Song of Susannah

Yet I’ve missed most of what makes the short-time life worthwhile. Haven’t I? The grief in that voice was awful; the surprise was even worse. And there’s no time for you to tell me. Not now.

Go somewhere else, Susannah said, with no hope at all. Hail a cab, go to a hospital. We’ll have it together, Mia. Maybe we can even raise it toge-

If I have it anywhere but here, it will die and we’ll die with it. She spoke with utter certainty. And I will have it. I’ve been cheated of all but my chap, and I willhave it. But… Susannah… before we go in… you spoke of your mother.

I lied. It was me in Oxford. Lying was easier than trying to explain time travel and parallel worlds.

Show me the truth. Show me your mother. Show me, I beg!

There was no time to debate this request pro and con; it was either do it or refuse on the spur of the moment. Susannah decided to do it.

Look, she said.

THIRTEEN

In the Land of Memory, the time is always Now.

There is an Unfound Door

(O lost)

and when Susannah found it and opened it, Mia saw a woman with her dark hair pulled back from her face and startling gray eyes. There is a cameo brooch at the woman’s throat. She’s sitting at the kitchen table, this woman, in an eternal shaft of sun. In this memory it is always ten minutes past two on an afternoon in October of 1946, the Big War is over, Irene Daye is on the radio, and the smell is always gingerbread.

“Odetta, come and sit with me,” says the woman at the table, she who is mother. “Have something sweet. You look good, girl.”

And she smiles.

O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again!

FOURTEEN

Prosaic enough, you would say, so you would. A young girl comes home from school with her book-bag in one hand and her gym-bag in the other, wearing her white blouse and her pleated St. Ann’s tartan skirt and the knee-socks with the bows on the side (orange and black, the school colors). Her mother, sitting at the kitchen table, looks up and offers her daughter a piece of the gingerbread that just came out of the oven. It is only one moment in an unmarked million, a single atom of event in a lifetime of them. But it stole Mia’s breath

(you look good, girl)

and showed her in a concrete way she had previously not understood how rich motherhood could be… if, that was, it was allowed to run its course uninterrupted.

The rewards?

Immeasurable.

In the end you could be the woman sitting in the shaft of sun. You could be the one looking at the child sailing bravely out of childhood’s harbor. You could be the wind in that child’s unfurled sails.

You.

Odetta, come and sit with me.

Mia’s breath began to hitch in her chest.

Have something sweet.

Her eyes fogged over, the smiling cartoon pig on the awning first doubling, then quadrupling.

You look good, girl.

Some time was better than no time at all. Even five years-or three-was better than no time at all. She couldn’t read, hadn’t been to Morehouse, hadn’t been to no house, but she could do that much math with no trouble: three = better than none. Even one = better than none.

Oh…

Oh, but…

Mia thought of a blue-eyed boy stepping through a door, one that was found instead of lost. She thought of saying to him You look good, son!

She began to weep.

What have I done was a terrible question. What else could I have done was perhaps even worse.

O Discordia!

FIFTEEN

This was Susannah’s one chance to do something: now, while Mia stood at the foot of the steps leading up to her fate. Susannah reached into the pocket of her jeans and touched the turtle, the skolpadda. Her brown fingers, separated from Mia’s white leg by only a thin layer of lining, closed around it.

She pulled it out and flipped it behind her, casting it into the gutter. From her hand into the lap of ka.

Then she was carried up the three steps to the double doors of the Dixie Pig.

SIXTEEN

It was very dim inside and at first Mia could see nothing but murky, reddish-orange lights. Electric flambeaux of the sort that still lit some of the rooms in Castle Discordia. Her sense of smell needed no adjusting, however, and even as a fresh labor pain clamped her tight, her stomach reacted to the smell of roasting pork and cried out to be fed. Her chap cried out to be fed.”

That’s not pork, Mia, Susannah said, and was ignored.

As the doors were closed behind her-there was a man (or a manlike being) standing at each of them-she began to see better. She was at the head of a long, narrow dining room. White napery shone. On each table was a candle in an orange-tinted holder. They glowed like fox-eyes. The floor here in the foyer was black marble, but beyond the maitre d’s stand there was a rug of darkest crimson.

Beside the stand was a sai of about sixty with white hair combed back from a lean and rather predatory face. It was the face of an intelligent man, but his clothes-the blaring yellow sportcoat, the red shirt, the black tie-were those of a used-car salesman or a gambler who specializes in rooking small-town rubes. In the center of his forehead was a red hole about an inch across, as if he had been shot at close range. It swam with blood that never overflowed onto his pallid skin.

At the tables in the dining room stood perhaps fifty men and half again as many women. Most of them were dressed in clothes as loud or louder than those of the white-haired gent. Big rings glared on fleshy fingers, diamond eardrops sparked back orange light from the flambeaux.

There were also some dressed in more sober attire-jeans and plain white shirts seemed to be the costume of choice for this minority. These folken were pallid and watchful, their eyes seemingly all pupil. Around their bodies, swirling so faintly that they sometimes disappeared, were blue auras. To Mia these pallid, aura-enclosed creatures looked quite a bit more human than the low men and women. They were vampires-she didn’t have to observe the sharpened fangs which their smiles disclosed to know it-but still they looked more human than Sayre’s bunch. Perhaps because they once had been human. The others, though…

Their faces are only masks, she observed with growing dismay. Beneath the ones the Wolves wear lie the electric men-the robots-but what is beneath these?

The dining room was breathlessly silent, but from somewhere nearby came the uninterrupted sounds of conversation, laughter, clinking glasses, and cutlery against china. There was a patter of liquid-wine or water, she supposed-and a louder outburst of laughter.

A low man and a low woman-he in a tuxedo equipped with plaid lapels and a red velvet bow tie, she in a strapless silver lame evening dress, both of startling obesity-turned to look (with obvious displeasure) toward the source of these sounds, which seemed to be coming from behind some sort of swaggy tapestry depicting knights and their ladies at sup. When the fat couple turned to look, Mia saw their cheeks wrinkle upward like clingy cloth, and for a moment, beneath the soft angle of their jaws, she saw something dark red and tufted with hair.

Susannah, was that skin? Mia asked. Dear God, was it their skin?