The Bronze King (19 page)

She grimaced. “I didn't say anything about that to anybody, and I'm not going to. I hope you won't either.”

I shook my head and poked at the grapefruit.

“You know, Tina,” she said, “your Granny Gran used to say that she'd seen the Loch Ness monster once, while she was out picking flowers or something. She didn't fuss about it or go around telling people in general, but she told me. Just once.”

“Is that why you believe me?” I said.

“No. I believe you because I guess I'm in the habit of believing you,” she said, and she leaned over and kissed my forehead, which made me feel shaky and embarrassed. “And because if it is the kind of thing that runs in families, better you than me, my dear. I'm not sure I could handle it as well as you're handling it.”

She could handle it. She's not as soft as she thinks. She took me to the doctor that afternoon to have me checked over, and I spent the next couple of days resting in bed.

Joel called.

“Tina!” he said. “You're really all right?”

“Yes, I guess so,” I said. “Joel, can you see?”

“Sure I can see. I saw that mess in the park, for one thing. Jesus! What happened? Where's Paavo?”

Tears started running out of my eyes. “He's dead,” I said.

“What?”

“I said he's dead. The kraken killed him.”

After a minute he said, “But we won. The kraken's gone. He can't be dead!”

“He's dead, Joel. He made himself into Jagiello, and the kraken came out of the lake. I threw some bottles at it, and he charged into it and it died. But he died too. It killed him as it died. I saw it happen.”

I felt as if I was killing Paavo all over again every time I said “died” or “dead,” and I knew it hurt Joel to hear it but I didn't care.

“He's not dead!” he shouted. “You're lying!”

I couldn't talk anymore because I was crying too hard. I hung up. Joel didn't call back.

So a hard part of all this was not having anyone my age to talk with about it. I tried to tell Barbara once, but she had no time for fairy tales, she said. And I never considered telling Megan. She wouldn't understand about me and Joel, let alone me and Paavo. There's no way I can see myself trying to explain it to her. Not until she grows up a little, anyhow.

Even Mom wouldn't talk about it much with me afterward. Sometimes I got the feeling this was because she was just a little bit jealous.

Another thing, about friends.

Word got around school, of course, all completely cockeyed but fascinating to people. The story agreed on by my mom and Joel's parents was that I had run away because of my grades in math, and that Joel had come after me to try to keep me out of trouble. We said we'd hung around in the subways and the park until we got too hungry to stick it out any longer, and then we'd come home. People seemed to believe this, but some of them—the wrong ones, of course—wanted more.

Kim Larkin came around one day and said to me, “Where did you and this Joel hole up? What happened?”

She and some of her pals sat down at my lunch table. I got the distinct impression that they were expecting me to try to buy my way into their group, at long last, with juicy secrets about me and “this Joel.”

I also had the feeling that I would rather cut my throat than feed any of that part of my life into their greedy little shining faces.

I said, “My guidance counselor says it's better for me not to talk about it.”

“Oh,” said Kim, shaking her hair back like a model, “that bad, huh? Well if it's something you two can't talk about to anybody else, I guess you'll be talking just to each other from now on, right? If ‘talking' is what you call it.”

Amy, the freckled one, started making disgusting wet kissy noises. The rest giggled. Other kids were watching us and whispering.

“Where is this Joel?” Kim said, looking around with this slinky look. “Nobody I know has ever seen him. What happened, did he disappear into the quicksand of the
swamp
?”

Amy said, “I bet Lennie murdered him in a jealous fit.”

“And threw his body in the
swamp
,” Kim crowed.

All of a sudden I got very tired of the whole thing. I sat back and looked her in the eye and I said, “Kim, you're pretty and you're smart and you're popular and your parents have enough money to buy you great designer clothes and send you to Europe to ski at Christmas. How come with all those advantages you act like such a horse's ass?”

They all looked as shocked as if I'd kicked them.

Then Kim came back with, “Well, Swampy, you're dumb and you're ugly and you've got no friends and you dress like a reject from the Salvation Army, so how come with all your disadvantages you don't go drown yourself?”

The weirdest thing happened. A giggle bubbled out of me and I started to laugh a good, loud laugh. It felt great.

Then I folded my arms and just looked at her, smiling and feeling good for the first time in days. Pretty soon she and her friends got bored sitting around going yuk yuk and trying to get anything more out of me, and they took off.

They haven't bothered me since. In fact, a couple of girls who are kind of fringe members of Kim's clique, sometimes in and sometimes out, have started trying to hang around with Barbara and me. Soon there'll be an invitation to a party or something, I can see it coming. Now that it doesn't matter a bit to me, the whole problem evaporates. Weird.

Mom and I went to see Granny Gran. I don't know what I expected, but anyway, she looked the same as always. She smiled at my mother and asked her to please go away and let us talk alone.

Mom said, “Whatever you two have to say to each other, in view of—what Valentine says happened, I think I have a right to hear.”

Granny Gran said, “What about that shortcake I asked you for last time?”

Mom set her jaw and glared from one of us to the other and back again. I sat there being miserable and silent, and Granny Gran hummed to herself. Finally Mom got up and went away to talk to Mrs. Dermott.

Granny Gran looked hard at me. “Well?” she said.

“He died, Gran,” I said.

“Who did?”

I started to cry because all of a sudden I was thinking about Paavo, which I hadn't been able to do much lately. Every time I'd tried, my mind went blasting off in some other direction as if I'd burned it on something. But now he was right there, and that burned, all right. Knowing he only existed in my thoughts and not in reality anymore really burned.

“Well, who, Val? Don't just sit there blubbering. A lot of people have died, you know. At my age it seems as if that's all anybody does, practically.” Then she said, “Oh, you must mean Paavo Latvela,” and she sighed and patted my hand with her knotty old fingers that could barely pick anything up anymore.

It all poured out of me in a flood, including the parts I'd censored from my mom.

Granny Gran sat patting my hand and listening and nodding, and after a while she put one bumpy-knuckled finger against my lips and told me, “Hush now, that's enough. He'd be embarrassed. You wouldn't want to embarrass him, would you? He was always a little shy, you know, a little nervous about strong feeling. That took a lot, him talking to you as straight as he did about attachments to people. And it was good sense, too, what he told you. I didn't know he knew that much about such things. About monsters and the like, yes, but people's hearts, well, that's a surprise.”

Shy! Paavo, shy? It's very hard when someone else turns out to know something you don't, something personal and important, about somebody you thought you got to know pretty intimately. Especially when you'll never have a chance now to find out that kind of thing about him for yourself.

“How can you just sit and talk about him like that?” I said. “He's
dead
, Gran! I was with him and I didn't even know what was going on until it was all over. I didn't know Jagiello was him!”

“Well, of course it was him,” she said a little testily. “You didn't think that a brainless, hollow-hearted, soulless bronze statue could take on a kraken, did you? Keep one out, yes, but fight one once the kraken was loose and moving? Never. Of course Paavo Latvela had to take over himself, and naturally he couldn't do it in that elderly human body he was wearing, pleasing though it was. It was pleasing, wasn't it? He was always fine-looking, in whatever form I knew him, but without ostentation. Great style, Paavo Latvela had. Thoughtful of him, too, not to let you know that he was moving Jagiello. After all, what could you have done besides what you did do, had you known?”

Well, off I went blubbering again, knowing she was right. There was nothing else I could have done, not a thing.

“Did you know?” I said, struck by a sudden horrible possibility. “Did you know he was going to do it that way and let him go off and do it?”

“Well, no, lovie,” she said softly. “I don't think I could have managed that. I have some kinds of sight—I did see the ending, you know—but not that kind, not prediction, thank heaven.”

“You saw what happened at the lake?” I said. “How?”

“Why, in my bathroom basin, which I had filled with water. He used water to call me, because he needed my help to distract the kraken when you were looking for Joel. He had his hands full himself with the Princes, who were following his water shadow all over town, wherever he led them. I used the basin to concentrate and send some of the stored-up charge from here. Most of it I got from the cribbage game on the porch there. I made the kraken think that an army from Sorcery Hall was arriving through the Lincoln Tunnel. Off the brute went to do battle, leaving you free to contact Joel. That was about the limit of what I could manage, but it served, didn't it?

“I stayed by the water and watched the rest: a great and terrible ending for Paavo Latvela. I did my crying then, you see. I couldn't put it off, for fear I might not be spared the time to do it later.”

That pulled me up short: the thought of maybe losing Granny Gran too. I thought I would suffocate on my bitter feelings.

“Anyway, lovie, he did what he set out to do, didn't he? I'm sorry it cost so much, but I know he'd rather have paid the price than failed.”

True, I knew it was true. “Oh Gran,” I said. “But he's gone, and I have nothing at all to remember him by. Sometimes I can hardly even think what he looked like, I mean clearly.”

“Time will cure that,” she said a little grimly. “When you're old like me, lovie, you'll remember every hair of his fine head and feed your tired heart on those memories. But for now, it's just as well, you see, because he's gone and shouldn't be haunting you, now should he? Getting in your way, taking your attention from what's going on around you? Why, you could be busy remembering Paavo Latvela and walk in front of a bus!”

“Gran!” I said. I was really shocked. “You don't mean I should deliberately forget him! He was wonderful, he treated me like a grown-up, he was—”

“Just don't fight against it, that's all,” she said, “the blurring effect of time, I mean. You can't fight that any more than you can fight the growth of your bones, lovie.”

“I can,” I said. “I'll find some way to remember.”

“And he did leave you something,” she added.

I stared at her, wondering if he'd given her something for me, something she'd been keeping to give me now that it was all over. Past her shoulder I could see Mom coming back with Mrs. Dermott.

“What, Gran?” I said, “Quick, give it to me before Mom comes!”

“It's your name, lovie,” she said softly. “What did Paavo Latvela call you?”

I said, “He called me Val, or Valentine.”

“Not Tina, the little doll, the baby,” Gran said. “Val. Val for Valor. Valentine for love.”

And then Mom was saying, “Are you two ready to let anybody else into this conversation?” She was looking sharply at me, noticing that I'd been crying, of course.

Granny Gran said, “We were about to invite you, but I can't find the phone number, dear.”

Mom gave up.

But I had my gift.

So back to Joel, I guess. This is hard because it should have turned out differently, or that's how I felt. We'd been through enormous danger together, and I expected something strong and permanent between us, a bond, because of it.

Well, maybe that's what I got, but not in the form I expected.

A day came when I figured I'd better go make my peace with the fact that Paavo Latvela was dead but that ugly, dumb statue was back in its place again. They'd made a copy of Jagiello and set him up on his pedestal again, on the terrace at the east end of the lake. I knew because I'd read about it in the papers. I hadn't walked across the park after school since that night. I'd been taking the bus.

So one afternoon, on a warm day in late spring with the end of school in sight, I walked out on the black spur of rock in front of the terrace. For a while I watched some boys rappelling with khaki climbing ropes all over the cliff under the little castle at the other end of the lake. I felt nothing at my back where the new statue stood, no presence. I might have been standing anywhere.

Finally I turned around and walked between the two little old-fashioned lampposts (where Paavo had held himself up after the Princes jumped us that afternoon) and up the steps onto Jagiello's terrace under the trees. I looked up.

There he was, as ugly as ever: the lumpy horse in lumpy horse-drapery, with a twig caught on the little chain that links the bit to the single rein. The king was standing in his stirrups brandishing his crossed swords at the sky over the lake, with the hilt of a third sword showing at his left hip. Funny, I'd never noticed that third sword before. Imagine carrying three!

What bothered me was that there was no sign of what I knew had happened, nothing at all.