The Peculiar Night of the Blue Heart (2 page)

When Marybeth stepped outside, she was greeted by a gust of cool autumn wind. This was the time of year when Lionel was more prone to disappear. After most of the birds had abandoned their nests in preparation for the winter, he turned his focus to the foxes and rabbits, and left offerings to the coyotes in the hopes of charming them as well.

She knew better than to call out to him. Her voice would only startle whatever small creature he was trying to allure.

She was no expert tracker; she wasn't deft or silent. But she did know Lionel, and she could see the subtle traces that he left on his way out of the house. For starters, he never stepped in the soft earth like the kind that had formed after yesterday's rain. Soft earth left footprints. He would hop over that and tread only in the grass.

Marybeth looked for the grass that was slightly bent. There was an empty patch where she remembered seeing some clovers earlier. They were gone now, which meant that Lionel had plucked them.

He would feed them to the rabbits, she thought. Along with the bits of bark that were missing from a nearby tree.

Moving as quietly as she could, she ascended into the tree line and made her way to the warren.

Sure enough, she found Lionel lying on his stomach, looking into a mossy opening beside a giant tree. He didn't look at Marybeth, but she saw his ears prick up. He was being a rabbit himself just then.

She took a step toward him.

“Quiet,” he whispered, and made room for her beside him.

Marybeth lowered herself onto the ground, breathing as quietly as she could.

Lionel looked at her, and only she would have been able to recognize the smile in his eyes, on his face that was otherwise firm with concentration. “There's a fat mother rabbit in there,” he said. His voice sounded just like the wind, his words barely audible. “She's shy, but she can't resist the clovers. Give me your hand.”

Marybeth held out her hand, watching curiously as he filled her palm with rumpled clovers.

“Hold it up by the entrance,” he said, nodding to the small cavern. “Go on.”

Marybeth did as he instructed with a sense of caution. Lionel sometimes tried to include her in his endeavors with wild creatures, but she lacked his natural magic. She always ended up scaring the poor things away.

For several seconds, nothing happened. It was beginning to get dark, and soon Mrs. Mannerd would grow cross with them.

“Lionel—”

“Shh. Shh. Look.”

Marybeth sensed the rabbit before she saw it. It peeked its gray-brown head from its warren and twitched its nose against her fingertip. Marybeth felt a chill and did her best not to giggle.

Bit by bit, the rabbit came out into view. It really was
a chubby thing, and it went for the clovers in Marybeth's palm. It looked at her with its nervous black eyes as it chewed.

Lionel talked softly to it, murmuring sweet things mothers said to sleeping babies—or so Marybeth would imagine—and stroking its cheek with his knuckle.

A sharp gust of wind pushed across the sky, rattling the bare branches and fallen leaves. The rabbit's ear twitched, and it hopped back into hiding.

Marybeth burst into giggles and rolled onto her side. “I don't think she liked me very much.”

“Sure she did,” Lionel said. “It's taken all week for me to get her to come out.” A smile was beginning to creep onto his serious features. Marybeth plucked a blade of grass from his unruly hair.

She was the only one he would allow to do such a thing. When Mrs. Mannerd attempted to comb his hair, he hissed.
Be reasonable!
Mrs. Mannerd would cry, which of course only made him less reasonable. But Marybeth never told him what to do. She never tried to tame him, not even when she didn't understand why he behaved the way that he did. She merely cared for him, the way that he cared for the rabbits. The way a mother bird guarded her nest.

“What did you do with the berries you took?” she asked.

“I left them by the river. I'm sure I saw the blue fox go there.”

Marybeth stared at the bit of clovers still in her palm. It was a simple-enough thing, a clover; people stepped over them on their way to grander things. But she knew that it was the greatest thing Lionel had to offer her. It was an invitation into his peculiar world.

From far away, they heard the storm door open.

“Children!” Mrs. Mannerd called.

Marybeth cringed. “I was supposed to find you and bring you back inside.” She stood and held out her hands. He took them, and she pulled him to his feet.

The smile was still lingering on his face, and it grew. “Race you back.”

He took off running before she could answer.

“Lionel!”

He held an unfair advantage, and he knew it. He was barefoot while she wore stiff leather shoes that were secondhand and a size too small. And when he had a mind to be, he was the wind itself, flying over the surface of the earth, impossible to catch.

But when he reached the side of the little red house, he waited for her. That was the thing that made him human again.

CHAPTER

2

The wind and rain picked up late that night. The older ones did not notice storms, and they slept on.

Marybeth shared a bedroom with three older girls, and she slept on the rickety top bunk beside the window that overlooked the woods. There was a maple tree that grew beside the house, and its branches would rap on the glass when it was especially windy, as though it wanted to wake her and show her something.

Only there was never anything out there to see. Marybeth rubbed the sleep from her eyes and squinted through the blur of her nearsighted vision.

She was just falling back to sleep when she saw it: a flicker of blue.

She sat upright immediately, unsure if she had dreamed it. She reached for her spectacles, hanging from a nail in the wall above her pillow.

The edges of the swaying trees came into focus. When the branches moved just so, she saw it again, a flash of blue.

She descended the ladder from her bed, minding the missing rung that had broken off before she came to live there.

There were no windows in the upstairs hallway, and without so much as the moonlight to guide her, Marybeth walked with her hand along the wall to make her way.

The door to the boys' room was slightly ajar. Marybeth could hear the older ones snoring.

“Lionel,” she whispered. His bed was farthest from the door, in a corner where the ceiling leaked when it rained. He kept a galvanized bucket at the foot of his bed, and Marybeth could hear the
plunk
,
plunk
,
plunk
of water falling into it. “Lionel!”

One of the older ones stopped snoring. He sat up, his silhouette all black against a flash of lightning that brightened the window.

“I was dreaming that I was a king, and then you woke me,” he told her. “If I'm not still king when I go back to sleep, I'll hang you by your toes.”

He might do it, Marybeth knew. She'd been locked
in closets and framed for the older ones' offenses, so that she'd be punished with their chores. The older ones made a game of tormenting Marybeth and Lionel, but Marybeth especially, because she was easier to catch and too timid to defend herself.

“Beat it,” the older one said, and Marybeth shrank away from the doorway. If she wanted to look for the blue creature, she would have to go alone and tell Lionel about it in the morning.

She made her way down the stairs, knowing precisely which ones to avoid because they creaked, and took the lantern from the hall closet and struck a match to light the candle. After that, she grabbed her yellow rain slicker from its hook by the door. She wriggled her feet into her rain boots, which were a size too large and beginning to come apart from their soles. They were older than Marybeth herself and had been worn by every child to live in this house before her.

The cold wind filled the house as she opened the door, splattering the floorboards with rain. Marybeth moved quickly, pulling the door shut tight behind her and hoping the sound wouldn't wake Mrs. Mannerd in her bed. She was a light sleeper as it was.

This was not the first time she had snuck out of the house; she had chased after Lionel on his odd adventures, and she had sought sanctuary in the woods so that she
might catch up on her reading. But never at night and in such horrible weather. She would have waited until morning if she thought the blue creature would show itself.

She held the lantern ahead of her and tried to see beyond its dull light. She was sure the flash of blue came from along the river, somewhere near the big rock where she and Lionel would lie on their stomachs to watch the fish as he tried to charm them to the surface.

“Are you here?” she said, her soft voice drowned in the wind and rain. No answer. She tried to imitate Lionel's confidence when he spoke to his animals. “Come on out,” she said. “There's no one here to hurt you.”

If she found this blue light, this fox—or whatever it was—she knew that she would at last understand Lionel the way that she wanted to understand him. For years she had tagged along and tried to be a part of his hidden world, but all she could ever do was watch from the outside.

She stood still for a long time, the rain making its way under her hood and plastering her hair to her neck. Nothing came of it, and her heart sank. The blue creature was gone, if it had ever been there at all. It could have been a dream, or some trick of the light.

She was just about to turn back for the house when she saw it again—a flash of blue rushing past her. She
spun around to follow it, slipping on the leaves and grasping at tree trunks to steady herself.

“Wait!” she said, for she could see it racing ahead of her. She thought she could hear its breathing, and she could see that it truly was glowing like a light. If only it slowed down she would be able to get a better look at the sort of animal it was.

Something pulled her back, and with a wince she realized that her sleeve had caught on a branch and ripped halfway off its seam. Mrs. Mannerd would be furious; she made that slicker herself when the old one finally wore beyond all use. It was the only new article of clothing any of the children had been given this year.

Perhaps she could repair it before the morning and not be caught, Marybeth thought. Water seeping in through the tear, she ran on, her lungs burning in her chest. Lightning made the woods bright as day for an instant.

“Wait!” Too late, she felt the ground disappear from under her feet and realized that she had run into the river. The lantern flew from her hand, the candle extinguished the moment before she hit the water.

The darkness was so absolute, so silent, that at first Marybeth thought she was dead. It was the ache in her lungs that assured her she was still living, and she thrashed blindly for the surface, but there was no telling the surface from the depths in all that black.

And then she saw the blue light, and forgot her own hunger for air. She forgot to panic. Forgot that death was a possibility at all.

The light circled around her, long and soft like a tail. Its face came close to hers. It had a pointed snout like the foxes that ran through the woods, but its eyes were big and white, as though they were completely blank. Only when she stared harder did Marybeth see that there were faint silver pupils. The blue creature was studying her; was it trying to help?

She felt her eyes closing, her body floating off somewhere. Out of the river, away from the trees and the little red house, into a sky without stars in it.

Something hit her chest, hard. Warmth surged through her blood and, with it, the strength and the mind to kick herself up to the surface.

She broke through the water with a gasp.

The blue creature was gone.

CHAPTER

3

Lionel descended the stairs for breakfast ten minutes late, with his sandy brown hair not brushed and his shirt missing, as usual. The consequence was that he would miss out on a fresh bowl of oatmeal and toast, which he hardly minded. He would crawl about under the table looking for crusts the older ones dropped so Mrs. Mannerd would think them eaten. Sometimes there was still jam on them.

This morning, though, Mrs. Mannerd stood at the head of the table, wringing her apron and frowning.

“Tell the truth,” she said, and Lionel could hear the worry in her voice. She didn't sound angry, which made the worry even louder. “Did you and Marybeth sneak out to play one of your games last night?”

Only then did Lionel realize that Marybeth's seat at the table was empty. Her bowl had been scraped clean, her toast snatched away by the older ones.

Lionel was not one to answer Mrs. Mannerd's questions, and he especially hated talking in the morning, when his voice cracked and his head was still filled with sleep. But he could feel Marybeth's absence. He could sense that she had left some trail that led out of this house and then disappeared.

“No,” he said. His cracked voice sounded like it belonged to a little boy, and he hated how human it was.

Mrs. Mannerd knelt down before him. She took his hands—something she had never done. Lionel felt cornered, and he resisted the instinct to growl. “I need to know the truth,” she said. Her eyes were small and startled. She was not an old woman anymore, but a bird that had lost one of her young and needed to find it before the weasel ate it for lunch.

Her grip on Lionel's hands tightened. His breathing became shallow; his pupils dilated; he could hear the older ones scraping the porridge from their bowls, the sounds they made becoming louder and closer, their chatter reduced to the grunting of pigs at a trough.

He saw that Marybeth's yellow slicker was missing from its hook.

“Please,” Mrs. Mannerd said. Her entire face became the face of a bird.

Lionel ripped his hands from her grasp and ran for the door.

“Lionel!” Mrs. Mannerd cried. “For heaven's sake, this is important! I need you to be a rational child for once.”