“Well, she ain’t here,” Fran said. “That’s what I know. So I have to stay here in her place. I don’t expect she’ll be back, neither.”
“She shouldn’t have left you behind,” Ophelia said. “That was wrong, Fran.”
“I wish I could get away for just a little while,” Fran said. “Maybe go out to San Francisco and see the Golden Gate Bridge. Stick my toes in the Pacific. I’d like to buy me a guitar and play some of them old ballads on the streets. Just stay a little while, then come back and take up my burden again.”
“I’d sure like to go out to California,” Ophelia said.
They sat in silence for a minute.
“I wish I could help out,” Ophelia said. “You know, with that house and the summer people. You shouldn’t have to do everything, not all of the time.”
“I already owe you,” Fran said, “for helping with the Robertses’ house. For looking in on me when I was ill. For what you did when you went up to fetch me help.”
“I know what it’s like when you’re all alone,” Ophelia said. “When you can’t talk about stuff. And I mean it, Fran. I’ll do whatever I can to help.”
“I can tell you mean it,” Fran said. “But I don’t think you know what it is you’re saying. If you want, you can go up there again one more time. You did me a favor, and I don’t know how else to pay you back. There’s a bedroom up in that house and if you sleep in it, you see your heart’s desire. I could take you back tonight and show you that room. And anyhow, I think you lost a thing up there.”
“I did?” Ophelia said. “What was it?” She reached down in her pockets. “Oh, hell. My iPod. How did you know?”
Fran shrugged. “Not like anybody up there is going to steal it. Expect they’d be happy to have you back up again. If they didn’t like you, you’d know it already.”
Fran was straightening up her and her daddy’s mess when the summer people let her know they needed a few things. “Can’t I have just a minute to myself?” she grumbled.
They told her that she’d had a good four days. “And I surely do appreciate it,” she said, “considering I was laid so low.” But she put the skillet down in the sink to soak and wrote down what they wanted.
She tidied away all of the toys, not quite sure what had come over her to take them out. Except that when she was sick, she always thought of Ma. There was nothing wrong with that.
When Ophelia came back at five, she had her hair in a ponytail and a flashlight and a thermos in her pocket, like she thought she was Nancy Drew.
“It gets dark up here so early,” Ophelia said. “I feel like it’s Halloween or something. Like you’re taking me to the haunted house.”
“They ain’t haints,” Fran said. “Nor demons nor any such thing. They don’t do no harm unless you get on the wrong side of ’em. They’ll play a prank on you then, and count it good fun.”
“Like what?” Ophelia said.
“Once I did the warshing up and broke a teacup,” Fran said. “They’ll sneak up and pinch you.” She still had marks on her arms, though she hadn’t broken a plate in years. “Lately, they been doing what all the people up here like to do, that reenacting. They set up their battlefield in the big room downstairs. It’s not the War Between the States. It’s one of theirs, I guess. They built themselves airships and submersibles and mechanical dragons and knights and all manner of wee toys to fight with. Sometimes, when they get bored, they get me up to be their audience, only they ain’t always careful where they go pointing their cannons.”
She looked at Ophelia and saw she’d said too much. “Well, they’re used to me. They know I don’t have no choice but to put up with their ways.”
That afternoon, she’d had to drive over to Chattanooga to visit a particular thrift store. They’d sent her for a used DVD player, riding gear, and all the bathing suits she could buy up. Between that and paying for gas, she’d gone through seventy dollars. And the service light had been on the whole way. At least it wasn’t a school day. Hard to explain you were cutting out because voices in your head were telling you they needed a saddle.
She’d gone on ahead and brought it all up to the house after. No need to bother Ophelia with any of it. The iPod had been lying right in front of the door.
“Here,” she said. “I brought this back down.”
“My iPod!” Ophelia said. She turned it over. “They did this?”
The iPod was heavier now. It had a little walnut case instead of pink silicone, and there was a figure inlaid in ebony and gilt.
“A dragonfly,” Ophelia said.
“A snake doctor,” Fran said. “That’s what my daddy calls them.”
“They did this for me?”
“They’d embellish a bedazzled jean jacket if you left it there,” Fran said. “No lie. They can’t stand to leave a thing alone.”
“Cool,” Ophelia said. “Although my mom is never going to believe me when I say I bought it at the mall.”
“Just don’t take up anything metal,” Fran said. “No earrings, not even your car keys. Or you’ll wake up and they’ll have smelted them down and turned them into doll armor or who knows what all.”
They took off their shoes when they got to where the road crossed the drain. The water was cold with the last of the snowmelt. Ophelia said, “I feel like I ought to have brought a hostess gift.”
“You could pick them a bunch of wildflowers,” Fran said. “But they’d be just as happy with a bit of kyarn.”
“Yarn?” Ophelia said.
“Roadkill,” Fran said. “But yarn’s okay.”
Ophelia thumbed the wheel of her iPod. “There’s songs on here that weren’t here before.”
“They like music, too,” Fran said.
“What you were saying about going out to San Francisco to busk,” Ophelia said. “I can’t imagine doing that.”
“Well,” Fran said, “I won’t ever do it, but I think I can imagine it okay.”
When they got up to the house, deer were grazing on the green lawn. The living tree and the dead were touched with the last of the daylight. Chinese lanterns hung in rows from the rafters of the porch.
“You need to come at the house from between the trees,” Fran said. “Right on the path. Otherwise, you don’t get nowhere near it. And I don’t ever use but the back door.”
She knocked at the back door. BE BOLD, BE BOLD. “It’s me again,” she said. “And Ophelia. The one who left the iPod.”
She saw Ophelia open her mouth and went on hastily, “Don’t. They don’t like it when you thank
