Spring's Arcana, page 1
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For Claire and Lucienne, who believed more than enough
Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.
—Lewis Carroll
THE TOWER
OTHER THAN WINTER
The entire city was full of dirty ice-whipped slush after the first hard freeze; it had only reluctantly warmed enough for snow. A whistling, iron-cold wind poured down both the Hudson and East Rivers, slicing between feathery falling flakes. Thanksgiving was over for what it was worth, Christmas lights blooming everywhere, and it was hard to believe anything other than winter had ever existed.
The bus was a blue-and-white metal beast wallowing up the slight incline of Pastis Hill on a cloud of diesel smoke; the subway was warmer but wasn’t worth the stairs involved for this part of the trip. Nat Drozdova’s throat ached, her nose was full, and her eyes watered. She could claim it was the cold or the persistent creeping fingers of car exhaust slithering from street level to irritate tender membranes.
Crying on the 2:00 P.M. downtown special was what Mom would call your silliness, Natchenka, now stop it.
It was standing-room only; the vehicle swayed and she was almost thrown onto a thin, sour-faced businessman who had forgotten to bring his tie back over his shoulder after lunch. He’d also had more than one martini if the simmering alcohol fume was any indication, and his wingtips were going to be slush-soaked by the time he got back to the office.
Well, everyone had problems in this world, as Uncle Leo grimly intoned at the slightest provocation. Nat wiped her cheeks, a sting of woolen glove-fingers against already abraded skin, and set her chin. A baby fretted somewhere along the bus’s flexing, swaying length; a crop of wet croupy coughs bloomed on either side. Nat hung on to the pole, trying not to bump the businessman again, and closed her eyes.
Just a moment, that’s all she wanted. A single breath’s worth of rest.
The darkness behind her lids was terrifying, so her eyes flew open again, filling her head with a regular Wednesday afternoon full of regular people. Except her surroundings lasted only a few seconds before melding into a familiar, pale pink hospice room holding softly beeping machines, the reek of disinfectant, and her mother’s gaunt face, now-graying hair neatly braided and resting against a sanitized pillowcase.
It was the light, Nat decided. An echo of fluorescent hospital tubes ran down the bus’s throat like streptococcal stripes, their pitiless glare showing every pockmark, every pimple, every stray hair, every scrape and scuff and loose thread.
Just like it showed Mom’s veins, blue and branching, or the papery skin under her chin.
I’m too young to look this way, Mom had said mournfully during her last visit, and Nat had to agree. She had to keep blinking; everything blurred because her eyes were full of brimming hot water yet again.
The bus crested Pastis; skyscraper valleys swallowed a wheeled aluminum tube-pill. Snow whirled past the windows as she counted the streets: Nieman, the funny curve of Totzer, the park blocks between Crane and Gallus a stone’s throw from Times Square full of wet green tinged with ice-pale lacework. If the contraption jerked again she’d be thrown onto two private-school boys with their shoulders and temples almost touching as they bent over a game, unaware of anything other than pixels on a handheld screen.
The stoplight went on with a soft chime, Nat was thankfully not tossed into the laps of strangers, and she began the laborious process of elbowing towards a door.
They were saying at least three inches of snow, but Nat rolled the air across her tongue the way Leo had taught her many winters ago and decided there was going to be more. Quite a bit more, in fact, and that was part of why she was downtown today, even though her shoes would fill with slushmelt and her calves would freeze almost solid.
It happened so fast, too. One moment she was sitting at her cubicle desk in Brooklyn, the phone jangling, coffee solidifying into syrup at the bottom of its pot, one of the salesmen whistling “Jingle Bells” and another in the depths of the office yelling about quarterly figures. Then she was outside, breathing deeply against the chill, the business card in her wallet weighing down her purse like a scoop of compressed matter dragging everything into the heart of a brand-new black hole.
Maybe they wouldn’t even notice she was gone. Christ knew she felt pleasantly invisible most days, except when Bob—his new toupee was the exact color of brown shoe polish—had a new idea and someone had to wrangle him out of it. Middle managers inevitably rose to the level of their incompetence, and he was a shining example who might even make corporate one of these days.
The bus finished disgorging fellow travelers and heaved away; Nat turned up the collar of her navy wool peacoat and set off too, her office flats crunching scattered deicer pellets. Gallus and Third was the address on the card—heavy ivory stock, deeply pressed letters blacker than ink should be, the corners crisp no matter how long it sat in Nat’s wallet, glaring at her each time she paid for coffee or groceries or anything else.
Did you see her yet? Do you have an appointment? The tremor in Mom’s voice, the impatience disguised as helplessness—Nat tilted her head back while matching the speed of sidewalk traffic, more to get the tears to crawl back into their holes than to gaze at skyscrapers, their tops lost in billowing white as the sky scattered tiny, frozen pellets struggling to turn into snow.
When her chin came back down to save her fool ass from skidding off deicer and into the street, the building was right there. She stopped for a moment, ignoring both the hiss of a man in a dun-colored trench coat who had to do some fancy footwork to get around her and a cacophony of horns from Gallus Street, where the slush was busy snarling end-of-lunch traffic with a side of fender benders and screaming out windows that should have been rolled up to keep the heat trapped.
People would waste even precious resources to yell obscenities out a window. It was a fact of human nature.
Tiny iceflakes swirled on the back of a whipping wind, and maybe it was only the vagaries of air moving between man-made concrete cliffs turning the white curtain into a tornado before neatly flicking it wide-open as a sheet to hit the other side of Gallus Street and the Vogge Mutual Building, a high thrusting needle with a granite-sheathed base. The Vogge had blinking multicolored lights in deference to the season; there was even a tree in its foyer, a multicolored migraine gleam through bright windows.
The Morrer-Pessel Memorial Tower, on the other hand, was an unornamented black-mirrored building, its walls curving like the architect hated even the idea of a straight line. It seemed to squat even though it challenged its neighbors for height, and the concrete forum-park set before it was always curiously free of beggars and buskers.
Maybe it was the statues. Whoever did the art installation had some weird ideas about human anatomy, and the host of copper and stone figures in various attitudes dotted around Pessel Square—as the sign between two forlorn, winter-naked bushes proclaimed it, with more hopefulness than declarative thunder—were tinged with frost, beginning to grow shaggy white winter coats as the snow decided to quit fucking around and get its afternoon work started.
Did you see her yet? Mom kept asking. Not hello, and forget how are you.
“I don’t want to,” Nat muttered. It was one thing to endure Mom’s disappointment each time, but if Nat got the brush-off here and trudged into Mom’s hospice room during visiting hours tomorrow to report not just a lack of appointment but a complete failure to even get in the door, what would happen?
Mom had already gone so far downhill over the past couple months. It was silly to think Maria Drozdova’s heart would finally break and the rest of her might not be far behind, wasn’t it?
Your imagination, Natchenka. Tch, tch.
A wet, invisible fingertip touched her nape; her hair was up in its usual office-friendly twist. Letting it down would be fractionally warmer, but only until it was soaked through. She had no hat, her legs were already cold despite black wool tights, and her shoes were never going to be the same.
Digging out the card to check it once more would be a waste of time. Even thinking about it called up the spare, elegant words on the front, and the purple-ink writing on the back.
Y.A.G.A. FINE ARTS AND ANTIQUES, IMPORT-EXPORT. MORRER-PESSEL MEMORIAL TOWER. No phone number, no email, just that beautiful, chilling fountain-pen writing on the reverse.
Let her in.
Well, maybe they would. Or maybe she could st
The entire world was unfair, and her own problems less than a speck of comparative dust. Nat Drozdova shook her head, couldn’t hitch her purse strap higher on her shoulder because it was trapped under her coat for safekeeping, and took off across Pessel Square, threading between the statues.
She was very, very glad that despite her lifelong overactive imagination, none of them looked like they were about to move.
SOME WEATHER
The Morrer-Pessel foyer was just as cavernous and mirrorlike as the outside; Nat had time to wonder how they cleaned the place before the pair of shaved gorillas in three-piece suits at the security desk noticed her. She was a sight, certainly—almost wet clear through, shaking deicer pellets off her cheap flats, her hair starred with snow and her skirt crooked enough she wanted a few minutes peering into a restroom mirror before she attempted any human contact.
But this place certainly wouldn’t open up its bathrooms to anyone off the street, so Nat unbuttoned her coat and dug in her purse, her head down as she shuffled for the desk, trying to appear businesslike and polite at once. Her wallet squirted through her damp fingers. She finally fished it out, and when she reached the security desk—a big, black, dull-gleaming curve, probably with monitors and screens all along its inside for the guards’ delectation—she found one of the beefy men in matching dark suits had stepped back a bit, his fingertip to his ear where a tiny plastic bud nestled.
Just like in the movies.
She held up the card—its ink was exactly the same color as the desk—and tried a placating smile on the remaining goon, a slab of fair-haired muscle with the pink-rimmed blue eyes some blonds were cursed with. “Hi,” she said, as brightly as possible. “Some weather, huh? I’m here for Mrs. de Winter.”
You’ve got to be kidding, she’d said to Mom. Tell me her first name’s Rebecca.
But her mother, usually so happy with literature in-jokes, had merely frowned. Don’t ask, my dumpling. Just go, and be polite, she’ll know what you’re there for. Please do this for me.
“Dumpling” meant Mom was disposed to be kind and wanted her daughter to do something very badly indeed, and the thought that maybe Nat had put this off because the kindness was such a rare occurrence rose like bad gas in a mineshaft, was strangled, and went away quietly.
“Some weather,” the blond agreed, cautiously. The dark-haired one behind him dropped his hand and studied Nat—at least, what he could see of her over the desk, which left her hips safely out of the equation. His gaze settled on her breasts, as fucking usual, and Nat bit back a cheeky see something you like, sailor?
He didn’t look like he’d get the joke. So instead, she simply laid the card on the desk, her wet fingertips leaving a quickly vanishing streak.
The blond glanced at it, then at her. “Turn it over, please.” There was no purchase on this cliff; his face was a wall just as straight and unyielding as the Vogge building’s granite skirts.
“Okay.” So she did, and he stepped back as soon as the purple letters came into view. “Mrs. de Winter’s an old friend of my mother’s, and—”
“Yes ma’am.” He almost collided with the dark-haired fellow. They really looked astonishingly alike, except for their noses—the blond’s was a big beak, the brunet’s was mashed. “Through the stile, last elevator on the left, press the P key.”
Well, that’s simple enough. Nat took the card back, trying not to notice both of them staring at it like they expected the paper to grow scales and fangs, and also tried a small wave at the blond one. Maybe their imaginations were just as vivid as hers, which would be a welcome change. “Thanks. I appreciate it.”
The duo stared mistrustfully at her, and Nat’s smile faded. The trouble with social anxiety was that you couldn’t tell what was someone having a bad day versus them trying to tell you they hated your guts personally and forever, so your brain picked the latter as default just to be safe.
The turnstile made a dry, bony click as she stepped through, and the faces of glossy black elevators multiplied the few people waiting for a mechanical box to carry them up on either side, ghosts standing in mirrored halls. Nobody was waiting for the last one on the left, and there was no summoning button to press because it was standing open, red carpet on its floor a welcome break from all the black.
Nat stepped in, pressed the round silver circle next to the P at the top, and waited for the doors to close.
They did, and even their inside was mirrored. She stared at a pale brownette—not blonde, not brown, somewhere in between—with a crooked skirt and a wet coat, damp curls coming loose from what had been a businesslike French twist and her cheekbones standing out alarmingly. Acceleration pressed along Nat’s body while she did her best to repair the damage.
She was still tugging at her skirt’s hem when the elevator slowed, dinged, thought about what it was chewing, and reluctantly opened its red-carpet mouth to deposit her before a wall of frosted glass broken only by double doors—also glass, with brass handles shaped like falling leaves. Whatever lay beyond glowed with snowy light, shadows of office workers hurrying back and forth like more trapped ghosts.
No holiday lights here. Maybe this de Winter lady felt the same way Mom did about Christmas.
An arc of gold-foil letters on the door smugly announced Y.A.G.A, with a small, tasteful IMPORT-EXPORT underneath, in case anyone accidentally arrived up here and didn’t know where in the woods they’d landed.
Nat took a deep breath, stepped decisively to the door, and had to glance at the hinges. It opened in instead of out, which was probably against fire codes, but what did she know?
Chin up and her feet squishing, Nat stepped through.
OUTSIDE CAPABILITIES
The grande dame was in a mood today, standing behind her massive curved mahogany desk like Napoleon in a campaign tent. Her shape flickered between a round-hipped, unbent crone and a tall, stately middle-aged professional poured into a pantsuit, both forms with ivory hair piled high and coal-black eyes narrowed. It was probably the snow; whoever was on duty shaking out her bedding was working their little heart out.
You never wanted to be found underperforming when Baba was in charge. Look at what had happened to Dascha, after all.
Dmitri liked lounging on the apostrophe-shaped black leather couch, mostly because he knew it irritated the old woman. He liked stretching out his feet and admiring the bright caps on his boot-toes for the same reason, but the slicked-back hair and well-tailored suit—not black, a few shades off true darkness into indigo—were worn because they pleased him alone, like the inked lines crawling over his knuckles, up his arms, down his back, across his chest. Certain folk would see bright colors there, others just the deep bruise-blue of prison ink, and some would avert their gaze without knowing why, especially when he smiled.
At the moment, he was more occupied with watching the dame slip between her shapes than with his toes. When she was in this mood, it paid to be vigilant.
A mannerly tap at the heavy door was followed by sloe-eyed Daschenka in her trim green knee-length skirt and matching jacket, her blouse a froth of soft white ruffles upon her capacious chest. Her dark hair was an elaborate confection, looped and braided fit to trap-tangle a pixie to death for later consumption, and her green stiletto heels made crisp little sounds until she noticed the mood Baba was in and they turned silent as fawn hooves amid deep, dead grass. Dascha’s lipstick, a perfect carmine, had just been reapplied— or she’d taken advantage of her lunch hour to have a quick snack.
The old lady at the window didn’t turn. “Well?” she snapped, staring at the whirling flakes like she intended to count each one.
It wasn’t outside her capabilities, but it sounded boring as fuck. Dmitri rested his head on the couch back, his eyelids dropping to half-mast. He wasn’t quite hungry enough, he decided. Not yet.
