Their particular sameness usually meant that Nell and Max sat on each other’s very last nerve, a pattern that only changed when they turned their mutual energy to analyzing what had gone wrong with Susan. Susan wondered now if the two of them had radar communication set up on the subject, because as soon as Nell jogged up, she looked from one to the next and raised an eyebrow.
“What’s wrong?”
“Susan,” Max shot back.
“Nothing,” Susan snapped.
Nell zigzagged up the road, pouncing on every half-decent snow pile that remained in the street as Max replayed the afternoon for her. When he was done, Nell nodded sagely.
“You let people push you around too much,” she informed Susan.
“She’s the teacher,” Susan protested. “I couldn’t say anything. Why would I even want to?”
“I said something!” Max cut in.
A chilly wind whistled past Susan’s ears and set them tingling.
“I should have clobbered you before you did,” she grumbled, rubbing the feeling back into her ears with a gloved hand. “I still should.”
Nell ambushed another lump of dirty snow, splattering Susan’s exposed leg.
“Bad temper in all the wrong places,” she said. “That’s you. If anyone deserves a clobbering, it’s Lucy Driscoll.”
She frowned suddenly and turned around. “Hey!”
“Hey what?” Max asked.
Nell tilted her head. “That’s juvenile, Max.”
“What is?”
“Tapping me from behind and pretending you didn’t.”
“I didn’t.”
Nell’s frown deepened. “Susan, did you?”
“No!”
“Well, somebody did. And whichever of you it was, just stop it.”
Max hitched his backpack higher onto his shoulder. His puffy coat sighed under the weight of it.
“Maybe it was some of that snow you keep flattening, hitting back,” he suggested.
“Yeah, right.” Nell looked over her shoulder again, brow furrowed.
Susan felt suddenly antsy, as if she’d forgotten something she’d been supposed to remember. But then it had been a strange day, full of wishing she could fly out the classroom window, or at least turn invisible. She tried to shrug it off and set her mind to getting home and finding her book, the only proven way, so far, of disappearing.
She did just that for most of the evening and went to bed early, hoping sleep would wash away the mortification of the day.
“Susan? I had a funny dream again.”
Susan squinted in the sudden light from the hall and glanced at the clock. Past midnight, and Kate stood there in her nightgown, waiting.
At eight, Kate was too old to be waking her parents but apparently not too old to be waking her big sister. This big sister, anyway, who had a soft spot for pensive eight-year-olds with bad dreams. Pensive. That word had been a find, and one Susan had immediately applied to Kate. It seemed to fit them both, and maybe that’s why they got along so well. Being pensive, at eight or thirteen, always kept you a half step out of the main. For Susan, who would rather read than talk, and Kate, who seemed to hear things differently than other people did, pensive was just the right word. Susan rolled over and nodded to the small figure standing in the doorway, Kate’s unruly curls lit by the light of the hall. They were sandy brown, a shade lighter than her eyes, and gave the impression of being lighter still, the color of amber or honey.
“Funny how? Scary? Were there monsters?”
A long pause from Kate, until Susan waved her in, permission to climb into bed beside her. The mattress bounced and Kate slipped under the covers. Susan could feel her sister’s bony little body, warm against her.
“Not monsters. And I don’t think I was scared. But I was someplace different. And there were other people there. I could hear them.”
Susan yawned. Sleep was tugging at her.
“And? What did they look like?”
Kate sighed in the darkness. She rolled over and threw an arm across Susan. “They were gone when I turned around. I think the splashing scared them off.”
“Splashing?”
“My feet were in the water.”
“Oh.”
Susan waited, but Kate didn’t elaborate. She was that kind of kid, always dreaming of strange places and people calling from out of thick trees. Susan wondered if she ought to tell Mom.
Kate lifted her head slightly, and her hair brushed the bottom of Susan’s jaw. “I wasn’t scared,” she said. Kate had a knack for reading her intention even in the dark, and somehow, with Kate, Susan didn’t mind. “You don’t have to worry about it.” Kate waited, head up, for Susan to answer.
“But you wanted to come in here anyway, I guess?”
Kate rested her head back on Susan’s arm.
“Just for a little,” she said drowsily. “And besides, Jean was talking in her sleep.”
Susan smiled. Sleep, warm and comfortingly heavy, crept over her again, and she closed her eyes. “Maybe she was having funny dreams, too.”
She fell back to sleep thinking what an odd twenty-four hours it had been. She swore to herself tomorrow would be different.
She was usually very good at keeping her word.
The exile found company only in dreams. Beneath tall, unfamiliar trees, others would appear: a sunny-haired girl who sat on the edge of a shining pool, her bare feet in the water. Another, darker, older, who stood in the dappled shade, eyes on the blazing sky.
The ancients had spoken of a place outside time, a whispering orchard, a sparkling wood, a dream that lived. And yet if they had spent nights walking its paths of wisdom, the exile was given just moments, flashes that drifted away with the dawn.
What was to be found on waking? Only the hard sky over the mountain, the cottage, the trees, the garden, and the ever-present muttering of the valley, with its undertone of warning, its reminder of punishment. Few came through it, and those only reinforced the solitude — watchers, radiating judgment harsh as summer heat, and the broken ones, who screamed their agony into the wind before disappearing through the trees, beyond help or hope.
The sounds of exile were few. No
