By the windmills of Babyland he sat down and wept, and the moldering toys seemed even sadder and lonelier than he remembered.
She was waiting for him in the parking lot, leaning against her car, smoking a cigarette. She looked uncomfortable.
“Hullo, Mrs. Bustamonte,” said Fat Charlie.
She took one final drag on the cigarette, then dropped it to the asphalt and ground it out beneath the sole of her flat shoe. She was wearing black. She looked tired. “Hello Charles.”
“I think if I’d expected to see anyone here, it would be Mrs. Higgler. Or Mrs. Dunwiddy.”
“Callyanne’s gone away. Mrs. Dunwiddy sent me. She wants to see you.”
“I doubt it. She is not very well.”
“Oh.”
He climbed into his rental, followed Mrs. Bustamonte’s Camry along the Florida streets. He had been so certain about his father. Certain he’d find him alive. Sure that he’d help—
They parked outside Mrs. Dunwiddy’s house. Fat Charlie looked at the front yard, at the faded plastic flamingos and the gnomes and the red mirrored gazing ball sitting on a small concrete plinth like an enormous Christmas tree ornament. He walked over to the ball, just like the one he had broken when he was a boy, and saw himself distorted, staring back from it.
“What’s it for?” he said.
“It’s not for anything. She liked it.”
Inside the house the smell of violets hung thick and cloying. Fat Charlie’s Great-Aunt Alanna had kept a tube of parma violet candies in her handbag, but even as a chunky kid with a sweet tooth, Fat Charlie would eat them only if there wasn’t anything else. This house smelled like those sweets had tasted. Fat Charlie hadn’t thought of parma violets in twenty years. He wondered if they still made them. He wondered why anyone had ever made them in the first place—
“She’s at the end of the hall,” said Mrs. Bustamonte, and she stopped and she pointed. Fat Charlie went into Mrs. Dunwiddy’s bedroom.
It was not a big bed, but Mrs. Dunwiddy lay in it like an oversized doll. She wore her glasses, and above them something that Fat Charlie realized was the first nightcap he had ever seen, a yellowing tea-cosy-like affair, trimmed in lace. She was propped up on a mountain of pillows, her mouth open, and she was snoring gently as he walked in.
He coughed.
Mrs. Dunwiddy jerked her head up, opened her eyes, and stared at him. She pointed her finger to the nightstand beside the bed, and Fat Charlie picked up the glass of water sitting there and passed it to her. She took it with both hands, like a squirrel holding a nut, and she took a long sip before handing it back to him.
“My mouth get all dry,” she said. “You know how old I am?”
“Um.” There was, he decided, no right answer. “No.”
“Hunnert and four.”
“That’s amazing. You’re in such good shape. I mean, that’s quite marvelous—”
“Shut up, Fat Charlie.”
“Sorry.”
“Don’t say ‘sorry’ like that neither, like a dog that get tell off for messin’ on the kitchen floor. Hold your head up. Look the world in the eye. You hear me?”
“Yes. Sorry. I mean, just yes.”
She sighed. “They want to take me to the hospital. I tell them, when you get to be hunnert and four, you earn the right to die in your own bed. I make babies in this bed long time back, and I birth babies in this bed, and damned if I going to die anywhere else. And another thing—” She stopped talking, closed her eyes, and took a slow, deep breath. Just as Fat Charlie was convinced she had fallen asleep, her eyes opened, and she said, “Fat Charlie, if someone ever ask if you want to live to be hunnert and four, say no. Everything hurt. Everything. I hurt in places nobody ain’t discover yet.”
“I’ll bear that in mind.”
“None of your back talk.”
Fat Charlie looked at the little woman in her white wooden bed. “Shall I say sorry?” he asked.
Mrs. Dunwiddy looked away, guiltily. “I do you wrong,” she said. “Long time ago, I do you wrong.”
“I know,” said Fat Charlie.
Mrs. Dunwiddy might have been dying, but she still shot Fat Charlie the kind of look that would have sent children under the age of five screaming for their mothers. “What you mean, you know?”
Fat Charlie said, “I figured it out. Probably not all of it, but some of it. I’m not stupid.”
She examined him coldly through the thick glass of her spectacles, then she said, “No. You not. True thing, that.”
She held out a gnarled hand. “Give me the water back. That’s better.” She sipped her water, dabbing at it with a small, purple tongue. “Is a good thing you’re here today. Tomorrow the whole house be fill with grievin’ grandchildren and great-grandchildren, all of them tryin’ to make me to die in the hospital, makin’ up to me so I give them things. They don’t know me. I outlive all my own children. Every one of them.”
Fat Charlie said, “Are you going to talk about the bad turn you did to me?”
“You should never have break my garden mirror ball.”
“I’m sure I shouldn’t.”
He remembered it, in the way you remember things from childhood, part memory, part memory of the memory: following the tennis ball into Mrs. Dunwiddy’s yard, and once he was there, experimentally picking up her mirrored ball to see his face in it, distorted and huge, feeling it tumble to the stone path, watching it smash into a thousand tiny shards of glass. He remembered the strong old fingers that grabbed him by the ear and dragged him out of her yard and into her house—
“You sent Spider away,” he said. “Didn’t you?”
Her jaw was set like a mechanical bulldog’s. She nodded. “I did a banishment,” she said. “Didn’t mean for it to go so. Everybody know a little magic back in those days. We didn’t have all them kinda DVDs and cell phones and microwaves, but still, we know a lot regardless. I only wanted to teach you a lesson. You were so full of yourself, all mischief and back talk and vinegar. So I pull Spider out of you, to teach you a lesson.”
Fat Charlie heard the words, but they made no sense. “You pulled him out?”
“I break him off from you. All the tricksiness. All the wickedness. All the devilry. All that.” She sighed. “My mistake. Nobody tell me that if you do magic around a, around people like your daddy’s bloodline, it magnify everything. Everything get bigger.” Another sip of the water. “Your mother never believe it. Not really. But that Spider, he worse than you. Your father never say nothing about it until I make Spider go away. Even then, all he tell me is if you can’t fix it you not no son of his.”
He wanted to argue with her, to tell her how this was nonsense, that Spider was not a part of him, no more than he, Fat Charlie, was part of the sea or of the darkness. Instead he said, “Where’s the feather?”
“What feather you talking about?”
“When I came back from that place. The place with the cliffs and the caves. I was holding a feather. What did you do with it?”
“I don’t remember,” she said. “I’m an old woman. I’m a hunnert and four.”
Fat Charlie said, “Where is it?”
“I forget.”
“Please tell me.”
“I ain’t got it.”
“Who does?”
“Callyanne.”
“Mrs. Higgler?”
She leaned in, confidentially. “The other two, they’re just girls. They’re flighty.”
“I called Mrs. Higgler before I came out. I stopped at her house before I went to the cemetery. Mrs.
