Dust of Eden (34 page)

Dinner was a minor production. Molly and Dana exaggerating the motions. Plates set down on the table with slow deliberation. The kitchen faucet on and off at low force, as if they knew there was trouble. No one asked Amber to sit down. When it was over and people straggled out, Mrs.
Novicki
put a plate of gingersnaps on the table and gave her a glance. But Amber couldn't eat.

What was taking so long upstairs?

It would be dark soon. In her mind she saw her mother glaring steadily at her twin, her voice like a melody but the words chilling:
I suppose I'll have to paint one of you out, if it gets too confusing . . . Whichever one of you brings back my paint, that's the one who stays
. Only, it must be a lot more than that. Explanations, plans, plots. Maybe tears and doubts. But it was taking a long time. And finally, with dusk falling, she had had enough.

Retreating to her room, she closed the door and wedged a slipper under the seam. Hopefully Amber Two or anyone else would think she was in there pouting and leave her alone at least for a while. Maybe, if she was lucky, she could even do what she had to do and get back here before anyone was the wiser. She pulled the shade so no one could see in the room. Then she wiggled behind it and climbed out the window, drawing the sash down from outside.

Stooping below the parlor window, she retrieved the spade she had left by the porch and scooted to the basswood side of the house. From there she followed the line of trees along the drive, circled back behind the charred remnants of the barn, and dashed out into the fields.

There was a mahogany cribbage board on the credenza in the dining room. The pegs had long since been replaced by small finishing nails, but she liked to push and pull them in and out in sequence, dreaming that each hole was another step in an exotic journey. The journey led to a treasure, and sometimes she had to dodge other pegs, or cross rows to escape imaginary pursuit. And that was what she felt like now, crossing the furrowed fields and darting among the broken stalks. Each step followed a row until she crossed to the next.

She thought of the spider and the other things she had painted: red eyes in red bodies with red fangs and red claws. The sun was half under the horizon, so her creations would be coming to life soon—nocturnal, like her mother said. But she had been out at night before since then and nothing had happened, so, so far so good. Of course, she hadn't gone where she had to go now on any of those nights. If she could just get in and out of the cistern before the spider started to hunt . . . .

The closer she got to that hole in the earth, the harder she ran, her heart flip-flopping like a fish on a dock, perspiration on her brow (
That kid never sweats
, her father used to say, and she had tried not to then, wiping her lip or her brow before she came into the parlor on hot days). When she saw the stand of trees the warmth in her chest went out like a snuffed candle. Ice churned in her belly. She had to pee. How could she have thought she could do this?

The dreaded spider was probably watching her with all its pairs of firefly eyes, as unblinking as her mother. She had hoped the light would be bright enough in the tops of the trees so that she could see if it was up there. But maybe it was sitting on the ground in its hole or something—there were spiders that did that.

She would go around the woods as far as she could, she decided. She would try to come up on the cistern from the other side.

And then she stumbled, and it made her remember another thing her father had told her. That some spiders used trip lines. They ran them along walls or out on the ground, and when passing prey touched them the spider knew. It felt the vibration and it could tell everything, like how big you were. And then it came, and if you were what it wanted, it attacked and bit you and wrapped you up with silk as strong as steel cables, and it would stick something in you like a needle full of poison. Then you were paralyzed. Sometimes the poison dissolved your guts. Sometimes the spider just laid eggs in you and the eggs hatched and ate you while you were still alive, and—

She caught her balance again, but instead of slowing, she ran harder, faster. Going for the far side of the field. Fighting off the shucks in her face and staggering. Dodging nimbly, like a peg on a cribbage board.

When she got to the edge of the field she calmed a little. The sun fire on the horizon was just cold orange now. Nothing much lit the earth. She stared intently along the rows, trying to detect any motion, but it was very still. Unnaturally still. It was the moment right at sunset before the hunters came out. Which was why she had to hurry. No time for caution. As soon as it was totally dark, she was doomed.

Moving up the edge of the field to the end, she went straight to the cistern. She had pushed the dog fennel and spurge back in place the last time, but now she could see one of her footprints in the mud right by the rim. Reaching down she found the edge of the wooden cover and dragged it off.

The green smell was overpowering, and there was no sun or moon to dispel the darkness of the gaping hole. She could just see the weathered ladder ends like two paws clinging to the brink. Tucking the spade in her waistband, she buried her fingers in the spurge and dangled one foot in search of a rung.

She had a sudden premonition then that there was already something down there, maybe on the ladder, and that it was going to grab her by the ankle, but her toe found support and she let her weight sink after it. Down she went, one hand letting go of the spurge, then the other. Coolness came, then the pungency of the emerald fungus, and even the wisp of cinnamon sharpness she had smelled before. The ladder shivered less and less as she descended until her left foot encountered the solid floor and she stepped off.

The spade was cutting into her hip. She rotated it slightly. Then she felt around for the brick enclosure she had built around the precious jar, and to her relief, she found it smooth and whole to her touch. She sidled around so as to be able to pull out her treasure without knocking the glass on anything hard. But as she squatted, she sensed something whiz past her cheek, followed by scraping like a violin bow across flaccid strings. She looked up just as the geometry of the ladder was disappearing over the edge of the cistern. Against the dusk a small face peered over, green eyes lucid with remorse.

"You should've told me," echoed down. "I would've trusted you, if you'd told me."

T
hey had been watching her all along. Watching when she left the house, probably from the second floor. The long delay had been to make her run for the paint so that her twin could follow.

The little girl at the bottom of the cistern heard the voice and saw the face slide away and knew that her only possible escape was abandoning her to die by whatever fate found her.

"She lied!" she screamed at the empty rim.

Slowly the face came back.

But what could she say now? She couldn't really blame her twin for knuckling under to their mother's threats. What did Amber Two have to save herself with except cooperation?

A torrent of desperate persuasion poured out of the cistern: "She won't let you live for long . . . You won't be able to please her . . . She's crazy, and the first time you do something wrong, she'll repaint you . . . You can't live like that . . . Let me up and we'll do something . . . see, I've got the paint . . . We can stop her! . . . C'mon,
Amber
"—there, she used the name—"let me out. It's not too late. We can gang up on her, if you put the ladder back and let me out."

The answer that came down was much softer but almost as mournful. "She's got the paintings."

So now the prisoner switched to raw pleading. "Don't do this. Please don't. It's almost dark, and the spider will come if you leave me here. Please, please, please,
don't do this
!"

And then it was just a circle of graying light above her, the last daylight she would know before the night and the spider came. But still she yelled, foolishly yelled—"Amber!
Amber!
"—until the shaft in the earth rang with her voice and her head was exploding with the sound.

The pressure of the voice in her skull was red. Red needles jumped into line like a stockade fence and sank back into the green stench of the hole. And then it struck her that if the spider hadn't known she was here before, it would know now because of her shouts. Even if it was deaf, it would feel vibrations. She stopped yelling.

Think. Think! What was going to happen? Her twin would tell her mother where she was, and even if she hadn't seen the paint, she must have heard the glass clinking, and so she would tell their mother that the paint was here. Then her mother would take out the portrait of her and paint it over. No. She would want to see that the paint was here first. She would come see for herself. Then she would paint her out. But what about the spider? Her mother knew about that, so she probably wouldn't come at night. So Amber had until morning. If she survived that long.

The spider knew where she was and it would come, and of course it could crawl down the wall. The specter of that huge hairy creature filling the circle above her and creeping down, demon eyes never blinking, until it had her with its legs and its fangs made her clammy and faint. It would eat her right here. Or maybe it would paralyze her and drag her back to its web to feed its young. And even if it couldn't crawl down one side, it was big enough to brace its legs across the circle and come down that way.

If only she could reach all the way across the cistern herself. But she couldn't. Not by a mile. And then it occurred to her to use the length of her body instead of just the spread of her arms. So she pressed her palms into the bricks on one side and lifted one foot against the opposite side, then the other. She had to spread her arms a little on the curve to shorten the distance, but she got everything up in the air.

Except the paint . . .

Forget the paint. The ladder must still be up there, and once she got out, she could lower it in and come back for the paint.

Her arms were already starting to get heavy from pushing so hard, and her spine was killing her, so she had to keep going while she still had the strength. She felt like an elephant trying to back out of a bucket—right foot, left foot, lifting butt first, but only a couple of inches at a time, because otherwise she couldn't reach all the way across, and—
crap, she couldn't do this!
Her arms felt like goalposts and her backbone was splintering. She let one leg drop and that pulled her down like a bobber on a short fishing line. With a whimper she collapsed to the bottom.

There were things she couldn't quite frame but that sat in the anteroom of her child's logic like numbered puzzle tiles waiting to be set in order, as in: Amber One, who was really Amber the Second if you counted a forty-four-year-old woman who lay moldering in her grave, could not coexist with Amber Two, who was really Amber the Third. And there were things she couldn't know or grasp for their horror. Such as the fact that her mother could birth her in legions!
I am Amber
. Numberless. No bond-engendering gestations, no womb-ripping travails—the industrious strokes of a brush laden with red dust from an ancient site on the other side of the world would create dispensable armies of Ambers marching off canvases. What she did grasp, lying there, was that she was no longer special.

She cried soft, aching tears that made her throat hurt. It wasn't fair. She wanted to be nine again in 1965. She wanted to go to school and listen to the Beatles and see her poster of Twiggy in mod stockings and a miniskirt back on her wall and talk to her dad out in the yard while he tinkered with the old Ford
Fairlane
, and no one said "far out" anymore or wore mood rings. But she felt too gritty and thirsty to mount a good cry. Bone dry. Funny. Here she was at the bottom of a cistern and she was dying for a drink.

Dying
.

And that was the lightning that set the dry tinder of rebellion inside her on fire again. Because now she was thinking of another way she might get out. The cistern was falling apart, and there were bricks all over the bottom. Ignoring the burning where she had scraped her palms and the bruises on her knees, she stood up.

This time she put the precious glass jar of paint in her shirt, and with the spade she had brought for the mud at the culvert, she began to dig at the loose bricks in front of her. To her intense relief the first one came out like a cookie on a spatula. And the next. She could almost build her own staircase out of bricks, she thought in a burst of jubilation. But she wouldn't have to try that.

Using the cavities that were already in the wall, digging out others, stabbing the spade into the crumbling joints, she began to climb. She had to lean close like a rock climber to keep from falling, but that was the kind of thing she did instinctively. Never mind that the natural-born Amber had become paralyzed in a rock-climbing accident at age thirty-three, this was her prototype, the nimble child who danced in the bonnets of trees and sprinted on fence rails. The
Skechers
slid into the open slots that her fingers abandoned as if they were stirrups, and in less than five minutes she was clawing at the fennel and the spurge at the top.

She kept to the field because it was already too late to avoid the spider. If it was there, she would have to outrun it. Too late too for the culvert. Too late and too dark. She had a stitch in her side, and the paint sloshing against her chest like blood from her heart made her feel queasy. Hunger pains alternated with faintness. She wished she had eaten the gingersnaps Mrs.
Novicki
had put out for her. When she crossed the dead furrow, she slowed. And when she got to the field nearest the house, she began to walk.