Kepler’s Dream (15 page)

By the end of the lesson I wasn't quite ready to herd cattle or ride in a rodeo, but I was able to trot around the ring on Paloma without falling off. So when Rosie got back from her ride and asked, “How'd it go?”—this time without the snotty undertone, just interested—I could look her in the eye and say, “Not bad.” Carlos bragged about how I definitely had cowgirl legs and before anyone knew it I'd be out on the mesa with the rest of my posse.

Miguel was gone, I noticed, and Carlos explained that he had errands to run and had suggested I stay on at the ranch that day. So I got to go into the big house with Rosie and Lola and have some of Tía Gloria's fantastic enchiladas. Mexican food, at last!

After lunch, Rosie offered to show me around the stables. We ambled through dirt and flies to a huge metal-sided building. Once inside, Rosie took me all up the long, cool central corridor, telling me which horse was which. “This is my boy, Mocha … and Juno, he's a frisky one … and Rocky … and Picchu …”

“Wait. What did you call that one?” I pointed at a smoky-gray pony.

“Picchu.” Rosie half smiled, and kicked at some hay. “It's a goofy name, I gave it to her. It's short for Machu Picchu, which is a place in Peru.”

“I know.”

“They have these really amazing old ruins there, up on a mountaintop—”

“I know.”

“—And one day I want to go.”

“Me too.”

Rosie finally stopped talking. “Really?” She squinted at me in that way cool girls do when they think you're just copying them. So I explained that my mom and I had talked about it, and about the Vacation Game we used to play, and how one night we read about Machu Picchu together and decided it would be a cool place to go.

“I think so too. My uncle Ignacio has been there.” Rosie looked into Picchu's stable and saw the pony needed more oats, so she took a big bucket and went over to get more. As she was scooping oats, Rosie said, not quite facing me, “So I heard your mom is sick. And that's why you came out here.”

“
Yeah.” My stomach, heavy with enchiladas, got even heavier. It was never easy to talk about this. “She's got leukemia. Which is, you know—cancer.”

“Yeah.”

“So she's being treated at a hospital in Seattle. They're giving her a stem cell transplant in a couple of days, on the Fourth. It's a pretty tough treatment, I guess, they blast them with radiation and stuff, so she thought it would be better if I did some kind of trip while she was doing it.”

“Why didn't you just go stay with your dad?”

“Oh. Well, see—” How to explain the whole mess in one line? “It didn't work out.” I shrugged.

Rosie nodded, like that was clear enough. She had filled the bucket, but before carrying it over to the pony she paused. She looked straight at me, her face open and serious.

“Is your mom going to die?”

Now,
die
was not a word people used around me. They found lots of other phrases—“I know your mom's going to pull through,” “Amy's going to beat this thing,” “one day this will all be a distant memory”—but it was always
that
kind, the kind about her getting better. If someone told you about their friend or relative who had had cancer, it always turned out that the person got cured and everything went back to normal. They never told you the other stories. The sad ones. The ones where all the medicine and operations
didn't
work.

No one, not even Dr. Lanner, wanted to admit that that happened, too.

“
I don't know,” I told Rosie. I swallowed. The enchiladas had become a gross mass of worry in the pit of my stomach. I was afraid I might be about to cough them back up. “I hope not.” Which was probably pretty obvious.

Then Rosie did something interesting. She ran her fingers along the beads of her pretty necklace, her eyes closed. She murmured, as if she were talking to someone I couldn't see. Or as if she were praying.

She opened her eyes suddenly and I saw how brown they were, the color of the thick, strong coffee my mom used to drink every morning, before she got sick.

“She's going to get better,” Rosie told me. Her face was kind, and sure. Suddenly I could see the resemblance between her and Miguel. “That's what my
abuelito
is telling me. She isn't going to die.”

I wanted to hug Rosie, but I wasn't sure she'd want me to, so I just stroked the nose of the horse nearest me instead and asked, “Your
abuelito
?”

“My grandpa. He passed away a long time ago, but sometimes he tells me things, if I ask him. If they're important.”

She acted like this was not an especially surprising thing. “That's cool,” I said, which was lame, but I was trying to distract her from the fact that I was rubbing my eyes, in case tears threatened to pool. I pretended I had gotten some dust in there. Still: it
was
cool that Rosie could talk to her grandfather. I would have liked to be able to talk to Edward Mackenzie, too. Dead or alive. “I never knew mine,” I said. “He died before I was even born.”

“
I know.” She nodded. “Mine too.”

“Oh, yeah?” I remembered something. “Hey. Didn't your grandfather used to work for my grandparents?” I felt weird about asking, but I was too curious not to.

“Yeah.” She turned away to carry the oats back to Picchu, and I thought maybe she wanted me to change the subject. It made us seem unequal. Even if I didn't myself grow up with diamonds and peacocks and a million books everywhere, but just in a regular house in Santa Rosa with my optometrist mom, next door to a nice lady who liked watching old Bruce Lee movies.

It was cool and quiet when we got back later to the GGCF. Miguel and Rosie dropped me and then vanished. Hildy padded to the door, as if to warn me that her mistress was napping. Lou and I played outside for a while, but I think he could tell my heart wasn't in it.

“Ella? Is that you?” Framed by the blue doorway, just like when I saw her for the first time a hundred years ago—way back in June—was Violet Von Stern. She looked sleepy and strangely emptied, like a soccer ball that's lost air, or a pillow with half its feathers gone.

“Where have you been?” She peered at me in confusion.

“At the Circle C. Learning to ride.” This was weird, her forgetting. It was like Mom on chemo. With my mom I had learned to stop saying,
Remember?
That only made her feel bad. (“It's bad enough to be bald and ugly,” she said to me one day in May, “but it's especially unfair if I become an imbecile, too.”)

The GM's blue eyes became clearer now. “Oh yes, of course.
The Circle C. So you were.” She shook her head, as if to get the cobwebs out of it. “Come along, Brunhilda. Let's get some fresh air.”

She walked slowly outside. “Christopher has gone off to do a bit of sightseeing in Old Town,” she told me. “He's very upset about the Kepler disappearance. We both are.” Her voice sounded heavy and tired. “We spent the entire morning searching the Library, in case the volume had somehow been misfiled, and trying to determine whether the boys knew anything about it. They did not.” I decided to keep quiet. “And no, frankly, I don't think Tweedledum and Tweedledee would be capable of any sort of deeper conspiracy. Those boys have nothing upstairs.” She looked at me. “I mean, Ella, there's very little furniture up there at all.” Now she sounded more like herself. Pulling insults out again was waking her up. “Really, the whole notion of an actual, physical
book
is entirely foreign to those boys. Granted, they understand computers, but reading something between two covers, on printed pages, rather than on a screen? Completely exotic. I think those young men have found working in the Library akin to looking at cave drawings, or petroglyphs—exploring evidence of some earlier, primitive culture.”

We had wandered over to the cratered area under the high cottonwoods where Hildy and Lou were sniffing around in bird poop together like old pals. You really have to be a dog, I guess, to appreciate bird poop fully.

“This used to be a pond, you know,” the GM told me. “With
swans and ducks swimming about in it. When Edward was still alive.”

“Yeah … Uh,
yes
. Miguel told me.”

“Did he?” My grandmother seemed surprised. “I suppose he might remember, though he was young then. His brothers were older.” She sighed. “Did Miguel tell you about the trees?” She gestured around us. I shook my head.

“Well, they were planted by Edward, years ago, when we first moved here. In the pattern of the Big Dipper. It was one of his wedding presents to me—a ‘constellation of cottonwoods,' he called it. You can hardly tell now, but the pattern is still there.” She looked up into the high trees, and some late-afternoon leaf light fell on her worn face. “I miss Edward, Ella. Even after all this time. I miss his conversation, his company, his sense of humor. I know it may seem strange, but that book—that single book—was one of my great connections to my late husband.” She sighed. “It made me feel closer to him. That is why I will be heartbroken to lose Kepler's
Dream
. It's not just the value of the volume—not the monetary value, that is.”

“I know what you mean,” I said.

“Do you?”

“It's like something that represents the person when they're not around.” I touched the bracelet on my wrist. The thing's importance wasn't something you could
see
. It was just some cheap metal. But I never took it off. “A kind of charm.”

“That's exactly it.” The GM looked at me with a new warmth in her eyes. “You know, my friend Joan thinks you're an exceptional
girl, Ella. Uncommonly intelligent. And strong.” It was as though she was seeing someone new in front of her. “She may be right.”

This was, by a factor of about a thousand, the nicest thing Violet Von Stern had ever said about me. I took a deep breath. It was now or never.

“Grandmother, there's something I'd like to know,” I said to her. “How did Edward die? What happened exactly, in the accident?”

The GM startled instinctively, like a phantom dog had just jumped up to bite her. Then I saw her try to settle herself. “He was fishing,” she began slowly. “On the Rio Grande. With Walter.” She paused, staring out at the emptied pond. “And Oscar, and Ignacio, too. Oscar Aguilar was—”

“—Rosie's grandpa,” I supplied. Suddenly things that had been all blurry were beginning to go clear in my mind. Coming into focus.

“That's right.” She nodded. “Oscar worked here for us. He was marvelous with the horses, the dogs, the birds—all the creatures. And his boys, Ignacio, Carlos and Miguel, were often about. They all played with Walter.” I could almost see this group of kids reflected in the GM's deep blue eyes. “In any case, Oscar and Edward used to go out on fishing trips together. They liked to take the older boys, too—not around here, but upriver where the Rio Grande is deeper and broader. I was never happy when they were gone. I never understood the lure of fishing, pardon the pun, and I didn't like being left alone. I—I always had the
feeling that something was going to go wrong.” A dark, old sadness crossed my grandmother's face. “And one day, you see, it did.”

She stared out at the dead pond, as if watching the ghosts of birds glide around it. Long-ago swans. Ducks of the old days. “It was hard to know exactly what happened. Walter was being a daredevil, I imagine, as he often was at that age. In any case, he was out in the river, or too close to it, and his father went in after him to pull him back to the bank. And then, a rogue current came …” Her voice caught. “The river took Edward, and he drowned.”

“And Rosie's grandpa, too.”

“Yes. Oscar, too. He must have followed, to try to help.”

I remembered Miguel's comment the first time we crossed the Rio Grande. “Dangerous river,” he had called it. I had found that hard to believe.

“So the boys lived, and the men died. The children could hardly speak afterwards, for days. They were in shock, of course. The police came to investigate, which was utterly pointless and rather lowered my opinion of the profession. As if they could be heroes by proving there had been some argument between Oscar and my husband. Fools.” I was glad Officer Barker couldn't hear her opinion of the men in blue. “What happened that morning on the river was an accident. And a dreadful tragedy.” My grandmother turned to walk back into the house. “It wasn't Walter's fault, I suppose, or Ignacio's. They were young, they
meant no harm. And yet … ” She shook her head. “I couldn't help feeling that if the children hadn't been there, the men might simply have caught their fish, and come home.”

I remembered Miguel talking about his family moving away, and their getting rid of the horses. I wondered what had happened to my dad.

“Walter went away to school soon after that,” my grandmother said, as if she had heard my question. “Boarding school. It seemed to be for the best.”

I wasn't sure what to say. Watching your father drown, then being sent away to school: it was a lousy story. For maybe the first time in my life, I felt sorry for my dad. Maybe it hadn't been such a picnic for him, either.

“And ever since losing Edward, I've forced myself to be adventurous, to move out into the world. As a distraction, partly. I have thrown myself into my travels, and when I am here, I devote myself to the Library. As a way of feeling close to him, still.”

I could see my grandmother snapping out of her trance now, and coming back to the present tense.

“So you see, Ella. It's given all of us rather too much history to carry around.”

I realized something very strange. I was feeling sorry for her, too. For Violet Von Stern!

“I want to help you find it,” I said to my grandmother. “Kepler's
Dream,
I mean. I want to help figure out who took it—and get it back.”