The Scholomance (43 page)

“—that thou
wouldst give much to have it, even in pretense. Yet this Connie is as close as
thee ever came to that Eden, and she only for that she never knew love better
than in thee. And that is surely the greatest jest of all, and a miserable worm
of a mortal, for it would have to be the most wretched creature—”

She heard a
rusty scream wrench out of her and threw herself at him.

“—that ever
tried to love thee,” Kazuul concluded, watching her harmless hands scratch and
beat at his stony hide. “If pity ever had power to move such as me, I would
pity her, this Connie, because thou art all the better friend she has known,
and thou—” He caught her railing fists and then cupped her shaking cheek with
cruel tenderness. “—thou art terrible.”

“I hate you,”
she whispered.

“Thou dost not. And
I am terrible,” he added, with a rueful smile. “And truly, what more proof of
thy nature do I need?”

She felt his
lips on hers, felt them part for him, then yanked herself back and out of his
arms. She couldn’t hurt him, couldn’t shout at him, so she slapped him again
right across his smirking face and ran for the door, fighting her way up the
risers in a haze of rage.

“Thou wilt find
her,” he called, his voice booming right behind her. “And thou wilt save her
when thou dost, I think. But never thee. Thou art beyond all redemption.”

She fell on one
of the benches, stumbled up again, and left bloody smears on the door when she
forced it open.

“I told thee not
to ask,” he said, his voice receding now. “And such a mood of honesty I have
about me that I tell thee now, why not leave her lost among us, Mara? Let her
languish where she lies, believing only the best of thee until she passeth out
of all reason. Wouldst thou truly have her know thee better?”

But the door
slammed behind her then and he did not follow, so that, mercifully, was all.

*
         
*
         
*

She ran home, or
as much like it as she could, just like any frustrated child will run to the
security of her room when pleas and tantrums fail her. In her cell, alone for
the moment, Mara took off her locket and wrapped a loop of cheap chain around
her fingers so that it could dangle. It spun slowly back and forth, flashing
reflected light from the blister lamp in the hall around the dark cell. Mara
stared without seeing. She was back in the Panic Room, dialing back her
memories to the day, just six days before her twelfth birthday, the day of the
orange cat.

Her party had
been planned now for three months. It was going to be at Madame Jade’s Tea
Parlor, in the city. All the little girls from the right families were invited.
Kimara’s party dress, in crimson and gold Chinese silk, hung in plastic in her
closet. Today, Mara’s mother had told her she could invite Connie if she wanted
to. This concession had been the result of one idle-seeming request on her part
about two months back, and a veritable psychic siege ever since. Caroline
Warner resisted the idea much more than she ever had any of Mara’s previous
mental demands. She didn’t like Connie, who she saw as a filthy, cringing
little foreigner, and she hated Connie’s mother, who was all these things as
well as noisy and socially awkward. She had tolerated Connie’s presence at her
daughter’s previous parties, but the Tea Room was really more of her own idea
and she wanted only her own kind of people there. The girls, well, the girls
were rather like accessories, no different from a bracelet or a brooch, and
Caroline had been looking forward to seeing her well-behaved if strange little
daughter among the others, shrill and giggly creatures that they were. Having
the Vitelli brat around would simply ruin everything.

Mara did not
insist, not out loud. She simply pummeled her mother’s mind under the surface
day and night—hourly on the weekends—until her mother wore out and started
seeing things her way. Kimara asked for so little, after all. She had only the
one friend and it was her own party. Things of that sort. So this morning, an
exhausted and smudge-eyed Caroline had poured out her breakfast coffee and
announced that if Kimara wanted to bring her ‘little friend and her mother’ to
the Tea Room on Monday, so be it. Dress was formal. Mara extended the
invitation after school, visiting with Connie at Connie’s apartment, and
Connie’s mother (who was rather noisy and socially awkward to tell the truth,
and who knew it, which was even worse) had accepted, her large heart gripped by
dread at the thought of the malicious old hens who would be at that sort of
party with her. She would have to have her hair done, she supposed. And mend
the buckle on her good shoes.

Her thoughts had
only become more frantic as the afternoon wore on, and so Mara had excused them
from the apartment. Now the two best friends walked through the Poho County
Arboretum, relaxing in the autumn air.

“We could have
gone to the movies,” Connie said. “You never want to do anything fun.”

“This is fun.”

“No one’s even
here!”

“That’s why it’s
fun.” Mara led the way up the bark-covered path to the hiking trails. She knew
them all by heart.

“But there’s
nothing to do!”

“Read the
information plaques. See if you can spot the peachleaf willow.”

“You are a laugh
riot. Have you been told?” Connie reached up and stripped the leaves from an
overhanging branch, scowling at nature’s well-manicured glory. “Can’t we sit
down at least?”

“Sure. There’s a
bench over by the river.”

“Thank God for
really tiny favors.” Connie tromped on ahead. She broke off a branch and used
it to beat on other trees as she passed them, sending late-summer berries and
dead leaves flying. She was wearing an Arbor Day t-shirt.
Love your Mother
Earth
, it said. “You know, if I didn’t like you so much, I’d never come
along on these dumb excursions.”

“Your mom thinks
they’re educational.”

“My
mom
—”
Connie rolled her eyes and delivered a particularly savage blow to an
unsuspecting huckleberry bush. “—thinks garlic is a food group. Besides, what
does she know about educational? I don’t even think she graduated high school.”

“She had other
things on her mind.” ‘Like being pregnant with your brother Johnny,’ Mara
thought, but did not say. Connie hadn’t done that particular bit of math yet,
and anyway, if she ever said such a thing, Connie would want to know how she
knew and they were still four months away from that night of purple-haired
fairies and frank talk of magic. “Besides, neither did Abraham Lincoln. Or
Thomas Edison, I think.”

“Yeah, whatever.
All I know is—oh my God!”

Mara gave
Connie’s mind a tap and saw the dying cat through those eyes before she had to
use her own. “Don’t touch it,” she said immediately, and still had to grab
Connie’s arm to keep her friend from picking it up. Should have hammered the
suggestion in…but she didn’t want to do that to Connie.

“Is it sick?”
Connie asked, her eyes huge as she watched the cat gasp and strain.

“Could be. It’s
not okay, that’s for sure.”

It was a big
cat, orange and white, and it had surely come out the worst in a fight with
another animal over the easy leavings of some family picnic. A dog maybe, or a
raccoon. Raccoons were a lot more vicious than most people realized. It had
managed to crawl here, close to the trail, before its wounds overwhelmed it and
so here it lay. As it writhed, the terrible extent of its injuries were
revealed—bloody mats, a torn ear, a few shallow bites, and finally, its
wide-opened belly. Its teats protruded on either side of the ghastly wound; it
was pregnant, but not due. Mara could sense its life and the little lives it
carried, but of course, it had no thoughts. Despite the things most people
liked to believe about their pets and animals in general, they really didn’t
have much in the way of minds.

“Should we get
someone?” Connie asked.

“For what?”

“To fix it, of
course!”

Mara could not
help the incredulous, dubious expression that crawled over her face at that. She
looked from Connie’s heartsick face to the dirt-flecked coils of the cat’s
intestines and back again. “There’s no fixing that, Connie.”

The cat rolled
onto its side, purring in the extremity of its panic and pain. It did not see
the two girls who stood over it or hear their booming, giant-like voices. If
one of them had touched it, even to try and help, it would have bit. Animals do
that, even the pet ones. They couldn’t reason the way people claimed they
could. They didn’t love you back.

“I think it’s
dying,” Connie whispered.

“It is.”

“Well, what can
we do?”

There were tears
in Connie’s eyes. Her twelve year-old heart was breaking, just as if she knew
this cat, had loved it all her life.

“We can’t do
anything,” Mara said. “It has to die.”

The cat yowled,
a terrible rattling sound. It took two or three rapid breaths, then one slow
one, and then died. Mara felt its mind fade out. The kittens began to at once
to panic in their uncomprehending, unborn way. Then they died too, one by one,
as Mara held Connie through the storm of Connie’s grief. Fleas jumped off the
dead cat. Ants crawled on.

Mara couldn’t
quite understand why Connie was taking it so hard. She’d been to hospitals
before, and for that matter, to parks and movie theaters and even church, when
her mother’s family were visiting. Anywhere there were lots of people, she’d
felt people who knew someone who had died or were even dying themselves. This
wasn’t the first time she’d shared it, and she seriously doubted it would be
the last. It was just something people did. They got sick, they got shot, they
got in crash-ups on the freeway or burned up in buildings; people fell off
things, like bridges or roofs or ladders; they got things thrown at them, like
bottles or bowling balls, and they got things thrown into them, like knives or
even a soda straw if the weather was really bad and the wind blew hard enough;
or sometimes even got things dropped on them, like big branches or pianos being
lifted into apartments. You could go outside and get hit by lightning, or
sometimes lightning could come in the house and get you for talking on phone or
using the shower. You could get murdered, or kidnapped and murdered, or even
kidnapped and raped and murdered. Sometimes sick or sad people suicided
themselves by sticking their heads in ovens or cutting up their wrists, and
sometimes people who didn’t mean it got dead when they drank too much or used
too many drugs. Death happened to everyone, every day, everywhere you looked. It
didn’t have to mean anything. When someone died, you just buried them and moved
on with your life.

Connie was
crying.

“Let’s bury it,”
Mara suggested, after groping some time for some comforting thing to say.

Connie picked
flowers while Mara found some soft soil under a maple tree and dug out a grave.
She lined it with leaves and pine needles, and laid the cat inside, curled on
itself so that none of the blood or messy bits showed. She waited for Connie to
pet it a few times and then covered it over with dried autumn leaves so that
when they filled in the hole, the dirt couldn’t touch it directly. Connie was
afraid to see that, afraid to see dirt in its fur and its ears and mostly its
eyes if its eyes came open. After the dirt came the flowers and then Mara found
a nice big rock with a flat top to use for a marker and that was the grave.

The two girls
knelt side by side for a long time, staring at it. Connie’s thoughts were
tangled—a collage of cat and blood and grandfather and was it always like that?
They said ‘pass away’ and was that like ‘passing out’, because Bobby Tom said
you could pass out easy on hot days or if you didn’t eat a breakfast. Could she
die if she didn’t eat her breakfast? Could she passout and then, if no one fed
her, passaway like Papa Frankie? She remembered him in his coffin and how Mama
made her kiss him, his check like wax, lying there. They said he passawayed in
his sleep, that it was peaceful, but maybe they just hadn’t been close enough
at the end to hear him yowl.

She started to
cry again, very softly, and Mara knelt there and wondered what else to do. Hesitantly,
she put her arm around Connie’s shoulder, and the other girl immediately swung
around and clutched her close, crying hard but in near-silence. Mara patted
her, stroked her hair, did all the things that grown-ups do to crying little
kids, but none of it made much of a difference to Connie.

So she said,
“Look around.”

“W-what?”

“Look around.” Mara
tipped back her head, studying the branches above her, that dark leafy lattice
eating up the sky, the birds and bugs and everything between her and the heavy
West Coast clouds. After a while, Connie did the same, and Mara said, “The
world just keeps going.”

“I guess.” Connie
let go of her and sat by herself for a while. Finally, she sighed. “You must
think I’m dumb.”

“No I don’t.”

“It was just a
cat.”

Mara shrugged. “So?
I’m just a little kid. I bet you’d feel pretty bad if I died, though. It’s okay
to feel bad when things die.”

“Little kids
don’t die,” Connie said, but uneasily. Mama said they didn’t, she said, ‘Don’t
be silly, angel, you’re going to live a long long time and nothing’s ever going
to get you,’ she
said
that, but—

“Sure they do,”
Mara said. “Sometimes. Bad things happen to kids just they happen to grown-ups.
Or to cats. But the world goes on. So do we.”

“Like…to
heaven?”

“Maybe. Maybe
just as other things, I don’t know. I mean, take the cat.” Mara gave the stone
over the fresh grave a comforting pat. “It’s gone now, but the bugs and stuff
will come along and eat it up, and whatever doesn’t get eaten will turn into
good fertilizer for the bushes and trees right here, and they’ll get bigger and
be homes for all the animals and birds that eat the bugs and worms and stuff. Everything
goes on, see? You, me, everyone.”