"I'm with you."
"Henry, Henry, stop. Henry, where’s Eddie?"
I rolled off her and situated myself. The fog thickened a bit, blurring the contours of a small rocky peninsula that jutted out into the sea. A hardy patch of conifers clung to its granite skull. Behind us, the waterfall ran down to the sand at low tide. No other noise but the surf against shore.
"Eddie?" She was already standing up. "Eddie!"
I stood beside her. "Edward, where are you? Come here."
A thin shout from the trees, then an intolerable wait. I was already mourning him when he came clambering down and raced across the sand to us, his clothes and hair wet with salt spray.
"Where have you been?" Tess asked.
"I went out on that island as far as you can go."
"Don't you know how dangerous that is?"
"I wanted to see how far you could see. A girl is out there."
"On that rock?"
"She was sitting and staring at the ocean."
"All by herself? Where are her parents?"
"For real, Mom. She came a long, long way to get here. Like we did."
"Edward, you shouldn't make up stories like that. There's not a person around for miles."
"For real, Dad. Come see."
"I'm not going out to those rocks. It's cold and wet and slippery."
"Henry"—Tess pointed out to the fir trees—"look at that."
Dark hair flying behind her, a young girl emerged from the firs, ran like a goat down the sloping face, as thin and lissome as the breeze. From that distance she looked unreal, as if woven from the mist. She stopped when she saw us standing there, and though she did not come close, she was no stranger. We peered at each other across the water, and the moment lasted as briefly as the snapping of a photograph. There and gone at the same time. She turned toward the waterfall and ran, vanishing beyond in a haze of rock and evergreen.
"Wait," Tess cried. "Don't go." She raced toward the girl.
"Leave her," I hollered, and chased down my wife. "She's gone. It looks like she knows her way around this place."
"That's a helluva thing, Henry. You let her go, out here in the middle of nowhere."
Eddie shivered in his damp clothes. I swathed him in the blanket and sat him on the sand. We asked him to tell us all about her, and the words tumbled out as he warmed up.
"I was on an adventure and came to the big rock at the edge. And there she was sitting there. Right behind those trees, looking out at the waves. I said hi, and she said hi. And then she said, 'Would you like to sit with me?' "
"What is her name?" Tess asked.
"Ever heard of a girl called Speck? She likes to come here in winter to watch the whales."
"Eddie, did she say where her parents were? Or how she got all the way out here by herself?"
"She walked, and it took more than a year. Then she asked where was I from, and I told her. Then she asked me my name, and I said Edward Day." He suddenly looked away from us and gazed at the rock and the falling tides, as if remembering a hidden sensation.
"Did she say anything else?"
"No." He gathered the blanket around his shoulders.
"Nothing at all?"
"She said, 'How is life in the big, big world?' and I thought that was funny."
"Did she do anything ... peculiar?" I asked.
"She can laugh like a seagull. Then I heard you started calling me. And she said, 'Good-bye Edward Day,' like that. And I told her to wait right here so I could get my mommy and dad."
Tess embraced our son and rubbed his bare arms through the blanket. She looked again at the space the girl had run through. "She just slipped away. Like a ghost."
From that moment to the instant our plane touched down at home, all I could think about was that lost girl, and what bothered me about her was not so much her mysterious appearance and disappearance, but her familiarity.
When we settled in at home, I began to see the changelings everywhere.
In town on a Saturday morning for a haircut with Edward, I grew flustered by a towheaded boy who sat waiting his turn, quietly sucking a lollipop as he stared, unblinking, at my son. When school resumed in the fall, a pair of twins in the sixth grade spooked me with their uncanny resemblance to each other and their ability to finish each other's sentences. Driving home from a band performance on a dark night, I saw three children in the cemetery and wondered, for a moment, what they might be plotting at such a late hour. At parties or the odd evening out with other couples, I tried to work in veiled references to the legend of the two feral girls and the baby-food jars, hoping to find someone else who believed it or could confirm the rumors, but everyone scoffed when I mentioned the story. All children, except my own boy, became slightly suspect. They can be devious creatures. Behind every child's bright eyes exists a hidden universe.
The quartet's album, Tales of Wonder, arrived by Christmas, and we nearly wore out the groove playing it over and over for our friends and family. Edward loved to hear the dissonance of violins against the steady cello line and the crashing arrival of the organ. Even anticipating its arrival, the movement was a shock no matter how many times one listened to the album. On New Year's Eve, well after midnight, the house quiet as a prayer, a sudden blast of my song startled me awake. Expecting the worst, I came downstairs in my pajamas, wielding a baseball bat, only to find my son bug-eyed in front of the speakers, hypnotized by the music. When I turned down the volume, he began to blink rapidly and shake his head as if awakened from a dream.
"Hey, pardner," I said in a low voice. "Do you know how late it is?"
"Is it 1977 yet?"
"Hours ago. Party's over, fella. What made you put on this song?"
"I had a bad dream."
I pulled him onto my lap. "Do you want to tell me about it?" He did not answer but burrowed closer, so I held him tighter. The last drawn-out note resounded as the song lapsed into silence, so I reached over and shut off the stereo.
"Daddy, do you know why I put on your song? Because it reminds me."
"Reminds you of what, Edward? Our trip out to California?"
He turned to face me until we looked eye-to-eye. "No. Of Speck," he said. "The fairy girl."
With a quiet moan, I drew him closer to me, where I could feel in the warmth of his chest the quickening of his heart.
CHAPTER 32
Speck loved to be by moving water. My strongest memory is of her animated by the currents, empathetic to the flow. I saw her once, years ago, stripped to the skin, sitting with her legs tucked beneath her, as the water rolled around her waist and the sunshine caressed her shoulders. Under normal circumstances, I would have jumped and splashed in the creek with her, but struck by the grace of her neck and limbs, the contours of her face, I could not move. On another occasion, when the townsfolk shot off fireworks in the night, we watched the explosions upriver, and she seemed more enchanted by the waterflow than by the loud flowering in the sky. While the people looked up, she watched the light reflecting on the ripples and the sparks as they hissed on the surface. From the beginning, I had guessed where she had gone and why, but I did not act upon that intuition because of a fundamental lack of courage. The same fears that had prevented me from crossing at the riverbend also made me break off the search and come back to camp. I should have followed the waters.
The path to the library never seemed as long and foreboding as on the night of my first return. The way had changed since we had parted. The forest thinned around its edge, and rusty cans, bottles, and other refuse littered the brush. None of us had visited in the years since she left. Books lay where we had left them, though mice had nibbled the margins of my papers, left their scat in our old candleholders and coffee mugs. Her Shakespeare was lousy with silverfish. Stevens had swollen with dampness. By dim candlelight, I spent the night restoring order, pulling down cobwebs, shooing crickets, lingering over what she had once held in her hands. I fell asleep wrapped in I he musty blanket that had long ago lost her scent.
Vibrations above announced the arrival of morning. The librarians started their day, joists creaking under their weight and the patterns of their routines. I could picture their goings-on: checking in, saying hello, settling at their stations. An hour or so passed before the doors opened and the humans shuffled in. When the rhythm felt normal, I began to work. A thin film of dust covered my papers, and I spent most of that first day reading the bits and pieces in order, tying the loose pages with entries in McInnes's journal. So much had been left behind, lost, forgotten, and buried after we had been driven away the first time. Reduced to a short pile, the words documented time's passage with deep gaps and yawning silences. Very little existed, for instance, from the early days of my arrival—only a few crude drawings and pathetic notes. Years had gone by without mention. After reviewing all the files, I understood the long chore ahead.
When the librarians left for the evening, I popped open the trapdoor underneath the children's section. Unlike on other forays, I had no desire to pick out a new book, but, rather, to steal new writing supplies. Behind the head librarian's desk lay the treasure: five long yellow pads and enough pens to last the rest of my life. To introduce a minor intrigue, I also reshelved the Wallace Stevens that had been missing.
Words spilled from the pen and I wrote until my hand cramped and pained me. The end, the night that Speck left, became the beginning. From there, the story moved backward to the point where I realized that I had fallen in love with her. A whole swath of the original manuscript, which is thankfully gone, was given over to the physical tensions of being a grown man in a young boy's body. Right in the middle of a sentence on desire, I stopped. What if she wanted me to go with her? I would have pleaded for her to stay, said that I lacked the courage to run away. Yet a contrary idea pulled at my conscience. Perhaps she never intended for me to find out. She had run away because of me and knew all along that I loved her. I put down my pen and wished Speck were there to talk with me, to answer all the unknowables.
These obsessions curled like parasites through my brain, and I tossed and turned on the hard floor. I woke up in the night and started writing on a clean pad, determined to rid my mind of its darkest thoughts. The hours passed and days drifted one into the other. For the next six months, I divided myself between the camp and the library, trying to piece together the story of my life to give to Speck. Our winter hibernation slowed my progress. I grew tired in December and slept until March. Before I could go back to the book, the book came back to me.
Solemn-eyed Luchóg and Smaolach approached one morning as I crunched a farl of oats and drained the dregs from a cup of tea. With great deliberation, they sat on either side of me, cross-legged, settling in for a long talk. Luchóg fiddled with a new shoot of rye poking through the old leaves, and Smaolach looked off, pretending to study the play of light through the branches.
"Good morning, lads. What’s on your minds?"
"We've been to the library," said Smaolach.
"Haven't gone there in ages," said Luchóg.
"We know what you've been up to"
"Read the story of your life."
Smaolach turned his gaze toward mine. "A hundred thousand apologies, but we had to know."
"Who gave you the right?" I asked.
They turned their faces away from me, and I did not know where to look.
"You've got a few stories wrong," Luchóg said. "May I ask why you wrote this book? To whom is it addressed?"
"What did I get wrong?"
"My understanding is that an author doesn't write a book without having one or more readers in mind," Luchóg said. "One doesn't go through the time and effort to be the only reader of your own book. Even the diarist expects the lock to be picked."
Smaolach pulled at his chin, as if deep in thought. "It would be a big mistake, I think, to write a book that no one would ever read."
"You are quite right, old friend. I have at times wondered why the artist dares to bring something new into a world where everything has been done and where all the answers are quite well known."
I stood and broke the plane of their inquisition. "Would you please tell me," I hollered, "what is wrong with the book?"
"I'm afraid it's your father," said Luchóg.
"My father, what about him? Has something happened to him?"
"He's not who you think he is."
"What my friend means to say is that the man you think of as your father is not your father at all. That man is another man."
"Come with us," said Luchóg.
As we wound along the path, I tried to untangle the many implications of their invasion into my book. First, they had always known I was Henry Day, and now they knew I knew. They had read of my feelings for Speck and surely guessed I was writing to her. They knew how I felt about them, as well. Fortunately, they came across as generally sympathetic characters, a bit eccentric, true, but steadfast allies in my adventures. Their line of questioning posed an intriguing concern, however, as I had not thought ahead to how I might actually get a book to Speck, or, more to the point, about the reasons behind my desire to write it all down. Smaolach and Luchóg, ahead on the trail, had lived in these woods for decades and sailed through eternity without the same cares or the need to write down and make sense of it all. They wrote no books, painted nothing on the walls, danced no new dance, yet they lived in peace and harmony with the natural world. Why wasn't I like the others?
At sunset, we stepped out of cover and walked down past the church to a scattering of graves in a green space adjacent to the cemetery enclosed by a stone wall. I had been there once before, many years ago, thinking it a shortcut back to safety, or perhaps merely a good hiding place. We slipped between the iron bars into a tranquil, overgrown garden. Many of the inscriptions on the stones were weathered and faded, as the tenants had lain beneath their vanishing names for many years. My friends took me on a winding path between the graves, and we stopped short among the memorials and weeds. Smaolach walked me to a plot and showed me the stone: WILLIAM DAY, 1917-1962. I knelt down on the grass, ran my finger along the grooves of letters, considered the numbers. "What happened?"
