The Year's Greatest Science Fiction & Fantasy 6

SOMETHING BRIGHT by Zenna Henderson

Readers of those earlier S-F annuals in which Miss Henderson’s chronicles of The People appeared (“Pottage” in 1956; “Wilderness” in 1958) will be happy to know that the long-delayed publication of the complete series is at last a fact (“Pilgrimage: The Book of the People,” Doubleday, 1961).

Miss Henderson is, in private life, a schoolteacher in the primary grades, and most of her stories about children have been from the viewpoint of the sympathetic adult. This time she tells it through the child’s own mind and eyes.

Do you remember the Depression? The black shadow across time? That hurting place in the consciousness of the world? Maybe not. Maybe it’s like asking do you remember the Dark Ages. Except what would I know about the price of eggs in the Dark Ages? I knew plenty about prices in the Depression.

If you had a quarter—first find your quarter—and five hungry kids, you could supper them on two cans of soup and a loaf of day-old bread, or two quarts of milk and a loaf of day-old bread. It was filling and—in an after-thoughty kind of way—nourishing. But if you were one of the hungry five, you eventually began to feel erosion set in, and your teeth ached for substance.

But to go back to eggs. Those were a precious commodity. You savored them slowly or gulped them eagerly—unmistakably as eggs—boiled or fried. That’s one reason why I remember Mrs. Klevity. She had eggs for breakfast! And every day! That’s one reason why I remember Mrs. Klevity.

I didn’t know about the eggs the time she came over to see Mom, who had just got home from a twelve-hour day, cleaning up after other people at thirty cents an hour. Mrs. Klevity lived in the same court as we did. Courtesy called it a court because we were all dependent on the same shower house and two toilets that occupied the shack square in the middle of the court.

All of us except the Big House, of course. It had a bathroom of its own and even a radio blaring Nobody’s Business and Should I Reveal and had ceiling lights that didn’t dangle nakedly at the end of a cord. But then it really wasn’t a part of the court. Only its back door shared our area, and even that was different. It had two back doors in the same frame—a screen one and a wooden one!

Our own two-room place had a distinction too. It had an upstairs. One room the size of our two. The Man Upstairs lived up there. He was mostly only the sound of footsteps overhead and an occasional cookie for Danna.

Anyway, Mrs. Klevity came over before Mom had time to put her shopping bag of work clothes down or even to unpleat the folds of fatigue that dragged her face down ten years or more of time to come. I didn’t much like Mrs. Klevity. She made me uncomfortable. She was so solid and slow-moving and so nearly blind that she peered frighteningly wherever she went. She stood in the doorway as though she had been stacked there like bricks and a dress drawn hastily down over the stack and a face sketched on beneath a fuzz of hair. Us kids all gathered around to watch, except Danna who snuffled wearily into my neck. Day nursery or not, it was a long, hard day for a four-year-old.

“I wondered if one of your girls could sleep at my house this week.” Her voice was as slow as her steps.

“At your house?” Mom massaged her hand where the shopping-bag handles had crisscrossed it. “Come in. Sit down.” We had two chairs and a bench and two apple boxes. The boxes scratched bare legs, but surely they couldn’t scratch a stack of bricks.

“No, thanks.” Maybe she couldn’t bend! “My husband will be away several days and I don’t like to be in the house alone at night.”

“Of course,” said Mom. “You must feel awfully alone.”

The only aloneness she knew, what with five kids and two rooms, was the taut secretness of her inward thoughts as she mopped and swept and ironed in other houses. “Sure, one of the girls would be glad to keep you company.” There was a darting squirm and LaNell was safely hidden behind the swaying of our clothes in the diagonally curtained corner of the other room, and Kathy knelt swiftly just beyond the dresser, out of sight.

“Anna is eleven.” I had no place to hide, burdened as I was with Danna. “She’s old enough. What time do you want her to come over?”

“Oh, bedtime will do.” Mrs. Klevity peered out the door at the darkening sky. “Nine o’clock. Only it gets dark before then—” Bricks can look anxious, I guess.

“As soon as she has supper, she can come,” said Mom, handling my hours as though they had no value to me. “Of course she has to go to school tomorrow.”

“Only when it’s dark,” said Mrs. Klevity. “Day is all right. How much should I pay you?”

“Pay?” Mom gestured with one hand. “She has to sleep anyway. It doesn’t matter to her where, once she’s asleep. A favor for a friend.”

I wanted to cry out: whose favor for what friend? We hardly passed the time of day with Mrs. Klevity. I couldn’t even remember Mr. Klevity except that he was straight and old and wrinkled. Uproot me and make me lie in a strange house, a strange dark, listening to a strange breathing, feeling a strange warmth making itself part of me for all night long, seeping into me …

“Mom—” I said.

“I’ll give her breakfast,” said Mrs. Klevity. “And lunch money for each night she comes.”

I resigned myself without a struggle. Lunch money each day—a whole dime! Mom couldn’t afford to pass up such a blessing, such a gift from God, who unerringly could be trusted to ease the pinch just before it became intolerable.

“Thank you, God,” I whispered as I went to get the can opener to open supper. For a night or two I could stand it.

I felt all naked and unprotected as I stood in my flimsy crinkle cotton pajamas, one bare foot atop the other, waiting for Mrs. Klevity to turn the bed down.

“We have to check the house first,” she said thickly. “We can’t go to bed until we check the house.”

“Check the house?” I forgot my starchy stiff shyness enough to question. “What for?”

Mrs. Klevity peered at me in the dim light of the bedroom. They had three rooms for only the two of them! Even if there was no door to shut between the bedroom and the kitchen.

“I couldn’t sleep,” she said, “unless I looked first. I have to.”

So we looked. Behind the closet curtain, under the table—Mrs. Klevity even looked in the portable oven that sat near the two-burner stove in the kitchen.

When we came to the bed, I was moved to words again. “But we’ve been in here with the doors locked ever since I got here. What could possibly—”

“A prowler?” said Mrs. Klevity nervously, after a brief pause for thought. “A criminal?”

Mrs. Klevity pointed her face at me. I doubt if she could see me from that distance. “Doors make no difference,” she said. “It might be when you least expect, so you have to expect all the time.”

“I’ll look,” I said humbly. She was older than Mom. She was nearly blind. She was one of God’s Also Unto Me’s.

“No,” she said. “I have to. I couldn’t be sure, else.”

So I waited until she grunted and groaned to her knees, then bent stiffly to lift the limp spread. Her fingers hesitated briefly, then flicked the spread up. Her breath came out flat and finished. Almost disappointed, it seemed to me.

She turned the bed down and I crept across the gray, wrinkled sheets and, turning my back to the room, I huddled one ear on the flat tobacco-smelling pillow and lay tense and uncomfortable in the dark, as her weight shaped and re-shaped the bed around me. There was a brief silence before I heard the soundless breathy shape of her words, “How long, O God, how long?”

I wondered through my automatic Bless Papa and Mama—and the automatic back-up because Papa had abdicated from my specific prayers—bless Mama and my brother and sisters—what it was that Mrs. Klevity was finding too long to bear.

After a restless waking, dozing sort of night that strange sleeping places held for me, I awoke to a thin, chilly morning and the sound of Mrs. Klevity moving around. She had set the table for breakfast, a formality we never had time for at home. I scrambled out of bed and into my clothes with only my skinny, goosefleshed back between Mrs. Klevity and me for modesty. I felt uncomfortable and unfinished because I hadn’t brought our comb over with me.

I would have preferred to run home to our usual breakfast of canned milk and shredded wheat, but instead I watched, fascinated, as Mrs. Klevity struggled with lighting the kerosene stove. She bent so close, peering at the burners with the match flaring in her hand that I was sure the frowzy brush of her hair would catch fire, but finally the burner caught instead and she turned her face toward me.

“One egg or two?” she asked.

“Eggs! Two!” Surprised wrung the exclamation from me. Her hand hesitated over the crumpled brown bag on the table. “No, no!” I corrected her thought hastily. “One. One is plenty.” And sat on the edge of a chair watching as she broke an egg into the sizzling frying pan.

“Hard or soft?” she asked.

“Hard,” I said casually, feeling very woman-of-the-world-ish, dining out—well, practically—and for breakfast, too! I watched Mrs. Klevity spoon the fat over the egg, her hair swinging stiffly forward when she peered. Once it even dabbled briefly in the fat, but she didn’t notice and, as it swung back, it made a little shiny curve on her cheek.

“Aren’t you afraid of the fire?” I asked as she turned away from the stove with the frying pan. “What if you caught on fire?”

“I did once.” She slid the egg out onto my plate. “See?” She brushed her hair back on the left side and I could see the mottled pucker of a large old scar. “It was before I got used to Here,” she said, making Here more than the house, it seemed to me.

“That’s awful,” I said, hesitating with my fork.

“Go ahead and eat,” she said. “Your egg will get cold.” She turned back to the stove and I hesitated a minute more. Meals at a table you were supposed to ask a blessing, but … I ducked my head quickly and had a mouthful of egg before my soundless amen was finished.

After breakfast I hurried back to our house, my lunch-money dime clutched securely, my stomach not quite sure it liked fried eggs so early in the morning. Mom was ready to leave, her shopping bag in one hand, Danna swinging from the other, singing one of her baby songs. She liked the day nursery.

“I won’t be back until late tonight,” Mom said. “There’s a quarter in the corner of the dresser drawer. You get supper for the kids and try to clean up this messy place. We don’t have to be pigs just because we live in a place like this.”

“Okay, Mom.” I struggled with a snarl in my hair, the pulling making my eyes water. “Where you working today?” I spoke over the clatter in the other room where the kids were getting ready for school.

She sighed, weary before the day began. “I have three places today, but the last is Mrs. Paddington.” Her face lightened. Mrs. Paddington sometimes paid a little extra or gave Mom discarded clothes or left-over food she didn’t want. She was nice.

“You get along all right with Mrs. Klevity?” asked Mom as she checked her shopping bag for her work shoes.

“Yeah,” I said. “But she’s funny. She looks under the bed before she goes to bed.”

Mom smiled. “I’ve heard of people like that, but it’s usually old maids they’re talking about.”

“But, Mom, nothing coulda got in. She locked the door after I got there.”

“People who look under beds don’t always think straight,” she said. “Besides, maybe she’d like to find something under there.”

“But she’s got a husband,” I cried after her as she herded Danna across the court.

“There are other things to look for besides husbands,” she called back.

“Anna wants a husband! Anna wants a husband.” Deet and LaNell were dancing around me, teasing me sing-song. Kathy smiled slowly behind them.

“Shut up,” I said. “You don’t even know what you’re talking about. Go on to school.”

“It’s too early,” said Deet, digging his bare toes in the dust of the front yard. “Teacher says we get there too early.”

“Then stay here and start cleaning house,” I said.

They left in a hurry. After they were gone, Deet’s feet reminded me I’d better wash my own feet before I went to school. So I got a washpan of water from the tap in the middle of the court and, sitting on the side of the bed, I eased my feet into the icy water. I scrubbed with the hard, gray, abrasive soap we used and wiped quickly on the tattered towel. I threw the water out the door and watched it run like dust-covered snakes across the hard-packed front yard.

I went back to put my shoes on and get my sweater. I looked at the bed. I got down on my stomach and peered under. Other things to look for. There was a familiar huddle of cardboard cartons we kept things in and the familiar dust fluffs and one green sock LaNell had lost last week, but nothing else.

I dusted my front off. I tied my lunch-money dime in the corner of a handkerchief and, putting my sweater on, left for school.

I peered out into the windy wet semi-twilight. “Do I have to?”

“You said you would,” said Mom. “Keep your promises. You should have gone before this. She’s probably been waiting for you.”

“I wanted to see what you brought from Mrs. Paddington’s.” LaNell and Kathy were playing in the corner with a lavender hug-me-tight and a hat with green grapes on it. Deet was rolling an orange on the floor, softening it, preliminary to poking a hole in it to suck the juice out.

“She cleaned a trunk out today,” said Mom. “Mostly old things that belonged to her mother, but these two coats are nice and heavy. They’ll be good covers tonight. It’s going to be cold. Someday when I get time, I’ll cut them up and make quilts.” She sighed. Time was what she never had enough of. “Better take a newspaper to hold over you head.”

“Oh, Mom!” I huddled into my sweater. “It isn’t raining now. I’d feel silly!”

“Well, then, scoot!” she said, her hand pressing my shoulder warmly, briefly.

I scooted, skimming quickly the flood of light from our doorway, and splishing through the shallow run-off stream that swept across the court. There was a sudden wild swirl of wind and a vindictive splatter of heavy, cold raindrops that swept me, exhilarated, the rest of the way to Mrs. Klevity’s house and under the shallow little roof that was just big enough to cover the back step. I knocked quickly, brushing my disordered hair back from my eyes. The door swung open and I was in the shadowy, warm kitchen, almost in Mrs. Klevity’s arms.

“Oh!” I backed up, laughing breathlessly. “The wind blew—”

“I was afraid you weren’t coming.” She turned away to the stove. “I fixed some hot cocoa.”

I sat cuddling the warm cup in my hands, savoring the chocolate sip by sip. She had made it with milk instead of water, and it tasted rich and wonderful. But Mrs. Klevity was sharing my thoughts with the cocoa. In that brief moment when I had been so close to her, I had looked deep into her dim eyes and was feeling a vast astonishment. The dimness was only on top. Underneath—underneath—

I took another sip of cocoa. Her eyes—almost I could have walked into them, it seemed like. Slip past the gray film, run down the shiny bright corridor, into the live young sparkle at the far end.

I looked deep into my cup of cocoa. Were all grownups like that? If you could get behind their eyes, were they different, too? Behind Mom’s eyes, was there a corridor leading back to youth and sparkle?

I finished the cocoa drowsily. It was still early, but the rain was drumming on the roof and it was the kind of night you curl up to if you’re warm and fed. Sometimes you feel thin and cold on such nights, but I was feeling curl-uppy. So I groped under the bed for the paper bag that had my jammas in it. I couldn’t find it.

“I swept today,” said Mrs. Klevity, coming back from some far country of her thoughts. “I musta pushed it farther under the bed.”

I got down on my hands and knees and peered under the bed. “Ooo!” I said. “What’s shiny?”

Something snatched me away from the bed and flung me to one side. By the time I had gathered myself up off the floor and was rubbing a banged elbow, Mrs. Klevity’s bulk was pressed against the bed, her head under it.

“Hey!” I cried indignantly, and then remembered I wasn’t at home. I heard an odd whimpering sob and then Mrs. Klevity backed slowly away, still kneeling on the floor.

“Only the lock on the suitcase,” she said. “Here’s your jammas.” She handed me the bag and ponderously pulled herself upright again.

We went silently to bed after she had limped around and checked the house, even under the bed again. I heard that odd breathy whisper of a prayer and lay awake, trying to add up something shiny and the odd eyes and the whispering sob. Finally I shrugged in the dark and wondered what I’d pick for funny when I grew up. All grownups had some kind of funny.

The next night Mrs. Klevity couldn’t get down on her knees to look under the bed. She’d hurt herself when she plumped down on the floor after yanking me away from the bed.

“You’ll have to look for me tonight,” she said slowly, nursing her knees. “Look good. Oh, Anna, look good!”

I looked as good as I could, not knowing what I was looking for.

“It should be under the bed,” she said, her palms tight on her knees as she rocked back and forth. “But you can’t be sure. It might miss completely.”

“What might?” I asked, hunkering down by the bed.

She turned her face blindly toward me. “The way out,” she said. “The way back again—”

“Back again?” I pressed my check to the floor again. “Well, I don’t see anything. Only dark and suitcases.”

“Nothing bright? Nothing? Nothing—” She tried to lay her face on her knees, but she was too unbendy to manage it, so she put her hands over her face instead. Grownups aren’t supposed to cry. She didn’t quite, but her hands looked wet when she reached for the clock to wind it.

I lay in the dark, one strand of her hair tickling my hand where it lay on the pillow. Maybe she was crazy. I felt a thrill of terror fan out on my spine. I carefully moved my hand from under the lock of hair. How can you find a way out under a bed? I’d be glad when Mr. Klevity got home, eggs or no eggs, dime or no dime.

Somewhere in the darkness of the night, I was suddenly swimming to wakefulness, not knowing what was waking me but feeling that Mrs. Klevity was awake too.

“Anna.” Her voice was small and light and silver. “Anna—”

“Hummm?” I murmured, my voice still drowsy.

“Anna, have you ever been away from home?” I turned toward her, trying in the dark to make sure it was Mrs. Klevity. She sounded so different.

“Yes,” I said. “Once I visited Aunt Katie at Rocky Butte for a week.”

“Anna.” I don’t know whether she was even hearing my answers; her voice was almost a chant, “Anna, have you ever been in prison?”

“No! Of course not!” I recoiled indignantly. “You have to be awful bad to be in prison.”

“Oh, no. Oh, no!” she sighed. “Not jail, Anna. Prison, prison. The weight of the flesh—bound about—”

“Oh,” I said, smoothing my hands across my eyes. She was talking to a something deep in me that never got talked to, that hardly even had words. “Like when the wind blows the clouds across the moon and the grass whispers along the road and all the trees pull like balloons at their trunks and one star comes out and says ‘Come’ and the ground says ‘Stay’ and part of you tries to go and it hurts—” I could feel the slender roundness of my ribs under my pressing hands. “And it hurts—”

“Oh, Anna, Anna!” The soft, light voice broke. “You feel that way and you belong Here. You won’t ever—”

The voice stopped and Mrs. Klevity rolled over. Her next words came thickly, as though a gray film were over them as over her eyes. “Are you awake, Anna? Go to sleep, child. Morning isn’t yet.”

I heard the heavy sigh of her breathing as she slept. And finally I slept too, trying to visualize what Mrs. Klevity would look like if she looked like the silvery voice-in-the-dark.

I sat savoring my egg the next morning, letting my thoughts slip in and out of my mind to the rhythm of my jaws. What a funny dream to have, to talk with a silver-voiced someone. To talk about the way blowing clouds and windy moonlight felt. But it wasn’t a dream! I paused with my fork raised. At least not my dream. But how can you tell? If you’re part of someone else’s dream, can it still be real for you?

“Is something wrong with the egg?” Mrs. Klevity peered at me.

“No—no—” I said, hastily snatching the bite on my fork. “Mrs. Klevity—”

“Yes.” Her voice was thick and heavy-footed.

“Why did you ask me about being in prison?”

“Prison?” Mrs. Klevity blinked blindly. “Did I ask you about prison?”

“Someone did—I thought—” I faltered, shyness shutting down on me again.

“Dreams.” Mrs. Klevity stacked her knife and fork on her plate. “Dreams.”

I wasn’t quite sure I was to be at Klevity’s the next evening. Mr. Klevity was supposed to get back sometime during the evening. But Mrs. Klevity welcomed me.

“Don’t know when he’ll get home, “ she said. “Maybe not until morning. If he comes early, you can go home to sleep and I’ll give you your dime anyway.”

“Oh, no,” I said, Mom’s teachings solidly behind me. “I couldn’t take it if I didn’t stay.”

“A gift,” said Mrs. Klevity.

We sat opposite one another until the silence stretched too thin for me to bear.

“In olden times,” I said, snatching at the magic that drew stories from Mom, “when you were a little girl—”

“When I was a girl—” Mrs. Klevity rubbed her knees with reflective hands. “The other Where. The other When.”

“In olden times,” I persisted, “things were different then.”

“Yes.” I settled down comfortably, recognizing the reminiscent tone of voice. “You do crazy things when you are young.” Mrs. Klevity leaned heavily on the table. “Things you have no business doing. You volunteer when you’re young.” I jerked as she lunged across the table and grabbed both my arms. “But I am young! Three years isn’t an eternity. I am young!”

I twisted one arm free and pried at her steely fingers that clamped my other one.

“Oh.” She let go. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

She pushed back the tousled brush of her hair.

“Look,” she said, her voice was almost silver again. “Under all this—this grossness, I’m still me. I thought I could adjust to anything, but I had no idea that they’d put me in such—” She tugged at her sagging dress. “Not the clothes!” she cried. “Clothes you can take off. But this—” Her fingers dug into her heavy shoulder and I could see the bulge of flesh between them.

“If I knew anything about the setup maybe I could locate it. Maybe I could call. Maybe—”

Her shoulders sagged and her eyelids dropped down over her dull eyes.

“It doesn’t make any sense to you,” she said, her voice heavy and thick again. “To you I’d be old even There. At the time it seemed like a perfect way to have an odd holiday and help out with research, too. But we got caught.”

She began to count her fingers, mumbling to herself. “Three years There, but Here that’s—eight threes are—” She traced on the table with a blunt forefinger, her eyes close to the old, wornout cloth.

“Mrs. Klevity,” My voice scared me in the silence, but I was feeling the same sort of upsurge that catches you sometimes when you’re playing-like and it gets so real. “Mrs. Klevity, if you’ve lost something, maybe I could look for it for you.”

“You didn’t find it last night,” she said.

“Find what?”

She lumbered to her feet. “Let’s look again. Everywhere. They’d surely be able to locate the house.”

“What are we looking for?” I asked, searching the portable oven.

“You’ll know it when we see it,” she said.

And we searched the whole house. Oh, such nice things! Blankets, not tattered and worn, and even an extra one they didn’t need. And towels with wash rags that matched—and weren’t rags. And uncracked dishes that matched! And glasses that weren’t jars. And books. And money. Crisp new-looking bills in the little box in the bottom drawer—pushed back under some extra pillow cases. And clothes—lots and lots of clothes. All too big for any of us, of course, but my practiced eye had already visualized this, that and the other cut down to dress us all like rich people.

I sighed as we sat wearily looking at one another. Imagine having so much and still looking for something else! It was bedtime and all we had for our pains were dirty hands and tired backs.

I scooted out to the bath house before I undressed. I gingerly washed the dirt off my hands under the cold of the shower and shook them dry on the way back to the house. Well, we had moved everything in the place, but nothing was what Mrs. Klevity looked for.

Back in the bedroom, I groped under the bed for my jammas and again had to lie flat and burrow under the bed for the tattered bag. Our moving around had wedged it back between two cardboard cartons. I squirmed under farther and tried to ease it out after shoving the two cartons a little farther apart. The bag tore, spilling out my jammas, so I grasped them in the bend of my elbow and started to back out.

Then the whole world seemed to explode into brightness that pulsated and dazzled, that splashed brilliance into my astonished eyes until I winced them shut to rest their seeing and saw the dark inversions of the radiance behind my eyelids.

I forced my eyes open again and looked sideways so the edge of my seeing was all I used until I got more accustomed to the glory.

Between the two cartons was an opening like a window would be, but little, little, into a wonderland of things I could never tell. Colors that had no names. Feelings that made windy moonlight a puddle of dust. I felt tears burn out of my eyes and start down my cheeks, whether from brightness or wonder, I don’t know. I blinked them away and looked again.

Someone was in the brightness, several someones. They were leaning out of the squareness, beckoning and calling—silver signals and silver sounds.

“Mrs. Klevity,” I thought. “Something bright.”

I took another good look at the shining people and the tree things that were like music bordering a road, and grass that was the song my evening grass hummed in the wind a last, last look, and began to back out.

I scrambled to my feet, clutching my jammas. “Mrs. Klevity.” She was still sitting at the table, as solid as a pile of bricks, the sketched face under the wild hair a sad, sad one.

“Yes, child.” She hardly heard herself.

“Something bright …” I said.

Her heavy head lifted slowly, her blind face turned to me. “What, child?”

I felt my fingers bite into my jammas and the cords in my neck getting tight and my stomach clenching itself. “Something bright!” I thought I screamed. She didn’t move. I grabbed her arm and dragged her off-balance in her chair. “Something bright!”

“Anna.” She righted herself on the chair. “Don’t be mean.”

I grabbed the bedspread and yanked it up. The light sprayed out like a sprinkler on a lawn.

Then she screamed. She put both hands up to her heavy face and screamed, “Leolienn! It’s here! Hurry, hurry!”

“Mr. Klevity isn’t here,” I said. “He hasn’t got back.”

“I can’t go without him! Leolienn!”

“Leave a note!” I cried. “If you’re there, you can make them come back again and I can show him the right place!” The upsurge had passed make-believe and everything was realer than real.

Then, quicker than I ever thought she could move, she got paper and a pencil. She was scribbling away at the table as I stood there holding the spread. So I dropped to my knees and then to my stomach and crawled under the bed again. I filled my eyes with the brightness and beauty and saw, beyond it, serenity and orderliness and—and uncluttered cleanness. The miniature landscape was like a stage setting for a fairy tale—so small, so small—so lovely.

And then Mrs. Klevity tugged at my ankle and I slid out, reluctantly, stretching my sight of the bright square until the falling of the spread broke it. Mrs. Klevity worked her way under the bed, her breath coming pantingly, her big, ungainly body inching along awkwardly.

She crawled and crawled and crawled until she should have come up short against the wall, and I knew she must be funneling down into the brightness, her face, head and shoulders, so small, so lovely, like her silvery voice. But the rest of her, still gross and ugly, like a butterfly trying to skin out of its cocoon.

Finally only her feet were sticking out from under the bed and they thrashed and waved and didn’t go anywhere, so I got down on the floor and put my feet against hers and braced myself against the dresser and pushed. And pushed and pushed. Suddenly there was a going, a finishing, and my feet dropped to the floor.

There, almost under the bed, lay Mrs. Klevity’s shabby old-lady black shoes, toes pointing away from each other. I picked them up in my hands, wanting, somehow, to cry. Her saggy lisle stockings were still in the shoes.

Slowly I pulled all of the clothes of Mrs. Klevity out from under the bed. They were held together by a thin skin, a sloughed-off leftover of Mrs. Klevity that only showed, gray and lifeless, where her bare hands and face would have been, and her dull gray filmed eyes.

I let it crumple to the floor and sat there, holding one of her old shoes in my hand.

The door rattled and it was gray, old, wrinkled Mr. Klevity.

“Hello, child,” he said. “Where’s my wife?”

“She’s gone,” I said, not looking at him. “She left you a note there on the table.”

“Gone—?” He left the word stranded in mid-air as he read Mrs. Klevity’s note.

The paper fluttered down. He yanked a dresser drawer open and snatched out spool-looking things, both hands full. Then he practically dived under the bed, his elbows thudding on the floor, to-hurt hard. And there was only a wiggle or two and his shoes slumped away from each other.

I pulled his cast-aside from under the bed and crawled under it myself. I saw the tiny picture frame—bright, bright, but so small.

I crept close to it, knowing I couldn’t go through it. I saw the tiny perfection of the road, the landscape, the people—the laughing people who crowded around the two new rejoicing figures—the two silvery, lovely young creatures who cried out in tiny voices as they danced. The girl-one threw a kiss outward before they all turned away and ran up the winding white road together.

The frame began to shrink, faster, faster, until it squeezed to a single bright bead and then blinked out.

All at once the house was empty and cold. The upsurge was gone. Nothing was real any more. All at once the faint ghost of the smell of eggs was frightening. All at once I whimpered, “My lunch money!”

I scrambled to my feet, tumbling Mrs. Klevity’s clothes into a disconnected pile. I gathered up my jammas and leaned across the table to get my sweater. I saw my name on a piece of paper. I picked it up and read it.

Everything that is ours in this house now belongs to Anna-across-the-court, the little girl that’s been staying with me at night.

—Ahvlaree Klevity

I looked from the paper around the room. All for me? All for us? All this richness and wonder of good things? All this and the box in the bottom drawer, too? And a paper that said so, so that nobody could take them away from us.

A fluttering wonder filled my chest and I walked stiffly around the three rooms, visualizing everything without opening a drawer or door. I stood by the stove and looked at the frying pan hanging above it. I opened the cupboard door. The paper bag of eggs was on the shelf. I reached for it, looking back over my shoulder almost guiltily.

The wonder drained out of me with a gulp. I ran back over to the bed and yanked up the spread. I knelt and hammered on the edge of the bed with my clenched fists. Then I leaned my forehead on my tight hands and felt my knuckles bruise me. My hands went limply to my lap, my head drooping.

I got up slowly and took the paper from the table, bundled my jammas under my arm and got the eggs from the cupboard. I turned the lights out and left.

I felt tears wash down from my eyes as I stumbled across the familiar yard in the dark. I don’t know why I was crying—unless it was because I was homesick for something bright that I knew I would never have, and because I knew I could never tell Mom what really happened.

Then the pale trail of light from our door caught me and I swept in on an astonished Mom, calling softly, because of the sleeping kids, “Mom! Mom! Guess what!”

Yes, I remember Mrs. Klevity because she had eggs for breakfast! Every day! That’s one of the reasons I remember her.