But Susan only shook her head. She pressed her lips together and shut her eyes, as if the light hurt them.
“There’s nothing to fix,” she said. “It’s just a little ringing in my ears. People get that, you know. And don’t change the subject!”
Nell wanted to change the subject. The subject was all wrong in her opinion. But Susan went on, talking more than she had in days, to tell her to leave well enough alone, to leave it to Max, to leave it to Susan herself, for she was sure to find the answer soon, in one of the many books.
Her parting shot was the worst. Putting her head in her hands, Susan tugged at her own hair as if she were trying to rip her skull open and make the sounds she heard stop. “Just listen, for once in your life, Nell!” she said.
Nell turned her face to the window. Outside, the mist was invisible, but it was there, up the hill, flowing through the window in the pink evening light like a germ, like a disease. She tried not to be angry. She told herself that Susan wasn’t herself. But then, in some ways, she was. Even at home, Susan listened to Max and no one else. Leave it alone. Leave it to Susan and Max, even if Max barely came around anymore and Susan disappeared into herself more and more each day. Nell thought of telling Susan exactly what she thought, but she peeked at her sister’s hollow face and kept silent.
Nell tried to imagine what it was like inside Susan’s head. She wondered if the sound that plagued Susan was like the slow shhhh of water in a kettle just before it broke into a whistle. Or maybe it was the sssssss of a snake. She’d heard that herself once, in a wooded patch near home. She liked to go exploring near the house in a thicket on the edge of the park, where a bed of heart-shaped leaves rose from a coil of woody stems. They were so pretty, those leaves, striped with lines of yellow and green, and she had liked to wade through them, up to her ankles in green and yellow, as the whole bed of them bounced and wiggled and tickled her legs. Walking along once, she’d heard a whisper and stopped. Sssssss. There it was, and then gone again, as if she’d imagined it. Curious, she’d separated the leaves with a stick. Among the scribble of stems, a spotted snake with eyes like a cat’s lifted its head, hissed at her, and sped away. She’d run, too, the other way. Susan, hearing about it, had laughed and said the expression was true, then: A snake in the grass. But Nell said it wasn’t. It was a snake beneath the beautiful leaves.
Where the chant of seeds soothed, Susan’s words grated.
Tradition, obedience, patience.
Tradition had built the sanctuary. The orchards and the fields, the corn glazed with sunlight, the women singing at the harvest, the smooth-faced scholars, and the children playing in the gardens. Obedience had done that. Patience.
So Susan said.
But tradition kept her from the third band and from the joyful, lilting laughter of the old man. Worse, tradition had spread the mist vile across the valley, and obedience and patience had let it thicken. And now, when Susan spoke, her voice was too loud, as if she were straining to be heard over that hiss, the sound beneath the pleasant wind that swept down from the hills, beneath the happy laughter in the gardens, like a snake beneath pretty, pretty leaves.
“You can’t always have your way, Nell. Don’t you see that?” Susan pressed her over dinner.
Nell concentrated on chewing. She didn’t answer.
“It’s better than the city, isn’t it?”
When Nell refused to speak, Susan turned to Kate and Jean. “Well, isn’t it?”
“Anything’s better than the city,” Kate said helpfully.
Nell didn’t even look up to glare at her.
That night, she tried again to see Max but was told that he was still busy in the third band, though Mistress Dendra had another one of his letters for Jean. Nell carried it back, a chunk of lead in her chest, and when she came into the room, Susan shouted at her and then said she wasn’t shouting.
That night Nell lay beneath the window, staring into the moonless night and thinking of that slim maple trembling in the sun, and of the luminous flame dancing over Max’s open hands. She rolled over and saw the folded page of Max’s letter glowing dully in the starlight. She’d refused to listen when Susan read it to Jean tonight, but now it seemed irresistible. She slipped out of bed, retrieved it, and took it into the hall, where the lamps still lit the way to the bathrooms.
Max’s cramped printing covered half the page, and Nell could see that he’d been churning with excitement as he wrote, because the letters slanted across the paper as if they were hurrying.
Dear Jean,
Remember when you asked me when we first got here if this was a dream? We were kind of hoping it was, so we could just wake up and be done. Now I’ve been thinking that if this is a dream, I hope I never wake up. Yesterday was the best day ever, maybe the best of my life. Most of our time is spent outside now, because Tur Kaysh says we have to hurry and learn with our feet near the roots of the world and our lungs drawing the open air. Today he took me out of the sanctuary, far out into the empty fields on the east end of the valley. It’s all flat ground there, where he says the land is breathing, and he had me stand there in tall grass for a long time, not saying anything, until my own breathing slowed down and I could start to hear what he meant. There’s a rhythm to
