It feels strange to call Olympia your home, but you have a sense of "returning" as the Uber stops in front of Charles's house. You felt a sting of regret as you left Margaret and Fyodor in England, but you feel a sense of relief and comfort now.
Robert wrenches the front door open and bolts out to meet while you're still on the sidewalk. He pulls up short, and there's an awkward pause as he and you can't decide whether to shake hands or hug. Finally, you embrace—something you never did back in Saratoga Falls.
"Missed you, you little punk," you growl at him.
"Same as you, scarecrow." He pulls away. "How come you didn't want us picking you up at the airport?"
"Not my idea. Charles told me if I couldn't find my way back here on my own, I deserved to get lost."
"You wouldn't want that!" Robert chortles as he drags you to the house. "You're back just in time for the good stuff. Thanksgiving's in a few days, and Charles throws big parties every Christmas! We’re gonna be meeting even more Stellae!"
Thanksgiving? you reflect numbly to yourself. It wasn't even Halloween when you left for England! Have you been gone that long?
"Really," you say as you try to recover from your surprise. "Are all of them coming?" Fyodor would certainly liven up a party, but you don't see Margaret traveling. You smile at Laverne, who is waiting in the living room as you step inside.
"No, not everyone," she answers on Robert's behalf. "It'll be more than enough," she adds with a laugh. "We'll have to add on some rooms."
"But Frank and Joe'll be coming back!" Robert exclaims.
"Coming back? Hold on, isn’t Joe here?"
"No, he left right after you did." Robert's smile turns sly. "Why do you think I said I missed you? I wouldn't have, if he—"
"Where'd he go?"
"Mission. I told him I wanted to go too, and he said he'd take me but he'd have to smuggle me out in his suitcase. Pff! And I thought he was joking but then he actually put me in his suitcase!" Robert grimaces. "I nearly suffocated, and when he let me out, he told me it was a lesson, to always be careful what you wish for in this business."
"Was he going back to Saratoga Falls?" Your thoughts, like a flock of birds, wheels and darts for your old home, where Frank is watching over Lucy and Taylor, and for signs of the professor. "Have you heard from Frank?"
"I haven't, but maybe Charles has. Hey, so tell me about England!"
Laverne interrupts. "Come in the kitchen and let me fix your brother something to eat, and he can tell us both about it, if he wants."
"Well," you tell Robert as you follow them into the kitchen, "it was scary at first but it turned into something like in a fairy tale. There was this little old woman and a giant with an enormous beard, and they lived together in a cottage on the edge of some woods ..."
It's funny, but after your weeks with Fyodor, it feels very natural to share your story ... in the form of a story!
--
After you've eaten you go down the hallway to knock on the door of Charles's study. "Come in!" he booms, and you push open the door.
It's a small room, done up in knotty pine paneling and with a ragged and worn carpet. Bookshelves line most of the walls, so all so overstuffed that books are squeezed in sideways between the bottoms of one shelf and the books on the shelf beneath. It makes you dizzy as you follow the lines of each shelf, for you have the odd impression that the shelves are multiplying and extending just out of sight each time you shift your gaze.
You're snatched from this impression before it can turn to an attack of vertigo by a hearty cheer from Charles. "So you made it!" he exclaims as he pushes himself to his feet, from his chair at a small desk by the window. "Laverne and I were laying odds you'd make a side trip to Las Vegas! Let me look at you, son!"
He lays his hands on your shoulders, and beams at you. You blush as he searches you out with twinkling blue eyes. You struggle to make some kind of reply, to cast into words all that you felt and went through with Margaret, and your face turns hot as you find yourself at a loss.
Then Charles squeezes your shoulder, and you realize you don't have to say anything. He can probably read it all in your face.
Maybe he read that thought too, for he claps your shoulder and gestures you at the second chair in the room. "So now that you're done with that, we can talk about what comes next."
You're still feeling shy, so you try turning it into a joke. "Thanksgiving, right? According to Robert, that's what's next."
Charles laughs. "Yes, that, but I mean your training. Next week your first teacher will arrive to collect you. You'll be traveling back to Los Angeles with her."
"What are you going to do with Robert?" You could tell from the way he talked over lunch that he was starting to go a little stir-crazy.
"Joe will be back about the time you leave. He'll keep Robert entertained through the holidays, and then his schooling will begin.
"Schooling?" you ask. "Or training?" The latter word, which you welcome in your own case, troubles you in Robert's.
Charles smiles gravely. "It will begin as schooling. Whether it turns into training will depend upon him."
Your sense of unease deepens. "He'll want it to be training. He told me he wanted to go with Joe when he left," you add.
"Yes, I heard about the attempt to smuggle him out. But no one is tested before they are ready, and you might be surprised by the choices he makes." He claps you on the knee. "This business abounds with unlikely paths and unexpected outcomes."
Just like mine, you think, as I escaped the clouds of Lurga.
--
Thanksgiving comes and goes. You felt equivocal about the holiday as it approaches, for you thought it be only you and Robert and Charles and Laverne, but in fact Charles has arranged for a "movable feast" with friends of his in town. It begins early with coffee rolls at his house; proceeds to a small pre-feast brunch of fruit salad and sweet potato casserole at the house of a friend; thence to three meals of turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, green beans, and other mainstays at three other houses; pumpkin, pecan, and chocolate pies for dessert at a fourth; and every house is packed with people who start as strangers but end somehow amidst the laughter and gossip as aunts and uncles and cousins. It all finally ends after nightfall with a general collapse into a stupor back at Charles's house. You and Robert spend the few days afterward trying to work the calories off with lots of rough play in the woods and fields behind the house, in a landscape aflame with gold and scarlet foliage.
The following Monday, though, you return from a solo jog in an atmosphere that is starting to pass from crisp to frosty to find a visitor awaiting you on the back porch.
You find yourself immediately wondering how old she is. Though her tightly kinked, coppery hair shows a touch of gray at the temples, her mocha-colored complexion is clear, her eyes bright, and her skin youthful. From a distance you would peg her as a well-preserved woman in her late fifties, but the years drop from her the closer you get until, as you step up to meet her wide, white, dazzling smile with a more tentative one of your own, you decide that the gray in her hair must be cosmetic, and that she can't be more than ... thirty? She's a very stylish thirty-year-old, if so, being dressed warmly in a tartan wool skirt and heavy boots, and draped all about in red and green scarves and shawls over her dark brown jacket. A green beret perches rakishly on her head.
"Good morning!" she trills at you in a light Scottish burr that seems completely at odds with her African features. "I take it you are Jeffrey Harrison!"
"Uh ... Yes! Hi!"
She extends her hand. "And I am Kali Valentine!"
"Pleased to meet you," you stammer. You now recall the name of the teacher Charles was bringing in, but you realize you were expecting another Margaret.
"It's a beautiful day for a run," she observes. "I don't—run, that is—but would you indulge me in a stroll?"
"Sure, I need to cool off before I go inside, Ms., uh—"
"Ms. Valentine, if you prefer the courteously formal. Kali, if you are comfortable with the informal." She steps into the yard, and you fall in beside her. "Let me begin by offering you my condolences."
"Condolences for what?"
There's a fractional hesitation before she answers, "On your family."
Oh, you think, feeling very stupid. "Thank you," you mumble.
You glance sidelong at her, to check her reaction, and find her giving you a quick and kindly smile.
"The air here is very healing," she says, "as is the air in Oxford. 'Tis the season of merriment, too, and at such times, in this place, our thoughts tread not often bitter pathways. I spoke only so that you would know what I know, and not wonder."
"Ah. Thanks. Um—"
"Yes?"
"Well, speaking of what we know and what we don't know— You're taking me to Los Angeles?"
"I am taking you to study, child," she says with a very light severity. "Los Angeles is merely where we will be conducting your studies."
"Oh. Well, what exactly am I going to be studying?"
"About the ousiarchs!" she exclaims. "Yours specifically, but of them in general. One's learning is a mansion of many rooms," she continues, and turns to gesture back at Charles's bungalow, "but every house starts with a foundation. I will help you build that foundation. I am by profession a designer and decorator," she adds with a trace of self-reproach in her voice. "Architectural metaphors suggest themselves too easily to me."
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