“It’s hard,” Jean muttered. She had brought her Barbie in her waistband, and now she pulled it out to play, hunching her shoulders so maybe the older girls wouldn’t see.
Jean was little. That’s what Susan always said. Kate and Jean were little and had no patience. Kate would not be little that way.
She tried again. And again. On her sixth attempt at forcing herself to see nothing but pieces of twig and air, the stick rose, shakily, and held at eye level.
Laysia had been watching.
“Well done!” she said. “You’ve answered your own question, then.”
She had, but not quite in the way she’d meant it. She couldn’t do what the others could. She watched Nell’s stick do a jig in the air, watched Susan graduate to making pebbles and even rocks move, and, by the end of the day, Kate had gotten her stick to rise steadily and move in any direction she wanted, even as Jean’s still shook haltingly just beside her shoulders. So she was almost satisfied.
All day they practiced moving things without touching them, until Kate felt shaky with exhaustion. She wondered why she should be so tired, when they’d been sitting in the clearing all day. They walked back through the woods amid the late-afternoon clamor of birds, and she nearly stumbled. But Susan reached for her hand, to steady her.
Coming from the clearing back toward the cottage felt like walking into a rainstorm. Everyone drooped. To Kate, it was like taking off in a plane, her ears full and popping with a hateful rushing noise. After a while, it receded, like a bad smell that had grown familiar, but it was there just the same.
Moods turned, too. Susan’s lips pressed into a thin line. Nell stomped. Jean was worst of all, maybe because she was loudest. That evening, she demanded to know how she’d get her letters when Max didn’t know where to send them and ordered Susan to take her back down so she could get them.
Susan looked as if someone had punched her. Without a word, she took a book from Laysia’s shelf, went into the bedroom, and shut the door. Nell had some words, none of which would have been allowed back home. Then she barged out to the garden, where Laysia was harvesting vegetables for supper, and yanked carrots from the ground as if she’d caught them doing something bad.
“Jean, he’ll come. . . .” Kate tried.
But Jean shook her head and ran outside to sit behind the house, away from the others. Kate followed her. There was no garden in back, only clover and grass and tall trees crowding the edge of the clearing like children pushing to get out the door at the end of school.
Jean had unfolded one of Max’s letters. She kept the ones she’d gotten all crumpled in her pocket, and the page she examined now was veined with creases and smudged with fingermarks.
“Which one is that?” Kate asked her, trying to make conversation.
“The one about teachers and trains,” Jean said in a muffled voice. Her nose was stuffy from crying.
“Want to read it to me?” Jean had read them so many times that she knew all the hard words now.
Jean gave a one-shouldered shrug. “You can read it.”
Kate took the letter and smoothed it as best she could. She remembered this one. Max’s cramped, dark hand sloped across the page in the fading light.
“‘Dear Jean,’” she read. Kate glanced at her sister, who made an effort to quiet herself so she could hear, despite the fact that she’d heard it twenty times before.
“‘It’s a good thing I’ve been spending my days here, even if Nell doesn’t think so. You can tell her I said that.’”
Jean sniffed loudly, and Kate wondered again if Max knew what had happened to Nell. To all of them.
“Well, go on,” Jean prodded. Her voice sounded a little better. Kate cleared her throat and read on:
“The reason is because what we learned on our own was just a percent of a fraction of what there is to learn. We were like somebody trying to figure out how to build a car by himself, just because he figured out how to make one wheel. Here, people have been studying how to do things, how to understand things, that is, since almost the beginning of time. They have books and books and books of people’s thoughts and learning and discoveries, and Tur Kaysh says that in the old times, they knew even better than we do today, with us being so far from the beginning of everything. I’ve never met a teacher like him before. At home, questions aren’t always so welcome. Teachers get impatient, and they want to move on. Don’t you hate when they say that? It’s like the class is a train and I’m holding everybody up in getting to the next station. It’s not like that with the Guide at all. It’s more like having a conversation. We talk and talk — that is, he talks and I listen, but he doesn’t mind questions. He says questions are the lifeblood of thought. He says they’re the mark of the true student. Wait till I tell them that at home. Maybe I can skip a grade and get to college faster. Even if I did, I don’t think it would be as good as this. When I visit next, I’ll show you some things you wouldn’t believe. See you soon.
Your brother,
Max”
Neither of them said much when she’d finished. Jean wiped her nose with the back of her hand, then kicked at the clover until she’d gouged out a clump with her heel. Overhead, the sky had begun to fade gently into its long summer twilight. After a while, Kate folded the letter back into its wrinkled square and handed it to Jean.
“He’ll come get us,” Jean said, and Kate was glad to hear that she was done crying.
“Yeah, he will.”
Jean
