Hyacinth regarded Barnaby. Barnaby regarded Hyacinth.
He was standing with both hands on the upstairs railing and looking down. She was standing amidst boxes, cots, and floating food downstairs and looking up.
“Don’t kill anything else. I want to make an assessment. I can tell when you’re lying to me,” she said, pointing a finger.
“Righty-o.” He saluted her, it seemed appropriate.
“Chris?” She could just make out a blue person sitting on the floor through the gaps in the railing and the boxes. “C’est votre magie. Est-ce que ces choses vont rester là comme ça? Nous avons beaucoup de «magic strikes,» et beaucoup sont doubles. Me comprenez-vous?”
He blinked and nodded at her. “Oui, madame. Ils est en… uh, uh, très-très «safe!»” He signed her a thumbs up. “Je utilise il pour le, uh, «art installations!» Dehors!”
“Okay. Votre accent est mignon. Do you know “mignon?” Like the fillet. Joli! Cute! Calliope?” She couldn’t see Calliope, but she had heard her up there and the woman hadn’t come down. “You’re the one with the functioning brain. Is that stuff going to stay up there? We get a lot of magic strikes and a lot of doubles.”
“As long as nothing hits us for real!” Calliope’s voice said. She stood up. There was a dust-bunny clinging to her hair.
“Yeah, if something hits us for real we’re screwed anyway,” said Hyacinth. “Okay. You guys can do that if you want, but I want my good chair back. People don’t like to sit on the cots, they’re uncomfortable. No more chairs or anything people are using. Chris? Trouvez mon autre grande chaise rouge! Find her, you get me?”
“Oui, madame. Je es, uh, ah… siento… sorry!”
“It’s okay. I’m not en colère! You guys are fine,” she told the card game in passing. “Sanaam, how are the kids?”
“They were fine when I left…”
“Check ‘em. General, how are the babies?”
“Lucy has eaten part of a crayon.”
“Part of a balanced diet,” Hyacinth said, nodding. She collected her doctor bag from the coat closet under the stairs, where she had hidden it. “Mordecai, are you still…”
“Hyacinth, hand me the egg carton! I can see it!” he cried.
She handed him the egg carton through the doorway without engaging the gate. “I hope that’s enough for you to do while I check the basement…”
He opened the carton. Six authoritative male voices spoke in tandem: “Du bist wie eine Blume! So hold und schön und rein! Ich schau dich an, und Wehmut! Schleicht mir ins Herz hinein!”
“These eggs are off!” Mordecai declared, staring at an artfully arranged package of pastel rubber ducks.
Calliope abandoned Chris, and the search for the chair, and tore down the stairs. “Em, don’t cook my duckiiiieees! They’re not food!”
Tommy stood so suddenly his chair fell over and folded itself. “Oh, shoot! Has he been cooking the whole time? Hyacinth, I’m sorry! I completely forgot. I’ll get him out of there…” He grabbed his guitar.
Hyacinth put up her hands. “Tommy, no-no-no, wait…”
The green teenager played a chord. A female voice emerged from the vibrating instrument and sang, “Tommy, can you hear me?”
“What?” said Mordecai. He dropped all the ducks.
“Tommy, he can’t…”
“Erik, if you don’t let me out of this kitchen right now I really will hurt these weird ducks and then Calliope will be sad!” Mordecai said. He whapped the invisible surface of the baby gate lightly with the egg carton, which was sprouting a nest of multicoloured wires like a trendy hairstyle. He dropped it and threw himself into the front room, nearly falling over the kitchen step.
Tommy noted the dangling sling with the painted flowers and the powdery white cast. “Oh, no, what happened?” he said.
Calliope pushed past him and collected her ducks.
Mordecai looked down and lifted his arm, turning it slightly. He scowled at it. “I am so sick of this thing. I haven’t been able to play any violin for two months! Did you ever have to quit playing guitar for two months?”
Tommy regarded his guitar. “I pawned her once…”
“It sucked, right?” said Mordecai. He examined the cast. “I don’t even have my damn poodle sticker anymore.” With sudden decisiveness, he seized the crumbling white plaster by the wrist and twisted. The stiff bandages shattered in a puff of dust.
“Mordecai!” said Hyacinth. She snatched his shoulder and pulled him back.
He calmly dusted his arm, flexed his fingers and turned his wrist. There was a faint red glow, but it was hardly visible under the plaster and fading. Hyacinth may have been the only one who caught it.
Mordecai fisted his hand and punched the air. “Magic storms, hell yeah! Where’s my violin?” He vanished into Room 102.
“Mordecai?” Sanaam said, muffled.
“Hyacinth…?” Tommy said.
Hyacinth sighed. She lifted her doctor bag and shook her head with a smirk. “If he really needed it, he would’ve screamed when he did that. Let him play with you, Tommy. Thanks for getting him out of the kitchen. I gotta check the basement.”
◈◈◈
Ann was sitting on the floor below a cot, with Erik in her lap. Seth was sitting in the cot above them, with his legs drawn up. He had already created a snowdrift of folded tissues beside him, and the box was in his lap. To keep both hands free, he had gone the bedsheet ghost route and pulled the fire blankets over his head.
Erik was bundled in one, but it kept slipping down and he didn’t seem to need it. He lit up a lot more easily since he got hurt, but it didn’t always bother him or mean he was upset. There was a faint green halo around him, not quite a flame, which brightened when magic struck the decoys outside.
Seth’s tea glass was on the floor. He had finished the tea and refilled it with the rest of the orange juice, which he was slowly emptying.
Occasionally the blanket ghost in the cot sneezed.
Cerise was kneeling next to the worktable with her hands folded on its surface as if she intended to pray. She had reheated her tea and it was getting cold again as she devoted all her attention to the glowing radio.
Milo had decided he was totally fine with being Cerise’s replacement little brother and he was taking this time to engage in a stream-of-consciousness ramble about all the other family members he had stolen for himself.
…Calliope wanted me to have a big family, so I’m definitely going to tell her about you — if it’s okay we do the thing — and Ann is her sister so that means you get Calliope for a sister too! But she’s not my sister because we’re not sure if we can love each other yet. I’m trying but it’s really complicated. Ann thinks I’m not good at it. I’m good at feeling but I don’t know what to do with it. That’s what she thinks. I don’t get it.
You can’t tell Hyacinth she’s my mom, okay? If she comes down you have to switch it to the headphones really fast, because I’d scare her. That’s why she ran off on you, Cerise. Ann wants her to stop doing that and fix her but she can’t. I don’t want Hyacinth to be fixed because I like her a lot and I wouldn’t want her to be different, but I’m sorry she hurt your feelings. We wanted to explain, but she just wanted you to think she’s a bad person and not come over anymore…
Meanwhile, Ann was very gently assuring Erik that she was going to stick with him and help him for the rest of the storm. Not to bother him, but she wanted to stay close if he needed anything. “I don’t want to bother you, sweetheart. You’re the boss. But we have lots of people to help out this storm, and Hyacinth isn’t glued to the wall anymore, so it’s not going to hurt anyone if I stay…”
…I put pancakes on Barnaby’s head because he was being mean to my dad. Mordecai can’t defend himself right now. Maria fixed his suit and that pisses me off because I wanted him to suffer…
“Do you think you could eat something? I know you didn’t want the rest of the pie, we won’t have that. What about soda crackers?”
…I want to find where he left his pyjamas and put syrup on them!
Cerise shook her head and sat back with a thump. “He’s a mile a minute just like you are, Annie. But he doesn’t sound like you. It’s like a magic trick!”
Ann turned and smiled at her. “We can’t do magic just now.”
“Ventriloquism then,” Cerise said. “I almost want to make you drink a glass of water!”
“No thank you, I still have juice,” Seth said faintly. He sneezed again and drew out another tissue. “Oh. I’m sorry.”
“That’s all right, dear. I think I’ll at least have to bring you a paper bag for the tissues, and I’ll see if Maria has had any time for your clothes…”
“But Annie!” Cerise stood. “Milo wants Calliope to hear him! He’s being very careful about saying he might not get to do it, but he obviously wants to. You said it yourself, they can spare you for a while. Go get changed! I can find a paper bag if he really must have one!”
Erik cringed suddenly and put a hand to his head.
My uncle wants to play violin, said the radio, cutting off Milo in the middle of his protest that Cerise wasn’t a maid and that wasn’t okay.
He brushed his metal socket with his palm, causing a greenish spark that Ann saw, and which made a snapping sound that Cerise heard. He took down his hand and sat on it.
“Are you all right, dear?”
“It’s all right as long as he doesn’t come down here,” Erik muttered. He looked up the stairs with a narrow expression.
It’s just Auntie Hyacinth, said the radio.
Cerise quickly flicked the little metal switch on the speaker box to the position labelled Headphones! in Ann’s handwriting, cutting off the sound.
The opaque grey shade over the basement doorway flickered and then vanished. “Thanks, kid,” said Hyacinth. “I’m just here for the sick people, Cerise. I’ll be gone in a minute. I still have to sort out Kitty and the mice.” She set her doctor bag on the floor by the cot and looked up with a frown. “The irony that a woman named Kitty is killing my mice is not lost on me, but I’m not ready to laugh at it yet.”
Cerise let go an airy chuckle, perhaps just to annoy her.
Hyacinth ignored her. She obtained consent before finding Seth among the blankets and uncovering his head. She fed him some analgesics and anti-nausea meds with orange juice and then pawed into her bag. “Now what else…?”
“I wouldn’t say no to some decongestants, but I don’t know if they’re going to help,” Seth said. He turned his head aside and sneezed into a tissue.
She stared at him. “Are you sick too?” She heard herself sounding irritated and tried to clamp down on it. She was, not with him, just with circumstances that might have provided a magic storm and a cold. That wasn’t fair!
“Please don’t lock me in your basement again,” he said. He trailed off and the hand holding the tissue went limp. He regarded her sideways, with the shrewdness of one who has very little idea what is going on, and on that basis suspects it may all be an elaborate hoax. “But I seem to already be here… And you’re not going to let me leave…?”
“Wasn’t planning on it.”
He looked under the blankets and checked. “And you already have my clothes.” He shook his head. “This isn’t right, but please don’t explain it because I think if I remember what’s going on it’s really going to hurt…”
Erik crawled into the cot next to him and hugged him. “I won’t drop you.”
Seth put both hands over his face. “I know, but I’m trying very hard not to fall. It’s just where I am is slippery.”
Ann leaned in and spoke in Hyacinth’s ear, “Erik’s trying to make him remember when we took care of him for Yule, but it’s not working as well. Don’t jostle him.”
“I am definitely in danger of drowning,” Seth declared. “I am in the water. But I have this completely ridiculous beach ball to hang onto and I am looking right at that printing they put on them that says, ‘this isn’t a flotation device, you idiot.’” He blew his nose. When the tissue came down he was smiling weakly. “It’s loads better. I just can’t let go ’cos I’ll die.”
“I think you’d better have these decongestants and I’ll bring down some ornaments if I notice any,” Hyacinth said. She dished him some more pills.
“Please don’t let Calliope come down anymore, I’ll get her sick.”
“You know, I really think I’d better not,” Ann said. “There will be another storm. We can try it then.”
“Annie, don’t you dare!” Cerise said. She stamped her foot. “Milo is excited about it! I know I sort of think of him like a hat you wear sometimes — he’s just so quiet! — but he’s a person with feelings. The next storm isn’t going to be any less crazy than this one. Let him talk to her then, too, if he can!”
“Yeah!” Erik said.
“Oh, no, I want Calliope to do the headphones!” Seth said. “That’s really cute! I just… not… the decorations…” He shook his head, looking down. “Please don’t make me make sense. Do the headphones.” He shooed a hand at them. “I’ll hide.” He pulled both blankets over his head. “I’m a lamp!”
The lamp sneezed and pulled out another tissue.
“I don’t think…” Ann said.
Please, Ann. Now we’re going to make them sad if we don’t.
If it had been him in his pants and suspenders, she knew he would’ve been smiling. …And Calliope might like it. A little.
“Cin, do you mind if we…?”
“It’s quiet, it’ll make everyone in the basement happy, and nothing will die,” Hyacinth said. “Go nuts.” She closed up her bag. “I have to deal with the mice. I’ll tell Mordecai to put on some tea. Have Milo bring it down.”
Hyacinth went up the stairs first, then Ann. Half a minute later, grinning, Cerise followed.
◈◈◈
Past the grey barrier in the doorway, which did not impede her, Mordecai and the boy with the guitar were in the middle of playing something incredibly overdramatic about love and rain, while the girl in the headscarf did her best to assist them with a drumbeat by banging both her hands on the guitar.
The children had come out to listen, and Ted and Maria were giving the double bed a break. Some of the audience had stolen chairs from the kitchen to sit in. The General and her husband were sitting on the floor in the dining room with the babies. Hyacinth was upstairs talking to Barnaby and the yellow girl about mice, but it was difficult to hear her.
Cerise took a peek in the kitchen to make certain Annie was in her room, then she mounted the bottom stair for a little extra height and waved her hands for quiet. “Now, stop that. Stop being silly!” She paused and leaned forward. “Excuse me, Mordecai, didn’t you have a broken arm?”
“I got tired of it,” the red man said.
“Well, nevermind. Nevermind. If I tip you, I get to make a request, don’t I?” She stuffed a hand in her pocket and came out with two coins of indeterminate value. She held them up with a smile. “I want ‘Love Grows Where My Rosemary Goes’ for Milo and Calliope!”
Mordecai took down his violin and turned his back. “After a long hiatus, I am not taking any requests for drivel!” he said.
“I don’t know it,” Tommy added apologetically. Penny shook her head.
“Well, there goes your tip!” Cerise said. She pocketed the coins and descended the stair. She drew Tommy aside and said in a lower voice, “Something romantic. Anything romantic.”
“Isn’t ‘Love Reign O’er Me’ romantic?” Tommy said.
“Horrible puns are not romantic!” Cerise hissed.
“Romantic?” Mordecai said. He considered for a moment and then shouldered his violin again. He began to play a slow song which warned a girl not to wear red tonight, because that would make the singer feel blue. The violin’s voice was a bit raspy, it reminded her of Annie when she sang, but crystal clear and impeccably on key.
Tommy laughed and said, “I don’t know that either!” He listened with his hand muting the guitar strings to see if he could pick up enough to fake it.
Cerise listened approvingly for a time, but after a little less than a minute she clicked her tongue and swatted Mordecai’s arm to stop him. “No, no, no! What are you doing? That’s about someone who can’t get over another girl! Milo doesn’t have any other girls! Don’t be stupid!”
“That’s not what it’s about!” He regarded the violin. “Well, not to me…”
Cerise grimaced and wiped her hand up and down her pant leg, leaving a blurry white smear. Mordecai was filthy.
Calliope had disentangled herself from the boxes and appeared at the top of the stairs. “Are you guys taking requests? Do you know any Ramones, Tom?”
“Oh, I know them!” Tommy said. “They’re awesome!”
Thus, when Milo emerged from Room 201 with a card clutched in his shaking hand, Calliope was standing three feet away, listening to ‘Blitzkrieg Bop’ and bobbing her head with a smile. He almost ran into her, and he dropped his card.
She turned with a snicker. “Hey, babe. I thought you didn’t like storms?”
She had changed out of her trousers after peeling Chris off the ceiling — they had gunk on them. She was wearing her one black skirt, and she hadn’t bothered to put on any socks or shoes. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail, and she was wearing her glasses at the end of her nose. Her glasses looked a lot like his glasses, but she needed them for the opposite reason. Her face was smudged, and her clothes were dusty, but you could still make out the freckles. Like some god had decided Calliope wasn’t quite perfect enough and had added a dash of cinnamon.
He didn’t want to stop looking. He felt blindly around on the rumpled wood floor and eventually found the card, which he handed to her. Then he turned away while she read it.
Hi, Calliope.
I have a cool thing to show you
in the basement.
It’s a surprise!
But don’t be mad they’re not blue.
You can paint them later like you wanted.
“You finished the wireless headphones with teeth?” Calliope said.
He nodded, still looking away.
“Cool! Hey, Chris, do you want to see…”
Milo picked up his head and waved both hands frantically in front of him. No, no, no. No crazy artist who is also your ex-boyfriend! No!
Calliope covered her mouth with a hand. She snickered again and lowered her voice, “I guess he might glue them to the ceiling, huh?”
Milo nodded.
She leaned past him to wave at Chris. “Hey, hon? Never mind. I’ll just be a sec. Keep looking for Cin’s chair, okay?”
A shaggy, white-haired head appeared amongst the random objects glued to the ceiling. Chris was dangling upside-down and investigating his artistic output like a customer at a rummage sale. With his hair hanging like that, he might’ve been either a novelty doll or a paintbrush. He beamed and signed Calliope a thumbs up. “Bien sûr!”
◈◈◈
There were two piles of blankets with bare human legs under them seated on the cot against the far wall. Calliope thought they looked like licensed characters from a children’s radio show.
Big Blob and Little Blob, she decided. Before she could decide if Big Blob was the smart one or the dumb one, Little Blob piped up and said, “Don’t mind us!”
“We’re lamps!” said Big Blob.
“Click!” said Little Blob.
Both blanket piles lit up at the top like light bulbs, one green and one blue.
“Aw, that’s cute you guys,” Calliope said. Milo had picked her up and tucked her under his arm again, on account of her bare feet and the stairs. “You guys want shades? I think we got shades upstairs.”
Both blanket piles were silent for a moment, and the blue one went out.
“We were just being silly, Calliope,” Seth said, muffled. “I’m sorry. Pretend we’re not here.” He pulled out a tissue and used it somewhere under the blankets.
Erik was also determined that she not have to bother about Cerise, who was trying to get back in on the other side of the doorway. She had started pitching magic at it and was demanding to see Milo and Calliope being adorable, but Milo had put multiple redundancies in all his safety spells and it held fast. People with anxiety were clever that way!
“We brought you tea, though,” Calliope said.
“Thank you! We’ll get to it!” Seth assured her. “I still have juice!”
A small green hand with one pink-painted nail emerged from under the smaller pile and signed her a thumbs up.
Milo tugged her gently by the hand. He hadn’t bothered to braid his hair and the humidity had rendered it frizzy. His glasses had a pale thumbprint. He had buttoned his shirt wrong, but it was tucked in. He didn’t seem to have any extra cards in his pocket behind the suspender. His lower lip was caught between his teeth.
“You’re excited about this, huh?” she said.
He nodded.
She put the teapot on the worktable next to the radio. It was lit up and flickering but the speaker box wasn’t, and there was no sound. “Is it working?” she said.
He nodded. The headphones were hidden behind the radio. He pulled them out.
The metal parts were dull silver and the fabric was white flannel he’d cut out of an old nightie. Most of the works were inside — Calliope wanted to paint these — so the aesthetic was a lot more streamlined than Milo’s usual output. They looked like a prop from a cheap space serial, the kind where the radar looks like a radiator.
The headband was adjustable, so the kids could use them, and set at about mid-size with a screw on either side. The cans were big enough to cover the whole ear and had been made with real cans — steel ones, so the headphones’ days were numbered in this house. They might not last long enough for the kids to use them.
But this was what they were for.
…Okay, and he wanted to see if he could. But once he figured that out, this was what they were for.
She took them from him but she didn’t put them on. She held one of the cans up next to her ear and shook them.
He gave a little gasp and covered his mouth. He couldn’t laugh, not really. He wished he had a sign he could hold up so she’d know.
She’s listening for where the teeth are, Ann!
They were in the cans, she had it right, but he packed cotton around them because he thought hearing the power source would bother people. The rest of the household had indicated in no uncertain terms that running a pair of headphones off the dead tissue in human teeth was creepy.
Also human teeth in general. He made sure he crammed the whole box in there, so nobody would find a stray molar and freak out.
He shook his head at her. She wouldn’t figure it out that way.
But he could tell her.
He put his hands over her hands and placed the cans over her ears.
“Ooh,” Calliope said. “It’s really staticy, but I think that’s the storm. That’s not your fault. It sounds like a commercial…” She trailed away with a frown. “No. What?”
He smiled at her and nodded.
“This is you?” she said. “This is you?”
More nodding.
She laughed. “I thought you were a commercial. You sound good! Oh, they are in the cans?”
She curled up under the table and sat with her back against the wall to listen. He sat next to her. She held the headphones with one hand, they were just slightly too loose for her but she didn’t want to take them off to fix the band. Slowly, her other hand crept into his lap, found his hand and held it.
He didn’t know how long they were like that. He was scared to look at her and he stared at the opposite wall. She was quiet.
Her breath caught in her throat and she sniffled.
When he turned to look there were tears streaming down her face, and a bubble of snot clinging under her nose.
He grabbed for the headphones. She put her hands over both and shook her head. “Uh-uh.”
He drew back and then reached out again, more gently. This time she let him, but she wrapped both arms around his neck and wouldn’t let go, so he just had to leave them on the floor. He held her.
“You didn’t make me sad,” she said, muffled against the fabric of his shirt. “I love you too.”
It was awkward getting out from under the worktable. He had to drag her part of the way. She still wouldn’t let go of him. Her reading glasses were hard in her shirt pocket and they made a creaking sound when he squeezed. He cradled her butt with one arm and put his hand on her back like he was going to walk with her to get her to sleep. She hooked her bare legs around his waist and dug her feet into his back. He carried her up the stairs like that.
The grey shade in the doorway flickered away, and Cerise fell to the floor. She shot to her feet and dusted her overalls before combing back her short hair with a hand. “It’s fine. I’m not interested. You have your privacy. It’s fine.”
Tommy and Mordecai were playing a hybrid version of “Do You Wanna Dance?” that was not quite the Ramones, but at least Mordecai was familiar with the song.
Cerise stormed a few steps after Milo. She spoke in a low, urgent voice, “As soon as you can talk again you tell me everything!”
Calliope lifted her head. “Go away, Cerise. I’m being seduced.”
Cerise wobbled a step backwards, gave her ankle a light twist in one of her high heels, collapsed onto the nearest cot and put her hand to her mouth. She grinned and issued a tiny cheer: yay.
Milo ignored her altogether and climbed the stairs to Room 201. He managed to get the door open and Calliope nudged it closed behind him.
