Jeffrey
The next day dawned picture perfect and Liko took his cup of coffee for a little meander around the farm.
His mind meandered as well, to his first tour of Schoenfeld’s, back in March, with Diane as his guide.
Odd how little thought he’d given to her since.
Occasionally the incident wandered through the transom of his mind—Oh yeah, there was the time Dane was dressed as a woman—and always he filed it under OK, Whatever, which was a crowded sub-folder within The Meaningless Scrapheap of Everything Else.
“Why should I care,” Liko said aloud, then sheepishly looked around to see if anyone was in earshot. He’s not a drag queen, he thought. He’s not transitioning. But so what if he were? He said Diane’s a private thing he usually keeps inside.
Liko smiled, remembering Dane describing Diane as a life coach, saying, She helps me do brave things.
He’d also used the word sister. And Diane had used brother.
Maybe Dane and Maisie had another sister who died tragically.
Liko shrugged at the beautiful day. Diane’s an alter ego. So what, we all have them.
Fake screen names. Sock puppet accounts. A British adolescent dialing down his accent to fit in with his American friends. Even Janelle had suits and stilettos she specifically wore when she was making presentations at work.
“Uh-oh, you’ve got the power heels on,” Liko would say.
Janelle would smirk and donkey-kick the fridge door shut. “I’m going into this meeting beav first.”
The memory made him sigh as he turned down the path beneath the wisteria pergola. Dane was coming the other way, his hands cupped against his chest. “Morning,” he called. “Got something for you.”
“For me?”
“Put your coffee down.”
Liko did and into his palms Dane gently set a duckling.
“Stop,” Liko said.
“I thought maybe you’d be amenable to adopting a little creature while you’re on retreat.”
“Absolutely not. I’ve got writing to do, a mystery to solve, and I have no room in my schedule for cre— Hello, little fellow, who’s the most handsome baby duck ever?”
“He’s the runt of the flock.”
Liko half turned away, affronted. “Sir, how dare you.”
“He has eleven siblings who don’t share nicely. He keeps getting pushed out at feeding time and he’s not growing.”
“Look at you,” Liko said, holding the duckling at eye level. The little bird started nuzzling all over his face, then nibbling on his earlobes. “Yes. Yes, you’re so fluffy. Oh my God, you’re so floofy.”
Dane smiled. “He needs a champion. How about it?”
“This is my creature,” Liko said, running an index finger along the duckling’s back. “I shall love him and hold him and call him…”
“George?”
“Unfortunately, George is the name of the creature who shtupped my wife.”
“Oh shit,” Dane said.
“I shall call him Floofy.”
“Please don’t.”
“Actually, no, this is Jeffrey,” Liko said. “Named for the runty duckling in Charlotte’s Web.”
“Well, in the movie, not the book.”
“Dane’s being a purist twat,” Liko said to Jeffrey’s downy face. “Isn’t he, Jeffrey? Yes he is.”
Dane took Liko to see the duck brooder, which was a big galvanized tub with a wire cave clamped over the top. The bottom was lined with wood shavings and outfitted with feeders and water, a padded box for sleeping, and a heat lamp hooked overhead.
“No pool?” Liko asked. “My duck must have a pool.”
Dane pointed to a child’s wading pool against the far wall. “They splash around there until Mama takes them for swimming lessons.”
A farm worker was devising a new brooder out of a large plastic tub. She’d cut out the center of the lid and was fixing wire mesh over the opening.
“Maya, this is Liko,” Dane said. “Liko, Maya. She’s making a separate brooder for Jeffrey and just one or two of his siblings. He’ll still have company, but he won’t have to work so hard to get food.”
“You’ll find I am an excellent brooder,” Liko said to Jeffrey, scratching him around the bill. “I brood all day every day. We’re gonna be such good mates.”
Dane had a look of unadulterated pleasure on his face. A mix of Whew, my idea worked and Look how cute you are with your duck.
Liko smiled back a goofy moment before asking, “Will you feed him anything different?”
“Probiotics work well to help the small ones thrive,” Maya said. “He’ll get a little yogurt stirred into his feed. We do extra monitoring at mealtimes to make sure he gets enough.”
Dane nudged Liko’s side. “We meaning you. Report back at, what, noon?”
“Noon,” Maya said. “Looks like he’s imprinting already so he’ll be waiting for you, Liko. Don’t be late.”
Liko felt more than a little reluctance to surrender his charge. He lowered Jeffrey into the pool, watched him paddle a bit, then backed toward the door clutching his heart. “Farewell, web-footed friend,” he said, laughing. “Damn, this is like His Dark Materials. I’m separating from my daemon.”
Now Dane was staring at him with unadulterated surprise.
“His Dark Materials,” Liko said again. “Philip Pullman. It’s a fantasy ser—”
“I know what it is,” Dane said. “Only one of my favorite series in the world.”
“Really?”
“Really.” Dane headed outside. “I don’t meet many others who know it.”
“Does this get me promoted from people to pipple?”
“If you like Philip Pullman, you are officially pipple.”
“God what a day,” Liko said, looking around.
“Got plans?”
“I feel like a walk. If I take Salma, is there a good trail to follow?” At the magic word walk, Salma started running circles around Liko’s legs.
“Sure. I’ll show you the path through the woods to the Hare Ring.
From there you can pick up a couple trails that loop around the property.
One will take you back into town and you can walk home along Oak Hill Road.
If you want a longer hike, it’s two miles to pick up Liberty Loop, three to Winding Waters.
Or you can drive to either and park at the trailhead. ”
Liko looked down at his beat-up sneakers. “I’ll start small.”
“Good call. You have to be back in time to feed your duck.”
He and Liko walked up the farm road and onto a path that cut through the woods.
Almost instantly, the humming buzz of birdsong and insects was halved, as was the din of machinery and caterwauling of roosters.
A calm, hallowed quiet closed around the two men as they followed the meandering trail around trees and boulders, ducking under branches and hopping over fallen logs.
“Reminds me of when I was young,” Liko said. “Summer holidays when I’d run wild in the woods with my mates. Playing knights, pirates, cops and robbers. Secret Agents. We would— Wow…”
The path abruptly emerged into a large grassy clearing, almost perfectly round.
“Holy hell,” Liko said, stopping short with hands on hips. The ring of trees was engulfed in a purple veil. Every trunk and branch coiled in wisteria vines, dripping purple flowers like great clusters of grapes.
“Welcome to the Hare Ring,” Dane said. “At its peak of purple perfection. Another reason I wanted you to come here in early May.”
“This is amazing. Did you guys plant these vines?”
“No, it’s all naturalized. Look out, there she goes…”
Salma had darted into the clearing at a run. Dozens of small, brown rabbits exploded out of her path and fled for the safety of the woods. Two raced toward Liko and Dane, did a mid-air flip turn and bounded the other way.
“O wisteria hares turning,” Liko said.
Dane started walking toward the middle of the clearing, toward a large, square stone in its center. It was about two feet high by three feet long, rough and weathered.
And weirdly familiar.
“Where’d this come from?” Liko asked.
“Nobody knows. Maybe thrown up by the earth over eons. Maybe dragged here by glaciers. Maybe part of a fence that was dismantled but this baby couldn’t be budged. So here it stayed. And Ethan being Ethan, he took it as a challenge.”
The short end facing them was carved with an unfinished Green Man, only the eyes and half his face completed. The other short end had a simple carving of the Three Hares motif. Across one of the long ends were chiseled letters.
“Oh, no way,” Liko said, crouching down to examine the line of words: Ye then deign to know me.
“It’s off-center,” Dane said. “Which drove Ethan batshit. The triangle of the hare ears is off by like a tenth of a degree or something. Also drove him batshit.”
“This is the altar in the Green Man Chamber,” Liko said.
“Correct.”
“Which came first? I mean, did he carve the words before or after the game was released?”
“Before,” Dane said, sitting on the rock. “Long before.”
Liko sat on the grass, leaning back on his hands, listening to Dane tell how this clearing was where he, Ethan and Nomi came to be together.
To talk about hard things. To make promises.
To reach decisions. Or just be. It was most beautiful in springtime when the wisteria bloomed.
Coldly magnificent in winter, under a full moon, when they’d build little fires in the stone’s depression.
“Not every full moon religiously,” Dane said, “but when we felt like it. Always on the winter solstice though. We had a thing about it.” He glanced at Liko. “Which I can tell you, or I can point you toward the trails and let you get on with your day.”
Liko lay down, laced hands behind his head and put his feet up on the rock. “I’m listening.”
“So I was the only one of the three who knew their mother’s name,” Dane said.
“The only one who had memories of a biological mother. Helen deWinter kind of went from being my mother to our mother. The mother. The woo-woo earth mother. Helen means light, so we’d come out to the Hare Ring on the winter solstice and celebrate the light coming back.
Celebrate Helen deWinter, Light of Winter returning. ”
“I think Swedes have a saint,” Liko said. “I forget her name but they have a solstice celebration in her honor, and children wear crowns with candles on their head.”
“It was dumb,” Dane said. “But at the same time, it was just fun as fuck to make up these rituals together and be unabashedly into them. To find meaning and magic in names and flowers and everything we saw in front of our faces on a daily basis. To treat a weird rock in the middle of nowhere as an altar. To look at the moon and not see a man there, but a rabbit.”
Liko sat up and gazed around the ring. “Damn, all I’d have to do is take one wide-angle picture of this place, with the stone and the wisteria, and the gaming forums would lose their bloody minds.”
“Wait, let me get out of the shot.” Dane got off the block and moved a few feet away. “Go for it.”
“You’d let me?”
“Haven’t you been?”
“What?”
“Sharing what you’ve learned online.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because it… All of this… It’s yours. I don’t know what it means yet, and I don’t want to post something that’ll result in a stampede of people showing up at this farm and clipping wisteria blossoms as souvenirs. Stealing the Green Man medallions or the hare statues. Disturbing your peace.”
“The mission of the Danelaw is peace.”
“What?”
“Never mind.” Dane came and sat again. “Thank you,” he said. “I’m protective of my peace, so I really appreciate it.”
“Well, don’t go thinking I’m an entirely noble fellow. Most of the not telling is selfishness. Greedy selfishness. Hoarding the secrets makes me feel I have a little power in a world where I feel so fucking helpless.”
“I get it.” Dane reached and pushed a little of Liko’s hair back. It was a frank, unhesitating caress. The first of its kind between the men. Wasn’t it? Liko’s memory backtracked through the party and the late-night session in front of the laptop.
No, Dane hadn’t touched him before. Not like this.
“Anyway,” Dane said, in a cheerful, subject-changing tone, “the significance of wisteria in the game is it’s Nomi’s birth name Misteria with the M turned upside-down.
Outside the game, strictly within Schoenfeld lore, it’s how in nineteen ninety-one, the wisteria pergola was fifteen years old and still hadn’t bloomed.
Then one day, a stranger came to the farm.
Naomi Misteria. She’d read about Schoenfeld’s in a newspaper feature.
It sounded like everything she’d ever wanted and maybe she could get a job.
She came, she met John and Mary, and on her way out, she met Ethan.
They had a conversation at the end of the driveway, right by the Green Man pillar.
Ethan misheard her first name, Naomi, and thought it was Nomi. ”
“Really?”
Dane nodded. “She didn’t correct him. She left the farm with a new name.
The next day, walking under the pergola, Mary saw buds on one of the vines.
The wisteria was blooming. That was all it took for Ethan to believe Nomi belonged here.
She’d come and turned the world upside-down in the best of ways.
He got in his car, drove two hours to where she was living, and brought her back. ”
He was quiet a moment and Liko stared. The sun was higher in the sky, and its rays hit Dane’s head, glinting and shining on the blonds and coppers and silvers. His right profile was facing Liko, the brown eye gazing out at nothing. Then it flicked toward Liko and he smiled. “What?”
“I don’t know why you gave me bollocks about being a terrible storyteller.”
“Sometimes I manage to tell a concise one.”
“How’d you end up at Schoenfeld’s?”
Dane didn’t answer.
“Story for another day?”
“The long version, yes. Concise version for now. Maisie hosted Ethan’s first big art show at her gallery.
She brought me along. Ethan was there, obviously.
So were Nomi, and John and Mary. That’s how I met them all and how I got invited back to Schoenfeld’s.
Parallel plot, Gideon Perfect commissioned Ethan for the artwork on Two-Faced, and Ethan wanted to use me as the model.
So you can say that like Nomi, I first came here to make some money. Then I just…stayed.”
“How old were you?”
“Twenty.” Dane got up. “And now I’ve got work to do.”
He walked Liko to the far side of the clearing, pointing out where the trail continued through the woods and the options to come back.
Then he bent and took Salma’s head in his hands, rubbing her neck.
“You’re in charge on this walk. Don’t lose my friend, okay? Bring him back to the brooder at noon.”