Зенна Гендерсон - Something Bright

"Hey!" I cried indignantly, and then remembered I wasn't at home. I heard an odd whimpering sob and then Mrs. Klevity backed slowly away, still kneeling on the floor.
"Only the lock on the suitcase," she said. "Here's your jammas." She handed me the bag and ponderously pulled herself upright again.
We went silently to bed after she had limped around and checked the house, even under the bed again. I heard that odd breathy whisper of a prayer and lay awake, trying to add up something shiny and the odd eyes and the whispering sob. Finally I shrugged in the dark and wondered what I'd pick for funny when I grew up. All grownups had some kind of funny.
The next night Mrs. Klevity couldn't get down on her knees to look under the bed. She'd hurt herself when she plumped down on the floor after yanking me away from the bed.
"You'll have to look for me tonight," she said slowly, nursing her knees. "Look good. Oh, Anna, look good!"
I looked as good as I could, not knowing what I was looking for.
"It should be under the bed," she said, her palms tight on her knees as she rocked back and forth. "But you can't be sure. It might miss completely."
"What might?" I asked, hunkering down by the bed.
She turned her face blindly toward me. "The way out," she said. "The way back again—"
"Back again?" I pressed my check to the floor again. "Well, I don't see anything. Only dark and suitcases."
"Nothing bright? Nothing? Nothing—" She tried to lay her face on her knees, but she was too unbendy to manage it, so she put her hands over her face instead. Grownups aren't supposed to cry. She didn't quite, but her hands looked wet when she reached for the clock to wind it.
I lay in the dark, one strand of her hair tickling my hand where it lay on the pillow. Maybe she was crazy. I felt a thrill of terror fan out on my spine. I carefully moved my hand from under the lock of hair. How can you find a way out under a bed? I'd be glad when Mr. Klevity got home, eggs or no eggs, dime or no dime.
Somewhere in the darkness of the night, I was suddenly swimming to wakefulness, not knowing what was waking me but feeling that Mrs. Klevity was awake too.
"Anna." Her voice was small and light and silver. "Anna—"
"Hummm?" I murmured, my voice still drowsy.
"Anna, have you ever been away from home?" I turned toward her, trying in the dark to make sure it was Mrs. Klevity. She sounded so different.
"Yes," I said. "Once I visited Aunt Katie at Rocky Butte for a week."
"Anna." I don't know whether she was even hearing my answers; her voice was almost a chant, "Anna, have you ever been in prison?"
"No! Of course not!" I recoiled indignantly. "You have to be awful bad to be in prison."
"Oh, no. Oh, no!" she sighed. "Not jail, Anna. Prison, prison. The weight of the flesh—bound about—"
"Oh," I said, smoothing my hands across my eyes. She was talking to a something deep in me that never got talked to, that hardly even had words. "Like when the wind blows the clouds across the moon and the grass whispers along the road and all the trees pull like balloons at their trunks and one star comes out and says 'Come' and the ground says 'Stay' and part of you tries to go and it hurts—" I could feel the slender roundness of my ribs under my pressing hands. "And it hurts—"
"Oh, Anna, Anna!" The soft, light voice broke. "You feel that way and you belong Here. You won't ever—"
The voice stopped and Mrs. Klevity rolled over. Her next words came thickly, as though a gray film were over them as over her eyes. "Are you awake, Anna? Go to sleep, child. Morning isn't yet."
I heard the heavy sigh of her breathing as she slept. And finally I slept too, trying to visualize what Mrs. Klevity would look like if she looked like the silvery voice-in-the-dark.
I sat savoring my egg the next morning, letting my thoughts slip in and out of my mind to the rhythm of my jaws. What a funny dream to have, to talk with a silver-voiced someone. To talk about the way blowing clouds and windy moonlight felt. But it wasn't a dream! I paused with my fork raised. At least not my dream. But how can you tell? If you're part of someone else's dream, can it still be real for you?
"Is something wrong with the egg?" Mrs. Klevity peered at me.
"No—no—" I said, hastily snatching the bite on my fork. "Mrs. Klevity—"
"Yes." Her voice was thick and heavy-footed.
"Why did you ask me about being in prison?"
"Prison?" Mrs. Klevity blinked blindly. "Did I ask you about prison?"
"Someone did—I thought—" I faltered, shyness shutting down on me again.
"Dreams." Mrs. Klevity stacked her knife and fork on her plate. "Dreams."
I wasn't quite sure I was to be at Klevity's the next evening. Mr. Klevity was supposed to get back
sometime during the evening. But Mrs. Klevity welcomed me. "Don't know when he'll get home, " she said. "Maybe not until morning. If he comes early, you can go
home to sleep and I'll give you your dime anyway."
"Oh, no," I said, Mom's teachings solidly behind me. "I couldn't take it if I didn't stay."
"A gift," said Mrs. Klevity.
We sat opposite one another until the silence stretched too thin for me to bear.
"In olden times," I said, snatching at the magic that drew stories from Mom, "when you were a little girl—"
"When I was a girl—" Mrs. Klevity rubbed her knees with reflective hands. "The other Where. The other When."
"In olden times," I persisted, "things were different then."
"Yes." I settled down comfortably, recognizing the reminiscent tone of voice. "You do crazy things when you are young." Mrs. Klevity leaned heavily on the table. "Things you have no business doing. You volunteer when you're young." I jerked as she lunged across the table and grabbed both my arms. "But I am young! Three years isn't an eternity. I am young!"
I twisted one arm free and pried at her steely fingers that clamped my other one.
"Oh." She let go. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to hurt you."
She pushed back the tousled brush of her hair.
"Look," she said, her voice was almost silver again. "Under all this—this grossness, I'm still me. I thought I could adjust to anything, but I had no idea that they'd put me in such—" She tugged at her sagging dress. "Not the clothes!" she cried. "Clothes you can take off. But this—" Her fingers dug into her heavy shoulder and I could see the bulge of flesh between them.
"If I knew anything about the setup maybe I could locate it. Maybe I could call. Maybe—"
Her shoulders sagged and her eyelids dropped down over her dull eyes.
"It doesn't make any sense to you," she said, her voice heavy and thick again. "To you I'd be old even
There. At the time it seemed like a perfect way to have an odd holiday and help out with research, too. But we got caught."
She began to count her fingers, mumbling to herself. "Three years There, but Here that's—eight threes are—" She traced on the table with a blunt forefinger, her eyes close to the old, wornout cloth.
"Mrs. Klevity," My voice scared me in the silence, but I was feeling the same sort of upsurge that catches you sometimes when you're playing-like and it gets so real. "Mrs. Klevity, if you've lost something, maybe I could look for it for you."
"You didn't find it last night," she said.
"Find what?"
She lumbered to her feet. "Let's look again. Everywhere. They'd surely be able to locate the house."
"What are we looking for?" I asked, searching the portable oven.
"You'll know it when we see it," she said.
And we searched the whole house. Oh, such nice things! Blankets, not tattered and worn, and even an extra one they didn't need. And towels with wash rags that matched—and weren't rags. And uncracked dishes that matched! And glasses that weren't jars. And books. And money. Crisp new-looking bills in the little box in the bottom drawer—pushed back under some extra pillow cases. And clothes—lots and lots of clothes. All too big for any of us, of course, but my practiced eye had already visualized this, that and the other cut down to dress us all like rich people.
I sighed as we sat wearily looking at one another. Imagine having so much and still looking for something else! It was bedtime and all we had for our pains were dirty hands and tired backs.
I scooted out to the bath house before I undressed. I gingerly washed the dirt off my hands under the cold of the shower and shook them dry on the way back to the house. Well, we had moved everything in the place, but nothing was what Mrs. Klevity looked for.
Back in the bedroom, I groped under the bed for my jammas and again had to lie flat and burrow under the bed for the tattered bag. Our moving around had wedged it back between two cardboard cartons. I squirmed under farther and tried to ease it out after shoving the two cartons a little farther apart. The bag tore, spilling out my jammas, so I grasped them in the bend of my elbow and started to back out.
Then the whole world seemed to explode into brightness that pulsated and dazzled, that splashed brilliance into my astonished eyes until I winced them shut to rest their seeing and saw the dark inversions of the radiance behind my eyelids.
I forced my eyes open again and looked sideways so the edge of my seeing was all I used until I got more accustomed to the glory.
Between the two cartons was an opening like a window would be, but little, little, into a wonderland of things I could never tell. Colors that had no names. Feelings that made windy moonlight a puddle of dust. I felt tears burn out of my eyes and start down my cheeks, whether from brightness or wonder, I don't know. I blinked them away and looked again.
Someone was in the brightness, several someones. They were leaning out of the squareness, beckoning and calling—silver signals and silver sounds.
"Mrs. Klevity," I thought. "Something bright."
I took another good look at the shining people and the tree things that were like music bordering a road, and grass that was the song my evening grass hummed in the wind a last, last look, and began to back out.
I scrambled to my feet, clutching my jammas. "Mrs. Klevity." She was still sitting at the table, as solid as a pile of bricks, the sketched face under the wild hair a sad, sad one.
"Yes, child." She hardly heard herself.
"Something bright …" I said.
Her heavy head lifted slowly, her blind face turned to me. "What, child?"
I felt my fingers bite into my jammas and the cords in my neck getting tight and my stomach clenching itself. "Something bright!" I thought I screamed. She didn't move. I grabbed her arm and dragged her off-balance in her chair. "Something bright!"
"Anna." She righted herself on the chair. "Don't be mean."
I grabbed the bedspread and yanked it up. The light sprayed out like a sprinkler on a lawn.
Then she screamed. She put both hands up to her heavy face and screamed, "Leolienn! It's here!
Hurry, hurry!"
"Mr. Klevity isn't here," I said. "He hasn't got back."
"I can't go without him! Leolienn!"
"Leave a note!" I cried. "If you're there, you can make them come back again and I can show him the
right place!" The upsurge had passed make-believe and everything was realer than real.
Then, quicker than I ever thought she could move, she got paper and a pencil. She was scribbling away at the table as I stood there holding the spread. So I dropped to my knees and then to my stomach and crawled under the bed again. I filled my eyes with the brightness and beauty and saw, beyond it, serenity and orderliness and—and uncluttered cleanness. The miniature landscape was like a stage setting for a fairy tale—so small, so small—so lovely.
And then Mrs. Klevity tugged at my ankle and I slid out, reluctantly, stretching my sight of the bright square until the falling of the spread broke it. Mrs. Klevity worked her way under the bed, her breath coming pantingly, her big, ungainly body inching along awkwardly.
She crawled and crawled and crawled until she should have come up short against the wall, and I knew she must be funneling down into the brightness, her face, head and shoulders, so small, so lovely,
like her silvery voice. But the rest of her, still gross and ugly, like a butterfly trying to skin out of its cocoon.
Finally only her feet were sticking out from under the bed and they thrashed and waved and didn't go anywhere, so I got down on the floor and put my feet against hers and braced myself against the dresser and pushed. And pushed and pushed. Suddenly there was a going, a finishing, and my feet dropped to the floor.
There, almost under the bed, lay Mrs. Klevity's shabby old-lady black shoes, toes pointing away from each other. I picked them up in my hands, wanting, somehow, to cry. Her saggy lisle stockings were still in the shoes.
Slowly I pulled all of the clothes of Mrs. Klevity out from under the bed. They were held together by a thin skin, a sloughed-off leftover of Mrs. Klevity that only showed, gray and lifeless, where her bare hands and face would have been, and her dull gray filmed eyes.
I let it crumple to the floor and sat there, holding one of her old shoes in my hand.
The door rattled and it was gray, old, wrinkled Mr. Klevity.
"Hello, child," he said. "Where's my wife?"
"She's gone," I said, not looking at him. "She left you a note there on the table."
"Gone—?" He left the word stranded in mid-air as he read Mrs. Klevity's note.
The paper fluttered down. He yanked a dresser drawer open and snatched out spool-looking things,
both hands full. Then he practically dived under the bed, his elbows thudding on the floor, to-hurt hard. And there was only a wiggle or two and his shoes slumped away from each other.
I pulled his cast-aside from under the bed and crawled under it myself. I saw the tiny picture frame—bright, bright, but so small.
I crept close to it, knowing I couldn't go through it. I saw the tiny perfection of the road, the landscape, the people—the laughing people who crowded around the two new rejoicing figures—the two silvery, lovely young creatures who cried out in tiny voices as they danced. The girl-one threw a kiss outward before they all turned away and ran up the winding white road together.
The frame began to shrink, faster, faster, until it squeezed to a single bright bead and then blinked out.
All at once the house was empty and cold. The upsurge was gone. Nothing was real any more. All at once the faint ghost of the smell of eggs was frightening. All at once I whimpered, "My lunch money!"
I scrambled to my feet, tumbling Mrs. Klevity's clothes into a disconnected pile. I gathered up my jammas and leaned across the table to get my sweater. I saw my name on a piece of paper. I picked it up and read it.
Everything that is ours in this house now belongs to Anna-across-the-court, the little girl that's been staying with me at night.
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