Interim Summer 2010

One of the reasons Wilhelmina loved visiting the aunts was the conversations they had that she wasn't supposed to hear.

At night, Wilhelmina had a routine. When it was her bedtime, she climbed into bed in her own little bedroom that the aunts kept for her at the top of the house. They kept it for her year-round. No one else slept there. It was one of those cozy rooms, small, with slanted walls and dormer windows that were always left open in hot weather. Wilhelmina's bed was pressed against one of those windows, and a sycamore rustled outside. At bedtime, someone, usually Frankie, would visit her or read to her, then tuck her in. To the sound of the wind in the leaves and the distant voices of her aunts rising from the open kitchen window two floors below, Wilhelmina would fall asleep.

Sometimes she slept through the night; and sometimes, after an hour or two, she woke up, knowing that the aunts were talking about something that mattered. She couldn't make out their words through the window. But maybe she could recognize something significant in their tone? Or maybe it was part of whatever inner sensitivity always told Wilhelmina where people were. Once she heard salsa music, and knew somehow, maybe from the breathless feeling of the laughter she could just barely catch, that they were dancing.

An old Victorian house nearing its century and a half birthday is not a quiet space for sneaking. When Wilhelmina slipped out of her bed onto the rag rug Frankie had made, then crept down the first staircase and along the second-floor corridor, then onto the next staircase, the floorboards creaked. One of the steps on the upper staircase practically screamed, and Wilhelmina's legs weren't long enough to skip over it. But the aunts never came looking to see what all the noise was. It never occurred to Wilhelmina that they knew what the noise was, and didn't mind.

It was during the summer after the summer when Bee had been allowed to visit, when Wilhelmina was eight—the summer of 2010—that she heard the aunts talking about Frankie and the owls. It was a cool night. As Wilhelmina settled into her usual spot halfway down the stairs, she almost wished she'd pulled a hoodie on over her pajamas, but it was too much work to go back. She hugged her legs with her arms and half closed her eyes, focusing sleepily on the rectangle of yellow light at the bottom of the stairs that was the doorway to the kitchen. She could hear the water turning on and off, and the clatter of dishes being washed. Esther and Frankie had made dinner together, fish and chips and a giant salad, the fish flaky and tender and the breading perfectly crunchy and light, and Wilhelmina had noticed a lot of bowls and pans. She could also hear a pen scratching on a page, and someone shaking the newspaper open.

"Oh, Frankie!" said Aunt Margaret. "Some sad news here. Mrs. Mancusi died."

The pen stopped. "What!" said Frankie. "Are you sure?"

"Concetta Mancusi," said Aunt Margaret. "That's her, right?"

"Yes. Oh!" said Frankie. Then she was quiet for a while. The water stopped running and all the aunts were quiet, except for footsteps and the sliding of chairs, then some low sniffling.

"There, mi cielo," said Esther softly. When the aunts were alone, Frankie was Esther's sky, and Aunt Margaret, "mi corazón," was her heart. Esther had a name for Wilhelmina too, but it was Yiddish, not Spanish: Wilhelmineleh.

"There, there," said Esther. "Oh, my hands are wet."

"It's okay," said Frankie, her voice full of tears, and muffled against someone else's body. "I suppose she wasn't young exactly. But she can't have been old either, right?"

"I'll check in a minute," said Aunt Margaret, whose voice was also muffled.

"Now, help me remember," said Esther. "Was this the woman who showed you how to turn back the odometer?"

"That was Mrs. Ferrari," said Frankie. Then she let out a teary, wet snort. "Why haven't I ever noticed it's funny that Mrs. Ferrari helped me with the car?"

Another moment passed, and more scraping of chairs. Wilhelmina heard footsteps and a thump, and thought Esther might be back at the sink again. Frankie's pen resumed scritching.

"Our car was the furthest thing from a Ferrari, of course," Frankie said, after a while. "An ancient Ford that only went into reverse if you threw your whole body into it."

"I remember that car," said Aunt Margaret. "Mrs. Mancusi was our senior-year math teacher, Esther, the one who came by every day after school and brought Frankie her lessons."

"The only one who did that," said Frankie. "Some of the other teachers sent lessons with her, but Mrs. Mancusi was the only one who came herself. She didn't care what I'd done. She taught school, then she came to the Harts' house and taught me."

"And dutifully ate my mother's burnt cookies," said Aunt Margaret, who was crinkling the newspaper again.

"Your mother's cookies weren't that bad," said Frankie. A chair moved. Frankie's footsteps. "Here, Esther, let me get that out of your way."

"Well, Mrs. Mancusi wasn't coming for the cookies," said Aunt Margaret.

"She was coming because she was an angel," said Frankie firmly.

"Ah, here it is," said Aunt Margaret. "She was seventy-five. Survived by three children, seven grandchildren, and eighteen great-grandchildren!"

"Good heavens," said Frankie. "All that at seventy-five. Do you remember how young and pretty she was?"

"I remember the day you got out of bed and actually did your hair," said Aunt Margaret, "because you wanted to try the crown braid she wore in her hair. I went out into the yard so I could cry without you knowing. I was so relieved. You were so depressed, Frankie. I kept expecting to find you hanging from the ceiling."

"It was a dark time," said Frankie. "I remember I missed my mother's cooking, but I didn't miss my mother. I felt guilty about that for a long, long time."

"That which you water, grows," said Esther. "That which you don't water, dies. Your mother starved that garden."

"You missed the barn owls," said Aunt Margaret.

"Oh, I did miss those barn owls!" said Frankie. "They were such beauties. They knew all my secrets too. All the animals did. They even watched Mrs. Ferrari take apart the odometer!"

"She did that in your own barn?"

"Yep. At night while my parents slept. She sat in the front seat with a flashlight and a couple of screwdrivers and her Sunday hat on her head. Here, Esther, I can dry that. Told me her unscrupulous brother had a used car dealership and at least she'd learned something from it."

"Here," said Esther. "That one's soaked."

"I remember when she finally turned off the flashlight," said Frankie. "It was so dark in there, so suddenly, that we both squealed. And then, one after another, the owls hooted, and I thought to myself, They're thanking her for helping me."

"I suppose Mrs. Ferrari is long gone," said Aunt Margaret. "She wasn't young then."

"And now Mrs. Mancusi has joined her," said Frankie. "Bless her heart. She's the only reason I ever finished high school."

"And now I learn that your hairstyle comes from her too," said Esther.

Frankie gave a gentle laugh. "I suppose so, yes."

"En paz descansa," said Esther. "May her memory be for a blessing. Should I light candles for them both?"

"Yes," said Frankie. "And for Margie's parents too. They took me in. I wasn't alone."

There were a few things Wilhelmina didn't understand about this conversation. She didn't know what an odometer was, or why Mrs. Ferrari's name was funny. She wasn't sure just how literal Frankie was being when she talked about the animals knowing her secrets. It seemed possible to Wilhelmina that Frankie was being quite literal indeed. She certainly didn't know what thing Frankie had done to make her have to leave home, and it was a revelation to learn that Frankie had lived with Aunt Margaret's family instead of her own. Wilhelmina thought back to every time Aunt Margaret had ever driven past her childhood home and said, "I grew up in that house right there, dear. Can you believe it?" Wilhelmina had imagined a young Aunt Margaret in that house, maybe Wilhelmina's age, maybe looking a lot like Wilhelmina herself, in old-timey clothes. Now she retroactively changed all her imaginings so that a teenaged Frankie, dark-eyed and lonesome, with long, dark hair and at least one unhappy secret, lived there too.

There was one part of the conversation Wilhelmina did understand: she knew what it was like to miss owls. The woods around the aunts' house were thick with owls in summer. Wilhelmina heard their low call in her dreams sometimes and knew she wasn't actually dreaming. At the end of every August, when she returned to Massachusetts, her sleep felt empty for a week or two, until she got used to nights without owls. When Wilhelmina returned to her warm bed that night after listening to her aunts' conversation, she thought she heard the hoot of a distant owl as she drifted back into her dreams.

In the morning, after Aunt Margaret and Esther drove off to work—Aunt Margaret had some job with math, and Esther did some kind of consulting—Frankie sat quiet and still at the kitchen table, nursing her coffee longer than usual. Her recipe box was nearby and she had a pen in her hair, but she didn't seem conscious of either. Wilhelmina was allowed to look inside Frankie's recipe box whenever she wanted. It contained cards with lists of ingredients, notes, and questions. "Turmeric for E's joints?" "M's eyes: avoid St. John's wort." "Breathe a blessing in through the feet." Frankie's handwriting was a bit wild: spiky in some places, bulbous in others.

Like the plants in her garden,Wilhelmina thought. Wilhelmina was quiet too this morning. She was wondering what an odometer was.

"May I call Bee?" she finally asked. The aunts let Wilhelmina call Bee whenever she wanted to, as long as she didn't talk too long.

"Yes, dear," said Frankie absently. So Wilhelmina ran upstairs to use the phone in the second-floor sitting room, because that room had a door that closed. She could ask Bee to find out what an odometer was without Frankie hearing. Of course, the aunts had a computer; they had dictionaries, and even an ancient encyclopedia. But she wanted to know from Bee. She wanted to tell him what she'd heard, and get his thoughts.

Bee's father answered the phone. As an emergency room doctor, he worked long, unpredictable shifts. Wilhelmina always knew, even before he spoke, that he was the one on the other end. She could hear something hollow in the air.

"Tobey isn't home," he said. "Which of his girlfriends is this?" He always asked that, which of Bee's girlfriends she was, even though she wasn't Bee's girlfriend and Bee didn't have any girlfriends and she was probably the only girl who ever called him anyway. Bee's father thought it was hilarious. It made Wilhelmina extremely uncomfortable, because saying, "This is Wilhelmina," as if it were an answer to the question he'd asked, always felt like a betrayal of Bee. Yet there was no other way to get past Bee's father to Bee.

For some reason, that morning, the situation made her hang up the phone, very hard and loud, without responding.

When she returned to the kitchen, Frankie had removed the pen from her hair and was flipping through her tarot cards. Wilhelmina knew Frankie's cards. They were soft with use, and colorful, and Frankie tended to pull them out when she was in a quiet and thoughtful mood. Wilhelmina didn't understand most of the cards. This was partly because there were so many of them: seventy-eight. Most of the deck was made up of suit cards, like the four suits of playing cards, except that these suits were called cups, wands, pentacles, and swords. But twenty-two of the cards in the deck were separate. When you laid them out side to side, they told the story of a person traveling through life. Some of them showed the trials the person would face; some of them showed the helpers they would meet. Some of them, like card zero, the Fool, and card nine, the Hermit, showed the person themselves. Wilhelmina liked these twenty-two cards best, because whenever Frankie worked with them, she told Wilhelmina a story.

Frankie kept her cards wrapped in a piece of dark fabric scattered with tiny golden bumblebees. Wilhelmina always noticed it because it made her think of Bee. Today Frankie spread the cloth onto the table before her, then slipped a few cards out of the deck, choosing them deliberately, placing them onto the cloth. They were all cards from the part of the deck Wilhelmina liked best. One showed a turning wheel and was called the Wheel of Fortune. One showed a woman in a garden wearing a dress with a print of pomegranates and a crown of stars on her head, and was called the Empress. And one showed an angel pouring water from one cup into another, and was called Temperance.

Frankie peered keenly at Wilhelmina. "That was quick. Are you all right, dear?"

"Bee wasn't home," said Wilhelmina. "What are you going to do with those cards?"

"I'm thinking about the story they tell," said Frankie, then patted the seat beside her. Wilhelmina sat down, hoping Frankie was about to answer her questions about the things she'd overheard.

"Chance brought me a person once, Wilhelmina," Frankie said, tapping the Wheel of Fortune. "This is the wheel that turns through our lives, bringing us surprises, then surprising us again by taking things away. Bringing us endings, and new beginnings. As we grow, Wilhelmina, we begin our lives again over and over. A long time ago, at a time in my life when I was making a new beginning, fortune brought me a person.

"That person was a woman who was like a mother to me," said Frankie, touching the Empress card. "She nurtured my mind, and my heart too, and helped me to heal when I was hurting. She's also the person who taught me about tarot cards. And she taught me the importance of temperance."

Frankie lifted the Temperance card and handed it to Wilhelmina. The angel on the card had massive red-and-gray wings.

"Have I ever talked to you about Temperance, Wilhelmina?" asked Frankie.

"No," said Wilhelmina.

"It's about time I did, then. I think it's my favorite card."

"Because an angel is like an owl?"

Frankie flashed a smile Wilhelmina recognized: it was her surprised smile. "I hadn't thought of that," she said. "Does that angel make you think of an owl?"

The angel on the card didn't really look like an owl. He looked very much like a person, in a white dress, with blond hair, golden cups held in human-shaped hands, and truly mammoth wings. He had a funny gold triangle on his chest too. It made Wilhelmina think of the giant Citgo sign above Fenway Park. Maybe this was Frankie's favorite card because Frankie loved baseball.

Anyway, he was definitely an angel. But for a moment, she imagined an owl in his place.

"I like owls more than angels," she said.

"It's interesting," said Frankie, "because both have reputations as peaceful, wise creatures, but in fact, both can be quite ruthless."

"Owls are ruthless?"

"Owls are nocturnal raptors. They're designed to blend into the night and keep perfectly still, so still that it seems impossible. It's the stillness of a predator, Wilhelmina. Then they swoop down on little animals who don't even know they're someone's prey until they're airborne. You must never corner an owl. Their claws can hurt you badly."

"I wouldn't corner an owl."

"I know you wouldn't," said Frankie simply. "You're not a person who tries to control the creatures around you. In fact, I believe you're a person who would excel at temperance."

Wilhelmina studied the way the angel on the card was pouring water from one cup to another. "Is it something about drinking?" she said.

"I suppose that for some people, temperance means to abstain from alcohol. Generally, temperance means a kind of moderation, in drinking but also in attitude. In the tarot specifically, temperance is the most beautiful—and practical—quality imaginable. It's a kind of balance. It's when you take all your dreams and imaginings, all the things you most want and all the magic you believe in. And then, next to that, you take all the harsh realities of the way things actually are in the world. And you find the way to balance both sides inside you. So that when you're planning and dreaming, you're also being realistic, and if you find yourself caught in one of the traps of reality, you remember your own magic. Temperance is the place where magic meets the mundane, Wilhelmina. Remembering the mundane makes us smart; remembering the magic makes us brave."

When Frankie got abstract like this, Wilhelmina didn't always understand. She thought that every time Frankie ever did anything, that was probably magic meeting the mundane, because Frankie was magic. What else could magic be, if not the sense of comfort and rightness that radiated from Frankie?

"Tomorrow I'm going to a funeral, dear," said Frankie. "Esther will work from home so you won't be alone."

Wilhelmina thought about that for a moment. "Did your empress die?" she said.

Frankie gave Wilhelmina another keen look. Sadness was plain on her face. "Yes."

Wilhelmina thought a little more. "Can I come?"

The funeral took place in a church Wilhelmina had noticed before from the car, because it was made of a kind of pale brick that was the same color as her own skin. She liked her skin well enough, but she didn't like the building. It looked like a giant thumb.

She was surprised by how different it was on the inside. From the outside, the windows looked muddy and opaque, but inside the church, the light streamed through them, dazzling her with brilliantly colored designs. Wilhelmina had meant to be a detective. She'd wanted to solve the mystery of Frankie leaving home, and the odometer, and what Frankie had done. Instead, she spent the funeral entranced by the way the light streaming through the windows stained the floor—and sometimes even the people—blue, red, purple, orange, and gold. There was a little boy sitting some distance from Wilhelmina, near one of the windows. He had some scraps of tissue paper cut into shapes Wilhelmina couldn't decipher. He kept hurling them into the air, which upset his parents. It seemed to be the thing to be quiet and still during funerals in churches, not throw stuff straight up into the air. But whenever he threw the papers, the light would catch them, so that they floated down again gently, spangled with changing color. It was so pretty that at one point, Wilhelmina made a noise of appreciation deep in her throat.

Then she glanced at Frankie beside her, worried that she'd been too loud. But Frankie, who had tears running down her face, was smiling. She was watching the spangling colors too.