Samuel and Aviela

Their uncles had warned them: people in town slept lightly, twitching like dogs, naming every creak and rattle their houses made, and damning the noises that were new and strange. Older folk kept bayonets under their mattresses, rusting from pee, and they diced stray children and stirred them into their stew. Samuel stuck close to Aviela as she scurried from shadow to shadow. They left footprints on the cobblestones—country mud and horse shit—and their footprints were close together because Samuel had wriggled under Aviela’s shawl. When they came to tidy rowhouses, amicably nudging, grateful for each other’s warmth, Aviela stopped, and Samuel bumped into her. Samuel guessed she was sizing up the rowhouses to find the richest prize. Gazing at the houses, Samuel could only believe that his uncles had been wrong. Decent people dwelled within, people who drank tea with cream poured from silver pitchers, people who told happy stories ending only in accord, people who could not imagine a morning they would find their silver pitchers gone. Samuel wondered how long until the rain rinsed their footprints away, not to cover their tracks, but to restore the ordered cobblestones to clean.

Aviela would know. So why was she so afraid?

A coal truck rumbled past, and Aviela yanked Samuel against a wet stone wall. Her fingers dug into his arm. Their cheeks touched. Samuel listened to Aviela’s panting. Samuel wondered whether she resented having to bring him along.

Aviela picked a house with light flickering from the second-floor window. As Aviela kept watch, Samuel scampered up the downspout, nimble as a cat, and peeked inside. The window was streaked with rain, but Samuel could tell from the crowd gathered around the pump organ, from the candles on the blood-red tablecloths, from the singing, that it must have been a party, or a rite, and that the rest of the house was likely deserted. Samuel let himself drop the full length to the ground, rolling into the fall, the way his uncles had taught him. Easy. He came up. Aviela found a darkened window and began working the latch with a flatware knife. Her breathing was slow and steady. Samuel made his breath slow and steady too. Their breath fogged the glass.

Light from the upstairs window shone on their work. Aviela had not tied back her hair, and it slid glossy and black from under the hood of her cape and got in the way of her hands. “Fuck!” she whispered. Samuel had never heard her say that before. He was eleven, she was fifteen: what else did he not know? Aviela shoved her hair under her hood and went back to working the latch.

She had been ignoring Samuel all day. Last night, after the tightrope, Samuel had found her and Peter, a horse handler, in the caravan. Peter was fastening his pants. Aviela’s silk skirt was pulled around her waist, and she was daubing at her crotch with a bloody rag. Her eyes looked terrified. Samuel tried to climb into the caravan, and he did not understand when she screamed at him and sent him away.

Samuel blew the rain from his lips. “Peter says he wants to dance with you when we get back.”

“Hush.” She glared at Samuel. She still wore her glittery makeup, and her face sparkled.

“ You’re still angry?”

“Hush.”

“ What were you doing in the wagon?”

“ You...hush...now.” She squeezed Samuel by the jaw. She squeezed until Samuel felt pain in his teeth.

“I won’t tell,” he managed to get out.

“ You better not.”

Samuel did not want to press her. He knew she was afraid. He could smell it in her sweat. Usually, when Aviela was on the tightrope, she displayed a calm that Samuel clung to like a log in a tumbling stream. Her jaw and mouth became firm. She breathed through her nose, moving through her leaps and flips gracefully, seeming to will her worries away. Samuel, standing flat-footed on the platform awaiting his turn on the rope, felt emboldened to step into the air, and Aviela would always be there, always beautiful, reaching her steady hand to his. Her face did not flinch from the gasps from the crowd. She floated through all the perilous tricks the crowd liked best. But her sweat gave her away. She was terrified. Samuel had smelled it when he found her and Peter in the caravan. He had smelled it two years ago when she tried a stunt her uncles were always urging on her, and she fell from the rope and landed on the hay; her uncles were afraid to lift her body, and the audience wondered if it was a gimmick, but Samuel, kneeling beside her, knew it wasn’t a gimmick, because of that smell. Now, as the two children huddled at the window, whose pane buzzed with every steaming truck that passed, Samuel smelled Aviela’s sweat and wondered if he should be afraid, but he remembered: fear was something Aviela had taken on so he wouldn’t have to.

A s Aviela worked the knife beneath the sash, Samuel saw she had cut her finger. A trickle of blood crept down the back of her hand to her elbow. She must have known, but she kept working, saying nothing. Mistakes did not exist. Tight-rope walkers did not make them. Neither did thieves. Samuel knew that Aviela, in fact, made a lot of mistakes, but he figured she saved them for when it didn’t matter: a jar of apple juice, spilled in her lap; a patch on Samuel’s sweater come loose; Aviela tripping over a rock on the warm safe ground.

“ You’re bleeding.”

“I told you not to talk about that.”

“No, dummy, right now. You cut yourself right now. It’s dripping all the way to your elbow.”

“Hush, it’s nothing.”

“It’s going to get all over the place. They’ll come out to the caravans, and their dogs will sniff you out.”

“ They never come out. And townspeople don’t have dogs.” She wiped the blood with the edge of her wool cape.

“ You say that, but you don’t know.”

“ Will you stop talking!” Aviela slid the windowpane up. She dropped the dinner knife, and it clanged on the paving stones. Samuel expected lamps to converge on them, he expected voices, he expected dogs to chase them away, but Aviela did not flinch from the noise of the knife. Then Samuel remembered: when he and Aviela were not walking a tightrope in the show, they were invisible. Begging for change on a market day, picking a few pockets on the sly: invisible. Leading their caravans down a road, slow and squeak- ing, while the coal trucks roared past: invisible. Being invisible was their best chance. They left the dinner knife twitching on the cobblestones, and, invisible, they climbed through the open window.

W hen Samuel was small, when his mama’s blankets were a safe raft on a stormy sea, he had climbed onto the raft and watched her die. They never did figure out what it was, and the remedies his papa stirred into her tea did not help. Samuel always remembered the moment when his mother grasped the sad truth: soon she would be alone, really alone, for the first and last time, and alone meant apart from everyone she loved. She and Samuel rode that raft, and she whispered to Samuel she was about to die. He knew it was true when his hands stroking her face did not seem to matter to her, and she closed her eyes, and the tears had to find a way out on their own. Then it was Samuel who felt alone, but only for a moment, because Aviela was suddenly behind him. She must have been weeping too, her sweater wet with tears, but she wrapped Samuel in her arms and led him out of the caravan. Aviela’s long black hair fell around Samuel’s face. The fear of being alone, well, he would store that away for another time. He had been doing so ever since.

It was a thrill, a terror, to slide his feet on the smooth wooden floor. Samuel and Aviela unlaced their shoes, dangled them around their necks, and skated past dressers and cabinets that loomed as big and dark as bears. They coasted over noisy floorboards and hushed them, stroking them with their soles. Aviela opened doors slowly, tenderly, and the doors made squeaks and cries like a baby unsettled in sleep. Again and again Samuel and Aviela jostled elbows, bumped knees, breathed the same stale air, and she frowned and handed him the end of her shawl to hold. She said, “Back off!” That was how Samuel followed Aviela through the rooms of the house, skating in his bare feet, a burlap bag in one hand, his sister’s wool shawl in the other. They looked for things their uncles had asked for, coins and jewelry, and they found them. They found palladium prints in tiny frames. They found an ivory chess set, the smooth pieces tumbling into their bag like plums.

Coins clinked in the dark.

Samuel heard singing from the room upstairs. “When Jesus calls my name...”

A set of alabaster combs.

“And bids my spirit rise...

A gold pocket watch.

“No earthly pain or peril...”

A blue bottle of perfume.

“ Shall bar my journey home.”

Samuel bumped into Aviela’s shoulder. Aviela’s fingers stroked his face. The gesture said, “Don’t be afraid,” but why did her fingers tremble so? She moved on, and Samuel followed.

Years ago, before a steam truck crashed into the caravan and scattered their family across the road, Samuel had always lived with the assurance of his papa and his sisters and brothers around him, their touch as warm and comfortable as his own clothes. At night he had always known their voices telling stories, their breathing in the dark. In the morning, when the family ate buckwheat meal together, leaning against the flanks of horses for warmth, and the steamy breath of the horses hovered in their midst, he knew that he would never be alone. After the coal truck had smashed into the caravan the way a boot kicked a pile of leaves, Samuel sat with Aviela on the side of the road in the steam and rain, counting the bits of gravel at their feet because what else was there to do, and they held each other because who else was there to hold. Their family and their horses were dark wet shapes on the road. Aviela’s wet hair stuck to Samuel’s arms. He knew he would never leave her, and he knew that neither would she.

Now, as they moved through the rooms of the darkened house, Aviela guided Samuel like a blind boy. Aviela’s fingertips on his arm told when to crouch, when to slide, when to scurry across rugs as wide as fields. But her breath was quick now, and her eyes brown and large as chestnuts—were they swollen with fear? It was the same expression as last night in the caravan when she held the bloody rag to her crotch. Or the time she fell from the rope to the hay, her leg twisted beneath her, her eyes gazing at the rope, bare and quivering, thirty feet above; she seemed to be looking for someone’s eyes, anyone’s eyes, but no one came, and she began to weep right there in the circus ring, and then Samuel was there, turning her face toward his. He would never leave her alone. But he needed her not to be afraid.

T hey opened jewelry cases lined in velvet and silk, poured pearls into their burlap sacks, slippery and tumbling like baby onions into a stew. In one room they found a silver snuff box. A millifiori paperweight. A harmonica. Aviela blew into it. Couldn’t they hear upstairs? Watching Aviela take this risk, the same girl who shut out the whistles and catcalls and ooh-la-las when she walked the tightrope with a slippery silk scarf shaking on her hips, Samuel guessed: you learned to be terrified by some things and not others, and maybe it was the crying of a child in the night, or a door squeaking open, or the wind slipping into your caravan where no wind should be, but nobody found terror in a child’s musical instrument, lips touching breathy notes. Beyond the window, a truck screamed past, and Samuel turned. Trees groaned in the sucking wind, branches reached to touch each other but failed. Samuel watched the window, then turned back to his sister, and he held the bag open as she dropped the harmonica in. Her short breathing finally began to slow.

In the hallway, a man walked past the room, singing about Jesus. Samuel didn’t even freeze. They watched him shuffle, smelled his breath. They were invisible. They were ghosts, their uncles had promised him, they could not be seen. Their uncles, rubbing lavender into their tea, had told stories about this...no one could see them. They would camp for the night on someone’s field and be gone by morning. Always at the edge of the field, always against the trees. They followed the backroads where you could still pull a caravan with a team. Invisible. That was why the crash had happened: the humming coal truck had crashed into them as if they weren’t even there. Oh sure, at night they would put on silk and sparkling makeup and Aviela would braid her hair into a thick coil that dangled and danced down her spine as she walked across the rope; people saw them then, but they only saw what they wanted to see. As painters and cobblers and tinkers and farriers, picking up jobs at this and that door, they were invisible. Their uncles sold jewelry hammered from coins; no one noticed that it was their own coins sold back to them, made beautiful. As they made the circuit, year to year, town to town, the same faces brought the same pots and pans for repair, the same faces gasped and cheered as Aviela and Samuel balanced on the rope, but the faces looked through them. Invisible.

Aviela promised Samuel that in the kitchen they’d find the silver laid out openly, and there it was on the counter. Samuel and his sister grabbed fistfuls of the stuff. No one came to investigate. Maybe, when they heard a clatter in the kitchen, they were relieved to know that the servant was doing the dishes.

In a study that smelled of leather and smoke, Samuel bagged a silver letter opener and letters that he and Aviela would read later at night, shining an oil lamp through the parchment, casting the letters onto the ceiling of their uncle’s caravan for everyone to see. Watermarks and secrets made plain.

With a brush on Samuel’s arm, Aviela signaled it was time to leave. They retraced their steps, lugging bags over their shoulders as they glided down the hall. They found all the quiet spots, the tender boards that wouldn’t complain. Samuel reached for Aviela’s hand and she let him take it. They slid across the floors side by side.

T hen Samuel lost Aviela in the dark. He lost the silky touch of her fingertips for only a few inches, but a few inches became a mile, and she was gone. Did he make a wrong turn? Had she slipped ahead of him down the hall? Had she gone left or right? Which door? He had never been so alone. He ran.

T he bag fell from his shoulder, sending jewels and coins and flatware clattering and clanging across the floor. Samuel was afraid to move. He reminded himself that he was invisible and, trusting this, he froze. They will never see me, they will never see. Like the sound of silverware pinging on the floor, I too will fade and disappear. He saw Aviela at the far end of the hall, waving madly for him to run to her. He saw her eyes, afraid. Footsteps thumped down the stairs. Aviela gave him a final urgent stare, then scooted out the window. A gas light flickered on. Silver and copper and pewter and gold sparkled around Samuel’s feet. Aviela was too far, the hall too long. Samuel turned and ran the other way.

W hen a doorway came up on his right, he twisted the knob exactly as Aviela had shown him to make no noise, making only a breath of soft air as the door sucked open. The footsteps thudded past. A rainstorm moving on.

A candle flame flickered in the swirling air. Samuel guessed he was in a child’s bedroom: for the first time in his life, he touched music boxes and stuffed bears and a stack of wooden blocks spelling out words. He had never felt so alone, so afraid. He thought about giving himself up. The ceiling tall as the sky, the ocean of cold floorboards—it was the silence that scared him the most. He couldn’t bear a quiet not stirred with the soft breathing of another, the beating of a heart close to his. His hands moved ahead of him in the darkness, not to find his way but because Aviela had always been an arm’s reach away. He found nothing. The candle flame settled, became still. Samuel’s solitary shadow stopped swaying on the walls.

Samuel heard a sigh and turned. On the bed lay a child. Samuel could not tell whether it was a boy or a girl. The child seemed to be about Samuel’s age. The child lay as still as a doll. The child’s eyes blinked and turned towards him. Smooth blonde hair fell across the child’s face. A silky white nightgown. The child’s eyes were wet with tears, and they sparkled from the candlelight. Samuel sat on the side of the bed. To be close to someone. Anyone.

“Are you an angel?” the child asked.

Before Samuel could answer, the door swung open and smacked the wall. The candle blew out. Samuel froze.

“Are you alright?” A man’s voice.

“ Yes, Papa.”

“Have you seen anyone?”

“I see an angel, Papa.”

“ That’s fine. Now go back to sleep.”

“ Yes, Papa.”

T he door closed.

Samuel had not moved.

He touched the child’s hair the way he had once touched a leaf of silky gold that his uncle was hammering on his anvil. The child’s eyes watched his. Samuel felt a fever on the child’s skin. He heard labor in the child’s breath. He saw in the child’s eyes the same understanding he had seen in his mother’s eyes a long time ago, and he knew that the celebration in the upper part of the house was some kind of vigil: this child was soon to die.

Beyond the door, someone was gathering the coins and jewels and letters and all the good jingling objects Samuel had lifted a thousand heartbeats ago. He continued to stroke the child’s hair. “You are beautiful,” he said.

“ So are you.”

“But you’re ill.”

“Yes.”

“ You’re going to die.”

“I’m going to live with Jesus.”

Samuel thought of his family, and he felt a knot in his stomach. The bodies strewn across the road. His mother, lying in her blankets and closing her eyes for the last time. It was hard to remember her face. He and Aviela had a tintype of their mother, but her gaze was frozen. Samuel realized this child’s eyes were exactly the same, frozen, and he wanted to look away, but the child was so beautiful.

“ You’re going to die, and they’ll forget you,” Samuel said.

“ They’re going to pray over me.”

“ You die, that is all, and then you’re completely alone. I’m sorry about it.”

Tears welled in the child’s eyes. The child fought for breath between high-pitched squeaky sobs. The tears dripped down the child’s face and into the blond hair. Samuel sat with the child until the eyes were closed, and that awful feeling of being alone came into the room and sat beside him.

Samuel heard a noise. It was Aviela at the window. She whistled a soft cooing note meant for him alone, a breathy whistle any sleeper would mistake for the wind at a window. But Samuel knew. Aviela tapped the glass with her fingernail; to anyone else, it sounded like hot water knocking in a cold pipe, but Samuel knew it meant hurry.

He left the child on the bed and slid over to the window. He turned the latch and tried to slide up the sash, but it had been painted shut. He pushed with all his strength, but it wouldn’t budge. His breathing was hard. Someone would hear him. Outside, Aviela pressed her hands against the glass, and Samuel pressed his hands against hers, but the glass between their palms was cold.

Before Samuel could move out of the way, a scowling Aviela smashed her fist through the pane, again and again, showering Samuel with glass, shattering the silence. Aviela cried out with each thrust of her fist, and Samuel heard in her voice an anger he knew was meant not for him, but for herself. It had never occurred to him before: Aviela was miserable. Her hair was snarled with sticks and leaves. She must have hidden in a tree. She had lost her cape. She had lost her bag of loot. Streaks of blood veined the skin on her hand.

Samuel climbed into the window opening. He felt Aviela’s bloody hand on his wrist. He felt himself yanked away.

T hey ran down the dark cobblestoned streets as fast as dogs. When the town thinned to low, flat-roofed cottages that stood apart from each other across fields of brown, crooked grass, they cut across. They left the cottages behind, and they ran down a road narrow enough for one screaming truck at a time.

“ They’re going to whip you when we get back!” Aviela stopped to rest beneath a tree.

“I’ll tell them you left me behind.”

“I can’t believe you, Samuel. You’re so hopeless! What’s going to happen to you? I’m too tired to do this anymore. At night, I can’t sleep, and it’s all from worrying about you. I hate the tightrope. I hate breaking into houses. I hate being afraid.” Aviela was sobbing, her face buried in her long black hair. “Afraid for you.”

Samuel tried to say “I’m sorry,” but the words did not come. He tried to pat her snarled hair, but she batted his arm away.

A fter a silence where the only sound was timid rain, Samuel said, “That time when you fell from the tight rope, did you—”

“Come on!” Aviela ran ahead. Samuel followed, making his own solitary foot- prints in the muddy road. Maybe that was her answer: fear was something you figured out on your own.

L ate at night there was fiddle music and dancing. Aviela put on a dry velvet dress and brushed her hair, and she danced with Peter and shook her hips and laughed in a way she never did with Samuel. She flipped her hair over her shoulders and looked at Peter from the corner of her smiling eyes. Samuel leaned against one of the horses and watched Aviela dance. Samuel knew he would be alone someday, and that day would come sooner than later. He was not happy about it, but he nestled into the warmth of the horse’s flank the way he used to nestle against Aviela’s back while she was sleeping. He felt the horse’s flank rise and fall with each breath. Rise and fall.

A s Samuel watched Aviela dancing, she tripped on a simple clump of hay, stumbling to her knees, her arms splayed out, her pretty face a scowl. A clump of fucking hay! Aviela stormed off, left her dance partner and the fiddler standing there. Watching from the shadows, Samuel knew: now was the time to be afraid. No one could do that for him anymore.