What I withdraw from her is less than a thimbleful of thick, swirling liquid.
Vala slumps in a heap. She crouches there, unmoving, in the swell of my hand for a long moment. Barely breathing air into her own small lungs. I bring her to the nameless mouse’s cage, and when I open the door, it trembles and looks at Vala as if she could be something to eat.
I set Vala inside. Watch her with curiosity for a moment. She is nothing more than a heap of warm fur. I do not pet or soothe her. But her body does not stay still for long.
After a moment she begins to shiver and shake uncontrollably. She stands, becoming rigid, and lets out a high-pitched sound of agony. Then she begins to run in circles. Banging up against the edge of the cage with her head, as if she is trying to beat something out of it.
I pause to note this development in my log.
Then I take the unnamed mouse in a firm grip as it squirms and tries to escape. The mouse with the mangled body and ripped ear. And I give it the greatest gift of its short, miserable life.
I insert the contents of the vial I extracted from Vala straight into its bloodstream.
At first, when the mouse stops trembling and squeaking, I’m certain I’ve killed it. Just like all the others.
But then.
A sense of anticipation trills along my skin without warning. I pause. Take another look at the cage.
The unnamed mouse raises its head, cocked and curious. Its muscles, always so taut through its starved body, suddenly relax.
I watch the mouse warily. Set my wooden bird and the empty vial down on the counter. After a moment I open the cage and extend my arm.
The nameless mouse doesn’t hesitate. It scampers confidently up the crook of my elbow. Past the curve of my shoulder to the prized spot just below my ear.
I begin to stroke the mouse’s patchy fur with great care until I swear it is almost purring.
Chapter Thirty-Six
The Clifftons usually hide the newspaper, but on Wednesday morning I find it spread wide across the breakfast table.
ROOSEVELT FLIES TO NORTH AFRICA: TEN-DAY PARLEY WITH CHURCHILL MAPS TOTAL DESTRUCTION OF AXIS.
Perhaps this means the war is almost over.
On Saturday I lie on my stomach on my bedroom floor and write to Father again, with Mother’s book open beside me. I lean to scribble a new line in my notebook. I have several lists now: lines of Disappearances and Variants. A section on Shakespeare’s life: marriage, twins, collaborators, death. Recurrent themes in his work that I will scour later for clues: ambition and loyalty, herbs and flowers, greed, blood, disturbance of corpses, plays on words, appearance versus reality.
My list is growing longer every day.
“Aila?” Will knocks on my door.
I close my books and follow him outside.
He’s made a buttress. The frame is made of wooden planks and covered with chicken wire. It’s packed tightly with what looks like rags, scraps of carpet, and quilt batting. As I watch, he secures a taut piece of canvas across its front. He tests the resistance of the wood, the security of the bolts. “Like it?” he asks.
I bend to the buttress and smooth the face of the canvas with my palm. “It’s exactly what I wanted,” I say. I try not to beam. “What do I owe you?”
He pops open a can of gray paint and says, “That look is more than payment enough.” When I flush, he laughs and hands me a paintbrush.
“My father built a target for me once,” I say. “He taught me to play darts when I was younger.” I sweep my hair out of my eyes. Glance away as soon as I feel the unexpected threat of tears.
I clear my throat and dip my brush into the gray abyss of the can. “We haven’t had a letter in a while.”
Will draws his brush along the edge of the target to create the outermost lines. “Maybe it simply got lost.”
I nod. Focus on filling in the bull’s-eye with quick, sharp strokes.
Will moves to paint the final concentric circle, and so do I, and we paint until we meet in the middle. At one point our hands almost collide, but at the last instant we skim through the air past each other.
“Wouldn’t you . . .” he pauses. “Wouldn’t there be a telegram if something had happened?”
I’ve thought this, too, a hundred times. But would they know how to reach us here?
“I’m sure he’s all right,” Will quickly says with a lopsided smile. He gestures to the target as if to draw my attention away from my thoughts. “Good job with the bull’s-eye.” He turns the buttress so that the wet paint will fully catch the sun. “I made a tripod to hold it, too. You can try it out as soon as it dries.”
Will heads upstairs to change his clothes, but I hesitate in the kitchen, where Miles is finishing a plate of eggs and swinging his legs under the table. Miles and I have barely spoken two words to each other since our falling-out. Maybe a letter came and he’s hidden it out of spite.
“There haven’t been any letters lately from Father?” I ask. “That you . . . forgot to tell me about?”
“No.” Miles’s legs stop swinging. “It’s been a long time. Hasn’t it?”
“Let’s play a board game,” I say quickly. “You choose.”
“All right,” he says, and though neither of us has apologized, I know this signals the end of our fight. Miles selects Mancala. We plop on the sunroom floor and count out the marbled seeds in each pit. Soon after, George arrives and joins Dr. Cliffton in his library. I can tell that Miles is distracted, because I take the first win, but then he recovers and gets the next two.
“One more?” I ask.
“I’m pretty sure I already won,” he says.
“One more,” I insist, and start lining up the pieces.
“Aila,” Miles says. “If there’s no letter from Father, what—”
Then he stops and jerks as if he’s been shocked.
At first I think I’ve imagined it.
The sound is distant, as if it is filtered through water. Miles and I look at each other. Then we scramble to our feet, and one of us knocks over the game board, scattering the pieces across the floor tiles like pebbles.
I reach the door first and fling it open.
The music.
It hits us in a wave of honey.
I recognize it immediately: Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings in C Major, op. 48. One of my parents’ favorites. My ears lick up the notes, and suddenly it’s as though I am seven years old again, sitting at Father’s feet. He’d played the record on repeat that summer my Nana Eleanor Cummings died. I’d met her only once that I could remember. She was kind and smelled like crackers and brought me a doll.
“Sometimes we can help Mama by stirring up that sadness and getting it out,” Father had said. I remember just the way it felt, sitting at his knee, when he reset the record needle again and then picked up the pieces of my hair between his fingers and let them fall like chaff.
I’d forgotten all of it until the notes of music unlocked those memories and let them fly out like birds.