“Then would you do something for me, Mom?” Nancy’s voice was shaking. “Stop seeing him! Stop having him over here! Give that locket back to him! You can take all my Christmas presents back if you’ll just give me that, please, Mom!”
“But honey,” Elizabeth said helplessly, “what would that accomplish? I need my old friends now. I have to start making a life for myself, and friends are a part of it.”
“Just till summer?” Nancy begged. “Just till Dad comes? Come on, Mom, please?” Her jaw was trembling and her blue eyes were filled with tears.
Elizabeth sighed and put her arms around her daughter.
“All right,” she said. “If it matters to you that much, sweetheart. All right.”
It was on a Saturday morning that Brendon was caught playing the piano. Kirby was at the dance studio and their mother, who did not work on Saturdays, was out grocery shopping, and Nancy had been practicing.
Over and over she had been playing a piece called “The Lazy Pony,” until Brendon, who was playing with his Nintendo again, said, “Nancy, can’t you put some life into that? It sounds like the stupid pony’s dying.”
“I’m playing it just the way it’s written,” Nancy told him.
“Then it’s written wrong. It’s creepy.” Brendon got up from the sofa and came over to the piano. “Move over. Let me show you.”
“You can’t play it,” Nancy said. “You can’t read music. You can hardly even read English, based on your grades.”
“So what? I can hear. That’s more than you can do.” Brendon wedged himself in at one end of the bench and pushed until Nancy came off the other end.
Then he began to play. He played the piece all the way through, making it swingy. Then he played it again. This time he put in some different chords.
“See?” he said. “Doesn’t that sound better?”
“Yes,” Nancy admitted. She regarded her brother with grudging respect. “How did you do that, just pick it out like that? How do you know what notes to play?”
“How do you not know?” Brendon asked her. “That’s what I can’t understand. How can you sit there and keep hitting clunkers? Can’t you hear how wrong they are?”
“I’m reading the notes out of the book,” Nancy said. “Now get up and let me sit down. I’ve still got fifteen minutes of practice time left.”
Brendon grinned at her and began to play “Three Blind Mice.” Every third note he hit was wrong. Even Nancy could tell that. Then he began putting chords in that went with the wrong notes, and suddenly it was a whole different song.
“That’s ‘Three Blind Rats,’ ” Brendon said.
“Stop showing off,” Nancy told him, “and let me get on with my practice. I want to get it over with so I can go to the library.”
But Brendon didn’t budge. He kept playing his new song louder and louder. He began to sing with it, making his voice very high:
“Three blind rats—Nancy is bats!…”
He was making so much noise that neither one of them heard their mother’s car pull into the driveway. It wasn’t until she said, “Well, Bren!” that they turned and found her standing in the doorway, a brown paper bag in her arms, her eyes wide with wonderment.
“Bren!” she said again. “Is that you playing? How did you ever learn to do that?”
Brendon jumped up from the bench.
“Hi, Mom,” he said. “I was just goofing around. Do you want me to bring some stuff in from the car?”
“But that wasn’t goofing! That was fantastic!” Elizabeth exclaimed. “Has Nancy been teaching you? Was it supposed to be a surprise for me?”
“I haven’t taught him anything,” Nancy said. “He isn’t even reading the music. He’s just banging away by ear.”
“But that’s wonderful!” Elizabeth said. “Really, Brendon! I never guessed you had talent like that! We’ll have to get you lessons immediately! I wonder if Mrs. Nettles can take you on Saturday mornings.”
“No!” Brendon exclaimed in horror. “I don’t want piano lessons! I don’t have time for stuff like that.”
“Of course you do,” his mother said decidedly. “If you can play this well without having had lessons, think how beautifully you’ll play when you’ve had instruction! It would be criminal not to direct that kind of talent!” She went over to him and gave him a hug. “I’m so thrilled! I just can’t tell you! And, yes, you can bring in the rest of the grocery bags, please. Just set them on the kitchen counter.”
When Brendon had banged his way out the back door, she turned to Nancy. There was a look of wonder in her eyes.
“Isn’t this strange?” she said. “My mother predicted it! I’d forgotten all about that. It is just incredible.”
“What do you mean?” Nancy asked her.
“Do you remember a couple of months ago when we were talking about magic, about how there might be special people in the world blessed with magical talents? I told you then how my mother had always seemed to me to be one of those people. She told me once that one day she’d have a grandson. She said he’d be like his father, except that he’d have the gift of music.”
“She really said that?” Nancy stared at her mother in amazement.
“She really did. It was so long ago, I’d forgotten all about it until right now. And here is Brendon with the ability to play by ear! It’s like something in a fairy tale!”
“Did she—” Nancy could hardly bring out the question. “Did she—our grandmother—did she predict anything else? I mean, about Kirby and me, maybe?”
“It seems to me that she might have,” Elizabeth said. “I’m afraid I didn’t always listen too closely. She was old and sick then. She rambled a lot. I was so busy trying to make her comfortable and take care of her that I didn’t even try to follow everything she said.”
At that moment, Brendon came in with his arms loaded with groceries, and his mother went with him into the kitchen to put them away.
Nancy did not go to the library that afternoon as she had planned. Instead, she thought for a long time and finally went up to the attic. It wasn’t a real attic like the ones children in stories always played in. It was simply a space between the rafters and the roof, just large enough for storage.
There wasn’t even proper flooring, so she had to walk bent over, balancing on the beams.
At the far end of the attic, there was a small window that wasn’t made to open, and along the wall beside it were some cardboard boxes. In them were the things that Elizabeth had stored when she put the house up for rent after her mother’s death. Seating herself on the wooden support next to the first of the boxes, Nancy stretched her legs out for balance and began to investigate the contents.
This box contained clothing: dresses and gloves and shoes, an assortment of odd, old-fashioned hats, and a christening gown for a baby. The gown was yellow with age, and Nancy lifted it out carefully.
This must have been Mom’s, she thought with awe, trying to imagine her mother as a baby tiny enough to fit into such a garment. Had it been used for Kirby or her as well? Probably not, since the two of them had been christened together and their mother would not have wanted to play favorites.
I’ll use it for the christening of my own daughters, Nancy decided. And Kirby—but then, Kirby would probably never marry and have children. Not anytime soon, at least, if she continued with her plans to become a professional dancer.
Poor Kirby, Nancy thought with an ache of regret, and she laid the little gown carefully away again against the day when it would next be put to use. She already knew that she would be having three daughters and two sons someday.
The second box was filled with papers. Some were legal-looking documents having to do with house payments and taxes. Beneath these were the more personal things—diaries and scrapbooks and engagement calendars and letters.
One letter flashed up at her in her father’s familiar handwriting.
“Lizzie, darling,” it said, “my poor sweet turtledove! I know ho
w tough it must be for you, stuck there with your mother so sick and the two howling babies and everything else to handle. Why don’t you hire a nanny to take over so you can come here and join me? I’ve got a great new assignment to cover the nightclubs of Paris! It would be so much more fun if you could be here!”
Nancy turned the letter facedown and added it to the pile of tax statements. She did not want to read any further, nor could she bear to look through the scrapbooks and diaries. The days when her mother had been “my poor sweet turtledove” were now behind them. Or—were they? Surely there must be some way—
She picked up a photo album. She opened it and smiled despite herself at the pretty girl who posed self-consciously on the pages. Elizabeth had been in her teens then, a slighter version of Kirby, dressed in miniskirts and fishnet stockings and tops with shoulder pads. Her hair was puffed out like a balloon and held back from her round, sweet face with a wide, black headband.
The background of the pictures was familiar. It was the same house they were living in now. The trees and vines were hardly started, and the house itself seemed to be nestled between barren dunes. There was a boy in a couple of the snapshots.
In one he was dressed in a dinner jacket and was gazing down at the young Elizabeth with an adoring look on his face. She was wearing a long, fluffy dress and a pinned-on corsage, and around her neck a little locket dangled on a thin chain. When she looked more closely, Nancy recognized the boy as a young Tom Duncan.
She turned the page, and there at last she found what she was really looking for. She recognized the face as soon as she saw it. Her mother had a snapshot of her own parents that she carried in her wallet, but the woman in that picture was old and snowy-haired and wore glasses.
Here in the album, she was much younger. She had flaxen hair, piled high on her head, and a straight, firm mouth and clear eyes that looked straight into Nancy’s own. It’s true, Nancy thought in astonishment. I do look exactly like her.
She laid the album open in her lap and sat studying the face in the picture. It was a strong face, shaped by bones instead of flesh. An intelligent face, too intense to be really pretty. I know you, Nancy thought. I know you, Grandma.
It was a strange feeling, this knowing, this complete and absolute knowing of a person whom she could not even remember.
Nancy closed her eyes, and the face was still there before her, etched upon the inside of her eyelids. It was as if it had been waiting all these many years to come into her mind, and now it was there, and it had no intention of ever leaving.
Nancy reached out a ways and stopped, beginning to feel frightened. I can’t, she thought—and even as she thought it, she knew that it wasn’t true. It was there, the thing she was reaching for, right there at her mind’s edge. She could, she could, reach out and touch it if she tried.
I’m not ready, she cried silently. Not for this! It’s too soon! I’m too young! I don’t know enough!
But she had no control any longer, for now her mind was suddenly moving on without her. The face on her lids was blurring, softening, shrinking with the years, until it was much more like the snapshot in Elizabeth’s wallet than like the one in the album.
The room was warm and close and filled with the smell of illness.
“To the boy,” the old woman was saying, “I leave the gift of music.”
“But, Mother!” Elizabeth took the thin old hand in hers. “There is no boy. There are just the two little girls.”
“There is no boy now,” agreed the woman on the bed. “Soon though, there will be. To him, the gift of music, although it may not do him much good, being as how he resembles his father. To one of my granddaughters I leave the gift of dance, and to the other—”
“To me?” Nancy said. She spoke aloud, and she could hear her voice ringing clear in the empty attic.
Elizabeth did not turn her head, but the grandmother said, “To you, a sort of magic. Do you want it?”
“I don’t know,” Nancy said. “It scares me. I don’t know how to use it.”
“You will learn. You must learn if you accept it. A gift is nothing unless it’s used. A mind must be exercised, stretched, trained to its full potential, like a dancer’s body, like the hands of a pianist.”
“You mean I must practice?” Nancy asked.
“More than practice. Practice is doing the same thing over and over. There must be more than that. There must be reaching. You must go out, out, in all directions, farther each time than seems possible, and the next time farther still—”
“Mother, dear,” Elizabeth said, “you need to stop talking. You need to save your strength. You can tell me things later.”
“It isn’t you I’m talking to,” the grandmother said.
“But Mother”—and there were tears in her daughter’s eyes as she bent to kiss the sunken cheek—“I’m the only one here. There’s no one in this room but me.”
Nancy opened her eyes. The album still lay in her lap, open to the picture. The light from the little window fell in a trickle across the cardboard boxes.
Nancy raised her hands and pressed them against her forehead. Her head ached, and she was tired, tired as though she had been running for miles, had not slept in months and—
And I did it! The realization leapt alive in her mind, chasing the weariness like dust before a windstorm. I did it! I did it! I reached backward! What was the word? She had read it aloud to Kirby. Retrocognition—a knowledge, a reliving of events past.
But surely it was not meant to be this—this mingling of past and present! Looking backward in time…. But then, that wasn’t too much stranger, really, than looking forward, than knowing that the phone was about to ring and that the voice on it would be her father’s. The looking ahead, through seconds or minutes, had been so much a part of her for so long that she had never even had to reach for it. It simply happened, like breathing, like one foot stretching out automatically to follow the other.
But we touched, Nancy thought incredulously. I found my grandmother, and we touched! How could that have happened, unless—unless—
You are so like your grandmother. Elizabeth’s words came back to her. She had spoken them more than once. Always Nancy had thought she meant the physical appearance. What if it is more than that? she thought now. What if Grandma could reach forward, into the future, and I can reach backward, into the past, and what if somewhere in between with both of us reaching—we met?!
The whole idea was so strange that it was terrifying. And yet there had been nothing evil in the experience. It had been beautiful in its way, like opening a box and finding that it had no bottom, that you could reach down and down and down inside of it and never find it empty and never find an end.
It was quiet and peaceful in the attic. Nancy sat there and thought for a long, long time. She thought about Kirby and her dancing, Kirby pushing her body to the furthest limits of what it could do.
She thought about Brendon, who never did anything unless he had to.
She thought about her mother.
Why not give it to Mom? she asked herself. Why didn’t she give this gift of magic to her own daughter?
But perhaps she had tried to. Perhaps Elizabeth, “turtledove” Elizabeth, had not been able to accept the challenge of so strange a gift.
But I am, Nancy thought. I am.
She looked again at the picture of the woman in the album, and her own face looked back at her. The two pairs of eyes, hers and her grandmother’s, met and held, and out of all the strangeness and uncertainty, Nancy knew one thing.
Whatever this power was that had been given to her, it had been given out of love.
Semester grades were given the second week in January. Nancy got straight As in everything except social studies, and in that she got a C.
“That’s not so terrible,” said Kirby, whose own card was a blend of Bs and Cs. “I don’t have a single A, and I didn’t expect one. And look at Brendon, with all those notes from the teacher and a D in citizen
ship! You’re some kind of saint compared to the two of us!”
“That’s not the point,” Nancy said angrily. “I deserve an A in social studies! That’s my best subject. I’ve been to all the places! I could practically have written that textbook myself.” Her blue eyes were blazing. “It’s that nutcase Ms. Green! She’s deliberately marked me down. It’s not because of my work! It’s because she doesn’t like me!”
“You made her look like an idiot in front of Mr. Duncan,” Kirby said. “She’s probably never forgiven you for that. She expected you to be punished for cheating on the quiz. I don’t think she believes in ESP.”
“I don’t care if she didn’t,” Nancy said. “She’s unfair, and she’s nasty. Everyone else in the class thinks so, too.”
“You’ve made a lot of friends since Ms. Green started picking on you,” Kirby observed. “Jessie and Emily and all those other girls. When we first started school they never paid any attention to you, and now they hang out with you all the time.”
“They’re just mad for me,” Nancy said. “She’s not going to get away with it, Kirby. I’m going to teach her a thing or two!”
“That’s a stupid thing to say,” Kirby commented. “You can’t ‘teach’ a teacher. She’s a cranky old lady and she’s probably going to retire soon, anyway. Just put up with her for a few more months, and then you’ll never have to think about her again.”
There was something about the way Nancy was acting lately that bothered Kirby. Her twin had always been serious and intense by nature, but now these qualities seemed magnified. There was a permanent frown line between her eyes, as if she were concentrating on the world’s heaviest problems.
The change in her sister had come so suddenly and abruptly that Kirby could pinpoint the exact day. It was the first weekend after the holidays. She herself had spent almost the entire day at the dance studio, and when she came home in the late afternoon, Nancy had been waiting for her.
“Kirby,” she had said, “I need you to help me with something. Will you?”