The hallway is socked with darkness broken by blue beams of moonlight. He keeps his feet flat and brings them down softly, so that he makes no more noise than a cat gliding across a rug, when he sneaks his way three doors down, Danica’s.
The knob is made from decorative brass. Maybe a minute passes before he turns it completely, and maybe a minute more before he opens enough of a crack to slip through. Her room smells spicy with perfumes. The bed is hers alone; her husband sleeps down the hall.
She is so thin, he cannot make out her body beneath the sheets, but her hair gives her away, as white-blond as thistledown, whiter even than her bed linens. He tries to detect her breathing but cannot, with the window open and the thrum of the city in the room. She has not drawn her curtains and the air is silvered with moonlight. He takes in his surroundings — its desk and dresser, its paintings of wildflower meadows, of lily-padded ponds, of women in white lace twirling sun umbrellas at garden parties — before starting forward.
His hand reaches first for the top left drawer of her dresser and he finds there the skins of stockings and many slips as thin as paper. In the next drawer he finds her panties, so many of them the drawer catches when he slides it out. He digs around, but every pair seems fresh off the sewing table — not a filthy, holey pair of panties in sight. He can’t wait to tell Ella.
He has the letter folded in his pocket. He slips it now into the topmost pair of panties. His fingers tease the fabric. Heat spikes inside him. He felt calm until now, his heartbeat fluttering up to the burning tips of his ears.
There is something about stealing he misses. With Ella, his life has grown comfortable, and the other side of comfort is boredom. He feels more alive now than he has in weeks. When you have no home, you find pleasure in taking from others who do. It is about the money, the value, yes, but it is also about energy. Harvesting from them some object that might be worthless — a photo, a trinket — that must matter to them: that seems somehow electrical, and making it his own, energizing himself.
That is how the panties feel to him. Charged. He cannot help himself. He slips a pair from the drawer and bunches it into his pocket — just as he feels a dagger at his spine and breath on his neck.
“Those are mine,” the voice says.
Chapter 31
GAWEA SHARES A blanket with Lewis, the two of them bundled together for warmth. She watches him scribble in his journal. The rest of them stare at the campfire and at each other. They gather at the leeward base of a hill as tall as four men stacked upon each other’s shoulders. It appears to have been cut by a great knife, its side is so steep. The sky is black, with the moon and stars forever bundled in clouds. Everyone huddles close to the fire. A column of heat and smoke twists upward and the snow vanishes into it, extinguished in little wisps of steam.
Lewis brought the journal with him to chronicle, author the new world. Map the landscape. Sketch whatever flora and fauna he observed. Such as this plant, with its thin-jointed, odd-angled stalks topped by purple flowers in the summer, now wilted to a bony brown and bristling with frost. He lifts his pen and the ink freezes and he blows on the tip to warm it.
Every day, he has another set of questions for Gawea, and though she once found him pestering, she now feels a kinship in their secret sharing. He tells her he has come to understand that knowledge is not enough. Observation is not enough. He no longer wishes to be a scholar, a gatherer, a chronicler, but a creator, too. The same impulse that drove him to tinker with inventions now compels him to tinker with the world.
“What are you writing?” Clark says.
“Nothing,” he says. “Just playing around with some theories.” Then he notices all their eyes on him. They want to know. They want something from him in the same way he wants something from Gawea. He looks to her, as if for permission, and she says, “Go ahead. You’re the teacher now.”
The wood pops and the wind hushes and Lewis licks his lips several times before he finds the words he wants. “Did you know that humans used to bite like other primates? Their incisors clipped, edge to edge, the bottom and the top coming together to tear and gnash. Then, somewhere around the late eighteenth century, two things happened. People began to braise and pound and cook their meat. And to slice up their food to pop into their mouths with forks. Almost immediately the European population developed an overbite, their incisors now coming together like scissor blades.”
Clark says, “What does that have to do with anything?”
“The body changes. People adapt, sometimes in an instant.”
He holds his journal upright for them to see. Next to the sketch of the plant he has written down its common designation — skeleton weed — and then its scientific identity—Lygodesmia texana—and then its chemical and cellular structure, and then he knows it in a way he never has before, like a lover undressed and drawn to bed, a name whispered in an ear, an accommodating body, submissive to his wants. “Gawea taught me this.”
He looks at her and smiles and she smiles back.
“When you know something, really know it, its chemicals, its strings and charges, its clustered atoms, in essence you know its secrets, and when you know someone’s secrets, they answer when called.”
Clark says, “You ask, they answer.”
“Pretty much.”
Gawea says, “They don’t always answer.”
Everyone huddles down into their blankets and no one looks particularly convinced.
“Show them,” Gawea says. “Show them with the weed.”
In a five-foot ring around the fire, the snow has mostly melted. He holds out a hand to the skeleton weed, as if in offering, his fingertips spotted with ink. He looks at Gawea questioningly and she says, “You can do it.”
He closes his eyes. The arm shivers from the cold or the effort. After what feels like many minutes it listens. Greening. Blistering with a lavender bud.
York’s eyes seem to grow wider. The doctor shakes her head and sucks her teeth. Clark’s face is impassive, her head crowned by a red nimbus of hair. Colter might be grinning, but it’s difficult to tell with his torn cheek. Reed has his head in his hands, lost in some private darkness.
The fire snaps and hisses, the wood wet. The wind rises, scuttling leaves, curling snakes of snow around them. “It’s magic,” York says.
“No,” Gawea says. “Magic is just a word people use for what they can’t understand. You should know that better than anyone. You and your tricks.”
York flinches, hurt.
Lewis tucks his journal and ink and pen away. “My mother once said that she knew when I was in trouble. If I fell and scraped a knee, or if the other boys picked on me”—here he looks at Clark meaningfully—“or girls. If something happened to me, she always knew. She found me once, you know. That time you hog-tied me and hung me from a balcony? She found me and she cut me down. She didn’t carry knives but she had a knife in her pocket that day. As if she knew she would need it. Every parent has a story like this, and I suppose it makes sense. We are them. We are made from them. In this same way, everything is born of something else, everything twinned.”
Gawea doesn’t know why she’s being so generous. Maybe it’s the enormity of the night, the way it seems to crush them together, make them one instead of many. She says, “You’ve heard the saying? We’re all made of stardust? We’re all made of stardust. We’re all made of the same thing.”
A few of them look up, as if to consult the sky for an answer, but the night and the clouds muddle whatever they might hope to find.