“Yes,” MacPhearson said. “I want your help. We are looking for the same thing.”
“And if I refuse?”
MacPhearson set his hands on his cane and shrugged. “You’re free to go.” He pointed to the far side of the gate. The Driver, Malory’s Driver, was standing at the passenger door of the car that only a few days before had driven him to TiborTina. “Your driver knows how to find me, if you find Louiza.”
Malory walked off the veranda and down the gravel path to the gate. He felt larger, taller than when he’d awakened to the sound of the Goldberg Variations. MacPhearson knew something, but Malory knew more. Without turning back, he sat in the car and waited as the Driver closed the door and returned to the wheel.
“Oh, and Mr. Malory.” MacPhearson hobbled up on his cane and motioned Malory to lower his window. “Mr. Malory,” MacPhearson said, leaning heavily on his stick to bring the remains of his red beard and his coffee-stained teeth to window level with Malory. “If you find that girl, please let us know.”
“Which girl?” Malory said, willing the Driver to back up and leave as soon as possible.
“The girl who left that fourth set of fingerprints on the gun.”
“Yes?” Malory said, thinking of those fingers wrapped around his arm in the innocence of the pasture below the Blue House, her excite ment about the stories of Haroun and Aldana and the remarkable treasure of Judar Son of Omar.
“We ran a quick DNA test on all your prints.”
“I see,” Malory said.
“Of course science requires a little more patience than just a day, but I thought you might like to know.”
“Know what?”
“The girl, you know who I mean,” MacPhearson said. “That girl — well I suspect you suspected.”
“Is my daughter?” Malory asked.
“And Louiza is her mother, yes,” MacPhearson said.
“But a funny thing,” MacPhearson interrupted Malory’s vision, leaning down to the window of the car. “There’s more to the genetic test. It appears that your friend Tibor was her father, too. It all depends on how you look.”
The Driver pulled away from the yellow house with the gables. Malory heard the sound of a guitar, the voice of Dylan, or was it Tibor:
You could almost think that you’re seeing double
On a cold, dark night on the Spanish Stairs.
Two fathers. Malory looked up at the sky. As MacPhearson saw it, there were big things and there were little things. Big things like galaxies, little things like the color-coded quarks that make up the cozy bits of atoms. But that only accounted for a fraction of the stuff that was maybe 5 percent of the universe on a rainy day. The rest was dark matter or dark energy. And Louiza.
3/2
T WAS A MONTH BEFORE I CAME OUT OF THE WOODS, BEFORE GRAVITY proved stronger than fear and I fell to Earth. My memory of that month includes water — streams, creeks, not all of them the same, a few ponds and September puddles, a lake perhaps. Above all, my memory includes the water that penetrates the forest in the slimmest of trickles, that blackens the bark of maples and birches, and mulches the leaves to an oaken rot that ferments into the colors of nightmares dripping onto softer wounds. My memory includes bugs and beetles, ants and earwigs, small things that wash in acorn cups, things that I followed at night into hollowed trunks, where I folded myself into knotholes, contracted into the shelter of a single leaf to escape the harsher elements and memory herself. Malory believed in One, Tibor in Seven. But the things I saw were beyond number.
I did my best to shut out memory. But at night the music came at me. And it came not just with electric girls in polyethylene thigh-highs and strap-on Fenders, but in a hail of falling leaves, falling branches, falling limbs more present, more horrible than any memory of Tibor’s exploded mind. The unimaginable had happened, although I couldn’t have known it at the time. Unimaginable not just to me and Tibor and Cristina, but to the world outside the forest. And the music of the unimaginable drove a wedge between sleep, thought, and imagination itself.
I don’t know how I coped that month, but cope I did. I swallowed bugs and mushrooms, licked the nighttime moisture from the naked trunks of my fortress. One tree at a time, I began to wander away from my knothole. One dawn, one week — although it could have been two or twelve — after the explosion, I found myself sitting at the edge of my creek, a hundred yards from my cabin, watching the water carry bits of TiborTina to me. I watched as cars came and went, up and down from River Road, policemen, others. And I waited. I don’t know how long I waited — hours, days, with the music louder, if that were possible, than it had been deep in the woods — sitting there on a boulder on the far side of the creek, through the sirens of the day and the Stratocasters of the night. Until one morning …
“So.”
I opened my eyes and looked around. No one. Across the creek, the morning had risen halfway to noon.
“So.” I didn’t turn around this time. “Did you find it, Ottavia?”
I didn’t need Tibor’s voice, real or imagined, to remember when I’d first heard that question, the day when Sister Francesca Splendida led us down past Mussolini’s Rose Garden to the Circo Massimo. There were twelve of us, hopping like sparrows behind Sister, down the granite steps and across the dusty oval. Along the middle of the Circo stood a crane with a cameraman on a seat. Below the crane, the most wonderful women — gowns, faces painted brighter than any in the frescoed chapels of Santa Sabina. And in front of them all, black and as large as a statue, sat a man. Sister Francesca Splendida led us up to him and stood to the side to present us for inspection. Immediately he looked at me. I knew he was looking at me.
He was different from the few men I had seen in my ten years at the convent, in spite of the black. The hair on his head was pulled back behind his ears. His beard climbed high up to his cheekbones. The whites of his eyes shone clear and direct. None of us could look away as he spoke, as he told us of seven treasures that were buried in the Circo Massimo — seven treasures that only we could find.
“Girls,” he said, “you have grown up your entire lives here in Rome, no?”
We all looked at Sister Francesca Splendida for guidance and nodded our heads.
“And you are good girls, no?”
Again a look and a dozen vigorous nods.
“But Sister Francesca Splendida and your other teachers have told you about sin, haven’t they?”
We were used to nodding by now, but did so with a little more hesitation.
“I am directing a spectacle in Rome, beginning right here in the Circo Massimo. It is a spectacle about sin, about a man in despair.” He saw our puzzled faces. “A man,” he explained, “who is confused. A man who doesn’t know which way to go. And so a teacher, someone perhaps”—and his eyes grew whiter—“like Sister Francesca Splendida, takes him on a walk. He takes him to a very special place where he sees all kinds of sin. But really, when it comes down to it there are only a few major, a few deadly sins.”
“Seven!” I didn’t raise my hand — I rarely did. Sister looked back at me fiercely, but Tibor smiled.
“So,” he said, “so small and already you understand the connection between sin and mathematics.” I didn’t understand what he meant until years later, when he repeated the story to others in an effort to make me blush. But that day, I was guilty only of the sin of pride. He was looking at me, talking to me. “Seven sins,” Tibor said. “Seven deadly sins. So girls. I need you to help me. I need you to look around the Circo Massimo, go exploring if you must. But come back to me once you’ve found an example of …”