GRETEL WAS IN THE FRONT HALL of the Baker House, arms folded as she surveyed a silver-birchwood grandfather clock from head to foot. The grandfather clock was brand-new; she’d brought it along for that crestfallen hollow beneath the stairs. No, the appointment had not been forgotten, today was the day, nothing had prevented Gretel from coming, she was there, but couldn’t stay long, as a changeling’s work is never done. The knowledge that Gretel was there didn’t seem to be enough to get Harriet out of bed, so Perdita stepped in.
Get up, Mum . . . get up, get up . . . if you don’t get up right now you’ll miss her.
Why couldn’t Harriet get up? She wanted to, so very much, but it just wasn’t happening.
Can’t even raise an arm, let alone a leg . . . it looks like this’ll have to wait until the second house . . .
Don’t you realize you’ll be even older then?
I know, but . . .
She says she’s not going to bother coming to the second house if you don’t show your face downstairs right now!
Perdita really was shaking Harriet, but she wasn’t talking about Gretel. Perdita was saying, Mum, come next door, my candle keeps going out . . .
“Surely just a draft,” Harriet mumbled. “Jump in here with me if you’re worried about it, though.”
Virtually mouthing the words, the way you do to minimize the possibility of being overheard, Perdita mouthed, “I’m not worried. Somebody keeps blowing out my candle. I light it again and then . . . don’t start shouting . . . I must nod off, because I don’t know how it’s happened, but a few minutes later my eyes sort of switch on again and the candle’s out. It’s cute—I think it’s someone worried about health and safety—unattended flames and all that. I just want to catch them doing it and it might take two people to do that.”
Harriet went next door and got into the bed there, feeling considerably less sleepy than before as she eyed the candle flame and the shadows and every place where the doors, walls, ceiling, and floors joined. How many children do you have, Ma Baker, and in your count have you made sure to include the one who most considerately blows out candles to protect this heritage house from fire? Perdita sat at a desk placed behind the bed, watching some show that was making her laugh . . . usually Perdita did this with her earphones in, but tonight she had the volume up, and every now and again Harriet sat up in the bed and looked back at Perdita—the long, tapered dimensions of that room might have been what made it echoey, but to her ear there were two people laughing.
Not an echo. There was a second laugher. It was the cupboard door that made Harriet dead certain of this. Behind the bed, behind the desk Perdita sat at, there was a cupboard set into the back wall, cupboard or wardrobe, some cross between the two. Anyway, the door opened softly, softly, wider and wider, because they had a gawker, someone capable of staying out of sight for months and years but seeing these two together, Harriet and Perdita, proved too much for him.
He was southern Mediterranean in appearance, like the rest of his family, and he was about twenty years old. He was tall and slender and his eyes were really beautiful—I mean that they conferred beauty—you felt that when he looked at you. Perdita said that he had the eyes of a bear; there was that mixture of strength and a strange humility (was it just that he didn’t know or care about his strength?) in his gaze. He gave them a lot of aliases at first, trying out names with the shy excitement of one who doesn’t often get a chance to introduce himself, but after Tamar and Margot had given him a lot of Look here, young mans they learned that his name was Jonathan Baker, and that he was the sanest member of his family by dint of having escaped his mother and younger sister’s notice altogether. When he was still quite small, one of his brothers had told him he mustn’t answer if either Tara or their mother spoke to him and to simply flee if either one of them approached. A few years of this persuaded Tara and her mother that Jonathan was some by-product of the repugnance they felt for the rest of their unacceptable family. So the sibling who’d given Jonathan the good advice helped him keep on the move between cupboard fortresses and box-room fortresses, and the same sibling made sure Jonathan always had something to eat and drink and some educational material, as well as entertainment every now and then. “I still visit him every week, and he’s still a bit shifty with me . . . I’ve had to promise him I won’t tell anybody that he was the one who helped me out.”
“Oh, so your brother thinks you’re imaginary too?”
“It’s hard to be certain, but I’m leaning toward yes, that is what he thinks . . .”
Tamar and Margot were roused from sleep, and the five of them gathered in the sitting room. Harriet and Perdita wanted to know everything about Jonathan Baker and how he had been making a living—he had been making one, and had been able to prove to himself that he wasn’t imaginary through certain scaled-down, though determined, interactions with the world. Recently there had been more good days than bad days. Tamar cut through the chitchat with a question: “So the house isn’t even for sale? I don’t think I can settle for less than seeing this Miss Maszkeradi behind bars.”
“You’d better not harm a hair on Miss Maszkeradi’s head,” shouted Jonathan. Drahomíra Maszkeradi was a friend of his. She’d told him about the Kercheval-Lee housing plan, and things had played out this way because he needed room to back out if anything about it felt wrong. But now he felt almost sure that his home was ready for another family, as long as the new family didn’t mind him being a non-imaginary member of it this time.
“I think that’ll work, Jonathan,” Harriet said.
Margot said. “Do you really? I’m not impressed by the way this young man hung around inside a cupboard without saying a word while my granddaughter was presumably changing into her night things and whatnot—”
“He didn’t look,” Perdita said, and Jonathan shook his head, silently condemning these low thoughts of Margot’s.
That was the first house, and the first of the missed meetings between Harriet and Gretel. It was also around that time that the doll named Sago and the doll named Bonnie moved in with Jonathan Baker. Perdita thought their personalities would complement each other, and Sago and Bonnie thought it was nice for Perdita to have an excuse to visit Jonathan. Apparently for the first three weeks Jonathan and the dolls didn’t converse, but they comfortably observed each other from beneath tables and through banisters—this is going to happen all over again when other people move in with these three. As far as being alarmed goes, weeks of wordless hide-and-seek won’t come anywhere near some of the situations the newcomers will have already outlived. But ideally the newcomers will also enjoy the settling-in experience just as much as Jonathan and Sago and Bonnie.
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