Page 29 of Spring's Arcana
The Cadillac yipped once, fire blooming behind its front grille, and barked as it turned hard right, fishtailing before the back end bit and propelled it forward.
Someone else had decided to leave the party, too.
REALLY REAL
Inside a dark, rocking, confined space, Nat sprawled on cheap harsh nylon carpeting, the end of a scream trailing between her teeth. The van swung into a wallowing turn and she tumbled, fetching up against a wheel-well with another barking, breathless little cry.
At least the magical new dress stayed largely where it was supposed to.
The van’s interior reeked of the chemical soup they callednew car smell,with a definite note of burning diesel. She thrashed, trying to brace herself against the metal bulge of the well so she could sit up, but the vehicle immediately turned again and there was a soft feathery bump underneath, as if it had veered to hit a small animal or bounced over a slight hillock.
Nat finally gained hands-and-knees. The first shock was the entire back of the van turning out to be empty, a cold carpeted cavern. The second was the two bucket seats—driver and passenger, a huge console between glowing with multicolored blinking lights in a rancid, stomach-churning pattern—correspondingly empty too. The steering wheel drifted from side to side with merry disregard for any law of physics or normalcy, seemingly unconnected to the rest of the car’s lunging through space. The speedometer’s orange needle was all the way to the right, hovering well past 120; spectral glow from the dash picked out the nap of flecked velour covering the seats.
I’ve been kidnapped by the seventies.Nat choked back a braying laugh. The van bounced again, and when she pulled herselfsemiupright, clinging to the back of the passenger seat, she almost wished she hadn’t.
The windshield was a cataract eye milky at the edges, the city approaching at high speed. That wasn’t the problem—it was actually a beautiful sight, electric gold glittering through ice-choked windows, bright flashes of holiday lights, concrete spires rising like gem-crusted teeth from snowy streets.
No, the problem was the white-fringed, choppy waves under the van, which kept bouncing just enough to make her seasick. Bouncing, in fact, on a cushion of empty air.
The van wasflying. Over Long Island Sound. Deep, dark, cold water, just waiting to swallow whatever dropped into its embrace.
Ohshit, don’t tell me we’re going to Yonkers.Nat’s knees gave out. She curled up behind the passenger seat, clapped her hands over her ears, and realized she was making a soft keening noise, like Jay hanging on a lumber X or Leo trying to sob quietly in the shower upstairs the night after Mom’s collapse and the ambulance, the hospital and diagnosis.
Mom. Think about her, think about helping her.
She tried. The van lunged upward, more like a helicopter than a car that needed good solid pavement corralled by painted stripes, and Nat gagged, retching once again as her stomach struggled to escape.
Oh, it’d seemed exciting, like she might finally be able to do something right, something Mama would appreciate. Imagining her mother restored to health, finally smiling and sayingwell maybe there’s something to all your wild stories, Natchenka,was all very well, but this goddamn van was flying over the ocean and she’d just seen…
Whathadshe seen?
Jay. Jay and Daisy. Oh, the problem wasn’t recognizing the names. That wasn’t it atall.
The problem was admitting the implications. No practical joke could be this elaborate, no hallucinogenic trip this seamless and durable.
“It’s insane,” she found herself moaning, rocking back and forthas the van veered to the left and continued climbing. Two raisins short of a fruitcake, a few sheets short of a wind, bats in the belfry,crazy Nattie freakgirllike they called her in school.
The van leveled out. The other eerie thing was the sudden quiet, the engine more a vibration than a sound. Some wild part of Nat wanted to crawl to the frost-starred back windows and look out, but the thought that they might swing open and some kind of depressurization launch her into space held her rigid-frozen.
Just like Jay, nailed to what she now realized were railroad ties.
The van shifted, banking like Jimmy Sparlick’s motorcycle the one time she’d gone riding with him. He’d ended up stranding her at Canarsie Park; the whole affair had been a particularly cruel prank, but she’d liked the sensation of speed and wind roaring past.
She’d never even been on a plane since Mama didn’t travel. Did this count? Her arm throbbed; Dmitri’s nails had scratched long angry red furrows.
Oddly, the thought of the gangster and his stupid shiny boot-toes made her angry enough to take a deep breath, forcing her hands away from her ears. She still couldn’t bring herself to go near a window, but she hugged her knees and concentrated on her lungs, the air slipping through her constricted throat, her throbbing arm, her aching calves, her iron-stiff neck and the buzzing in her head from the engine.
I’m here,she repeated, like she would in her closet at night after she’d cried all she was going to over the taunts of her classmates and Mom’s eternal impatience.I’m alive, I’m here. I’m me.
As usual, there was the sense that there were two Nats, badly superimposed on each other, the true core where they overlapped solid and real but the rest hazy and indistinct, pulled in different taffy-stretching directions by the impersonal gazes of everyone who saw a kid with too-wild dark hair and crazy ideas she didn’t have the sense to keep quiet about. It was easier to move into the solid overlap now that she was older, and the constriction around her lungs eased.
“Really real,” she found herself repeating. “I’m here, I’m me, and I’m real. I’mreallyreal.”
Mom loved that song.Rosie Real knows a thing or two,she would always say, and turn up the ancient yellow Bakelite radio in the kitchen that always had such a clear, warm sound.
There was a bounce, a change in the engine hum, a jolt that lifted her off the carpet and bumped her down again. Her ass was going to bruise, and that was the final, utterlylaststraw.
Nat Drozdova began to cuss.
