The Radiant Road (4 page)

“Look up,” said her father, smiling into the box he was slicing open.

Clare looked up and saw rocky dome, quartz stars—and something she hadn't noticed before: a platform of pale, rough planks, built high against the wall where the tree grew, the wall that faced the ocean. A ladder led up through a hole in the platform.

Like a tree house, but inside.

“Your room,” said her father. “It was your mother's room, too, when she was a girl. That loft always belongs to the girl who lives in this house, your mother used to say, as soon as she's old enough to climb the ladder, and until the house becomes her own.”

He climbed the ladder himself partway and, with effort, lifted Clare's suitcase onto the platform. But he didn't go in. “Your room, chocolate éclair,” he said. “All yours.”

Clare slung on her backpack and climbed the ladder's smooth-worn rungs.

She found herself standing on bare, broad planks, much closer to the starry, arching roof; and yet it felt all air and space, clean and cool. One side of the platform hugged the curving walls of the dome, and the other curved out into the air, so that the floor was shaped like a wide-open eye or the deck of a ship. Where the platform jutted into space was a half wall, up to her chest.

Clare walked around the room, trailing a hand to touch each object. The yew trunk sprouted a few leafy twigs here, making it even more like a tree house. A single bed with a giant pillow and a thick, sky-colored comforter pushed its head against the tree. Beside it sat a small blue table with one drawer and one lamp.

My mother's bed, when she was my age
, thought Clare. She lay on it carefully, and found herself looking at blue sky through a hole made of stones. Her room faced the window, which looked out to a green pasture; and the green and the sky looked in. Farther down the green, she could see something that might be a ruin of some kind, like an old church or a castle. Her mother had looked through that window at that sky, at those old stones.
Wearing this silver necklace, just like I am now.

Clare unpacked her clothes into a worn white wardrobe to the left of the bed. Against the wall near the foot of the bed was a wooden table, stained pale yellow, with other, more accidental-looking stains—ink? crayon? paints? all of these?—in various colors. She set a few books and pens there, and her commonplace book. It looked right there.

Clare sat back on the bed, leaning against the tree, and looked around at her room, her tree house, this empty, airy space that had been her mother's and grandmother's. She felt happy there, happy and secret and free, just herself and the stone and the sky and the
green beyond. In Texas, her room had been crammed with things, books and old stuffed animals and boxes of hair ornaments and notecards and posters on the walls. Most of that she and her father had thrown out, given away, or put in storage. At the time, it was hard to do. But now she wondered why she had ever thought she needed that. Only having what she had brought in her suitcase made her feel light and free. She had been given a gift she never thought to ask for: a way back into the great stone egg she had been hatched from before she was ready.

I'm home. I'm the girl who lives in this house. This is who I was always supposed to be. If I don't want to, I never have to leave again.

Clare's father made lunch with groceries he'd bought on the way from the airport. For a Scottish person, he made excellent Italian food, and with sudden and delicious hunger, Clare ate pasta with lots of Parmesan and meatballs on the side. After they finished the dishes, he sat on the couch to read. She stretched out on the other end of the couch. “We just had lunch,” murmured Clare, “but I feel tired as midnight.”

“You didn't sleep on the plane,” said her father, patting her ankle, “and only a bit in the car. The time change is confusing your body.” Flipping another page, he began to sing, a soft song about sky or Skye.
I hope that's not supposed to be a lullaby
, thought Clare with
sleepy annoyance. But whatever it was, it was nice. Her feet in thick gray socks just touched her father's leg, and that was nice, too. He sang to himself until she fell asleep.

Clare hardly remembered climbing the ladder up to bed, but once in bed she lay awake for a few minutes, disoriented. She could hear the ocean, a long crash and surge that never stopped. It reminded her of the early morning sounds of traffic in one of their New Mexico houses, when they lived near a freeway. But traffic is a single sound that never takes a breath, and this sound, the ocean sound, breathed in and out, in and out.

Clare's grandmothers had died before she was born, but she thought that this was what it must feel like, sleeping beside your kindest grandmother. Holding that thought close, she drifted toward sleep.

A thought drifted alongside her:
One girl in every generation.

And then she was asleep.

It was a sort of grandmother to Clare, that sighing, breathing sea. So was the belly of earth around this house, protecting the broken family within. So was the wind that carried her here and harried and questioned every stranger who approached this place with bad intent.

The sea and wind and earth all guarded and helped her as they could.

But a dark brute was moving toward this place. And the help of sea and wind and stone was not half the help Clare needed.

But wind had borne her home on its wings; earth bears her now in its belly; and the sea will bear her, too, before this hard time is done.

When Clare woke up, it was pitch-black. Above the rush of the sea she could hear her father's soft snore below. Middle of the night, and she was wide-awake. This must be jet lag, this out-of-time feeling, this private darkness while the world snored and the ocean rushed on.

She kind of liked it.

Clare got up, put on socks and a robe over her pajamas, and because it was cold for June, wrapped a scarf around her neck for good measure. She sat at the yellow desk, switched on its lamp, and in its little pool of light tried to guess the origin of those stains. A curve of crimson—a glass of grape juice, dripping? A blue-black blotch—that was spilled ink, a leaky pen. Dashes of grass green and bright lemon that outlined the edge of an invisible corner—oh, someone was painting and ran off the edge of the paper.

My mother's inks. My grandmother's paints.

She opened the commonplace book and began to leaf through the familiar pages, looking for blue-black ink to match that blotch. On its first page, she read, in looping blue ink,

He heard high up in the air

A piper piping away,

And never was piping so sad,

And never was piping so gay.

—WBY

On the facing page, in the same handwriting—
my mother's handwriting
—but in violet ink, Clare read:

Be not afeard. The isle is full of noises,

Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not.

Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments

Will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices

That, if I then had waked after long sleep,

Will make me sleep again; and then, in dreaming,

The clouds methought would open, and show riches

Ready to drop upon me, that when I waked,

I cried to dream again.

Underneath was written, in the same handwriting, and underlined twice:
Shakespeare was there.

Something about that sentence—
Shakespeare was there
—made her shiver.

A few pages in, she found a passage in ink just the color of the stain:

Fair seedtime had my soul, and I grew up

Fostered alike by beauty and by fear.

“Fair seedtime had my soul” was nice, though she wasn't sure
what it meant. She turned to the back, turned the book upside down, and took up her pen. She had waked up with an image in her head: a girl running across the sea, on a path made by moonlight. But where was the girl running? Bent over her desk, her hair touching the page, Clare began to write. As she wrote—but not before—she understood the answer. That was the miracle of writing, how she did not know what she knew, until she began to write it.

The stone window was black; her tiny lamp put out the stars. But the stars watched, anyway, as Clare wrote, and paused, and wrote. After numerous hesitations, cross-outs, and emendations, she had this:

Along the sea, the moonlight spills

A kind of path

For one with feet, not fins.

Bare feet and cold

Splash this radiant road.

On water and light she runs

Toward stone and tree,

Toward home.

Toward stone and tree. Clare looked up. Yes, the tree—because there was something so
important
about that tree, something she hadn't quite remembered yet. In fact . . .

Without conscious decision, she stood and moved toward the ladder. She would be very quiet. She just had to see.

The tree squatted against the wall in the dark like an ancient, lumpy toad. Clare put her hand against the bark and felt a flash of memory:
the way in.
Yes—how could she have forgotten? There was a way into the tree, a crack or space between two of the ropy trunks, small, too small for a grown-up.

But when she was a red-haired toddler, Clare had often hidden inside that tree.

Probably too small for me now, too
. The thought made her anxious, and she had to see. The crack in the tree was close to the wall, she remembered, feeling along—and yes, almost immediately: there it was, the long sideways mouth of it, like a slender leaf.

Looking at the dim shape, Clare was suddenly unsure: Was it one tree that divided? Or was it two trees that grew together?
Either way,
I might still fit that space between.
She slipped her arm in and turned sideways to see.