” said Valko. “That's your name!”

A word was spelling itself out in viney letters:
M . . . A . . .
something that looked like a backward
R
.

“And you're sure you're not writing on it yourself?” he said doubtfully.

“Why would I do that?
How
would I do that?”

She didn't even bother to keep the impatience out of her voice. But Valko, oblivious, was leaning even more closely over the egg now, working away at it as if it were a crossword puzzle.

“All those pictures, of course, but see the number forty there? And your name, lots of times—and look, more writing!” He pointed. “Look at that! All right, one thing's for sure: whoever made this for you was Bulgarian.”

Bulgarian?
Oh, blah!

Maya made a face.

“Honestly,” she said, “I'm kind of hating Bulgaria these days.”

For about one second Valko looked taken aback, and then he figured out what she meant by all that, and a slightly wistful version of the smiling crinkles came back into his face.

“I know,” he said. “But it's not an awful country. I remember it being beautiful. It just contains some awfully stubborn grandmothers.”

They were silent for a minute, thinking about that.

It's up to me
, Maya told herself.
I have to find a way to save him from his horrible grandmother. I'm the stubborn one, and I won't let him go
.

Her hand was still resting on the gargoyles' egg, and the pictures were making and remaking themselves under her fingers. Maybe it was the warmth of the stone that brought her back to herself.

“If it's Bulgarian,” said Maya, “then what does it say?”

“‘Keep me secret, keep me safe.'”

They looked at each other.

“I don't know—,” said Valko, but what he didn't know he didn't have time to say, because Maya's mother was calling them into the living room to “meet our guests.”

Guests?
(That was what Maya was thinking as she bundled the egg back into its hiding spot in the closet.) Where had her mother actually managed to come up with
guests
?

But it turned out to be as much her father's doing as her mother's. Assembled in the living room were more people than just Maya's father and mother and little brother, James, and the one guest Maya had been expecting to see, her mother's cousin Louise, looking quite elegant and mysterious in a tailored jacket.

She had been a highly forgettable person until quite recently, but then she had taken a large dose of a mysterious, magical substance (Henri de Fourcroy's
anbar
, distilled—oh, horror!—from the essence of charming children) and had become, overnight, astonishingly radiant and compelling.

The dose of
anbar
was slowly wearing off with the passage of time, of course, but for the moment Cousin Louise still outshone everyone else in the room. She was wearing the most extraordinary green jade earrings, and the reflected lights of the apartment flickered as if trapped in her eyes.

“
Bonjour
, Maya!” she said, coming forward to give Maya's hand an energetic shake. “
Joyeux anniversaire!
”

It was not just Cousin Louise wishing her a happy birthday, either. On Louise's right were two people Maya hadn't quite noticed until that moment: an older Asian man in a slightly too elegant pin-striped suit jacket and, at the man's side, a young girl in a blue dress and wearing a half frown plastered on her odd, beautiful, and strangely familiar face.

Oh! It was the girl with the amazing hair! Maya had seen her many times in the school courtyard. It wasn't just her hair that made her stand out from the crowds (a profoundly frizzy brown-blond flood of hair, held back from her face by an industrial-strength black headband), it was the way she stood so tall and proud out there on the concrete of the yard, even though she must have been one of the shortest, youngest kids in the whole school.

You noticed that sort of thing when you yourself spent whole recesses hunkering down in the shadows, feeling very American and out of place, and trying not to be conspicuous.

“
Salut
, Pauline!” said Valko, who had already cheerfully shaken hands with Cousin Louise and the well-dressed old man during the time Maya had been thinking about courtyards and recesses. Sometimes Valko's embassy upbringing welled up in the most impressive ways. Now he was kissing the frowning girl's cheeks—left side, right side, the traditional French pattern. The girl's frown faded just a little.

“But I did not know you would be here, Valko,” said the girl in French. “You've gone nowhere for vacation?”

“No, no, never vacations for us,” said Valko with a smiling shrug, and to Maya he said, “This is the astonishing Pauline Vian. Have you two met yet?”

“Not yet,” said the astonishing Pauline Vian, her frown becoming a shade friendlier as she reached out to shake Maya's hand. “You are the American girl. I am with Valko in many classes this year. Since he is actually quite clever.”

It was all Maya could do to keep from gaping. She was not used to people in any country anywhere who talked as bluntly as this tiny, frowning Pauline Vian.

“It was in the cafeteria at work,” said Maya's father, beaming proudly. “I found myself eating at a table with the head of the lab, Monsieur Pham here, and it turns out he has a granddaughter almost your age, Maya, and at your very school, too. Can you imagine? So of course I thought of your birthday.”

No, she could not possibly be twelve or thirteen, not this tiny little girl with the amazing hair.

“What grade are you in, Pauline, dear?” asked Maya's mother from her chair in the corner of the living room.

“Same as us, Mrs. Davidson,” said Valko. “You skipped a year, didn't you, Pauline?”

“Two years,” said Pauline, and she added a crisp edge to her frown.

“Our little Pauline! Eleven years old, and the best student in the
collège
!”

So that was her grandfather. They did resemble each other just a little, around the eyes, though one was smiling as if pride might just burst right through his skin, and the other frowning just as hard.

“Physics, we think,” said the proud old man. “She can already work equations like you would not believe, this one. Although she would also be a fine historian, wouldn't she? The talents of four continents, all combined in our Pauline!”

“But that's of absolutely no consequence, all that physics and history,” said Pauline Vian, her frown so deep that whole textbooks could fall into it and never be seen again. “Since my vocation lies elsewhere.”

A perplexed silence fell over the room for a moment, while those who were not native speakers of French tried to figure out what this little girl and her grandfather had actually been arguing about (or, in some cases, what the word
vocation
was supposed to mean). It was not a very long silence, because Maya's little brother, James, who was still only five and thus tended to produce loud noises when doing even quite ordinary things, went bounding over to Maya, one of his hands clutching something colorful and slightly grubby.

“Happy birthday, Maya! Can you open my present now? It's a real present! Open my present!”

Enough people laughed to break the general spell, Maya's father went into the kitchen to get some more glasses, and Maya sat down in the nearest chair to pay proper attention to the package James had just handed her.

“You didn't have to get me a present, you know that,” said Maya.

James grinned at her.

“I found it,” he said. “I actually found it this very morning. It's a really good present.”

He leaned against her chair while she took extra time with the wrapping paper, just so James could savor every second of it.

“Is it maybe a
very large book
or a
helicopter
?” she asked, and he laughed.

Actually she was thinking it might be a few mints or—well, something small. But she kept working away at the layers of crumpled paper and the tape, until something round and gleaming dropped into the palm of her hand.

“Oh, James,” said Maya, and then she was briefly speechless.

“Look, look. Do you see? It has a SALAMANDER on it! It's a real present!”

A
real present
! In fact (she couldn't help herself: she shivered), it was the very button she had thrown away, whenever that was. Yesterday morning. She had thrown it away, to show the gargoyles and the shadow and the Medusan stationery that they could not tell her she was bound to do anything. That she was free.

But here it had come back to her in the hands of her brother.

“Do you like it?”

“It's . . . a beautiful button, James. Where did you find it?”

He put his mouth to her ear: “In the courtyard! By the trash cans!”

And giggled.

“And it's not a button, anyway,” he added. “It's lots specialer than that. It opens up, see?”

He took the button back from her and tapped some little latch on it that Maya had not seen before, and the top sprang open, like a locket.

“How strange!” said Maya. “Is it a watch, then?”

“Looks more like a compass,” said Valko, who had come to look over Maya's shoulder. Maya remembered then, with a twinge of guilt, that she had never quite managed to mention it to Valko, this not-exactly-a-button that the ebony bird had spit out into her hands. “But the needle's not pointing north. Maybe it's malfunctioning.”

It didn't want me to tell him
, thought Maya. And felt trapped all over again, just
putt-putt-putt
ing her way down the clockwork path.

James, however, was beaming around at them all, happy his present was turning out to be so very interesting.

“There's writing on it, too,” he said. “On the outside and the inside. It's hard to read. Maybe it's in code.”

Maya was already holding the nonbutton up to the light to see what the words were, scratched into the inside of the metal cover:
forêt de Bière
.

The name of a forest. That didn't make any of this any clearer.

“Well, thank you, James,” she said. “That's really sweet of you, to give me a present.”

Inside Maya, it felt like a thin vein of ice had formed in her gut, though. She had wanted to be free!

Maya's mother broke the spell by giving Maya a kiss and slipping her a little box of her own.

“Something very old, darling girl,” she said. “My mother gave this to me, when I was thirteen, and she had it from an aunt or great-aunt, who had no daughters of her own.”

A bracelet, quite simple and lovely, with one milky stone set in it.

“That's an opal—can you see the colors hiding in it?” said Maya's mother. “Our family stone, said my mother. More than one thing at once, you see: water, stone, and light, all mixed up together. Like a rainbow in the fog. Wear it, and be happy.”

She fastened it on Maya's wrist, where the stone winked in the light, shy and mysterious. They watched it glimmer for a moment, Maya and her mother.

“Oh! And ‘
it comes with a choice
'—that's what she said when she gave it to me.” And Maya's mother gave a surprised little laugh. “Isn't that funny? I'd forgotten that completely. It was so many years ago, you know.”

“Choice?” said Maya. “What choice?”

A light flickered for a moment deep in Maya's mother's eyes—an old fire made of more than one thing at once, and seen from far away. The hint of a light, and then it faded again.

“No, I can't remember,” she said. “Memories can be pretty shy creatures, can't they? Just the merest glimpse, and then they're gone.”

On the other side of the room, Cousin Louise was talking very earnestly to Pauline Vian. And Maya's father was just now coming in with the cake:

“Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you . . . !”

They sang it in English, they sang it in French; one of them even sang bits of it in Bulgarian. And then they ate slices of Maya's father's excellent chocolate cake, while the various grown-ups made conversation with each other.

Meanwhile the astonishing Pauline Vian gave Maya long, appraising looks over her slice of cake.