“Then we’ll be right back!” And still holding Emme by her mittened hand, David sailed back into the crowd of kids and teenagers weaving their way around the rink to the tinny, amplified sound of “Frosty the Snowman.” It was a picture out of Currier and Ives-the frozen pond in the park, the skaters in their stocking caps and colorful leggings, their breath fogging in the air.
And it felt good to be out and exercising in the open air, especially as he had felt trapped in the whirlwind of his own thoughts ever since Mrs. Van Owen’s visit to the library. It had been the single most surreal moment in his entire life, and even after he’d run outside to return her pen-and she’d assured him that she meant every word she’d said-he’d been consumed by her promises. On the one hand, he knew it was insane-how could she possibly guarantee to save his sister’s life? No one could do that. But on the other, there was that business card, with the one-million-dollar offer on it. What kind of treatments or care or special attention could a million bucks bring? Plenty, he thought. He kept the card tucked away in his wallet, but he was never unaware of its being there. It just didn’t feel right-and he wondered if it was the kind of thing he should divulge to Dr. Armbruster… although he noticed, guiltily, that he hadn’t.
In an effort to forget about the distractions and just get on with the work, he had thrown himself into reading through the remaining pages of The Key to Life Eternal, presumably written in Cellini’s own hand. And as the secrets of the manuscript revealed themselves, he had come to understand what was driving Kathryn Van Owen and her search for La Medusa.
She believed in it.
She believed that the book was true, and that the glass truly held the power of immortality. As she had told him outside the Newberry, she had never entrusted this particular document, in its entirety, to anyone but him.
“Guard it carefully,” she had said. “You are the first person that I believe can make sense-and use-of it in your search. Do not disappoint me.”
As it turned out, the Key was not only an account of Cellini’s experiments with sorcery-the disinterment of dead bodies from holy ground, the construction of strange devices designed to nurture homonculi, the quest for the Philosopher’s Stone-it was also a detailed account of his own obsessive quest for immortality. Not content with the marvelous creations he had already made, or the artistic genius he had been blessed with, he had enlisted the help of a Sicilian magician named Strozzi and gone in search of the greatest gift of all-life everlasting. What he wanted was nothing less than all the time in the world-time in which he could re-create Nature in its most idealized forms, and craft things, from statues to fountains, paintings to glittering parures, of unmatched beauty and ingenuity. He reminded David of another great, if fictional, figure-Faust-who was prepared to sell his own soul for the knowledge acquired through immortality.
And in perhaps its eeriest passage, he recounted a hallucinatory (or so David had to assume) expedition to the underworld, led by Dante himself. Cellini claimed to have found not only the secret of invisibility-in a clump of bulrushes-but the secret of eternity, too. It lay in the water from the infernal pool, a few drops of which he had preserved beneath the glass of La Medusa. The mirror, Cellini wrote, could grant this gift, but only “ se il proprietario lo sa come approfondire ”-or, “if its owner knows how to use it.” In his Tuscan dialect, he went on to explain how the mirror must be held-“closely and directly, as if staring into one’s own soul”-and graced by the light of the moon, “the constant, but ever-changing, planet above us.” He concluded with an admonition: “But it is a boon less simple, less desirable, than may be thought, and I do fear that great anguish and misfortune may ensue.”
Tell that, David thought, to Mrs. Van Owen, as he distractedly embarked on one more circle of the rink.
“Amanda!” Emme screeched, before abruptly dropping her uncle’s hand and skating off to join her best friend, who was just teetering her way onto the ice.
David took that as his cue to skate over to the edge of the rink and plop down on the bench next to Sarah.
“Looks like she got a better offer,” he said, unlacing his skates.
“Don’t feel bad. She and Amanda are pretty much inseparable.”
“How are you holding up? Should we pack it up and head home?” Her face had the cold translucence of ice, and with her eyebrows gone from the chemo, she looked alarmingly like a glass mask. Only her eyes-as dark a brown as David’s-still held any spark of color and life.
“No, Emme’s having such a good time, it makes me feel better just to watch. I never know how many more chances like this I’ll have,” she said matter-of-factly.
It was the very offhandedness of her remark that struck David most forcibly. He tried like hell to keep his sister’s mortality out of his thoughts, but of course he knew that the subject was never far from hers. How could it be? For over a year, she had been living under a sentence of imminent death. She had gone from one surgery to another, one treatment to another, one special protocol to another, and while there were occasional respites in her decline, the general direction was unmistakable. Remission, if it came, would not come for long.
“You know what I’ll miss most?” she said, musing aloud.
He hated this line of thought, but if she needed to express it…
“Getting to watch Emme grow up.”
Just then, her daughter whirled by, laughing, and swinging hands with Amanda.
“But you will get to see her grow up,” David said, meaning the best, even if he knew-and he knew she knew-that any reprieve was temporary. “You’re looking better all the time, and Gary tells me that this new regimen they’ve got you on has shown some real improvements. You are going to get better.”
She patted the back of his hand, still following Emme, and said, “Put your boots on, or your feet will freeze.” He finished removing the skates and pulled on his boots, which were cold as icicles inside.
“I’d give anything to make that true,” she added, and David could not help but flash again on his strange conference in the book silo with Kathryn Van Owen.
In a deliberately casual tone, he asked, “You would?”
“Would what?” she said, already having forgotten what she’d just said. The drugs made it hard for her sometimes to follow the thread of a conversation.
“Do anything to… keep on going?”
She took a deep breath and looked out across the rink at the laughing, spinning skaters.
“I never thought I’d believe that,” she said. “I always thought-as much as anybody who’s healthy ever thinks about it at all-that I’d be happy to live my life, and go peacefully, with no complaints, whenever it ended.”
She coughed, and raised a gloved hand to her colorless thin lips.
“But that’s what you think when things are fine,” she said. “That’s what you think when there’s nothing really wrong. I don’t think like that anymore.”
A note of bitterness, one he seldom heard, had crept into her voice.
“Now, I’d give anything I could-and do whatever it takes-to live. To get old and gray with Gary. To see Emme play in the all-city orchestra, and go to her high-school prom, then off to college. To find out who she falls in love with, and what she decides to do with her life. To see her become a young woman, and have children of her own. I want all of that, David, all of it,” she said, tears welling up in the corners of her eyes. “I never thought I could want anything so much. And I’m so ashamed to be so weak and angry now.”
“You have no reason to be ashamed of anything,” David said, wrapping an arm around her shoulders and hugging her tight. “You’re the bravest person I know, and you’ve got a right to be angry. You’ve been through hell.” Mrs. Van Owen’s offer-“I can promise she’ll live to a ripe old age”-rang in his head like a cracked bell.
The tears were rolling down both cheeks, and one or two of the passing skaters threw a glance their way.
“Don’t let Emme see me like this,” she murmured into his coat.
“Don’t worry. She’s way over by the concession stand with Amanda,” he assured her.
“I just needed to say it.”
“You can say anything to me, you know that. You always have.”
She sniffled a little and smiled at that.
“Remember how you told me,” he said, “back when I was in junior high, that no girl would ever go out with me if I didn’t get rid of my dandruff? Or that I was such a bad dancer, I should just sort of stand in place and shuffle my feet around?”
“I told you that?” she said. “I’m so sorry.”
