Errantry: Strange Stories (8 page)

And there was the
Bellerophon
with its flickering wheels and wings propelled by a steadfast pilot, until the brilliant light struck from below and the clip abruptly ended, at exactly seventeen seconds. Nothing betrayed the figure as Maggie rather than McCauley; nothing seemed any different at all, no matter how many times Leonard played it back.

“So that’s it,” he said at last, and closed his laptop.

“Are you going to put it on YouTube?” asked Zach.

“No,” he replied wearily. The boys exchanged a look, but for once remained silent.

“Well.” Emery stood and stretched his arms, yawning. “Time to pack.”

Two hours later they were on the road.

The hospice was a few miles outside town, a rambling old white house surrounded by neatly kept azaleas and rhododendrons. The boys were turned loose to wander the neighborhood. The others walked up to the veranda, Leonard carrying his laptop. He looked terrible, his gray eyes bloodshot and his face unshaved. Emery put an arm over his shoulder and Leonard nodded stiffly.

A nurse met them at the door, a trim blond woman in chinos and a yellow blouse.

“I told her you were coming,” she said as she showed them into a sunlit room with wicker furniture and a low table covered with books and magazines. “She’s the only one here now, though we expect someone tomorrow.”

“How is she?” asked Leonard.

“She sleeps most of the time. And she’s on morphine for the pain,
so she’s not very lucid. Her body’s shutting down. But she’s conscious.”

“Has she had many visitors?” asked Emery.

“Not since she’s been here. In the hospital a few neighbors dropped by. I gather there’s no family. It’s a shame.” She shook her head sadly. “She’s a lovely woman.”

“Can I see her?” Leonard glanced at a closed door at the end of the bright room.

“Of course.”

Robbie and Emery watched them go, then settled into the wicker chairs.

“God, this is depressing,” said Emery.

“It’s better than a hospital,” said Robbie. “Anna was going to go into a hospice, but she died before she could.”

Emery winced. “Sorry. Of course, I wasn’t thinking.”

“It’s okay.”

Robbie leaned back and shut his eyes. He saw Anna sitting on the grass with azaleas all around her, bees in the flowers and Zach laughing as he opened his hands to release a green moth that lit momentarily upon her head, then drifted into the sky.

“Robbie.” He started awake. Emery sat beside him, shaking him gently. “Hey—I’m going in now. Go back to sleep if you want, I’ll wake you when I come out.”

Robbie looked around blearily. “Where’s Leonard?”

“He went for a walk. He’s pretty broken up. He wanted to be alone for a while.”

“Sure, sure.” Robbie rubbed his eyes. “I’ll just wait.”

When Emery was gone he stood and paced the room. After a few minutes he sighed and sank back into his chair, then idly flipped through the magazines and books on the table.
Tricycle
,
Newsweek
, the
Utne Reader
; some pamphlets on end-of-life issues, works by Viktor Frankl and Elizabeth Kubler-Ross.

And, underneath yesterday’s newspaper, a familiar sky-blue dustjacket emblazoned with the garish image of a naked man and woman, hands linked as they floated above a vast abyss, surrounded by a glowing purple sphere. Beneath them the title appeared in embossed green letters.

Wings for Humanity!

The Next Step is OURS!

by Margaret S. Blevin, PhD

Robbie picked it up. On the back was a photograph of the younger Maggie in a white embroidered tunic, her hair a bright corona around her piquant face. She stood in the Hall of Flight beside a mockup of the Apollo Lunar Module, the
Wright Flyer
high above her head. She was laughing, her hands raised in welcome. He opened it to a random page.

. . . that time has come: With the dawn of the Golden Millennium we will welcome their return, meeting them at last as equals to share in the glory that is the birthright of our species.

He glanced at the frontispiece and title page, and then the dedication.

For Leonard, who never doubted

“Isn’t that an amazing book?”

Robbie looked up to see the nurse smiling down at him.

“Uh, yeah,” he said, and set it on the table.

“It’s incredible she predicted so much stuff.” The nurse shook her head. “Like the Hubble Telescope, and that caveman they found in the glacier, the guy with the lens? And those turbines that can make energy in the jet stream? I never even heard of that, but my husband said they’re real. Everything she says, it’s all so hopeful. You know?”

Robbie stared at her, then quickly nodded. Behind her the door opened. Emery stepped out.

“She’s kind of drifting,” he said.

“Morning’s her good time. She usually fades around now.” The nurse glanced at her watch, then at Robbie. “You go ahead. Don’t be surprised if she nods off.”

He stood. “Sure. Thanks.”

The room was small, its walls painted a soft lavender-gray. The bed faced a large window overlooking a garden. Goldfinches and tiny green wrens darted between a bird feeder and a small pool lined with flat white stones. For a moment Robbie thought the bed was empty. Then he saw an emaciated figure had slipped down between the white sheets, dwarfed by pillows and a bolster.

“Maggie?”

The figure turned its head. Hairless, skin white as paper, mottled with bruises like spilled ink. Her lips and fingernails were violet; her face so pale and lined it was like gazing at a cracked egg. Only the eyes were recognizably Maggie’s, huge, the deep slatey blue of an infant’s. As she stared at him, she drew her wizened arms up, slowly, until her fingers grazed her shoulders. She reminded Robbie disturbingly of a praying mantis.

“I don’t know if you remember me.” He sat in a chair beside the bed. “I’m Robbie. I worked with Leonard. At the museum.”

“He told me.” Her voice was so soft he had to lean close to hear her. “I’m glad they got here. I expected them yesterday, when it was still snowing.”

Robbie recalled Anna in her hospital bed, doped to the gills and talking to herself. “Sure,” he said.

Maggie shot him a glance that might have held annoyance, then gazed past him into the garden. Her eyes widened as she struggled to lift her hand, fingers twitching. Robbie realized she was waving. He turned to stare out the window, but there was no one there. Maggie looked at him, then gestured at the door.

“You can go now,” she said. “I have guests.”

“Oh. Yeah, sorry.”

He stood awkwardly, then leaned down to kiss the top of her head. Her skin was smooth and cold as metal. “‘Bye, Maggie.”

At the door he looked back, and saw her gazing with a rapt expression at the window, head cocked slightly and her hands open, as though to catch the sunlight.

Two days after they got home, Robbie received an email from Leonard.

Dear Robbie,

Maggie died this morning. The nurse said she became unconscious early yesterday, seemed to be in pain but at least it didn’t last long. She had arranged to be cremated. No memorial service or anything like that. I will do something, probably not till the fall, and let you know.

Yours, Leonard

Robbie sighed. Already the week on Cowana seemed long ago and faintly dreamlike, like the memory of a childhood vacation. He wrote Leonard a note of condolence, then left for work.

Weeks passed. Zach and Tyler posted their clips of the
Bellerophon
online. Robbie met Emery for drinks ever week or two, and saw Leonard once, at Emery’s Fourth of July barbecue. By the end of summer, Tyler’s footage had been viewed 347,623 times, and Zach’s 347,401. Both provided a link to the Captain Marvo site, where Emery had a free download of the entire text of
Wings for Humanity!
There were now over a thousand Google hits for Margaret Blevin, and Emery added a
Bellerophon
T-shirt to his merchandise: organic cotton with a silk-screen image of the baroque aircraft and its bowler-hatted pilot.

Early in September, Leonard called Robbie.

“Can you meet me at the museum tomorrow, around eight-thirty? I’m having a memorial for Maggie, just you and me and Emery. After hours, I’ll sign you in.”

“Sure,” said Robbie. “Can I bring something?”

“Just yourself. See you then.”

He drove in with Emery. They walked across the twilit Mall, the museum a white cube that glowed against a sky swiftly darkening to indigo. Leonard waited for them by the side door. He wore an embroidered tunic, sky-blue, his white hair loose upon his shoulders, and held a cardboard box with a small printed label.

“Come on,” he said. The museum had been closed since five, but a guard opened the door for them. “We don’t have a lot of time.”

Hedges sat at the security desk, bald and even more imposing than when Robbie last saw him, decades ago. He signed them in, eying Robbie curiously then grinning when he read his signature.

“I remember you—Opie, right?”

Robbie winced at the nickname, then nodded. Hedges handed Leonard a slip of paper. “Be quick.”

“Thanks. I will.”

They walked to the staff elevator, the empty museum eerie and blue-lit. High above them the silent aircraft seemed smaller than they had been in the past, battered and oddly toylike. Robbie noticed a crack in the Gemini VII space capsule, and strands of dust clinging to the
Wright Flyer.
When they reached the third floor, Leonard led them down the corridor, past the Photo Lab, past the staff cafeteria, past the library where the Nut Files used to be. Finally he stopped at a door near some open ductwork. He looked at the slip of paper Hedges had given him, punched a series of numbers into the lock, opened it then reached in to switch on the light. Inside was a narrow room with a metal ladder fixed to one wall.

“Where are we going?” asked Robbie.

“The roof,” said Leonard. “If we get caught, Hedges and I are screwed. Actually, we’re all screwed. So we have to make this fast.”

He tucked the cardboard box against his chest, then began to climb the ladder. Emery and Robbie followed him, to a small metal platform and another door. Leonard punched in another code and pushed it open. They stepped out into the night.

It was like being atop an ocean liner. The museum’s roof was flat, nearly a block long. Hot air blasted from huge exhaust vents, and Leonard motioned the others to move away, toward the far end of the building.

The air was cooler here, a breeze that smelled sweet and rainwashed, despite the cloudless sky. Beneath them stretched the Mall, a vast green gameboard, with the other museums and monuments huge game pieces, ivory and onyx and glass. The spire of the Washington Monument rose in the distance, and beyond that the glittering reaches of Roslyn and Crystal City.

“I’ve never been here,” said Robbie, stepping beside Leonard.

Emery shook his head. “Me neither.”

“I have,” said Leonard, and smiled. “Just once, with Maggie.”

Above the Capitol’s dome hung the full moon, so bright against the starless sky that Robbie could read what was printed on Leonard’s box.

MARGARET BLEVIN.

“These are her ashes.” Leonard set the box down and removed the top, revealing a ziplocked bag. He opened the bag, picked up the box again and stood. “She wanted me to scatter them here. I wanted both of you to be with me.”

He dipped his hand into the bag and withdrew a clenched fist; held the box out to Emery, who nodded silently and did the same; then turned to Robbie.

“You too,” he said.

Robbie hesitated, then put his hand into the box. What was inside felt gritty, more like sand than ash. When he looked up, he saw that Leonard had stepped forward, head thrown back so that he gazed at the moon. He drew his arm back, flung the ashes into the sky and stooped to grab more.

Emery glanced at Robbie, and the two of them opened their hands.

Robbie watched the ashes stream from between his fingers, like a flight of tiny moths. Then he turned and gathered more, the three of them tossing handful after handful into the sky.

When the box was finally empty Robbie straightened, breathing hard, and ran a hand across his eyes. He didn’t know if it was some trick of the moonlight or the freshening wind, but everywhere around them, everywhere he looked, the air was filled with wings.

Near Zennor

He found the letters inside a round metal candy tin, at the bottom of a plastic storage box in the garage, alongside strings of outdoor Christmas lights and various oddments his wife had saved for the yard sale she’d never managed to organise in almost thirty years of marriage. She’d died suddenly, shockingly, of a brain aneurysm, while planting daffodil bulbs the previous September.

Now everything was going to Goodwill. The house in New Canaan had been listed with a Realtor; despite the terrible market, she’d reassured Jeffrey that it should sell relatively quickly, and for something close to his asking price.

“It’s a beautiful house, Jeffrey,” she said, “not that I’m surprised.” Jeffrey was a noted architect: she glanced at him as she stepped carefully along a flagstone path in her Louboutin heels. “And these gardens are incredible.”

“That was all Anthea.” He paused beside a stone wall, surveying an emerald swathe of new grass, small exposed hillocks of black earth, piles of neatly raked leaves left by the crew he’d hired to do the work that Anthea had always done on her own. In the distance, birch trees glowed spectral white against a leaden February sky that gave a twilit cast to midday. “She always said that if I’d had to pay her for all this, I wouldn’t have been able to afford her. She was right.”