The Cabinet of Earths (2 page)

He strode down the avenue Rapp ahead of them, turned left at the corner, and disappeared.

“Now we can go,” said Maya, giving James's hand another squeeze. It was the strangest thing: There was something about that elegant young man, about the graceful way he sliced through all this soft Parisian air that made a person want to run along after him for a while, just to see where he might be going. There was something about him that drew you to him, that made you want to see more of him, that might even (if you were James's age) make it very hard not to smile and wave. Maya could see that was the case. She could feel that call of his in her very bones.

But it made her think for some reason of the magnets they show you in science class, bars of metal all furry with iron filings, paper clips, or nails, and the thought made her stubborn all over again.

She and James were not paper clips, were they? She made her feet go extra slowly for a moment, just to give the elegant young man time to get well ahead of them and away.

Just beyond the strange house with the salamander on its door was a little blind court of a street, and more curlicued stone, and what looked like the entrance to a theater, of all things. T
HE
A
LCHEMICAL
T
HEATER
it called itself in elegant stone letters above a pair of large doors: What kind of theater was that? The smaller letters underneath didn't make things any clearer: T
HE
S
OCIETY OF
P
HILOSOPHICAL
C
HEMISTRY
, they said.

“Boofer would really like Paris,” said James thoughtfully, eyeing the elegant stone corner of the Alchemical Theater. “There are lots of really great places for dogs to pee.”

And then there was a
boulangerie
, which Maya knew meant a bakery, and an antiques store, and some other sort of business, and then a café across from the strangest fountain, all stone cherubs and banners, and by that point her feet were moving fast again, eager to get back to her parents and the apartment on the fourth floor in the rue de Grenelle that would never, never, ever quite be “home.”

“First you drag, and then you rush!” complained James. “I wanted to go up to the top of the tower!”

It was just as they swung around the last corner and their own doorway came into view that the strange thing happened.

The door opened and out stepped—

“Him again!” said James, and before Maya could think of anything to say or, alas, manage to grab his hand, James was already erupting into a big smile and a wave—

—at the same elegant young man, his hands once again adjusting the fit of the dark glasses he wore.

They were really
very
dark glasses.

And at this moment those dark glasses were turning right toward Maya and James.

“Ah!” said the young man. It was the sound of someone rather pleased, for private reasons, by what he now saw.
“And here,”
he said,
“must be the children!

He said it in French, of course, but Maya could understand every word of it. They weren't very hard words. What she couldn't understand, however, was why a stranger in Paris would be staring at her and James at all, much less exclaiming as if in recognition, and much, much less coming out of the door of the very building where the Davidsons were going to live.

“Well, well, well,” said the stranger, while one of his long pale hands patted the other in an absentminded way.

“Perfect,” he said. “The boy and the girl!” Pause. “Indeed, most charming!”

And then the man nodded, turned, and walked away so fast that one otherwise unremarkable woman coming the opposite way was nearly bowled right over in his wake.

A cold shiver went flying through Maya's limbs. What, after all, had the man from the Salamander House been doing
here
?

“Come
on
,” she said to James, giving him one last impatient tug.

Because suddenly all she wanted in all the world was to be already up those four flights of stairs and within sight, reach, and earshot of her ordinary, lovable, thoroughly unmysterious parents.

Chapter 3
Our Famous Cousin Louise

W
ell, there you are!” said their father as he came out onto the landing. The rattly old elevator gave a squeaky shudder and began to crawl noisily back down to the lobby. “How does Paris look? You know you've already missed our first guest.”

“The spy,” said James. “We saw where he lives. There's a salamander on his door. When can we go up to the top of the Evil Tower?”

“Excuse me?” said their father. “Spy? Salamander?”

“That man with the dark glasses,” said Maya. “We saw him downstairs. James thought he was a spy because of the—”

“Oh, I see!” said their father with a laugh. “Of course. Quite logical, James. But I'm afraid he's not a spy. Some-thing wrong with his eyes, probably. Odd fellow—from that Society, you know. Must be the youngest Director any Society ever had. Seemed very disappointed to have missed you kids. Kept asking about you, and then off he went.”

The elevator clattered to a halt, four floors below their feet, and there were various knocks and bangs as someone sidled into it.

“What Society?” said Maya.

“Actually, he didn't miss us,” said James. He had sat right down on the doormat to wrestle with his shoes. “He saw us downstairs.”

“They gave me that fellowship, remember?” said their father to Maya as he held open the door. “So that I could bring you all along for the year. The Society of Philosophical Chemistry—I think that's what they call themselves. Hurry up, James, let's get off the stairs. And this apartment, too—it's theirs.”

The creaks and rattles were getting louder again: The elevator was nearly there.

“I bet maybe that's the spy again,” said James happily.

But when the door of the elevator opened, nobody in particular came out. Not a spy, not a Director of any Philosophical Society, just an unremarkable sort of woman looking for some other door.

“In we go, then, kids,” said Maya's dad, in a quieter voice than before, and he nodded in the direction of their hall.

There was a nondescript sound from the landing. And then another, but they weren't the sort of sounds that leave a mark on the brain. And in any case, Maya was still busy with the thought of men in dark glasses and apartments that somehow mysteriously belonged to them and their shady Societies.

A hand was tapping her on the shoulder.

“Excuse me,” said the unremarkable woman, for the third or fourth time. “Would this be the
appartement
of Madame Sylvie Miller Davidson?”

Maya did turn around then and looked at her, or at least tried to. She was strangely hard to see. No color to her, somehow, just an oddly muted effect, as if there were a curtain of frosted glass between Maya's eyes and her. Or a kind of haze in the air, almost. Just an ordinary sort of woman, but too vague to be properly ordinary, because
ordinary
ordinary people become more vivid when you pay attention to them, and this woman—well, you couldn't quite focus on her, somehow.

Madame Sylvie Miller Davidson!
It sounded so strange in the woman's mouth, so bland and so foreign, both at once.

“That's my mother,” said Maya.

“May I ask—” said her father.

“I wrote to her,” said the woman. “I said I would be coming, right away. I am,” she added, “her cousin.”

And then she somehow trickled right by them, in through the door, and down the hall.

“My goodness,” said Maya's father in a slightly weak voice. “At this rate, we'll have had forty-eight guests by Friday.”

Maya slipped under his arm and through the door.

“Like clockwork, one per hour,” he said, shooing James in after and shutting the latch carefully behind him, without the slightest bang. “But perhaps the pace will slow at night?”

“Shh,” said Maya. What had traveling done to her eyes? The salamander on that strange building had turned its head and flicked its brass tongue at her. It couldn't really have done that—but it had. And now this woman who had just walked past them and down the hall: How could an ordinary person be so very hard to
see
?

In the living room, Maya's mother was already rising from her chair and listening to something the woman was beginning to say in that voice that sounded so oddly like nothing at all.

“How kind of you to come,” said Maya's mother with great earnestness, as if the vague person in front of her were a Nobel Prize—winning duchess or a terribly famous poet, instead of being—well, whatever she was. Less notable than people usually are, somehow. “We've all wanted to meet you for such a very long time. Maya and James, come say hello. Can you guess who this is?
This
is our famous Cousin Louise!”

James looked skeptical.

He said, “But Cousin Louise was a—”

“Come shake hands,” said their mother. But James was not to be deterred.

“—
baby
,” he said with great definiteness. “A baby. That's what she was! Ouch! You're pinching me!”

Maya tried to quench him with a look, which didn't work at all, and then she gave up on subtlety and angled herself in between her brother and the vague figure of Cousin Louise, whose blurry hand was perhaps already reaching out to her, though it was somewhat hard to tell.

She had eyes that were an ordinary dull sort of brown. Her hair was almost no particular color at all. And when Maya took her hand, she felt—
all right, this is strange
, thought Maya—she felt
nothing
. Do you know how your cheeks and tongue and lips sometimes feel, after a trip to the dentist? That was what it was like, shaking Cousin Louise's hand. It was like the little bit of the universe containing Cousin Louise made everything around it just slightly numb.

“Enchanted,” said Maya in at most a wobbly whisper.
Enchantée!
That was what you were supposed to say when meeting French cousins. Even if they were really quite the opposite of enchanting. That's how French is.

She was only distracted for a second, but it was long enough. James wriggled by, picking right up where he'd left off.

“You were only three,” he said, with some relish. “And the church crumbled down all around you, and you became
famous
.”

“Well, now,” said Cousin Louise.

Maya gave her a worried look, but on that plain, unreadable face there was no sign of annoyance, not a trace of pain. No trace of much of anything at all, as far as Maya could see.

In fact, maybe nobody on earth ever seemed less like someone famous than the Davidsons' famous Cousin Louise. She was exactly the sort of person that when the whole sixth grade is heading off to the old Victorian mansion of John Muir, and there's going to be an hour-long bus ride to get there, and everybody's chatting and sorting themselves in that awkward way that happens before you get on the bus—well, Cousin Louise is the kind of person you end up sitting next to, when you'd really rather not. And then it's up to you, of course, not to let the poor person next to you know how much you are half-listening all the time to the fun the people a few seats behind you are having, and so really the whole bus ride is a bit of a chore.

“I bet it was scary,” James was saying. “Was it really, really scary?”

“I'm afraid it's entirely my fault he's pestering you,” said Maya's mother, leaning forward in her chair. Her face was pale, but her eyes were very alert, the light dancing in them the way it tended to do when something had caught her attention. “I've told them the story a thousand times, you see. They've seen the newspaper articles and the pictures. I hope you're not offended.”

“Offended,” said Cousin Louise, quite blank. “Why?”

There was a little hiccup of time in the room, during which Maya's mother offered everyone cookies, and everyone but James politely refused.

“Well,” said Maya's mother brightly, as if starting over again. “I'm so glad we've finally found you! And my mother would have been so glad. She wanted to adopt you, you know, when . . . when . . . that terrible thing happened, when the church fell down and everybody was killed, even your poor brother—”

“Your poor brother was Nicolas,” said James solemnly. “He was six. And the church was made of
stone
.”

“Oh, dear,” said Maya's mother.

But Cousin Louise still had not so much as flinched.

She said instead, in her dry and plodding way, “The children, I presume, will be going to school?”

School! Maya's heart closed around that word like a sea anemone poked by an unfriendly hand. School! And while her mother rattled on about the forms they had filled out, and the various educational establishments in the
quartier
, and her conviction that being thrown into the French public schools would, in the end, be the best experience her children could ever possibly hope for, Maya thought about home, and the new locker she would have had if she had stayed at Livingston Junior High where she belonged, and the way her friend Jenna would again this year almost certainly bring her stuffed chipmunks to class on the first day, just because that was what Jenna always did at the beginning of every year since the first day of kindergarten five million years ago—and she forgot all about Paris for a moment. Just closed her eyes and remembered what it felt like: school!

But then Cousin Louise said, “
Mais oui
, of course,” and that brought Maya right back out of her daze. She had just managed to miss something important. What?

“How wonderfully kind!” said her mother. “Maya, how about that?
Cousin Louise has just offered to help you with your French.
”

There were, in fact, audible underlines under all of those words. Maya's inattention must have been showing.

“Oh, Mom!” said Maya in horror, and her father, who believed in the comforting effect of treats, pressed a cookie into her hand.

“Of course we don't want to inconvenience you, Louise,” said Maya's mother. “There's your work.”

Maya looked up in hope. But no—

“Bah, the work,” said Cousin Louise. “I file letters, papers, forms in the basement of an enormous firm. Anonymous labor. They will not mind me, present or not present. I am
invisible
.”

And for a moment there seemed to be almost a flicker of something in Cousin Louise's eyes. Perhaps only Maya saw it, that quick winking of light, and Maya looked away very fast, feeling a little strange inside.

She knows
, thought Maya, keeping her eyes well away while her stomach did that odd, embarrassed flop.
She knows what she's like.

When Cousin Louise had finally said
au revoir
—which means, unfortunately, not just “good-bye” but “until we meet again”—when she had disappeared, neither smiling nor frowning, into the rattly old elevator and gone off and away, Maya's father leaned back against the apartment door for a moment in mock exhaustion.

“No more,” he said. “I don't care who it is; I don't care what Society they run; I don't care whose long-lost cousin they may be—that's it. We don't open the door.”

“Well, I was glad to meet her,” said Maya's mother, relaxing a little into her chair. “And now Maya will have help with her French.”

A wave of frustration sloshed over Maya's edges at that. And she was so tired, too! Your edges always get sloshier when you're tired.

“But, Mom,” she said. “Don't you see what a crazy idea that is? You don't know anything about her. For all you know, she could be an
ax murderer
!”

Maya's mother looked distinctly taken aback.

“Good grief, Maya,” she said. “Louise is our cousin. She's not an ax murderer.”

“Even ax murderers are
somebody
's cousins,” said Maya. “She's a little strange, couldn't you tell? She's, like, blurry or something. Didn't you
notice
how strange she is? I can't go wandering around Paris with Cousin Louise. She's practically invisible.”

Maya's father laughed out loud.

“Slow down!” he said. “Just because a person's not, um, especially memorable—”

“Not that,” said Maya—to her mother, not her father, because if anyone was going to understand about statues on buildings that looked like you, and brass salamanders that came alive when you walked by, and cousins that were surrounded somehow by a blurry, numbing cloud, it would be her mother. “I mean really, like,
invisible
. Couldn't you see that?”

For a moment Maya thought she saw a spark of recognition lighting her mother's eyes—
“You, too?”
said those eyes for a millisecond—and then the millisecond was over, and her mother blinked, and whatever that light had been was forgotten and gone.

“Maya,” said her mother kindly. “Calm down. Think of it this way: It will be good for Louise, having some contact with her cousins.”

Maya was just opening her mouth to say—something!—when her mother stopped her with the tiniest shake of the head.

“Look,” said her mother. “Brains are very delicate things. You know that. Do you think her life has been easy? An injury like that can change someone's entire personality.”

Maya's mouth stayed open for another moment, and then she gulped it shut.

“Injury?” she said. “You mean, she was hurt?”

“Maya!” said her mother. “A whole church fell on her!”

(“With a great big CRASH,” said James, from somewhere under the table.)

“But,” said Maya. “You didn't tell us she got
hurt
.”

She was beginning to feel pretty foolish. Of course, it made sense. All that rock tumbling down! And then never to be the same as you were before that happened! It was an awful thought, to tell the truth.

Though something naggled at her about it all. She remembered the picture. It was in the album back home, a clipping from the newspaper, as old as could be. The smiling child in the arms of her rescuers. Grainy smile, grainy ruins, big headline shouting something in Italian underneath, because they had all been tourists in Italy, Cousin Louise's family, when the church fell on them.