“I understand you’re hurt, Dad!”
“No,” says Octavian. “No! It’s not just that. It’s like she took some part of my brain with her when she left. I get confused, and I only want to be in the library. I get sleepy, and I lose track of time.”
“That’s not normal, Dad,” says Kiran. “You should go to the city and see your doctor.”
“I can’t leave.”
“What are you talking about? Of course you can leave.”
“Charlotte needs me, she wants me,” says Octavian.
“Charlotte isn’t here.”
“She’s close,” says Octavian. “If I stay here, and keep reaching, I can bring her back.”
“Dad,” says Kiran. “You’re not making sense. Bring her back from where? The underworld? Like Orpheus and Eurydice? Charlotte left! She went away!”
“She talks to me,” says Octavian. “She sings. She wants me to join her.”
“Okay,” says Kiran sharply, “that’s it. You’re delusional. After the gala, Ravi and I are putting you on a boat and taking you to the doctor and you don’t get to have an opinion about it.”
Jane is noticing something about the room, about the way the air seems buzzy and strange, as if there’s an extra energy to it. The buzziness is focused on Octavian. If the thing I’m sensing were visible, Jane thinks, Octavian would be blurry. As if he were existing partly in some other dimension.
“I bet you almost disappear when you’re in the library,” Jane says out loud to Octavian.
Kiran and Octavian both turn to stare at Jane, startled by her interruption. Below, Jasper nips Jane. Then he opens his mouth, clamps it around her calf, and bites, hard.
“Ow!” cries Jane. The room comes sharply into focus again and the buzzing drops away. “Jasper! You sadist!” He’s punctured a hole in her black-and-white-striped jeans. She wants suddenly to go outside and get some air. She needs some air. It’s a desperate, pressing need.
“I’m going for a walk,” Jane says to Kiran and Octavian. “Bye.”
Jasper turns and sprints into the corridor, hopping in anxious excitement. Jane follows him.
*
Jasper leads Jane down the stairs. For once, he doesn’t try to trip her. In the receiving hall, he herds her around a woman who’s picking pieces of lilac and glass from the floor. Jane doesn’t even notice the woman at first, which upsets her, that she’s so out of it, she almost steps on another human being. Aunt Magnolia, she finds herself repeating. Aunt Magnolia, Aunt Magnolia.
A framed photo on a side table catches her eye. It’s a portrait of a youngish blond woman with some other people and when Jane tries to go to it, Jasper herds her away with enthusiasm. The woman has a maniacal smile on her face. Jane knows it’s Charlotte. She cranes her neck to keep looking at it while Jasper shuffles her out the front door.
The moment she passes into the outside world, she begins to come awake again. She feels the straining sunlight on her skin and hears the pounding sea, the pushing wind. The sounds are normal, natural; there’s no strange pressure on her ears. Standing in the front yard, buffeted by wind and light, she takes a deep, jellyfish breath. Aunt Magnolia.
Jane thinks, suddenly, of the way her aunt died. Aunt Magnolia froze to death, in a blizzard. Hypothermia. Jane has learned, since then, from her doctor, some of the details of what it would have been like. Aunt Magnolia would have struggled with a mental fog like the one Jane has been experiencing today. An inability to remember things, to feel coherent and whole. She would have fought for clarity, but found it impossible, and finally given in to the fog. She would have had no choice.
Aunt Magnolia? Why did you send me to this strange, strange house? Did you know it would make me feel this way? She looks up. Tu Reviens stretches before her, huge and cold, pockmarked with windows and unmatching stones. It makes her think of an old dragon with missing scales and multiple beady glass eyes, protecting its treasure. It feels . . . lonely, she thinks. And hungry.
An instinct tells her that in future it might be wise to stay out of the library.
Jasper’s forging a path across the front yard through grass up to his neck, aiming for the east side of the house, where Jane can just make out the edges of the garden. Jane follows, pushing herself through the soggy grass, taking slow breaths.
Rounding the house’s corner to the garden, she’s bombarded by the smell of fresh, cold dirt and the sight of tulips and daffodils—jonquils, she thinks, touching the one at her ear—and a magnolia tree that looks like it’s ready to explode into flower.
Near the edge of the east lawn, Mr. Vanders sits on a funny, crooked bench that looks more like it’s made for meditation than for gardening. Or maybe it’s just the slow, contemplative manner in which he’s digging. The garden and yard are covered with uneven, random holes and piles of dirt.
“Hello there,” Jane says, not wanting to interrupt, but wanting him to know he’s not alone.
He attempts to speak but instead begins sneezing.
“Bless you,” says Jane.
“Thank you,” he says, pulling a handkerchief from his pocket. “Forgive me. I’m allergic to spring. Going for a walk, are you?”
“I needed to clear my mind,” Jane says, gesturing with her book hand. “I’ve been feeling muddleheaded. So I came outside for some air. Should you be gardening if you have allergies?”
“We mustn’t neglect the gardening,” says Mr. Vanders. He sneezes again, explosively, then sighs, stretching his back.
The damp chill is doing wonders for Jane’s mental clarity. Jasper sniffs happily at the holes Mr. Vanders has made, then starts digging one of his own. Jane feels an urge to go for a jog across the yard and toss her book like a javelin.
Mr. Vanders closes his watering eyes and turns his dark face to the sun. Jane can see every fine line crisscrossing his skin and wonders if the day will come when sudden little details will stop being about Aunt Magnolia, when the lines in the face of an old person won’t make her think, Aunt Magnolia will never be that old.
She remembers, with a start, that Mr. Vanders knew Aunt Magnolia. Before she started feeling so foggy, she meant to investigate. “I haven’t managed to talk to Mrs. Vanders yet,” she says, “about my aunt.”
“Mm-hmph,” says Mr. Vanders, not opening his eyes. “Maybe after the gala. She’ll find you once it’s all over with.”
The gala, Jane remembers. The gala is tomorrow. The details of this day are trickling back. She takes one great, big breath and decides that never again will she go into the library. “Apparently something happened with a Brancusi sculpture?” she says. “Of a fish?”
Mr. Vanders opens his eyes, blows his nose. “Apparently.”
“We’re lucky Lucy St. George is visiting, since she’s an art investigator,” Jane says, with a sudden flash of the jailbird umbrella. “It’s scary, actually, isn’t it?” she says. “If someone in the house stole a piece of art?”
“Yep,” Mr. Vanders says, not sounding scared, or even particularly interested. Jane considers his messy garden. It’s unclear what he’s doing besides creating craters.
“Do you like gardening, then?”
“I wouldn’t say so,” he says, grasping his back. “My lumbar region is in agonies and I couldn’t tell a flower from a weed if my life depended on it. But I’m trying to approach it as an exercise in mindfulness.”
“Is it working?”
“Not particularly,” he says wearily.
Jane watches Jasper root happily around in his hole. Then she anchors her eyes on Tu Reviens again.
“Have you always lived here?”
“Aside from college and grad school and some travel,” says Mr. Vanders, “yes. My parents worked for the Thrashes. I grew up here, and have watched Octavian, then my own son, then Kiran and Ravi and Patrick and Ivy, grow up in this odd, wonderful house.”
Jane considers the winter garden. “Even the glass of that wall is a patchwork,” she says, indicating the panels.
“Just part of the house’s lopsided charm,” says Mr. Vanders.