The Thief (16 page)

Maybe if they told us why,
it would stick,
I think.

Chapter 9

Jul

earlier that day

“
I’m working at the library
this afternoon, so dinner may be a bit late,” Bea said.

It was Saturday, and I was curled up on the
couch with my history book, earmarking passages for the paper due
Monday. I didn’t like the Civil War era. Or any of the war eras,
really. I wanted to get to the parts of history where people were
inventing things and improving lives, not mowing them down.

Bea shrugged into a light jacket. It was
finally getting cool enough for that, and I was glad. November had
no business being flip-flop weather, as it had been last week. “If
you need anything, call the library,” she said.

“
I remember,” I said. She
seemed reluctant when she had to leave me alone. I wasn’t sure if
that meant she was worried about me, or if she was worried I’d
break her house. “I’m just working on a paper,” I said.

“
Good.” She went to the
front door, and hesitated. “...How are your grades?”

This was the one thing I could be positive
about, so I smiled. “Great. I should make the honor roll. Ms.
Miller thinks I could take AP chemistry next year.”

“
Oh,” she said. “That’s
good. Well...keep up the good work.”

The instant she left the
house I pulled my mother’s journal out from under my textbook. I’d
treated all the pages with ammonia, and I’d been poring over it
every night, trying to decipher it. There was very little in it
that was actually written down - most of it was drawn out. I
flipped through pages of sketches of castles, thrones, and
elaborate jewelry. There were sketches of people, with bewildering
notes. Young drawings of my father, carefully inked. He was
smiling, which I had never seen him do much of. One of Charlotte,
haphazardly penned in a corner, noted
boring.
Several tagged
John
, drawn in harsh,
jagged lines, as if in anger.
Problem or
solution?
was noted on the page.

The one that particularly stood out - the
one I kept coming back to - seemed to be a map of the orchard out
back. There were very realistic sketches of apples in the margin,
so I was assuming it wasn’t just a random piece of forest. On the
facing page was an even more beautiful drawing of an apple tree,
that mirrored one in miniature on the map. With Bea out of the
house for several hours, I’d decided now was the time to try to
find it. I had considered going out at night, but the forest in the
dark was more than a little terrifying to me, so that impulse had
quickly died.

Nevertheless, it was a grey
day, overcast and with a hint of a coming chill. I pulled the hood
of my jacket up around my ears and held open the journal. There was
a structure marked
Graham House
on the bottom edge of the map. Supposedly I just
went forward in a straight line, and I would find the tree. I
steeled myself and started the trek through the grove. The trees
closest to the house were tame and orderly, if a little overgrown,
and mostly bore pecans. As I progressed deeper into the treeline,
though, it began to look as if the forest were trying to reclaim
the land, grafting onto the orchard with resolution.

A raindrop hit the side of my nose. I looked
up. The sky had turned a deeper grey and I hadn’t even noticed. I
zipped the journal into the interior of my jacket. The leaves above
me took up a chorus I could almost hear words to.

I hurried between the gnarled tree trunks,
hoping to not get caught in a sudden downpour. You would think a
New Yorker would always have an umbrella handy, but someone had
told me the south wasn’t like that and so mine was buried at the
bottom of a bag in my closet. I felt exposed without it. Dead
leaves crunched under my feet and I heard what might have been a
squirrel leaping across branches overhead. I caught my breath for a
moment under what appeared to be another of my grandmother’s pecan
trees, judging by the shell casings scattered around the base. I’d
seen pecans before, but never in their shells. I was surprised by
how pretty they were – smooth and pale with little stripes.

Then came a
whoosh
that usually
preceded a subway train – but this time it was followed by a
downpour. I pushed away from the pecan tree, going further into the
orchard. My new goal was to find something with a large enough
canopy to shelter me.

In the early twilight that the clouds
brought, I could no longer see very far into the distance. Not that
I’d been able to see terribly far through the trees to begin with.
The rain was beginning to disorient me, but I didn’t want to pull
out the journal for fear of the rain blurring the drawings.

Then I saw it, looming ahead of me – a huge
tree with apples still clinging to its boughs. I hurried forward
and huddled against the trunk and breathed a sigh of relief. It was
almost completely dry here. I tried to peer in the direction of the
house, but saw only a haze. The earth was still warm from the past
few days, so it had evaporated most of the rain and spit it back up
already, making it almost foggy.

I leaned back against the trunk and stared
up into the boughs of the tree. Was this it? I didn’t think apple
trees grew this rotund - the others around certainly were more
spindly. This one was almost like an oak tree that happened to have
fruit attached to it - it had to be at least five feet in
diameter.

I brought the journal out from the dry
interior of my jacket and checked the tree against the sketch. Yes,
the one my mother had drawn was just like this. My heart beat
faster, even as rain poured around me. Was she trying to tell me
something? A tiny heart had been drawn onto the sketch. I closed it
and stowed it back in my jacket. It had to be here on the real tree
as well.

I circled the tree, carefully inspecting the
bark as I stepped over its knobbly roots.

There. I spotted it. I laughed out loud. It
was real. There, carved into the bark, as with a pen knife, was a
heart. Inside were initials - SG and KH. I wanted to cry. This was
proof, real, tangible proof, that my parents had been in love. It
was like proof that I existed. I hadn’t known I’d wanted proof of
that, but at this moment, it was indescribably comforting.

Did I dare to hope that my mother had left
the journal just for me, to lead me to her after all this time? I
didn’t know why she’d left. I didn’t know if she’d wanted to take
me with her or not. Maybe she had, maybe Dad hadn’t let her. What
if my real home was with her, wherever she was?

Deep down, I always thought I would see her
one day. That somehow, I’d get a phone call, or a letter, or just
an address. And I would stand in front of some foreign door, both
terrified of and desperate for what awaited on the other side.

I placed my hand over the
heart, imagining the tree as a door, and the carved initials as the
bell. Rain pattered softly.
Who’s
there?
I imagined her saying.

“
It’s me,” I murmured, with
my forehead on the bark. “Can I come in?”

I fell forward. A section of the bark had
swung inward, throwing me off balance. On my hands and knees, I
looked up in shock. There, inside the hollow of the trunk, stood a
mirror.

The mirror stood a little taller than me, so
it had to be close to six feet. The frame was a delicate design of
twining thorny vines and roses in silver. And there was not a spec
of dirt anywhere on it – no dust or corrosion of any kind. The
glass of the mirror was absolutely pristine. It seemed to glow.

I climbed back to my feet,
gaping at it in wonder. I saw my reflection – my hair sticking to
the sides of my face, rain dripping from my chin and my fingers –
as I reached to touch the delicate silver branches and flowers that
arched from the mirror’s frame.
Who in
their right mind would hide something this beautiful?
I thought.
Is this what
my mother wanted me to find?

Then my finger pricked on something and I
pulled back, shaking my hand reflexively. It must have been one of
the thorns. A drop of my blood hit the mirror.

Against all laws of logic and nature, the
surface of the mirror rippled on the droplet’s impact, waves
undulating out to the mirror’s rim. The surface began to darken and
dim. It seemed to dissolve, until I was no longer looking at a
mirror, but a silver-rimmed hole in the back of the trunk. But it
did not show the orchard on the opposite side. I beheld through the
rose frame a darkened stairwell, leading upward.

It did not even occur to me to step away. I
reached out my arm, testing to see if the glass was really gone or
if it was an illusion. My hand passed right through, and I swear it
even felt cooler on the other side. I pulled my hand back and
stared at it, marveling. I had to. I had to go. Zipping the journal
safely into my jacket once again, I stepped over the mirror’s rim
into the stairwell. I shivered as I passed through, a tingle
running through my nervous system that faded as my feet found
purchase on the stone floor.

It was noticeably cooler, like I was somehow
underground. Or maybe it was the stone walls - though one section
at the base of the landing was a solid sheet of iron. I could be in
a castle for all I knew. My heart quivered, both terrified and
ecstatic. I began to climb, my steps echoing up the spiral.
Iron-and-glass oil lamps were nestled in recesses in the stone,
casting strange shadows around the tight corners. Strangely, some
of the sections of stone were glued together with what seemed to be
glass instead of regular mortar – like the walls had veins of
glass. And I climbed.

I must have ascended at least four or five
stories, maybe more, before I reached a landing with a curtain. I
pushed it aside and blinked at the sudden brightness. I shielded my
eyes with one hand and stepped forward in wonder.

Sunlight streamed through an open arch
directly ahead of me, where a lush garden awaited. To my left and
right were two other curtained arches. I stood in a foyer made of
white bricks, maybe marble or alabaster.

“
Hello?” I called
instinctively. “Hello, is anyone here? I don’t mean to intrude, I
just sort of...walked in...” I sort of hoped no one answered. I
mean, there was no social protocol for this kind of situation. What
would I say?
Oh, I do apologize, I simply
had to step into this mirror I found that turned into a portal to
your home
. I shook my head.
Then again...
I thought
of my mother, and tried not to get my hopes up.

But the place was silent, not even a breeze
touching the garden up ahead.

I should leave,
I thought.
I don’t belong
here.
But despite the words in my head, I
couldn’t shake the feeling that I did somehow belong here – that I
had every right to be here. That I was home. I swept aside the
lefthand curtain.

I beheld an empty gothic cathedral
sanctuary, every inch made of dark stone, with high vaulted
ceilings and support pillars, but no furnishings of any kind. No
chair, pews, benches, tables – just cold stone floor, pillars, and
a series of unlit colored glass lamps hanging by long chains from
the ceiling. The only other adornment was the surplus of stained
glass windows that populated every wall.

And what magnificent windows they were. I
stepped forward, dazzled. Wherever I was, it must be bright and
sunny outside, because the light was streaming through the
carefully assembled shards of colored glass. It made the darker
glass smolder in rich royal blues, blood crimson, and amethyst
purple, and it made the pale colors almost blinding. And then, as I
studied each pane individually, I began to realize that they were
all connected, almost as if they told two sides of the same story,
with the giant pane at the front of the sanctuary showing the point
where the stories intersected.

The furthest left pane showed a man at a
brookside. The next pane showed him meeting a fox – the fox seemed
to be talking to him, and stood on its hind legs. It reminded me of
an illustration I’d seen in a children’s book once.

The far right hand pane showed a woman – or
was it a girl? The figure was too small to be sure – kneeling in a
vast field of flowers. The next pane showed a wolf in the bushes
watching her.

They were beautiful, and excited to see what
the rest of this place held, I went back through the partition into
the foyer, and crossed to the other curtained room.

When I pushed the fabric aside, my breath
caught in my throat.

Books. Ladders of books. Towers of books.
Sliding ladders leading to more tiers of books. Tables with piles
of books heaped on them. There were couches upholstered in heavy
fabric nestled in the crooks of shelves for browsing. Lamps of all
shapes and sizes hung from the ceiling, stood in random corners,
and topped tables and shelves. It was magnificent, and couldn’t be
the slightest bit organized, and made me happier than anything in
years. It even smelled right – like paper and ink and worn wood and
dust and light and shadow. But most of all, possibility.

Oh, I would be coming back here, all
right.

Heart lightening, I skipped out to the
garden. There were fruit trees here, though I couldn’t name what
they bore. They were strange, jewel-colored, and similar to plums,
if plums were scarlet or blue or orange. The flowers that grew at
their bases were more recognizable - daffodils, irises, and
violets, among others. Various colors of rose bushes made hedges
and ivy climbed over the garden wall, too high for me to see
beyond. What could be on the other side?