“Easier said than done.” Wink had a heart-shaped freckle, right above the inner elbow hollow of her left arm. It matched her heart-shaped face. I wanted to touch it. I wanted to put the fleshy part of my thumb right on it.
She smiled at me, big, and it made her ears stick out until they looked elvish.
“So everyone saw my unicorn underwear, Midnight. So what. Repeat after me. So everyone saw Wink’s unicorn underwear. Who cares.”
I grinned, and did it. “So everyone saw Wink’s unicorn underwear. Who cares.”
“There,” she said, and laughed, and her laugh was full and high and chinkled like the keys on the toy piano I’d had as a kid. “In a hundred years, who will care about my unicorn underwear? Who cares right now? There are bigger things to think about.”
“Bigger things like what?”
“Battles and wars. Lost causes and lost loves. Unsolved mysteries and magical rings and Here Be Dragons. Fairy paths. Child-eating witches and child-saving witches. Tinderboxes and saucer-eyed dogs.”
It was the longest she’d talked so far and her voice got quieter and quieter toward the end until her words were almost a lullaby.
“I’m using my Putting the Orphans to Sleep voice,” Wink said.
“I could go to sleep right here in the hay,” I said. And yawned.
“Midnight?”
“Yeah?”
“What do you want to be?”
“You mean, what do I want to do, like whether I want to be a writer like my mom, or a rare book dealer like my dad?”
“Yes.”
A breeze blew through the opening to the hayloft and rattled the lantern. The flame flickered and the shadows in the barn jumped.
“I want to be a treasure hunter.”
I probably should have said something realistic and normal. Something like “professional soccer player” or “film director” or “private investigator.”
I waited for her to laugh. Poppy would have laughed. But Wink just looked at me.
“I don’t want to find relics, though, like the Arc of the Covenant. I want to find music, and art. I want to find lost Bach compositions in German monasteries. I want to track down the missing paintings of Vermeer and Rembrandt, and the lost plays of Shakespeare. I want to crawl through castles and dig through attics and search through cellars.”
“You would be good at that,” Wink said.
And I wasn’t ashamed of my confession anymore, not a bit, even though I’ve never admitted my treasure-hunting dreams to anyone except Alabama.
Wink smiled at me, and her ears popped out again.
“What do you want to be?”
She made a soft hmmm sound. “I want to be a Sandman. I want to crawl in children’s windows and blow softly on their necks and sprinkle sand in their eyes. I want to make up stories and whisper them in the children’s ears and give them good dreams.” She breathed in, and out, her skinny ribs rising in her strange green dress. “Sometimes I do this for the Orphans. When there’s a thunderstorm and they’re tossing and turning. I sit beside them and whisper until they sleep deep and quiet.”
She was looking at the hayloft ceiling and I was looking at her. “What kind of stories do you make up?”
“Well, I have a story about a cruel, selfish witch girl named Fell Rose. She casts a spell on an entire village, and makes them all her slaves, makes them dance to her wishes like puppets on strings . . . all except a dark-haired boy named Isaac who figures out her weakness and takes away her powers.”
“What happens?” I asked, all caught up already. “What happens to Fell Rose and Isaac?”
She turned her head to the side, and met my eyes. “They become friends.” She paused. “The Orphans always fall asleep before I get to the end. But I think they become friends.”
We both stopped talking for a while, and I soaked up the comfortable silence.
“How many brothers and sisters do you have?” I asked a little while later.
Wink didn’t answer me, just made a hmmm sound again.
“What happened to your dad? Do you read tarot cards like your mother? Did your older brother Leaf really run off to the Amazon?”
I was spewing questions suddenly, but didn’t feel embarrassed, not at all.
Wink just laughed, chinkle, chinkle. She stared at the high barn ceiling, stretched her arms above her head, and sighed. “There are five Orphans,” she said, “not counting the one that left.”
I found out later that there was pretty much no way of getting the direct truth out of Wink when she didn’t want to give it. So that was all I got in response.
A few minutes went by and I watched Wink’s profile in the shadowy barn light, her small doll nose and her pointed chin.
That morning I’d been standing next to my new home and looking at the farmhouse across the road and wondering if I’d finally managed to leave Poppy behind.